Transform Your Customer Journey and Accelerate Growth with Kia Puhm, CEO of DesiredPath

Growth for B2B is hard.


It used to be that you could accelerate growth with huge customer
acquisition.


Ramping up your sales and marketing is not enough to sustain
growth. Today, the best companies are growing through customer
success.


That’s why I interviewed Kia Puhm (@kiapuhm), CEO at DesiredPath,
to talk about customer success.


Kia’s got a fantastic perspective on “how do we accelerate and
grow our existing customer relationships,” which is something
that many companies don’t focus on nearly enough.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Kia: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. I come to software from an
educational background in computer engineering and practical
experience background of 22 years in the industry working at
rapidly growing, very dynamic software companies.


I guess I’ve built every post-sales function, and always the
common denominator has been how the organizations I led get
customers to adopt software so that they are using it and get
value out of it. Moreover, it translates into loyal customers
that can translate into additional revenue at some point in time.


I had to do that with a finite, limited amount of budget and
resources. So I always try to figure out how to drive that
adoption equation while doing what I could or what I had
available to me and use that most efficiently, if possible, to do
it.
What’s the most significant trend affecting your work?

Kia: Great question. I’m going to have to say disruption. With
all the changes happening out there to businesses, with
technology and data and information we have, and artificial
intelligence, and just the way the world is changing, it’s
changing how we operate.


So, the biggest trend in the work that I do with my customers in
helping them understand their customers and how to support that
is how do you do that in a continually disruptive environment
where things are always changing?
Vendor-centric vs. customer-centric

Kia: There have been many studies done and much research that
shows that companies operating from a customer-centric viewpoint
(that deliver amazing customer experience) far outperform their
competitors that aren’t customer-centric.


So, I think that that is where companies are moving toward, and
that is how we adapt to all these changes that are continually
happening.


The reason I think that’s important is not only the obvious
(customers stay loyal when they have good experiences and that
the product is delivering on the promises that it says it’s going
to deliver) but also as our customers keep evolving and changing,
so too are the ways that we operationalize that and support those
customers.


If you are customer-centric, it means you are observing that
evolution that’s happening to your customer base. You’re able to
be very agile and nimble in responding to that as a business.


If you keep using that information, that observation of a
customer, either passively or through active engagement with them
to find out that information, you could feed that into your
organization and continually change and respond to that to
continue to drive that value for customers and that loyalty that
you need to keep growing your own business.
Using journey maps to improve customer success

Kia: I know you, and I have had conversations at other times and
have completely aligned regarding the type of approach that we
use.


I use customer journeys to facilitate customer-centric thinking
to make sure that an organization understands empathizing and
understanding what customers are trying to accomplish when
purchasing your products.


When you understand it from the customer viewpoint, specifically,
as it relates to software, how you support and deliver the
various services that you need to to help that customer adopt
that software fully and continue to drive ongoing value from that
software, can dramatically change when you look at it from the
customer’s standpoint.
From a vendor-centric to a customer value approach

What I see all too often, and it’s so natural for us to do this
as vendors, defines the value proposition that our product is
meeting in the market. We organize ourselves for how we’re going
to deliver on that value proposition, and then we tell customers
all about that.


It’s a very vendor-centric approach, and while we don’t walk in
their shoes, we’re trying to push the product in an environment
that we’re not necessarily familiar with.


I think problems with retention and why customers have
difficulties adopting software are not because they don’t
necessarily understand the value or can’t learn the software or
understand it. It’s because we put the onus on them to understand
how to operationalize, take that software, and put it within
their environment.


However, if we start to employ a customer-centric approach and if
we understand the following:


Why, in general, our customers buy our products? What do their
environments typically look like inside? What are some of the
common trends and challenges that they have in their work
environment? How could that software seamlessly or best fit into
that?


We can now take a lot of that burden off that customer.
Taking the burden off the customer

We make it easier. We make it more enjoyable to bring that
software into their organization. Moreover, the faster we do
that, the more we make it feel seamless and easy and have a
better experience with that, the better they’re going to adopt
it. Then they’re going to recognize the value because it had felt
easy, and it’s going to meet the objectives that they set out to
achieve when they purchase the product, which then translates
into loyalty.


When you build that loyalty through trusted advisor-type of
relationships, that’s where you can start to talk to them about
doing more, which is that ultimate nirvana of expansion and
driving more revenue out of that install base.


I use those journeys as the beginning step of understanding,
walking in the customer’s shoes, seeing what that looks like, so
that then we can figure out how to align organizationally to that
journey and translate that into something that makes sense from
them, from their perspective because it’s coming from their
perspective in the first place.


Brian: I like the way you think, Kia. For our regular listeners
and readers, you just heard the episode with Brent Adamson from
Gartner. Brent said that as much and as for how difficult it is
selling B2B today, for our customers, buying is even harder.
Applying empathy to develop better customer journeys

I think we’re still in the infancy of journey mapping. I mean,
some people are quite advanced in it and companies that are
advanced, and there’s much information out there on how to
conduct journey mapping and how to do that quite effectively.


When I talk about infancy, I think we map out the customer’s
journey, but we still do it from our perspective. In the work
that I do, I haven’t seen that yet. I’m waiting for the day that
somebody shows me a journey map that they’ve done that reflects
the customer’s viewpoint and their perspective versus a
vendor-centric approach.


If you’ve got that journey, then you start to add on “What is in
place? What is that methodology?” Not just processes, but the
role alignment and systems alignment, and technology that needs
to be in place to support that customer journey.


Now you’ve got this business model, and then if you’ve got this
closed-loop feedback, where you’re getting input from customers,
and you’re feeding it back in: this is where the agile comes in.
Getting more agile with customer feedback

You can then respond to that and continually improve your
operations as you’re getting that feedback from customers as
they’re evolving so that you’ve got this agile, optimized
business model. That’s where I think journey mapping is not just
the mapping per se. It’s how do you operationalize all that and
create that agile business model. This is where I think is the
next stage in evolution.


To your point about empathy, it’s just common sense. How can you
understand someone’s point of view if you’re not thinking from
their perspective? I think that it takes just that skill set of
empathy to be able to understand that.


That’s the interesting work that I quite enjoy doing with
clients; it’s getting those “Aha!” moments where “Oh. Wait. I
thought I was doing it from the customer’s perspective, but, ah,
now I see. I’m not thinking from their perspective,” and then
just that training to keep thinking from the customer’s
perspective, and then things start to click, so just honing those
empathy skills.


Brian: What I hear from you is understanding how people think,
really. We need to understand how they are thinking about their
business now and understand the emotions. What are they feeling
at various points of their journey? Do I understand correctly?
Capturing emotional moments of truth for customers

Kia: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that’s a component. In the
industry, people often refer to the concept of “moments of
truth,” right?


Moments of truth can make it or break the interactions that
customers have with your company as a brand that could decide
whether they continue to be your customer. They also tend to be
highly emotionally charged at those moments of truth, and then
there are other times in the journey that might not be critical
moments of truth.


I think there are emotional elements there that help to
understand that customer perspective. So you need that emotional
component and understanding of that because what needs to be done
at a certain step in the journey can get delivered in multiple
different ways.


Well, if you know what the feeling of that customer might be, if
they’re feeling angst about using the software, if they’re
feeling excited about it, if they’re feeling bored about it, you
might approach the discussion with the customer differently. You
might approach how you’re instructing them differently or how
you’re working together with them. Those things all impact, and
so when you have that visibility into that, you can be much more
targeted and effective with how you are moving that customer
through that journey.
How can others start to improve customer success?

Kia: That’s a great question. Sometimes, it can feel overwhelming
or very abstract. People often confuse customer success or
customer experience with just making somebody happy or feel good.


I look at it very much as a disciplined way of operationalizing
how you’re going to engineer an amazing experience for customers,
not only in the business outcomes they get but also in that
emotional experience, to become a very consistent repeatable
methodology and approach.


It can feel overwhelming, like, “Where do I get started?”
Journey map to see from the customer’s perspective

Journey map and understand what that would look like from the
customer’s perspective. You will start to see how your
organization is aligned in each stage of the journey to support
that journey and those emotional points in that journey or those
critical moments of truth.


This is where this concept of agility is what I think is so
empowering and why I employ it with my customers and why I think
it’s so powerful is that mapping these things out.


Maybe you don’t get it right, but if you start to have this
concept of closed-loop feedback, where you’re reading and
understanding the customer more and more, then you can start to
make that continuous improvement and really create that agile
business model that keeps getting honed and refined as you learn
more about it.


You don’t have to have it right and perfect at the beginning. You
might have it completely wrong, but if you map something out, you
start to observe it and validate whether things are right or
wrong and start to use customer feedback to inform how you should
tweak operations.


Alternatively, what you’ve got in place to provide a better
customer experience, that’s where you’re going to optimize that
approach, and it should continually be dynamic forever.


None of us have static customers. They’re just as dynamic as we
are in our business operations, so let’s ensure that we’re
continuing to observe them and see how they’re improving or what
they need help with and build that into our model. Actionable
advice is a journey map. Build some initial model, observe it,
and then keep honing it. It’s not just a one-time effort.
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