"As human beings, we love to hear and watch stories.”  - Brent Dykes Brent Dykes, Founder and Chief Data Storyteller at AnalyticsHero and Author of Effective Data Storytelling, has seen it all when it comes to managing and analyzing data. He has spent years at companies like Domo and Adobe, constructing and implementing data strategies, and now he is now taking his knowledge and experience to the market to help companies become world-class data storytellers. In this episode of Value Builders, Brent sits down with Dave to discuss his new book Effective Data Storytelling.  In the discussion, Brent defines data storytelling and helps us understand how data storytelling can help a company develop a high-performing data culture to drive change.  Brent is also writing about the importance of creating and supporting a data culture within a company.  You’ll hear Brent expand on why creating a data culture is so important to fully realize the benefits of investments in data and data storytelling.Effective Data Storytelling on AmazonBrent's Data Culture Whitepaper

“Some of our most traditional, original ideas of business strategy have turned out to be profoundly flawed.”  The research is in,  the key to driving world-class customer retention and growth rates is not customer happiness or customer satisfaction. While both are important, it's the results the customer achieves with a supplier that matter most.   It may seem obvious, but conventional wisdom and behavior have not always led companies down a path to embracing the importance of ensuring customers achieve results.  In this enlightening episode of Value Builders, Dave sits down with customer retention, growth, and strategy expert, Greg Daines, to discuss how Greg's economics background and retention research are providing a clearer understanding of how to  effectively attain better retention and growth rates by changing behavior and creating meaningful results for customers.About Greg Daines Greg Daines is a leading expert in customer retention, growth, and strategy. Throughout his career as both a founder and executive, he has regularly challenged the conventional thinking. He has spent the past several years working with companies around the world to transform their results using his unique Total Customer Strategy playbooks. Greg is known for his thought-provoking and data-driven approach, and he holds advanced degrees in business and economics from MIT and Cambridge University.

“We need to market and sell what things do, not what they are…we need to be marketing and selling pains and gains.” - Aaron Thompson In this episode of Value Builders, Dave is joined by one of the most well-known names in customer success, SuccessCoaching CRO, Aaron Thompson.  They sat down to discuss outcome-based selling.  Aaron helps us understand why it’s so important for companies to embrace an outcome-selling mindset and strategy in order to put teams and customers in the best possible position to achieve results - especially with subscription business models. In the discussion, he defines outcome-based selling, shares what we in B2B can learn from direct-to-consumer offerings, and talks about the realities of managing an infinite product lifespan with today’s buyers and why new thinking is necessary to retain and grow customer relationships.  About Aaron Thompson Aaron Thompson is a world-renowned Customer Success Keynote Speaker and Educator. He is the Chief Revenue Officer at SuccessCOACHING (www.successcoaching.co), the world’s leader in Customer Success training and education. He is also the CEO and Founder of RedSlacks.com, an online library of free Customer Success educational content.  Aaron has decades of training and instructional design experience and has built and scaled numerous Customer Success organizations from scratch. This real-world background in both disciplines uniquely positions him as an educator in the discipline of Customer Success. Aaron is a very active participant in the global Customer Success community and consistently challenges the industry norms to improve and grow the CS function in its entirety.When not evangelizing for Customer Success best practices, Aaron enjoys spending time with his friends and family in the great outdoors as an avid kayaker, golfer, and skier. He resides in the Pacific Northwest, USA, and as best he can, he takes full advantage of everything nature offers.

In this episode of Value Builders, Dave sits down with Bill King of RiseNow -  a foremost expert in sourcing, supplier management, and specifically supplier value management. They discuss the differences between the disciplines and break down how identifying strategic, and investing in, strategic supplier relationships can produce case study-worthy results.  Bill explains how he thinks about taking supplier relationships to a place of trust and creativity where ideas and recommendations fuel a path to business impact.  He also elaborates on his process for creating supplier scorecards to drive focus and shares how he once turned the tables on a supplier to drive a QBR discussion in order to bring more focus to what he cares about as a customer.   About Bill King Bill King is a senior director and heads RiseNow’s sourcing service line. He brings his proven track record for sourcing, client success and leadership skills. He is a recognized leader and visionary in spend management with over 20+ years of expertise in strategic sourcing, sourcing best practices, GPO/BPOs, contract management, contract development, supplier value management, project management and spend analytics. He has extensive experience in enabling technology to achieve best practices for his clients while also developing strategies to help them build powerful, strategic supplier partnerships.

What does a customer-centric culture actually look like?  Leslie Pagel, CCO at Authenticx, knows firsthand what it means to develop a customer experience strategy that is truly customer-centric after spending the majority of her career developing industry-leading customer experience strategies.  In this episode of Value Builders, Leslie breaks down the two key principles of effective customer experience strategy - listening to understand and the responsibility of advocating for customers.  She elaborates on how these two key principles are essential for weaving the customer into the fabric of a company.  In the second part of the conversation, Leslie talks about the work she and the team at Authenticx are doing to innovate in the customer experience space.  Specifically, she explains the role interaction data plays in unleashing an understanding of customer behavior and emotions.  She speaks to the power of investing in understanding the dynamics of a customer conversation as a path to unlocking customer experience improvements and extrapolating the data to improve a business overall.   To round out the conversation Leslie explains the concept of The Eddy Effect and how Authenticx is using it to help customers get ‘unstuck’ in the development of their customer experience strategy.   About Leslie Pagel Leslie Pagel is the Chief Customer Officer at Authenticx, a conversation analytics company dedicated to improving the way healthcare companies engage with patients. In this role, she leads efforts to work with Authenticx clients to advise and inform customer strategies. With over two decades of working with customer experience (CX) teams, Leslie helps clients actualize the voice of the patient to show how these voices prompt meaningful action.

What does customer success look like at a venture firm?  A Chief Customer Officer turned venture partner, Cassie Young is tackling this question head-on as she brings her customer success strategy expertise to the world of venture capital through a unique operating model.  In this episode of Value Builders, listen to Cassie explain how Primary Venture Partners is taking a new approach to supporting its portfolio by leaning on customer success principles as a catalyst for portfolio success. She also details the importance of customer storytelling, understanding that retention is a growth catalyst for new business sales, and why she believes that the CROs of the future are the CCOs of today.    About Cassie Young As Primary's Operating Partner focused on go-to-market, Cassie helps founders and portfolio companies to build and scale their sales, marketing, and customer operations.After graduating from Duke (making her a life-long Blue Devils fan), Cassie began her career as an analyst at Citigroup and entered the NYC tech scene in 2006 when she joined TheLadders as an early employee. Cassie took a quick break from NY to earn an MBA at the Tuck School at Dartmouth, but quickly returned to NY and has since worked as VP Marketing & Analytics at GLG and as VP Marketing & Partnerships for Savored (acquired by Groupon in 2012).Before joining Primary in early 2020, Cassie was Chief Customer Officer for CM Group, where she ran global customer and commercial teams for a $200 million+ martech portfolio. Cassie joined CM Group as part of their acquisition of Sailthru, where she was the Chief Revenue Officer.

What is the best way to create real social or environmental change?   According to David Ehrlichman, impact networks are the best way for a group of people to unlock the potential of uniting alongside a shared purpose. In his new book, Impact Networks, David outlines how impact networks open up new avenues for bringing people and organizations together to create meaningful change for today’s greatest social challenges.  In this episode of Value Builders, listen to David define impact networks, discuss why they are necessary and how they can be used to create true societal transformation.  He explains the power of a network mindset and offers advice for those who have an interest in creating an impact network.David has also recently released a documentary to complement his Impact Networks book.  You can watch the documentary here.   About David Ehrlichman David Ehrlichman is author of Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change. He is also a catalyst and coordinator of Converge (converge.net). With his colleagues, he has helped form dozens of impact networks in a variety of fields, and has worked as a coordinator for the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network, Sterling Network NYC, and the Fresno New Leadership Network. He speaks and writes frequently on networks, finds serenity in music, and is completely mesmerized by his newborn daughter. Find his writings at davidehrlichman.medium.com.

Four years into his journey of building the value consulting and management function at MongoDB, Worldwide Director - Customer Business Value, David Moskowitz is proving that a strategic investment in a value practice can pay great dividends for a company. In this episode of Value Builders, David reflects on the history of the practice of value consulting and explains how it has evolved into being a critical part of the business model equation for growing organizations. He shares how he thinks about ROI in comparison to TOC (total cost ownership) and introduces TVO - Total Value of Ownership -  a key measure he uses for positioning value with customers to paint a full picture of the benefits of a customer relationship with MongoDB.David also explains how he is using coaching as a new technique to teach his team’s Sales and Customer Success peers how to fish and uplevel value conversations.  The conversation ends with David elaborating on his prediction that value organizations and customer success organizations will grow closer together in the coming years.

In this episode of Value Builders, Dave sits down with Box CMO, Chris Koehler.  It’s a two-part conversation - first, Chris offers his take on the emergence of the MetaVerse™ and delves into some of the big questions that companies and marketing leaders have to consider as MetaVerse™ strategies take shape. In the second half of the conversation, Chris shares his perspective on marketing’s role in value creation for a company and a market.   He is tapping his customer success experience to bring empathy to his marketing efforts and explains how he tackles the issue of customers not fully understanding all of the value Box can bring to customers - his biggest pet peeve. Chris also touches on how he thinks about balancing marketing strategy across product-led growth and enterprise selling and he reflects on the importance of communication as a leader in a remote work environment.

Nathan Stuck is an award-winning leader in the B Corp community and as the Director of Culture & Strategic Impact at Ad Victoriam Solutions, he’s an inspiring example of social value leadership. In this episode of Value Builders, Nathan joins Dave to talk about his social impact journey and specifically touches on how leaders can align with their CEO for profit and purpose. He also shares how working within the Salesforce partner ecosystem has been a catalyst for change and accountability and offers advice to those looking to drive new social impact initiatives with their companies. About Nathan Stuck Nathan is an award-winning leader in the B Corp community. In addition to his role as the Director of Corporate Culture & Strategic Impact at Ad Victoriam Solution, a certified B Corp, he also founded and runs B Local Georgia, a nonprofit dedicated to growing the number of purpose-driven businesses in the Peach State. Nathan also teaches an experiential MBA course on B Corps at the University of Georgia and is the founder of Profitable Purpose Consulting, which helps for-profit businesses certify as B Corps. He has appeared on multiple podcasts and spoken at events across Georgia and the Southeast. His unique background provides both an authentic and genuine story that resonates with audiences and inspires them, and their businesses, to be a force for good.Follow Nathan on Linkedin.

As the newly appointed Chief Customer Officer of high-growth company, Electric, Ellen Terchila is laying the foundation for years of success for her customer success organization and the Electric business as a whole. In this episode of Value Builders, hear Ellen talk about how she thinks about value creation by being one step ahead of customers, building her team so she can directly influence net dollar retention, and the importance of prioritizing hiring manager recruiting and team enablement as part of scaling a high growth customer success strategy. About Ellen Terchila Ellen has 20 years of experience in customer-facing roles in the software industry. Prior to joining Electric, Ellen led the global customer success organization at CM Group, a family of marketing technology brands. Ellen has led teams spanning customer strategy, inside sales, customer enablement, customer experience, and solutions architecture. Prior to CM Group, Ellen led Customer Success for Workday Europe and was previously at Accenture and Ariba. Ellen holds a BS in Public Relations from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

The foremost thought leader on outcome strategy development, Paul Henderson,  Founder of Outcome Leaders, will soon be launching his next book titled Income From Outcomes: How to Drive Revenue and Profit Through A Customer Outcome Program. In this episode of Value Builders, Paul joins Dave to discuss his new book and the best ways to tap into unrealized income by creating an outcome program.  Paul details several concepts that align to building an outcome program including outcome lifecycles, the growing gap in the buying cycle that is handcuffing organizations, and the opportunity to build pipeline through the development and positioning of initiatives in collaboration with customers. Follow Paul on Linkedin or by visiting his website Outcomeleaders.com.  About Paul Henderson Before founding Outcome Leaders, Paul Henderson led the Asia Pacific region for a mid-sized enterprise software company. He had 200 people across nine countries supporting 800 enterprise customers. For the last five years in this role, he led the design and running of an outcomes program across the whole region. He learned what worked and what didn’t across diverse cultures.At the end of that five years, he realized two things:1. Lots of other technology vendors were struggling to deliver real success for their customers, and with over five years’ experience, he thought he could help them.2. He really cared about customers achieving the outcomes they bought software to achieve.He then left the software company, spent one and a half years researching and writing, and published his second book; The Outcome Generation: How a New Generation of Technology Vendors Thrives through True Customer Success.Paul’s practical experience and his research for the book underpin the Outcome-based Customer Success program.

State governments can have a vision for innovation just like other industries (software, healthcare, manufacturing, etc..). When you combine vision with outcome-based models and a fresh strategy for ecosystem collaboration, state governments can innovate and create a new catalyst for economic development and growth. Lawrence Walter, VP of Entrepreneurship for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC), is doing just this - casting a big vision for building a digital ecosystem to cultivate the growth of the state of Indiana in one of the most innovative economic development organizations in the country. In this episode of Value Builders, Lawrence sits down with Dave to discuss how he is thinking about bringing an outcome-based strategy to economic development to put Indiana’s ecosystem in a better position for success.  He elaborates on how his organization is creating new mechanisms for stronger collaboration with his customers and partners, and he speaks to how he is using technology, via MetaCX, to create new levels of alignment and progress for his most important stakeholders and strategic projects.

The case for creating a dedicated value team is increasingly becoming well understood - but how do you create one?  Once you’ve established the team, how do you scale it?  Anurag Goel has been down this road before multiple times at companies like SAP, Adobe, and Salesforce. As the newly minted Global Head of Value Consulting and Realization at Red Hat, he is well positioned to educate us on how to think about starting and scaling a value consulting and realization function. In this episode of Value Builders, Anurag shares his perspective on how to create and scale a value organization. He offers advice for how to think about using the value organization as a steel thread across the entire customer lifecycle while helping Sales and Customer Success teams position the ‘why’ piece of the value proposition. He also offers his take on the most important skills that are necessary for building a strong and successful value team and speaks to the importance of keeping things simple.  About Anurag Goel Anurag is the Global Head of Value Consulting and Realization at Red Hat and is based out of the Bay Area. For the last 16+ years, Anurag has embarked on 4 occasions of building and scaling Value-Selling and Realization functions aimed at accelerating profitable revenue growth and customer adoption for Fortune 500 cloud businesses. After stints at SAP and Deloitte, Anurag led the establishment of the Value Consulting function at Adobe globally which contributed to 3x growth in revenue from $4B to $11B He has spent the last couple of years leading a Business Value team at Salesforce supporting a $200M ARR business before moving to Red Hat at the start of 2021 to yet again build a new value function from scratch. Anurag is passionate about value management and has been a mentor, thought leader, and speaker at multiple events including Dreamforce. Outside of work, Anurag enjoys playing tennis and traveling. Anurag is always looking to connect with others who are passionate about value building - you can follow him on Linkedin here.

There has been an awakening in recent years in the business community. Now more than ever, companies are understanding their social responsibility to serve their employees, customers, communities, investors, and entire ecosystems. There are two types of value in business - commercial value and social value.  One of the reasons we rebranded the podcast to Value Builders was to create an opportunity to talk more about the intersection between commercial value and social value. In this episode of Value Builders, I sit down with Marcy Twete, Founder and CEO of Marcy Twete Consulting, to bring the social value conversation to the podcast. Marcy is helping companies build sustainable and responsible business value and I’m excited to tap into her expertise to talk more about how companies can create more social value.  In the discussion, Marcy defines social value and several of the foundational concepts that companies need to understand and embrace to serve their stakeholders and communities and compete in the future.  She also shares her perspective on why environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies and investments are good for business. We discuss how social value impacts commercial value and we touch on the recent trends including the rise in transparency, the importance of ESG strategies to investors, and why it matters for customers.  About Marcy Twete Marcy Twete is a recognized leader in corporate responsibility and sustainability for multinational Fortune 500 companies, and has a background both broad and deep in ESG (environmental, social, governance) factors, ethical decision-making, marketing and communications. She is the founder and CEO Marcy Twete Consulting where she advises corporations of all sizes, their investors and key partners on environmental, social, and governance risks and reputation management. In addition to leading her consulting practice, Marcy also co-hosts Office Baggage, a podcast that tackles topics for women in business that are all too often brushed under the office rug. In June 2020, she will launch Table Stakes: The Podcast for Responsible, Sustainable Businesses & Leaders, discussing the issues of sustainability with forward-thinking leaders to forecast the future of responsible business.Marcy is a proud Trustee at the Chicago Architecture Center, and a former member of the Boards of Directors for Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana and Step Up. She received her undergraduate degree in Political Science from the College of Saint Benedict and her MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In late 2020, after nearly 10 years in Chicago, Marcy and her husband Charlie  relocated to their former home of Minneapolis with their tabby cat Betsey and terrier mix Pearl. You’ll find them running on Lake Harriet and Minnehaha Creek near their home in South Minneapolis.

How do you create a true operating model for customer success - one that spans the entire organization and unifies a business?It’s an aspirational idea for many but Aaron Fulkerson, GM, Customer Success & Customer Service Products at ServiceNow, is tapping into years of start-up and enterprise experience to create a customer centricity operating model via his customer blueprint strategy to elevate customers, and in turn, ServiceNow to new heights. In this episode of Value Builders, Aaron explains how co-authoring a blueprint strategy with customers can inform product and go-to-market strategy through deep customer understanding.Aaron also discusses the trends he is seeing in the market and in particular, how customer success strategy is maturing to more value experience-based thinking and strategies. He closes with a great perspective on how Value Builders are leaders at heart. About Aaron Fulkerson  Aaron Fulkerson is a Product leader for the Customer Support Product at ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a cloud computing company that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Fulkerson is the Founder, former CEO, and a Board Member of MindTouch. MindTouch is a leader in self-service customer support and knowledge management. Aaron began MindTouch as an open-source project that quickly became one of the World’s most popular with thousands of daily downloads. He helped turn this free software project into a successful SaaS company that serves many of the World’s most respected brands and provides self-service support to millions every day. Aaron worked at Microsoft in Advanced Strategies and Policies. He has keynoted many conferences on the topics of entrepreneurship, leadership, management, and technology. He has been published by Forbes, CNN, Fortune, and many technology publications. Aaron has informed national policy for higher education at the White House. He has helped to create education-focused non-profits for underserved communities.

How do you partner with your customers to tell their value story? Brian LaFaille, Global Lead- SaaS Customer Success Programs at Google, thinks about this constantly and he has developed a  program and structure at Google to ensure the customer success team is well-positioned to develop and tell powerful value stories with customers. In the episode of Value Builders, listen to Brian share his customer success team founding story at Looker prior to being acquired by Google and how it set the tone for him to now be in a position to develop global SaaS customer success programs at Google. He talks about the importance of crafting value stories to articulate value and get credit for customer work, the role that value mapping plays in that equation, and why change management and storytelling have become critical customer success skills.Brian also discusses why Google has created a cloud value advisory group to support enterprise customers starting in the sales cycle and how this group is partnering with customer success to create a full lifecycle approach to value delivery.

As many have stated, anyone can be a leader regardless of title or tenure.  Nicco Bosco, Senior Customer Success Manager at LinkedIn, epitomizes this attitude while fully embracing her opportunity to lead and serve in her role managing some of Linkedin’s largest customers.In this episode of Value Builders, Nicci opens up about how she relies heavily on listening skills to build trust with her customers, her approach to hunting for the value that she can deliver to customers, and using perspective to solve problems. Nicci also shares how she is using her position at Linkedin to serve the veteran community within the company.  As a sister of a veteran, she has channeled her desire to serve veterans to help develop inspiring programs at LinkedIn that create an environment for diverse contribution, participation, and equity within the LinkedIn veteran community. Tune in to hear one of our most inspiring discussions thus far.  About Nicci Bosco Nicci has spent the last fifteen years in the talent acquisition space, first spending four years at CareerBuilder and now with LinkedIn for over ten years in a variety of roles including her current role as Senior Customer Success Manager. Throughout her career, she has focused her passions outside of work on advocating for both women in the workplace as well as military spouses and veterans, most recently serving as the Global Co-Chair for LinkedIn's Veterans & Allies Employee Resource Group.Nicci was born and raised a Cubs fan in Chicago, but with her heart in the mountains, she currently resides in Colorado Springs, CO where she can always find a trail run and serve the military community that surrounds her.  Constant growth and curiosity drive Nicci and she’s always on the lookout for a great book!

You’ve heard of love languages but how about the language of value?  The language of value is the backbone of today’s most customer-centric organizations and the leaders talking this language with their colleagues and customers are catapulting their organizations to new heights. In this episode of Value Builders, Michael Sachs, Head of Customer Success Value Methodology & Strategy at Slack, sits down to share how he thinks about the language of value while explaining how organizations can use it to unify to effectively manage customers. Michael also shares why Slack/Salesforce has decided to bring him on board to develop the company’s first value methodology and strategy team. He reflects on his value management leadership experiences at Oracle, AWS, and Salesforce (his first stint) and offers advice to those working to define value strategy and management functions in their organizations.  Michael rounds out the conversation by sharing how he uses the idea of ‘carpe diem’ as a personal mantra to champion his work and focus on driving innovation with a value delivery mindset. About Michael Sachs Michael Sachs is currently head of Slack’s Value methodology organization. He is an executive value management strategist who transforms organizations and ignites continued growth by aligning core business outcomes with strategic solutions, utilizing Cloud SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Mobile, Analytics, and Collaboration. He brings a broad background across numerous business functions and technologies. His industry knowledge and passion has grown throughout his career, leading him to obtain senior executive leadership roles for Fortune 500 organizations. For the past 12 years, he has launched, scaled, and optimized Value Management organizations at Oracle Tech and Apps, SFDC, AWS, and Slack.

From Revenue Revolutionaries to Value Builders. I set sail on the Revenue Revolutionaries podcast journey to create a space for genuine conversations with today’s best customer-focused leaders. Through MetaCX’s growth and the many conversations I’ve had, I’ve noticed that enterprise companies and the leaders within them are more focused on value creation than ever before. With this evolution, there is an opportunity to elevate the podcast to facilitate more conversations focused on value creation across a variety of roles and industries.  I am excited to announce a rebrand of the podcast from Revenue Revolutionaries to Value Builders. Why Value Builders?  Tune in and learn more here.Thanks for listening! Dave DukeHost, Value Builders Podcast