Start With A Win - Discussing the Future of Business Growth with Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Evangelist

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, Win Nation, Producer Mark here. Hey, real quick, before we jump into this episode, I have a favor to ask. Go into where you listen to your podcast and give us a five-star rating and leave us a simple review. It doesn't have to be complicated. Just say something nice or say something you like about the show. But what that does is it helps us get the word out about Start With A Win and reach more people. So that's all I got for you. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Starting point is 00:00:23 Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. and coming to you from the bunker at fort contos here not top of the 12th floor remax global headquarters like i usually am it's adam conto ceo remax with start with a win in remote studio at brand viva headquarters we got producer, buddy? Hey, I'm doing so good. Awesome. Hey, what do you think is one of the big things that really moves a company forward right now? I mean, what comes to mind when I say that to you? Well, I mean, I would say probably digital content or being online, being accessible. Obviously, a lot of us are locked down. An innovative way of touching your customer, right? That's right, yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:31 I love it. Well, I'm super excited about today's guest because we're going to talk about that and your growth IQ. So we have a very special guest with us today, Tiffany Bova, who is the author of Growth IQ, Get Smarter About the Choices That Will Make or Break Your Business. She's a global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce. She's also the host of What's Next with Tiffany Bova, one of the top 100 business and marketing podcasts on iTunes. Tiffany, happy to have you here on Start With a Win. Welcome.

Starting point is 00:02:10 Oh, thank you for having me, Adam. It's a pleasure. Oh, this is a really cool topic. I mean, I really follow a lot of what you do and the content you're putting out here. So can you tell us a little, you know, let's unpack first your title, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. What does that mean? Yeah, it's so funny. Like, you've done all these really great things, but I want to talk about your title. It's like, it doesn't matter. Everyone loves that title. So there is a story. One is, I didn't want to put sales in my title because I think that that, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on where you are in the world, right, will have a certain connotation.

Starting point is 00:02:51 People will think that I'm trying to sell them something. If I put my rank and file, they'd go, oh, she manages people. She has a responsibility and she has a budget. And I don't have any of those things. And so, you know, really my job and my role is traveling around the world. Usually now I'm just doing it virtually and via video. those things. And so, you know, really my job and my role is traveling around the world usually. Now I'm just doing it virtually and via video, but traveling around the world, sort of sharing what other brands are doing, other companies are doing in other industries

Starting point is 00:03:15 around growth and innovation and how it's really fueling and powering their company and their culture and, you know, what they're doing in the world on a daily basis. So it's really an awesome dream job, I have to say, like no complaints, that's for sure. I love that. And you work for an amazing company as well. Tell us real briefly, what is Salesforce? What is that like real quick overview of your company? Well, we're an enterprise software company that is about 21 years old. We're one of the fastest growing enterprise companies in the world. People know us from a CRM or customer relationship management perspective, but we've got so much more.

Starting point is 00:03:53 We've got marketing. We've got analytics. We've got machine learning. We've got service capabilities for customer service. Obviously, we have sales. We've got a development platform. We've got ISVs that develop in and around our community and really extend our capabilities. We leverage SIs from a global basis.

Starting point is 00:04:11 But I'd say the thing I'm most proud of that the reason I decided to work here is our CEO is very much focused on business being the greatest platform for change and doing well by doing good. So, you know, we volunteer millions and millions of hours as employees, 55,000 strong. And we even do virtual volunteering now. And so, you know, it was a great combination of the philanthropy side of business and the business side of business. But we power some of the best and biggest brands in the world on how they sell, engage, and service their customers. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:04:47 And full disclosure, ours is one of those. So we have an amazing relationship with Salesforce, and we're just so happy to be part of the Salesforce family. So let's get into the book, Growth IQ. Where did that come from, and what drove you to write this book? What's the problem you're solving here? Yeah, so prior to joining Salesforce, I worked for a company called Gartner, which is the world's largest analyst and consulting firm for tech, really for IT, for CIOs, chief information officers

Starting point is 00:05:14 around the globe. But my customer base, my client, if you will, would have been the head of sales, the head of marketing, head of customer service, and traveling around the world and having thousands of calls, some 5,000 calls with customers over the course of that decade, sometimes small startups all the way to the largest company in the world, helping them with go-to-market models. I heard the same questions kind of over and over again. The difference really was scale, size, geography, industry, et cetera. But it was, you know, how do we grow? How do we, you know, recover from a growth stall potentially, right? Like we were growing and all of a sudden we started to notice it was getting either harder or we were having negative growth.

Starting point is 00:05:55 How do we sort of engage with customers in new ways? What do we do if we're trying to expand into new markets? What's the best thing to do? It was sort of this series of questions and it didn't matter, like I said, where I was or what industry, it was very similar. So I said, how can I scale myself? Last year, as you mentioned, Adam, last year I flew 375,000 miles. I was on six continents, gave a hundred keynotes. And so I said consistently, how can I scale myself? I can't get on planes and talk to everybody. The book was a natural progression, if you will, from a lot of the thought leadership work I had been putting out as an analyst. This was my way to make it more approachable and accessible to a

Starting point is 00:06:36 wider and broader audience. Such a deep explanation. Let's start unpacking this a little bit because you are so right. As the, it's as the CEO of a company and, and I run six companies. I mean, how, that is the top of my thing that we're always being asked by analysts or, you know, our leaders or our board of directors or whatever. And the question we ask ourselves, how do I grow? And it's like you said, in, in Growth IQ, there's not one right move for this. It's like a combination or it's a specific thing, right thing, right now, stuff like that. Give us a little bit of insight. Where do you start when you begin talking to a company about where do I grow?

Starting point is 00:07:19 Yeah, one of the opening stats I use in the book was something from Bain & Company, a large consulting shop. And I'm going to ruin this quote because I'm not reading it at the moment. But the net of it was that brands that are bigger than 5 billion or smaller than 5 billion, it was like between 87 and 94% of them said that the reason that they were unable to achieve consistent and repeatable growth was internal inertia and not external forces. And so right after that sentence, I said, unless you hit a black swan event, which we, of course, are right in the middle of, right? So, so much for that. So, I asked my publisher, can I remove that sentence? But ultimately, this internal inertia is where I

Starting point is 00:08:02 really have to start to have hard conversations with executives. You know, what got us here won't get us there. If they've been growing, they're sometimes unlikely to be willing to hear how to do things differently if what they're doing today is working. They're not very in tune with what the customer is looking for, the changing demands of those customers. But more importantly, are they really focused on the employee and their broader shareholder community, right? So if you're publicly traded, that's an obvious, but it could be partners and vendors and employees and all of those things make up your shareholder community.

Starting point is 00:08:37 And so what are you doing for them and with them? And so when you start to have that conversation about why do you think you aren't digitally transforming or why you're not making investments in a customer service or marketing tool or even a CRM, sales automation or forecast or pipeline, any of the things that really technology can now allow you to do much easier, especially as an executive. Forecast is everything for you. Where do you think you're going to be, especially for a publicly traded company? And if the forecast and pipeline is getting lumpier, right, and more inconsistent, you, unfortunately, people start to tighten up the same kind of productivity metrics they've always done versus saying, hold on a second,

Starting point is 00:09:19 this is a different world, a different market. When you get executives to be open with a beginner's mind of giving yourself some space to have new ways of thinking and unlearning and relearning things, really amazing things can happen. This re-imagine the art of the possible, those conversations are really inspiring for me, but I can tell right away how willing they are going to be to have that kind of conversation just by asking them a series of very specific questions, how they answer them. I know how I need to then direct the conversation because I need to help them feel like it was their idea. I'm not telling them what they can do. I'm just leading them to, if you will, to some of the questions they need to ask themselves. I love this. This is so true. In fact,

Starting point is 00:10:05 just, you know, we're talking about all the zooming around we're doing right now. In fact, I was just on a mastermind and we were talking about just kind of that situation there. And then last week, I was in a multi-day group discussion with a whole bunch of really top key business leaders. And it kept coming back to that. And that said, your company either grows or dies from within. And we have to kind of hold up the mirror and look at it as leaders instead of looking around going, who's going to champion this growth? Who's going to champion this change? Because everybody's looking at us, right? I mean, isn't that where it starts? And what conversation do you have with a leader that talks about that? Well, we've got some new research coming out that's not yet out,

Starting point is 00:10:48 but one of the really big key findings, we did it with Forbes. It was a project I was really passionate about, and I was able to sort of get it going. And one of the things that was said is executives feel like it's the employees that aren't willing to make these cultural changes, and employees feel like it's leadership. And the gap between those two sort of looking at who's to blame, like, look, leaders, you're leaders. So you have to inspire your people to want to change, but you have to give them a reason why. And individual contributors need to understand how their role day in and day out serves to the greater good of the business, the community, and the shareholders, right? So if I'm a receptionist in a better situation than

Starting point is 00:11:32 we're in right now, but I'm a receptionist at a real estate office and someone walks in, that receptionist may not be the agent that sells the house or takes them out on viewing different homes or helps them understand what's going on in the market, but they're the first impression. Then they walk in. Does someone offer them coffee? That's the second impression. Then the realtor shows up, sits down with them. That's the third impression. Then they get in a car. It's the addition of all of those things simultaneously. If individuals understand their role in delivering those kinds of things, it has to be set at the executive level to help explain to them why that is so important. How you greet a guest when they walk into your doctor's office or your dentist's office or your real estate office or whatever it might be has an impact. And I think

Starting point is 00:12:17 that that gap, unfortunately, is not getting smaller at the moment. And it could be just because we're all remote right now and it's really hard to have those kinds of very inspiring, transparent, heartfelt conversations, sometimes not face-to-face, but it's a leader's job to sure give it a shot, right? As you said, you're doing so many of these, but if it's daily Zoom calls and you're spending hundreds or thousands of hours on video calls, are you delivering the kind of message that's inspiring people to want to follow you? It's fascinating because, I mean, you know, obviously there's this big veil of fear that hangs over society and people. And it could be that, you know, somebody in their, at their kid's school got COVID or that they're

Starting point is 00:13:04 afraid of something might change in, you know, some other part of their life, who knows what it is. Or maybe they're just going, I need to get out of the house. I'm telling myself stories in my mind. And leaders go through this also. I mean, it's lonely being a leader. It's lonely at the top. And I think this is really kind of, kind of really magnifying that. So leaders need to prepare for growth, right? And I mean, you talk about that. What can leaders do to prepare for growth? Well, I'm going to go back to something you just said about kind of it's lonely at the top, that kind of quote of being a leader. And I feel like if you are a four-wall leader, meaning you sit in your office in the four walls,

Starting point is 00:13:45 it's very lonely being there. Right. But would you say the CEO of Costco, you know, when he was still the CEO, he was out in a Costco six days a week somewhere in this country. Do you think it was lonely at the top for him? So, you know, I use that and I use Undercover Boss as a great social experiment because, you know, in the TV show Undercover Boss, they spend the first sort of five minutes or so getting to know the executive. And then they sit them down in a chair and they put a disguise on them, change their hair color. If it's a man, they'll shave their beard or have them grow a beard. If it's a woman, maybe put a wig on or whatever it might be. And I always felt like that was such a waste of very expensive TV time because none of your people would have been able to know who you were anyway because you never

Starting point is 00:14:31 leave your office. So they wouldn't have recognized you, right? If you walked into your retail store or into a delivery or the, you know, supply chain or your warehouse, would they immediately go, oh my God, that's our CEO, right? And so, you know, I love what Tom Peters says. He's the author of In Search of Excellence. He's, you know, one of my favorite humans. And he does a management by wandering around, right? Asking questions. And so now you're wandering around, has to be via Zoom, but asking questions, right? Becoming a master asker, but ultimately you have to be willing to listen. And so it'll be lonely if you isolate, but if you are willing to communicate and collaborate and say ideas can

Starting point is 00:15:12 come from anywhere and you make it feel like a culture of inclusiveness, then I get, I still agree, right? That it is lonely. You are at the top, the buck stops with you, but it's also about that perception that your team has, that you're approachable and you'd be open to ideas even if they're not yours. And I think that'll go a long way, especially now because people are under a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety and, you know, all burnout and all kinds of things are going on. So a leader's job now is not only to lead and drive the business, but it's also to make sure that his people, her people are okay. It's interesting because you're talking about leading by walking around, leading by being present, things like that. A lot of companies can't do that right now.

Starting point is 00:15:55 So you have a lot of COVID restrictions, you have travel restrictions, things like that, where maybe you're a leader for an organization that's nationwide or just across town or something, you just can't go there and see people or maybe they're not in there anymore. What recommendations do you have? And is this digital transformation heavy in the leadership needs now that we all can participate in? Yeah. So I can only use us as an example. So Salesforce, we started out, you know, back in March when this first hit and everything went into lockdown, was we were having weekly leadership calls. So our entire leadership team, and not just our leadership team, by the way, our board of directors, everybody got on the phone and all of us could dial in, right?

Starting point is 00:16:40 And it was a Zoom call. We were seeing them in these unusual situations, right? You know, they're in their, you know, home corner office or whatever, like they're used to being in the tower or wherever they may have been. And our board of directors were all over as well. And then we created in our community, in our chatter, which is a technology product that we sell, really a collaboration tool, you know, post questions. And so this became every single week, one hour, And we would talk about all kinds of things. Initially, it was about how do we stabilize the business? What are we

Starting point is 00:17:09 doing for everybody? What are we doing to get people to continue to work? Giving our salespeople challenges of making a million Zoom reach outs or video reach outs to customers. And we blew that out to a million five. Now we're doing five million. And so ultimately, it was a way once a week to get the executive team. And that's continued every single week thus far. Then we started doing something called Be Well, which was once a day or twice a day, where we would have people come on and talk about how to get better sleep, how to deal with anxiety and stress. We'd have people come on to say, how do you structure a kid's day for school when you're working? We'd have people come on to say, how do you, you know, structure a kid's day for school

Starting point is 00:17:46 when you're working? You know, we'd have people come and read kids' stories so the parents could take time. And so, it used to just be for Salesforce. Now, we've totally opened that up. And we've had people like Serena Williams come on. We've had Jennifer Hudson. We've had Chrissy Hines. We've had, you know, Deepak Chopra. We've had Soledad O'Brien. We've had all kinds of people come on and talk about, you know, things, Arianna Huffington, you know, for Be Well. We also started doing something called Leading Through Change. Like, how do leaders actually lead through change at this time? Same thing.

Starting point is 00:18:17 It used to just be for us once a week. And now it's happening and we've opened it up for everybody. And we'll get 100,000, a half a million, a million views on it. We're streaming across all the social platforms. So this was a way for us to not only communicate and make sure our own people were okay, but also our customer and the greater shareholders

Starting point is 00:18:36 and the greater community that sort of are in our orbit. Now the executive meeting obviously is just for us, but that connection to our leaders that we could ask anything, the connection to our board of directors, the fact that they're trying to grapple with what do we do, launching new products during this time, you know, like organizing people, like what do we do with our furloughed employees who are not, or you know, our contractors who are not working for us right now, what do we do for them, what do we do for everyone who relied on us for daycare during the day, like all of those things.

Starting point is 00:19:05 So I think this has to happen. If you are, even if you have a team of five or six people, like, are you doing a weekly call check-in about burnout and sleep and inviting speakers to come in like this, right? Where you get an opportunity to not just have it be business all the time, that you take that time to think about the personal side of it as well. So cool. You've taken a lot and fitted into some great ideas in business and some great useful tools that people can take back. Some of our listeners are key business leaders in a lot of different organizations. So you've studied a lot of different companies during the transitionary period in society that we've been going through with dealing with COVID and how different people work from home and how they kind of get back into mainstream, things like that, as cities back open up.

Starting point is 00:19:56 Let me ask you this. From your perspective, what does the future of work look like when it comes to us being present leaders and helping our employees and our stakeholders do a great job for our customers? Yeah, I'd say now it is work from anywhere, right? Because it may be home. It may be at a modified office location. It might be at a more local office location where people are driving all the way into downtown and into big towers. But I'd say ultimately, this is about how do we get people back to work, back to the office, back to visiting customers in a safe manner. Real estate is a great example of that, right? I mean, the real estate industry is booming. The interest rates are really low. But if you can't visit a client and you can't show them a house and they can't come with all their

Starting point is 00:20:43 family and you can't do that, what do you do? Right. And so real estate for many years has been doing sort of virtual 3D tours, right? Using drones to show properties, like using videos for international buyers who are buying in the US. And so that just all of a sudden very quickly amplified. So for those realtors who were like, nope, I take out ads in the paper, I do mailers, I get in a caravan. I drive around. This was a big adjustment for them, right? That outside sellers around the world in every industry, all of a sudden now are inside sellers. And depending on where you are in the world and where you're listening to this in the US specifically, you know, you may be back on

Starting point is 00:21:20 lockdown. Like Victoria is on lockdown in Melbourne. Hawaii is at a stay-at-home order. You've got places in, I'm in Southern California where, you know, things are just starting to open back up. New York, things are opening back up, but that may be short-lived. It may shut back down again, right? So we're constantly having to stabilize the business. But I would say the future of work for me is working anywhere but making sure everyone is safe has what they need to be successful and as well you know allowing people to have some kind of balance in their life you know if we're all working from home and there's a lot of stats out there from the McKinsey's of the world etc saying of the percentage of people you know 75 percent

Starting point is 00:22:00 of people who used to work at the office are now working from home. There are some that think some 35% of them will remain working from home going forward. And even us, as an example, like we've been told, unless it's necessary, if it's nice to have to go to the office, we're not requiring people to go back to the office till July 2021, August 2021. So if you're not a necessity, right, you're not part of the IT team or the development team and you have to be on premise, everybody else, it's like work from home till August of next year. So, you know, that's a big change. And so, you know, and if schools are still not in full swing, that has implications if you have kids. So I think that work from anywhere requires us to be much more mindful of

Starting point is 00:22:45 maybe a four-day work week, maybe a no meeting Thursday. Maybe you don't reply until you set your emails to only send out between eight and five. So people get in the habit of, I can't just reach out to Tiffany at two o'clock in the morning because I'm in Europe and she's in the US. We have to be a lot more mindful. Yeah, some great points there. And it's interesting because we've all tried all these little bitty tidbits of different work modifications, and now we're kind of experimenting with packing them all together. So it's really interesting to look at. We have nearly 600 employees at our organization and we went remote March 13th. So it's come down to essentially who needs to be there, when do you need to be there? And what we found in and through our surveys is that most people, they want to go in a couple

Starting point is 00:23:38 days a week, call it either two or three days a week, because they need that presence away from the distractions in their home life. But we also, like you said, want to balance doing it safely and within the regulations in our local government areas. We have many of them around here, as well as to balance out the needs of our young families that have kids in school because we've got like, I don't know, call it six or eight different school districts and they're all different. So this is a big, I don't want to say an experiment or a test. It's a reality of flexibility as a leader now. And it's so cool to have this conversation with you, Tiffany. So I have a question that I ask everybody that comes on the show because we have some amazing people on the show, just like yourself. And everybody has a little thing that they do that really kind of leverages their day, gets them going, things like that. So Tiffany, how do you start your day with a win?

Starting point is 00:24:36 So I'm going to actually flip that a little bit. And I'm going to say, I like to actually end my day on a win and then start my day on a win. Right. There you go. At the end of my day, you know, it's sort of in my downtime. I'm unwinding. You know, it's usually like I'm getting ready to take a shower or have something to eat. And I start to play through what are the things that I wanted to do today that I didn't get done? Or what did I do today that I was really inspired by? Or what, you know, I sort of am reflective of the day. So that's kind of how I end the day to go, today was a good day. You know, even though it might've been challenging and I wish I was on the road, like at the end of

Starting point is 00:25:14 the day, I have first world problems. I have a roof over my head. I have food in my refrigerator. I have a job. I have first world problems, right? So I'm grateful at the end of every day. In the morning, it's sort of, I ease into my day. Like, okay, what do I want to get done today? What do I want to challenge myself to do something maybe I'm a little uncomfortable with, to try something new? Who do I want to reach out to that I haven't reached out to in some time to just check in, maybe see how they're doing? You know, what do I want to put out from a content perspective, just because of what I get to do every day, right? How do I spend some time thinking? Because it's so distracting right now. And I'm so busy with all the time zones. Normally I'm on an airplane

Starting point is 00:25:56 and I get that downtime to think, and now I don't have that. And I have time to actually meet and converse with people who help me think differently about the things I think about every day. So I try to bookend my days at the end of the day and the beginning of the day with some reflection and goals I have for the day, things I'm thankful for. But I am an ease out of the day and I am an ease into the day kind of gal. I love it. That is a huge tip for everybody. I mean, we do need to reflect on what we've done and what we need to do and the successes and the happinesses that have been created by that. So Tiffany Bova, thank you so much. I encourage everybody to check out Growth IQ, Wall Street

Starting point is 00:26:38 Journal, bestselling book, and make sure you check out Tiffany on the social media platforms. You have so much great information. Thank you again out Tiffany on the social media platforms. You have so much great information. Thank you again for being on Start With A Win. Oh, thank you for having me on. It was my pleasure. All right. Well, hey, thanks so much for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question or tell us your Start With A Win story, give us a call and leave us a message at 888-581-4430. Don't forget to go on iTunes and subscribe, write a review and leave us a message at 888-581-4430. Don't forget to go into iTunes and subscribe, write a review and rate the show. For more great content, head over to startwithawin.com

Starting point is 00:27:11 and follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. And remember, start with a win. you

Start With A Win - Discussing the Future of Business Growth with Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Evangelist

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