Posted on January 26, 2025January 27, 2025

Growing your business is no easy task. To help you RTS has hosted a panel of experienced professionals to discuss how your business can grow effectively by aligning your brand, technology, and leadership strategies.

This topic also plays a crucial role in RTS’ approach because we move the conversation out of the server room and into the boardroom to learn as much as we can about a company’s internal structure and operations. Since we manage the very technology that supports our clients’ organizations, it’s vital for us to understand how they operate—who does what, which teams are involved, and how processes interconnect that span through brand, leadership, and technology.

These discussions also allow us to spot opportunities for leveraging technology in the future. Interestingly, even in strong and successful organizations, it’s not unusual to uncover some disconnects during these conversations. Every organization has them. Consistently engaging in this type of deep, collaborative work is essential for addressing those gaps and ensuring long-term success.

Below, we’ve distilled our panel’s conversation into a series of questions and answers to provide key insights and actionable advice on how to scale your business through leadership, brand, and technology.

How should your business approach customer journey from brand, leadership, and technology perspectives to grow?

Katie Turner: The customer journey encompasses every interaction a customer has with your brand, from an email with a sales rep to a call with customer service, or even handling a return or complaint. Each touchpoint reflects your company’s identity and values. It’s crucial to manage these interactions to ensure the narrative customers share about your brand is positive.

Robert Stoneking: From a leadership perspective, it’s vital to ensure these touchpoints are consistent and aligned with your strategic goals, supporting the teams as they execute them.

PJ Sawchuk: Growing your business from a technology standpoint, at Epic Solutions Partners we focus on CRM and ERP systems to support the customer journey. Our goal is to make the transition from prospect to customer, and eventually to brand evangelist, as seamless as possible. We implement systems to track data points throughout the journey, ensuring no critical information is lost. For instance, if a customer has specific billing preferences noted in a letter of engagement, it’s essential that this information is carried through to the invoicing stage to support the team effectively.

Why is it important to think about the customer journey from a whole business perspective?

Katie Turner: Viewing the customer journey from a holistic business perspective means recognizing it’s not just about the customer—it’s also about leadership. Great leaders understand that how you treat employees directly influences how they treat customers. If employees don’t feel empowered, they can’t empower customers. Similarly, if you promise fast service but your backend systems are slow, employees can’t deliver on that promise. It’s essential to define your brand and the customer experience you want to offer, then ensure all business systems support that vision, embedding it throughout the organization.

Robert Stoneking: Growing your business successfully means your leadership must align everything with the customer experience continuum.

PJ Sawchuk: An organization is like a living entity, constantly evolving. As you are growing your business and increasing efficiency, it’s crucial to maintain balance across all processes and systems. This balance is why we’re excited about this webinar, as it brings together diverse perspectives on achieving it.

Katie Turner: In a small company, it’s easy to control the customer experience with a tight-knit leadership team. However, as you grow, it’s easy to lose touch. I’ve seen organizations assume everyone will learn by osmosis, without systems to teach customer treatment, brand meaning, or values. This oversight can hinder scaling and brand recognition.

What are the key areas businesses should focus on to attract customer that are in the awareness stage of the buyer journey?

Bob Stoneking: Effective business growth requires strong leadership that aligns everyone with the company’s goals and purpose. This alignment should be evident early in customer interactions, ensuring that everyone understands and communicates the business’s value and objectives clearly. Leadership sets the standard, enabling effective engagement from the start.

PJ Sawchuk: From a technology standpoint, it’s crucial to capture data points to identify where you achieve the best outcomes and consistently deliver quality services or products. Once leadership establishes these criteria, technology can help track and enhance delivery, supporting scalable growth.

Katie Turner: Defining a clear “North Star” metric is essential for guiding efforts. However, the impact of AI on marketing and brand building cannot be ignored. AI has democratized content creation, making it easy to produce ineffective marketing. Brands must now focus on offering unique perspectives and new insights to stand out, as AI already summarizes common answers. AI is like an eager personal assistant that can be incredibly powerful and useful. However, without proper control, expertise, and guidance, it can quickly lead to negative outcomes. The use of AI also changes how consumers search for and find information about your business, affecting brand strategies significantly.

What are some threats and opportunities that may arise from using AI? 

Robert Stoneking: Businesses must differentiate meaningfully, especially as AI saturates messaging. It’s crucial to align with core values and the desired customer experience to avoid becoming irrelevant.

PJ Sawchuk: Currently, all our clients are eager to explore AI and how to start integrating it into their operations. There are many accessible ways to do this. For instance, during my four site visits last week, I used ChatGPT to input the addresses and create an optimized route. This is a straightforward way to enhance efficiency. This example illustrates how AI can be leveraged to improve performance while maintaining control over outcomes, ultimately enhancing effectiveness.

Katie Turner: You can’t optimize a process without fully understanding it. It’s essential to map out your customer journey, identifying all touchpoints and interactions. Determine where barriers and friction points exist, and assess where AI can effectively alleviate these issues. Without this foundational understanding, implementing AI may simply accelerate poor outcomes. To truly integrate AI in a way that enhances efficiency and supports growth, you must first deeply understand the customer journey and strategically incorporate AI to address specific needs.

How are leadership, brand, and technology interconnected at the consideration phase of the customer journey?

Robert Stoneking: Many businesses focus heavily on task and workflow training but often overlook the importance of customer experience training. With customers more informed than ever, it’s crucial to understand their needs to make impactful connections and growing your business. Leadership plays a vital role in aligning the organization to effectively engage with customers.

Katie Turner: From a marketing perspective, it’s a mistake to think marketing ends once a lead is generated. Not all leads are ready to buy immediately; nurturing them through the consideration phase is essential. This involves creating consistent, value-aligned content to guide them, as decisions are often influenced by emotional and personal alignments, not just price or features.

PJ Sawchuk: Technology can support nurturing by identifying ideal clients and tracking touchpoints. Automated systems are necessary for large organizations to manage extensive customer bases, using journey logic to guide prospects through the consideration process.

Katie Turner: Analyzing data from touchpoints helps you identify where leads drop off, allowing for targeted messaging and training to address these issues for growing your business.

How should your business approach awareness and consideration stages differently depending on your size?

Robert Stoneking:  Regardless of your business’s size or stage, it’s essential to analyze your successes. Understand why customers choose you and how they became customers. This insight allows you to craft messages that attract similar clients. Many companies fail to thoroughly examine their current successes.

PJ Sawchuk: Establishing a feedback loop is simple. You can create a survey or directly engage with customers by phone to gather insights.

Katie Turner: If you’re struggling to keep customers engaged long-term, consider retracing the customer journey to identify areas for improvement, possibly starting with the awareness phase. Ask yourself if you’re setting the right expectations. Evaluate whether your early messaging effectively sets the stage for future interactions to keep your potential customers engaged in the buying process.

What similarities or differences exist between for-profit and nonprofit customer journeys?

Robert Stoneking: A key similarity across sectors is the need to align everything with the mission and end goals. Nonprofits, however, often have more opportunities to engage deeply with their audience, fostering relationship-level discussions that differ from typical sales processes. This allows for unique value creation early on, which can be systematically leveraged.

PJ Sawchuk: In the nonprofit sector, maintaining a personal touch is crucial, so we advise against automating processes that might diminish this warmth. Nonprofits often have diverse service offerings and funding sources, such as grants and donations, requiring sophisticated systems to manage and attribute these effectively.

Katie Turner: For nonprofits, a consistent brand message at every touchpoint is vital, especially when cultivating long-term donor relationships. It’s important to communicate the impact donors make and use each interaction to strengthen these relationships. The customer journey for donors differs from that for service groups, so it’s essential to manage these distinct paths while integrating them to enhance storytelling and mission alignment.

What makes the decision stage so critical, and what should your business focus on to close the deal?

PJ Sawchuk: Simplify the process to eliminate friction in the customer journey. Tools like DocuSign, PandaDocs, or Zoho can expedite contract execution and seamlessly integrate into existing workflows or tech stacks.

Katie Turner: It’s crucial to manage handoffs carefully. When marketing or business development teams pass leads to sales, poor communication can cause deals to fall apart. Similarly, if onboarding teams aren’t informed of agreements, it leads to customer frustration. Aligning teams across the entire sales process, from lead generation to client management, is essential.

Robert Stoneking: Absolutely, simplifying processes is a leadership responsibility. Leadership should orient the entire business, not just individual departments, towards a sales-focused approach to effectively scale.

Katie Turner: Internally, aligning KPIs or OKRs across teams is vital. Often, marketing, sales, and operations have conflicting goals, which can hinder growth. Ensuring these goals are harmonized is critical as the company expands.

Robert Stoneking: Joint development of KPIs can address this issue effectively.

PJ Sawchuk: It’s important for all stakeholders to have visibility into these metrics. Even if a KPI seems irrelevant to one group, it may impact them eventually. Transparency and regular communication through dashboards or meetings ensure everyone is aligned and informed.

How can your business make the decision-making process feel less transactional?

Robert Stoneking: Continuously ask how you can better serve your customers and document these insights. Train everyone who interacts with customers to focus on this question. This approach shifts the focus from transactions to building relationships.

Katie Turner: A strong onboarding process is crucial. While signing a document is inherently transactional, you can immediately outline the next steps and work plan to demonstrate value. This initial engagement sets the tone for the entire relationship, enhancing retention by showing immediate returns on their investment. Consider what first steps can provide value and align with your brand and philosophy.

PJ Sawchuk: Make the experience feel personal and less transactional. For example, CarMax celebrates car purchases with photos, creating a memorable moment. Technology, like CRM systems, can help track customer preferences, enabling personalized interactions that enhance their experience.

Katie Turner: It doesn’t have to be complicated. Many companies send immediate follow-up emails with tips on maximizing product value. This applies to any business, whether it’s software or catering. Consider how your product or service integrates with the customer’s broader needs and provide guidance to maximize its value.

Robert Stoneking: The key is to understand and deliver value on the customer’s terms, not just your business’s. Consistently communicate how you add value that matters to them, which positively influences retention.

Why is customer retention pivotal for growing your business? And how can you build processes to support it?

Katie Turner: It’s widely known that acquiring a new customer is five times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Maintaining long-term relationships increases the lifetime value of your customers, which is a straightforward way to boost revenue—though “straightforward” might be an understatement. As customer needs evolve, new challenges and opportunities arise after solving their initial problem. This is where you can add value by upselling or cross-selling additional solutions, or by partnering with other organizations to meet their needs. The goal is to be a true partner, focusing on what the customer needs rather than just your own profit. This customer-centric approach is key to driving retention.

Robert Stoneking: My experience with SaaS companies has shown that making your platform indispensable by introducing new features keeps customers engaged. This principle applies to any business: understand what customers want to achieve next and help them do it with your services. Companies that scale successfully are adept at identifying these needs and executing practical strategies to meet them.

Katie Turner: Scaling often begins with achieving product-market fit, where you solve a specific problem for a defined audience. As you grow, you aim for platform-market fit by offering diverse solutions and expanding product lines. Listening to customers and understanding their evolving needs is crucial for this expansion.

PJ Sawchuk: This is where the real test begins. Up to now, you’ve convinced customers of your product or service’s value. If you fail to deliver, retention suffers, and your organization becomes unbalanced. Scaling requires maintaining this balance. If customers start leaving, even the best sales team can’t compensate. You must fulfill your promises, and the systems you choose to support this depend on your business model. There are many tools available to help you succeed.

Key takeaways for growing your business through brand, technology, and leadership

• Prioritize Brand Consistency: Understand the essence of your brand and ensure it aligns across teams, customer touchpoints, and marketing strategies.
• Leverage Existing Technology: Before investing in new platforms, evaluate what you already use and ensure it aligns with your goals and processes. Even basic tools can achieve impactful results.
• Focus on Leadership: Effective leadership ensures alignment, removes process friction, and fosters collaboration across departments.
• Customer-Centric Thinking Is Critical: Listen to your customers and act on their evolving needs. Their feedback is your best strategy for improving offerings and retention.
• Retention Drives Revenue: Keep promises, deliver consistent value, and nurture long-term relationships to build sustainable growth.

Growing your business doesn’t happen by accident—it requires clarity, consistency, and a commitment to holistic growth. By aligning your brand, technology, and leadership, your business can achieve sustainable success in 2025 and beyond.  

About Our Speakers

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Katie Turner, President, Kate Turner Marketing

katie@kateturnermarketing.com

Katie Turner is a seasoned brand and marketing strategist, with over 20 years of experience, leading marketing for major organizations like the American Red Cross and Howard Community College. Katie has partnered with startups, nonprofits, and small businesses across a variety of sectors to craft innovative strategies that drive growth and deepen customer engagement known for bridging analytical rigor with creative storytelling. She empowers organizations to align their marketing efforts with their goals and values, building sustainable success through thoughtful results driven strategies.

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PJ Sawchuk, Partner, Epic Solutions Partners

pj.sawchuk@epicsolution.co

PJ has close to 20 years of diverse technology, leadership experience, regularly acting as a fractional CIO for organizations of all types. PJ helps assess, identify, and implement technologies to make them better. As a people centric technologist, he also builds and nurtures the team’s task with ensuring systems support the needs of organizations. Prior to consulting, PJ was in leadership roles in legal and with a CRM software vendor.

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Bob Stoneking, Principal, Pachydermos LLC

bob@pachydermos.com

Bob Stoneking, has packaged 30 years of doing the work as a technology executive into actionable and relatable frameworks that swiftly align teams on how to make incremental progress through his work. With Pachydermos he specializes in leadership, strategy and execution, assistance for mission focused businesses by creating customer success operations and sales discussions, that matter.