Experience Leader
Devin Smith
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Top 10 Experience Leader Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Experience Leader episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Experience Leader for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Experience Leader episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
CX Tech: The Unexpected Power of a CRM
Experience Leader
05/26/22 • 40 min
In today's episode, hosts Devin and David discuss customer experience tech, specifically diving into customer relationship management.
Since David is our resident CRM expert, he fills the role of guest as Devin runs the interview! Devin first wants to explore David's history with CRM, which includes experience building a CRM platform. From his early CRM experiences, including such things as rudimentary efforts using Excel and Access, and onward, David has seen all the flavors of what's out there. He first became heavily involved in work on CRMs when he participated in building a CRM for a college sports program. This process, he explains, prompted him to think about the full customer life cycle; for a prospective college athlete, this life cycle actually extends from pre-college athletics through the rest of life as a student and alum. The question was, how could David and his team build a system for this market to help different aspects of the business keep up with the customers (athletes)? There were tricky nuances to navigate, especially if the CRM platform was to function smoothly—like an extension of human touch.
At their best, CRM platforms work with humans to augment their efforts; thus, they must be designed around the layers of relevant use cases and different aspects of a business. Since some companies' touchpoints with customers never leave the digital realm, these companies' CRM platforms are the employees' only means of customer interaction. In these instances, it is especially crucial for the platform to represent customers well and thoroughly. David explains how business leaders can help employees who feel burdened by the task of keeping up with customer information input, highlighting the need for proper information to meet customer needs and expectations in the moment. As the conversation wraps up, he and Devin talk about empowering employees to deliver a great customer experience by using CRM for prioritizing, business optimization, and personalization. CRM is not only good for customers, David goes on to share, but is also a tool by which leaders can empower their employers!
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leader podcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
If you have any questions on this episode, send them to [email protected]
Connect with Devin
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Five Forces of CX, Part 3: Product & Service Excellence
Experience Leader
05/12/22 • 43 min
Welcome to the Experience Leader podcast, and to this episode brought to you by Active Digital! Do you want to de-commoditize your products and services? Do you want to become a destination brand, increase your revenue, and have more control over your pricing? If so, you're in the right place! Each week, we'll talk about how to create great customer experiences and how to orient your company to enable them. In today's episode, hosts Devin and David have a conversation about product and service excellence.
To begin, Devin stresses the importance of always asking if the main intent of your product is to help customers meet their goal. As someone who has run a product company himself, David shares his thoughts on this. While it may sound obvious, this task is a hard one to do. Small scale businesses have limited resources, so it’s crucial to make tradeoffs which will actually resonate with the customer. That being said, customer goals are rarely linear. You run into big problems when you begin thinking of customer needs as a one-size-fits-all. Customer feedback, both positive and negative, is essential to this process. In both Devin’s and David’s experience, not all feedback is created equally, so it’s important to single out feedback from customers with the job to be done that you are targeting. Similarly, you must have realistic expectations which map to gradual innovation.
Innovation is about being able to deliver more in a way that helps the customer solve that problem in a way they couldn’t before. While it is a cultural force, there is a need to give people the latitude to make those decisions. Most companies don’t allow a sufficient amount of time to ask why something didn’t advance progress like it should’ve. If you ask yourself these questions, you’ll often find that you weren’t very far off from success at all. Another way to nail product and service in the software world is to keep employing agile. David shares that if the adherence to the process becomes more important than the outcome of the work done, you need to reevaluate. Most importantly, you need to care about the impact of your product.
If you find that your product is not helping the customer reach their intent, you need to feel comfortable enough to stop what you’re doing and find out why. However, it’s never easy to slow the train down, especially in a large organization. Most of the time, it all comes down to how well you understand your customer. David explains that excellence comes from a place of understanding and demands latitude to solve problems. Finally, Devin offers parting advice for achieving excellence.
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leader podcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Creating Great CX in the SaaS World as a CMO with Sydney Sloan
Experience Leader
07/21/22 • 44 min
How do you create a consistently great customer experience in the SaaS business world? We find out from Sydney Sloan, whose storied career has included serving as CMO of Salesloft as well as senior marketing leadership positions at Adobe and Marketo.
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If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
What is Strategy?
Experience Leader
01/25/21 • 44 min
This week I bring Assaf Weinberg back on the show to have a conversation about what strategy is, and why it is important to your business success.
Show Notes:
Find me online: www.devinwsmith.com
Ask me a question: [email protected]
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If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Does Design Thinking Work? with Steve Nedvidek
Experience Leader
08/11/22 • 51 min
Does Design Thinking work? Or does it oversimplify design, misrepresent it to the business world, and try to place designers? Steve Nedvidek joins Devin on the podcast in this episode to discuss it all.
Steve teaches design thinking at Wake Forest University, is responsible for introducing design thinking to Chick-fil-A, and is himself a designer. He is the perfect person to address recent critique of design thinking, in which a well-known designer claims that design thinking oversimplifies what design is, misrepresenting it to the business world, and ultimately tries to replace design itself. Devin’s own experience with design thinking has been far more positive than this critique suggests, and Steve agrees that there is more to the story than what this critic asserts.
Steve can understand the critic’s perspective when design thinking is thought of in one particular way, but Steve conceives of it much differently. Coming from the angle of his own background as an artsy kid having to try to explain to people what he did, Steve explains how design thinking was the language he needed to communicate what he was doing to people who did not know how he did what he did. In his experience, design thinking most certainly works, and helps facilitate connections between designers and non-designers. It is a discipline, mindset, and process that both enables understanding between people and helps non-designers to employ design concepts to solve problems - all without making the designer superfluous.
Design thinking, Steve says, calls us to think more deeply about the order of things. It adjusts the brain to the discipline of knowing what comes next, helps keep teams grounded in the central problem they’re working to solve, and promotes customer-centricity by demanding a team start with the customer rather than the product. Not only does design thinking foster empathy, but it is a living structure (rather than an equation or rigid set of rules) that also helps businesses to function effectively. It provides the structure for a business to play the long game, focusing on good solutions and stakeholder value rather than speed and immediate results, and following a methodology that takes one step at a time.
Links:
Learn more about Steve Nedvidek.
Learn more about the Experience Leaderpodcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Leadership with Assaf Weinberg
Experience Leader
01/01/21 • 35 min
How do you lead a team to be at its best so that your team can do their best for your customers? Assaf Weinberg, Director of Product Engineering at Emporos gives us powerful insights that you can put into practice immediately.
Connect with Devin
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If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Fantastic Hires and Where to Find Them
Experience Leader
07/14/22 • 44 min
Your next star performer might not have the traditional background you're looking for, but you can find them, and Derek Greenacre is with us this week to show the way.
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If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Applying Jobs to Be Done to Sales
Experience Leader
07/07/22 • 37 min
How do you apply the Theory of Jobs to be Done to Sales? Bob Moesta is with us this week to talk about how he has done it, as outlined in his book, Demand-Side Sales 101.
Connect with Devin
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If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus - Part 2
Experience Leader
06/30/22 • 41 min
In today's episode, hosts Devin and David are back for the second installment of this series on sales, marketing, and how both can work better together. Last week focused on marketing, this week is about sales!
While sales and marketing may feel like they are from different planets, both have to work together to ensure the best experience for the customer. The main goal for the company is how to orient itself around the customer, and to help the customer make the right buying choice for them. So the question is, how do you make a customer-centric sales process that works hand-in-hand with marketing? Devin and David answer this question in three main steps that will help both sales and marketing win.
First, you must make sure you understand the context of the customer. By the time the customer comes to a salesperson, they have already researched and formed opinions about the company. Even so, it is the job of the salesperson to still ask questions, find out what problem the customer is facing and what they’ve done to try to solve it so far. After that, you can better serve the customer by helping them understand what your company offers and the outcomes your offerings can produce to help the customer make progress.
The next stop on the customer journey is helping them identify the trade-offs they will face and discussing the service from the customer’s perspective. The customer has too many options and each organization is competing for their time and attention. The point in sales is not to just get numbers, but to understand what the customer needs and give them your opinion on what steps they should take. The salesperson needs to build trust with the customer and help the customer make the right choice for them. You can win trust as a company by helping the customer make the right buying decision, and discussing the ramifications and benefits for the options they have.
The last step is having sales and marketing work closely together to receive feedback and adjust accordingly. Just like the customer is researching your company, the sales and marketing team also need to receive intel on the customer to make sure they are the right fit for the company. In order to learn about the customer, you need to have conversations with them and ask questions. Then, you can share those assertions with the sales team, but also be willing to tighten and reframe those assertions about the customer. Both teams need to be able to receive feedback, reset, and try again. If it doesn’t work out with a customer, both teams need to find out why and work hand-in-hand together to improve. In every company, leaders need to give sales and marketing the ability to have conversations and make adjustments. The key to winning on both sides, is to continuously improve and to keep the focus on helping the customer make progress on their job to be done.
Links:
Learn more about theExperience Leaderpodcast.
Learn more about hostsDevin Smith andDavid Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsorActive Digital.
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Sales is from Mars. Marketing is from Venus. Or are they?
Experience Leader
06/09/22 • 43 min
Welcome to the Experience Leader podcast, and to this episode brought to you by Active Digital! Do you want to de-commoditize your products and services? Do you want to become a destination brand, increase your revenue, and have more control over your pricing? If so, you're in the right place! Each week, we'll talk about how to create great customer experience and how to orient your company to enable them. In today's episode, hosts Devin and David unpack the idea that sales is from Mars and marketing is from Venus.
At almost any given company, the tendency for the sales team is to feel like marketing is not doing their best, and vice versa. This can lead to pressure for teams to end up behaving in a way that isn’t in line with the best interest of the customer, and therefore the company. Individually, each of these groups struggle with short term vs. long term, which often ends up with each side feeling they are in opposition with one another. One of the biggest issues within enterprises is having marketers who don’t see how their actions impact sales. However, both sales and marketing should understand that they share the same end goal: helping the customer buy.
While it’s necessary to have a method behind the madness of marketing, this isn’t just limited to the number of calls made or how the conversations went. Rather, it needs to be measured by asking ourselves if we are helping customers be more educated on the service and understand how we can be of value to them before they ever make a final decision. Having a goal number to shoot for to incentivize ourselves to grow can be good, but it’s important not to wind up too focused on the numbers. There is the question of looking at these teams and how they operate, and then there is also the question of leadership. Representatives from any field of a company must have a clear vision of who their customer is and what their expectations may be at every touchpoint. Leadership and company culture is really where this all begins.
As a marketer, you hold a unique ability to expand someone’s mind by helping them consider other possibilities rather than the ones they already know. The beauty of understanding what somebody is trying to achieve is that you can actually introduce solutions for them to solve their problems at hand. Once the door is open, it is prime time for marketing. Moving forward, Devin and David predict that the line between sales and marketing will continue to blur as people tend to do more research and shopping without human contact. Similarly, we will find that sales will have to be involved in the process of educating without contact.
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leaderpodcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Experience Leader have?
Experience Leader currently has 36 episodes available.
What topics does Experience Leader cover?
The podcast is about Purpose, Product, Branding, Management, Leadership, Podcasts, Technology, Business and Customer Experience.
What is the most popular episode on Experience Leader?
The episode title 'Creating Great CX in the SaaS World as a CMO with Sydney Sloan' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Experience Leader?
The average episode length on Experience Leader is 48 minutes.
How often are episodes of Experience Leader released?
Episodes of Experience Leader are typically released every 7 days, 18 hours.
When was the first episode of Experience Leader?
The first episode of Experience Leader was released on Dec 17, 2020.
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