Growth Insights for CEOs

From Loyalty Programs to Leadership: What 20 Years in CRM Taught Me About Organizational Growth
Executive Takeaways
- The principles that build customer loyalty work just as well on your best employees and partners.
- Salary and bonus are table stakes. What keeps top performers are the moments that make them feel like insiders.
- Internal friction is as damaging as friction in a customer journey — and just as fixable.
- Generic recognition retains no one. Tailored moves do.
Loyalty programs taught many of us how to turn casual buyers into raving fans. My 20 years in CRM and loyalty for brands like Marriott, Amazon, and American Express—and leading a $3B customer platform—taught me something bigger: The same system that keeps customers coming back also keeps your best people from leaving. When growth stalls, most CEOs reach for the usual levers: more demand gen, more recruiting, more channels.
Recent Posts

The Importance of Authentic Service and Hospitality in Business
Tue, Oct 2, 2012 — What Makes Exceptional Service in Your Business? Recently I have been looking more closely at service — which factors contribute to great service in business and which elevate the quality of service to exceptional levels. I have considered both the objective, measurable components of service as well as the subjective — less tangible factors that focus on the specific relationship between those served and those serving. It's fairly simple for us to evaluate the concrete aspects of service. We, as marketers, preach and follow mantras of "what gets measured, gets done," and "if we can't measure it, we can't manage it." We rate and measure service quality with customer satisfaction research and Net Promoter scores. Measurement is, and will continue to be, a critical component of our understanding and responding to day-to-day performance in our businesses. In today's increasingly competitive market though, is evaluating only the easily measured variables sufficient? Is doing this alone enough to raise our customer service from great to exceptional? Does it ensure that our business performance is consistent with our vision, values and strategy?

Customer Retention, or BJs Chickens Have Flown The Coop!
Fri, Aug 31, 2012 —

What To Do When Your Sales Are Up But Your Profits Aren't?
Thu, Aug 16, 2012 — Several times as a CMO, I have been called upon to solve a net profit, rather than a total revenue problem. Sales in these cases were not bad. Not where we wanted them to be, but adequate. The problem was that no one was making any money.
Stay up-to-date with the latest from Chief Outsiders

Can Your Product Be Easily Replaced?
Sun, Aug 12, 2012 — Have You Heard of Wally Pipp? Pipp was the first baseman for the New York Yankees in 1925. Folklore has it that on June 2 he asked to sit out the game because of a headache. The coach substituted Lou Gehrig, and that was the beginning of Gehrig’s streak of 2,130 consecutive games. What would happen to your product if it was replaced by a competitor, or worse, from another industry altogether?

7 Tactics for Customer Closeness with Improved Customer Profiles
Thu, Dec 23, 2010 — Customer Closeness Begins with Great Customer Profiles Think about your ideal customers. Do you have customer profiles to better understand who they are? Do you know them well or are they strangers? If they’re consumers, you might know basics like age, gender, household income, and some of what they buy. If they’re a business, you probably know what industry they’re in, what their revenues are, and some trends facing them. But knowing the basics won’t tell you what issues they face in their daily lives or business, how well they are or aren’t resolving those issues, where they go to find out more about resolving things and how they go about making a decision. You need to know what motivates them, how their attitudes and actions are measured, and what their priorities are. With detailed customer profiles, you can better customer closeness for your company. How do you get better customer profiles? Get to know your customers.