How to reliably predict future revenue with Waymaker CX.

Craig Hindman
Welcome to Leadership Torque, the official Waymaker podcast, the place for conversations about leadership, strategy and technology that helped me business improvement business as usual.

Welcome to Leadership Torque, the one and only Waymaker Podcast. I’m Craig and with me is Stuart Leo, CEO and founder of Waymaker. How are you? Good. Craig, how are you today?

What are you smiling at?

Stuart Leo
The one and only,

Craig Hindman
It is the one and only

Stuart Leo
it is the one and only the official, the official. There are many people trying to imitate, there is only one Waymaker podcast.

Craig Hindman
Stu, last episode, we introduced the Leadership Diagnostic. And actually, we’ve had a pretty good response to that product, since we’ve launched it.

Stuart Leo
My goodness, just blown away. Very, very, very popular. So if you haven’t kind of jumped in and got gotten into our world, first history making, earth shattering, breaking, leadership platform inside Waymaker. And it’s true, I’m saying that jokingly because we just like to have a laugh, but it’s a bit special.

And it’s, it’s there because we believe that to build a better business, you’ve got to build better people – got to build better leaders. And so it’s the element of the platform that helps you do that.

Craig Hindman
But we also know that leadership development is just one roadblock that we have to navigate in order to build a better business, right?

Stuart Leo
Yes, yeah. Yeah. How did you do it? Absolutely. And that’s, that’s where I mean, if you’ve been listening along last few episodes, and you’ve been on the platform, you’ll have seen, we’ve made a couple changes, we’ve gone from one diagnostic tool and the kind of diagnostic plan deliver cycle of Waymaker to five diagnostic tools.

So, we’ve unlocked the capacity to choose the swim lane you’d like to start. So you’re going to build your peoples and lead better choose the Leadership Diagnostic. If you want to employ and deliver a better employee experience employee better, then you’re going to choose the EX Essentials tool. If you want to choose the traditional plan better, that’s the strategic tools, the where we started, which is super transformational – Pick the Business. And if you want to sell more and sell better, you’re going to choose CX Essentials, which is all about helping you sell more more easily.

Craig Hindman
Which if you’ve read the title of this podcast, you know that that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Correct.

Stuart Leo
The setup landed deadly serious, it’s that we are we are talking about how to sell more. If you want to know how to sell more, then listen to this podcast. Subscribe. So.

Craig Hindman
So the issue is Stu that, like, you know, for business owners, I’ll often find that even though I’ve had a really successful quarter, I don’t necessarily have any confidence that the next quarter is going to be equally successful. That the things that I did last time we’re gonna work next time the products that are delivered or the services that I delivered, may not necessarily work in the next quarter. Is that just a tension that I’m going to have to live with? Or is there a bit of a framework or an understanding that will help me get a little bit more consistency in that area?

Stuart Leo
The big idea with Waymaker is that we give you a way to run your business that helps you continuously improve and identify the skills, the systems, the gaps that you can close to be better next quarter. And so the reality is yes, you can use Waymaker to get to a point where you’re saying “excellent, I have predictability about what we’re doing.” And so the pain that so often happens, and we’ve all been there at different points in our lives is you get to the end of a quarter, you’re like that was a great quarter. And it’s like but I don’t know how we got there. How do we repeat that? I’m not sure. So it’s not it’s not that you can’t have great quarters. It’s just that you don’t always know what led to that great quarter. And you don’t know how to repeat that great quarter or build upon that great quarter. Likewise, you can have a terrible quarter. And it’s like, that quarter sucked. Let’s not do that again. But then you’re like, I’m not sure We’re not doing that, again means, because we just kind of did what we did. So the mystery here is, we don’t know what we’re really doing as we’re building and so and so we don’t know, we don’t know, we are building blocks. And that’s the problem. That’s the challenge the, if you know, your building blocks, then you can actually put the foundations in place, you can improve the foundations, you can move up to the next levels, and you can start to grow. And that’s what, that’s what we’re talking about. Helping people find those building blocks so that they can build, I can continuously improve.

Craig Hindman
Yeah, the frustrating thing is also that I’m probably not going to get to this point of evaluation until I’ve had a bad quarter. Because I’ve had a good quarter, I’m just gonna be on crushing it. That’s awesome. Yeah, we’re not planning for the seven years of famine.

Stuart Leo
That’s right. That’s right. I think the

Craig Hindman
so we’re, yeah, go.

Stuart Leo
I was gonna say, I think the the issue here is, you… If I can highlight it this way – if the business hasn’t worked out at secret source, it’s just hired a few people that have some secret sauce. And so you don’t really feel this pain until you really feel it, you lose a salesperson or somebody walks out the door, and you’re like, oh, no, how do I actually replace that person, because it’s not just the who that’s walked out the door. But it’s the what and the how, because the what in the hell wasn’t yours, you hadn’t built that intellectual property. So we’re really talking about this moment where there’s a shift in this stage of growth, from having a smallish team, maybe 510 people, where everybody just did what they did, because they’re kind of part of the team. And now you’re moving up into 1520 2530 people. And you’ve actually got to say, this is what good looks like. And we can help good people become great, because we can take good people teach them what we do. And it helps them be better, smarter, faster at what they do, we’ve got a system, we’ve got a set of skills, we’ve got an engine that you can drive as a as a sales or marketing person or service person. And when you drive that engine, our engines great. So we can we can put you behind, like putting an average driver behind the wheel of a BMW or Mercedes, they look great. They do well, they drive fast and safely because of that amazing German engineering. And you need that engineering. Does that make sense?

Craig Hindman
Yeah. And so how do I know that I’m in this in this point of transition? Like, what are going to be some of the signals that say, you actually need to start looking at this now?

Stuart Leo
Yeah, well, one of the cataclysmic signals is, you know, a gun salesperson who’s killing it for you walks out the door, and, and you’re like, oh, how do I replace that? And how do I replace that? Quickly? At a cost, that is not prohibitive. And that’s, that’s going to be one of the signals. Another one will be okay, I’ve, I’ve had a couple of good quarters, a couple of down quarters. I’m not saying consistency. So how do I actually begin to lead this team and show this team what, what good looks like what great looks like what poor looks like? And help them see where they can improve? So we don’t have any standards, we’d have any objective standards or measures to go? If you haven’t done? Well, it’s easy to isolate why you haven’t done well, that’ll be one, so repeatability that another is you’re not getting the same kind of customer kind of knocking on your door and regularly coming through your business. You’re getting maybe a smorgasbord of different types of customers. And, and so you’re not getting that rich depth and consistency of going, oh my gosh, we know exactly who we’re talking to. We know where they want to buy. We know that these are the little secret sugar sources that we can give them to help them by faster. We know how to, you know, onboard or deliver our service really, really well. You know, you don’t what you’re not building is deep knowledge. You’re building kind of horizontal knowledge. And so you’re going from this state, you might feel like you’re constantly reacting, and that you probably say things like, well, if they’re breathing, if their breathing will sell to them, you know, and that’s like great, excellent 7 billion targets on planet Earth. So Is that painting a bit of a picture?

Craig Hindman
Yeah, definitely. I mean, and it’s, it’s hard to know sometimes because like if that gun salesperson does walk out the door, it’s hard to know whether or not the sales were because you had a really great framework that they executed well, or you actually just didn’t have a good framework at all. And they just were just really good at selling ordinary stuff. Yeah, you don’t even know you don’t know that. Right?

Stuart Leo
Yeah, it’s like not having a map, you know, it’s yeah, we use this analogy all the time, within Waymaker. The worst thing you want to do, so I’m going across the ocean and not have a map and not reset your sails. Because you don’t know, you just point the boat and hope you get land on the other side, you know, hour 1543. And you need to have that map, and you need to know how to recalibrate back around that map. And as you use the map, you need to know how to make that map smarter and smarter as you go along. You’ve got to build organizational intelligence into this map. And that’s hard.

Craig Hindman
Is it even possible, though, realistically to to build a framework that does deliver reliable, consistent revenue? quarter to quarter?

Stuart Leo
Yes.

Craig Hindman
Discuss!

Stuart Leo
Yeah. So one of the signs of maturity is consistency. Yeah. So the, you know, you’re beginning to see maturity, when you know, my cost per acquisition of customer is x. My customer lifetime value is Y. I’m seeing repeated performance in that I’m tapping into a problem in the market. You can have competitors, no problem, you can be highly competitive marketplace. But because you solve that problem, you have a method and a way of acquiring people into the customer journey, retaining people in that journey, and growing people through that journey of growing accounts or people through that journey. And then you can build predictability, you can you can see that there’s forecast demand in the marketplace. Yeah, you know that looking back over the last three, four, a 1012 quarters, you can see, okay, these are the consistent results achieved, and you can can confidently go and deliver them. Now, the point is to not just do what you did last quarter, but to say, okay, what can we begin to improve this quarter from last quarter? But you’ve got to put those building blocks in place? So absolutely, the answer is yes. And this is the this is the big myth or the fear, I think many business owners and leaders face when you’re in that transition stage, you’re moving from, from having some success to really going, Hey, this business is going somewhere, this organization is going somewhere, we’ve got something the market wants the community wants and, and so you’ve often been very reactive. We talked about this shift state going from reactive chaos to strategic agility, how do you make that transition, and you make that transition by starting to put fundamental fundamental building blocks in place, it’s, it’s why on our leadership curve, which is the diagnostic element of this, that you see the core skills and the core systems to start putting in place. And, and as you practice that methodology of diagnose, plan, deliver, diagnose, plan deliver, you start to sharpen and focus each quarter in and out. And as you build those building blocks, customer journey, ideal personas, buyer journeys, sales methods, you are going to start to understand the core foundations of the predictability of the sales process.

Craig Hindman
Great. So talk to me then about Waymaker CX, in particular, like and, like and the customer journey, like explain the customer journey process, and how that relates.

Stuart Leo
So if you use Waymaker CX, you’re saying we’re going to adopt a way of, of working on our business, not just in it. So what does that mean? It means when you’re working in the business, you’re you’re taking leads, you’re processing them, you’re calling people, you’re you’re taking, you’re selling, you’re running campaigns, you’re generating all that fun stuff of CX and by the way, C stands for customer experience, which is just the grouping of sales, marketing and service. The three disciplines to execute the customer journey, but the sole purpose of customer experience is to is to sell more is to sell. Marketing solely exist to sell something to find a problem, develop a product or a service and sell it to a marketplace. Salespeople exist to sell service people exist to service those sales and sit and set up the next sale. It’s the solo, the big idea is still so when, when you’re using Waymaker CX, you are working on the business of selling. So how do we improve a marketing function? And team? How do we improve our sales function and team? How do we improve our service function and team? So what

Craig Hindman
just before you go on? Just to clarify, what you’re saying is that sales, marketing and service are? What’s three sides of the one coin? Yeah, you can’t separate them. Right?

Stuart Leo
One of the mindset shifts you’ll go on as a business is you’re in that reactive chaos to strategic agility is moving from silo based teams, “I’m in the marketing team, I’m in the sales team, I’m in the service team,” to journey based teams, I mean, the acquisition team. And you might have an SDR and a qualifier in an acquisition team. You might, you might have a retention team. And there might be a salesperson, working with solutions people, professional experts, whatever it might be. But an acquisition team is made up of the skills of sales and marketing and service and technology and a retention team is the same and a growth team is what we’re saying is shift from that mindset of building a marketing team or a sales team, and move to the mindset of building a journey. And in that journey, you’ll require multiple skills. And to be honest, who cares, you can argue about where this person sits or where that person sits at good customer journey and buyers journey has clarity of this person on this stage of the journey. Whether it be a salesperson physically working through us a stage with them, or a marketing person generating retargeting ads, or ads or email messages or whatever it might be to get somebody to that next stage of the journey. Great.

Craig Hindman
So what’s the difference between working on a customer journey and say, setting up a sales funnel or a series of sales funnels?

Stuart Leo
Yeah, that’s a common question at this kind of stage, this transition because you’ve obviously got some sales funnels that work and some that don’t, and you probably constantly being settled sales funnels. Think of a customer journey as a series of collections of funnels. So at the acquisition stage, you might have a, a customer acquisition funnel, from first touch through to potential prospect identified and know, that’s the funnel. But then you might have another funnel at the consideration and or decision phase, helping accelerate those moments through, you might develop another funnel, post purchase. Yeah, that triggers six months after post purchase. That is reengagement back into repurchase, that’d be a great retention funnel. So think of a customer journey as clarity of the stages. I’m moving through the emotional journey, and the content journey and the practical journey through that. And then funnels as little microcosms of activity throughout that journey. Great. So

Craig Hindman
it’s a high level overview or the big why, on each of the individual elements. Yeah,

Stuart Leo
Correct. Yeah, yep. And the way to do a journey is to break it down into its individual parts. So each of those individual micro moments are supporting the acceleration through that journey. And so what Waymaker CX does the first thing of diagnosis is your sales, market and service skills and systems maturity, where can we improve? And it’s going to find areas like customer journey or buyer journey, sales personas, that are weak and say, Hey, think about working here. And, and that’s what it’s going to catalyze. And we would say, start building those, those goals that that help you improve what you’ve got, and go and do it. rediagnosis, recalibrate and do it again and you move into this business improvement process. Team, you move into a working on the business versus working in the business, you move from reactive chaos into strategic agility.

Craig Hindman
So, Stu, you, you threw this line out me before which I wrote down reliable revenue solves problems.

Stuart Leo
I hear this all the time from customers and partners and all the time too. It’s it’s so tricky to reliable revenue solves many problems, ie you can have a lot of problems in your organization. If you don’t have reliable revenue, those problems compound into nightmares. Reliable revenue, often is the thing that buys you the oxygen to fix the other problems. So generally, you ask any business owner, what do they want more of, and it’s either more leads, or more people. And, and so what they’re really saying is, I want more customers to shore up my Predictable Revenue. So if you have an engine, a method, a way of making that predictability, then you have a method you can deploy. And that’s the, that’s where we want to really drill in and say, hey, the first thing you need to build is an engine. Even if that engine kind of sucks for the first quarter, it’s still better to know that it sucks and needs a bit of tuning here or there, or let’s sharpen and put new oil in over here. It’s better to have that and start tuning it than it is to have a collection of parts that you’re throwing randomly around or using, you know, manually with gaffa tape to make something work. So it kind of makes sense.

Craig Hindman
Yeah. And the beauty of like any of these diagnostics that we take at the start of the journey is that over time, we get more resolution, as it were.

Stuart Leo
Yeah, yeah, the resolution is a good word. You, you move from what a TV started, like 1k or 2k.

Craig Hindman
Not even that. Okay, that was less than a quarter of a K.

Stuart Leo
Really? Okay, standard definition. And what are we today 4k, or 6k or something, something like that some crazy resolution, you know, you can look at 50 inches on a wall and just go it’s like looking at reality. And that’s true. Every time you take the diagnostic the dataset rebuilds, but it compounds on the last and you get greater and greater clarity of where the issues are in the business to improve. You also get greater clarity in the fundamentals. And so you’ll, you’ll be like, Okay, last quarter, we rolled out a new sales persona. And you know what 80% of that was right. And we’ve learned this, this and this. So now we’re going to tweak and update that sales persona, so our sales team can more easily identify good quality prospects. So now we’ve got more intelligence building on last quarters intelligence. So you want to end up in a strategic compounding moment.

Craig Hindman
Cool. So Steve, if I sign up and dive into Waymaker CX, tell me tell me, tell me what the process looks like?

Stuart Leo
Well, you go straight to waymaker.io. You’ll take a free trial, you’ve got a 30 day free trial, choose the license, CX essentials, customer experience essentials, and that will give you access to sales, marketing, service, leadership diagnostics. You’ll go through a diagnostic process, it’ll take 5-10 minutes to go through that. At the end of that, you can actually add team members, you can say, hey, I want to add bill, Jane Doe, whoever. And they’ll get an invite in to do that. Or if you want to look at your results, and then go and invite them in, you can follow the instructions to do that too. You can choose to work with one of our partners who can implement you and teach you how to go through the process of this diagnose, plan deliver. Because really what you’re adopting, there’s some new ways of working, that’s Waymaker or you can work with us. We can implement you at this stage you’ll be talking to us. If If and when we implement you, whether it be us or a partner, we’re going to help you get really clear on what success looks like in the next 12 to 24 weeks. And then we’re going to help you build the alignment in your team around that success. So one of the shifts you’ll make will be from annual KPI thinking to short term Got thinking, you’re gonna learn how to work with goals, that’s, that’ll help you work smarter. The second thing we’ll help you do is bring a level of clarity to the foundational elements that create the greatest amount of value in your sales market serves. So what does that mean? It means work through some of the content and toolkits that sit around the diagnostic, to build clarity in your ideal personas in your jobs to be done and your value propositions and all those classic things that you know, you need to build value in. And that content you can get from Waymaker Academy, or you can be facilitated through from from Waymaker, or from a partner, and two things are going to happen. One, you’re going to reduce the clutter, and the distractions in your day to day work. By developing the right focus in the right goals. step one. Step two, you’re going to work on the clarity of some of the fundamentals that improve your go to market, which will make the work you do on a day to day basis more effective. So you actually get a strategic compounding effect on your work, not only will you do less and achieve more, the more you do, will be easier and smarter because of put some hard yards into the clarity of it. The net net of that one of the one of the outcomes of those two things is that you’ll actually learn, we say learn how to fish, not just by a fish, you’ll learn how to actually execute a continuous improvement cycle. And you’ll learn how to redo that on your own.

So we know that in 12 or 24 weeks, you will not become all that you can become as a transformational leader in the area of sales and marketing and service. There is so much more in you and in your team to become. But you actually will learn how to sell feed some of that, you’ll actually learn to apply that into your business, you’ll learn how to carve out small amounts of time as part of your day to day that are working on building the better business that ultimately make it easier to work in the business. And that operational rhythm that begins to emerge in your business will actually become the secret sauce to how you work. And you will find a new way of working. That brings back the joy brings back the results print back brings back the togetherness of those great quarters when you got to the end going this is awesome. How do we keep this going? You won’t it won’t make life perfect forever? No, not at all, because every quarter presents its own challenges. But it will give you the confidence to approach each quarter as a general, not a reactive kind of captive on the battlefield. And you can start to be that strategic transformational leader that you know you are you just need some of the tool sets to actually put it into the into practice.

Craig Hindman
And so if I do lose one of my star salespeople or whatever, it’s not the end of the world.

Stuart Leo
In fact, what you’ll learn is how to turn average into good into great. So you’ll learn to hire well trained well and deliver exceptional. And that’s the difference, something called shift. Suddenly, it’ll be where we know how to build the next round of emerging leaders in sales, marketing and service. And that that’s the transitional moment from early stage to scale to growth. Because you’ve now cracked the code on what it means to win and how to build the next winners. And that is the moment you have found a critical platform in your leadership.

Craig Hindman
Sold Stu Thank you. I’m sold.

Stuart Leo
You’ve drunk the Kool Aid.

Craig Hindman
So if I want to find out more information for read up about it, I can jump on waymaker.io forward slash CX and you can download download the Waymaker CX guide And if you’re already convinced then you can just jump on waymaker.io and sign up for a free 30 day trial and just trying to get started straightaway yeah

Stuart Leo
yeah there’s there’s no day like today to make tomorrow better.

Craig Hindman
Sounds like a Winnie the Pooh statement he was quite a fan.

Stuart Leo
There’s not there’s no day like today to make tomorrow better. Let’s let’s credit that to Winnie the Pooh but I did just make it up.