Podcast

CX Education 11: How to look beyond the competition with Bill Eveleth from GoLive

Join Bill Eveleth and Sunny Dhami as they discuss the importance of staying ahead of the competition and the benefits of creating a high-quality customer experience.

How to look beyond the competition with Bill Eveleth from GoLive
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About this episode

There’s nothing like healthy competition. And monitoring the way your competitors do business and approach their customers can make you a stronger player.

But if you want to stay on top of the game, sometimes you need to look beyond your competition. In this episode of CX Education, our host Sunny Dhami welcomes Bill Eveleth, the COO/CFO of GoLive. They talk about the importance of staying ahead of the competition, why text messaging is still an effective communication channel and the benefits of creating a high-quality customer experience.

Image for Bill Eveleth, COO/CFO | GoLive

Guest Speaker

Bill Eveleth, COO/CFO | GoLive

Bill has owned and operated a business consulting company, The Fractional CFO, since 2004. The company provides part-time CFO services including strategic planning, budgeting, vender, banking and customer support, financial reporting and analysis and a host of others.

Prior to the Fractional CFO, Bill was a corporate SVP of Finance with a $22 billion company, he led a team of over 500 professional employees. He and his family lived in Belgium for two years where Bill was on assignment with AT&T.

He is the author of four books: one on goal setting and attainment, two on operations management and the last a book of stories and life lessons.

Bill has taught college since 2008. His classes have included: Introduction to Business, Ethics, Project Management, Operations Management and others. He has taught for The University of Arkansas since 2011, at the graduate level, in their Master of Science in Operations Management program.

Bill’s education includes a BBA and an MBA both from the University of North Texas.

Image for Sunny Dhami, VP Product Marketing | Sinch

Host

Sunny Dhami, VP Product Marketing | Sinch

Sunny Dhami is a product marketing leader with 12+ years’ experience in Marketing and Product Marketing roles across the CPaaS, SaaS, communications, and technology industries. In this time, he has held responsibilities within global product marketing functions and has been fortunate enough to have worked in high-growth organisations like Sinch and RingCentral, where he has supported triple digit revenue growth.

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Key insights

Having competition is a natural part of every business – it can help you stay on top of the game while keeping customers happy. But sometimes, you need to go beyond the competition to win in business. Bill explains, “If you’re going to really win in business, you’ve got to be out front. You’ve got to be on the leading edge of where you want to take your business, and that’s what I do as COO of GoLive; we really spend a lot of time thinking about where are the blue oceans, where are the fields that people haven’t gone to yet, and that’s where we really want to compete. If you jump into the competitive mass and you try to do anything there, you can just get gobbled up in marketing expenses. So, we focus on the future and where we want to take the business.”

Despite what some people think, text messaging is still one of the best ways to reach customers and prospects. Bill explains, “One of the things we really like about text messaging is that 90% of the messages received are read within five minutes. Text messaging, we see as a very efficient and effective form of communication, whether it’s in marketing or whether it’s in employee communication or patient communication.”

o build a long-standing relationship with customers, you need to put them first – a high-quality customer experience can make all the difference in business. Bill says, “If somebody comes to me and says, ‘Okay, I have a situation, and I want to know if you have a solution,’ then yeah, absolutely. You can say, ‘Well, I hear what you’re saying, and we have a product that I think will solve this problem for you.’ So, it’s a little different when you’re selling a product or a service than when you’re selling consulting services. It’s okay to have the answer being your product, but you want to understand what their needs are first. Put your prospect’s needs or your customer’s needs before you make recommendations to them.”

Episode highlights

Personal growth is vital

“When I was early on in my career, I worked for CitiCorp, and I worked for AT&T. Combined, there were about 12 years there, and I would tell people I knew that I would never stay in a job for more than six months if I didn’t feel I was learning something. One of my neighbors used to say, ‘Bill, you can’t hold a job, can you?’ Even though I worked for the same company for five years, he knew I was always switching from one department to another. So, I think personal growth and development — any way you can get it — is critically important.”

Management is about facing the harsh truth

“One of the things I’ll say is the biggest problem I see with management and managers is that they don’t manage. And what do I mean by that? Part of management is facing tough facts. Part of management occasionally is holding up a mirror and telling people who don’t like to hear that they don’t have any clothes on, that they don’t have any clothes on there — the emperor without any clothes. We need to point out people’s strengths as well as their weaknesses, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with that.”

Security comes first

“We’ve gone through the efforts and spent the money, and we continue to go through the efforts and spend the money. It’s not like one and done. It’s continually being tested there. So, we see that as a cornerstone to our success that we really are able to convince our customers that their data is fully secure in the GoLive system. So, we pride ourselves on that as a unique selling proposition for GoLive versus the competition.”
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