Rob Markey – Partner in Bain & Company and Creator of the Net Promoter System

Rob Markey 0:00
You have to ask less to learn more. You don’t do that with multiple choice questions. You don’t do that by just surveying people you do it by observing and listening and thinking and understanding,

Kara Goldin 0:11
I am unwilling to give up, that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be, I want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don’t get knocked out knocked out. So your only choice should be

go focus on what you can control, control control. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Kara golden show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders will talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time, can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone, its Kara golden from the Kara golden show. And I’m so excited to have my next guest here we have Rob Markey, who is a partner at Bain and company. And while I’m sure we will chat about Bain and company, what I was most interested in was talking to him about kind of his baby that he is part of and incubated inside of Bain, which is Net Promoter systems. So we’ll get into that and talk much more about that. But he is just this incredible leader who has really focused in on customer strategy, which I know that all of us as, as leaders or want to be leaders, it’s it’s really focusing in on the customer and understanding what the customer is thinking about things. I mean, this is what Rob has just really been. I mean, that’s what Rob loves to do. So I think that that was the the key thing that I really wanted to jump in and dive in a little bit more. What I also think is, is fascinating, I mean, Rob, after Harvard Business School, just jumped in and and to Bain and was able to, has been able to just really, you know, grow his career overall, again, focusing on what he loves doing. And he leads the it’s called the NPS loyalty forum, which is a group of approximately 35, senior executives from so many companies that are focused on loyalty as well, including American Express, and JetBlue, and Lego and all those tiny little brands that maybe you might have heard of. So very, very excited to talk more about that. And he’s also the co author of a book called The Ultimate Question 2.0 how Net Promoter companies thrive in a customer driven world. So we’ll hear more about that. And of course, I’m, I’m definitely sharing that you should pick that app. It was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, which is super, super great. So let’s just jump right in now and and just meet Rob and hear a little bit more. So Rob, super great.

Rob Markey 3:14
Thank you.

Kara Goldin 3:15
Really excited. So you’ve been at Bain for over 30 years. Crazy, right?

Rob Markey 3:21
Yeah, I forgot to leave.

Kara Goldin 3:23
Yeah. Did Did you know, I mean, did you think that you would be there that long? No way.

Rob Markey 3:30
No way. No way. I, you know, I came to Bain right out of business school. And like, probably, you know, 99% of the people who go to consulting firms or AI banks or whatever, I was pretty, pretty convinced that I would be at Bain for an 1824 months. I was pretty convinced by them. They would figure out that I was a big fake and fire me. And then I go get a real job and a real company. And I just had a lot of fun. I had, I enjoyed it so much. It was hard. And long hours, but I just kept looking every couple years, I’d say you know Am I do I do I like and trust the people I’m working with? Yes, I’m including my clients? Do I feel like I am doing things that are making a big impact in the world? Yes. Do I feel like I’m learning so fast that I can have more impact in the future? Yes. So for me, that equation has been kind of really good the whole way through. I’m still learning today.

Kara Goldin 4:38
That’s awesome. Well, I think that the great thing about doing consulting too, although I’ve never done it, but I’ve talked to many friends who have is that you have lots of access to a lot of different companies and the ability to kind of see what’s going on and how people think about things. So I think it’s a it’s an incredible experience and it’s it’s Unique but exciting to hear about somebody being in a company for for that long. So it’s, it must be they must be doing something right.

Rob Markey 5:09
Well, I think carrots also it would be funny if a guy who devoted his entire career to loyalty was job hopping.

Kara Goldin 5:18
That’s a good point. Right? Yeah, no, I think that i think that that is that’s super. Yeah, very, very relevant point. Absolutely. So when did you really? I mean, I don’t know that you like woke up and said, I want to focus on customers now. Right? I mean, it wasn’t you. It just sort of came along your journey, right?

Rob Markey 5:40
Well, it was kind of like it, I inherited it or something. My I was thinking about this not too long ago, I was like, Why? Why did I get it? How did I actually get into this? My grandfather started a meat company in the, you know, probably the, the 30s. When he during the Depression, wow, it was a handcart when he was a kid. And it turned into a business. And you know, until the day he died, he ran this meat company. And it was a supplier to restaurants and hotels and stuff like that. And I worked for him during the summer and saw how he interacted with his customers how he when he when he was short on, on, you know, certain products like a steak type or something, how he would allocate what he had based on the relationships that he had with the different restaurants, or how he would let one restaurant, you know, be a little late on their payments, but another restaurant, he would always make pay in cash upfront before you did the delivery. And just talking to him about the business and how he thought about the long term relationships he had with the restaurant owners. And the chef’s was sort of foundational. And then it just so happened that my first job after college was a company where the company had kind of invented its market it was it’s called LexisNexis. And

Kara Goldin 7:10
I remember LexusNexus,

Rob Markey 7:11
it’s this is back in the 80s. Before there anybody knew what the internet would become.

Kara Goldin 7:19
I’m married to a lawyer. So that was the only that was the pre Google, as I say, that’s how we got information on companies.

Rob Markey 7:25
Oh, that’s right. No, before there was a Google, in fact, the the whole archive of the New York Times was search lonely on Nexus. But what was interesting was that shortly before I arrived there, they had done a big technology upgrade. And they viewed themselves as a technology company. I think these days, you would you talk about them as a publisher, or, you know, media, they didn’t think of it that back then it was all technology. And so they done this big technology upgrade to make the search ability like to make it more efficient and faster, and so on. But they had applied a technology that was used for searches that only happened infrequently, it came from the IRS. And the nature of LexisNexis is that the same data gets searched for by lots of people at the same time because of breaking news or because of the release of a new Supreme Court decision. And just technology wise, all of the data was going over the same wires at the same time, melted, physically melted part of the circuit boards, and put them out of service for a while giving their competitor, its first real opening into the market. And so that then led to several years of market share loss. And what the the real story underneath this is that we were owned by a paper company that was growing at, you know, 3% a year with the economy. We were growing at 15 or 20% a year. And even though we were losing market share hand over fist, the senior leaders of our division were, you know, making big bonuses and getting rewarded. Because they were growing like there was no, I was like, wow, is this possible? You’re actually giving up you’ve taken a bunch of highly loyal customers made them disloyal. It kind of ruined your market and you’re getting big bonuses. And so it just kind of opened me up that when I when I was in business school, and I read this article by a guy named Fred reichheld, about the importance of customer retention, and its its financial impact. I was like, Yes, yeah, that’s what I saw. And so I decided I wanted to go work with them and I got lucky enough to I get to work with Fred from day one at Bain, and never looked back. I just have loved every minute of that.

Kara Goldin 10:07
That’s amazing. Why don’t you explain net promoter score for those listening that have not been all that familiar with it.

Rob Markey 10:16
So Net Promoter Score, or NPS is something that we developed as a way of gauging customer loyalty. And it’s just a very, it’s like the simplest possible way to get a gauge on whether a customer is likely to stay longer, buy more, and tell their friends and maybe even be lower cost to serve. While we, it actually is just what this one question how likely are you to recommend, say, hint, to a friend or a relative or a colleague, that gets scored on a zero to 10 scale. The people who give nines and 10s tend to be promoters, people who buy more, stay longer tell their friends, people who give zero to six tend to be what we call detractors, they usually aren’t very happy, they are not super loyal. And then the people who are sevens and eights are kind of interesting, because they are perfectly satisfied, we call them passively satisfied. They’re they’re happy with the product, they’re happy with the service, but they’re not going to go out of their way to buy it if something else is available at lower cost, or they’re not going to drive to three stores if the first store is out of it. And they’re certainly not going to put their own personal reputation at risk. And so the net promoter score is the percent of respondents who give you a nine or 10 minus the percent of give you a zero to six. And that score tends to be good indicator of the loyalty of a customer base.

Kara Goldin 11:55
So interesting. And so so who was like the competitor that’s out there to a net promoter? I don’t know that anyone’s really doing it in the same way. I think you guys just really own it.

Rob Markey 12:08
That’s it’s so interesting to hear you say that, because I kind of lived through this thing where, you know, we, the early versions of net promoter, like the pre pre Net Promoter things we were doing, we would ask customers a whole battery of questions. And we would create a regression model. And we would figure out which questions were you know, contributed what to the likelihood that a customer would buy more, stay longer tell their friends, the lifetime value prediction? And we could get more and more precise, the more questions we asked. And so back at the beginning, when we first introduced it, the idea was based on this observation, that Andy Taylor, the the guy from the founding family of enterprise rent a car had, which was, the more complex you make these metrics for frontline employees and the rest of the organization, the less likely the organization is to act on that customer feedback. And so his his perspective was, why don’t you just go for radical simplicity, make it really easy. It’s going to be a little less precise, but it’s going to be a lot more impactful. And so building on their experience, we decided to look for this, you know, what’s the one question that you could ask, that would get close enough to the high predictive power, but really be inspirational to an organization. And so what NPS replaced back then was two things it was replaced these complicated loyalty, batteries or indexes. And it also replaced the sort of very simple customer satisfaction, or cset. And the reason it was it more impactful than C sad or customer satisfaction is because ours was built not on the just like, Are people satisfied or not, it was built on the idea of some customers become more valuable, they have a higher lifetime value. And if we could figure out how to identify those, then that would be good. And that was that’s why we chose to do it that way. So we were identifying the top end of our scale, the nines and 10s tend to be behave very differently than say, five out of five on customer satisfaction. Because there’s a big difference between being satisfied with something and being enthusiastic or being an advocate

Kara Goldin 14:39
of it. Totally agree and somebody that’s going to actually go out and advocate for your product and share their story and all of those components. Absolutely. So do you think you have to have a direct relationship with the customer, whether it’s DTC or your store or I mean, obviously, you work with Somebody like a JetBlue? I guess I mean, that is direct to consumer that there’s selling tickets in that way. But if you’re not actually selling products directly,

Rob Markey 15:12
you’re probably it make sure I’m answering the right question you’re really talking about if you’re selling through distribution, like if you’re selling through, if you’re selling insurance through insurance agents, or you’re selling consumer products, through distribution through distributors, or through stores.

Kara Goldin 15:29
Yeah, like, for example, like as an example, as it relates to hint, I mean, we have over 50% of our business is direct to consumer. But my question is, when somebody is calling our, you know, customer service line, and it doesn’t happen often, or emailing, it doesn’t happen, often with an issue, our biggest complaints calm when we’re actually selling through the experience the consumers having is through a store, right, that we actually like, you know, the product is too high up on the shelf, or, and it typically isn’t actually about the water that they

Rob Markey 16:09
have. They don’t have the the flavor in stock, right? I want. Yeah.

Kara Goldin 16:13
And what I learned in launching my own company was that it’s interesting, like the consumer will write to us about a retailer not having the flavor of our product, or they’ll write to us about, maybe the price is different than another store down the street. And they think we’re actually controlling that. And I’ve always thought that that was fascinating. Like, why why is that, but getting back to the whole NPS score, they’ll associate it with the brand, they won’t actually associate it with, you know, the distribution point.

Rob Markey 16:53
Well, they actually care they may or may not. I mean, it’s, it’s actually possible that they do associate it with the store, but you gave them an opportunity to give you feedback. And yeah, they’re gonna guide you. Yeah, the truth is, you do have some influence over that, even if you don’t control it. And whether you like it or not, customers interpret things, the way they’re going to interpret them their experiences through their lens. And no matter what, you know, it’s not fair, that you that they hold hynt accountable for dirty shelves, or for stock that is dusty, because the store clerks aren’t keeping it clean. That’s not your fault. It’s not fair that it be reflect on your brand. But that’s how customers behave. And so your question, the question becomes, Well, okay, what can I do to influence that because it impacts my brand, should I not sell to that retailer, if they’re consistently the source of end consumer complaints, should I do something to earn more of a right to influence that that retailer, and then try and find a way to make it easier for them to present my product in a way that is more favorable for the consumer, in a lot of the work that we do with products that are intermediated, or sold through distribution or stores, we spent a lot of energy thinking about the relationship between the brand and the channel, the channel, and the consumer, or the consumer in the channel. And the consumer and the brand is sort of triangle. And it just turns out that in most of those businesses, if that the channel partner, the distributor, say the store, likes your brand, and finds you easy to work with and finds that you help their business, you get more shelf space, you get better presentation, you get more attention, they put you, you know, all good things, and your share of your category tends to go up. Similarly, if the end consumers have good, good experience with the store, or the distributor, that usually reflects pretty well on your brand. And then finally, if the consumers really like your brand, then that usually is a good thing for your relationship with the distributor. So it’s it’s a, you know, this complex web of relationships and interactions that you need to measure and manage as relationships, not statistics.

Kara Goldin 19:31
Yeah, unfortunately, in certain cases where shelf space is bought, and every single category, it’s not always about the customer, you know, loving what you do, but instead what I think what happens is that they’ll go to a different store, right? Or they’ll go and they’ll go find what they’re looking for. But I think it’s it’s such an interesting piece. You know,

Rob Markey 19:55
it’s interesting to think about some models, some business models, were The brand chooses not to go through certain stores, even though that gives up significant market share, simply because of that type of situation. And I’ll give you two examples. One from a long time ago, because I, I did a lot of work around this. It used to be, I don’t know if it’s still true, but that brands like Levi’s and Nike, were very careful about which retailers they would sell through, because they did not want to be discounted. And they didn’t want to be it used to be that some of your, your, your younger listeners aren’t going to recognize this used to be these things called circulars that came out on Thursdays and Sundays in the newspaper, and people would cut out all the the coupons and they would look at for the big sales for the weekend. And Levi’s, or Nike or whomever didn’t want to be the lead, you know, discounted brand, because they were trying to maintain their premium. So they would, they would refuse to sell through certain retailers, if they ended up in those situations. Another example is Vanguard, the mutual fund company. They refuse to pay for distribution, full stop. Now, what that means is that the same financial advisors out in the marketplace, do not have a sales incentive to place Vanguard mutual funds in the portfolio’s of the investors. And that’s a huge disadvantage. Because every other mutual fund company by and large, offers a fee for the initial sale in vendors, like No, we are not doing that period. And you would think what boy that would really hobble your chances of growing in the marketplace, that would be terrible. And Vanguard is now the biggest mutual fund company in the US. So go figure.

Kara Goldin 22:07
So interesting.

Rob Markey 22:09
It, it is a function of thinking through I mean, they’re actually one of the great loyalty leading companies, they have a great value proposition, they have a business model, it’s designed perfectly to deliver that. And they are super consistent in everything about their business to deliver amazing experiences to customers at low cost, with really good performance of the underlying product, the mutual funds.

Kara Goldin 22:38
So interesting. But then you have categories like the airline industry, I remember, I don’t know if you if American Airlines still does this, but they don’t. I know at one point they weren’t participating with certain search engines. And and I think most of them now are part of a search engine because it’s what customers do. I think it’s really looking at your industry and category and testing it and figuring out what is the answer?

Rob Markey 23:02
I think maybe a better example would be Southwest who for the longest time and I don’t know if this is true, still but certain. I don’t know all the details of how how airline tickets are sold. But there are certain platforms, technology platforms, distribution platforms in the travel industry that Southwest refused to be a part of. Yeah, simply because it wasn’t consistent with their business model. Yeah. And here is another example very much like vanguard of a company that grew very big, very effectively and very profitably by bucking the industry trends and and not bowing to the power of the distribution channels, which is real. Yeah, it’s it’s a strategic choice. That’s a perfect example of a really consistent customer strategy at work. Costco. Costco is another example of a great company with tremendous discipline. They have, you know, they stayed on strategy, they stayed in their their sort of area, and they consistently invest in better and better products at lower and lower prices for their customers, and they pay their associates top dollar for those kinds of positions. They give them health insurance, they do things that, you know, the

Kara Goldin 24:25
other large ones don’t other

Rob Markey 24:26
ones do not do and still they make more money. So,

Kara Goldin 24:31
so interesting. So the net promoter score, so is do you have to be a certain size to actually really appreciate it and and do you have to have so many people participating in order for it to be valid?

Rob Markey 24:47
Well, I think when we first introduced it, we thought a lot about NPS as a score. And the primary way that we used it was to look we did, we did market research, double blind And so you had to have a big customer base for us to find your customers in the pop the consumer population. And we were really looking at, you know, what’s the score of hint versus I don’t even know who your competitors are, but versus the the other drinks that are available? And what’s the relative Net Promoter Score among the different competitors in that market? And then what are their relative growth rates? What kind of price realization do they get? How much do customers really how much share of their wallet Are you getting, and so on. Over time, the net promoter score became far less important at Bain and with our clients, then what we call the Net Promoter system. And the Net Promoter system takes that score that is, I’m talking about the kind of external research not conducted by you, but by like a third party research firm, and actually brings it inside. And it forms what I think of is a dialogue between the company and its customers. And so the system can be implemented by anybody, because you don’t it does. It’s not dependent on statistics. And those analytics, it can be enhanced by that. But the basic principle is get feedback from your customers real time. Look at each individual piece of feedback as it comes in, and then treat it like a relationship customer gives you feedback that merits follow up or some kind of dialogue, call him up, talk to him. So customer gives you feedback and says in the way that works, it’s like, how likely are you to recommend zero to 10? Why? What could we do better? Three questions. If they give you a really low score, that’s, that’s an indication that the relationship is at risk. If they give you a modest or even a high score, but they write all kinds of nasty things in the open ended comments, relationship at risk, call them find out what’s going on. Apologize, empathize, listen, you can do that if you are a tiny little small business, or you can do it at scale. If you are the largest of large businesses. Another thing you could learn from a customer, they have an open an unresolved issue. Like they’re waiting to hear from you on something where they they tried to do something and it just didn’t work on your website. Oh, okay. That’s another reason to call him up and say, Hey, let me help you figure that out. And then the final reason to call somebody up and talk to him is they basically write you a book, they might, they might give you a 10. But they have all these in I’m thinking about, like, if it was him, you know, I might have all these things like, Hey, I really think that your bottles are there, they’re too thick, the plastics too thick. And I think the environment would be better if you made thinner walled bottles. And I actually have an idea about that. And don’t you know, there’s this kumquat flavor that I’ve always wanted to have, and can’t you do kumquat or whatever? For I know, Carrie, you have kumquat. But see, there’s an idea. Yeah, there you go. But, but but you want to talk to those people, because what they’re telling you when they write you that book is, I love your brand, I want you to do better. I want to be heard because I personally identify with you. And so it would be it would almost be irresponsible not to follow up and let them talk to you more to hear what they have to say.

Kara Goldin 28:32
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, because something that you’re that you’re talking about, I mean, Steve Jobs used to say, you know, don’t expect the customer to actually answer the question, right, but they’ll give you information, they’ll give you the story, they’ll give you sort of the issues. So there are some customers who drink a lot of hint. And we would have those phone calls or those emails that went back and forth. And the response was I go through a lot of bottles. And so our response was actually not what we were hearing from consumers. But it but was solving their problem was we created a larger size bottle. And so that actually came out this year, a one liter bottle. And then we also heard from customers that so often they’re giving their little kids hint, and that they wouldn’t finish the bottle. And so

Rob Markey 29:28
they have a smaller size, the

Kara Goldin 29:31
smaller size, but when we what we did was, you know, we looked at the market, we looked at juice boxes, and we said that the format kind of works for little kids and versus a bottle and they’re you know, we’re not going to try and get kids off of sugar and try and change what they’re used to. Right that that’s like a difficult problem. And so instead what we did was we borrowed Equity from that industry. And we, yeah, so we have hit

Rob Markey 30:07
boxes really good x, this really, really good example of something that illustrates one of the benefits of the way that we treat the Net Promoter system. And that is that we always say you have to ask less to learn more. And what I mean by that is that most companies, when they want to do research, and they want to learn about what their customers want, they kind of get into this mode of saying, well, I want to know about this, can we add a question on this? What about that? Can we ask them about that? Wouldn’t they like a better better? What you did is, you listened to them deeply you you develop empathy for them, and you understood what the underlying need was? Yeah. And then you thought about a lot of different ways of solving that need, and you came up with the one that work best for your brand. You don’t do that with multiple choice questions. You don’t do that by just surveying people. You do it by observing and listening and thinking and understanding.

Kara Goldin 31:06
Yeah, I totally agree. And it’s, it’s something that you and I talk a lot about curiosity and curiosity. Curiosity, I think is what makes the best

entrepreneurs, you know,

but it’s also I don’t I’ve been, I’ve always been curious, right? I always sit there. And for me Actually, getting that customer feedback. I never rely. I And to your point, I will have people on the team that say, okay, we want to get the answer to this question. Let’s ask this. And I said, you know, don’t be looking for the customer to actually solve your problem. Tell them, ask them what the problem is. Right? And hopefully, we’ll get a lot of problems, because that’ll just make the puzzle even more interesting. And we’ll we’ll be saying, Well, what if we did it this way? Right? And we’re not going to say, why don’t we do it this way. And before we actually even watch it, you know, what I always share is like, let’s, let’s test it, let’s just do it. We don’t announce that we’re doing it. We just go and do it. We put it we found a retailer to bring in him kits. And we watch. And we literally went into stores and watched people turn the package around, they saw the hidden brand, and turn it around and see, Wait, is this the same as the juice box? Or is this the same, but it was not what consumers actually said they wanted from us.

Rob Markey 32:37
I think that’s the that that’s the other thing that I love, hearing you say is that you went and you observed. Too many people think that they can do these things from the comfort of their desk, or a conference room. Or that it’s going to come to them in a report from some market research firm or their marketing department. Or that it is something that they can do through the the one way mirror of a focus room focus group room. And none of that is is true very often 99% of the time, infield direct observation and querying with curiosity reveals the things that that other companies don’t see. And that spark ideas for you about how to meet fundamental customer needs in a way that no one else is doing. And that’s how you earn loyalty. That’s how you become remarkable. That’s how you create promoters out of your customers who then sell your product for you.

Kara Goldin 33:39
I love that that is so great. So for businesses that are growing and increasing their customer base as they grow, how do you determine what you should be looking for in your customer base?

Rob Markey 33:54
and talk a little bit more about what you mean?

Kara Goldin 33:56
You’ve got an audience they’ve come in. And you know, you’re trying to figure I guess you’re trying to figure out, are they repeat customers? But I mean, do you treat those loyal customers different? Then? I’ve got an opinion on it. But do you treat them differently than the new customers? Or do you just care about getting more and more customers in?

Right as they’re

Rob Markey 34:25
all there? Yeah, I mean, I’m a big believer that you should never have a better deal for non customers or new customers than you have for your existing with with I guess I should say, not never, with very rare exception, you know, you can you can incent trial. But what you don’t want to do is have essentially an incentive that attracts that what we call the butterflies instead of the barnacles meaning the people who are price shoppers or deal shoppers And you should never do something where your existing customers feel like they’re not getting the best deal. Like they’re they’re, they’re being treated like second class relative to the newcomers. That can be hard when you’re trying to grow a business and you want to inset trial, and you want to figure out how to get to new populations. But you alluded to this, when you said, you know, how do you think about which customers to listen to, and which ones to go after. And we do a lot of thinking about, it was something I always call the sweet spot customer, that’s the customer who falls at the intersection of, you know, they have a need that I know how to solve really well. They have a propensity to buy what I have to sell, they have a wallet, for my category, my products that is big enough to be worth going after. And my ways of delivering my ways of manufacturing my way my supply chain, my service delivery is tuned to reaching them effectively and efficiently. Those are the those are the the sort of core of the core of the core of your customer base. And then what you’d want to do is say, Well, okay, let’s suppose that I know who that is. And I’ve got a persona and it looks very much like Kara gold. Well, now, what are the other adjacent closely adjacent populations of customer types, who share an overlapping set of those characteristics? Maybe not all, but an overlapping set, and what small changes to my business model what I need to make in order to really hit a homerun with them. So I think, you know, it’s like, focus on narrowly on that sweet spot, in order to gain the deep end during advocacy, loyalty of that, that tight population, and then use that to build out small little tendrils of adjacent customers that then can grow into a bigger, a bigger movement. So let’s say that, you know, Kara, is health conscious, and very much, very thoughtful about the amount of sugar that she consumes, and she gets a lot of exercise and so on. And there’s a mindset that goes with that. There may be another adjacent set of customers, who kind of like that they’re more health aspirational, they don’t get as much exercise as they want. Maybe they have small kids, like you’re just talking about, maybe they tend to live in urban centers instead of in in suburbs, I don’t know. Well, they share some of the characteristics with that, that persona, that Kara golden persona, and then they have other ones. And so for example, your idea of doing the, the juice box style delivery of, of hint, that may be a great way to tap into that adjacent population, because now you’re satisfying the needs of their kids while you’re also satisfying their needs.

Kara Goldin 38:17
Totally. No, I love that. That’s awesome. So one other? Well, two things. First of all, where do people find out more about Net Promoter? Because I’d love to know, for those of you who have not seen it, I mean, do you have to be a client of vain to actually be in Net Promoter or tell me a little bit more?

Rob Markey 38:40
No. So you know, there’s a whole variety of resources available at Net Promoter system.com, that’s probably the easiest place to find everything. If you can’t, if you can’t remember that, you can go to Rob markey.com, that’s easier. And there are links to everything there. But But Net Promoter system.com or bane.com will give you a just a treasure trove of resources on the fundamentals of the net promoter score, the Net Promoter system, loyal customer loyalty, economics, customer experience, design, you know, all that kind of all that kind of stuff that that you have to do in order to earn the enduring loyalty of your customers. I love it. And if you’re really serious, and you want to join, like the NPS loyalty forum, or you want to become a part of, you know, there, we, you’ll find resources there, but there’s a variety of ways to get much deeper if you’re really interested.

Kara Goldin 39:36
I love it. And then also, I think that the other thing that is just incredible, your story of you know, when you’re working in a large organization and you find something that you’re really passionate about creating a role that you love doing, I think more and more. It is I hear it happening. And I think it’s definitely possible. And so if you’re sitting inside your company, and maybe you’re bored and, you know, go figure out how to go learn, right and go take on something that is is new and write out that business,

Rob Markey 40:14
if you want to hear the stories of other people who have done that, yeah, the Net Promoter system podcast, the podcast that you’re a guest on Yeah, is a is actually a great place to hear about people who, who are like minded who really want to get into doing things, great things for customers, and many of them coming from different disciplines, you know, sales or operations or even finance and, and kind of finding their way into this world of customer loyalty in big companies and making making that place for themselves and making themselves valuable to the shareholders in the firm.

Kara Goldin 40:55
I love it. I absolutely love it. So you mentioned Rob Markey comm you can go Where else can people find you?

Rob Markey 41:05
I hang out on occasionally on Twitter. It’s RG Marquis, and you can find me on LinkedIn if you want to find a way to connect somehow I love it. And I

Kara Goldin 41:19
loved your article too on are you undervaluing your customers and, and Harvard Business Review. So from I think it was last year or

Rob Markey 41:29
is about a year ago, it was January, February, Harvard Business Review right article is the it’s my latest passion, it’s the thing that I am spending a lot more time on now the Net Promoter actually is, you know, finding ways to measure and manage a company through the lens of the value of its customer base, as opposed to just the p&l or the functional budget or the you know, the product.

Kara Goldin 41:55
I love it.

It was it’s a great article for those of you who are interested more and hearing from Rob and that that is a rap with Rob we loved it loved just hearing so much about it. And Net Promoter is just this awesome, incredible thing, but also just a very, you know, entrepreneurial venture with inside of a, you know, incredible company, Bane and more than anything, I just I love the backstory and I love that you know you’re doing what you’re doing and really focusing on customers every day. So thank you so much for joining us. And thanks, everybody, for coming on and joining us and we’re here every Monday and Wednesday with all kinds of amazing guests for you to learn from. So thanks everyone. Talk to you soon. before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book calm and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight? send me a tweet at Kara golden and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara golden thanks for listening