Karen Mangia - Listen Up!: How to Tune In to Customers and Turn Down the Noise

Listening with authentic intent gets results. Karen has lived it in her career. Now she has written an accessible and real book that can be used again and again. Leading with questions, locking in on values, and meeting your customers where they are at are just a few takeaways from this riveting read. A must for every conscious leader.

• Sean Magennis, COO, Young Presidents Organization (YPO)

Karen Mangia clearly and powerfully articulates the significant benefits of cultivating a Listen Up! company culture. As a former chief customer officer and CMO, I can clearly see how businesses can build longlasting customer relationships and advocacy by following this brilliant blueprint.

• Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist, Salesforce

The most powerful strategy for creating trust and lasting relationships is intimacy. The best way to gain intimacy is to care enough to give someone your full focus and listen. REALLY listen. The superpower in business is caring, and Listen Up! is a practical, tactical guide to real and improved customer experience.

• S. Anthony Iannarino, writer, speaker, and author of The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need

Customer perception is everything. Listen Up! enables you to query, explore, and act on new and surprisingly valuable dimensions of customer perception.

• Peter E. Cohan, author, Great Demo!

KAREN MANGIA

Copyright 2021 John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data is available:

ISBN 9781119642114 (Hardcover)

ISBN 9781119723868 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781119723875 (ePub)

Cover Design and Illustration: Wiley

Author Image: Rogue Images Photography.

To my grandfathermy most cherished mentor in business and in life

When I started out in business late in the 1970s, we were all working off an industrial playbook, where product was king, and capital was the scarce ingredient in the economic equation. Information technology was having a revolutionary impact on improving the efficiency of the supply chain and the back office. The big disruption was the Internet, enabling global outsourcing which, in turn, drove down the costs of products and services dramatically while simultaneously fueling a rising middle class in China, India, and other heretofore underdeveloped economies. By the end of the 20th century, we were giving ourselves high fivesmission accomplished!

Then, at the beginning of this century, a second technology revolution began to unfold around consumer applications enabled by cloud computing and mobile smartphones. Digital communication went from being an elite medium, to a commonplace experience, and finally to a de facto standardall in the space of a couple of decades. Digital transformation is reengineering our enterprise value chains end to end. We now live in a world where access to products, and all of the information about them, is ubiquitous. We also are living in a world where taking title to products is being displaced by subscription models and asaservice transactions. Product, in other words, is no longer king. Now it is the customer who is the scarce ingredient in the economic equation.

And that is what has led to this book.

In the Age of the Customer, every enterprise must reengineer its processes to be customer first. That means reframing functions like Customer Support as Customer Success. It also means reorienting sales calls from presentation plus demo to provocation plus dialogue. It means focusing our products and services on outcomes, not just on deliverables. We need to secure adoption, not just ownership. We need to get inside the minds of the customers to make sure that we are addressing the things about which they really care deeply.

Marketing is no longer about what we say. Instead, it begins with what we hear. Then it must translate what we hear into what we do. That, in turn, will ultimately translate into what other people say about us. Sure, we still have our taglines and positioning statements. But now, more than ever, we have to walk the talkwe have to show that we are listening, that we do care, and that we can respond. And that means we have to listen up.

How can we listen better? For many a spouse, that can pose a lifelong challenge. Think how much more challenging it is, then, to institutionalize listening across an entire enterprise. That, in essence, is what the Age of the Customer demands, and it is precisely here then why this book can be of such great help. As an executive at Salesforce, Karen has had a frontrow seat in the company that perfected the customer success function, that has lived the asaservice mission from day one, and that has learned how dependent a landandexpand sales model is upon customer satisfaction and retention.

Since I wrote Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers