Many have predicted that the CEOs of the future will have a CCO background and George Bilbrey is a shining example of that career evolution.  In this episode of Revenue Revolutionaries, Dave sits down with George to discuss his path to becoming the CEO of Signpost.  George shares how a leap into entrepreneurship set the tone for his career path, why aligning the company to the customer journey is critical to managing a business, and the importance of understanding why customers need to achieve their outcomes.

Episode Key Takeaways

1. The purpose of a business is to do the job the customer hired your product to do - George gets back to basics and highlights that the purpose of a business is to do the job that the customer hired your company and product to do.  The customer must achieve their desired outcomes in order for the customer relationship to stay intact. It is paramount that the team understands what your customers are actually buying. The outcomes are what they are buying and they are buying them for a reason. Good CCOs and CEOs understand this critical point.

2. Customers are people too and this needs to be understood to drive internal alignment - CEOs are responsible for helping the organization understand that customers are people too and they have needs.  George thinks a lot about how to ensure his organization understands the customer journey and how functional areas impact customers at each stage of the journey. Align with the customer journey to put customers in the best position to be successful.

3. Fix things before they break - Things break in business, it comes with the territory. George works with his customer success team to proactively identify issues before they turn into organizational detriments. He takes a quantitative approach to discover what key customer behaviors and variables correlate with retention. He organizes new efforts to create new workflows and communication strategies to drive positive change to reduce churn.

4. Get good at dealing with weird and awkward situations - As Geroge explains the importance of having a growth mindset when being a manager of managers, he highlights the need for a leader of managers to get good and dealing with weird and awkward situations. It’s one of those insights that often goes unsaid but I think it’s a great call out because of the rollercoaster ride leaders go through when managing people.  How do you do this? Having a growth mindset is key. Use every weird and awkward situation to get to know the needs and wants of your people better so you can coach and guide them in those situations.

5. Monitor the customer journey quantitatively and qualitatively - Building on takeaway #3, George works to show the organization how metrics align with the customer journey. He thinks about how best to show his team how the day to day work directly impacts the key KPIs that are being used to manage the business. This strategy puts the team in a position to understand the business better and shows how the customer experience and the team’s understanding of the customer’s desired outcomes determine the trajectory of the business.