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Ron: Hi  this is Ron Kaufman. I’m at the Salesforce world tour in Sydney Australia with Tiffany Bova. 

Tiffany: Yes.

Ron: Who’s Tiffany Bova? Tiffany Vova is the author of this best-selling book-Growth IQ. It’s her first book.

Tiffany:  It might be my only. But  right now it is my first. She’s  a toddler at the moment so I haven’t yet gotten to the terrible twos. Got  to let her breathe a little bit before I start talking about it.

Ron: And it’s got legs, it’s a toddler, it’s gonna get out. What’s  the essence? What  is this really all about? 

Tiffany: Well I think one of the most vexing problems that businesses have today is actually all-around growth. Growth is getting harder, sales is getting harder, attracting and keeping customers is getting harder. Everybody’s  getting into the game. These  little sort of new startups are coming and trying to compete in certain ways. And  so I think it was just a way for me to tell the story of what I’ve been doing over the last 15 years and where I’ve seen great success in companies doubling down on certain things and finding growth. 

Ron: When you say doubling down on certain things I know that there’s a narrative that’s out there called you know just the one thing. But  I get the sense that you’re saying, maybe that’s not what is your view on that?

Tiffany:  Well so it started out where everyone used to say to me from a client perspective Tiffany, you know we need to correct sales in this quarter what can we do. What’s the one thing we can do? Hire  more salespeople, spend more marketing dollars,cut costs. And  then when I started to analyze and I really I’d like to call it, kind of became this anthropologist of growth for high-performing companies started to deconstruct what they were doing. I started to see the patterns that number one, it was never one thing. Number  two it was the combination of multiple things and three it was the sequence in which they did it that had all made all the difference in the world. That’s  fascinating, that was what the aha was for me.

Ron: Which kind of explains also, why on the front you’ve got this sort of stage to stage to  stage. I imagine the sequence in which you do it matters a lot. Now  you’re with Salesforce tonight as the force of all the platforms in the world has got so many things. If people can do something, how do people figure out what’s the one thing to do now? What’s the sequence we should  precede it?

Tiffany:  Yeah I always like to reframe that question by saying, I don’t know, what do your customers want you to do? What  do your customers expect you to do? What do your customers really love what you do today and what don’t they like that you do today? And so behind every decision Marc Benioff -our CEO likes to say, there is a customer. So before you start making those decisions,get out, talk to your customers, listen in on customer service calls, manage by wandering around, you know talk to your customers, get out of your office and go be with the people.

Ron:  Read the compliments, read the complaints, find out what happened at the customer site. So  you actually have told us what’s the first thing to do is get closer with customers.

Tiffany: Get closer with the customer! But  I think sometimes people get so far away from that because they get caught in the day-to-day. I’ve become a manager, I’ve become your director, I’ve become a VP, I’m responsible for all the revenue and I might even be an entrepreneur and I have all these things to do. I don’t have time to talk to the customer. Like, this is the thing you have to make the most time for, right? And  so I like to use Undercover Boss, the TV show as an example where, the first four, five or seven minutes of Undercover Boss they spend all this time putting makeup on the executive, so that they can go out and not get recognized. And  I find that fascinating. Because I’m guessing that they wouldn’t really get recognized?

Ron:  Because they actually aren’t out of that office. 

Tiffany: So I always use that as an example right just kind of get out

and figure out what you should be doing next.

Ron: Great. Well  it’s wonderful to meet you here. If  you’ve got one last point from the world of Salesforce here in the world tour in Sydney, what would be that invitation or that suggestion you’d make to people all over the world watching this video?

Tiffany:  I would say that the backbone of corporate growth is personal growth. And so with every decision we have to make, we have to make as individuals a conscious decision, that we want to try to do something different today and tomorrow and in the future. For not only ourselves but for our roles and our jobs and our customers. So I’d say it’s all about personal growth.

Ron:  Very good and that’s for everyone, certainly the young labor force that’s coming in that says “hey if you don’t have that in your company I’m not coming in”. And then everybody at middle-age is going what life is really all about. And then as the workforce ages and carries on people are looking for purpose in life and of course, every customer the same.

Tiffany: Yes, he said it perfectly. 

Ron: Yeah well, she wrote it.