From Passion to Profit: Turning Your Dreams into Revenue

In my conversation with a young lady from the beautiful city of Johannesburg in South Africa I explained to her that in my CX journey I have realised that “passion for CX cannot exist without passion for business”, which is what informed the title of this reading “from passion to profit” if our passion for CX doesn’t translate to profit and if we are unable to turn customer’s dreams into revenue for businesses then there’s truly no value for CX.

So how did this young lady turn her passion to profit because the path to profit is not always made clear. In my career of over 20 years in customer environments I have learned, designed and implemented winning strategies for a number of local and global brands. This article will provide the reader with a step-by-step model for turning your passion to profit, remember we are still on the journey of “Breaking the Mold with Mandisa”.

?Early January this year I was approached by a young lady who was visiting Cape Town on holiday with her family, they were staying in Stellenbosch which is surrounded by the vineyards of the Cape Winelands and the mountainous nature reserves of Simonsberg whose oak-shaded streets are lined with cafes, boutiques and art galleries. She was give my details by a woman who was part of the Women in Business Cohort sponsored by UVU Africa and Absa where I regularly facilitate training for women in business in the areas of customer experience and branding. She seemed rather frustrated as a result of poor planning of their holiday to Stellenbosch. She went on to explain how passionate she was about planning events and experiences for friends and family and how over the years she’s been able to see the need for end to end experience design. She shared how she has begun to be intentional about planning events and the accompanying experiences without any of her family members and friends knowing. She has been documenting every detail of the events pre and post, she has even went as far as requesting feedback from her friends and family in order to ensure that she does a better job with upcoming outings and events.

?In my conversation with her I asked how she would like me to help her and she indicated that she wants to position herself as not only an experience designer /creator for the black market but an educator about the importance of experience design. Why ‘experience designer/creator” rather than “event planner/organiser”, I asked, “Mandisa I’ve learned that people are not just looking for events, outings, gatherings, it is far more than that, deep down they are longing for experiences, they wants to experience the places they visit, they desire to leave with memorable experiences”, she responded, in addition she believed that she had collected enough information from the previous outings to design a proper product and she was quite confident there is a market for it. She was convinced that her ability to curate experiences and her current network of stakeholders which she had built over the years was enough to respond to the need for experiences and she was quite clear that there is a definite need for planning, creating, facilitating and overseeing the end to end planning of any event, gathering, outing etc.

?Here’s how we turned her passion into profit, using the 3 steps of building a CX strategy:

1. Preparing to design her customer’s experience
2. Mapping the experience
3. Designing the future state experience

Step 1: CX Vision

We began by seeking to understand from her how she wants her customers to feel in the course of doing business with her. What was the aspiration because this would determine everything else that follows.

?Step 2: Customer Personas

?We looked through all the information she had documented over the years to define her customer and come up with their persona. She has images, videos, voice notes and written notes of every conversation from planning to the end of the outing and post outings. This was enough for us to come up with a variety of personas for her product. We had a really comprehensive view of the customers she was to serve, from the videos we got to see how the customers engaged with the places and each other, we could hear their tones from the voice notes, we were able to glean such valuable insights from the images, videos, voice notes and her personal notes.

?Step 3: Research

We designed a set of questions to test her hypothesis, I encouraged her to host recorded focus groups, written surveys, electronic surveys via deployed via whatsapp and very casual one on one conversations.

Step 4: Stakeholder Mapping

We reviewed the stakeholder network she had been able to develop over the years, she had a list of all the various suppliers she had worked with over the years in organising the outings. We mapped each of the stakeholders, defined their role in this journey, what the customers would need from them, how she was currently communicating with them, where they were located, their services and prices.

?Step 5: Journey Mapping

Using the above information we began to map the entire end to end journey for each persona and measured their current experience against the business aspiration. We organised the key stages her customers go through, from becoming?aware of her right through to exiting or extending the relationship.

Step 6: Future state design

After we had mapped the experiences we had a couple of sessions where we developed further initiatives and identified opportunities in order to ensure that we stop, retire certain ideas and further develop new ones into a business case for action. Critical to this stage was the incorporation of the vision to ensure alignment and realisation.

Without her knowing we had basically gone through a three-phase approach to customer experience strategy.

We were able to incorporate the above insights into her business model and developed a comprehensive business plan for the ongoing operational management of the business. We mapped all the cost and revenue streams, channels, value proposition, customer segments using the insights from the personas, we documented all the key partners and suppliers based on the information from the stakeholder mapping exercise.?

Her passion for planning events and outings was now transformed into a brand “Amanda, Your Experience Creator”,?“TRANSFORMING EVENTS TO EXPERIENCES”

I am happy to share that Amanda has secured her first 2 big corporates outings where she has been asked to curate experiences for a team of business leaders for their 3 day quarterly strategy session.

Amanda has a proper onboarding process, checklists in place, a network of suppliers to bring the experiences to life from photographers, transport providers, graphic designers for branding the events, caterers, tour operators, guest house owners, hotels, security companies etc. Her role is to work with the team of suppliers to transform events to experiences, she also acts as an educator where she provides guidance to her customers based on her expertise and experiences.

This is one of the many success stories from the heart of the townships of South Africa. We are working with Amanda to design the brand website and create an online presence for the brand. My advice to Amanda was to use real customer images from the events for the website and social media in order to give the brand a distinct personality and to allow potential customers to experience the brand from real stories. Once the site is up and running including all the social media handles, we will share all the details to allow you to come along this journey as Amanda “transforms events to experiences”

On the topic of "breaking the mold", Amanda's brand did not follow the traditional route to starting a business, she sees herself more that just a business person, she is here to transform events and outings and she recognises that true transformation can only be achieved when you work with your customers.

Written by Mandisa Makubalo

CEO & Founder – Unlimited Experiences SA