IAM999- Author Helps Clients Find, Win, and Keep More Business

Mark Boundy has grown businesses in a variety of industries for 25 years, amassing wide-ranging experience in sales, marketing, new product development, and product management. He helps his clients find, win, and keep more business—more profitably. He’s led firms to be value – and price–leaders in a wide variety of product and service industries.

Mark wrote “Radical Value. Elevate Your Company – and Career – By Unleashing the Power Within Customer Centricity. Boundy Consulting, LLC. helps its clients find, win, and keep more business…more effectively and more profitably.

• CEO Hack: Focus of a mountain biker
• CEO Nugget: Understand what's the most important and drives towards that
• CEO Defined: Choosing the right direction as chosen by your customers

Website: http://boundyconsulting.com/

Book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Value-Company-Customer-Centricity-ebook/dp/B08527K4ZG

Full Interview:

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00:15 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:42 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Mark Bounty of Bounty Consulting. Mark, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:52 – Mark Boundy

Gresh, it's great to be here.

00:53 – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on as well. It's definitely great to have you on. Before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Mark so you hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Mark has grown businesses in a variety of industries for 25 years amassing wide-ranging experience in sales, marketing, new product development, and product management. He helps his clients find, win, and keep more business more profitably. He's led firms to be value and price leaders in a variety of product and service industries. Mark wrote radical value and elevated your company and career by unleashing the power of customer centricity. Bounty Consulting LLC helps its clients find, win, and keep more business more effectively and more profitably. Mark, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:42 – Mark Boundy

I'd love to. I'm

01:45 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here, a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:54 – Mark Boundy

Well, kind of as my bio indicated, I've had a bunch of different roles. I didn't grow up in sales, didn't grow up in marketing, didn't grow up in product management. I grew up in a little bit of each of those. So I got a little bit bigger picture than a lot of people do coming up. And I also got to work in a bunch of different companies in a bunch of different industries. I got lucky to have been laid off in one, like during the telecom bust when you couldn't get back into telecom. I had to go to a completely different industry and that happened a couple of times.

So I've been blessed to be cursed by not being able to go back into the same industry or the same job. And that gave me some perspective that a lot of people don't get coming up. And I also, my first big-boy job was with a company that was relentless about understanding customer value. In all my travel since then, I've seen that the failure is really not understanding and selling to the customer value the way this first company did. So radical value, my book and my practice around that is all about helping people become better at understanding customer value.

03:10 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I absolutely appreciate that. And I almost say, you know, so many times we forget why we do the things that we do. And it's often to serve the clients and the customers and provide that value. And I love how you have had that experience because I think so many times, especially in larger organizations, but even sometimes within smaller organizations, you don't realize how the things that you do kind of help that help to serve the customers. So I love that you have that experience and of course, are able to kind of provide that value and help people understand that value.

03:40 – Mark Boundy

Yeah, you know, we talk about it and we kind of know it, but we don't really dive into detail. Think about it. The purpose of your company, whether you're a profit or a non-profit, the purpose of your company is to produce more value for customers than it costs you to deliver. So if that is the purpose of your company, If that's the central mission, let's look at all the metrics you track. Look at the dashboards. Do you know what outcomes your customers are achieving?

Do your salespeople? I can tell you, that I was a sales performance consultant for the world's oldest, largest, and most successful sales training company. Based on the background of hundreds of thousands of individual opportunity reviews, your salespeople who are the ones tasked with knowing this don't. So, McKinsey found that more than 75% of directors on your board don't understand the outcomes your customer achieves from delivering with you. So you don't understand it, you don't track it in your metrics, maybe there's a problem there.

04:50 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. So that's why I love, you know, that you, you know, work with clients and of course, you know, being able to write that phenomenal book because I think it puts everything, kind of in alignment and, and kind of maybe, clears up that North Star that we all should be looking at to understand why we're doing what we're doing and making sure it's all in alignment. So could you drill down a little bit more so we can hear a little bit more about your book and also how you work with your clients and what that looks like?

05:14 – Mark Boundy

Well, because it's about having those value uncovering, value delivering conversations with your customer, most of the calories, most of my energy, most of the consulting fees, most of the training is around having conversations. So it sounds and feels and looks a little bit like sales training. But I think that everybody who touches the customer should know about the outcomes your product or service delivers. So rather than sales training, it's everybody who engages. So that's a lot of people. So therefore that's going to be a lot of the work. But also that means all of your content, your product training, your lead generation, your pricing, and your value-based pricing should also be oriented to value. And you can't really do that well until you've got those people to be really good at talking about value with your customers.

06:09 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's absolutely, Hija. I appreciate you for talking about that. And of course, writing about that as well too, because I almost feel like, and I've had a, you know, I've had sales jobs where you always hear between sales and marketing, it's always like, well, you should give us better leads and then we need more leads. And it's always a back-and-forth and never feels like it's fully aligned. So it definitely sounds like you have that for lack of a better term, maybe a holistic approach to how each of those, I guess rungs kind of work in alignment to help out the customer.

06:38 – Mark Boundy

Yeah, that's great, thank you for saying that. That's a huge compliment. I thought I've got this holistic view And I tried not to put that word in the book, but people have come back to me saying, Mark, this is a holistic view of business. This is the business theory of everything. You know, think about it. We all kind of know that you wanna be customer-focused, But there's something about that customer that's really the most important. You don't wanna know everything about your customer. You wanna know what the customer value is.

So value is that magic kernel within customer focus that you really were looking for. Being customer-focused is fuzzy, hard to measure, and hard to do. But understanding customer value is something that you can do. You can have those conversations. You can measure it. You can measure it with your prices. So it's the clarifying kernel within that fuzzy customer focus that you are always really looking for. That fuzzy picture comes into sharp focus when you say, no, it's about value, not just about the customer.

07:47 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that's absolutely huge. Cause I think it makes it a lot more tangible and makes it more of a target that, you know, you can get the whole team and the organization behind when you can understand this is exactly what the value is. This is how we might be able to quantify it or this is what it looks like. And I think it helps to, of course, be able to try to reach those goals, but also some measure performance in relation to those goals I imagined too.

08:09 – Mark Boundy

Yeah, you know, a lot of people think they know value and it's fuzzy, but when I ask people to define it you get all kinds of different definitions. So I start the book, I start my work with clients by saying, here's the definition. Remember your customers do not buy your product. They don't buy your service. They don't buy your features or your benefits. They don't buy your people. If you're a salesperson and say, what does your customer buy? They buy me? No, they buy their own outcomes for their own reasons. So the value is how badly they want those outcomes. So do they know about those outcomes? Do they realize those outcomes? Do they realize how important those outcomes are?

Have they thought about the implications of those outcomes? So once you've got that definition right, value is the desirability of the outcomes. Now marketing can talk about outcomes and talk about educating people on outcomes. Salespeople can help individual salesbuyer personas understand how that outcome affects them personally and how much they want it. And when they tell you how much they want it, now you've got a really clear idea of what it's worth to them and how much they will pay for it. If you're a CEO and you have a sneaking suspicion that your salespeople are discounting too much, understand the value and you will know whether those discounts are needed or whether they are just a bandaid put on bad selling.

09:41 – Gresham Harkless

Let me ask you this, would you consider that to be what I call your secret sauce? The thing you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique. Is it that ability to kind of see the forest for the trees, so to speak, so that you can actually articulate that, not just for the clients, but for the people that are actually communicating on different levels?

09:59 – Mark Boundy

Yeah, The secret sauce is looking deep into that customer's mind and knowing that nothing happens until it's happened between your customer's ears. And then we measure our success from the customer's brain inward or from the customer's brain out and from the customer in. And so our metrics become not how many phone calls did our sales people make, but were good conversations about value. How much value did they create? That's harder to measure, but that's the right thing to measure.

There are famous quotes, the things that matter can't be measured and the things that are measured can't be, you know, don't matter or far easier to measure and get an approximate answer to the right, you know, the right question rather than the precise answer to the wrong question. The wrong question. And I want to help people slow down and understand what they're really trying to accomplish. And then let's put metrics in place to do that. Not the easy-to-measure crap that most of us measure.

11:02 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely appreciate that. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

11:13 – Mark Boundy

You know, Early in my career, I was taking problems home and thinking of problems and having arguments with the people in the meeting that I just had in my head. And I started mountain biking. And I almost wrote a book on the business wisdom of the mountain biker because mountain biking forces you to shut everything out but the problem in front of you right now. Because if you start thinking about all the different problems, you're gonna hit something and get yourself hurt possibly quite badly.

11:46 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely appreciate that. And so I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So that could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:59 – Mark Boundy

You wanna understand what's the most important and drive towards that. It seems like trite advice, but when you genuinely understand that everything happens, your entire success happens between your customer's ears. And I use this phrase over and over, you can't push a rope. Maybe that's my nugget. You can't push a rope. Your success happens only between your customers' ears and you can't push a rope.

12:28 – Gresham Harkless

So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Mark, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:38 – Mark Boundy

CEO isn't just about leadership and getting everybody moving in the right direction. The CEO is about choosing the right direction. And ironically, the right direction is chosen by your customers, not chosen by the brilliant, wise, all-knowing CEO. It's chosen by the humble, listening, curious CEO.

13:03 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's extremely powerful. And I love how that comes into the North Star analogy we've been talking about because I think when we're talking about the direction, we sometimes think that direction is because we think of X, Y, and Z, but it's largely because we understand what that value is and we're trying to be at that direction when we're trying to serve our clients.

13:21 – Mark Boundy

Yeah, you know, we always used to say before COVID hit, you know, the only constant in the world of business is change. And I think COVID basically told the world here, hold my beer, because change has become bigger and more rapid and it is not slowing down. We are not going back to normal. We're going back to the first normal, then to the second normal, then to the third normal. Normals are changing faster and more wildly than ever. And I think they're gonna continue to change. So you're thinking of a single-step change and adjusting your business to the next normal is the failure because the CEO can't keep up with the changes that we're going to see as fast as your people can because your people engage with the customers. And you need to have that. You need to change from being the CEO who is the all-seeing visionary to the all-listening.

14:18 – Gresham Harkless

That's extremely powerful and being able to kind of listen from so many different aspects, as you mentioned, clients, customers, the people that are on the team that are having those direct conversations, being able to kind of take that all in and truly being listening, truly listening to exactly what's to come from that and then coming up with a strategy from that. So definitely appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get a hold of you, get a copy of the book, and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

14:50 – Mark Boundy

Thanks, Gresham. My book is called Radical Value. So just Google radical value, Mark Boundy, and it's on Amazon, the big A, or wherever you buy your books, radical value, or you can get a hold of me at Mark at Boundy Consulting. Boundy is spelled almost like the paper towels, B-O-U-N-D-Y, consulting.com.

15:13 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Thank you so much again, Mark. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too to make it even easier to get a copy of the book. But truly appreciate you for providing so much value to us today and reminding us how important that is to be aware of that, especially during times that this can be turbulent and ever-changing. So appreciate you for all the awesome work you're doing. Appreciate your time again. And I hope you have a great rest of the day.

15:36 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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