You can hear Tiffani in person at our 80th Annual Convention by joining us in Houston. Register on our website. 



Ranked for the last six years in the Top 50 Business Thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, Tiffani Bova is a thought leader who Forbes says “reshapes our perception of growth.”

As both a practitioner and academic she offers a unique perspective and has helped lead the tech industry through several evolutions over her nearly 30-year career as Salesforce’s former Growth and Innovation Evangelist, and previously as a Research Fellow at Gartner and a sales, marketing and customer service executive for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. She is the author of two Wall Street Journal bestsellers: GrowthIQ and The Experience Mindset.

At The Futurum Group, she runs the research and strategy organization, while working closely with the entire leadership team to develop and scale its data and intelligence platform and insights for its clients. She also leads the team’s efforts within the technology and telecom channels, demonstrating the power and performance of connected go-to-market strategies and alliances.

While at Gartner, her forward-looking insights and guidance helped some of the largest technology companies in the world including Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, expand their market share and grow their revenues. She was a trusted advisor to multiple senior executives who were responsible for shifting from on-premise to as-a-service business models resulting in new billion-dollar divisions.

In the late 90s and early 2000s she was a pioneer of cloud computing, she previously led direct and indirect sales, marketing and customer service for two of the largest web-based start-ups in the US and spearheaded a newly formed division of a Fortune 500 company to $300 million in revenue over two and a half years.

 Tiffani has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Bloomberg, MSNBC-TV, Yahoo Finance, INC and Forbes. She is also the host of the podcast What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova. More info here: https://www.tiffanibova.com/

Tiffani will be a keynote speaker during SFNet’s 80^th Annual Convention as well as facilitator of the Crafting Tomorrow Workshop during the Convention.

In your book, Growth IQ, you discuss ten paths to growth.  Which of these do you believe is most critical for businesses to focus on in today’s market and how can leaders effectively implement to accelerate their company’s growth?

Bova:  Within the book I actually tried to answer this question in the following way: there’s a couple of things that started before you chose the growth paths.  One is context, meaning what is your market, who are your customers, what is the product? You need to answer that.  Second is this combination theory where, in that case, I say the one thing about growth is it’s never one thing.  It’s a combination of multiple paths, never just one.  And then the third thing is sequence, meaning the order in which you do those things has meaningful impact on its ability to be successful. 

I need to kind of set that up a little bit; there’s always a set of paths that I say are present – customer experience, which should be obvious. Two, customer-based penetration, meaning taking care of the customers you already have.  Don’t just always go chasing new customers.  Third, optimizing the way you sell.  And then, fourth, if you’re in a recurring-revenue business, such as a gym membership or a Netflix membership, you want to manage and reduce churn.  So those four to me are always in place.

The others are: do we want to enter new markets, do we want to launch new products, do we want to do partnerships? That is all interesting, but if those four things aren’t in place – a good customer experience, you’re taking care of the customers you have, you’re being better at the way that you sell, and if you have that rapport in business you’re reducing churn.  So to answer it, which of the paths do you believe is most critical, those four are always the most critical, 

If you chose to do one of the other six paths, I always say that those four are foundational, and then you can build upon it.  But if those things aren’t solid and right, it doesn’t matter what you do above it.  If your customers aren’t happy, if you can’t sell, if you’re churning too many customers, and you’re not taking care of your existing customers, it doesn’t matter how great your products are.

How can leaders of smaller organizations, who may not have vast resources, foster growth?

Bova:  I’m going to go back to that context comment.  Whether you’re small or large, you always want to be able to answer those questions:  who are my customers, why did they buy from me, why did not buy from me?  If you were trying to sell to somebody or you were trying to get them as a client and they chose another firm, reach out and say why didn’t you go with us, what was it?  They might say it was you didn’t follow up or the price was too high or I didn’t understand your value.  Those kinds of inputs are a great way for you to make those adjustments, and when you’re small, it’s even more impactful if you’re losing more than you’re winning. 

Doing that post-sales analysis of why you won, why you didn’t win, why customers are leaving, why they’re staying, that will help you define your competitive differentiation.  And a smaller firm needs to always know, I know why we win, I know why we lose, and I’m okay with why we lose because I’m not willing to do A, B, C.  I know why we win, so let’s just focus on why we win and let’s go win more of that, that kind of customer, that kind of opportunity.  Let’s go win where we know we can win.

What are some of the common pitfalls that hinder growth and what strategies could companies implement to overcome those challenges?

Bova:  It’s kind of  along the same theme, they don’t know why they’re not growing.  So a few things happen.  I categorize businesses in a few categories: I’m growing, I’m growing higher than market growth rate, like the industry is growing at 3 percent, and I’m growing at 8.  Great.  Next bucket is market’s growing at 3 and I’m growing at 3.  Great. Market’s growing at 3, I’m growing at 2 or 1 or zero or negative.  Those are very different starting points.

If you’re growing faster than market rate, you have different opportunities than if you’re growing at market rate or you’re not growing at all. And so, again, understanding that context where you’re starting from will allow you to make very different decisions.  If you’re growing above market rate, you have the ability to say let’s try new things.  If you’re growing at market rate, you could say, look, we’re not growing faster, we’re not growing slower, but we could be on the cusp of growing slower, and starting to get into a growth stall.  So we better start making decisions now.  And if you’re in a growth stall, unfortunately, the reality is it’s the realization of decisions you made about a year ago, four quarters ago, are now manifesting themselves.  It’s not like you made a decision this quarter and all of a sudden you’re growing negative.  That’s not what happens.

The common pitfall is they’re not asking the right questions all the time to identify the signals in their business, and so they think, wow, we’re growing, it’s just going to keep happening, or we’re not growing, so let’s cut costs and hunker down until we come out the other side instead of saying we’re not growing, this is actually when we need to invest.  Otherwise, we’re going to be on this slow burn until we’ve got no growth left. 

As a thought leader in sales transformation, what role do you think emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning will play in shaping the future of growth strategies and how can companies embrace these but still maintain that human feel?

Bova:  I am an advocate for human and tech.  Never human alone, never tech alone.  I am an advocate for both.  Technology never replaces jobs for all intent and purposes. Of course, there used to be an elevator operator, there’s no longer an elevator operator.  But for the most part, technology will replace tasks more than jobs.  Are there tasks as humans we no longer want to do because it’s just kind of redundant, mundane kind of stuff, like loading boxes?  Why not let a robot do that?  But if you’re going to say it’s creative, it requires critical thinking, those are the things you want the humans to focus on and let technology pick up those mundane repetitive tasks. 

Now, there’s a little gray line in there.  Some of those mundane tasks are necessary, so I think this all comes down to understanding where your people spend their time, what pieces and parts of that time could be automated, what pieces and parts of that time still require humans involved.  Like talking to a customer, let’s not have AI do that.  But if you can have a bot answer very quick questions on a website of like how do I do a return, do you need a human on the other side of that chat or could a bot go here’s the link to the return, have the bot do it.

But if you don’t know that 80 percent of your chats are about returns, then you can’t go create that bot.  You just keep putting people at it and thinking we’re getting a thousand inbound questions on our website, we need more people.  Well, hold on, if half of them are about returns, have the bot answer that.  If a quarter of them are about my credit card’s expired and I need to update it, have the bot answer that.  If 25 percent of them are where you have to actually talk to the customer, have that directed to the human.

I use the show Undercover Boss as a very non-threatening example because they go and talk to employees, they experience what it’s like.  They uncover the inefficiencies, the mundane tasks, the drain on profitability, the reasons they cannot keep employees.  At the end, they’re crying, and saying I didn’t know this was happening.  How do you not know this is happening?  Because you’re managing the business on an Excel spreadsheet in your four walls.  And so it’s that fear of being able to go out and manage by wandering around which is a Tom Peters-ism, not a Tiffani Bova-ism. 

The workshop at SFNet’s 80th Annual Convention in November that you’ll be facilitating will focus on hunting and farming best practices as well as product and market innovation.  Do you have a sneak peak or some perspective on these topics?

Bova:  Hunting and farming specifically goes back to that customer-base penetration strategy.  When you’re a smaller organization, the people responsible for generating revenue, i.e., salespeople, you might call them business development, whatever you call that role, if the same person is responsible for selling new and managing existing, that person will naturally focus on where they’re most comfortable, hunting or farming.  Some will say “I’m not so comfortable hunting.  I like nurturing and building upon a relationship versus going out there and being rejected 99 times in a day to find the one person who might want to talk to me.”  They will go where they are at their best, and so that means that one side of that coin is getting focused on; the other side is being ignored. 

There should be two people focused in this area.  You could have customer-success focus on nurturing and upselling and cross-selling, and have a true selling motion focus on attracting and closing net new customers.  At some point you’re going to get large enough where you go we have enough volume of customers or they’re large enough where we should have someone focused on them just to make sure they’re happy, they’re using everything they’ve bought from us, they’re getting value.  We know way ahead what they might want next from us.  We know way ahead when they’re unhappy and they might leave.  Someone is focused over there where someone else is trying to get new customers. 

But that deciding when to do that, separating roles, where and how does it work if you put them together, the kind of exercises we’ll talk about during the workshop.

Product and market innovation, that’s another path.  You have to get those four right, so I’ll talk about those four probably in the keynote.