From Insight to System to Sales Growth: Lessons from an NPS Veteran

Introducing the Net Promoter System almost always requires overcoming multiple forms of organizational resistance. Peter Pizzi, currently the director of customer experience and insights at Analog Devices, was one of the pioneers of overcoming these forms of resistance in a prior role. With the benefit of experience, he has developed pattern recognition about how customer and product teams may push back on Net Promoter System integration. He has also developed tactics and approaches to getting the organization on board with the changes required to earn deeper customer loyalty in complex business-to-business environments.

“The key is the information and the data that we provide,” Peter says. Only by ensuring that the right people in a customer organization can provide the right feedback at the right time and in the right way can he get salespeople to say, “This is great. I’m receiving incredible information. All these diagnostics I’m getting from my customers is really going to help me,” according to Peter.

The Net Promoter System, Peter adds, forms a critical element of account management support. He has learned that integrating Net Promoter feedback into the normal rhythms of account planning and management creates the foundation. Importantly, developing a system in which account teams not only receive the feedback in a timely and granular way but also have the opportunity to follow up with their customers to learn more and address issues and opportunities solidifies organizational commitment.

“It’s about building that muscle where I have a robust system and cadence in place that moves the needle with all these actions that need to happen,” Peter says. To make it successful, he believes the process must be highly collaborative and should include convening a council and steering committee, conducting regular project updates, and turning first-year baseline information into actionable decisions.

Transitioning NPS data from interesting statistics into a valuable insight system that motivates improvements across teams, Peter says, is about systematically capturing feedback along the way while ensuring continuous alignment. For Peter, the Net Promoter System serves as a means to drive cultural innovations. “The hard part is getting everybody in the field and everyone in their position to believe this is the right thing to do—and that these deep insights we're getting from our customers will help sell more into the account and have a better relationship with the folks at the account,” Peter explains.

“It's that convincing—that change management part—where it starts to flip into a system,” Peter explains. “It’s really important to work across the organization and to ask the right questions.”

In this episode, Peter and I discuss how to focus an organization on customer feedback–based actions, the role of customer experience in tackling sales challenges, and how to ensure that the improvements customers are asking for make their way onto product and functional leaders’ agendas alike.

In the following excerpt, we discuss what defines team-wide success.

Rob: Talk a little bit about your team composition. What does it take to be successful?

Peter: It all varies, depending on what you have. It’s about being extremely passionate about customers and driving customer experience and using data to drive action. 

I need some people who are good relationship people—they can have a conversation with anybody in the organization at any level to communicate value. 

And I need people who know their way around data.

Rob: How do you achieve the right integration and support from, for example, the account teams?

Peter: Have communications with the account people to understand what's going to be valuable to them from the account level. Have that upfront conversation on what we should be going after—looking at revenue and year-over-year changes, and then the experience data mapped against it all.

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