Mark Boundy is a business builder, sales leader, author, coach, consultant, teacher…and Chief Clarity Officer…he has grown businesses in a variety of industries using a relentless focus on customer-perceived value.
In this episode, Mark discusses the importance of aligning every employee’s actions with customer value, emphasizing that every touchpoint with a customer either creates or destroys value. He shares stories from his experience, including a manufacturing operator and a receptionist, to illustrate how seemingly small ideas can have significant impacts on customer satisfaction and business outcomes. Boundy underscores that value creation is about helping customers achieve desired outcomes, and this focus can drive growth, profitability, and employee fulfillment across all levels of an organization.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Discover real-life stories about how employees at every level, from operators to receptionists, can innovate to drive customer satisfaction and business results, making it relatable and motivating.
- Gain actionable strategies to ensure every team member understands how their role impacts customer value, helping you foster a culture focused on positive customer experiences.
- Learn how traditional metrics can sometimes hinder value creation, providing tips on aligning KPIs with customer-centric goals to achieve greater long-term success.
“Customer value comes from two things, one, your differentiation, and two, the outcome that customer achieves because of your differentiation.”
– Mark Boundy
Topics Covered:
01:25 – Sharing the experience that gave rise to using the word ‘antipreneurial’ in his book
04:08 – The importance of flexibility within processes, contrasting rigid corporate guidelines with adaptable checklists
07:41 – Stressing the importance of a value-oriented organization not just sales around delivering customer outcomes
09:14 – Highlighting the importance of aligning sales and implementation teams to ensure realistic promises are made to customers
12:39 – What it requires to create a value-driven organization
16:09 – Emphasizing the need to prioritize customer-focused KPIs over purely efficiency-driven ones with real-life illustrations
20:12 – How focusing on customer satisfaction and adding value leads to substantial growth, high profitability, and employee satisfaction
21:35 – Stressing a point that employees feel more fulfilled and engaged when they understand how their work directly impacts customers’ lives
22:51 – Defining value and illustrating how value was created by understanding customer outcomes deeply
26:51 – Mark sharing how anyone in the company, even janitors and receptionists can add value
Key Takeaways:
“If the most important process in your company is your customer’s buying journey, and your KPI has nothing to do with that buying journey, that’s a yellow light.” – Mark Boundy
“If maximizing that KPI inhibits the customer journey, I call that a masking KPI. You’re measuring something that makes you worse by making yourself good at stopping the customer from complaining. You get bad at turning customers into joyous partners.” – Mark Boundy
People/Resources Mentioned:
- The Infinity Effect How Elite Growth Companies Abolish Antipreneurial Patterns and Create More Profitable, Happy, Lifetime Customers by Mark Boundy: https://www.amazon.com/Infinity-Effect-Summary-Antipreneurial-Profitable-ebook/dp/B0D1NNLWRH
- Lucent technologies: https://lucenttek.com/index.html
- Cisco: https://www.cisco.com/#tabs-35d568e0ff-item-194f491212-tab
- Miller Heiman Group: https://www.kornferry.com/about-us/our-story/miller-heiman-group
- Zappos: https://www.zappos.com
- Barefoot Wines: https://www.barefootwine.com
Connect with Mark Boundy:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markboundy/
- Website: www.boundyconsulting.com
- Email: [email protected]
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: [email protected]
Full Interview Transcript
(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)
Mark Boundy
Customer value comes from two things, one, your differentiation, and two, the outcome that customer achieves because of your differentiation.
[Intro / Ad]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the inseparable relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and our guest today is Mark Boundy. Here are three things you’ll learn about Mark before we start. He has been running Boundy Consulting for 13 years. My favorite thing about him is he was eight years as a consultant slash trainer for Miller Heiman, and Miller Heiman was the very first sales training I ever took, and he is the author of his newest book, The Infinity Effect: How Elite Companies Abolish Antipreneurial Patterns and Create More Profitable, Happy, Lifetime Customers. Welcome, Mark.
Mark Boundy
Mark, thank you. Great to be here.
Mark Stiving
Hey, I always love talking to you. I’m going to start out with the following. What is the word antipreneurial and how did you come up with it?
Mark Boundy
Well, I’ll give you the long answer. My first big boy job was at a company called W.L. Gore & Associates, who is famous for their culture, but should be even more famous for their maniacal, unending intense obsession with customer perceived value.
Mark Stiving
Can I interrupt real fast? I just want to remind the audience or the listeners, a couple years ago, you and I did a podcast on Gore, so it was fascinating. So if you want to hear more about Gore, go back to that, but please continue.
Mark Boundy
Yeah. So I got my value goggles installed, and I didn’t want to move. They closed the plant, and didn’t want to move. So I got a new job with what had been my largest customer, Lucent Technologies. And at Gore, we asked ourselves three times a day, I’ll bet, what’s our value here? What’s the value here? What’s the value if we do that to our customers? And on my first day at Lucent and it’s three meetings, what’s the process? What’s the process for this? What’s the process for that? And that company was all about inward focus, where Gore had all been about customer-value focus. So after I left that company they couldn’t market their way out of a pet wet paper bag. I had somebody from Cisco, our main competitor in my product. One of the customers told me, well, Cisco can’t do it. They say, because Cisco is famous for putting stuff on slide that didn’t exist yet, right? For slideware, which is before vaporware, which is before hardware and software. So, Cisco can’t do what they say, but Lucent can’t say what they do.
Mark Stiving
Great line. That’s great to hear from a customer too, right? So I left that company and I started writing a book that was subtitled, Why Big Companies Can’t Innovate. So, it’s all about the cultural impediments rather than Clayton Christensen talking about the strategic difficulty of replacing yourself. All very true. I said, it’s much more mundane than that. It’s about corporate culture standing in the way and about companies making processes that make them antipreneurial. So I coined the word in 2001, antipreneurial.
Mark Stiving
It’s a great word. I think about the description that you just gave, in my world or way of thinking, I often think of that as, all companies have constraints, and so we have to decide which constraints we want to break down or, go fight. And what you’re really saying is these big companies have so many constraints they don’t even want to consider changing what their processes are.
Mark Boundy
Yeah. I quickly learned that…I like processes and guidelines and as much as, well, way less than the next guy, Gore had a company value. One of the founders put out a memo in 1960 that was there in the 1990s when I was, it was still floating around in the 1990s when I worked there. And it was about process skepticism. Like, basically it was, we all have processes, we all have guidelines, and when we need to, we’re going to create processes and guidelines and policies. But it’s your job as an associate to not unthinkingly follow that process. It’s your job to understand what outcome the process is trying to create. And if you’re operating in one of those border situations that mindlessly following the process is not going to give you the right result, you’re responsible for getting the right result and it is out of bounds to blame the process. And I started realizing that every process that you create, this is also true of any law, of any guideline, any process that you create that makes you good at doing something, makes you bad at doing everything else.
Mark Stiving
It certainly makes you bad at creative thinking.
Mark Boundy
Yeah. Right.
Mark Stiving
And so I create checklists for my bootcamps. That’s a process I go through. The reason I do it is I don’t want to forget something. But does that mean that we can’t, here’s a situation that’s different, do we think outside the box, do something unique or different for that? Of course we do.
Mark Boundy
Yeah. But antipreneurial companies discourage that.
Mark Stiving
I have to do it for myself.
Mark Boundy
Yeah. Well, I also think there’s some difference between a process and a checklist, because a checklist, first of all, doesn’t necessarily enforce the order in which of those steps. And in sales there’s a million entry points and a million conversational permutations. So you can’t go from beginning to end through a submarine. Like, it’s through a submarine with a door, and then you close it behind you, and you go to this room and you accomplish that task. And then you go through the next door of the max bulkhead water type bulkhead, and you pass through that. Sales works like that when it’s very transactional and very automated. As soon as you get into my world, which is multiple decision makers, complex, highly considered just buying decisions, it doesn’t work that way. So, a checklist is great because it makes sure that as you’re looping back, you don’t miss something which automatically makes it more flexible than a serial dedicated process.
Mark Stiving
And you can look at an item on a checklist and say, yeah, we don’t need that one for this situation.
Mark Boundy
Absolutely. But the checklist makes you ask.
Mark Stiving
Yep. It helps you think through it.
Mark Boundy
Yeah. And I use that. It’s fine to get the answer back. No, that’s not relevant. The sin is not asking the question.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Okay. Mark, I’m going to change topics slightly, although I think it’s along the same lines. And that is you and I have one massive thing in common, and that’s, we’re both obsessive about value. We just love thinking about value, it drives business, period. And so tell us about the new book that you’re writing and what does value have to do with the new book?
Mark Boundy
Yeah. Well, the new book is really targeted towards leaders of companies who want to, and it makes the case that you really want to have a value oriented organization, not value selling in your sales silo, but the entire company. And so where my last book was kind of written to the sales silo saying, here’s how to sell value, here’s how to price value, and kind of a shout out to the marketing and the product managers that are affiliated with that, all that basic idea. This one is written to the CEO and to the boards of directors saying it’s more than that. You need to make an organization that aligns itself around delivering a great customer outcome because the customer value comes from two things. One, your differentiation, and two, the outcome that customer achieves because of your differentiation. So, value is an outcome. So if your implementation and your installation and your customer service and your account management people don’t know what outcomes the salespeople we’re selling, you are already two steps behind the game.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. It’s almost like you sell the product and then you hope the client is able to get the value out of it that they thought they were going to get, but you no longer take responsibility for it. You’re not not making sure or helping them get there.
Mark Boundy
Yeah. And it’s kind of funny, right? You and I both took the Miller Heiman and most of the major sales methodologies do this. But when you’re selling, you find out all of the stakeholders who have something to say about whether or not they’re going to buy. And you find out what outcome each stakeholder wants to achieve. And then you see in Miller Heiman, we harped saying, what personal outcome do they get when they get that business outcome? That is, if we do this, I’m likely to get a promotion. If we do this, I’m not going to have to work so much overtime, if we do this, I’m going to be seen as a problem solver in my organization. And so we gather all that information and sales teams bleed from the ears trying to get all those stakeholder expected outcomes, and then the customer pulls the trigger. And what gets turned over to the implementation team is a sterile statement of work. None of those stakeholder expectations go over to the implementation team. You have that information there, the sales team, and you didn’t give it to the implementation team. How stupid is that?
Mark Stiving
Okay, I want to play devil’s advocate for a second. So if I’m on the implementation team and sales says, ‘Hey, we promised these people we were going to do this for them,’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, we’re not doing that.’
Mark Boundy
Well that’s another great story. It was almost 15, 20, 30 years ago. I was in first class next to this guy who was traveling a lot, and he was an implementation engineer for some company who found out I did sales training. And he goes, I hate you guys. Of course you guys suck. You know what? My job is Mr. Salesman, my job is right after the deal is won, I go in and I crush dreams. And I tell them that what you thought you were buying is not possible by the laws of physics and my job is to tear them back down and then rebuild from the wreckage something that they kind of want that is going to accomplish their ultimate goal. And so, yeah, I get where you’re going, Mark, but that concern is accepting the assumption that salespeople and the implementation teams aren’t tied at the hip so that salespeople deliver what can be accomplished and what will be accomplished. That question assumes that that gap cannot be closed, and I reject that.
Mark Stiving
And I think a fairer way to say this is that if we were to help salespeople truly understand the value that we’re delivering, they could win deals selling that value. They don’t have to make stuff up and go sell things that we don’t have. It’s like, okay, here’s what we do. And it’s super valuable to you, Mr. Customer.
Mark Boundy
Amen, brother.
Mark Stiving
Okay. So as I hear you talk about what you want to do and what we’re doing with this new book, it almost sounds to me like you need to be an expert at every department inside the company. So you need to know how to do operations management, you need to know how to run the factory or software development. You need to know how to do marketing. You need to know how to do sales, which you know well, right? And so how is it that you are an expert at all these? Or do you not have to be an expert?
Mark Boundy
You don’t have to be a super expert. That being said, I started out as a product manager at a company where the product manager was the general manager. It wasn’t a technical product manager or a marketing product manager. It was a GM product manager with P&L responsibility. A humble brag, I went to a pretty good business school that treated a business degree as a generalist degree, where you have to know something about everything in the business and you have to realize what you don’t know. So I just came out of a, last week I was consumed with a really great client that wanted to do this. And we started with a team from sales, but we quickly engaged a team of all leaders from all around the company, and we said, here’s the customer’s entire journey from beginning to end, right?
So that’s why I wrote the infinity effect. It’s an infinity loop, which is the figure eight on its side, and the left hand is the customer’s buy experience, right? That’s where the customer goes from. Status quo is not good enough. Why? What about it has gone wrong? What could I do about it? What are the options? Which one do I choose? And now I pull the trigger, and then the right hand loop of that infinity loop is I’m going to install it, I’m going to master it, I’m going to integrate it into my operations, I’m going to document it, I’m going to measure the results, and then I’m going to figure out what else I can do with this great toy or with this vendor. And so we started talking with people on the sales side, but then we said, none of what they do matters if you don’t deliver it.
And that customer journey should be the organizing principle for our entire company. And so when you in finance, when you in shipping, when you in implementation, when you in customer service, when you in account management, do your job, your job is not to just do the job description, stay in your lane, do not have a business conversation, get your rear end back to the office, stay in your lane. That’s not your job. Your job is envisioning that figure eight loop as a flywheel. And your job when you are touching the customer is to propel them around a flywheel to power the flywheel through the ownership experience. And so people bought into it, they left that week super excited, realizing that they weren’t denizens of some little tiny cabin in the bowels of the ship. They came to realize, I touched the customer for short periods of time, but it’s very important how I treat that customer when I’m doing it. And so, and we discovered all the outcomes that those people deliver, right? What is the part of you that your company’s differentiation that you who thought you were in the bowels of the ship actually deliver? You make the customer’s world and their results special. Let’s make sure that salespeople start highlighting your brilliance when they’re selling an outcome because your outcome is highly appreciated by our customers. Yeah, we’re closing lots and lots of loops.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. One of the things I often think about and say is that every customer touchpoint either creates or destroys value.
Mark Boundy
I think you’re a hundred percent right. A hundred percent right.
Mark Stiving
The only question is if you’re touching the customer, which one are you doing?
Mark Boundy
Yeah. Well I use the example, the two examples, one, the installers who didn’t get all of the stakeholder expectations. They got the statement of work and a project plan, and they manage that installation to the resources’ timelines and tasks, right? And they are doing that without the context of the business result they’re trying to create. And here’s a statistic that has been true since the mid 1990s. 50% of all corporate changes involving a software purchase fail to meet even one of the intended outcomes. 70% of all of those change initiatives with the significant software component, 70% of them fail to meet a significant number of the intended outcomes. And it’s no wonder because the people who are implementing have no idea what the outcomes are. That’s one example. The other example is we tell customer service, we give them a KPI that’s internally focused rather than customer focused. And we tell them, I want you to handle 19 calls an hour, which means now the game is to get the customer to stop complaining as quickly as possible so that they will answer no to that insincere question. Kind of, is there anything else I can help you with and you can just hear it dripping through the phone line. Please say no, please say no. Please say no. Please say no. Right? You can hear it. And if instead of saying, I want you to get 19 people an hour to stop complaining, what if you said, I want you to get as many people as you can turned into evangelists and power users of our stuff.
Mark Stiving
It reminds me, I did a tour of Zappos before the COVID. I don’t know if they still do tours now since COVID. But one of the fascinating things about Zappos was that when we went to the customer service area, they said, these people are not graded on how many they can do per hour. They’re actually rated on how long they keep the client on the phone. Right? So could you just keep them happy and keep giving them service as opposed to, ‘Hey, I got to get you off the phone now.’ Yeah. It was fascinating.
Mark Boundy
And look at the results difference from Zappos versus the average company.
Mark Stiving
Yep.
Mark Boundy
And one of the points I make in the infinity effect is let’s start looking at the KPIs you have all over your company and the metrics and look at those KPIs. And if the most important process in your company is your customer’s buying journey and your KPI has nothing to do with that buying journey, that’s a yellow light. And if maximizing that KPI inhibits the customer journey, I call that a masking KPI, you’re actually measuring something that makes you worse by making yourself good at stopping the customer from complaining. You get bad at turning customers into joyous partners.
Mark Stiving
And you can almost imagine that they’re diametrically opposed. And that is efficiency metrics versus customer satisfaction metrics.
Mark Boundy
They can be, I’ll use a big word to say they’re orthogonal. I could see a situation where it’s possible to be hyper efficient and build customer expectations, deliver on customer expectations. But I could definitely also see Zappos saying, we are going to be completely different. We want you to stay on the phone trying to add value. And it’s not the length of the phone call, but you keep talking until you’re not adding value anymore. Right?
Mark Stiving
Okay, so why do I care about any of this?
Mark Boundy
Because there’s money in it. I learned the basics of this when I was at Gore and I was a product manager there, and I was there for nine years. And during those nine years, my average growth of my product was 20% per year. And it was in wire and cable, a super mature industry. And I was growing a product at 20% per year. And my last year before I left, my profit, after all allocations, all overheads except for taxes. So pre-tax profit was 40%. You think that sounds good. I was mid-pack. And so growing that rate at that high profit is possible, even in a hyper mature industry. And also Gore was consistently on the 50 best companies in the country to work for. So happier customers, higher prices, better growth, happier employees, all at the same time. They aren’t trade-offs.
Mark Stiving
Well, if you think about it, employees want to help customers. They want to think they’re doing something valuable for the world and for their customers. And so it isn’t just let me come push a button or do a job. It’s, I want to do something valuable and useful.
Mark Boundy
Yeah, absolutely. Those people that you took from what they thought were the bowels of the ship and you told them what you do is critical in the customer’s life. And I want you to document that and show the rest of the people around you how that is. And we’re going to tell great stories to sales so they can tell stories to your customers. Which employer is happy? The one who’s doing that, who’s got that kind of a world and that kind of a recognition, or the one who just sits in a cubicle and something squirts in that tube over there in your cubicle. You do your thing to it and you put it out the tube in your cubicle. You don’t look at people, you just do your process. Which one’s more fun?
Mark Stiving
And the only time you get interaction is when you do something wrong.
Mark Boundy
Yeah. Or have to go to the bathroom, right?
Mark Stiving
There we go. Okay, so I want to go back to the Gore story for just a second. And I mean, fascinating story, but I want to see the value. What does value mean? And so when you were a product manager at Gore. Can you give some examples of how you found a value in whatever it is you were doing, and then how we delivered that through the organization?
Mark Boundy
Yeah. So value, I’ll give you the definition, my definition of value, which is the desirability of the outcomes a customer expects to achieve as a result of doing business with you. So value is about the customer achieving an outcome. And we would ask, what’s the value? What’s the value? What’s the value? I had a customer who had this little cable that went in the nose cone of a commercial jet airliner. That little rounded nose cone is hollow and there’s a radar dish right behind it that sweeps back and forth a couple times a minute on a 120 degree arc. And the cable that goes from the dish into the airplane rubs on its, is kind of a bundle of wires that twist torsionally and it slowly rubs on each other at 37,000 feet in 20 minus 60 minus 70 degree temperatures.
And so we made a cable that they tested and it outlasted all the other options, not because of our brilliance, but just because the kind of polymer we used was a little bit better than the only other polymer that could survive those environmental conditions. When you rubbed it against each other, sometimes when you rub it against sandpaper, that other polymer outlasted ours. So this was just a happy accident. So we were talking about this and asking what’s our value? How can we increase the value? And the machine operator, the guy making the cable said, Mark, do you realize the way we make this cable, and I knew this, we all knew this was we take the copper wires, we wrap them, put one layer of insulation on them. And so they go into a cabling machine pre-insulated with half of the insulation already applied to the bare wire, and then the second half of the insulation is delivered on a piece of tape to turn them into a ribbon cable where all the cables are conducted.
He says it’s a two layer insulation system. What would happen if the inside layer, if instead of white, which we usually use, what if we made it red? So the outside, which is gray, when these things are rubbing on each other, if a little red starts to show through, that’s an indicator that half the insulation’s gone and you can schedule it for maintenance on a leisurely way. And the cable’s not going to fail, but it’s a super easy visual identification. The manufacturing tech came up with that brilliant, brilliant creation of value that increased flier safety and airplane safety and increased the efficiency of inspecting that thing. I mean, all kinds of great things happened because the machine operator knew something we all knew, but he knew just when to suggest it. And so we created, like, somebody in the bowels of my ship created incredible value for a customer because I let them.
Mark Stiving
Great, great story. So did the machine operator truly understand the application for where it was being used and why?
Mark Boundy
Yes, because every single time it was maddening at the time because everybody would ask everybody else what’s our value? We’d make this cable for Raytheon and then somebody else wanted a cable that was built just like it. And so I’d take the old Raytheon drawing, cross out the Raytheon exclusive part number, issue a new part number, and give the new customer name. And that was it because it was the same, like it was changed. I changed the color, added two conductors, and I would go to the engineer for a simple instead of initials and he’d stop me and say, yeah, I can do that. But what’s our value?
Mark Stiving
Okay, so first of all, I dearly love that story. That was incredible. But now I’m going to take it even farther and ask you possibly the hardest question I’ve ever asked anyone ever on my podcast.
Mark Boundy
Alright.
Mark Stiving
Can you come up with a story where the janitor added value?
Mark Boundy
The janitor?
Mark Stiving
I just want to see if everybody could add value, right?
Mark Boundy
Well, there’s the famous story of John F. Kennedy touring Houston Mission Control right after it was built. And he’s asking everybody, what do you do? What do you do? What’s this, what’s that? And he asked the janitor, what do you do? And the janitor said, I will keep all the clutter and dust and dirt and litter away from these sensitive machines so that we can bring an astronaut safely to and from the moon.
Mark Stiving
Okay, you win. Nice job. So, I love the idea that everybody in the company creates or destroys value, right? Everybody. And the question is, do you understand it?
Mark Boundy
Yeah. So, I’ll top that story. It’s not the janitor, it’s the receptionist at Barefoot Wines. They were starting out and they were having a hard time getting space in grocery stores. And so they had finally gotten into a big pub, a big chain. They had gotten shelf space, but it was the bottom shelf. And the buyer said, you sell or you’re gone too. And so they were brainstorming, how can we get more sales? And the receptionist had the idea of taking the barefoot logo, which is a footprint, and we’re going to make a right-handed and a left-handed version, and we’re going to make big 10-inch long stickers out of them, and we’re going to make footprints from the entry to the store into the wine department, and it’s going to turn and stop at the display for Barefoot Wines. And it ended up getting enough visibility that Barefoot Wines started selling, like, man, so the receptionist had that idea. They happened to use adhesives that were so aggressive that those footprints stayed for 10 years in some stores,
Mark Stiving
Nice. Mark, we’re going to have to wrap this up. Thank you so much for your time. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Mark Boundy
The book is on the big A on Amazon, it’s The Infinity Effect. Actually I’m only selling the summary to that. So you only have to wade through 38 pages. But there’s links to videos that you can watch if you want more. And then the book will be coming out. I am on LinkedIn. I think there’s not very many Mark Boundys in the entire world. And I’m the one that’s not the Golf Pro in New Zealand. And otherwise I’m at [email protected].
Mark Stiving
Excellent. Thank you, Mark. And to our listeners, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? Speaking of which, Victoria on Amazon said about my book, Selling Value: How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices. She wrote:
‘In this book, Mark focuses on selling value and how buyers discover value. His methods and knowledge reveals how companies can truly increase profits from understanding these concepts. Highly recommend it!’
Victoria, the check is in the mail. And finally, if you have any questions or comments about this podcast or pricing, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
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