Sara Sheehan’s guest in this episode is Laura Patterson, Co-Founder and President of VisionEdge Marketing and author of “Fast-Track Your Business”. Sara and Laura discuss what prompted her to write her latest book and the themes it addresses. Laura delves into what customer-centric means to her and why it’s key to growth strategies. From software that assists companies in finding individualized success measures to what she’s learned from mistakes in business, Laura provides an insightful look into how she built her success.
One of the driving themes of Laura’s book, and her career, is the idea of being customer-centric. She uses a term called “the circle of traction” to illustrate how to create a customer and then find ways to keep them and grow their value. She and Laura talk about eliminating random acts to focus on deliberate, customer-centric approaches to business instead.
Laura shares where to source insights and data for clients, and marketing software platforms that she recommends. She weaves her customer-centric approach into all the questions that drive research; by focusing on what the customer needs, the data sourced will drive growth that is specifically tailored to creating and sustaining customers. Laura asks ‘How do we help our people grow’ when contemplating future choices in order to maintain focus on investing in people. The lessons she’s learned and advice she has to share are invaluable for any business looking to grow and foster greater customer success.
About Laura Patterson:
No newcomer to customer-centricity and its accelerators (performance management and operational excellence), Laura’s passion for customer-centricity, as the definitive growth engine, started at Motorola in the ‘90s. During her corporate career, she’s held the roles of director of customer marketing and brand strategy, customer relationship manager, customer marketing initiative lead, and customer loyalty architect.
Laura is an award-winning author. Her fourth book is Fast-Track Your Business: A Customer-Centric Approach to Accelerate Growth. She has won 12 thought leadership awards including Most Powerful Thought Leaders to Follow. Laura holds numerous marketing certifications and received a patent for her performance management software. She is also a peer-reviewed researcher and is a trusted advisor to CXOs and board members.
Growth is in her DNA. As president and co-founder of VisionEdge Marketing, Laura has helped grow 250+ companies worldwide and of all sizes. Most of her customers have been in the B2B space in these industries: technology, cybersecurity, financial services, manufacturing software, and medical devices/bioscience.
Laura is a medal-winning triathlete and brings high energy to everything she does. She lives in Austin, TX where she is Mom to Riley, a toy Aussie. She is a superfan of hummingbirds and maintains a garden to attract them. She keeps her Zen with Yoga and reenergizes with a long run.
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Contact Sara Sheehan | Sara Sheehan Consulting:
Contact Laura Patterson:
- Website: VisionEdgeMarketing.com
- LinkedIn: LauraPattersonVEM
- Book: “Fast-Track Your Business: A Customer-Centric Approach to Accelerate Market Growth” by Laura Patterson
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Transcript
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:02] Hi there, I’m Sara Sheehan and welcome to my podcast, Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today I’m talking with Laura Patterson. Laura is a recognized and trusted authority for enabling companies to take a customer centric, outcome based approach to organic growth by enabling them to use analytics, accountability, alignment, and operational excellence to attract, retain and grow the value of customers. Laura leads VisionEdge Marketing, and she is frequently asked to speak and facilitate workshops for educational institutions, associations and company meetings. Laura has been recognized for her thought leadership and has won numerous awards, including Engati’s Top 30 Marketing Influencers and Top 200 Thought Leaders, Piktale’s Top 100 Influencers and 20 Women to Watch in Business by the Sales Lead Management Association. Laura, welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here today.
Laura Patterson: [00:01:18] I’m really glad to be here, Sara. Thank you for having me.
Sara Sheehan: [00:01:21] Laura, your backstory is important because it is what got you here, but what I would love to focus on is your book, ‘Fast-Track Your Business’, which I have read and I think is fantastic. Can you speak with me about what your through line is for the book?
Laura Patterson: [00:01:43] First of all, thank you for reading my book. I really appreciate that. It’s so kind of you to do so.
Sara Sheehan: [00:01:49] You’re so welcome.
Laura Patterson: [00:01:49] ‘Fast-Track Your Business’ is my fourth book, which I never intended to write. So I want to tell you a little bit about how it ended up becoming a book. It is actually the result of a customer, a longtime customer who I worked with in as he went through various companies as a chief growth officer, would bring me into his organization to talk about what we call the circle of traction with his group, his sales, his marketing, his customer service, all of his team. And we would go through a workshop related to the circle of traction. And at one of those meetings in one of those companies, he said to me, when are you going to put this circle of traction into a book? And I said, never. Because I’d already done three books, Sara. And it’s a lot. You know, there are labors of love. They take a tremendous amount of energy and time. And he said, I hope you will rethink that. And so I didn’t rethink it right away. But then I got an opportunity to be I was asked to be a radio show host, which I also declined initially. I need to say yes more often, I guess. This company, they had someone who had to bow out of their program for whatever reason, and they came to me and said, would you pick up this show? And I said no to that because I really wasn’t an expert, and I don’t like to be misrepresenting what I’m capable of doing or trying to lead conversations that I really have no business trying to lead. But I offered to replace the remaining episodes of that show with ‘Ready, Set, Grow’ as long as they would allow the guests on my program to be CEOs here in Austin.
Laura Patterson: [00:03:43] Their show tended to focus on the coastal CEOs, and we have amazing CEOs here in Austin. There were eight episodes left, and they asked me if I would do that. I picked up the phone and called some of the CEOs I have known for a very long time, and they said yes. After I completed those interviews, another colleague said to me, “Wow, you’ve got some great content there. Have you thought about figuring out how you might put some of that into a book?” So here I was, now two people suggesting that there be something around growth and customer centricity in a book. I finally succumbed, and that’s how ‘Fast-Track’ got started. The whole theme of ‘Fast-Track’ is that, for companies, especially B2B companies, who want to be successful in the marketplace and grow in today’s, what we call, customer engagement economy or the age of the customer, whatever you want to call it, you have to be more customer centric because the customer is in the driver’s seat. As a result, you need a different approach to how you’re going to be more customer centric. And that is the essence of the ‘circle of traction’, which starts with, how will you help your customers be more successful? Because if you can help them be more successful, you will be more successful. Hopefully that answers your question.
Sara Sheehan: [00:05:09] Yes, absolutely. Could you speak a little bit about ‘the circle of traction’?
Laura Patterson: [00:05:17] In its infancy it was called ‘The Wheel of Growth’. But we changed it to ‘The Circle of Traction’ many years ago because our customers are trying to get more traction or growth right in the marketplace. The essence in the world of business is to create a customer, and then once you have that customer, to find ways to keep them and then to grow the value of them. It’s about creating customer value. The ‘circle of traction’ is basically a wheel that consists of nodes and then has an axle. And in the axle are the things that obviously every company has to have if they want the wheel to turn. That’s an important concept. A lot of people want to turn a wheel and make things happen, but if you don’t have the axle, the wheel will not turn. The four things that have to be a part of the axle are your organizational culture and structure, your people and their skills, your processes and systems, and your ability to leverage data and do analytics on that data and derive insights from that data. So that’s the axle, and a lot of companies struggle with just those four things.
Laura Patterson: [00:06:31] We need to get those four things right, then you can make the wheel turn and get velocity in the wheel. The place the wheel begins is with understanding your customer. We always ask people, what do they know about their customers? What is it they don’t know that they need to know about their customers? Do you know what your customers value? Do you understand what problem your customers are trying to solve? Do you understand what your customers’ aspirations are? Do you truly understand what success is for them? And if you don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, it’s really important to go get those answers, have those insights before you do anything else. We find a lot of companies like to do ‘fire, fire, fire’ when it comes to execution. A key part of execution is ‘ready, aim’. The axle and the customer insights are the ‘ready’, and then you can start working on what the ‘aim’ is so that eventually you can do the ‘fire, fire, fire’ which comes much further in the wheel.
Sara Sheehan: [00:07:38] Laura, I give you credit because there aren’t many marketing organizations that are looking at business so holistically. I really want to commend you for that.
Laura Patterson: [00:07:51] Thank you. When I go to places and introduce myself, I always love those opportunities. I tell them what VisionEdge Marketing does, people will say, “Why do you have marketing in your name? You don’t do any marketing.” And that is true if you think of marketing in the sense of the downstream, the creative execution and the SEO and the email campaigns and websites and social media and video and all of those things, events, whatever they might be. That’s very downstream, but companies who want to grow and scale need to be focused on what we call the upstream part of marketing, which is what we do. The upstream is where the ‘ready, aim’ takes place. That’s an important distinction. I think that’s, to your point, why so many companies who hire marketing end up feeling frustrated. Because we hear that a lot, maybe you do too, because they’re getting the downstream, but their upstream isn’t right yet. If you don’t have the upstream right, you’ll end up, what we call, polluting the downstream.
Sara Sheehan: [00:09:01] That’s right, or maybe they just need to focus on the upstream.
Laura Patterson: [00:09:06] Maybe. Remember that you had one of your prior guests talk about focus and clarity. That is really important. One of the challenges a lot of people in business have is that they’re inundated with things every day. I don’t know if you find that to be true, I know I am.
Sara Sheehan: [00:09:29] Most certainly in today’s world.
Laura Patterson: [00:09:30] Especially today. A lot of folks find themselves engaging in, what we call, random acts. The challenge you have with random acts, besides the fact that they cost you time, energy, potentially money, is that they also steal your strategic capacity. They steal your ability to focus and have clarity. One of our missions is to help our customers eliminate random acts and replace that with a deliberate, intentional, customer centric approach so they can create measurable outcomes and smarter growth. That’s what we try to help our customers do. We have a little test if you’re interested, if you think your community would be interested in finding out whether or not they’re engaging in random acts, do you think they would be interested?
Sara Sheehan: [00:10:20] Sure, tests are always good.
Laura Patterson: [00:10:23] This is a simple test. Open any plan. Your sales plan, your strategic plan, your marketing plan, whatever your plan your company has. You start at the beginning of the plan, which should be your outcomes, which hopefully are written in customer centric terms. If not, they should be. You might want to think about changing that. As you look at that plan, can you draw a straight line from the outcome all the way through the plan? Objectives, strategy, programs, tactics, activities, all the way through a straight line. Do you have a direct line from top to bottom? And anything that’s not on that line, we call that an orphan. Then the question becomes, is that orphan a random act? Because if it’s not tied to an outcome, why would you be doing it? If it is tied to an outcome but the outcome isn’t in your plan, that’s probably something you might want to think about. What outcome is it trying to drive? We may need to revisit our plan. What we find people try to do is they try to reverse engineer, and they try to find a way to stuff those orphans somewhere in the plan, back into the line. But usually that’s a sign that either the orphan is just something that people have done habitually and no longer serves a purpose. Or it’s something that got brought into the picture later in the planning, and therefore it never was given careful thought. It wasn’t intentional, it was just an idea that got put into the plan. So that’s a really simple test that any company can do.
Sara Sheehan: [00:12:05] It’s an easy way to see if your plan is connected from beginning to end. That is beautiful. Laura, besides my comment, which I believe to be true, you can tell me if it’s not, that one of your differentiating factors is that you’re so holistic in your approach. What else differentiates you from other marketing experts?
Laura Patterson: [00:12:34] I’ll talk about the old days. VisionEdge Marketing is 26 years old. When we first started back in 1999, some of the things that we were doing then were very novel. Insights derived from data, focusing on process and operational excellence, creating performance measures that are tied to measurable outcomes, being customer centric in your growth strategies. These were things that were, for many people, new words. Now those are all buzzwords. But I do think the things that differentiate us is this idea of the deliberate, the process side, intentional, the strategic side, the measurability and the insights. We have never found a firm that is a boutique like ours, who has the ability to bring that all to bear. You can find them in really large firms, like McKinsey for example, or Deloitte or some big name like that, because they have a lot of different lines of business. But to find that in a boutique that’s bringing that kind of thinking to the conversation is a little unusual.
Sara Sheehan: [00:13:48] That’s a wonderful piece of insight to share with our audience, and it’s another reason to consider partnering with you, for certain. What are some of the best sources for insights and data, and how can you apply those findings in your clients’ plans?
Laura Patterson: [00:14:15] This is a great question and I’ll tell you why. In today’s world, we have so much data that we’re drowning in it. Way back when, when I first started in my career, and I know you and I are not that far apart in terms of peers, so you probably can remember the days when you had a box sitting on your desk and it had a green blinking light. Your access to data was far more limited. I think in some ways, we made better decisions from that data than we do today, and I’ll tell you why. Today, a lot of people want to spend time immersed in the data trying to figure it out. The real thing that I would encourage most people to do is start with the questions that you need answered. Because that will allow you, back to what you said earlier, to have more focus and clarity, instead of looking at it and getting overwhelmed by everything that you’re seeing and trying to figure out what to do with what you’re seeing. I always say, what are the questions that you need to have answered in order to make a good decision? What decisions do you need to make that will bring additional insight into your customers, additional value to your customers, additional value to your business? What do you know that you need to validate, and what is it you don’t know that you need to learn?
Laura Patterson: [00:15:42] Start with that. Then you have to think about, where would I get that data? For many companies today, they have invested heavily in technology. They have CRM systems and automation systems and social media platforms and websites and Google Analytics, on and on and on. They have a lot of it internally, not to mention their ERP and financial accounting systems and whatever other systems that they might have internally. A lot of that could be potentially already available to them. Then there’s, of course, numerous and unending lists of ways to get external data all the way from third party resources to what you see through your social media channels from your listening data, your sentiment data from external. Then, of course, your own research, doing and conducting your own research with customers and or prospects. Whether that research is methodical and done through some very traditional methodologies, or maybe done through a customer advisory board or conversations with customers at an event or a roundtable or a lunch-and-learn. There’s lots of different ways to get that other data. Also, if you use the channel, your partners can provide some useful data. There’s lots of data sources, and that’s why starting with the question can be a lot more helpful. Otherwise, you’ll just be chasing a lot of data and going down a lot of rabbit holes.
Sara Sheehan: [00:17:16] Right. Are there any software platforms specific to marketing that you do recommend?
Laura Patterson: [00:17:25] There’s so many. If you ever have looked at the MarTech Landscape, it is massive. I don’t really like to tell people what kinds of products or applications to buy because they need to find what’s right for their company. I think that’s the bottom line, find what’s right for your company. A product like HubSpot or Salesforce may be great for your company. If you’re a really large company, I think that they could be great. But they’re complex products, they’re expensive. So maybe you could use a less expensive automation platform or CRM platform. And there are so many to choose from. We could use up our whole time just listing them off. There’s a slew of AI platforms out there, as AI is becoming a very big part of what we all do. Generative AI and other forms of AI, that’s been around a very long time. That’s all the way from something simple, a lot of people are using ChatGPT, to products like we use in our company, Center AI, which is great for a SMB size company, to much bigger products, Jasper and others. Again, it just depends. Many companies are integrating generative AI and other AI capabilities within their software. Keeping up with all of the updates that are being made, I think, could be challenging for a lot of companies to try and keep up with if they don’t have dedicated people to technology or dedicated people to analytics or data science, along those lines.
Sara Sheehan: [00:19:03] One question I do want to double click on is the application of those data and insights that you glean. Once you step back and you take a look at the question that you want to answer and the best sources to get data and insights, how do you then apply your learnings?
Laura Patterson: [00:19:25] Sometimes it’s just getting the answer to the question to apply. For example, if you wanted to say, do I have any customers that we’re working with that are particularly at risk? Are any of our customers at risk? You identify what might be some potential behaviors of customers that would signal to your organization that that customer is at risk for whatever reason. You can go through your data and look at those behaviors by customers and identify who those customers are. You could also create a customer vulnerability index and get a sense of which ones are at risk. You can go depending on how sophisticated you want to be. So that would be an example. Once you see those customers that are at risk, you might want to put a plan together and you might want to look at those customers and say, which ones of these are ones we don’t want to lose no matter what? And are there some on here that the cost to serve is really high? Maybe if they do go, it’s okay, but we want to do that in the right way so how might we do that? That’s how you might, as an example. Another example of using the data you might have would be asking yourself, which of these customers would be the most likely to buy our next new product?
Sara Sheehan: [00:20:49] That’s a great question.
Laura Patterson: [00:20:50] We’re going to bring a new product to market. That old Ansoff’s Matrix is really important because it basically says, the easiest thing to do is to sell what you have to people you’re already doing business with, and the next easiest thing to do is to sell whatever’s going to be new to the people who you’re already doing business with, because they already know and trust you. You’re going to bring a new service or a new product to market, and you want to get fast product adoption, your product adoption rate, and you might say, which ones of our customers would be most likely to do that? Again, we’re talking about behaviors and indicators. You’d have to really know your customers and then look at that data and say, it looks to us like this group of customers would be the best candidates for maybe being an alpha or a trial user or an early adopter to get some feedback from, things like that. Then that would be another way to use the data. So those are a couple of examples. We can talk about more if you think it would be helpful.
Sara Sheehan: [00:21:55] Those are excellent examples, and they really help listeners to understand, at a much deeper level, how your customer centric approach applies in everything that you do. To pivot from there, I’d love to talk about, or hear from you, what some new or emerging practices are that are driving results for customer centric clients that you’re using today.
Laura Patterson: [00:22:28] I know we’ve already talked about AI a little bit. And of course, everyone is embracing AI as fast as they possibly can. I would make a caution there because if you’re not careful, AI can turn into an echo chamber. You want to be quite careful about how you use AI. You don’t want to put any customer data outside your firewall where it could fall into the hands of competitors or just violate the trust you have with your customers. That said, trying to understand more about what your customer’s needs are and how that fits into their customer’s needs, I think, is a really important trend, especially in B2B. In B2B, we might be working with a company that makes something that’s sold to another B2B company that makes something that’s sold to another company that eventually makes itself into the marketplace. There’s a movement to understand all the people next in line in that process, in that exchange, in order to do a better job of anticipating what your first customer is going to need and in what time frame they’re going to need it, and what products and services you’re going to need to bring to the table to help them be more successful. That’s an interesting thing to be looking at. We have a tendency to sit across the table from a customer and ask them about what they’re doing or what they need or so forth, but really, we should be thinking beyond that customer and to their customer or to their customer’s customer. I think that’s interesting.
Sara Sheehan: [00:24:07] That definitely helps you think in terms of impact and the exponential way to grow your business.
Laura Patterson: [00:24:14] Yes, I think so too.
Sara Sheehan: [00:24:15] Fantastic. You are a very growth oriented person, and that’s very clear by how you approach everything that you do in business and in your pursuit professionally. What big leap are you working on in your business right now?
Laura Patterson: [00:24:37] We have a software as a service application we have a patent for that helps people with that test. Making sure that they build plans that are completely aligned, where there is direct line of sight. One of the challenges a lot of people particularly in marketing face, but it’s not the only organization, is being able to come up with the right measures and chain of measures so that when they’re having a conversation with the C-suite or the board or one another, they can talk in a vocabulary around how we’re going to agree on what success measures we’re using. A lot of people are into OKRs or other things, and those are all great, but you still have to have the chain. Those systems don’t set up the data and metrics chain that companies need, and that’s one of the challenges and gaps we’re working very hard to close. The second thing is that a lot of people need to engage in a different kind of conversation, particularly in challenging economies with the finance organization. Because they control the purse strings, in the sense that they’re going to have a lot of influence over that. Being able to have a conversation about how the money is going to be allocated in a way that makes sense for the company. Everyone always talks about ROI, I know we’ve had these conversations before, and I’m sure you’ve had them many times.
Laura Patterson: [00:26:11] What we try to tell people is, you can’t have that conversation if you’re going to allocate your funds in the traditional subaccount way, especially for marketing. If you’re in a traditional subaccount way of allocating your funds, where you have a line item for events and a line item for PR, and a line item for a website and a line item for email, a line item for direct mail, you get the idea. How will you ever be able to know whether those things made a difference to the bottom line? Attribution models can help with that in a different way. What would be helpful is to be able to allocate your budget by outcome and say, all of these activities that we’re doing, that we’re spending money on, that we’re investing on behalf of the company, are all intended to produce this result. Now, if we spent this money, did we produce this result with that investment? It’s looking at your portfolio of investment a little bit differently. It’s a little bit more like looking at the way that you invest your own money into however that portfolio is. That helps, I think, create a different kind of business conversation for people who are in marketing, customer service, product, places where it isn’t such a direct and obvious link. Like sales, for example.
Sara Sheehan: [00:27:48] So your software platform, Excellence, that is patented. That is out in the marketplace, correct?
Laura Patterson: [00:27:57] Yes, people can subscribe to it. We can help them set it up if they need, it’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s statement based, so that probably gives you a hint on its future direction. It’s all designed around statements, and we have a way to help people tee that up through what we call a ‘Collaboratory’, which is basically collaborating with them to make sure they get their plan initially set up right, set up correctly. But yes, that’s an important thing. Planning season is all the time now. In the old days you had planning maybe once a year, but now people plan all the time. Whether that’s quarterly planning or semiannual planning, it seems like the planning season is never ending.
Sara Sheehan: [00:28:40] Yes, I definitely think it has expanded beyond anything that we would have ever imagined years ago. In your platform, have you already embedded AI into the approach?
Laura Patterson: [00:28:56] No, but it’s on the roadmap. I have been a user of ChatGPT since the second day it came on the market. I got to be one of the people that helped crash that site. I’ve been around generative AI for a pretty long time, and being a data scientist and in the data space and analytics space around AI and machine learning a long time. I have no problem embracing this technology, but I do think it is still in its early days and that we will see some things shake out. Right now we’re seeing a tremendous amount of mushrooms popping up, so to speak, in the space. I think we need to see how that settles out. I think about the early days of email automation platforms, and you probably can think of off the top of your head, lots and lots of different platforms. Some of them are still with us, some of them have long since gone away, some that were the big players aren’t the big players anymore. I think that will change, so I want to be careful that we wait and see.
Laura Patterson: [00:29:58] I saw that happen with one of our customers, and I saw that happen also when I was the head of marketing, the CMO for an enterprise software company. That was one of the first in the space of, what we call, ETML, extract and movement of data. It was a data platform, and that was built on a particular approach that didn’t become the industry standard. The companies who waited and came out and used what became the industry standard did far better than this particular company, which ended up having to sell early. I think it’s important. I’ve seen that happen on other platforms. I spent 14 years at Motorola, I’ve seen things happen on those platforms. I have a lot of respect for the innovators, the people who are the first and watching the trends and leading the pack and are bringing the new ideas to market. But I also recognize that companies like ours need to hitch our wagon to something that’s really stable and market ready.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:06] It’s okay to be an early majority member.
Laura Patterson: [00:31:09] It’s perfectly okay.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:10] It is okay, for sure. I definitely understand why you’re watching and waiting and being very mindful while doing it.
Laura Patterson: [00:31:23] Thank you.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:24] If you were to build your business over again, what would you do differently?
Laura Patterson: [00:31:29] I’ve made so many mistakes, Sara. There are far too many to count. I would probably do a number of things differently. I think more importantly is, if I were to start today, I would love to be able to go back in time and say I would do something differently, but for the time, that is what we did. But if I were to start a company today, here’s something that I will say to people in your community. For those of us who were around in the early days of Salesforce and HubSpot, and we saw the number of partners they needed to implement their technology and to help those companies succeed, they were a key part of the ecosystem. I believe that there’s that opportunity for some of the AI platforms, and that would be something cool to explore. I think that it would be really fun to be one of those kinds of implementation partners. People think that they can just do it themselves. I know that many can, especially the larger companies that have the talent. But for the SMBs of the world, and maybe the mid-market people who don’t have dedicated talent inside, having an implementation partner in that space would be really valuable. If I had a chance to start all over, I probably would do something like that and I think that could be a lot of fun.
Sara Sheehan: [00:32:56] There’s definitely space for not only expertise, guidance, wisdom, and sheer experience based on trial and error, and actually using technology in a business setting so that you can understand what you can actually get back. Having that human in the loop really is a critical part of it, to be able to fine tune the prompt and the process. I think you can really influence the results tremendously with an educated partner.
Laura Patterson: [00:33:38] Absolutely. I’m listening to what people are doing today. We do a lot of process engineering work, operational excellence work, and you can get a lot of value out of using an AI to help you with that, and also a lot of value of finding ways for AI entities to do some of that work. But before you go off and do all that, you really need to have clarity around the process. What is it right now? What is it you want it to be? What is the future state? What is the real value of that going to be of those changes in the organization? How are you going to educate your people to use a new process? Change management, how are you going to educate them? There’s so many variables, and a lot of those require humans to be a part of that.
Sara Sheehan: [00:34:28] Most certainly, human intervention is critical.
Laura Patterson: [00:34:31] I think that will be really important. It’s important even whether you’re going through some form of transformation or you’re just tweaking. You want to tweak a process, you want to tweak your dashboard. That can be done with people to help you do that. And you might end up with a better end result because they have already done so many of them in the past, and they know what are going to be the things that you can stub your toe on.
Sara Sheehan: [00:35:00] Absolutely. Laura, what big goals and aspirations are you currently working on this year?
Laura Patterson: [00:35:06] I am hoping to do a lot more paid speaking engagements going forward, especially around the customer centricity. We have a program called ‘For Game Changers For Every Stage of Growth’, to start helping people understand what that entails, so that they can begin to think about that within their organization. Some simple steps as well as the bigger picture. I’ve been making my way from nonprofit board service to working on and supporting a mid-market technology manufacturing company on their board. I’d love to do more of that.
Sara Sheehan: [00:35:48] Congratulations, that’s a wonderful step, leaning into business and influence even more.
Laura Patterson: [00:36:00] We have a board of advisors in our company. I always encourage companies to have a customer advisory board or a board of advisors. I have a couple of advisors who have been nudging me so I’m taking the nudge.
Sara Sheehan: [00:36:17] That’s a great thing to do, because not only will you be able to add value to their businesses, but you’ll come back with insights that you can apply to your own.
Laura Patterson: [00:36:29] And to other customers, absolutely. You’re so right, Sara.
Sara Sheehan: [00:36:34] Excellent. Laura, what are you learning right now? What is intriguing you that you are digging into?
Laura Patterson: [00:36:43] Of course, I’m digging into AI just like everybody else is, and reading all about it and writing about it. I’m in Austin, Texas. You can’t hardly go to the gas station or the grocery store without there being a conversation about AI. I’ve said that before, so that’s important. I’m a big proponent of trying to figure out how you help your people grow. How do we help our people grow? How do we help our teams grow? It’s not just about our customers, it’s about our people as well, and investing in our people. So that is always top of mind for me. Also, candidly, we have to talk about and think about our own growth and be mindful of that. Sometimes we are a little bit like the shoemaker’s children without shoes while everyone else has got them, so we do have to stop and think about our own future of our company. Because if we don’t think about that, we won’t be here to serve our customers. And our goal is to do that.
Sara Sheehan: [00:37:49] I couldn’t agree with that more. As you think about your business and what you’re doing right now, how you’re currently engaging with clients, is there anything on the horizon that you’re planning? Is there anything else that you would like to share?
Laura Patterson: [00:38:10] We are so blessed. When I think about the last couple of decades, the ups and downs, we’ve gone through the .com bust, 9-11, a recession, Covid, we’re still here and that’s because of our customers. Everything we do is through the lens of our customers and this is a really important message for everyone. I’m not saying that we were asked to do something and we just willy-nilly do it, that’s not what customer centricity is about. But we do try to make sure that what we do will be in the best interest of the communities we serve, and those communities include our customers, our partners, communities we all live in. So I think that’s where we try to keep our head in that game.
Sara Sheehan: [00:39:03] Wonderful. Laura, I really appreciate your time. Can you tell me how our listeners can find you?
Laura Patterson: [00:39:10] I would love for them to visit visionedgemarketing.com. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn or email me at laurap@visionedgemarketing.com. If they have any questions, happy to have a conversation.
Sara Sheehan: [00:39:25] Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today, Laura.
Laura Patterson: [00:39:28] It is my pleasure, thank you for having me.
Sara Sheehan: [00:39:31] Here are my top three takeaways from today’s episode. Start with customer insights. Laura emphasizes that real growth begins with a deep understanding of your customer, what they value, their aspirations, and how you can genuinely help them succeed. Without these insights, execution is just guesswork. Eliminate random acts. She introduces a simple but powerful test. Can you draw a straight line from your strategic outcomes all the way through your activities? Anything not tied directly to an outcome is likely a random act and a drain on resources and focus. Be deliberate with data and technology. With today’s data overload, don’t get lost in the numbers. Begin with the right questions, then seek out only relevant data and tech solutions that truly fit your company’s needs. Tools and platforms are valuable, but only when aligned with clear goals. Laura’s thoughtful, holistic approach offers a blueprint for leaders ready to move from noise to clarity and results. Thanks so much for listening and as always, subscribe and never miss an episode.
