Peter LePiane is the Founder of Idea Bridge, a consulting firm specializing in product transformation and customer experience enhancement across various industries. With over 25 years of experience, he integrates lean startup methodologies and change management to help clients, from mid-sized businesses to large multinational corporations. Peter's expertise extends to financial services, insurance, retail, telecommunications, consumer packaged goods, and fragrance manufacturing sectors. He is also a proponent of incorporating AI tools and data-driven strategies to refine customer insights and drive business growth.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:23] Peter LePiane discusses how Idea Bridge helps people
[4:04] Importance of considering the end customer in change management initiatives
[6:24] The lean startup techniques for rapid customer insights
[8:11] Tactics for obtaining customer feedback and integrating it into business solutions
[10:16] Peter talks about the risks of focusing solely on feedback from a limited customer base
[13:45] Balancing innovation with real customer needs for future success
[17:16] Innovative ways AI is used for persona analysis and customer feedback
[21:28] Change Management and adoption
In this episode…
In today's dynamic business landscape, meeting customer expectations while driving operational efficiency is crucial for sustainable growth. Striking a balance between addressing present consumer needs and laying the groundwork for future innovation is the hallmark of successful organizations. How can businesses navigate this intricate dance between current satisfaction and future readiness?
Peter LePiane, an experienced management consultant and a lean startup enthusiast, delves into the nuances of customer discovery and experience. He shares his insights on differentiating between direct clients and end customers, incorporating their needs into strategic planning. Peter emphasizes the importance of directly getting customers' feedback and using that to inform significant business decisions rather than relying solely on internal perceptions. He shares his methodology, which incorporates the lean startup philosophy to the application of AI in customer service and marketing.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Peter LePiane, Founder of Idea Bridge, about enhancing customer and product experiences. Peter discusses how Idea Bridge helps people, the importance of considering the end customer in change management initiatives, tactics for obtaining customer feedback and integrating it into business solutions, and balancing innovation with real customer needs for future success.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
"[Perspective Series] The Bold Leadership Blueprint With Amy Riley" on The Customer Wins
"[Perspective Series] Embracing Technology To Win in Real Estate With Lauren Schreyer-Merdinger" on The Customer Wins
"[Perspective Series] Exit to Excellence: Guide to Strategic Business Departures With Jerome Myers" on The Customer Wins
"[Perspective Series] Secrets to Winning at Golf and Life With Bobby Steiner" on The Customer Wins
"[Perspective Series] The Art of Wonder: Solving Problems Through Magic With Dan Trommater" on The Customer Wins
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank
Lean Change Management: Innovative Practices For Managing Organizational Change by Jason Little
The Real Startup Book: Find the Right Product for the Right Customers by Kromatic
Quotable Moments:
"There's great danger in the sample size of one."
"If there's no end customer, then it doesn't matter if I help them change to adapt this AI tool."
"If you talk to five people, you will find the major problems."
"At the end of the day, it's the customer that matters, doesn't matter what our opinion is."
"It's paramount that you think about both sides of that experience to be successful with it."
Action Steps:
Implement lean startup methodologies in your business: It streamlines the process of discovering and implementing what customers truly desire.
Foster direct customer feedback mechanisms: It provides authentic insights into customer needs and combats reliance on internal bias, which is crucial for a business’s success.
Utilize AI for customer discovery and market research: AI can enhance the accuracy and depth of customer persona analysis, improving target marketing strategies.
Validate business changes and strategy through well-designed experiments: This approach ensures adaptability and relevance to customer needs, reducing wasted resources on ineffective strategies.
Reinforce data-driven decision-making throughout your organization: Grounding business strategies in verified data can prevent misguided leadership and ensure true innovation.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Today is a special episode in my perspective series, and today's guest is Peter LePiane, founder of Idea Bridge. Some of my past guests have included Amy Riley of The Courage of a Leader, Lauren Schreyer-Merdinger of Contract2Close, Jerome Myers of Exodus, and Bobby Steiner of Bobby Steiner Golf Academy.
And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik!, using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started. Before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Dan Trommater, a prior guest, and the only magician I've had on this show. Go check out his website at dantrommater.com if you're looking for a transformational speaker who can bring magic to your audience.
All right, I'm really excited to talk to Peter LePiane, an accomplished management consultant with a track record of helping organizations transform how they validate and launch products and services. With a background in startups, incubators, venture capital and professional coaching, Peter spent the last two and a half decades refining his consulting toolbox serving a diverse range of clients, from mid-sized companies to large multinational corporations and industries including financial services, insurance, retail, telecommunications, consumer packaged goods and fragrance manufacturing. Well, that's an interesting one. Peter, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Peter LePiane 2:01
Rich. Thank you so much for having me here.
Richard Walker 2:04
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you, get your perspective. For those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. Peter, let's understand your business a little better. How does your company help people?
Peter LePiane 2:23
Yeah, what an interesting question. And I love the fact that it's people in general. So there are, really, if I'm to group it, kind of two types of people. I suppose that I help. So one is my direct client. And my direct client typically has a customer-facing problem. So that could be some kind of experience with a product that's in market. It could be something that they want to bring to market that is customer-facing. So, that's a type of person that I help very directly, but I really think a lot of the time who I'm helping as a person is that end customer. So it might be the customer of a bank, for example, and helping them with a better experience with a credit card or some kind of other financial product. A fragrance manufacturer, for example. With that particular client, that was an internal customer, so to speak, but they're, I guess, and talking about this out loud, there's a bunch of different types of people, but in general, it's usually that my direct kind of client, and then their customer.
Richard Walker 3:37
So I'm glad you articulated this way, because this is actually the challenge of so many companies. I work with financial services firms who serve the advisor, who served the investor. I work with fintechs who served the advisor, who served the investor. And this is true of so many different industries, right? So, how do you decide who's the more important person to serve? How do you choose to figure out which problem to solve for, right as I mean, how do you go about that?
Peter LePiane 4:04
Yeah, that's interesting. It's almost by, I think, process. It's not like I spend a ton of time thinking about this. It's fairly automatic, I think. But I do think about it. Look, if there was no, let's use a credit card as an example. No, actually, I'm going to go to the fragrance manufacturer, because you can raise your eyebrows with that one. So that initiative was a change management initiative, and it was their internal sales force that was adapting to the use of an AI tool as a co-pilot and how they worked. So at the end of the day, it was really, they were changing.
Now, changing theoretically, for the benefit of their customer. So a customer who uses their fragrance, a well-chosen, selected fragrance, for whatever the commercial application, hand sanitizer, so laundry detergent, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not like I spent a lot of time thinking about that, but I did think about the fact that, look, if there's no end customer at the end of the day, the consumer of the fragrance, then it doesn't really matter if I help them change in to adapt this AI tool. They could stay, we could leave. Yeah, sure. That's my client. That's who I'm serving. But they'd be irrelevant if they didn't have an end customer. So if I don't think about that end customer, even though that's really not directly, even close to directly, my client, in this situation, I have to think about them.
Richard Walker 5:42
Well, but to see, that's why this point is so important, because their business, doesn't exist without their client, the use case you're talking about doesn't exist without the end user going through the processes they're trying to create. So it's paramount that you do think about both sides of that experience in order to be successful with it. I was talking to my team yesterday. We were talking about our product and my product manager. I love him. He said something to effect of, well, I'll put this out on Slack, and we can all vote on what the best thing is. And my response was, look, I love our opinion, but it doesn't matter. It's the end user's opinion that actually matters here. So I'm kind of curious, do you help your clients get to that feedback from their customers, so that you can incorporate that into what you're doing?
Peter LePiane 6:24
100%. So my usual philosophy methodology, the toolbox that I employ is something called Lean Startup, and that started in the Bay Area, in Stanford, really, that was in and around Stanford and really, it was all about discovering what the customer wants. So a guy by the name of Steve Blank really started this way of thinking inside of Stanford. A guy by the name of Eric Reese wrote a book called The Lean Startup. And that's really read the whole thing. Yeah, the whole thing went nuts. So Steve Blank was Eric Reese's prof at Stanford, and that's how, okay, Steve Blank wrote a book called Seven Steps to the Epiphany, something along those lines. It's all about startup and how you get to really customer insights and understanding a go-to-market strategy based on those customer insights. So what I tend to help customers out with is getting to insights that direct strategy in as quick and cheap away as possible. That is the goal of any lean startup practitioner. And certainly I'm no different.
Richard Walker 7:49
Okay, so I want to ask you more difficult tactical challenges here. So I have a series of questions I might ask with this, but one of them is, how valuable is your customer service person on your team's opinion or perspective of the customer feedback, versus can you get to more direct feedback going to customers? This is one part of the question.
Peter LePiane 8:11
Yeah, I'm always going to want to get the answer from horse's mouth. So that means the customer sometimes that's impractical. So let's say that we're sitting in a customer journey mapping session as much as I always invite my clients. So whether it's a bank or an insurance company or whoever, fragrance manufacturer doesn't really matter, startup doesn't matter. I invite them to invite the customer in. I've not had that. They haven't taken me off.
Richard Walker 8:40
Yeah, it's hard, right? This is part of the challenge.
Peter LePiane 8:43
It's vulnerable, right? Like you want to. I mean, you've got your own successful company, right? It's very natural as the founder, as the owner, to want to show your customers that you're the best. You have competition, more than likely, a bank certainly does. So it's a very vulnerable position to bring your customers in and expose to them, hey, look, I'm figuring this out. I'm figuring out this customer experience for you to get the best product, which really is, I think about that is obvious. Every customer knows that they're aware of your competition. Of course, they know you're trying to figure out the best customer experience. I think most of them, and maybe that's just my bias, and now I've lost your initial question.
Richard Walker 9:28
And I'm going to tear on this a little bit, because I think if your customer is your customer, they will want you to have a better product. And I agree it's hard to get them to participate, but they definitely have an incentive to help you, and many of them love to help which actually leads to a different question. So you did answer my question. You think getting it straight from the customer is better than internal perception or opinion about it, and I agree, but it's hard to do. So my second question then is, let's say you have a loud customer. The one who's willing to give you all the feedback, and that's where all your focus goes, because they're willing to give you the feedback, how much credit do you give them, versus trying to balance it out and not be skewed to one specific framework or their filter?
Peter LePiane 10:16
There's great danger and sample size of one. And so I have a statistics background, and that has kind of stayed with me as much as I hated it in university. It's really stayed with me throughout my career, and trying to think probabilistically about any kind of business problem has served me well. So I think in that particular case, but it's also dangerous to take just the very happy customer as well. So as much as possible, getting a nice cross-section of your customers is ideal. Now the next question might be, or, I don't know if you have this question or not, but I think that, the next logical question is, well, how many of them are we talking let's say my potential target market is the population of the United States. Well, that's 3 million people.
That's a lot of people. Well, luckily, statistics will help you out in terms of what a representative, statistically significant sample size would be, well, so if you're using the statistics there, that's 384 people. Well, come on, you're not going to go and get 384 people. So you can be plus or minus 5% in your margin of error. Who cares? Yeah. So then the question becomes, well, then how many do I get if I don't just get one? So the research will say that five is the right number to, when you're trying to find the biggest problems in a customer experience, if you're trying to really refine something, and it's say a button placement, and you're doing an AB test, that's something where you're going to have to get a really statistically significant sample and then look at the numbers.
But if you're just trying to figure out, you know what, is this customer journey even good? Are there major problems in it? If you talk to five people, you will find the major problems. It's like almost driving down your street and finding potholes. So if you ask five neighbors where's the biggest pothole on the street, they'll probably be able to tell you.
Richard Walker 12:37
I think that's really good, because it's manageable. Five is an achievable number, and I will give you credit there, because last year, in pre-launch of our new product that we released in January, we talked to 32 customers about the product, and part of it was to see who would want it, but most of it was to validate the price and fit did we have it? What was interesting is probably out of the 32 probably 25% were of one specific style of company. Not a fit. They did not want the product at all, which was eye opening for us, but super important too. We're not going to waste our marketing efforts on that segment of the market.
So it wasn't a huge number, but it was sufficient enough for us to get the message, no, I think that's really key. So going back to the inner loop that we have as companies, some of us think we're innovators. We're Steve Jobs. We know what the customer wants better than what they want. So I'm kind of curious, if you see that with your customers, and how do you balance the innovation, the futurism that people have in their mind of what could be out there versus what customers are telling you, because customers don't see the future that well or do they?
Peter LePiane 13:45
Yes, very, very tricky. Look anyone who is who has either risen up in an organization and is in a position to make these types of strategic product direction decisions, or who has birthed the company themselves, is going to be hard to convince, and they should be, I think like as but yet, there's danger in that. So I have always tried to rely on the data I have. So what that means is, here's an experiment. So designing an experiment is much harder than it sounds. Now, we learned, it's funny. I have my son's scientific method book, like theories in grade five, here it is nice. And we forgot that, I show this all the time. That's why I kind of have it handy, we kind of forgot how the scientific method works. It's got a particular process. It's got very strict rules to it.
So, in answering the question, if you've got someone who is a fan of the data, and you present them a number of experiments, all well designed. All solid hypotheses, the design of the experiment and the way that was processed was legitimate, sample sizes, all that good stuff. If that's what we need, if that's what we're trying to prove, then that person usually can be convinced or swayed, or at least brought off of kind of a very, very strong opinion to look at another way with data. If you don't have that person, for me, you've got to first try and convince them that the data is the thing that should speak and then go that direction. That's really, all I've ever been able to do is really, at the end of the day, it's the customer, just as you've said, it's the customer that matters.
Doesn't matter what our opinion is. Who cares? It's sample size of one. My opinion, I'm irrelevant. Doesn't matter what I think. So, I think, look, if you're so staunch kind of in your stance that that data can't speak to you, and it's a slam dunk case, I think you're probably gonna fail anyway.
Richard Walker 16:13
That's the truth, right? You're not willing to face facts, you're not willing to look at truth. So yeah, how are you going to survive that? I love it when data can work for you, and sometimes that's really hard to get to. Yesterday, we were talking about a specific new design in our product where we were saying, how many of these items should we show by default? And the number was five that we showed. How do we know five is the right number? So we ran a query. We found out the average customer has less than five or less by 70% of the customers have five or less.
So that's a great design. And actually, the ones who had the most weren't going to use that feature, so it didn't matter. So I love it when data can help inform that. So let's switch gears. You mentioned you're helping this customer deploy an AI tool? I wonder, from your perspective, how much does AI play a role in trying to figure this out with feedback from customers, persona analysis, anything like that. How are you using AI with your customers?
Peter LePiane 17:16
Yeah, I mean, quite a bit. So not just straight-up content creation. That's pretty straightforward. I think it's getting to be table stakes at this stage of the game. But I've done things like kind of prepped whatever chatGPT or whatever your favorite large language model is to basically say, hey, look, you're a customer in this segment, and then really start asking it questions. And it's not like I'm taking that as the data. I think that's dangerous, but what it's allowed me to do is really rethink some of the questions that I ask, and then I'll end up with a better customer interview script when I actually go out and talk to real customers.
So that's one use case for sure, certainly, doing my desk research, when I've got to figure out segmentation and perhaps segment sizing attributes of segments, that stuff, I'll do, either just with straight-up Google searches, but more often than not, doing some kind of query to chatGPT remember that the search engine that I'm using, and it's ends in a perplexity, yeah, that's what it's called.
Richard Walker 18:32
Perplexity. I've heard of Perplexity. I haven't used it yet.
Peter LePiane 18:35
Yeah, it's definitely cool, because you can ask more questions. It's not just like, hey, here, this is what I want to know. And here's a bunch of results. And then you go kind of pecking through them, yeah, ask a second question. Get some refinement. It tells you where its sources are. So it's actually a really useful thing to do. I find for desk research. So things like target markets and sizing and things of that nature, those are really the two major ones that come to mind.
Richard Walker 19:02
I've had an idea of what to use, how to use AI in our own marketing and sales aspects. And I'm going to ask a question with this kind of filter in my head, are you seeing clients, or are you, in particular, feeding the AI, persona analysis, market studies, research anything that you've already collected and know about your industry, market, customer, etc, and then using that to go further?
Peter LePiane 19:27
Yeah. I mean, I think, in essence, so a lot of what I'm doing is customer discovery. So in essence, I am doing a little bit of that. So I'm kind of feeding it. Here's what I know. So therefore, here's what you are. And now I'm going to ask you these questions. So I kind of left that part out of it. So I want you to be like this, and here's what I know about this thing, whatever it is, segment, persona, what have you now, answer me these questions. So that's. Yes, definitely.
Richard Walker 20:01
I feel like we should all have an AI that knows our business, our industry, our audience, super well, so it becomes this partner of ours, and we can go to it with different needs, like, okay, help me write SEO optimized content, or help me understand maybe what's possible in this industry, or needs, et cetera. And I'll tell you something else, if you have a really broad audience, or something that's really well known, the AI is amazing for that.
A year ago, my wife wanted to start a weight loss clinic, and so we said, give us personas of women between 30 and 55 years old who have these types of problems. Oh my gosh. I mean, it came up 20 different personas for us. We chose the five that made sense, and we were at profitability in four months because the advertising was aligned with those personas that just came straight out of chatgpt, with us feeding it very little, in fact, but I presume a lot of your customers are bigger enterprises, business to business, and it's a harder thing to figure out.
Peter LePiane 20:57
It can be, I think it's all got to get validated at the end of the day, which I'm sure you did too. I mean, yeah, known, if your marketing was a little bit off in this one segment, you would have adjusted. Oh, yeah, no different. No different whether it's B2B or B2C.
Richard Walker 21:15
Yeah. All right, well, we have to wrap up soon. Is there anything I've left out that you think we should get across today in what you do and how you help customers, and something I didn't uncover.
Peter LePiane 21:28
Yeah, I mean, I think, I touched on, really, the two main ways that I tend to help my clients, and one is product and the product realm, and really helping them either adjust a product that's already in market to be more successful, or take ideas and bring those to market, and then really if they need to come up with ideas in the first place. So that's kind of the product realm. And then there's the change management realm, which is all around really is the same thing when it comes to toolbox. So when I go and apply the tools, change management to me is just an adoption of something, a product is an adoption of something. It's a choice.
So you can whip people and say you're going to work in this way, but they usually find a way to not work in that way, but make it seem like they're working in that way. So in essence, it's adoption. So I treat it the exact same way. I think it changed the product. And under the hood, I'm using the exact same techniques. It's basically lean startup. There's something called Lean Change Management. There's a guy out of Toronto who wrote a book called Lean Change Management. It then it's got very much lean startup under the hood, and that's kind of the method that I apply with my own flavor to it, with a bunch of product stuff built in.
Richard Walker 22:48
And I think fundamentally, what you're getting at is, if you want people to adapt, adopt, buy a new product, it has to have a great underlying experience for them, because everybody always asks, what's in it for me? I mean, I've done change management, I've worked at a company and people were crying thinks they're going to lose their job because they didn't understand what was in it for them to change to the new system we were giving them. So fundamentally, you are designing and building out better experiences for your customer so they can get that adoption right.
Peter LePiane 23:18
100% doesn't matter whether it's a new way of working, or a new product that's sitting on the shelf, virtual or not? Yeah, totally agree.
Richard Walker 23:25
Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Look, I do have one more question that I want to ask you, but before I do that, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Peter LePiane 23:35
I'd say the way to guarantee get me is through LinkedIn. So I don't know if we can kind of put my LinkedIn profile out there.
Richard Walker 23:45
Yeah, it'll be linked to the episode. Sure.
Peter LePiane 23:47
Okay, great. Yeah. I think that's the that's the easiest way to do it is just message me on LinkedIn. You can kind of see more about what I do, some of the stuff that I'm posting, even though I very lousy at posting consistently. And you can see my past posts, at least, and then you can take a look at my background, of course. So that's probably the best way to do it.
Richard Walker 24:09
Awesome. Yeah, your name is unique, so you're not hard to find.
Peter LePiane 24:12
No, anyone else on LinkedIn with my name, I'm related to them.
Richard Walker 24:17
That's awesome. All right, Peter, here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Peter LePiane 24:27
Yeah, so I would say a so a gentleman by the name of Tristan Kromer, who runs his own boutique consulting firm called Kromatic in San Francisco, so probably 10 years ago or so maybe a little bit longer, he is the person that really helped me to understand Lean Startup, the way I practice it today. I had been aware of it before I dabbled in. It really. I thought I was using it, but I dabbled in it really. And he really opened my eyes to kind of the way that I apply the toolbox, and therefore some of the things that I needed to communicate well, to educate at the leadership level, so that at the end of the day, it wasn't just this kind of secret thing operating in middle management and lower it was something that was companywide, adopted and embraced. So Tristan. Tristan is the guy, for me.
Richard Walker 25:29
That's awesome. So now you've made me think I need to reread the book, like I'm missing something here. There's always more to learn. We've been, of course, we've been trying to use the lean startup approach for the last eight years, and I'd say we were doing a lot of good things with it, but I actually think I'll put that back on my reading list.
Peter LePiane 25:47
Yeah, well, there's some other ones too. I can recommend. There's a whole series in that lean series, and then a couple of my colleagues have written books. There's an open-source one that that Tristan has put together, called The Real Startup book that is amazing. It's got all sorts of different techniques in it, lean startup techniques, and does a really nice job of explaining how to use that, each technique, what situation you use it in, and then a bunch of case studies. Yeah, so, and it's free. You just download it from the Kromatic site.
Richard Walker 26:19
Nice, nice. All right, we'll have to link to that too. This has been great. So I want to give a big thank or thank you to Peter LePiane, founder of Idea Bridge, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Peter's website at ideabridge.group, and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will check or click the Like button. Share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Peter, thanks so much for joining me today.
Peter LePiane 26:50
Rich, this was awesome. Thanks for the questions and thanks for having me on your podcast.
Outro 26:56
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.
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