"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 Amazon

Brent'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.