Erik Flegal
Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Thought and Action. We’re going to be discussing the digital pivot today. And we have Todd King, Chief Marketing Officer, and Jon Jones, CEO, of Anthroware and we have Doc who will make a surprise visit at some point. He couldn’t make it home all the way from the vet, so he’ll pop in and out, which will be fun. First, I wanted to give a plug as to why I thought this would a good topic and group to speak. I chose Anthroware because they do design, marketing, growing, scale. Really any size business. There is a wide breadth of expertise as they’ve been doing this for over a decade now. They’re the perfect fit to talk about this topic, regardless of the size of your company. And that’s the reason I wanted to have them on. You’re going to get a deep dive into the marketing side with Todd. And then Jon is going to talk more about the execution, kind of high-level stuff. We’re going to have some really good insight over the next 20-30 minutes. So that said, I’ll just kick it off with a kind of overarching question. Just how has COVID changed digital strategies in this environment or really strategies in general for the people you’re working with.
Todd King
I think what COVID did was basically take everything thing that was occurring, and move it at warp speed exponentially faster. Take the example that I used when we were talking earlier. You’re at home or you’re working and 3 months ago, or three years ago, you’re going on a trip in the next weekend and you need a roof carrier for your car. Three years ago you would have driven out to the place to buy your rooftop carrier, you would have spent two hours round trip getting everything done, and have done your research in advance. Now you take your lunch hour, and within 10 minutes, you can order your rooftop carrier and it’ll arrive in two days for your trip over the weekend. Quantum change that’s occurred in that time frame and that is exactly kind of the analogy that we’re seeing for everything. And as companies move, they need to adapt. They need to pivot. That’s an overused word, but we’ll use it. Everybody is seeing their business change. And what Anthroware has been focusing on is the customer. And I’ll let Jon kind of take it from there. But basically, we focus on Human-Centered Design, Human-Centered Marketing. And we look at customer habits and how they’re changing because of COVID. And the one thing that is completely different is what your customer is doing.
Jon Jones
Yeah, that’s a good tee-up. My answer would be similar to Todd’s. We’ve seen a lot of change but in a much shorter period of time. And that leads to you not knowing your customers anymore. The customers that you knew six months ago are different, their comfort levels are different. They’ve changed. And the data that’s available is available to everybody, right? Your competitors have the same data you do unless you go and find out from your customers how they’ve changed and how it relates to your business. The human-centered approach to this, that unique data set that’s unique to your business, the only way to go get it is to go ask and to go ask in the right way. And if you know that information, then that data then turns into something that you can say “Wow!” It might come out that my customers used to be okay with something, but no longer feel safe. Or, this process in life has become very complicated. If I take that on, I can beat my competitors. It’s like the analogy of airlines. They are still struggling financially. They’re not filling airplanes up the way they used to just a few months ago. And the question is, are people never going to fly again? Because of COVID? Maybe a couple, but the majority – no. So what makes them comfortable? Is it a rope between? Is it a seat between? Is it new air filters? You know, what is that? That data set is very unique to that specific niche in that specific industry. All businesses have had that. So yeah, your customers have dramatically changed their emotional reaction to what you’re doing. Everything is just totally different than it was and you have to find out.
Erik Flegal
I acknowledge that COVID has brought on some change. Yes, it’s shifted the landscape. But, truthfully, the landscape is always shifting. There’s always something new. Whether it’s the internet or social media or the move from computers to cell phones, there’s always something going on. Isn’t this something that companies should be doing anyway – pre-COVID, post-COVID? It’s not like this is something you do in a bubble right now, this is something that companies really should be doing on an ongoing basis.
Jon Jones
Yeah, I think the best companies do that already. They did it before COVID hit. I think COVID put a very fine point on companies that don’t. If you don’t engage in that kind of research activity to deeply understand your customers, to deeply understand why people said no when you lose a sale, to deeply understand why people said yes when you win a sale, to deeply understand lifetime value and why people stick with your company for a long time, you’re missing key data. Do you understand lifetime value and why people stick with your company for a long time? A lot of companies don’t even know what they sell. On the surface, it may be a product, but maybe they sell a process, or they sell trust. They sell customer service. There are things that the winning companies have always done well. And what this pandemic has done, because everybody shifted so quickly, is it’s really shone a light on the importance of that product. It’s important now, but if you continue to invest in those kinds of activities and make that a habit, a cultural thing in your company, you’re always going to be one step ahead. Nobody else has that unique set of data that you have, because you went out and got it.
Erik Flegal
What does that process look like? Todd, you’re doing a lot of these marketing things. A typical engagement for you would be what, three months or six months? Is it ongoing? If somebody were to start from scratch, tell me what that looks like.
Todd King
So it starts with the key element, which is discovery. And that is essentially an interview process, a non-invasive interview process where we learn with key stakeholders within the company. We learn what challenges, opportunities, areas that they’re stuck, or just resource challenges that they have. When interviewing the key stakeholders you learn the areas that we should focus on. And then we turn externally and we interview customers. As Jon said, we interview not only customers that have said yes or that are happy with the product, but customers that have said no. You learn so much about your “why”. Is it a competitor that brought a new product to market? Is price sensitivity during this time even more heightened? Is there something that you’re not offering? Or was it the sales process? There are all sorts of questions and we take a customized approach on everything we do. So no, one size doesn’t fit all. And we look deeply into those questions from a human-centered approach.
Erik Flegal
I know when we spoke earlier, you brought up how you like to have multiple data points, you want multiple. Tell me what that looks like.
Todd King
We look at data as points, on a graph as we illustrate it. And then you take those data points and you color them in. And that’s the information you get as you learn from your customers. And then you connect those data points. And that’s where you gain insight. But until you’re able to really connect multiple insights, you don’t gain wisdom. And our goal is to go from data to wisdom. And it’s a process. So starting with that discovery process, we then can really paint a picture. You’ll see a cluster of data points over here that says, “Hmm, there’s 20 people that think this, there must be something to that.” Let’s uncover that. Let’s unpack that. And we do a lot of unpacking and understanding. Here’s an opportunity. You’ll find low-hanging fruit where all you have to do is something this, this, and this. Or it may be a new element that needs to be developed. Then we utilize what we call “selling experiments” where we basically iterate and we do A/B testing, we fail fast, we fail cheap, we understand, what if we offered this? Does that resonate? And by doing that, you’re able to really get to the core of what your customer wants.
And then you say, “Well if we offered this, would you choose this?” And by giving concrete examples, offering them at a value or really putting them out in front of the customer, you learn a lot. So that’s how our process works. It starts with discovery. And then once we discover, we then synthesize all of that data, and then you start to paint the picture, you see the picture, it becomes really clear. There are opportunities here, here, and here. And then we take that data, synthesize it, and then create a strategy based on that data. And then we create the roadmap to address it. Now, it may be prototyping, it may be creating. You can prototype a service as well, it doesn’t just need to be a concrete product, but it could be a financial instrument, it could be the way that you package or message your brand. It’s all independent of the particular company that we work with and what their needs state is. Jon, you have anything to add there?
Jon Jones
I think it does go back to being a cultural thing. And our process is our process because we believe it’s the best way to do things. It’s like a deep-seated passion to say like, everybody should be doing this. If you need help, we’ll help you. But first, there’s this decision that gets made in a company. They want to have a reason behind every decision that they make.There’s going to be strategic reasons at a high level like driving revenue is great. There might be a missional reason. So you want initiatives, products, strategies, processes that align with being a successful company. Add the missional things that you have that define success. So the processes are meant to uncover what’s next, what’s working now, and how do you make that efficient? Also, where are you investing next?
The only thing I would add with the selling experiment is that it is a shortcut to understanding whether or not people will buy your stuff now. Instead of going through an expensive product development process, you have a prototype that you say, “Hey Erik, I’ve got this thing. It’s not ready yet. It’ll be ready in three months, will you buy it now? If you buy it now, we’ll give you a discounted rate because we want five of your salespeople to give us feedback on this process.” You’re trying to close a real deal with a prototype to understand whether or not people are giving you a committed yes. They will actually hand you money right then as opposed to a confirming yes where they would prefer something else. Or even a counterfeit yes, which is where it’s just easier to say yes to you right now. So when you talk about customer insights, you have to understand that everybody’s willing to lie to you. And that they will tell you that they like your idea or tell you that they will buy. And you might take that as a validation point for your business. You might say, “We talked to a bunch of people, and this is how they think.” But it may not be the action they actually take when you put the thing in front of them to sell for real. So those selling experiments are a way to shortcut into a behavior standpoint because that’s what this really is – deeply understanding the people that you’re working with. I’m deeply understanding what you can do to see behavior change, which is like the holy grail of product and marketing. People are doing something the current way now. And we can provide this thing that is so much better that they will stop their habits, stop their behavior now, and go do this other thing. That’s what you want. You want people to value your services and products that much that they will change their behavior to buy your stuff over your competitors. So it’s all super related and very, very, very driven by the same principles and beliefs that we have about product development. It’s very powerful to understand both worlds.
Erik Flegal
So, full disclosure, I’m working with a marketing company. I’m not working with you, but it’s not because I didn’t like you. It’s because I didn’t know you. I’m hearing a lot of the things you’re saying and it resonates with me. I’m thinking about it and my business is a smaller business. And I feel like I can execute on things fairly quickly. I know you deal with businesses of all sizes. Give me a sense of whether a larger company is better advantaged, in this environment, a smaller company? If it’s apples and oranges, is it just different? What are you seeing in terms of company size and pivoting?
Jon Jones
I think you have advantages in each different size. It’s different. If you’re a really big company, you’ve got some amazing crown jewels that you need to utilize that hardly get utilized. Very rarely. Data is a big one. You have more data. You’ve got reach, you’ve got funds to go experiment. The downside is it often is very hard. Unless the culture of your company is set up to be conducive to experimentation, it’s very hard to go gather data and connect some dots, insights, and pure actual wisdom that you can apply to your business. Even if you get to that point, it’s still very hard to change, especially if you’re changing the business model design, or like a revenue structure, investing in another product that is not as performant as your flagship product, those decisions become very hard. So it’s a big ship. It’s easier to steer, if you know the course you’re on. But it’s harder to shift courses. Small companies have a huge advantage in this marketplace because they are able to make changes rapidly and listen to their changing customers. And again, Todd and I are both stumbling over the buzzword of pivot because it has such a large variety but it is so useful in this case. You’re pivoting because something is forcing the whole world to be more virtual, more remote. Small companies have the ability to do that much easier than big companies. So understand that as a massive, superhuman strength that you should be playing into. A lot of the stuff that we’re talking about and a lot of the stuff that we are passionate about at Anthroware is stuff that founders can do on their own. Consultants are not smarter than you at your own business. That’s the big secret about consulting that’s out. We’re not smarter than you at your own business. We’re connecting dots, we can make a recommendation and say why it makes sense and have all those dots. But that final interpretation of the data is still a team effort, like in the best scenario. And so we ask open-ended questions, talk to your customers, talk to the people that are upset with you, even though it’s hard getting a third party to do that’s not so emotionally tied to your business is a great idea. But you can do a lot of it on your own. The ability for small businesses to pivot faster is a superpower when the world is changing at a fast pace. So I think everybody should be thinking about this. And I could rattle off half a dozen examples of very, very small businesses that are taking huge advantage of the opportunities that are there. You can sit back and think about what’s broken and what changed and well, of course, it’s changed. What about a horizontal market that’s adjacent to you that you have the capability to service that’s in high demand right now? There are probably more horizontal markets that are in high demand. When you start something new you’re not burdened by having a business model that is already set in place. You can look at your competitors you can look at what’s commoditized in that space and undercut your competitors so you can focus on the bespoke, boutique aspects of the business that require hard thinking. There are just so many examples of why this is important for a small business.
Todd King
Very passionate about this as you can see. You almost can’t afford not to do it. Whether you do it yourself or whether you evaluate, you have to know where your customers are. And the one thing that we know is that they’ve changed. And you should really know where your customers are. I’ll just walk through kind of a small example. So there’s a business in Asheville that had a very successful restaurant. The owner, obviously, got hit with the change in not allowing in-store dining. So what she did, she created a selling experiment. She had talked to parents with kids that were going back to school, parents working full time on zoom meetings all the time. They get out, they have to help their kids with work, you know, it was just a lot of chaos in the home. So she created a business model based on an idea. Then she did a selling experiment where she delivers organic farm-to-table food to your house just like the days of when milk was delivered to your house, and you pay through Venmo. And she keeps her business and her restaurant running and has a delivery service that these deliver on certain days and it’s $25 a day for your family. That exploded because after one family had it for a week, they told the next family and the next, and her business now is larger than it was as a large-scale restaurant in Asheville. All this based on the change that she made from listening to her customers. So that’s just one example. You can go larger scale, we always joke about this cartoon that has a boardroom and the board is talking about not needing to change that rapidly to the impending digital pivot that needs to happen, and then you see COVID-19 outside the window as a wrecking ball swinging into the building. And it illustrates that this movement was already happening. And COVID-19 basically accelerated that. The other thing I’ll speak to is in thinking about your business, how do you see yourself? Say you’re a financial firm, do you see yourself part digital and part financial or are you just a financial firm? Are you a manufacturer or are you part digital company, part manufacturer? If you look at Domino’s Pizza, they are as much a digital firm as they are a pizza delivery service and pizza making service. Think of yourself not as what you do, but how you can become a digital company in the digital world. That’s just kind of poking the bear a little bit, but it’s also a provocative statement to help companies think a little bit differently.
Erik Flegal
Right. So that brings up another question. Some people are kind of hunkering down waiting out COVID. But you’re talking about this being a broader shift that’s accelerated because of COVID. So that being the case, will things ever go back to 2019, or is this change permanent?
Todd King
Well, I’ll ask you the question. Do you want to spend three hours or four hours of your day buying a roof rack for your travel? Or would you rather do it in 10 minutes online and have that time to spend with your family? I mean, it kind of answers his own questions. And a lot of companies and consultants are saying, we know exactly how to navigate this pandemic. Yes, there are certain things you should do to kind of have your digital toolkit sharpened. But the reality is none of us have gone through a pandemic before. We don’t know how this is going to change. You’ve got a dynamic of an election year, you’ve got all these kind of areas bearing in on the economy, on commerce, and all of that, that influence this. So we know that it’s dynamic. We know it’s changing rapidly. We know you need to talk to your customer and get much more data from your customer to have the insights that yield that wisdom.
Jon Jones
I’ll poke the bear now. So yeah, so there’s innovation that’s happened in the last few years. And that’s why it’s easy to buy a bike rack online. And if you look at the .com bust, the bubble, right, like, things weren’t the same after that, it was harder to make money on the internet. And then you had like a mobile search, right? There’s opportunity there. And then you have like, 2008 recession, and there’s companies that found a lot of opportunity there, right. So we’ve never been through a pandemic before, but we’ve been through stages where there’s immense sort of like chaos isn’t the right word, but uncertainty and all these things that affect businesses, you know, fight or flight mechanism. So you’re either gonna, you know, try to survive, or these companies that have been big winners in the past push forward. And there’s an old joke. Like, you know, we’re in the woods and we see a grizzly bear, the grizzly bear is going to attack us. And I look down at Erik and Erik’s tying his shoes tight. And I say, “Hey, man, you know, you can’t outrun the bear.” He’s like, “I just have to outrun you.” And so when you’re thinking about, “Are things changing, are they going to get back to normal?” They absolutely will not go back to normal because this is the thing that drives innovation. It has every time there’s been a big period of opportunity. You have companies like, you know, Uber came out of sort of that last bigger session that we had, and it just drove innovation. When you put constraints on companies and people they do crazy things and the things that stick are the things that become the next huge companies. So I would say dream big, outrun the bear, and definitely take advantage of fewer competitors and more market share. So I think there’s some very innovative things that always happen when there’s this much opportunity. And that’s what we’re talking about here in terms of digital pivot, you know, you digital pivot, to open up more market share while things are closed. Who’s to say that that won’t just be another revenue line for your business when things open back up? That’s right. So if I was just going to leave a thought here, I would say outrun the bear and look for all the opportunity that you can.
Erik Flegal
Right. I think that’s a really good thought. I want to ask one last question that dovetails that because it’s slightly a plug for what you do, but I think what you do is super important, especially since I’m going through it myself. Talk to me about people that say, I’m going to be innovative. I’m going to go out there, I need social media presence, and they just decided I’m gonna start posting things without doing the discovery without kind of creating that, as Todd was saying, the wisdom of getting data and input, which to me, as a person just wants to execute. I don’t want to do that. Talk to me about someone like me, who’s just like, I just want to execute without doing that stuff.
Todd King
Well, I think it all starts with a strategy. You know, I mean, I know it starts with strategy. You can’t just plug holes and things, you need to think about your business strategically from the top down. And strategically, how has your customer changed? What do you need to do in order to be you know, and there’s ideas there’s innovation there, everywhere you look there’s innovation opportunity, whether it’s your the way that you engage with customers or your customer service, the way that you think about your competitor and how you outrun them. How you think smarter and provide just that next level of service to your customer, or that element that makes them smile. You know, I mean, people want to smile more now. And anything that you can do to put that smile on their face, or just say, wow, I just had an interaction with your company, and it was so favorable. I just want to refer your company or do business with you again.
Jon Jones
I mean, well, all that is absolutely true. And the reason why you want a strategy, I speak this more from a product standpoint, than a marketing standpoint, but it’s the same concept. You only have a limited timeline and budget to do this stuff, right? Like you’re limited by your time, your money, the amount of ads you can run, how many shots you have to build a Gizmo before you’ve run out of runway. You know, you want to see your marketing dollars go very far, you want to build a prototype that people actually buy at the end of the day. You’ve only got a couple of shots. Like if you’re a really big company, maybe you’ve got, you know, half a dozen tries before somebody gets fired. But if you’re a small company, especially if you’re so limited on budget. And it’s you know, we talked about this example, a couple of times, I think, but it’s like playing dizzy bat at the baseball game, and you’re all dizzy, you’re disoriented and you’re drinking from a firehose. There’s a lot of uncertainty when you’re trying to do something new or build something new or try a new marketing strategy or whatever. And then somebody hands you bow and arrow with three arrows, and that represents your limited time and budget. So you’ve only got three shots to hit the target, let alone try to hit a bullseye. So if you just start shooting, because you’re action-oriented, and you just, you know, you start firing arrows away, the chances of you hitting that target are next to nothing. So, with pride development, with marketing, when you’re asking your customers and you’re trying to learn from them, study them to figure out what you should be doing, you’re able to say, okay, have I rotated far enough? Is it up, right, left, down? Up? Well, whatever, up, down, left, right, doesn’t matter. You get the point, you’re able to ask a lot of questions, as many questions as you want, so that you have a greater chance of hitting the target. So you know, think about it in terms of, you know, how you value your time, how much you value the project, and how much you want to succeed.
Todd King
Yeah, and I’ll kind of dovetail on what john was saying. So sometimes clients come to us and say, “Hey, we need a website.” and they may need a website. But we always have them step back and say, what problem are you trying to solve? What opportunity is there? You know, what is your goal? What does success look like? And sometimes they need a website. But sometimes they need a strategy that drives customers to a funnel to their website so that they can have customer acquisition. And yes, they need a website, but they also only had you know, 10 new website visitors a day, whereas if they had the proper funnel, they could have hundreds, thousands of website visitors a day. So we take a step back and just ask all those questions, and really do that discovery that instead of as john saying, you know, ready, fire, aim, Ready, aim, fire and have the discipline to really go through that process. And especially with what’s happening with COVID and all that. Companies are so in the day-to-day and just trying to either survive or navigate, or they’re having huge growth because of what’s happening. They sometimes just need that, that distance of an outside eye to say, yeah, here’s the way you should approach this.
Erik Flegal
How long does that process take?
Todd King
Well, everything is evolving fast. So it can be shortest, like two months, or as long as six months. But we can do things depending on what the needs state is very rapidly. You have your discovery process, and then you can have your implementation. But if it’s a larger scale project, obviously, you want to do it right. And so that’s the other piece. And we can either implement it through the development that we have on the software side, or we can hand the baton off to the internal team to have them execute the ideas and the discoveries that we unearth.
Jon Jones
A lot of times we’re starting from scratch, like there’s a lot of people that believe that data is important, that are already taking a lot of data, that have a lot of that are available already. And that dramatically shortens timelines. We’re not trying to redo any work. When I work with founders, you know, I mentor founders directly through Hatch ABL Foundation, which is an incubator here in Asheville. And oftentimes, they know a lot of this stuff just by being so close to their business. And it’s just a matter of organizing it and putting a little structure behind that with a sort of you know, kind of an advanced rice scorecard reach impact, confidence, and effort, and just actually running through some of this stuff and running some thought experiments to say, “Well, now that we’ve organized all this data, you have all the data that we need to organize so that we can actually extract things that we can apply to the business.” A lot of times they have a lot of that and there might be one missing piece, that we would call like a critical assumption if you’re wrong about it, the impact of your business is really big. And your level of certainty about that one thing is very low. Well, then let’s design a little experiment or design a set of questions that we can ask 10, 15, 20 people and find out about that one thing. And then we can move forward to like thinking about what a solution looks like, or thinking about what a marketing strategy should be. And so a lot of times we’re filling in little holes because generally, the companies we work with it at Anthroware are already exceptional. You know, they’re smart people, they’re driven, they’re trying to do a really great job. So fitting into that process and filling in the holes and then adding that little bit of structure can be all the difference. Sometimes it just starting from scratch, that takes a while. But we can offer insights pretty quickly.
Todd King
And there’s something valuable about a different set of eyes as well. You’ve been with your company or you are a founder of your company, you have a perspective. And so a different set of eyes a different perspective and also, you know, synthesizing what we’re hearing because we’re talking to so many different companies that are telling us how they’re navigating or the challenges that they’re having. So being able to share that, you know, is that community of communication. And so, you know, that would be one thing I would encourage anyone listening to this is, is make sure you ask questions to other companies of similar size scale, see what they’re doing, how they’re hand handling it use your networks and just learn.
Jon Jones
Yeah, I think Charleston for sure, Asheville, for sure has a super supportive network of companies. All throughout that ecosystem, we all want to see each other succeed. And yeah I know, Erik, you’re going to be publishing this on Dig South’s list. If there any member companies that want to chat with us about this, we’re here to help you succeed. You don’t have to hire us to get help. So yeah, any questions just let us know.
Erik Flegal
Well, I appreciate both of your time and I can attest to that John’s been very giving with his time. But I want to thank you both right now, just for spending this half an hour with us. I’m a little upset we didn’t get to see a little more of Doc, I did hear him jingling around in the back. I look forward to having you guys on in the next couple of months because I’m sure as things change, we’ll have another topic to talk about. Maybe we’ll talk about “Poking the bear.” You never know. But I appreciate your time and I look forward to talking to you both soon.
Jon Jones & Todd King
Thank you, take care.