1964 – Exploring Strategies for Business Alignment and Growth with Alignmint Growth Strategies’ Ali Cudby

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1:05With us right now, it's Allie Cudby. Allie, you are the founder and CEO of Alignment Growth Strategies. You're found on the web at alignmint.co. That's M-I-N-T.co. Allie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. I'm so pleased to be here. You are also the author of the book, Keep Your Customers, which we're going to be talking about. Well, Allie, in your words, I'd love to hear about the impact that you have in the world and who you serve and what you do? Sure. So I work with companies to help them with customer loyalty and retention strategies. And once you go through all of the effort to land a customer, what is it that you can do to make sure you keep them for the long term?

1:48Yeah. Well, the subtitle for your book is How to Stop Customer Turnover, Improve Retention, and Get Lucrative Long-Term Loyalty. I would believe that that is the hope of all, you know, we work with a lot of consultants, coaches, agency owners, B2B service providers. So definitely a topic that I think is top of mind. Would you mind maybe just kind of going through your mini TED talk on, you know, kind of the basic principles that you're well known for? Sure. So you would think that with the importance of long-term loyalty and the value that you get from a long-term customer, that that is where businesses would focus their energy.

2:30But in fact, what happens is they spend a lot of their time on front-end lead gen and then hope that the service is enough to keep people for the long-term. And what we find is that that's just not true. And what you need is clear, consistent, thoughtful processes to give your customers a follow-the-bouncing-ball wonderful experience so that when it comes time to renew, it's a no-brainer. And when you don't have those thoughtful, clear, and consistent processes, then you leave it to the customer to sort of fill in the gaps. And you just don't want them doing that because invariably they're going to fill in the gaps the wrong way.

3:19And when you spend all that time getting a customer in the door and you don't retain them, it is such an expensive mistake and you leave so much money on the table. And that's what we're here to help them fix. And so by understanding the costs of churn and how to address churn in your unique business, we have found that it is transformative for not just revenue, but also for word of mouth in the marketplace and also employee experience. Just the benefits, the positive benefits are numerous. Right. I believe that very few need much persuasion to that point of view. I think at least I hope we understand just how critical this is.

4:10And maybe we might feel that we're doing everything, but likely that's not the case. What are our best practices? And maybe some of these might be newer innovations or newer strategies that we need to adapt to, given where the market is, for example. Right. So the first thing that people often don't do is clarify who do they want to be on behalf of their customers. So people go through, they create a mission and a vision and maybe core values for the company. And that's really about them. But what they don't necessarily do is articulate who do you want to be on behalf of your customers? And how can you provide a clear bullseye for everybody in your organization to aim for so that they know this is who we want to be?

5:02We're all sort of singing from the same songbook when it comes to who we are on behalf of our customers. Because how you approach customer experience is going to be really different if you want to be the efficient, you know, like we want to be really efficient. We want to make it really easy versus we want to provide a white glove service. You know, how you approach customers, how you engage, how you do everything from sales and marketing straight on through is going to be different. So providing that clear target. And then it's really understanding who your customers are and making sure that everybody in the organization is clear on that.

5:41Because when sales doesn't have a clear vision of who they're talking to or a clear articulation of who they're talking to, they're just going to sell to whoever they can sell to. That's the nature of sales. But there is such a bad thing. There is such a thing as bad revenue. And if you're trying to sell to everybody, then it's going to make a messier customer experience. And so you want to avoid that too. So those are just a couple of the things that people are doing and just at the front end. Are you seeing any innovations over the last year that kind of get you excited? I don't know if there's any way that maybe your clients are leveraging AI to provide a better customer experience.

6:23You know, maybe just, you know, efficiencies that, again, not for the sake of efficiency and cheapening or bastardizing our relationships because we don't want to do that. So, right, we don't want AI to be a replacement for human connection and human attention. However, I definitely have seen where we have been able to provide just a much higher quality service, provide better resources for our clients more holistically, thanks to some of those innovations that allow my team to just do more on behalf of our clients. Absolutely. And I think that the ways that people are using AI or thinking about using AI, it's on everybody's mind.

7:01And how can we do it in a way that's authentic? Because the risks of getting it wrong are pretty high. Like if you, you know, trust is hard to build. And if you do something and you use AI in a way that undermines the trust that you have with your customers, then that I think is what a lot of business owners fear. And so, yeah, there's some things that I am seeing, a lot of it in efficiency, using AI as a good first draft for writing communication. And that does a lot. But also in data, having AI, for example, record calls, recording calls with customers, and especially like business review calls and stuff like that, where those little nuggets of information that might get lost are refound.

7:54So when you can have AI go through and look at all of the transcripts of my customer calls and tell me what are the customers happy about and what are they frustrated with? And tell me what you think the patterns are. That's a really smart use of AI. And then another thing that I'm seeing people use, and a lot of my clients are using this increasingly, one of the biggest stumbling blocks, especially in B2B companies that are recurring revenue, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is making sure that product information, the customer facing information that teaches customer how to use the products efficiently, they don't keep up with the product itself.

8:35The product is always changing. And so companies feel like, oh my God, I just created a video about how to use the product and the product changed and now the video is out of date, right? And it's really frustrating because even when you think that you're making a three minute loom, it's never a three minute video, right? It's always the hour that it takes because you hated the way that you said that thing. It was wonky on the next one. And so there are products out there that will use AI to take a typed script and create a video that looks like it's being spoken by a person. And it's not so seamless that you don't know that it's computer generated, but it's good enough.

9:20And so for customer, like product information, where it's not advertising, it's not marketing, but it's for, you know, customers and we're sort of not trying to pretend like it's a real human. It's really, really solid. And it saves all of that mess and time because you can just go in and edit the couple of lines that have changed about the product and not have to reshoot the whole video. Yeah. I am so grateful for your book, Allie. Keep Your Customers. I'll say in the vein of Never Lose a Customer Again, Joey Coleman, Retention Point, those are books. I'm going to add this to the list. My recommendation, I think, for everybody listening is that you make study of this topic just a regular part of your operations, your customer support, your leadership within your organizations, and that you never let off on this topic.

10:16It is just a part of your vocabulary, your vernacular, and your daily conversations with your teams. You just keep it front of mind. Would you mind sharing a little bit about your book, Keep Your Customers, How to Stop Customer Turnover, Improve Retention, and Get Lucrative Long-Term Loyalty, and why our friend who's listening right now needs to buy a copy for all of their leadership team and the transformation that would potentially take place in their organization if they followed the principles? Yes. So one of the things that we talk through in the book is understanding loyalty. Loyal customers, they're not all the same.

10:55And there are three different kinds of loyal customers that it's really important to be able to tease apart because if you don't understand those differences, you might look at a customer and say, hey, this person is delivering a lot of revenue. They must be really loyal. I should listen to what they say. And if you are listening to the wrong kind of loyal customer, it can really cost you money by chasing the wrong avenues. So how do you identify the three different kinds of loyal customers? How do you tease them apart and focus on those true lucrative loyals that are going to deliver the most revenue for you so you can find other ones that look just like that?

11:34So that's one of the keys in the book. And another one that I really love is this concept that I was talking to you about earlier, this idea of a bullseye statement that helps everyone in the company identify who we are as a company when it comes to our customers and how can we engage consistently. And so in the book, I walk through exactly how that works, a case study, and even a step-by-step on how to do it inside your own organization. Ellie, what advice or what, you know, what would you recommend to sales teams, you know, folks that are maybe on the attraction side of things so that they can just make things easier for everybody, right?

12:17Yeah, I think that there are so many prospects out there. And when you find prospects that are aligned with what your company does, it makes it so much easier to serve them. And it means that everybody can keep, it is the thing that makes it easier to keep your customers. It means that product extensions get easier. Like all of the things that people spend a lot of time fighting about, oftentimes that comes down to trying to serve too many different kinds of customers. And so when sales can see the value in the long term, it can be helpful. But it also means that the company needs to be aligned in this direction.

13:00Because sales, oftentimes, they will sell. It is the nature of how they're wired that they want to go sell. And so leadership also needs to be able to provide clear guidance to the sales team that, look, this is the ideal customer profile. We want to adhere to this to the greatest degree possible. That's what's good business for our company. Yeah. And Allie, tell me about the work that you do. So when you work with clients, how do you do that? Yeah, so there are basically four different ways that I work with companies. One is coming in and helping them with an audit. So coming in and saying like, okay, what are you doing?

13:39What's working? What needs work? What are the few things that you can focus on to really improve customer retention and make a difference quickly? Second is workshops and training. Third is the consulting and getting into helping customers develop the playbooks, which we step-by-step internal playbooks so that everybody knows exactly what to do, what email to send, what's their next step. And then finally, sometimes companies bring me in as a fractional leader to sort of come on board and help steer the ship and then get in and get out. Yeah. Tell me a bit maybe about who you've worked with historically, what types of companies?

14:23Sure. So it's mostly B2B companies that are high growth and recurring revenue. So that's my sweet spot. Allie, your website is alignment.co. I know you have some resources here. Would you mind maybe just sharing for our friend that's listening, like they've enjoyed this, they want more, obviously go get the book, but you've got something at your website that they might want as well. Yes, absolutely. How's that for a tee up? Yeah, thank you. So there is an excerpt of the book on the website. If you want to check it out, you want to try before you buy. But also what we have on the website is a really great tool to help you start the auditing process yourself that includes calculators where you can put in your numbers and really see not just like where are you from a customer churn standpoint, but what are the upsides for you to fix a customer churn problem?

15:13And how is that going to help you grow your business? Good to know. Again, Allie Cudby, your website is alignmind.co. You can go ahead and click on book, and that's where you'll see the free excerpt there. And again, the book title is Keep Your Customers, How to Stop Customer Turnover, Improve Retention, and Get Lucrative Long-Term Loyalty. Allie Cudby, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure talking to you.

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