This Week in Startups - How to manage customer relationships | Customer Basics with Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova | E1306

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

This Startup Basics is all about managing customer relationships. Tiffani Bova from Salesforce joins to talk about the ways startups can improve customer interactions, transforming one-time transactions to reoccurring relationships. Jason and Tiffani give practical tips better serve customers and keep them coming back.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. This is our startup basic series. This is where we talk about the basic things. You got to get right in your startup. So maybe you're working in a big company, a small company, starting your first company, maybe you're right out of school, and you're trying to figure out, how do I take care of my customers?

Well, we've got a great expert with us today. Tiffany Bova is from Salesforce. She's the global growth and innovation evangelist. At Salesforce for the last five years, she's the author of Growth IQ, get smarter about the choices that will make or break your business. and the host of the podcast, What's Next Podcast? And so we're going to get into our next topic, which is customer management.

Okay, what does customer management mean? We've talked about experience. We get that, how people use your product, engagement, how you authentically talk to those customers, and here we are at management. What does it mean customer management? Well, you know, it's not lost to me, right? I work at Salesforce. We are a CRM company, right?

And R is relationship. So it's really about managing that relationship, the customer relationship management. Now, if you're a startup, you might say, look, CRM might be something that's too big for me, right? It's an aircraft carrier, like I'm just trying to figure things out. But the decisions you make early on, especially around investments like technology

and in the category of CRM, go a long way for you to be able to scale, repeatedly and consistently respond to customer demand as well as selling from a sales and marketing and service perspective. So it's an area that I fear small businesses tend to ignore. And we've all been through a crazy 18 months, but let me give you an example. How many small restaurants had your customer information, didn't have their menu online? And then boom, overnight, you went in every Thursday with your family.

And sure enough, now the restaurants closed, but they want to do delivery. They don't have the menu online. They don't have a relationship with Uber Eats or Grubhub or whomever, and they don't know your email. And then overnight, you're not there anymore. But they want to tell you, hey, come back on Thursdays. We want to sell you your same meal and deliver it to you. So not having that customer information, it could have been a highly successful restaurant. And trust me, I'm in Los Angeles and I can just walk down the street about a half a mile

and I'll see 10 that have closed and not reopen because they didn't have the ability to go, how do I pivot really quickly and continue to stay open with delivery and all those things. So without the ability to manage that relationship with your customer, you're not able to then upsell, cross-sell, service them, market to them, get them to buy, buy more frequently, with more recency. You've kind of sold to them one time and moved on. That means every single day, you've got to go and find new customers every day, every day, more and more and more. When you think about it, it was so delightful in the pandemic when restaurants did open back up to be able to sit outside. They made these beautiful parklets for us in California. Take a picture with your phone, get the QR code, order on your phone, not have to have a waiter come to the table. Just a runner brings you your food. They get your phone number. They get your email. They have your payment information. And so many times, I'm like, why are you not emailing me and telling me what's happening next week at your restaurant? Why are you not offering me some incentive to come? back. And I think maybe they were just so busy surviving, but maybe one of the great

legacies of this is now that they've adopted this technology, they know more about their customers from the last 18 months than they did in the last 18 years. Absolutely, but they're not doing anything with it. So I totally agree. And I also would say that in that exact example, right, take the QR code, a runner just comes up to not stay there. Right. It needs to be back to this balance. I actually want to have human interaction. I don't want to do it on my phone. Because if something's wrong or I want to change my order, we all know, it's really a hassle to do. And you're actually paying and tipping before you get your food. And so there are things that can be improved upon, but you cannot do it without the data. And often it said data is the new oil, but you

cannot pull up to an oil rig and fill your car. You actually have to have it go through the refinery, which to me is analytics. And the petrol or the gasoline that powers the business is those insights to your point, Jason, right? Like, you ordered this last time we're running a special on your favorite dish, you know, come in, we'll give you two for one or whatever. I haven't heard from any of those restaurants actually since you said that. And I actually very quickly ran through my brain that had my QR code, my email address and my phone number I've entered from any of them. Now, it could be because we said they weren't going to use the data. Could be. Could be. Maybe. Maybe, right? But some of them were actually capturing it. And so, you know, relationships

is everything. It's everything, especially for a startup. Those early relationships that you make, they are the ones that will become your greatest advocates to help you get the next wave of customers. They are the ones that will help you design those new products. They will be the ones that are more open to telling you what's working and not working because early on, the founder is the one that's doing everything. And so that is your nucleus. If you don't know that relationship, and how can you scale that to the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, you really have to use technology. Well, and then just think, and I love your, like, you know, hey, we got this oil rig,

but it's not putting the oil in your car. You just think about all the possibilities there. While we were talking, I was like, you know what they could do? They could just say, give me the 27% of people who came to the restaurant and ordered wine. And let's do some wine specials or have a tasting, invite them and thank them. Hey, last time you came, you ordered a great bottle of wine. We're having this wine company come in and they're doing a tasting.

we're going to be having their Bojolet Nouveau for the Bojolet Nouveau festival in the fall. We'd love to invite you to come in. Or these people came in at 530 on the dot when we opened and they had kids with them. Great. We should let them know that we're going to be opening at 430 for families that want to come in early and that we now have 430 family dinners come in early, reserve your seat. There's so many opportunities if you just pause for a second and think, what data do I have and how could I segment these, and we're a fancy way of saying bucket, these customers,

into, you know, kind of some psychographic or some behavior, correct? Yeah, and I don't want it to be overwhelming because sometimes I hear from startups specifically that it's a lot. Like you can do you, like you just said, I can think of a hundred ways and a hundred things we can do. And so we have to make sure that we kind of crawl, walk, run. And so what is the crawl? What are the must-haves to make sure that when you attract those first customers, you establish

those relationships and what works? Okay, now, how do I walk? Now, I'm getting more customers. The only way you can scale it is you have to use technology. And so that's why I said those early investments. Now, I was flying back from San Francisco a couple years ago, and I ended up sitting next to this gentleman who owned a textile company in Los Angeles. He was a $3.5 million kind of startup, right?

and he was just acquired by a holding company. And the owner of the holding company said, go do a deal with Walmart, go do a deal with Amazon. That's your growth strategy for the year. So I looked at him and I said, well, okay, before you tell me all that, how many customers do you have? A hundred thousand customers he had. Are you kidding me? Like I closed my laptop. I'm like, okay, let's talk about that hundred thousand customers.

Guess what? He knew nothing about them. He didn't know when they bought last, what they bought, etc. So I said, start there. You're three blocks from USC, go get some interns, have them come in, clean up the data. Sure enough, we kept in touch. He had about 4,500 names that were good from the 100,000. Like, what a shame.

He lost touch with all those people, you know, over the previous years. But once he got that clean list, he went, got a CRM system, loaded them in, started to really engage with those customers around some of the things we've already talked about in customer experience and engagement. engagement, and sure enough, it was almost growing faster than those Amazon Walmart deals. In one case, it was growing faster than that one because he'd already established the relationship. So it's really important that if you get to that 10,000 or 1,000 and you don't have that customer data, you're going to have to go back and clean it up. So get in the habit early. It will really serve you well. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing worse than getting all of these people into your funnel.

and then they have a great experience and you have no way to re-engage them. As per our previous episode, and I had this happen to me recently. I have a company Inside.com. They do these amazing interviews and sessions with business leaders. They started embracing Twitter spaces, which is similar to Clubhouse or call-in and these casual audio apps. I said, okay, that's great. Did you collect RSVPs for the event?

They're like, no, we're doing it on Twitter. We just, there's no, that's not built into Twitter. And I said, I know it's not built into Twitter, but you could set up a very simple form on the web to RSVP for the event, collect their emails, and then just send them an email, hey, we're starting in 15 minutes, and then you'd be able to email them the second time. And they're like, oh, we never thought about that boss. And I was just like, how many of these have you done? They're like, well, this is like our seventh or eighth.

I was like, how many people came to the other ones? Like, oh, yeah, we got like 50 to 200 people. I was like, oh my God, we would have had a thousand email addresses by now. that we could have upselled on our premium. They're like, oh, yeah, we should have done that. And you really, any chance you have to capture that information to reengage them, those people want to be reengaged. They're giving you an hour of their attention already.

They came to your restaurant. You and I just mentioned, we're waiting to hear from these restaurants that we went to during COVID, and they could just look up who are the biggest tippers. Anybody who tipped over 35%, I would just put it on the VIP list. I would invite them to all kinds of unique things. many opportunities and you just have to set up the infrastructure from the beginning. What are some other great examples of once you have that infrastructure set up, things that kind of unlock themselves from proper customer relationship management?

Well, you know, I'd say this, that it will become a laundry list of things to do. So always make sure that if you say, look, I want to capture customer information for the following reasons. It cannot only be to sell more to them. It has to be about how do I engage with them in a more authentic way, which we talked about in the last session. And so it cannot just be all about sales. I know you're a startup. I get it. You have to sort of keep the money coming in. But if you look at anybody's statistics on why startups fail, if you point back to almost the top five, it has to do with they didn't know the customer. They didn't know what they wanted. They weren't able to, you know, capture more of revenue from them or keep them or offer them

a product or service that they actually wanted. And so all of that comes from that relationship. So it can't just be sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. It has to be about establishing it. So, you know, and even the big guys don't get it right. You know, so think about the credit cards in your wallet. How many times do you get a letter from them in the mail, sign up for this credit card? And you're like, I already have it.

What are you doing? I already have it. And imagine how many millions of dollars in stamps they have wasted, you know, that we just tear up or shred and throw away. We don't even look at it. We're like, I already have this credit card. So it's not just the small companies. It's the big ones too. So my favorite exercise I offer to startups is really take an inventory of when and where

and why you've had the best experience with a brand. What was it? What was the best email and why? What was the best newsletter and why? Really ask yourself, ask your team, ask those in your ecosystem, in your orbit, the same question. Does anyone mention your brand? Are people actually mentioning consistently the same sets of one or two or three brands? Study what they're doing and how they're doing it.

And how can you put your spin on that kind of engagement and connection and relationship building? the roadmap is in front of you. But if you don't take the time to sort of look and study, I like to say kind of deconstruct what others are doing, that's the best way to find your way forward. See, this is such a profound insight and it's so basic with like the profound ones typically are. There are people out there who have figured out and they are figuring it out and showing you in public, but you are not paying attention. All you need to do is just open up your eyes for a second and watch what world-class people are doing. They do very simple things.

And as an example, I was talking to my team, again at Inside, where we do like analysis and research and these events and newsletters. And I said, what are some other people doing in terms of how they're advertising their events? And they're like, we don't know. And I was like, do you know Facebook has a directory after the whole political election thing and people putting up ads that were a little bit strange? they basically said all ads will be transparent. You can go to Facebook ad library, I think it's called. Just Google that. And we found people who were doing events and we saw some successful events and how they were marketing it. And we were like, oh, that's an interesting technique. Oh, that's an interesting technique. They're not talking about the speakers. They're talking about the topics and the conversations that'll occur. Oh, okay, great. It's not just about the speaker. It's about the topic. Oh, here's another one talking about what you'll learn and then how you'll be able to apply it when you get back. So this is the outcome of coming to this event.

Okay, that's a very interesting way to market it. And again, as you're saying, just take a moment, take a deep breath, look at world-class companies, how are they behaving? How do they engage with their customers? And it should become pretty apparent what to do. I mean, my playbook has been for a couple of decades here, have a great conversation with smart people like we're doing, and take other people along for the ride. And if you take other people along for the ride for a smart conversation and you get them thinking, they get but one insight they can take back to their life, professional, personal, or otherwise, it's going to be an incredible halo effect. I couldn't agree more. And I wrote the book, Growth IQ, and in it is 30 stories of what

best in class companies have done on these 10 paths to growth. Two positive use cases of it. one cautionary tale. That was my way of telling the story, right, of best practices. So someone could go, I see myself being able to do that exact example. And instead of giving 245 pages of my opinion, I'd rather let those that have done it really well tell the story themselves. Let's give us a cautionary tale. Everybody loves to, you know, see like, whoa, that person took the corner too fast and the car flipped. What's the cautionary tale in the book? So the very first path to growth was customer experience, which we talked about in the first session. And my cautionary tale might surprise you was actually Starbucks.

My cautionary tale was Starbucks. Now, why is this? Because they lost their way on customer experience. The CEO, you know, they had started, you know, missing numbers, missing numbers, missing numbers, and they brought back, you know, the original CEO. And he went into the stores and talked to the people. And sure enough, all of a sudden they were selling teddy bears and CDs. and they'd kind of lost their way.

And when you walked in, you didn't smell coffee. You smelled food. And they had really lost what it meant to have and deliver this amazing customer experience, even so much as the app not kind of keeping up with the times. And so that was an example of nailing customer experience where so many would hold them up as a great example. And then it doesn't mean it's locked forever.

You always have to be working on it. And they started piling too many things. into the bucket for them, and all of a sudden, the experience was just not that great. So I use that as something to say that even it was good one day, doesn't mean it's going to be good the next. You always have to pay attention to. Is the decision you're about to make positive for your customer in this case, right, the relationship you're having with them, or is it a negative?

Is it going to add something to the list of things we need to, we're asking them to do for us, so we need to remove something? That kind of discipline goes a long way. And so from the time that he came back as the CEO, it was like a 1600% share price increase when they got back to the basics of really making sure they were delivering a compelling customer experience. Yeah, and it's so interesting during that period. I remember reading about this example because it takes vigilance to maintain that excellence.

and yeah, they started doing their own mixed CDs and teddy bears and other stuff, and the food got, became sort of the, the big part of the ritual. And then you saw something like Phil's coffee come out. And then they started charging $6 or $5 for a bar of a coffee. And they were being more attentive to you and your love of coffee. And they were nurturing and had that great theatrics around making your cup. And if you remember Starbucks during that time had a lot of push button, you know, instead of tapping down the espresso and making a proper, they were just like pressing buttons and moving on. And it felt like the coffee was an afterthought. They were going too fast and it lost the charm, right?

I think. And other people caught, I think Phil's caught on to that. And they said, let's slow down. And as a note, the Phil's app does remember your last order and serve that to you first as you brought up correctly as an opportunity. That's right. All right. Another great segment. Our fourth segment is going to be on customer growth and retention. Two critical things. Startups are meant to grow. Businesses are meant to grow. And one of the most important things in terms of growth is not losing customers. So stick around for episode four.

Thank you so much to Tiffany and the team at Salesforce for helping make startup customer basics possible. Go to Salesforce.com slash twist to apply for Salesforce for startups. Qualified startups will get 50% off their first year of sales. Salesforce Essentials, 90 days of free support, coaching access, and much more. Once again, that's Salesforce.com slash twist to apply for Salesforce for startup today.