Customer Access Challenges: Breaking Through Modern Executive Barriers

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome, everyone, to the C Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I'm Steve McDonald, your host, and today we've got a very special guest with John Laughlin. Now, John, you are the CTO or the CEO, I'm sorry, uh, of cti. And what we're going to talk about today, you're a very. I'm going to let you explain, uh, your company a bit more, but you have a solution for clients that is very technical, very product oriented. But my goodness, our conversation here today is going to be very culture based, very relationship based. Internally, externally, you have a focus on people and relationships that has grown your business for decades. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about you and the company and your philosophy. And then we're going to jump right in and we're going to talk about the ways that we can actually, we can take customer access challenges and we can break through things. Even with things that are going on today, like AI and other dynamics that are happening today that are really changing expectations, changing the way that we sell, changing the way that we operate. But there's some real fundamentals that we just can't forget, and that's what we're going to get into. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about you before we start.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, thank you. I appreciate it. Those are really kind words. Yeah. At CTI, we're really close to 40 years in the industry. Uh, we started out as a traditional audio visual firm, and over the years we've developed into a lot more than that. We still do traditional audio visual, but we're a very niche kind of organization. We work in the government, we work in the Fed space, we work with the Department of Justice. Uh, our, uh, broadcast systems are used in the NFL and collegiate sports. And we've just, we've turned into a company that just specializes in helping people in presentations and communications, building networks. And if video and audio live on that network and video audio are important from a quality or from a security point of view, people come to CTI to help solve those kind of problems. And that industry has grown so extraordinarily over the last 40 years. We've been very fortunate to be a part of that.

Speaker A: Well, one of the things that when you and I were talking before, you said, you know, before we talk product, we've got to win their attention, we've got to win their trust. I mean, getting access to the right executives these days is very difficult to do. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about Your philosophy and how you do that?

Speaker B: Um, well, it is very difficult. And I think one of the biggest challenges for us is the acquisition of a new customer, is finding the new customer that needs us, uh, and is a good gift for us as well. Somebody that we can not only execute at a high level for, but we can do it for many years and build teams that support them, those kind of things. Uh, and getting their attention is quite difficult. There is no question that in today's environment, everybody is fighting for the intent, their attention. And because so many companies, no, not necessarily our direct competitors, but just anybody in the world, so many people are barraging the decision makers, whether it be with emails or phone calls or direct marketing campaigns, they're just beat to death with nonsense that they don't need. So it makes it difficult for them to realize that, you know, sometimes there is a need to tattoo cti, uh, and, or allow us into your organization. And the reason they should allow us into the organization is because when we get there, we're coming to help our customers succeed, to be better, to be more profitable, to solve real solutions and real problems. We're not really there trying to sell things, not that that's not important too, but we come from just a different perspective and trying to get their attention and tell that story. It's challenging.

Speaker A: Well, so here's what happens these days. You know, the buyer is waiting longer and longer to want to talk to us, right? And they, they may be 70, 80% of the way through their buying journey when they actually want to talk to us. So our natural inclination is to start selling, right? We're finally in front of them. If they could only understand what we can do for them. But that short circuits something called trust, that short circuits the relationship. And what do you think about that? And I know you've got a big sales team and they're incredible technologists. They know the industry, they know the product, they know the technology. But what's your philosophy about how your sales team actually approaches the go to market?

Speaker B: Uh, you know, I think what you, it depends on how you get called into a potential opportunity. But when you're trying to create a new opportunity, you've got to be interested in that company. Why would they be interested in us, uh, if we don't demonstrate that we're interested in them? You need to learn something about the company. You need to know what they sell, uh, what their problems are, what their challenges are. If they're publicly traded, you can go read wide open documents to what they're working on those kind of things, you've got to be interested in them. And if you want them to trust us. Nobody ever trusted you in your first meeting. You have to earn that trust. And each individual gets to decide what their level of trust is or how they're going to choose. You know, the entry level person that walks in the door on their first day at cti. Uh, they don't trust me. I haven't done anything to earn it. And it's my responsibility to figure out what it takes during that trust. I think it's the same with the customers. So until you demonstrated that you actually care about them and you demonstrate that you want to be a trusted partner and you demonstrate that you're actually interested in the things they're doing and because of those kind of strategies, you're demonstrating that you plan to bring value to their organization and help them get better. I think all those things have to happen first before you can expect to sell them anything. And in fact, if you don't do all those things first, then sales cycle time will be so astronomically long that it's, that it's, you know, kind of guess, tasteful in its own right.

Speaker A: That's a really interesting point you just brought up at the end there. Right. Because we could think of relationship driven growth, which is kind of what we were talking about here as a softer sales approach. Right. Versus a more direct, hard hitting approach. What you just said is if we try to go for the close too early, basically we're going to take longer. It's going to take a lot more time, a lot more resources. The impression that, that we've made on them is not going to be the one that we want to make. We're thinking long term, we're thinking about them, we're thinking about growing their business. That's a very, um, a mentality that you could say that is going to take longer, but you just said it isn't. It actually is the shorter path.

Speaker B: Yeah. If you, if you think about trust this way. Right. I think trust is, is a huge factor in speed and efficiency. If you tell, if you have a couple of employees working for you that you don't really trust very well and you give them three or four tasks each when they're done, then you have to go follow up and make sure that they're actually done and check in on them and do those kind of things. But if you have, if you have a couple of staff members that you trust deeply and you give them three or four tests each, you never think about it again, you don't go check up one, you know it's complete. And that is incredibly. That is very efficient not to go follow people around. It's the same with our customers. When they talk to us about building an auditorium or broadcast suite for the NBA or mission critical space, it's monitoring the electrical grid. When they trust us and they tell us what they need to accomplish and they give us access to the decision makers and the influencers on their teams in their organization and they let us just go do what we need to do to get all of the information to engineer the system correctly, get the specifications correctly and figure out the logistics of how to get the work done. Uh, right. Some cities are union, some aren't union. Some, some cities are difficult to get to with trucks and some facilities are difficult. When they trust us enough just to let us go do our job, the speed and efficiency is dramatically faster and overall the project cost goes down because we're just faster and more efficient. And we believe in sharing those savings with our customers because we want to be trusted.

Speaker A: And that trust you had talked our previous conversation starts with your own internal culture. Right. And the opportunity that you've created at the company that you want to attract the right people that are going to stay here for the long haul.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: What's your thinking on that front?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a couple of things. We have a one page strategic plan that we teach constantly and we use that. I stole it from Von Harnish and he'll love the plug right there. He's a dear friend and one of my coaches. But um, we use that document to teach to. We're about 1500 employees now and we teach every employee that one page strategic plan and, and we use it as a strategy to allow them to go out and make decisions. Go make decisions, go do your job. There's not really any managers at cti. In fact, the word manager doesn't exist with maybe one exception, project manager in the field. And we're creating an environment where people who love this industry can come and can thrive and they can go do their job on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. And we're allowing them to go make decisions. And we have a communication strategy. So we communicate very quickly and very efficiently and go make mistakes. Make as many as you want. In fact, the person making all the decisions is the one making most mistakes. The person doing the most work is probably making the most mistakes. Go get things done and if you make a mistake, no big deal. Own up to it, learn from it fast Share what you learned so others don't do it. And let's just be a little quicker and a little bit more efficient, get a little bit faster than our uh, competitors. And at the end of the day that's been really good for us. On the trust side, that same one page strategic plan or some of the ways I teach it is one looking for effort, attitude and trust. We call it the EAT method. And in individuals that give effort, that's just a decision, right? I made a decision. You give a good effort, uh, or attitude, just a decision. I'm going to have a great attitude today. And trust, when you really look at it, is pretty much a decision as well. I've decided to trust this company. I've decided to trust this construction drawing set. I just decided to uh, trust my leadership and I'm going to go give my best effort today. And that system is what we're trying to deploy and we're trying to deploy it on a daily basis. Roll of your sleeves, one customer at a time, one project at a time. Just executed high level so that, so that our customers just keep dragging us with them. And it's worked really well for 40 years.

Speaker A: You know, it's interesting. When you and I first met, I asked you a question, I said, john, what do you think your two greatest challenges for creating long term sustainable growth? And I asked, I've asked that now of over a hundred C suite executives. I didn't ask it at the very beginning of this podcast, but I did about 120 executives ago. What's amazing, every single answer in the top 10 is in internal challenge. It is addressed first. Internally. There may be an external component, but first and foremost it's internal. Everything that you've been talking about here today is 100% within your control, right? It's how you operate your business, it's how you communicate inside of your business. It's how you create the culture inside of your business. It's how you decide to focus on trust and understanding your clients before anything else. How we used to live in a world go back 20, 30, 40 years ago and it was like just SWOT analysis, right? You know, and it was, it was all about our competition, what was happening out there and our, our threats and everything. And, but it's amazing, uh, when I ask C suite executives today, our greatest challenges for growth are ourselves. And it seems like you've just got a culture and a system and a company that people want to come, they want to be a part of, they're passionate about the industry. They're passionate about helping their clients and that seems the best way to optimize for revenue and growth. Am I getting that right?

Speaker B: Yeah, you're right on target. Uh, I think it's important to be a student of the industry and I think it's important to, you know, you got to know who your competitors are and where the best customers are at and what's going on. Like, I think it, I think it would be short sighted not to be a student and know those kind of things, but in a very short period of time, that's just not very relevant. What's actually relevant is how your team performs and how your people come together and how your people execute. And are, uh, your people, you know, carry a level of discipline? Are they in the right places at the right time, doing, doing the right things? Are they there with the right tools? Did they get the right education on their way to that environment? And are they equipped to win today? Right? Like, who got up in the morning and said, I don't want to win today? Like, I can't. It's funny. CTI that doesn't want to want to win. And as leaders and coaches, I think we have a responsibility to set people up for success. And if you stay really focused on setting people up for success and getting them in the right blanket, then they'll go out and take care of your customers. And if they take care of your customers, the competition is not really your biggest challenge. That's not where your issue lies.

Speaker A: You know, I, I don't know, but I can only imagine that when you're, you're pitching business that you're not the cheapest, you're not promising to be the quickest, the fastest, right. I was talking to a gentleman, he's a chief customer officer, and he had been talking to one of his clients. And that gentleman just put it out in rfp and he said, everybody, I mean everybody, they said that they checked every single box, right? And he said, the one thing that I wanted to know, the gentleman who was making the decision, he says, I just wanted to know what it was going to be like to work with them afterwards, what that experience was like, when things don't go right, when timelines get pressured, when they have to change the specs in the middle, right? How does your organization react? How do you roll with that? What kind of an experience is it like working with you? And how do you train for that? How do you prepare for that, to be that kind of organization that just we're going to be there, you can trust us, you can rely on us, and, uh, we're going to make the right decisions for you. We're going to help.

Speaker B: You know, it's a really good question. So one of the things we teach internally is to be incredibly flexible, right? The customers always write and be flexible, and they're human beings. And what we design and install is, can be quite complicated and mistakes do get made. And, you know, when you get a new customer for the first time, it can be a little bit challenging getting to know each other and figuring out how to dig through these things, because you still, you still have to build the trust that I've already kind of described in depth. But one of the things that I find about our very best customers is that they want us to be successful. They don't care if we make a profit. They want us to make a profit because they want us to be around for many, many years to take care of them. And if there's a mistake, they don't bludgeon us with the mistake. They stay involved in solving the mistake as quickly and efficiently as possible. And once you get. Once you find, you know, a book of business incentive customers that want you to be successful, and you combine that with the chess that I described, it just makes it easier to be faster and more efficient than your competition. And, you know, one of the things you said in this question and describing this question, you know, you guys aren't the cheapest. No, we're not. And. But we may be not the fastest. That's the one where I think we might be. And I'm not saying we're the fastest ones that ever lived. And I'm not saying there aren't things that can be done faster than us. But in general, uh, we've got systems in place that just make us a little bit faster and a little bit more efficient than most of our competitors. And we stay really focused on being a little faster and a little more efficient. Because when your projects in on time and on budget, which most of our customers want things to be on time and on budget, our sales consultants want things on time and on budget, the engineers and the project manager and everybody wants things on time and on budget. And when you get things on time and on budget, it's easier to propose the next project or engineer the next project because you start building really quality systems of how many hours does it take to do these kind of tasks and how fast can we get these things done, and what have we learned in the past? And we're pretty focused on that speed now, it's not to say that quality isn't mandatory. That's just table stakes. Your quality has to be fantastic. Things have to be done correctly, they have to be reliable. That's just mandatory. But if you can do it just a little bit faster, that allows you to keep your price down, that allows you to get more projects done in a year, that allows your people to get more projects done in a year. And next speed is where we spend a lot of our focus.

Speaker A: So it's interesting and I want to know if this is happening in your business. AI has done something that most clients in most industries expect, that they're going to get a higher quality output in shorter period of time. Uh, they're going to get more and they're going to get it faster. And that's. The bar has changed, the expectation has risen. Is that happening in your industry?

Speaker B: For sure, for sure. AI is making an impact, and I think it's at the very beginning stages of where it's ultimately going to go. But it's already making an impact at CTI. In the short term, it's not a 10, 20, 30% improvement across the board, anything like that. But the short term impacts that we're getting that are quite interesting and very helpful is we make less mistakes. Like you can just scour through an engineering document, or you can scour through quotes and engineering documents, and if you find a mistake, you can scour through hundreds and hundreds of them very, very rapidly to make sure that you don't duplicate those kind of things. It can help you order products the right time. One of the downsides to our industry in many industries is they just order products too early and they sit in warehouses. And, you know, technology is like a pile of strawberries, right? The strawberries are pretty valuable day one. But reclaimer, not so much. Technology is not that much different a month or two down the road. Now you gotta, uh, unbox it and upgrade the foam wiring. The warranties have gone downhill and new products being released. And you just gotta pay attention to these kind of details. And a high has really brought some tools in that have optimized us on those things. There were things we did well anyways, but now we're just a little faster and a little bit more efficient. And ultimately what my goal on, um, AI tools or optimization tools is that if we grow 20% a year for the, and I'm just making up numbers here, but if we grow 20% a year for the next five years, you know, normally you'd have to increase your staff by 20% or you know, a little bit less. Trying to optimize, but with AI tools I want to, I want to build the company the 20% but only increase personnel by 5% or 10%. And I want that additional savings that you're going to generate to go to our customers and our employees so that both thrive in this space. And uh, I think the AI tools are going to allow us to do those kind of things.

Speaker A: I was just watching an interview with the former Prime Minister of the UK and he was saying, I've been out, I've been talking to so many different CEOs. He said, here's what I'm hearing. Flat is the new up. So in other words, expect growth with the same amount of people is exactly what you were just saying there. But what's interesting is your perspective is to help turn that into how does that help our client, how does that help our employees? Because you know that's going to help the company, right? That's a good growth strategy for the company. How do the AI the change is coming in. How does it help reinforce your human relationship? First human connection importance strategy. As the CEO of the company, how

Speaker B: does AI reinforce that human relationship?

Speaker A: How can it help? How can I help?

Speaker B: So one of the, I mean this is at the simplistic level, but one of the cool things is you can learn using AI tools. You can learn so much about companies and competitors and what's going on in minutes, which used to take hours to, I don't know, Cyberstalk them on LinkedIn and Facebook and read all the documents and that kind of stuff. With some AI tools, you can have all of that information Islam together in 30 seconds and actually read it to you so you can learn more about what's going on in your customer base in a really quick and efficient level. You also can put, you know, depending on the physical size of the customer, they might have, um, you know, for us we're building spaces, uh, a lot of the time and they might have three types of spaces and they could have hundreds of rooms. Some of the customers have thousands. And you can upgrade those room layouts and those drawing layouts and those so much faster than just five years ago and learned 20 years ago was completely different. So those are things that I, in a one hour meeting with a customer, I can have most of those things done and back on their desk before I even leave the meeting. And taking those kind of, those are the kind of tools that make you valuable, just faster and more efficiently and sharing those with your customers. I think it just continues to build the trust that is the most important aspect is of the customer relationship, in my opinion.

Speaker A: So I wanted to make sure before, um, you end, you have a framework you call the EAT framework. And I wanted to ask you what that was and why, why it was important.

Speaker B: Effort, attitude and trust, we believe are the, you know, the three key ingredients in virtually every relationship. So whether it's the entry level technician that's just starting his career, a CTI or sales consultant that, you know, has huge customers and has been doing it for 30 years, we believe that you have to have ever attitude and trust amongst each other on a daily basis, an hourly basis, on a weekly basis. And any one day, if that breaks down, it's not the biggest deal. But if you can slang that together for years and decades and keep a group of people together long enough to do something meaningful, we think that's how you build long term success. And, um, our turnover is pretty low. Covid messed up just a little bit at one time, but without that, our turnover is pretty low in comparison to the rest of the industry. It's pretty good, right? We measure those kind of things. And our, um, acquisition of talent is pretty good. Some really talented people over the years that chose to come to CTI and, and that makes us better. And we create a culture where if you want to be the best and you want to thrive, you got to have fun too. But you fit into that effort, attitude and trust. Some other secret little sauces in the, in the system, you know, but we're trying to create a group of people that truly care about each other and truly care about the industry and they want to win on a daily basis. And when you keep that as a main part of your culture and tell people this is how it's going to work, CTI and I teach this course constantly. This is how it's going to work at cti. And if this is a good fit for you, welcome aboard. We're going to, we're going to love you very much. And if it's not a good fit for you, somebody's going to follow you around until you either jump into the culture or you leave. And we're okay with either one. Just do it fast.

Speaker A: Um, we've covered so much territory here that I wanted to ask a final question, and that was if there was one thing to take away from our entire conversation here today that you wanted, the C Suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast to take away, what's the most important thing

Speaker B: for me it's helping my people win. I want our sales consultants to win and make really good paychecks and do take care of their families. And I want our engineers to work on, um, really cool projects that, that they can go tell stories about. And project managers install techs, everybody in the system. I want them to come to CTI&M say, you know, uh, that company helped me win today. They set me up for success. They gave me a vision for the future. I trust these guys and sometimes people leave and always hurts my feelings just a little bit. And I understand that when you're growing throughout, if you start as a 22 year old kid, who knows where you're going to be, uh, at 35, 30. Right. But I just want people to realize at CGI that we're trying to help every single staff member win on a daily basis and trying to help them get what they want. And I just, I just think as leaders that we have a responsibility to take care of the individuals that are trust us to make those best decisions.

Speaker A: Well, I love it. John. The mission of this podcast is to bring C suite perspectives, insights, years of experience growing our businesses from all over the world together. And if we do it and we can all help each other, that's the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were an amazing part of that rising tide today. And I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for the time today and all of the wisdom.

Speaker B: I truly appreciate it. Thank you for the kind words and, and uh, yeah, I appreciate what you've done for me today. Thank you, sir.