Episode 12, Part 2 - Driving Business Growth Through Customer-Centric Leadership, with Charlotte Smith

of walk off. We go, right? That feels like a real challenge for those leaders in that space where the business is saying, let's go in this direction. This is great. We're gonna have a client centric approach to to the way that we win work, the way that we serve our clients. Great. By the time it lands on the desk of a junior person who's had their feet under the desk for less than five years. How does that translate?

deliver that? No one does that. No one sits there and blueprints that this is okay. This is the type of experience, competence and key traits that we are therefore going to interview to

ensure that we can deliver this strategy. It's it doesn't connect even right back before that, if I said to half of the leadership teams within the square mile of bank where my trilogy offices are based, have you and your sales leader sat down and mapped the target profile of the person that you want to hire into your team formally, again, minimal to None, right? So that's an easy thing that you could apply to your leadership team to go, Okay, we know what we want to

do. We know phase one of how we want to achieve that. Okay, how and who are we going to hire to deliver that? And what are our non negotiables around that? Because, again, within any sales professional, there is high turnover, right? Is that the fault of the person that got offered the job, or is that the fault of the business that didn't take the time to ensure that they were hiring the right people for the job?

they weren't good enough anyway. And then they point a finger at them, but we always say, Well, how many fingers are pointing back at you? And there's always the three that are pointing back at you, which is important to actually understand. It's probably the way that you've hired and Ill practice and focus. And that comes on to, like, the next question, really. And we're talking about the importance of leadership to

drive that sent, you know, custom centric approach. But when we think about that, and then wrapping around a cultural element towards it, you alluding to some of those practices and principles. I love the fact that you talk about the why, the what, the when, and you know, you were challenging a bit there, Matt about the how, and you've come up with some great frameworks. But from your experience, how do you sort of build the culture of a customer centric approach through the

leadership? Remember, that's the lens that we want to talk about. But how do you build that culture in an organization from your role?

type of communication and value proposition and question deck and coming away with the right outcomes from those meetings. I know that sounds very, very simple, but that is custom centric, because we're just ensuring that every time we touch a customer, we're doing it to the best of our ability. But the reason why I put a people spin on that is we're ensuring that we're showing and we're leading rather than telling so I think that's really, really key. So that's a very simple thing.

It's just always be there for those touch points, no matter how small, there is something that you can pick out on that. And I'm really blessed with a fantastic team at trilogy.

They're so hands on with their customers, so they're very involved, and as a result, are able to scale customers on a global setting, win whole programs of work, etc. I think in the recruitment sector, that's been another really fantastic change of mindset, which I've learned by being part of the leadership team at trilogy, which is we really

adopt. To our statement of work models. And the reason that has that kind of leader, customer centric approach is because we're not just going in and saying, Can we help you with a couple of program managers? We're going, let's own it together. Let's deliver this whole program together and actually, really go on that journey. We'll take some of the reporting away for you. So we've actually made the decision to hire some pMOS into our business whose skill set is completely

aligned to that and that. That is an exact example of being customer centric in our approach. There is something to gain from both parties, of course, but if you're dealing with the typical CTO, or if you're dealing with the typical director of change or digital transformation director, do they want to deal with multiple contingent agents, or do they want to actually invest in a mid weight so we're not a consultancy, we're not going to win your 30 million pound

projects because, quite frankly, you don't have them either. You just want to deliver a couple of key things we can partner on that there'll be more touch, there'll be more respect and responsibility in mutual spades. And as such, we win as a business, and we drive those numbers up by winning the whole project, and the customer is much happier as a result of it.

that's really binding around that customer center? I would imagine, in your illustrious career, you might have seen when it hasn't worked that well. What? But what's the feeling like in an organization when it doesn't work so well?

blame culture, finger pointing everyone correct. It's like that spider man meme that you see where they're all pointing and blaming each other. And then what happens is leadership panic. Then what happens is they start looking at KPIs. Then what happens is they start looking at working from home versus coming into the office, blaming the hiring, blaming the people, person, because I train them so if they're not all a grade consultants...

different for us. Come on now you know you're not, you're not driving each other forward, and then that actually doesn't mean if you're protecting or what you perceive to be the right way over another team in your business. You're not a succinct business, and I very much doubt you have a customer centric leadership team as a result of that.

of that in their own organizations. Something you said just previously, and I think that was particularly interesting, or that sort of jumps out for me, is how you've you what you're doing with your business, and how you're neighboring your business, is to take that KPI data focus and actually carry it into those client partnerships as well. You talk about having a PMO, and actually, let's get wrapped around the same metrics. So let's align your metrics with

our goals, so that everything is click. I mean, that's got to be the North Star of client centricity, right?

KPIs. KPIs means KPI. Management, leadership. Go, God, this bloody bird has joined our business, and she's making us look at all these data points we're losing what we were we weren't establishing....

and own it with any change methodology, right? You've kind of got those, those combative months where it's like, can't see it. Can't see it. Can't see it. What we really work together with as a leadership team, though, and we're a smaller business, right? So it is a bit easier for us to do. We're sort of between 6070, heads based across kind of three different locations. We're European, we're UK, we're us, so they're the

kind of cultural aspects with that to deal with as well. But we really, really shouted about the small stuff, because we we've got some people in our business that achieve incredible stuff, like I've never worked with a business that has got so many million pound dollar, Euro a year. Bill is right, and I think that's testament to the method. So when I dissected what was the trilogy, way it was customer centric. It was we work incredibly hard. We don't treat people as a client, and we don't

treat people as a candidate. We work incredibly hard to network with key figureheads in our market, so we stay in our lane. We're contract recruiters, the exception of the US, right with contract recruiters. We don't touch perm, so we have boundaries, and we won't go out of that. You know, we have customers that we work with that spend millions of pounds a year in Perm hiring. It could be so easy to go we'll do that. No, we are the contract recruiters. That's what people come to us

for. And as a result, we we, we deliver what we say we can deliver. And I think if you're sat here as a leader, putting together your strategy, and you think diversifying your offering with your current leadership team, because of course, you can hire in a great person that can help you branch off. But if you're trying to diversify your offering and your value to your customers, and you have no weight behind that, that's a not customer centric decision. That's greedy, you will fail.

Your customers won't enjoy that, and you'll lose what you were good at in the first place, right? So I've really enjoyed that, but I've had to demonstrate that. So yes, all of these incredible people that have been here since you were running it out of a shoe box, and I fully appreciate we now have a CRM and I'm showing you data and dashboards, and I'm sending around league charts, and you hate it, but now we're at a point where we're like, well, we've built the base level

funnel. We've got everybody really aligned to their markets. We've worked on the basics, and we've really pushed that, and I used key people in our business to help me support those messages. I found my business champions to help me with that. I took extra time to dissect the rationale, the reasoning and the why, so they knew where I was coming from. I then got them to do a bit of training with me to add weight. So I wasn't just

this person that joined the business. And they were like, Who's this Dizzy bird with the red lip telling us to do more pulls because it's gonna achieve this. And then now we're at the

end of funnel stuff. You know, we're really, we're really driving at the moment, you know, how many people were meeting, how many times it takes for you to meet somebody for you to then gain business, and then how we can work on ensuring that the level of business that we're bringing in is accurate to our wheelhouse, and do our talent pools match that, so we can deliver that with great speed to hire. Mic, drop.

about taking time, right? So taking time to win a deal, but also taking time to invoke change within the business is clearly something you've done to great success, and is starting to and taking those difficult personalities on the journey with you along the way as well. So on behalf of Johnny and I, Charlotte, thank you so much for joining us today. We've thoroughly enjoyed it. Fantastic insight, and to our listeners, I'm sure going to get a huge amount from this conversation. So thank you.