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[Music] [Applause] welcome to the SBI podcast offering CEOs sales and marketing leaders ideas to make the [Music] number welcome SBI podcast listeners and video podcast viewers my name is Greg Alexander and I am the CEO of SBI a sales and marketing consulting company dedicated to helping you make your number this is the weekly SBI podcast and its purpose is to help you make your number by getting your peers to share with you how they make theirs today's guest is John Meyers who is the CEO of Renta kill initial one of the largest business services companies in the world with 60,000 employees across 60 countries John is responsible for the $500 million North American pest control and interior landscaping business John welcome to the show thank you Greg great to be here okay today we're going to ask John to help his peers set their companies up for success by discussing how to develop and execute a revenue growth strategy we're going to use a section of sbi's Revenue growth methodology to guide our conversation specifically step two corporate strategy which can be found on pages 51 to 70 if you're following along at home if you've yet to download a copy of this methodology you can find it at salesbenchmarkindex.com sl26 report okay let's jump into it I'm going to lay some Foundation here for us and I want John my first question to you is if you could explain to the audience why does your company exist what is your mission and how was this determined a great question and a lot of people don't even think about talking about mission statements as part of their strategy they think it's sort of old-fashioned maybe like poster material and on the other hand we we think it's very important and our mission is protecting people and enhancing lives and we do this um delivery by providing pest control services and interior landscaping and a new business we've just launched called brand Ste auditing to over 500,000 customers using uh about 4,000 highly trained professionals that are spread throughout all of North America okay so the third business is what again brand standard auditing so uh simply put is we help customers ensure that what they think is going on in their operations everything from fast food restaurants to grocery stores to the like to confirm what they think is going on in their operations from a food safety and a workplace um safety standpoint as well as the type of customer service that they provide is really going on very cool I didn't know you guys were in that business and I can see just got in it yeah makes logical sense for you for sure all right so we understand the mission okay let's move to the vision now so what is the vision for your business and and how was it developed what do you want company to become yeah it's the old uh is it you just want to be the biggest and you know although we've grown by 300% in the past seven years it's never really just been about the biggest uh instead our Focus has been uh about this concept of the right people doing the right things in the right way and our view is if we get that Focus right and work on the three constituents that are served by that which we call colleagues so that's what we call our employees but if we get our constituents focused right related to colleagues and customers and shareholders really good things happen yeah great right people right things the right way okay exactly very simple to to understand so let's take that concept and let's think about your sales team for a moment and let's have a conversation around values specifically how do you want your team to behave so if that is your vision right people right things right way how do you make sure that when your sales team engages with customers the customers experience that you know great question because um if it's if it's just going to be poster material once again uh it's not going to get uh adopted and it's never going to resonate at the customer level um so as part of our right people right things right way Focus uh We've identified a set of promises and so we have a colleague promise and we have a customer promise and we have a shareholder promise and I know this concept of promises maybe uh considered a little bit old-fashioned but we really like the idea the thought that we step up and we make promises to these three constituents about what we believe in and what we will do and you you probably note that we identified the colleague promise in front of the customer promise and we did that on purpose I mean I know it's a little bit controversial maybe the customer's King and therefore why wouldn't you have the customer promise in front of the colleague promise but we've determined that um if we get the right colleagues or the right people doing the right things in the right way guess what the customary delivery is really well uh understood and and and hence delivered and so in our promises we make a set of promises everything from safety a matter of fact the first promise we make throughout the group is safety so promises to our colleagues promises to our customers and also the shareholders about safety uh we also talk about the transparency of communications and so honest and upfront about things uh we talk about respect so we have a very clear set of uh company values that our sales teams use to explain our value proposition and that we believe drives the way that they interact with their customers yeah I love it I love the term promises in fact later on in the show I'm going to ask you about your brand promise but let's save that for the next segment what I love about the word promise is nobody wants to break a promise right so if I'm an employee and you communicate my leader my CEO communicates a promise I'm I'm going to buy in because I don't want to be that guy or that girl who breaks that promise it's a great concept I think you're I think you're absolutely right right okay we're going to take a short break and when we come back John and I will discuss brand development financial objectives and Market selection and this bolts on the back of Mission Vision and values as part of our Revenue growth methodology so stick around after the break you are watching SBI TV this is a monthly web TV show featuring guests just like you Executives trying to grow their reeven revenues each month you can peek behind the scenes and watch your peers discuss their strategies for how they make their numbers you are not going to want to miss [Music] this welcome back my name is Greg Alex and I'm the CEO of SBI and my guest today is John Meers who is the CEO of Renta kill initial today we are discussing the development execution of a revenue growth strategy and we're using sbi's Revenue growth methodology to do it Pages 51 to 70 in this year's report if you're keeping up at the office before the break John shared with us how how he laid the foundation for growth by clearly determining the company's Mission its vision and its values the way that he wants his colleagues to uh behave when in front of customers and with each other as John mentioned some might view that as oldfashioned I'm not one of those people I think you cannot grow Revenue without those three things in place this segment we're going to come maybe from 30,000 feet to 10,000 feet and we're going to hear from John how he develops the rentokill brand how he determines Financial objectives and how he determines which markets to compete in and most importantly which ones to avoid and why so John what is your brand promise that you make to your customers how did you develop it and really why should I believe it the last part's a really good one isn't it um our brand promise is tied to three principles uh the words we use and our service relationship and teamwork and the definitions we use really kind of uh pull this together to make it real and uh something that's believable so service um we Define is we are passionate about delivering excellent customer service to every customer um and I'll just take a moment or two to explain what that means in our world first of all if you're not passionate about doing this go do it somewhere do something somewhere else um and the other part is uh we you know we said excellent customer service to every customer but we also believe in charging a premium price for that and there's lots of models out there where it's low cost and low price and it usually means low service and we think that's a really good model in certain industries um we happen to be on the other end we think that uh what our customers want is ex excellent customer service and the value proposition would support a premium price the second area that we talk about is relationships and we our definition is that we value productive and longlasting relationships with our colleagues and customers so our efforts of course are to retain our customers and have these longlasting relationships but you'll note that in the definition I said colleagues first customers second and once again you know that can be considered a little controversial but the because we're in the service industry we believe if we get the colleag k thing right then the customer service delivery is is right and we'll have those long lasting relationships and then the last piece uh teamwork is really a recognition that these are complicated businesses to run because we're in a decentralized um structure spread throughout North America so we have to work together to deliver great results and one of the things we use to try to describe that as a as a a visual is uh a set of gears and the sales folks are out there attempting to sell new business but once sold that's just one turn of the gear if you will and the other gears are tied to whether we work well together at all levels to deliver what the sales reps have sold so that's how we we get it going out there in the field so I will tell you my reaction to that is I do believe you brand promise because you're able to articulate it and it's getting validated every day how so well you you said you're going to deliver excellent customer service not good but excellent and in order to do that you have to charge a premium because those things cost money if your customers didn't pay you the premium then your brand promise is not believable but they're paying it to you which means your brand promise is believable and and I'm taking the time to explain that because those that are listening or wa or watching challenge yourself with that you know what is your brand promise can you articulate and are you backing it up is it being validated or is it just talk which is which is really um encouraging to hear John's comments on this there's a great lead into my next question which is around Financial objectives so if you have this goal of delivering excellent customer service and you're prioritizing your colleagues ahead of your customers because you are in the people business happy engage employees equals happy engage customers you know and you're in a decentralized environment probably with decentralized uh pnls and general managers running businesses it's complicated so how do you determine the financial objectives that the company must meet what are the non-negotiables yeah that's another great question so it really starts with a bit of a culture and first of all I'll describe us as we're definitely scoreboard company um meaning we we measure our results constantly try to improve our results and um and that's that's sort of who we are and um each year we identify the strategies for the next three years so we have a rolling three-year um strategic plan that we uh work towards and um and and then we identify the initiatives to support those strategies um and then these outputs then drive what we call a Bottoms Up budget for the coming year and I think it's worth pointing out that we start with the strategy first and let the budget be the output rather than the output is the strategy in other words I've been in companies where we've said all right we um you know we grew by 4% in revenue and 6% in profit so next year why don't we why don't we try to do five and eight and then you stand around and you try to come up with the strategies that are going to allow you to accomplish that well I think that's really backwards I think you start with the strategies first and you then determine what the outputs would be in the uh on the budget side and if you do that by the way it's have a much more supportable message when you say hey I expect you to grow 10% of Revenue and I expect the profits to grow by 20 yeah I agree and you know and when you're having these negotiations on budgets which can be dysfunctional right um you know being able to explain to somebody who you're giving a Target to how the number was C calculated and how it was a derivative of the strategy um can be a very powerful thing exactly when you're when you're determining so this three-year rolling strategy which I love another oldfashioned thing that you're doing but but a great thing I mean these days people can't look past three weeks let alone three years um when you're doing this Central to that is determining which markets you're going to compete in and which ones you're not going to participate in and why so tell the audience a little bit about Market SEL ction as part of that three-year rolling strategy process you know it's interesting uh our the segments we operate in uh the three businesses I described um we're in a very unique situation I think we have pretty much unlmited growth potential um due uh to the size of the markets and our relatively uh low market share uh even though you know in Pest Control we're number three in the country uh interior Landscaping were number one brand standards were number one but because it's a very uh decentralized business we've got unlimited uh UPS upside so what we decided to do is use uh an old school approach um called the quadrant approach to drive our efforts and we've kind of rebranded them to make them fit this new world but we have quadrants called the emerging quadrant the growth quadrant what we call Protect and enhance and manage for value and they help us to shape the strategies that we focus on so kind of give you a bit of an example if we were in an emerging market so that's a market that we would Define where it's a big Market that's growing and we have low market share we'll be uh our strategies will will be to invest sales reps and marketing because our whole goal to grow there has to be new customer uh attraction right and in a protect and enhanced Market where which we Define is we've got relatively High market share and the Market's not growing we don't want to invest in sales reps because the ability to get new customers is really limited but our investments might be in upgrading the level of service that we're able to provide because our growth might be driven strictly off of uh customer retention also could be based on pricing so as you upgrade your service levels you can charge a little bit more so we use the quadrant approach to drive our strategies love it I really do in that example that you gave us um and tying it back to sales on in the emerging growth when it's about new customer acquisition that warrants a sales investment in contrast in the protect business not that that business is not important to you it's very important to you it's probably a source of cash flow it's about holding on to those customers making sure they have a great experience so that they continue to buy from you so great example you know for those that are listening that are not CEOs like John here's what I would tell you to do walk into your CEO's office and say what's the three-year strategy and and hopefully your CEO can give you an answer as crisply uh as John just did and maybe he has his own tool that uses John uses the four quadrant approach which is great your company might use something else but you've got to understand your CEO strategy before you can build your sales strategy and at what we're talking about today your Revenue growth strategy okay we're gonna take right yep excellent okay we're gonna take a quick short break here and um when we return we're going to focus on how to name and defeat your competitors and how to develop sustained competitive advantages so come back after the break we're going to continue the [Music] dialogue [Music] do you have too many things to do and not enough time to do them is finding time to learn best practices almost impossible the SBI podcast is your solution turn time spent exercising commuting and traveling into productive learning time with a subscription to the SBI podcast SBI podcast listeners get unique insight into real world sales and marketing issues through interviews with your industry peers every week find us on iTunes by searching for sales Benchmark index podcast And subscribe today welcome back my name is Greg Alexander and I'm the CEO of SBI my guest today is John Myers the CEO of Renta kill initial today we are discussing how to develop and execute a revenue growth plan during this segment we're going to hear from John how to develop a comp competitive strategy and how to develop sustainable competitive Advantage I really want to emphasize the word here sustainable many of the business models that have been sustainable for years are rapidly deteriorating in our eyes for example if you're a product company you used to have a 5-year product cycle product life cycle maybe now you only have a one-year product life cycle and so it goes so sustainable is the key word here and sustainable competitive Advantage so John let me bring you back the conversation here so how do you define the competition in each of these markets that you compete in well first of all uh we uh start first by identifying the segments that we want to operate in and then we identify the competitors that operate in those specific segments and um I'll just a a plug for SBI um so we had this this concept swirling around in our head but when we took uh brought in SBI they helped us to identify segments that were profitable uh segments that uh we uh had longer uh tenure with when we got them a c as a customer rather than saying hey all segments are equally the same so we started off with that little bit of a differentiation about where do we want to play and then we just focus on those competitors that play in those segments right okay and in your business uh is it safe to assume that it's a mature business so therefore there's a relatively speaking a small number of customers and therefore identifying I'm sorry a small number of competitors excuse me and therefore identifying who the competitors is easy or is that not true especially as you expand into these emerging growth markets yeah it's It's Tricky actually um so each segment so let's just say in healthc care is a very very different segment from fast food restaurants and I'm just using pest control as an example both U of those segments require the service but they have very different demands and um the one thing that you're always challenged with when you're running sales department or if you're running the business is you have a limited amount of capital uh either Financial or human capital and so you've got to apply it uh in a very uh specific way and we've tried it the other way where we're going to try to do it across I don't know 28 segments Health Care fast food restaurants Office Buildings you name it and what we found was you just get such a weak effort because you're you're so spread so thin and um so I think what you do is you find the segments you're more likely to win in uh and then you you take your limited resources and you focus some more clearly on those yep okay fantastic so in terms of competition so you've done that okay so you went from trying to compete in 28 to competing in a smaller number and and through that analysis is how the competitors revealed themselves to you yeah and um by the way we um we learn a lot about the competitors from our customers and uh we have a really simple saying around here if your competitors you're talking to your customers more often than you are bad things are going to happen Okay period so we try to stay close to our customers at multiple levels so that they can tell us what's going on within their own business but also the value propositions they're hearing from our competition yep excellent so let's talk about that so you're talking to your customers which is great and you want to talk to them more than your competitors which I love that phrase um so they're they're coming at you okay with an offense which means you've got to play defense right um and get your offense back on the field so how do how do you develop your defense well I mean two thing there's nothing like not winning uh on a proposition so your value proposition isn't chosen to really understand uh whether what you have uh is is working for a customer and so when we don't win we probably win learn more than when we do win I know that sounds crazy because you know sometimes you you know it's funny um when we analyze our our results uh we don't analyze the positive variances at the same rate and fer ferocious uh nature as um when we lose um and the same thing happens here when we don't win we look really hard at why we didn't win and then we adjust the offering ingly so it's a sort of a offense defense response probably but yeah um one response to another well I think the big learning there for our audience is we learn more from our failures than we do our successes I mean that's yes that's true in all walks of life and making sure that you are humble enough that when you don't win you take the time to understand why and then pour that information back into your strategy you know that allow ows me that process you just subscribe to me allows me to uh consolidate a couple of questions that I had notated here that I was going to ask you down to my last one which is is this issue of um false differentiation yeah so sometimes we cook up these value propositions and these positioning statements you know how we're different versus the bad guys you know in our own laboratory and then we take it out into the market we think we're Superior based on XYZ we realize we not um how do you as the leader of the organization make sure that you know you don't read your own press clippings and you stay true to real differentiation yeah it's it's funny I think two words come to mind right away the word humble that you used earlier really good we think humility probably keeps you straight um the other word is paranoia um we're all always worried someone is out there trying to outsmart us that has figured out a different way to do what we do um and and I don't mean price I mean you know um just a better way so we're always trying to figure out what they're doing what the customer wants and we're you know we're humble enough to know hey there's folks out there that are pretty darn smart so we should stay close to them yeah very good you know if you're thinking about differentiation audience members and you're wondering is it false or is it real here's some things to think about so first is is you can't have uneconomic differentiation so what do I mean you think you're different for example in John's case they're gonna you're going to supply he's going to supply excellent service not good service so therefore he's charging a premium well if the customers don't pay the premium then you have uneconomic differentiation you're lying to yourself you may think it's superior but it's not so Superior that somebody's willing to pay your premium for it another form of false differentiation is unsustainable differentiation so maybe you have a lead for 6 months or a year and then next thing you wake up and your lead you know the competitors have caught up to you or maybe even have surpassed you so is it unsustainable differentiation you know I think it was Warren Buffett that once said you want to put a mo around your business so that it's you know if you try to cross the moat you you might get eaten by the dragon so these These are the types of things to think about as it thinks about differentiation okay we're going to take one last break when we come back John and I will discuss what to do next if you are focused on developing and executing a revenue growth strategy so the takeaway value is right after the break stick around we'll be right back making your number is hard your problems are complex complex problems need complex Solutions introducing the SBI magazine read in-depth stories written by award-winning journalists about how your peers have overcome their problems to make the numbers when you need more than a tweet social post or blog article turn to the SBI magazine go to salesbenchmarkindex.com to [Music] subscribe welcome back everyone all right John we're on the home stretch this is our last segment here um I would like to conclude our time together today with some practical advice of which you've already given us lots of um so let me ask you one final question that will allow you to summarize your thoughts so here it is if you were hired by a company tomorrow as their CEO and you were tasked by the board with getting a company who is not growing the top line to start growing again what would you do first second and third all right well it's pretty probably pretty basic stuff but I would start uh with clearly understanding the product or service is it truly needed by the marketplace and you know just because companies are in business today doesn't mean that the market hasn't passed them by and I do that through observation uh you can't do that in the in an office so you got to get in front of customers got to see your product or service being pitched and uh and and accepted or turned down to really understand whether you've got something that's relevant to the marketplace so that' be the first one the second one uh relates to uh can your uh your organization up and down and but clearly the sales team and the service teams that are delivering can they um do they understand the value proposition that you're you're providing I mean can they articulate why a customer should do business with us can they articulate why a customer should continue to do business with us and once again I only think you can see that through observation and um it's amazing we think that our teams understand the value proposition but until you're out there listening to how they're explaining why a customer should buy or a customer should stay with us um you you just don't know and then the last one is um a bit of the mechanics of um of the business but you know you got to reconfirm that your goto Market strategy is still relevant to the market you're trying to serve and uh you know the simple example would be um you know someone recently asked me uh you know what's my fax machine number and I started laughing and I I started laughing I said boy I don't know I'm I'm I'm not even sure we have a fax machine yeah and and and so you know if your if your goto Market strategy was developed during the you know invention of the fax machine I think your customers are have changed the way that they want to transact and if your if your goto Market strategy hasn't been uh adjusted since that time period I think you're at risk yeah so um this whole concept cep of you know making sure your your strategy is still relevant is a really important part so those are sort of the three top things that come to mind I I think there are three great things you know I'll tell you a funny story and and this is not understanding if you're relevant the other way so I'm in I'm in New York City and I'm in the back of a taxi cap and I get to my location and I go in my wallet and I pull out my dollar bills to pay and I hand the guy uh 22s and ask him for a change he can't give me change and I start yelling at him like a jerk and saying I can't believe you're a taxi capab guy and you can't give me change and he and he points to this credit card processing machine on the back of the plexiglass separating him and I and I it dawned on me that I was the person that was outdated at that point in time and these days the way you pay for a taxi cab is by swiping a credit card soly right yeah and another story about the fax machine there so that's interesting all right let me give you my two cents audience so if you're like most companies you think you have a well-developed revenue growth strategy but let me shoot you straight you don't most likely the corporate strategy is understood only by the senior executive team and the employee base is operating in silos using yesterday's Playbook on a daily basis what you really have is a series of tactics that you've been relying on for years that no longer work very well unfortunately this causes companies to miss their number too often because the CEO strategy does not get translated into product strategy a marketing strategy and a sales strategy that drive growth we call this strategic misalignment and it's plaguing many companies hopefully John's example today will help you get started in the right direction and you won't suffer from this and you'll move away from tax masquerading as a strategy and you'll develop a real Revenue growth strategy and put real effort around things like why do we exist I.E what's my mission what do we want to be when we grow up I.E what's my vision how do we want to be behave I.E what what are our values and making sure through observation which John mentioned several times which I want to reinforce is you're out in the field and you're seeing do your customers understand your value proposition if the answer is no that's probably because your service personnel and your sales Personnel aren't articulating it well and it's your job as a CEO and an executive to drive that through the organization so here are a couple of resources for you if you want to get to work on this so first I would tell you to get a copy of this year's research report if you haven't already it's titled how to make your number in 2016 you can get it at sales Benchmark index.com sl26 hyen report and this is what we used today so if today's was valuable to you and you want to do it more systematically get the report if after you get the report and you're going through it and you need some help and you think it might be beneficial to have an expert from our company take you through a workshop to help you determine these things and help you figure out how to upgrade your Revenue growth strategy go to salesbenchmarkindex.com 2016 workshop and we'll send somebody out to see you John on behalf of my audience uh you made a big contribution to our field today so I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time being on the show my pleasure really enjoyed it and a big thank you to our audience I appreciate the attention you give me every week I know you're busy the show is now listened to by over 100,000 people so squeezing me into your busy day is much appreciate I view it as a privilege and uh hopefully by having highquality guests like we had today you'll continue to stay with us so I'll conclude by wishing you you much success as you try and make your number this has been the SBI podcast for more information on SBI Services case studies the SBI team and how we work or to subscribe to our other offerings please visit us at salesbenchmarkindex.com [Applause]