Priscilla McKinney: You know, on this show, when we talk about leaving behind our egos and really helping people to take that next step forward to digital transformation success, I go out and look for experts who have done it before. And Lord knows I learned from people on this podcast, but you’re going to love this next guest I have with me, Eric. Eric, thank you for being on Eric Siano. This took me a little while to get you on the show, but I’m super excited to have you.
Eric Siano: Thanks. Appreciate the opportunity to be here.
Priscilla McKinney: Well, we, my God, it’s gonna be so fun. Let’s see how much I can grill you and how much I can learn in this episode. If you don’t know Eric, he is the managing director of Blue Leopard and he delivers absolutely practical results about business growth. And yes, it’s all about digital transformation and about data-driven marketing, but let’s just leave behind that jargon. We’re gonna talk about his experience in 15 different industry, in 17 different countries, and just really get down to that beautiful nitty gritty of what it takes to have an amazing strategy and execute it, stay accurate, and use your resources just very well.
So this is a great opportunity here from someone who is very passionate about helping businesses achieve real growth and real impact. And so we are again, just gonna dump all of our jargon and we’re gonna talk about what it really takes to get ahead in business today. Eric, I’m gonna start with this common assumption that people make that growth requires increased spending. And I know from other experiences with you that you don’t agree with that. So let’s start with that big one, your thoughts.
Eric Siano: It doesn’t require incremental spending. It requires you to rethink your current spending levels. One of the projects we did, we were tasked with something, they’re looking at a huge IT spend and we restructured it as a business process outsourced and used existing commercial money to pay for the whole deal. So it’s really about thinking through how you want to pay for it. It’s not about, geez, we got to invest X million dollars to get this done.
Priscilla McKinney: So tell me a little bit more about that because I know that you have achieved a lot of growth at the same time you’ve reduced costs. But what you’re saying is that, you’re kind of that from a different, allocating it from a different budget. But tell me about how just overall, if you are spending correctly, you don’t have to just keep spending to keep growing.
Eric Siano: So you have to look at this as a wheel with two sides. One is revenue, one is efficiency. If you start by focusing on increasing revenue and you think of data as your fuel, right? That fuels the whole process and you do the right data capture, you can impact the efficiency side because you got the, and let me give you an example. In one of the projects we did, we changed data capture so that we could impact product planning, procurement, manufacturing, and finance.
So what we did is captured the data and said, we don’t need to incentivize these products because we have more demand than supply. So no incentives, no discounts. Right. We need more of this in the future that impacts both procurement and manufacturing. Right. And we basically fine tuned why we were losing sales, et cetera, so we could give them insight is our pricing rate is our promotional strategy rate. So it’s really about capturing the data and creating insight. And you have to think as data as the fuel. Everything else is the engines, but they don’t run without data.
Priscilla McKinney: Now, you and I live in this world of digital transformation as it relates to go-to-market strategy and marketing performance. But what you’re saying is that before you even decide on that go-to-market strategy, you have to have that data to fuel the decision because otherwise you just run in and start marketing, marketing, marketing, let’s go to market. Well, now hold on a minute. When we go to market, to your point that you just said, we don’t need to discount this particular product. We need a very different strategy.
So it’s not a let’s do marketing or not. It’s a wait a minute, what kind of marketing, what kind of, what are we going to need to do to execute based on the data that we already know about our services? So help us make that connection from high level strategy to true executional impact? What frameworks or systems have you used to translate these big ideas into effective go-to-market strategies?
Eric Siano: So I’ve created a checklist for the digital transformation and I’ve also created a framework for go-to-market. And a good go-to-market, right? If you’re already in market, you can capture what you’re doing. It’s just a snapshot. And from there, think about your product, but you have to think about products and services differently. People think this is what we do. Customers have needs and wants. Right? I need transportation. I want the Nasta and Martin’s Agathe Ovaloffs. They start at $800,000. So I’m not likely to buy one. Right?
So there’s always a disconnect. There’s also how customers use the product. Right? So it’s needs, wants, jobs to be done. And you have to look at all of them and say, for customer personas. You know, getting the one-to-one is an ideal, but we’re not quite there yet, but it’s an ideal. We need to keep working towards it. But for these personas, these segments, what are they trying to solve? What do they need and what do they want? So that we can talk about our product the right way.
I also tend to group things, right, at the execution level in a good, better, best and I lead with the better. And if they can afford it, you can walk them up to the best. And if they can’t, you walk them down to the good. Right? So you don’t go with, here’s my one shot and I missed.
Priscilla McKinney: You know, it’s interesting how that relates to something else you’ve told me, and that is that digital transformation is not about technology at all, because I love you bringing up just even the idea of personas. I’m very well known for crafting amazing segmentations and personas. And yes, while we’d all love this one-to-one scenario, we know that we have to get as much insight or as much data as we possibly can about these needs and wants in order to blend them together in a needs and wants soup, if you will, so that we can create a good strategy.
But again, to me, that’s still very, that’s very, you know, expertise understanding. Can we get a little bit more practical about that? So let’s say between that needs and wants of that Aston Martin, how do you start putting that framework together to say, okay, this is what we need to do next for this persona?
Eric Siano: So part of it is changing the conversation. And I’ll give you a very specific example. I working on a project in Latin America. The company is talking to their distribution network about a digital ecosystem. It was falling flat. They’re looking at that. This is an expense, et cetera. I went back and met with the folks at the dealer association, the distributor group, right? That they all belong to and say, this is a sales system. Here’s how it’s going to benefit you. Here’s what you have to invest, but here’s the potential.
Long story short, at launch, we increased digital sales 570%. And a lot of that was right place, right time, were pretty good at what we do and they were really bad at what they did at the time. Right. But it’s really about thinking and changing the conversation because of those needs and wants. They needed to increase sales, right? The job to be done had a bunch of technology in it, but the real need was to increase sales. Right. What they wanted was to increase sales hugely and we almost got there. We almost got there.
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah. Well, 575 % I’m pretty good with that number. So.
Eric Siano: Like I said, was right place, right time. They were really bad at what they were doing. And we hit on a number of things that helped them get there.
Priscilla McKinney: But you kind of are talking about this mindset shift where you come in and say, wait, I’m not coming in and saying, hey, we have a new job to be done. So now we need new money for it. What we’re saying is let’s take a step back. Digital transformation of this whole process might be that we don’t need to spend more money. We need to reallocate it. We need to understand the bigger concept or the bigger context that’s happening in our business.
And in this case, you said here, they may be performing, you know, the product performing or the service performing really well, but we’re not meeting the needs. Like the actual delivery of the message at the right time to that total addressable market was off. So there was a big missed opportunity in there that could be solved by something digital. If only you could put the right strategy together.
Eric Siano: However, the technology was not neutral because the technology allowed you to do certain things. The impact could change the way people work, it changed the way they communicate, it changed their compensation programs. Uh-oh. Right? So we had to address all of that. It’s not as simple as, okay, we’re going to do this. Right? When you’re changing data, when you’re changing measurement systems, it impacts things downstream and there’s both emotional and political and financial impacts that you have to communicate well.
Priscilla McKinney: So people are involved and change management is hard. These are things that we know to be true. But I love this in this podcast where we really pull the curtain back on digital transformation and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, this isn’t just about automating your marketing. This isn’t just about putting in a new system. And this isn’t either just calling in a new marketing firm and seeing what can be done. It’s about really understanding all of the larger systems that are at play.
But let me throw you something a little bit tougher because you’re an expert. You have really led a lot of successful digital transformations in many industries. And that is rare because a lot of times people end up specializing in digital transformation for teams that are all doing the same things. So I think that you kind of have just one step above. You’re just like kind of sitting above that having a great vantage to be able to see what is the commonality across a lot of industries?
What are the most critical factors that determine whether a digital transformation is going to succeed or not across the organization? I think you touched on a little bit. It’s about being sensitive to some of the political and the people factors, but what else is missing from that list?
Eric Siano: Understanding that digital transformation is a growth accelerator. Once you understand that, right, there’s a lot of commonalities across industries. Certainly there are huge differences, there are regulatory differences, et cetera, but a lot of commonalities, right? We have to create products. We have to communicate the value of those products. We have to reach customers. So the commonalities, once you find how they work, it makes it really easy to make those variations minimal, right? And like I said, a lot of that is changing the conversation, right?
And understanding that technology is not neutral. And I’ll give you a really good example. I don’t ever talk about loyalty, right? Because I believe you can be loyal to your country, your God, and your family, not to a company. What we want is repeat purchase behavior. If you look at Apple’s technology, it’s a very closed system that drives that retention, but it does something fundamentally different, which is it changes people’s switching costs. Right?
So they’re not likely to defect because if you, I’m in the Apple ecosystem, even though I’m not the biggest Apple fan, right? I started out the journey on Apple because the Apple phone was the only one that could work the way I do right when I’m on site and moving around and just got used to it. So they keep people in the ecosystem with a very close technology stack. But it locks in customers and partners and locks other people out. And you need to understand that impact, that this technology decision does that, that technology does this. How does it fit with our overall strategy?
Priscilla McKinney: Let’s get a little bit more granular about the area where your expertise and my expertise collides because I’m really interested in your take on what happens when people get a growth strategy, they’re looking at change management for digital transformation, wanting to accelerate that growth. And so they do look to marketing. There’s some point where they look to marketing and say, let’s optimize what we’re doing. And hopefully they are wanting to do that through data-driven insights. They’re not just going to go make it up, right?
But let’s talk about the next step, which you and I hear a lot, which is we need these certain KPIs, they’re looking at dashboards and we get a lot of marketing jargon thrown at us. Tell me what your take is on that and how you start that conversation with a company so that they can frame up what marketing performance and what marketing automation optimization really means.
Eric Siano: I tend to simplify things to three or four KPIs and embed submetrics below each one of those. So when I look at any one of them, it helps me pinpoint where to go look for the problem. If I’m not hitting my targets, why? Right? Because that’s really how we optimize is where is the problem. So if you put things, particularly if you can shape them in a funnel shape, right? We’ve got to do this and achieve this and achieve this. And that’ll get us to this, is benchmark sales rate for our industry. All right.
Once you look at it that way and you embed the submetrics, if you’re running behind track, you know where to look for it. If you’re ahead of track, right. Then you have to look at other things. Part of marketing optimization is also understanding when you do nothing.
Priscilla McKinney: Okay, say more, say more. I know there’s more to that statement.
Eric Siano: So at one time I was doing a project for a financial services firm and I looked at the best customers. segmented the customers. They’re coming anyway. I’m not talking to them anymore. And I shifted the bulk of the marketing spend on those that were what we called credit insecure. And brought them into our system to talk to us and we never sold them anything. We just explained the financial products because the folks up here, knew the financial, they were coming or they weren’t. We weren’t gonna move that needle, right?
So we looked at where do we move the needle and focus the dollars there, right? There are times when you look and you say, I don’t need to spend because where I am with either inventory or capacity, you’re service company, I don’t have the capacity to bring on more customers, so I’m not going to spend that. I’m low on inventory, so I’m not going to do this. So it’s understanding when you do nothing is part of optimizing your marketing stack.
Priscilla McKinney: Well, and I love that because it gets a little closer to your ideal, which is that marketing is more of a growth engine and not a cost center. It’s this ideal. like, you shouldn’t even care how much you’re spending in marketing because the marketing should be actually generating revenue.
Eric Siano: Yeah, so part of it too is thinking about what are your growth levers?
Priscilla McKinney: Give me some examples of growth levers you’ve seen in the past.
Eric Siano: Well, you’ve got acquisition, you’ve got retention, you got winbacks, right? Bringing back customers that left us, because not all customers left us for good reasons. One of the things that struck me when I was, many, many years ago, I won’t even tell you how old I was, I read a study out of one of the universities, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Edinburgh? So, and basically what they said is that most people that left you reported top box scores and satisfaction. I’m like, gives me some ideas.
So for windbags, they didn’t all leave you because they’re unhappy with you. Maybe somebody made him a better financial offer. Something else happened that made somebody else’s product. So you got windbags. Then you’ve got two other levers that are harder to get going. One is margins. Right? You can increase margins, right? There’s only two ways to make money, volume or margins. Right? You have to decide which one you’re playing in so you can adjust your margins up or down, right? To increase the dollars, not the units.
There’s a fundamental difference between units and revenue dollars. We can raise our price and our revenue goes up, but did we really sell more? And the last is, can we expand? What are the adjacencies that we can address? Every product has adjacencies and that the best example, SkinSoSoft, was designed to be a hand cream. Turns out it’s a great mosquito repellent. So they sell it as a hand cream, some mosquito repellent. They got another idea. They put SPF stuff in it and so now you can sell it to golfers, campers, etc.
So it’s understanding any adjacencies both from the core products or something similar that you can go into. Go into some white space where other folks aren’t. So you’ve got five growth levels.
Priscilla McKinney: I’m interested in your take on this because as I go in and create go-to-market strategies and I start planning for customers on this growth strategy, yes, I get these five levers, but one thing I feel people are not awake and alive to and that is their churn rate. So they’re not realizing how fast their losing that retention. So the negative of retention or the reason why they have to spend money on win back.
So I’m curious what your thoughts are there because typically people, when I ask them, they say, no, we don’t, know, no customers leave us or no, I have a really low churn rate. And I think, well, I already know that’s not true. And people are often surprised as I lead them through, you know, looking at the real data, what that number is. And if they were really having digital success, they would already know that number. So I’m curious what you think about churn rate and how that comes into the conversation about these five growth lovers.
Eric Siano: So you’ll laugh, right? Related to the five growth levers when I talk to clients. So we’re in business to do three things. Acquire, optimize, and retain customers. If we do that well, we drive revenue, right? And if we also do it well and manage our cause, we drive profits. So when we think about churn, right? It’s about aligning marketing, sales, and service. So they understand who’s talking to the customer when, what’s the dog track so that marketing and sales don’t sell stuff that we can’t deliver, right?
Or that long-term, right? There are certain things that are easily replaceable. A lot of SaaS software is easily replaceable. And even when the customer makes bad decisions, the product takes the blame and they switch. So it’s about understanding what’s the talk track, who’s talking to them, when do they come back in the market so that we are talking to them the same way. That means we have shared revenue targets, shared goals. It means we understand what the last thing was said to them has a lot of implications, not only to CRMs, but processes. We have a shared customer profile.
So that it really is about aligning those three groups to do something simple. AOR, acquire, optimize, and retain customer. Optimize being share of wallet. So both service and sales play a role in that as well as marketing. But we need to know when that trade off is and who’s talking to them when. I’ve done this a number of times for a lot of companies is map those out. Who’s talking to them when? What are they saying? They’re really eight parameters, and I don’t want to get into all of them today, but that we can align on, right? So that the three groups are in unison, right? Whether you call it service, customer success, it really doesn’t matter. It’s a service function.
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah. Okay, well, let’s end on this because you have a lot of tips. We won’t go into the eight things, but let’s, can you give us some of your expertise because you have built so many scalable go-to marketing plans and for them to be sustainable, they have to do what you just said. They have to get really clear communication across a lot of different departments in the company. So how have you got about breaking down some of those silos in marketing, sales, and IT, other departments, so that they can get that alignment, so that they can digitally transform the whole company and grow the revenue together.
Eric Siano: My approach is always all of your departmental metrics are submetrics. We’re going to agree on shared goals. We’re going to reach these things together. Right? So you have shared, and I always aligned them on revenue because it’s the easiest thing to do. We’re going to hit this revenue number. Marketing, own this piece. Sales, you own this piece. Right? Service, you own that piece. And together, we win or lose, which means nobody gets a bonus unless we hit it together.
Priscilla McKinney: Ouch, you just hurt people where it hurts. And that’s interesting. You’re kind of getting rid of the superfluous conversations about excuses onto why marketing is not giving us the right leads, why sales not closing them, while finance thinks that you’re spending too much, while IT is not getting the dashboard done right, all those kinds of conversations and honing it in.
Eric Siano: Yeah, look, the marketing qualified lead is a myth. You need to understand the buying process for your target audience, right? Whether they have a buying center, just because somebody said, look at me, they’re not a lead, they’re a hand raiser that said, I’m interested in something in particular, right? They may be doing research, they may be one of the folks in the buying center, maybe just somebody that had an interest. So it’s really about understanding the buying processes for our target audience, including their budget cycles, right? Talking people outside of their budget cycles.
And I worked for one of the automotives for 18 years and I used to coach my vendors. Look, don’t come talk to us, right? We do budgeting at this time of year. We have our first budget cut here, the second one here, and we batten down the hatches, right, to hit our profitability targets here at the end of the year. Understand when you can come talk to us, because I can hide some money here and there in the budget for unplanned things, which I normally do. However, it’s not a lot of money. So understanding that budgeting process and how they buy is critical.
Priscilla McKinney: Okay, so just in closing, I want a little bit of a peek into your world. When people come to you because of your expertise, what are they asking and what do you think they should be asking? How do you have to correct the conversation and say, wait, wait, that’s not the problem that you have. That’s not really the thing that really is at the root of the problem. How are you free framing those conversations quickly to get to the truth?
Eric Siano: I use the word and to reframe. Many moons ago, I was talking to a client and this client said to me, we need to be on Pinterest. On the inside, I’m like, On the outside, I just looked at him quietly and said, tell me more about what you’re thinking. Client to explain their process. And then I simply looked at them said, and now all we have to do is figure out how to bridge the difference between your demographic that’s 75 % male and theirs that’s 85 % female.
The word and is very strategic. When I communicate, I typically communicate in groups of three. And I use strategic repetition and I’m very cognizant of the fact that people only remember 10 % of what you tell them. So make the 10 % that you want them to remember matter.
Priscilla McKinney: I love that. And as far as the 10 % we can take away from your expertise, it is that listening as the first tactic and then bridging it to what actually needs to happen, which then gets it back into alignment with the growth goals that you mentioned. So you can have whatever idea you want, but yes, that idea and we’ve got to figure out a way to make that idea actually actionable over to hit our goals.
Eric Siano: So if I could refine that a little bit, it’s not about being an expert or having all the answers. It’s about asking the right questions. So if you ask good questions, right, you can get to an answer with your providers much faster. Right? I typically tell people, don’t tell me the how, tell me what you want. We’ll figure out the how together. Tell me what you want to achieve. Because people focus on a lot of hows, either a channel that they, right? TikTok is busted loose. We need to be there.
I’m very big on do fewer things. I wrote a blog post on doing less to do more. Do fewer things, but do them well. Don’t do things unless you have the resources to do every one of them well because you may miss out on some customers, but you’re going to lose out on lot more interest if you are spraying and praying, right, in 50 different channels.
Priscilla McKinney: I love it. Eric Siano, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise. I just feel like I have delivered on the brand promise of finding people who are so good at what they do that they leave behind their ego and they’re willing to actually share the expertise from real life stories and help us put this all together for digital transformation success. Thanks so much for your time.
Eric Siano: Thank you for having me on.
