BONUS EPISODE: Top 7 takeaways from season 2

Ryan Barry:

Hi everybody. Welcome to Inside Insights, podcast powered by Zappi. My name is Ryan and I'm joined as always by my cohost, Patricia Montesdeoca. Patricia, what up?

Patricia Montesdeoca:

Hello.

Ryan:

How are you?

Patricia:

Oh, good. How are you doing?

Ryan:

I'm good. I'm good. Thanks. As you know, I had a few Palomas last night, so I'm moving a little slowly, but I'm excited to chat with you. We are gearing up for season three of Inside Insights. We're going to bring the heat. We actually just agreed to our full guest list about an hour and a half ago, and we have some really great conversations for you about advertising, about building brands that are customer obsessed, about diversity in market research, about building ecosystems. We're going to be bringing the heat in season three, my friend, aren't we.

Patricia:

Oh yeah. And I really loved the way we prepared for this. When we started thinking about what we wanted to bring in season three, we didn't just ignore the past. We went back and saw what we learned in season one, what we learned in season two, which is how today's podcast, bonus podcast came about. We're learning from the past, but not to repeat, but to learn and grow from that. I love that.

Ryan:

It's all about learning. I was just mentoring a member of our team, who's navigating early parts of their career and I said to him, "Don't worry about money, worry about learning. The money comes." I really believe that. I don't know whoever gave me that advice, but I've always had it in my head and it's really important.

So yes, we are excited about season three, which will drop sometime in September. I'm not giving you an exact date because shit happens and something might get delayed, but stay tuned and subscribe anywhere podcasts are available. But before we get into season three, we do want to learn, Patricia is going to drive today's episode. It's a bonus episode, We get to use-

Patricia:

It's really cool.

Ryan:

... big words like bonus and emojis when we post this on LinkedIn, which is always really fun. Kelsey loves that. 

Patricia:

Making Kelsey happy.

Ryan:

Yeah, we're here to make Kelsey happy. She's our boss. We would like to share with you the things we've learned through over 20 episodes of Inside Insights. Patricia, you always do such a wonderful job of summarizing the themes and the learning. So take us through kind of what you've learned, and I will undoubtedly interrupt you with random thoughts that I have as you go.

Patricia:

Please do. It makes it fun.

Patricia:

So there are about seven topics that we looked at and we saw, which is really interesting because we didn't go into season two thinking about a summary of summaries. We went into season two thinking about the various topics, but seven things just kept bubbling to the top that we saw that our amazing Insights leaders brought to us.

The first one, innovation is a game of skill. Focus on all three words, innovation, game, and skill, because at the end of the day, we all know about art and science. In this case, it's all about insights and creativity. Insights being based in data and creativity being based on our experience, what we know. 

Now another piece of advice that goes with that, is look backwards to learn from history. Spoiler. This is where we got our idea for a summary of summaries, because one of our people said, "Just go backwards, learn from a history. And then, armed with that go forward with a more laser focus," and that's fantastic. And the last thing about innovation they taught us this season was landing innovation right takes time and it's not foolproof. So be patient. Now, Cedric Steele, he was amazing. He said that he's always thought his quote, "The thing I absolutely just love about innovation is that I've always felt like it's this giant puzzle or game, or I'm just trying to figure it out and it keeps changing every day." This is what keeps Cedric Steele on his toes, so thank you, Cedric.

Ryan:

All right so let me put you on the spot. What does the word innovation mean to you?

Patricia:

Something new, changing, evolving.

Like for example, I'm a fan of Facebook Marketplace. Why? Because we don't want to create more garbage. We want to reuse what's there and somebody else has maybe gently used something, maybe once or twice. It'll be perfect for me. And I have a table that I bought on Facebook Marketplace, I took it, I polished it, I painted it. I innovated that table.

Ryan:

Exactly and then you didn't have to go to Jordan's Furniture and spend four grand on a table.

Patricia:

Exactly.

Ryan:

So as you know, I'm not on Facebook or Instagram any longer. Some days I think I might go back, but shout out to the Northborough Massachusetts Mom's group, because about half the things in my house for bought on that marketplace. I'm not a mom, but my wife Gillian is, and she gets the hookup on the Northborough mom's group.

Let's keep going. I like it.

Patricia:

In order to be innovative, you've got to be curious. Now, remember Cedric said be patient. So in order to be patient, you have to maintain that relentless curiosity. Why relentless? Because it's okay to not have the answers, but it's good to always have more questions. So be vulnerable and open and honest about what you know, but also, almost more importantly, about what you don't know. Now when you are armed with what you know and what you don't know, keep polishing your skills, but at the same time, stay on top of what's new so that you can have different things that you don't know about.

One of the sentences you said, once when I first started, is, "Make different mistakes, don't bore me." And I love that because I'm usually said something similar in my house. It's like, make different mistakes than somebody else did. There are so many mistakes, lovely mistakes to be made. So it's all about persevering and embracing the challenge, even when you feel like an imposter or you feel like you're drinking from the fire hose. Take the curiosity and run with it. Jessica Southard said, "No matter what role you're in, focus on asking the best and most outlandish questions." I love that quote from Jessica. Remember that?

Ryan:

That's really good. I like that a lot.

Patricia:

Number three, be agile in thought and action. Because at the end of the day, you can have really good ideas, but if you don't put them to action, what good is that? Now this was reminded twice by a few people, but most of all, Joseph Chen. He talked about being flexible and adapting to the situations around you. So remember in the first one we talked about looking to history? Well, if we have the history lessons there, we're able to go forward and ask the real questions that are all leveraging the six W's, which are actually five W's and an H, but don't tell anybody. You know, the who, what, when, where, how and why. Right?

Ryan:

I love it.

Patricia:

And go as deep as you need to uncover. Don't be afraid to fail, or don't be afraid to ask silly questions. Because at the end of the day, that saying where people say, I'm going to ask a stupid question and everybody says, "There's no stupid questions." It's true. The only stupid questions is the ones you didn't ask, because then you don't know. Joseph's quote, "At its core, agile insights, is a flexible learning process that's easily adaptable to whatever the need is. It's understanding the real question and finding the best path to the solution." Wise words.

Ryan:

I love that. This is a controversial thing. I said this on LinkedIn once and I got my ass handed to me, but I still believe it.

Patricia:

What?

Ryan:

I think there's only one question that I would find to be a little silly, which is, can I ask a question? That's like, "Yeah, you just did."

Patricia:

Yes. I love that.

Ryan:

You just did.

Patricia:

I love that.

Ryan:

Just ask me what you want to ask me, please.

Patricia:

So at the end of the day, I've heard somebody that is not you, say, "You just asked it, so is that the only one you wanted?" Right?

Ryan:

Yeah, exactly.

Patricia:

And so-

Ryan:

I always bite my tongue when somebody says it, and that's what, in my head, I'm saying, "Yeah, you just did."

Patricia:

...Oh, yeah. So, switching gears radically, because we talked about being vulnerable. We talked about being agile. We talked about asking questions.

Ryan:

Yes, you did.

Patricia:

But in order for you to completely put aside your fear of sounding silly and asking all the questions you want. Number four, put the damn ego aside. There's no room for it. There'll be room for it later. It'll come up, you'll need it later when you need to stand up and sell your ideas. You need to believe in yourself. You need to believe in your ideas. But for number four, put the consumer first, not your company, not your ego, not your past, not your experience, the consumer, your end consumer. Because at the end of the day, if you don't understand them, what good are we? What are we doing here? Become their advocate, become their voice and show up where they are, because it's their life that you have to emulate, not the other way around. You're not going to change the way they shop because you want them to. You got to go where they shop, right?

Ryan:

That's right. If consumers love what you build, you'll love the results.

Patricia:

Exactly. Quote for this one, LSW, "Put the customer at the center of everything you do.” It's true. Many people say it, not everybody does.

Ryan:

Not everybody does it.

Patricia:

Really important. Nope.

Ryan:

I'm reading a book at the moment that was written by a few of the early executives at Amazon and the book's called Working Backwards. And when they want to innovate, and I guess they still do this at Amazon, when they want to innovate, they start with a customer press release, and then they work backwards from there. And I think it's great inversion of kind of how to remain customer centric. And ego, let's talk about ego for a second, Patricia.

Patricia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

There is a difference between having an ego and being confident. We all have an ego on some. But an ego is, whatever I say is right no matter what. Being confident is asking those questions and then asserting when you know what you're talking about, or when you know what you don't know. Leave your ego at the door, people, come on. Just leave it at the door, there's no place for it.

Patricia:

Yeah. There is none, because I mean, then it's just like a battle of egos and who wants that? I'd rather have a battle of wits, a battle of ideas, a battle of questions, but not a battle of egos. Nobody wins that game.

Ryan:

No ego, amigo.

Patricia:

Nobody wins that game.

Ryan:

All set.

Patricia:

No ego, amigo. I love it. I love it, love it, love it. So, taking what you just said, that example about, I think Amazon but they do the reverse, they start with a press release. You know something I was taught at Coke, by one of my mentors. She was the leader of strategic insights for Global Coke, Stephanie Tashman. She said that reverse mentoring was the best. Not the senior person mentoring the younger person. It's the younger person that needs to mentor the senior person. The person that's just out of college. The person that's early on career, because that way together they learn. But if you don't open that door and say to that younger in career person, earlier in career person, "You're mentoring me." They may not feel comfortable enough to tell you what they think or what they need. I love that idea.

Ryan:

Totally. Totally. I love that.

Patricia:

Right? Let's continue with number five. Everybody in your organization has to be consumer centric. This is not an insights thing. Insights does not own the customer. Insights-

Ryan:

No they don't.

Patricia:

... does not have the only voice of the customer. Every single person, when they walk in the door, owns the customer. It's a mistake to do things, thinking you're the only person that's responsible. So if you're insights or if you're not, make sure that you're involving yourself. Don't do things alone. Involve your stakeholders, both inside and outside the company. Trust them to have the right ability. Trust them to bred unique contributions. Trust that their addition to the process is going to help, not hinder. So adding maybe a day to a process because you're getting the most amazingly rich insights from another layer of the company, that's so valuable. What's a day in the grand scheme of things?

So you have to make sure that, yep. It's like, who do you have on the team is what you have to ask yourself. Who have you not asked? What hat do they have on? I remember when I was at Colgate Columbia, many years ago, the supply chain team, the people who were responsible for the factory, where we produce the toothpastes and the soaps, they had an amazing program where they would pick random people, to come look at their plant and say, "Does anything look off to you?" They weren't asking me as an Insights Lead. They're asking me as a human being. That's so smart. It's really cool.

Ryan:

I love that.

Patricia:

Now, speaking of partnerships with your stakeholders, let's go to number six and talk about another partnership. Leveraging your partnerships with your vendors and suppliers. This is a tricky one, and I hope we don't get backlash because not everybody agrees with how you should manage this. Some people are all about privacy, but at the end of the day, these people, these partners, your vendors and your suppliers, they can help you so much. They can be valuable partners on your journey and they can help you learn new things from a different perspective. If you develop a collaborative and sharing relationship with them, of course, understanding the needs for legal and not sharing what you're not supposed to share, but tell them what you need and tell them the problems that you have. They're going to bend over backwards to try to help you. This is not about asking, discounting. This is about sharing the problem so that you can all learn together.

Now, Fernando talked to us about it's a totally transparent, open conversation in his world. It's sitting around the table together with marketing insights and the agency. How can we make this better? Not something that disappears and comes back as a formal process. But he talks about sitting everybody at the table at the same time and getting the answers hashed out there. No holds barred, no black box. I love that.

Ryan:

I do too, and I think, I'll tell you a quick story. So about a month ago, I go to, I'm most involved with our top customers because they're our biggest customers and I learn a lot from them. Anyways, I go to two different, we call them executive business reviews. It's when our teams meet with our customers and we align on goals of what we're going to do. Over the course of two days, a few weeks ago, I went to two of these. I couldn't tell you the difference being more stark and related to your point.

The first one was tense. It was rigid. It was confrontational on both sides. Everybody left demotivated and that was it. Couldn't wait to go do something else. The next day, the senior most person at one of our biggest customers, they sell cheeseburgers and they have golden arches. You can figure out who they are, probably.

Patricia:

I wonder. Nuggets, too?

Ryan:

They sell great nuggets, and I heard their chicken sandwich is really good. Anyways, the senior-most person goes on about a three-minute monologue thanking the Zappi colleagues for the work that they do. Then shares the CEO's vision of where the company is going and then asks for help. What I saw after that meeting was a group of people that would've quite literally run through a brick wall for that customer. Well, above the remit of our relationship with them, and it's because they were treated like a partner.

Now I also know that's a two-way street. You can't expect to be treated like a partner if you act like a vendor. You got to bring thinking and perspective and unique thinking to your customers and challenge their status quo and do what you say you're going to-

Patricia:

No bullshit.

Ryan:

...Yeah. So I personally, I've never worked for a "client." I've always been the "vendor," but I don't sell fucking hotdogs, Patricia, so that phrase kills me. But I get it because there's a lot of vendors who don't bring the heat every day, but it's a two-way street. And so I think this is the really profound insight, and it's no wonder why every single campaign Fernando ships, wins awards and sells chips.

Patricia:

There you go. Now I was with Colgate Global working on personal care and laundry care for a while, and I had the absolute privilege of working with some of the top fragrances suppliers in the world.

The world of fragrance is just an amazing world. Anyway, what I did is respecting all the legals and crossing every T and dotting every I, we were able to sit down, Colgate-Palmolive and the three fragrance houses to share the same problems that we were having. And it was, people still talk about what we accomplished there and nobody thought it was possible. Yes, when they shared their private things there, the other two houses would leave and then come back. We respected everything, but it was one of the most rewarding processes I've ever had in my whole entire career. I still remember it.

Ryan:

That's a great story.

Patricia:

Yeah. Now, last but not least, number seven, respect the process. But, I don't usually use the word but and you know that, don't be a slave to it. What does that mean? Plan so that you can avoid the plan if you need it. It's always good idea to have a process in place. So you've thought about it. You've been mindful. You know where you're supposed to go and what the steps are. Because if you don't have that in place, then when you skip the process or skip a step, you're really messy and you're not doing it mindfully. Your processes should be constantly evolving and therefore enabling the change you have. They shouldn't be stagnant, but they should be mindful.

You try to make a process towards change easy as well. So you not only have processes in general, but you have a process for change as well and you know very well that we're working on all of our playbooks for that. But we have to automate repetitive work wherever it's possible, so that you can create shared value and I leave your brain and your time for the fun stuff. And you have to value progress over perfection. It doesn't have to be like tight, right? Your assets and your company are your information, your products, and your people. But if you don't organize things, then you won't be able to play nice. You won't be able to have time to innovate. 

Ryan:

Yeah, I like the organization and codification because it allows you to learn new things.

Patricia:

Yes.

Ryan:

And when you do something different, you are sort of acknowledging you're changing. But I also think it's too easy to be obsessive over the process and it's the outcome that we seek. I don't care about... Had somebody the other day, a whole story of what they want to do and I, in the nicest way possible, is like tell me when you've done it. Because the process is to enable the end, which is the outcome. And so we run our business at Zappi off of OKRs and I'm increasingly telling people, "What's the customer metric that it actually moves?" Because that's what matters. Everything is-

Patricia:

Exactly.

Ryan:

... to make the customer more successful, which in turn makes the business more successful. But I do love it because if you don't have a plan and you're just winging it.

Patricia:

Exactly.

Ryan:

You're not going to know when you did something right or wrong and how to repeat that motion again, or how to avoid the same mistake or whatever it might be.

Patricia:

Yep, and the owner of the process is not there to put on guardrails or locks or even lanes. The owner of the process is there to make sure the process is still live, and when it needs to be adapted and teaching people, "This is what we've done thus far. If you have anything better, tell me and we'll tweak it." But the owner of the process is not there with the lock and key. They're there to help grow, so I love those.

Those were amazing thoughts. It was an amazing season. We learn so much. I mean, you think I've been around for 25, 30 years in this business and every day we learn more. I love it.

Ryan:

Yeah, I do love this business and I think, I was talking to somebody outside of our industry a couple of weeks ago, and it feels like a big tide is changing.

Patricia:

Yes.

Ryan:

We are moving from analog to digital as a trade. We're connecting what we learned back to what happens. Insights people are elevating. The ones who aren't elevated are finding new places to add value in other parts of the company. It's a really exciting time, I think, to be a part of this industry. And it's funny because about 12 months ago, I was complaining about doing this podcast and I got to tell you, I love doing it. It's super fun.

Patricia:

Me, too. I love it.

Ryan:

So season three's coming up.

Patricia:

Yes.

Ryan:

We're going to bring the heat, my friends. Tell your friends, leave us a review so more people can find out about us. And for those of you who helped nominate us in the podcast award, we really appreciate it because we're like the new podcast on the block, a lot of podcasts. And we're going to continuously try to be the podcast that gives you ideas that you can bring to work the next day. That's the thing that really motivates me. There's a lot of talking shops, a lot of great podcasts, this one's meant to be tangible. If there's people that you know that we need to talk to, we want to hear from them, just hit us up. You can get at us on LinkedIn. You can follow the Inside Insights LinkedIn page. You could even email us at insideinsights@zappistore.com. All this to say, we're not hard to find.

Patricia:

No.

Ryan:

We'll be back in September. We've got some really good conversations, and Patricia and I are excited to run it back for season three.

Patricia:

Yeah. Looking forward to it.

Ryan:

Bye, Patricia.

Patricia:

Thanks, Ryan. Bye, Ryan.

Ryan:

Bye everybody. Thanks for listening.