The Science Of Customer Connections
Jim Karrh is a PhD and he guides business professionals, teams and entire organizations to stand out through better messaging. It in turn produces better customer relationships, stronger brands, and more growth opportunities. Whether his clients need guidance in the form of speaking consulting or coaching, Jim offers a perspective rooted in his world-class experience and training.
As a consultant and coach, Jim has served clients on three continents, including associations, small businesses, high tech companies that are big into growth as they all are, and North America’s largest martial arts organizations, and a dozen members of the Fortune 500. He’s helped America’s oldest and continuously produced brands of bottled water to grow again. He’s a popular speaker at events that includes the CMO Summit and Packaging That Sells. He’s got a book that I can’t wait to dive in and ask him about, The Science of Customer Connections. Jim, welcome to the show.
It’s pleasure to be here. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation, especially because I know that your readers are all about how we can use messaging, stories, and conversations to sell stuff.
It’s all about that successful pitch. Before we get into your expertise on how we manage the message, let’s find out a little bit about your own story of origin. It’s one of my favorite places to start. Everyone thinks you had this linear growth path most likely. Typically, that is not the case I find from the guests I’ve had. You can go back as far as you want, your childhood, high school, college, wherever you want.
If linear means it’s full of 90-degree angles and 180 turns, to some degree, they are lines pieced together and for your readers as well. It’s been a combination of things, especially along my professional path. I hail from a little town in the Southern half of Georgia. My dad grew pine trees and my mother ran a dress shop off the Courthouse Square, Mayberry-esque in many ways. Professionally, early on, I was motivated by desire to be a media mogul. I always thought that would be cool to get into radio and TV, which got me interested in communication. In terms of work, I’ve had a business degree and an MBA from Duke University.
I did some work with small business for a while. I went back to get a PhD because I thought teaching and consulting are neat career path. Along the way, I get this combination. I’ve been a tenured marketing professor. I left that when a consulting client asked me to get a real job. I join him and his team as Chief Marketing Officer for a midsize private business. It’s getting some dirt under your fingernails. Take all the big concepts and see how you can market still for business that was stagnant. For the last little more than a decade, I’ve been working more on my own with field sales teams, leadership teams, and companies, helping them. I do that through consulting, speaking, and coaching work.
Let’s double click into your experience because I always love when speakers can show empathy for the audiences that they speak to because you’ve been in their shoes. For example, when I’m speaking to audience of salespeople, I sold advertising for over fifteen years and a multimillion-dollar mainframe computer back in the day. I understand pressures of quotas, deadlines, competitions and not taking rejection personally. You, as a former Chief Marketing Officer for a water company and know how challenging it is to balance marketing and sales, I’m sure there are a couple of stories there that you can share that gave you some expertise in your speaking and in the book.
Trying to balance marketing and sales sometimes is resolving the Hatfield–McCoy feud between marketing and sales to at least get the areas to work together. What I find is whether you’re on your own, you have a small business, or you’re operating in a big corporate environment, aligning marketing and sales to be able to have that better pitch or message, and accelerate sales is a big challenge for lots of reasons that I’m sure everyone’s familiar with. One of the things that I’ve found through these different experiences and a lot of it is working through with field salespeople, sales leaders, executive teams, subject matter experts, trying to orchestrate all of this together, is how to even think about marketing and sales in the way that it should work.
These are related areas. I’m a marketing person and I love my marketing people, but a lot of it is based on overall positioning, whether we talk about the brand or your reputation. It’s how you’re set in the marketplace, trying to get a sense of how you’re positioned against named competitors, against not doing anything at all, what you’re known for, and sometimes developing leads and opportunities for the sales team. For the selling part, I come into this a lot with messaging because messaging is such a broad term in terms of actual human conversations. Whether it be the sales team, the subject matter experts or other people inside or outside of your company, they talk about the business, the questions that they ask, specific stories that they share, the things that they talk about in human interaction.
When it’s good and done, those things fit together. There’s good positioning in the way that you’re knowing and establish your credibility, but oftentimes those things get lost. The message doesn’t seem to work its way into the everyday machinations. That’s part of what I work on there. It’s both the marketing piece of knowing where you fit, whom you serve, where the priority should be, but then there’s the how on the very specific conversation. If I’m meeting with a financial buyer or whatever that case may be, every conversation is not some scripted robotic thing. It has to be based in empathy and understanding of the buyer situation and the language that they would use for their problem. That’s the thing to try to manage, to orchestrate, and get very intentional.
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