Everything Begins and Ends with the Customer: Interview with John Keister, CEO of Mixmode
I recently went one on one with John Keister. John is the CEO of MixMode and the co-founder of Marchex.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
John: Like most people that have been in business for 20 years or so, I’ve seen my fair share of challenges and setbacks. But I would share one specific challenging experience that I hope other leaders and CEOs will find helpful. When I joined MixMode almost five years ago, I entered a new industry. Even though I was comfortable managing things like sales, marketing, and general operations — cybersecurity was new for me. Therefore I needed a practical way to understand our customers and understand their pain points. And I needed to do it fast. I’ll be blunt. There was no shortcut. I took part in hundreds and hundreds of conversations with customers. (And hundreds.) All in the first 6-12 months. Luckily we saw a few concrete themes emerge after that many conversations. Themes that informed our product direction and business strategy. More importantly, these themes gave our whole team a lot of confidence. That’s because we knew that our strategy and product direction were originating from customer needs and pain points. And it wasn't just about our product. It was about learning how customers think about and solve problems in Cybersecurity and what their goals were over the next few years. I’m a great believer that value in your business flows from your customer’s problem. What are the things that are causing them the most pain? If you start every day thinking about your customer’s problem, you’ll do a better job defining how your product can be uniquely positioned to deliver value.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
John: This has changed for the better in recent years. But I still believe far too few leaders think about culture. Not early enough in the company’s lifecycle, anyway. One of the pitfalls I've seen over the course of working with different companies, whether as an operator or advisor, is that many companies reach that point where they need to hire rapidly – and they scale the team quickly without putting enough care and attention into each new hire’s culture fit. It’s hard, especially if you've got capital and you're expected to grow quickly. You're expected to hire quickly. And for many venture-backed companies, you've effectively got a quota on how many people you need to hire. When it’s not happening fast enough, there’s a temptation to cut corners. “This person has a great resume and they've accomplished XYZ in their career — let's hire them.” It’s a balance, but you simply must think about culture even when you're growing. You have to think about how everyone is going to fit and work well together. Whether an individual will be a magnet for future hires. If this person is a manager, will people want to work for them? And that’s not easy because it slows your process down when you're not just hiring a resume. I know, for example, that the next 50 or 100 people we hire at MixMode are going to set the stage for how successful we are three or four years from now. It’s that simple.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
John: To build on what we have been discussing, the culture fit comes first. Is this someone that we want to work with every day? Then I look for the ability to communicate clearly and to prioritize. There's only so much we can get done in a given month. And I find strong leaders accept and use this to their advantage. Prioritizing well means you’re asking your team to focus on fewer things. Fewer things makes things simple for the team. And this allows the leader to communicate goals very clearly. And generally speaking, the more clearly leaders communicate, the better the team performs. So whether you're a startup or you're an emerging growth company or you're a publicly-traded company, it’s almost impossible to overdo it on prioritizing communicating well. One other key thing I look for in strong leaders is whether they empower everybody in the organization to bring great ideas and to execute those ideas. In my role, I want my team to poke holes in my ideas. I want them to bring data and tell me where I'm wrong. In fact, I often tell folks on my team how I reserve the right to bring up bad ideas and to be wrong. We want everyone to feel good about bringing good or bad ideas forward. As long as they can bring data to support an idea, we will look at it.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
John: All of us, early in our career, we come up in a given category. Maybe it’s marketing, or we cut our teeth in sales, engineering, client success, whatever it might be. Few people do it but my best advice is to think about how to expand your skill set and your experience, even if it means moving laterally a little bit. That's a very hard thing for a lot of people to do. After all, they’re successful already because of what they did in one category to get to this point. And a lot of individuals come to me wanting to become a C-level exec one day or start their own company. That’s great. You've got a lot of deep experience in this one area of an organization. But let’s say you are a great product person and you've never sold anything. What about going and being a sales or business development for a year? Or if you've been an engineer, what if you go join the marketing team for one year? And usually, in those cases, people come back to me later and say it was the smartest thing they ever did. Even though it was painful and it felt like taking a step back or they didn’t have as much of a leadership position. They still learned things that got them out of their comfort zone. They developed an appreciation for people in different parts of the organization and now understand how hard it is to oversee multiple different categories of an organization at the same time.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
John:
The best cure if you’re having a bad day is to talk to or help a customer (or a member of the public).
Dedicate time to the least-experienced people in your organization.
Make time for family, friends, and exercise.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading and managing teams?
John: Everything begins and ends with the customer — no matter what category you're in. In fact, the one and only PURPOSE of a business is to serve customers. Everyone has heard this idea of customer focus, of course. But it is amazing how many companies and executives think they are smarter than the customer. They sit in a room and decide what will be best for the customer…without talking to a single customer. In my view, Steve Jobs is the only one who has ever seen 10 years ahead of the customer need. I am no Steve Jobs, so we tend to talk to customers a lot and get their feedback. When there's no customer data, that generally leads to a lot of pain and a lot of failure. So one of the key pieces of advice I would share is this: Anyone can bring an idea to the table. But you better have customer data to back it up. This approach should be consistent across every group in the company. It's not just the product team's job to think about customer data. It's also the sales team's job to think about that. Marketing, engineering, everyone. One way that we work to get customer data into every group is to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to talk to our clients. So I’ve intentionally brought to MixMode an initiative to give our engineers opportunities to be on the phone with customers as much as possible. It’s amazing the ideas you get from smart engineers when they get a chance to hear the customer in a first-hand conversation.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing and branding?
John: I’ve been around a lot of really skilled sellers and brilliant marketers. And unfortunately, I can’t tell you the key is outworking everybody. Or go buy Facebook ads or sponsor some newsletter. The truth is you need to try all sorts of things to find what works for your organization and market. But in working with a lot of companies, I will share an observation. The sales and marketing teams who do best are the ones who make it fun for the customer. I learned this from one of my mentors. And it applies especially to enterprise sales. People buy from people they like. It’s really that simple. And it’s easy to like people who are having fun, who can switch gears and talk about lots of interesting topics, not just technology. We talk about that a lot in our sales meetings. We want to be a meeting that our customers look forward to, and we want to build a relationship where we can, over time, become a trusted advisor.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
John: So one time a mentor of mine handed me a book. And there were a bunch of management rules inside. And just kind of guidelines, things to think about. But one of them that just stuck with me, maybe because it's so simple, is the idea of drawing out a pie chart of your time. Literally draw what you spend time on in a given week and a given month. And how much. And it's really helped me, especially earlier in my career when I was first building high-growth companies. It's not just about looking at your pie chart and saying, “why am I spending so much of my time doing X?” Yes, that's part of it. But to me, in a high-growth company, the other real huge benefit is you'll look at that pie chart and clearly see what areas you need to hire in and get help. For example, if I'm spending half my time on hiring, maybe I need a couple more recruiters or some more HR assets to help us build a functional group. That way I can spend more time on sales and strategy, or being with customers or whatever else it is you need to balance. It's fascinating how even though it's a simple thing, when I've asked people in my org to draw their pie chart of time, it's hard for them! It's something where they initially say, “I know how I spend my time.” And so then I’ll ask, “Okay, well, how do you spend it?” And then they pause for a second. Then they might admit, “Alright, well, maybe I do need to do the pie chart.” The point is there's always a really good conversation that comes out of it. Because if people are being honest, they always learn something about themselves. They think about where they should be allocating time, how they can hire, how they can build their org out. It's as simple as it sounds. And yet it's something most of us don't take time to think about very often.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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