In this episode of The Workgrid, we are joined by Sterling Bailey, an esteemed marketing leader who has helped create the customer experience strategy for some of the world's most important brands. Sterling hasn't only made waves in the marketing sphere; he's also the founder of 'Cap For Kids' (https://www.capforkids.org) a wonderful non-profit that helps reduce the financial burdens of children and their families fighting pediatric cancer.
Here, we delve into the intricate art of customer experience, navigating how brands can make the most out of every customer interaction. Sterling shares his wisdom on the importance of infusing value into each touchpoint along the customer journey. We also discuss aspects of marketing - creating emotional connections between a brand and its customers. In today's increasingly impersonal digital world of distractions, this element has never been more crucial. Sterling provides compelling insights on how to establish these connections, making for a captivating discussion that any marketer, business owner, or customer service professional will find invaluable. This is an episode brimming with inspiration, enlightenment, and a human touch.
Can you tell us a little about yourself and the work you’ve been doing over the last few years?
I like to think of myself as a “modern marketer” which to me is just working around and advancing the concept of connecting with customers, whether they are B2B or B2C, in a way that is meaningful to them and brings them closer to your brands and relationships.
By day I am a marketer, by night I run a non-profit that helps families fight pediatric cancer, which we will dive into later.
You’ve spent time working with Evernote and Jive. What are some similarities between the two software companies?
When you think about these two systems, one thing they have in common is that users of Jive and Evernote were very passionate about the product. Considering this, I think something both organizations have in common is that they focus on delighting customers.
Evernote is a notetaking and task management platform. We all have situations where we need to capture information and we want to be able to do it on whatever device we have handy. We also need to be able to retrieve that information from wherever we are in the world on whatever other device we have. To be able to synchronize information in a seamless way truly delights people and that was my experience when I first learned about Evernote back in 2009. It truly made my life easier in so many ways.
In a professional context I used Jive, which is an employee engagement platform. At the time when you were looking to create a community around your brand, or employee communication with an intranet, the solutions in place as alternatives to Jive were basically email and maybe instant messaging platforms for quick transactions. There were all these difficult painful processes that we had to work through just to communicate with one another, so to be able to store, retrieve, and communicate information and you have a tool that just streamlines all of that, making it so incredibly easy, you form an emotional connection to it. Jive saved my job. I would’ve gotten fired from my job if they hadn’t gotten Jive.
Ultimately the thing these two had in common was how they impacted me as a customer. There was an emotional attachment because they made life better. That’s the trick.
There is often a challenge for companies. It’s what I call the painkiller vs the vitamin scenario. How can marketing take a role in positioning a product or service as the painkiller that solves the problem?
Marketing is at the center of this if done correctly. It’s marketing's job to create connections between the brand, the product, and the customer. This should be bi-directional, providing a solution to the customer and learning from the customer as to what pains they're having.
At the core, best-of-breed marketers truly understand the personas they are targeting and can articulate what they need to solve, working closely with product to make customers lives easier through software.
How do you believe Evernote was able to win with the deck stacked against them?
Evernote had what I called frenemies, the Microsofts and Apples and Googles. I call them frenemies because they owned the distribution channels of our app, so to get out into the stores we had to partner with them. At the same time, they had products that competed with ours, and they are a huge, massive presence.
From the outside, someone might think there is no way that they can compete with these players who have all these tools. What makes it possible are two things:
Truly identifying a gap/problem/pain in marketplace and solving it in an eloquent, easy to use, efficient way
The next step is do it well
These large corporations fall short when you look at the team supporting the portfolio and it is small. Often the resources dedicated to the product is not nearly the size or intensity of a smaller org like Evernote. When you are a small scrappy player that hits a specific pain point and have a specific product you can’t afford to screw that up, whereas at the giant corporations if it falls flat, or doesn’t make any money, it's okay because there is so much else going on.
Smaller orgs are operating at a laser focus that the big corps just aren’t. Of course, that doesn’t mean success is guaranteed. If you try to do too much, then you water down your own product – big or small.
How do you define customer experience and how has the role of Customer Experience evolved in recent years?
The very basic view is “what is a customer’s experience with a particular brand or product or company as a whole?”
I like to look at what the experience is for an individual customer as they interact with a brand throughout the entire customer journey from discovery to the sales cycle, to onboarding and customer success, through to support and optimizations, eventually becoming evangelists for the brand. Customer experience and marketing’s involvement in every one of those components is to make sure it is a positive, and importantly beneficial experience for customers.
Best-of-breed marketing orgs tie into every one of those stages.
What are some examples of companies that do CX exceptionally well?
I used a marketing automation platform called Iterable to provide customer intelligence and multi-channel orchestration. They are privately held and smaller, but they have done everything correctly. I was initially introduced to them through their partner ecosystem, which is one of the most underrated things out there.
It was clear through sales process that there was an undercurrent through every touch point which was “we want YOU to be successful!” There are companies out there in the B2B world where you are just a number. With Iterable, during the onboarding process they were working with us to help to fill gaps and identify pitfalls early on. When you have customer success reps who are compensated on retention and engagement, not just on licenses it has a profound effect. Employees who are incentivized to help customers succeed directly leads to better customer experience. Most often teams are just renewal focused, you hear from them once a year when it’s time to renew.
This success starts with hiring, all teams need to buy into the same ideology of prioritizing customer experience.
Door Dash is another example of a company doing a great job using data to understand the customer. They know the time of day I normally order and where I usually order from. I will get a push notification with “your favorite store is having a sale” for example. After purchase, they follow through with a stream of content to find out how my experience was and how they can improve. It continues to feed the cycle – Door Dash gets information to improve their processes and then in turn they are providing a better experience for customers.
How do you manage the delicate balance of creepy vs personal when using data to drive customer experiences?
Marketers around the world deal with this all the time. While at Evernote, we could not access employee notes as a security policy, and people create notes for all sorts of things. Because of this we would never send out an outbound notification that said for example “We saw you created a notebook titled “Divorce’ – here are some resources”
The special sauce for personalization is that it should be fed by information willingly given. There are many ways to ethically acquire this data, such as single click surveys, to provide data points to find out what a person cares about.
How many people have gotten an email from a company promoting a product that’s on sale, but you purchased in last week? This is a huge disconnect and creates a further barrier. It sends the message the brand doesn’t know or understand the customer. The best way to implement these kinds of communications is to say something like, “Hey, we love that you bought this product! Here are some other accessories you might want to go along with it.” You want to communicate to the customer that you know where they are in the buying journey.
Of course, having your data house in order is critical to implement something like this.
What are some of the ways companies can transform their outbound marketing efforts to accommodate the declining attention span?
To fight through the noise of media, marketers need to establish a relationship with the customer. That includes having meaningful data on the customer and being able to speak to them on their level. It’s a bit of right message, right person, right channel – but it’s deeper than that. You must understand the customer.
First party data gives you the information to provide value such as what the customer wants or is interested in, but to establish a true meaningful connection you must establish trust. As marketers we can do this by providing value. For example, Evernote had a persona set of authors. So, to build trust and add value, the content strategy was around supporting them through this detail that we know about them. We’d send them things like “Best ways to use Evernote as an Author”.
On a personal level, I’m sure you also experience this, we have crazy email inboxes, but we are able to discern the brands we like amongst the clutter. Yet the rest of the content is all just seen as fluff because we haven’t established a relationship, so we won’t engage with them.
Where do you think the conversation can start? Where you are creating value throughout the customer journey? Where do those good practices begin?
The conversation is really like all of the other stages in the cycle because what you are talking about is really awareness. What it comes down to is that companies all need content marketers. We need to build content specific to each stage of the buying cycle – like blogs, social posts, ad content, SDR collateral – and use that content to support customers and build value from the awareness stage.
How can marketing leaders align goals within the organization and build bridges across stakeholders?
Most likely if there is friction with marketing, it’s often with the sales teams. But these two groups succeed when they are most cohesive. Best practice organizations understand that the flow of data between the two groups needs to be bi-directional. Marketing has data they need to constantly be feeding to sales and they also need to be pulling in new data from sales to inform marketing efforts.
Good marketing leaders should truly understand sales strategy. Any marketing organization that sits in a silo is going to fail, in my opinion, which will of course have a downstream effect on sales and the organization broadly.
You mention bringing marketing into the Quarterly Business Review (QBR)– can you talk a bit more about that?
I have done it myself and seen other marketers do it successfully. Joining a quarterly business review (QBR) across sales and marketing is really helpful because you hear all the pain points including what’s going well and what’s not going well. With your marketing mindset, you can start to think about solutions. Problems often surface in meetings like these long before they become real problems, so if marketing is in there and aware they can partner with sales to head things off before it grows into a major issue.
It can also work the other way – sales teams can add insight to marketing and vice versa. For example, conversations around a campaign plan with sales insight might look something like, “You’re planning to run a campaign in this region but we don’t have the infrastructure to support that right now.” Maybe marketing would’ve gotten this information eventually, but they may have wasted millions of dollars before they did. These are opportunities to partner and make sure the two teams are marching to the same drum.
Can you share a bit more about the work that you have been doing with Cap for Kids?
Cap for Kids is a 501c3 non-profit organization that supports families with children going through cancer treatment. Our goal is to reduce some of the parents outside stressors so that they can focus on their child. When they can do that the whole family has a better chance. We sponsor families with $5,000 to help pay bills – things like rent, mortgages, car payments, cell phone bills, etc.
Another part of our organization is a character program. We have people who will go to the homes or hospitals dressed as a character, like Captain America, and bring a little cheer to these children’s day.
Cap for Kids was founded in 2015 and has grown from just Colorado to supporting families across the United States. We’re still a small crew but now we’ve sponsored 70 families! We’re doing everything we can now to support the families on our waitlist. Personal donations made on Capforkids.org go directly to the families. Right now, we are in the process of looking for companies and people who are able to support our operational organization so that we can expand there as well.
What’s your go to productivity hack for managing your day-to-day tasks and staying focused
My calendar. If it’s not on my calendar, I won’t do it.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in all your years of marketing?
I might sound like a broken record, but it is: You need to create a valuable relationship with the customer.
Who wins in a tag team match between Captain America and the Hulk or Thor and Iron Man
Cap and the hulk are going to win severely
About the Guest
Sterling Bailey is a top performing leader, modern marketer, researcher, student and teacher with over 20 years of experience leveraging marketing and sales technologies and best practices to drive marketing & sales within organizations small and large. A well-regarded speaker and moderator at venues such as Oracle Open World, MAU, Eloqua Experience, Iterable Activate and others. When not helping companies reach their marketing & sales goals, the focus is entirely on leading the 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Cap for Kids to help families fight pediatric cancer.
