In this service-driven episode, Johann Diaz, Founder of Service Revolution Academy, shares how he helps his clients boost their sales and profitability by focusing on dramatically improving the quality of their service in the eyes of their customers. If you and your team are tired of the new logo rat race or are frustrated that your company’s service is your industry’s biggest secret, you won’t want to miss this episode.
You will discover:
– How do you diagnose whether your sales problem is a service problem?
– How to differentiate even in a commoditized market
– Why you need to stop defining what is valuable and who should define it
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with us today is yet another high demand coach in the one and only Johann Diaz, with over 35 years of experience at the intersection of technology, service excellence and operational strategy, Johan is a seasoned business and technology leader who has significantly impacted various industries, from leading roles in high stakes service transformations for global giants like Unilever, Diageo, I don’t know if I got that one right, Vodafone and BP. I’m sure you’ve heard of a couple of those, as well as strategic leadership roles for ServiceNow, Capgemini and service, where Johan has consistently helped organizations to deliver measurable improvement in service quality, customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Interestingly enough, and Johan, welcome to the show. I’m very eager to see what you have to say about this. We’re going to talk about those things, but what we’re really talking about today is increasing sales. And we’re not doing that through that traditional lens of just go sell more. We’re talking about how we do that by turbo charging our customer service. So Johann, out of the gate here, there are two kind of equal but opposite strategic errors that I see teams make the I’ve given them kind of colloquial names here. The first one is the silver bullet sale, right? We’ll dive into in a second. And then the second one is, if you build it, they will come so let’s dive into this idea. You probably know exactly where I’m going with these the silver bullet sales, this belief that, like all, or at least, the vast majority, of our problems, are solved by more leads or more sales, you know, something in that line of thinking, why is that wrong?
Johann Diaz
Hey, look, who am I to say it’s wrong, okay, but from where I come from, and what I’ve seen in most organizations, large, medium and small, we spend a huge amounts of effort in trying to get those new logos, those new labels, you know, the new ticket offers out there and the newly sales organizations, and we don’t spend nearly as much as we should in working closely, much Closer, with our existing customers who are already paying us money already pretty much like what we’re doing, otherwise they wouldn’t be here still. And you kind of think, guys, it’s got to be a lower cost option to just improving the quality of what you’re doing and being able to sell on upscale, you know, upscales and such like Right? And many organizations, they just get themselves in a muddle, in my view, and they put all this effort in the front office, if you like your new Samuel’s office, and not enough. Now, I think we’re in a day and age where all of us as consumers, and let’s face it, we are all experts in service. We are because we’re served by, you know, good or bad organizations on a daily basis. And we all know we do, I guarantee we all know what good service feels like and what bad service feels like. I won’t use the expletives that I normally use that I’m sure we all do when we’re off camera. So it bemuses Me, Scott, it really does that. You know, organizations don’t put enough effort into really improving the quality of service they deliver, because when they do, yeah, customers buy more from you. It’s a simple one.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so this other myth doesn’t tend to last very long. It’s kind of dead on arrival, but I’ve seen it exist, particularly in in industries or with founders who have a really sharp eye out for quality. And there’s this there’s this idea that, like, if you just have the best service in the world, everyone will come running for it. And there’s almost this pacifism that creeps in in their sales process, there’s they’re so afraid of it being like a cringy sales process that they never actually sell their amazing service, or, or, or worse, yet, they’re constantly trying to perfect their service and then sell it later, and they just never arrived there, Right? What? What does it take for someone like that, who has that service mindset to really capitalize on all of that quality?
Johann Diaz
Yeah, that’s great question, and I agree with the inference of the question, which, in my world, says. Yes, there’s going to come a point that it’s good enough. It’s good enough for you and me as the current customer, the current consumer, but you have to do it from the perspective of the customer. So yes, the customer really ought to be engaged in the whole process. If we flip further over towards a good customer attention process, I would say that all the organizations that I’ve worked with as suppliers, that I’ve valued have truly become trusted advisors, valuable partners. Call it what you like, right? I get the value. I’ve had, you know, as when I was C suite organization roles, I’ve had recruitment companies come to me and say, Yeah. And you know, we know where you’re taking the business. First of all, good. They’ve done their research. We probably had lots of conversations. We understand the culture of the organization and what you’re trying to do. I know you’re not looking, but we found someone on the market who we just think would fit in amazingly, in your organization. Do you want to speak to her? And I have done and nine times out of 10 I’ve gone, you know what? I’m gonna make the budget to bring that person in, because they are so good now, that’s just, that’s, that’s outstanding service, right? Because for me, you know, I can’t do it all. We can’t do it all. We need our partners to be our eyes and ears on the ground out there for us, and particularly when you’re in fast moving environments, in the world of tech and such like, you need partners who can go, I understand what you’re trying to do with your business. You know what? We’ve got, something that we’re working on the moment. It’s not there yet. Do you think we could pull you in to help us actually guide it, to bring it to market so that it’s something that you’ve helped architect. You know, how great would that be? Right? So the quality of service, absolutely, but the quality of service reaches back into the product development life cycle, and if you’re a real partner and trusted advisor with your customer, and many smaller organizations are because that’s how they’ve grown so well, and now they’re at that stage. Maybe you know, as you alluded to, whether they’re getting bigger, they need to operationalize, industrialize, what they mustn’t forget is partnering with their customer, because then the quality aspect naturally gets delivered, because it comes through in the product, and then how the customer’s using the product, and then you’re up and running, and then you simply have the conversation, which says, So Scott, tell me, you know, over the last year, what value Have You received? Have you gained from using my product, yeah, which was already designed with you in mind, because you helped us design it, right? So you go, this should be a no brainer. It’s an easy conversation. Then, yeah. So somewhere in the middle of that, there’s a balance which says, Okay, tell me, yeah, because I it’s no point us waiting until we’ve got the perfect solution, tell me what’s good enough for you. It will give you enough value, enough value to get up and running, and I’ll give you in an organizational speak, I might say I’d give you the minimum, more viable product, right? But it is viable. It’s viable to the customer, not viable to you, the organization, it’s viable to the customer. Yes, that’s the crucial aspect.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that and and it’s something I tell all the time with the big themes when I’m coaching folks is, does it deliver consistent value in the eyes of the customer? And I could not agree more. It’s so important. Now, one of the things that that brings in for me and you, kind of you mentioned tech, and where I tend to get the most pushback on this when I’m working with clients, is in kind of construction, or quasi construction, where we would hope that quality is the most right. But industries, let me put it this way, that are somewhat commoditized, right? Or that feel commoditized. And so then, yeah, we could be the best service company in the world, but they’re just going to go for the guy who’s 25 cents cheaper. So what would you say, does this, does this matter more in some industries? Does it matter less? How do you how do you help clients really walk that out?
Johann Diaz
I’d say that’s that’s true. It probably matters more in some industries than others. Heavily commoditized industry is always going to be very sensitive to price, so hopefully strategically, the organ. Organization has started with that in mind, and therefore its whole product life cycle is all about, essentially bringing a quality product out at the cheapest price, because that’s what makes that market move. Nevertheless, there still has to be somewhere the room for client relationship. You know, whether you’re in a B to B or B to C, people are people we do business with, people that will be like generally, whether that’s in a highly distributed sales model or, you know, anything, anything different to that, or the other extreme. So it does depend on your market, and the more commoditized your product, I think the the less opportunity you have to differentiate around service. Now I would say so what you then can do is differentiate around what we often call Customer Success. How is the customer using the product? How could we extend usage of the product and still, you know, essentially be the cheapest or one of the cheapest on the on the market, right? But that’s a volume game. You’re now in a very different world, which is the big manufacturing organizations, as you say, the big construction organizations and so on, yeah. But even there, these days, the drive is towards delivering personalized product and service. So the game is on as to how efficiently can the organization then gear itself up to doing that.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so you mentioned earlier this idea of kind of striking the balance, and most of my clients are on either quarterly or annual kind of strategic planning process where where a lot of these bigger decisions would have to be made. So in a setting like that, in a strategic planning process, how can you as a team really begin to diagnose whether your sales problem is actually a service problem?
Johann Diaz
So you know, this is where I go from an organizational perspective. And I say, Look, if you stay focused on the fact that it’s all about the customer, let me put it that way, then you have to ask yourself, have we got enough data coming through at all points off the customer journey, so that we become truly informed as to what the customer’s thinking at each step along the way. Often, again, I find that organizations don’t they’re missing some pretty vital information. You know, these days, we can even go down to the sentiment in the customer’s voice, or a prospective customer’s voice, right? And you go, guys, you’ve been mad not to capture data at all stages of the sales. And then I’d say service lifecycle, the whole customer journey, from soup to nuts, you know, from the time they become actually, from the time they even start thinking about engaging with you as a as a potential supplier, through right to the end of that, that that lifetime, you need to be gathering good data. And with that data, you simply feed that now back into the whole product, service lifecycle process, and it’s generally then insights start to drop out. Insights start to drop out, and it’s pretty obvious then at which stage of the journey. You either don’t have enough data or it’s skewed because it’s only given to you by the sales team, as opposed to the service team, or as opposed to the onboarding team, or whomever they are, right? You just need to make sure, and you know, a good a good product manager would actually do this, they would be able to gather all that data and balance the view internally as to what it’s actually showing you, because each department, each department head, has got their own perspective, and that needs to be managed across the organization from the voice of the customer. And again, you know, I go back sometimes to to including the customer in some of those conversations. Get them in the room, get them around the table, right? Let’s get a couple of our really top customers, or or even customers who’ve who’ve left us. Let’s get them around the table and actually just have a normal conversation with them. You gain so much from it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. Johan, there’s a question that I like to ask all my guests. I’m eager to hear what you have to say. What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. With that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Johann Diaz
Scott, when I’m out there, and anyone who finds me on LinkedIn will see that for many years, I have said it’s all about service. And many people go, you mean customer service? I’m like, that’s not quite what I said. But yes, it’s about the service you deliver to your customer. But let me add this to your prospective customer as well. It’s just the same. So service for me, starts the moment a prospective customer engages with your organization all the way through to the end of that lifetime, that relationship and service goes all the way through because you and I, and everybody on this planet, in my view, we were born to serve. It is instinctual in the human being. Yes, it is natural. It is what we respond to as well. When other people serve us incredibly well, we love it. It makes us feel great. Feels, makes us feel warm. So what frustrates me with many organizations is when they when I say it’s all about service, they go, Oh, we’ve got a department called customer service, or field service, or whatever. I’m going, No, no, stop, stop. No. I’m not talking about that, you know, because if you do that, then you go into silos. Yeah. So what for me is blatantly obvious that I want everybody to know is that service starts the moment a prospective customer chooses to try and engage with your organization. You might not even know it, because it might be on the website, right, but that’s when you start serving. And don’t ever forget that.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, so good. Johann folks listening that maybe find themselves guilty of having let their service slide, or just knowing that the next stage of growth is going to come from being top notch in that category, where can they find more out about you and the work that you do?
Johann Diaz
Absolutely come find me on LinkedIn, I am there, or go to service-revolution.com, and you’ll find everything about the framework that I’ve put together, which is built on 35 years worth of that experience that they can pick up and consume, and I wrap it around With a support program that I offer as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s fantastic. Johann, thanks so much for being on the show. It’s privilege and honor having you here for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Johann Diaz
With over 35 years of experience at the intersection of technology, service excellence, and operational strategy, Johann Diaz is a seasoned business and technology leader who has significantly impacted various industries. From leading roles in high-stakes service transformations for global giants like Unilever, Diageo, Vodafone, and BP to strategic leadership roles for ServiceNow, Capgemini, and Serviceware, Johann has consistently helped organizations deliver measurable improvements in service quality, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency.
Want to learn more about Johann Diaz’s work at Service Revolution Academy? Check out his website at https://www.service-revolution.com/ or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanndiaz
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