Hearsay Platform

We have been researching onboarding tools to double check we have the right system on Hearsay (we found out we do but need to make some tweaks to our flows but that is another blog!).

During this research process, I contacted two companies on the web page and organised meetings for demos.

Company Number 1: Got on the call and got asked a barrage of questions. We answered most that we could and a lot of weren’t really relevant. What we expected was a bit of chat up front, of course it’s a sales call, but when we tried to shut down the questions and ask for the demo, we were very surprised. The company representative said, ‘my colleague will take you through the product on another call, I just want to find out more about your business’. We denied the offer and just asked for an email with the specific demo we wanted to see.

Company Number 2: Again, we got on the call, this time the sales rep asked a few questions but made it clear it was our meeting, we received a demo and asked a lot of questions.

It was a great reminder to me that companies still, particularly B2B businesses, build customer experiences around what suits them and not based on customer needs.

We know that customer-centric organisations outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth so why is this still hard for businesses to build a process right for the customers?

What should Company Number 1 have done differently? These three things:

👂🏻 Listen First, Sell Later: Rather than reel off a load of questions that you need to tick off a list, ask relevant questions to unpack the needs of your customers. Create a dialogue where questions are used to clarify and tailor your offering, rather than overwhelming the customer with irrelevant queries.
👩🏼‍💻 Flexibility in Customer Interactions: Ensure that your customer interactions, whether it’s a sales call or a product demo, are flexible and customer-driven. The experience should be adaptable, allowing the customer to lead the conversation to areas they are most interested in.
😘 Be Open and Honest: It would have been preferable if our sales guy got on the call and said straight up, my job is to ask a load of questions to learn more about you and then we find the right person to take you through the product. This didn’t happen.

We are often reminded, sadly, through a terrible experience, what makes a great one. Wouldn’t you rather be a business that people talk about post

Earlier this week, an agency similar to , that started the same year we did, won B&T Best People & Culture under 100 people. Well done Trudi Sampola and the Nature team.

At BrandHook, we looked at Nature as peers and friendly rivals. But we didn’t win any awards for Culture. In fact, the failure of managing our culture is what blew up the business and changed its scale up course.

So what have I learnt from our experience? The three ‘what not to do's’:

❌ Do not think it is one person’s or one department's job to create business culture. It is every leader’s job to drive a great work culture. I certainly took my eye off the ball and focused on bringing business in and forgot to look at what was happening on the office floor. 😚
❌ Do not ignore the early signs of unrest. Leaders need to be emotionally intelligent and trust their intuition. If you can feel a problem.. there is a problem. And nipping that in the bud early is key. 😔
❌ Do not think that culture builds organically. Creating culture requires active participation and the leaders of that organisation need to be intentional in those values and that vision. We naively promoted BrandHook as a ‘family’ but like most families, there were fractures. 💔

When building your business, it is important to learn from what not to do as well as testing out what to do.

Our story serves as a cautionary tale for other entrepreneurs: culture is not just a facet of your business, it's the backbone that holds everything together. Neglecting it can have far-reaching consequences, affecting not only your team's morale but also the very trajectory of your business growth.