“From an EX/CX perspective, what some of our cutting edge clients are starting to see is that any changes that occur even on the EX side, actually have an impact on the CX side, around retention, around levels of engagement.”

On this week's episode of Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos, our guest will be Manish Goel, the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of TrustSphere. In the fields of Relationship Analytics and Organizational Network Analysis, TrustSphere is the company that has established itself as the undisputed market leader. They assist companies in capitalizing on one of their most precious assets - the collective relationship network. Throughout today’s episode, we dive into relationship analytics and how businesses can utlilize it to improve their growth.

[01:06] Background – Manish outlines his journey and the factors that distinguished his profession and led to TrustSphere. 

[02:18] TrustSphere - Manish talks about his company and what they do for clients.

[05:59] Use cases - Manish describes the primary use cases that he observes many of his clients considering for his company's work.

[07:27] Inclusiveness – Manish explains how he considers gauging inclusion in an organization by examining details about the individuals. 

[10:19] Leadership Network – Manish discusses observations he has made that he deems vital in the leadership network. 

[14:36] CX – Manish illustrates how companies can enhance the customer experience through relational analytics. 

[19:04] Business Outcomes – Manish demonstrates how firms may boost their revenue and top-line growth by utilizing relational analytics.

[21:09] The Future – Manish discusses the direction he believes his work will take over the next three to five years and the aspects of his job that excite him the most.

[23:32] Predictions - As the capability of relationship analytics improves, Manish mentions what else he thinks may be quite intriguing in terms of predictive aspect. 

[25:33] Inspiration – Manish describes his business role models and sources of inspiration.

Resources:

Connect with Manish:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/manishgoelts 

Website: trustsphere.com/

Email: manishgoel@trustsphere.com

Manish Goel on Organizational Network & Relationship Analytics

Welcome to be customer led where we'll explore, help leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the actions and behaviors, employees, and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host bill stagos.

And I have known each other for a little while, almost two years now. Right. Manish and, one, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you on. I'm really excited to have you. Question and Manish is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. And the work that he's doing is so cool. I can't wait to talk about it.

And this is the type of work that you guys are gonna listen to this and say, we really need this in our company if we're not doing it today. So Manish, I ask every guest, tell us about your journey, what differentiated things in your career and led to trust.

Look, my, my journey, my career journey is an interesting one. It's it started out in consulting, went through to venture capital and I became effectively the, almost what I call the, accidental CEO of trust. Okay. I've had the opportunity of sort of working right around the world. So traveling quite a lot and, working with different cultures.

So for me, the, the journey has been really, really interesting, but lots of people, lots of places and lots of different experiences all coming together, in, all coming together to, to help us really understand or help me understand how to bring this important piece of technology around relationship analytics out to market.

I mean, there's really a lot of different avenues. So talk to us a little bit about the, the company and, and what you guys are doing with.

So at a really high level, if you think about it, the, the whole thing, it's not what, it's who, mm-hmm, , we think it's not only what but also who, that's really important, to under, for, for employee success and for organizational. To a large extent.

What we are doing is understanding from the digital communication flows that exist in an organization who's connected to who, how well they're connected, what that connectivity looks like, both within the organization and outside the organization. I mentioned earlier on that, my, I, I traveled a lot in my life.

If you think about this and at that most macro level, you think about when you're flying at 30,000 feet, you can look down on, on you look down as you're flying, you can see the, the, the, you look at the roads and the rivers and see how plots of land. Yeah. The plots of land, how different towns, how different cities and how metros are all.

Connected. That's really what we are doing for an enterprise. So if you think about this at the highest level, we're understanding the digital flows of communication. We're not analyzing content, we're not analyzing subject lines. We're just looking at the flows of con the flows of communication. But using that to understand effectively a, a digital MRI, if you will, or an enterprise MRI of an organization and the networks that exist.

[00:04:28] Manish Goel: I think particularly since COVID what's happened is I think the digital signals have become that much richer. I mean, mm-hmm, if you look at this, basically everything we do these days is on a digital platform of some sort mm-hmm at our end, being able to the richness of the, the telemetry that we have access to now, mm-hmm has allowed us to really start to transform the way that we are bringing our insights back to.

But our journey, we started the security. It's funny enough. We started the security space in the network security space, and we were trying to protect, we were helping organizations protect their, their S what we realized early on was actually the, the networks that we were, that we were protecting. We were building networks of trust, if you will.

So trusted networks, but those trusted networks could be used to help change the way sales teams. deal teams work as well as the way, as well as being able to understand from an employee experience perspective, how do you actually make, help individuals and teams become smarter the way they collaborate?

So we've watched a journey over the last number of years. The other thing I will say is, I mean, I think that, from a privacy and an ethics perspective, it's been, it's become. There's an increasing level of awareness around the, the value of the data streams, but also the responsibility that comes with how you actually, first of all, use or analyze these data streams mm-hmm , but then protect and secure the data streams.

I mean, it's, it's very rich source of

[00:06:02] Manish Goel: Yeah. I mean, our, our use cases break into two.

They, they break into, CXR ended work and E EXR ended work. So we're looking at both the internal and the external networks from an internal network perspective. We're looking at things like D diversity and inclusion. Diversity is relatively easy to measure inclusiveness or inclusion. Much more difficult to measure mm-hmm networks give you a very interesting lens on inclusion.

we're looking at leadership we've been doing, working with, with a large pharmaceutical company, specifically looking at how leadership networks at correlate to performance. So leaders performance is very strong correlation with cross functional collaboration and, leadership and performance. organizationally also looking at transformation.

[00:06:53] Bill Staikos: let's talk about the Le let's just talk about those for, for a minute or two. So maybe we start with.

Your point around diversity is easy to measure. Inclusion is more difficult to measure. So I'm a late forties, white male. I'm about as least diverse as you could possibly get. Right. How do you start to measure inclusiveness or think about measuring inclusiveness in an organization? If you were looking at maybe my data or even this Interac.

There's a number of, there's a variety of different metrics that we can give you around veto centrality and the rest, which I won't geek out on right now. but there's ways of there's ways of measuring someone's, both levels of influence that they have in the organization. Mm-hmm, where they sit within the graph.

And if you're starting to see populations where. A lot of let's call it, the underrepresented minorities happen to be the periphery, the graph yet. and yet the, the, the main population happens to be at the center of the graph. You recognize that formal power and informal power yeah.

Are dispersed. Right. And we've done a lot of work specifically around promotability and we looked at female promotability in particular. And what we found that is that female promotability is highly correlated to upper hierarchy relationships. And so being able. To be being able to measure that and make it visceral for individuals to better understand where the gaps are in their network structures, if you will, is a very important way of being able to coach, in our cases being coaching females, mm-hmm , but underrepresented minorities from being able to, to get promoted and become more represented.

[00:08:55] Manish Goel: and that's it. I think, everyone knows people's, everyone knows they have a network and folks have networks and how connected they are, but a lot of that's intuitive and it's, it's sort of instinctive by being able to have the data that shows this and it shows it empirically it's like a Fitbit in some ways what it does by measuring that it allows different people to have a common language around what that connectivity looks like.

But secondly, measure that on a real time basis or at least measure. Periodically to see whether there's changes in those network structures and how they actually correlate to other outcome variables. Yeah. Like promotability or performance or, or anything else. Yeah.

That you really know, is it working or not?

[00:09:46] Bill Staikos: and the leadership piece is interesting and. By the way for our listeners, man. And I have geeked out in this stuff more than a couple of times, and I just, I always come away learning so much more when we, when we chat ish, talk to us about the leadership network component, not only internally, but also maybe externally too.

What things have you seen there? Like what's really important.

The, the more the, from a performance perspective, the greater their performance. Generally. Can I, can I cut that and St do that one again? Can we start? Yeah, let's go

Do you mind asking

[00:10:42] Bill Staikos: Just as a prompt? Yeah, sure. We'll go back and ask. So Manish, let's talk about the leadership component and. what have you found there? That's really interesting in terms of size of network or maybe even speed of growth. I mean, velocity, if you're new in an organization, I mean, what, what kind of interesting stuff are you uncovering?

From a leadership perspective. What we've also found is that leaders with stronger networks and more diverse networks and broader networks, stronger networks and more diverse networks, tend to outperform in particular around cross functional collaboration. And so,

So let's just say I'm a new leader at a company I just joined, Medallia nine, 10 months ago. Are you delivering data up front? So. When a new leader comes in, they can create the right onboarding. Here are sort of the power circles within the business. Make sure that new leaders are meeting with these people.

And. Engaging or like, or, or how, how do you guys approach those, those recommendations?

What we can start to see is where you are making levels where the new hire is actually, connecting and where they're not connecting. And that allows you to periodically and empirically say, If you're not connecting, we need to put some more effort into connecting you to those people. If you're getting level of entrenchment in, if you're, if you're happy to be in sales and you wanna, you're supposed to be building relationships in finance.

If you're not building those relationships in finance, then your manager or your, or someone who's working with, you can start to make those introductions to ensure that you've got that kind connectivity into those different departments, those pathways and building those pathways is incredibly important.

Impact then I've I tried to do that at every organization and maintain those relationships and keep those, obviously you wanna, you can't meet with everybody all the time, but at least you can start to identify who are the ones that are gonna be critical to my success purely from, they are sort of the power brokers in the organization.

Others, these are meet folks from be critical to my success, cuz I need them to, hit my objective, et cetera, but really defining that kind of stakeholder. And I love the data, the data backing up,that kind of philosophy and that thinking, what are some of the more sort of cutting edge, or even further out there on the curve or the fringe you mentioned, you, you had CX and ex sort of focus.

Can you talk to me maybe a little bit about, like, how do you drive CX or customer experience? With organizational or relationship analytics. Talk us a little bit about that,

If you about this of a B2B sales organization, example. What we typically see in an organization. If you look at the CRM is you see an individual one individual, who's probably the relationship manager who's dealing with the, with the client, right? So what you're seeing is that's the connectivity point in reality, actually, there's a hu there's a number of people who are hidden within the organization.

The selling organization that are involved with this particular client. And on the client side, there's a number of people who are the influencers or part of that buyer network, who other, who probably don't necessarily appear in either in the CR or don't appear. it's very difficult to see who they are from an ex CX perspective, but some of our more cutting edge clients are starting to see is that any changes that occur even on the ex side, actually have an impact on the CX side, around retention, around levels of engagement.

So working with a large bank and what they found. When, when the relationship manager, was looking at leaving or potentially leaving, that would, first of all, that would have a big impact from a churn perspective on their customers. But what got really interesting was you could start to see changes in their network behaviors internally, which gave you an indication that they were potentially looking at leaving.

What that allowed the,allowed the leaders to do is make sure that there wasn't any gaps or, vulnerabilities when it came to being able to, to have coverage over the customer accounts, such that you could actually bring the right people in to take over the accounts, or at least protect the customer experience.

If that particular RM was going to lead.

Are you seeing, Hey, Bill's now emailing these folks in a different way or the, the distribution of connection, is different

Mm-hmm and they tend to communicate with the same people in the same sort at that same level of cadence. When you start to see changes in that cadence, you start to see indications and in itself it's not definitive or it's not deterministic, but when added to other signals, it becomes an incredibly powerful, way of being able to

And how are you deliver? And man, how is TRUSTe delivering this level of intelligence? Is it? And I, and, and forgive me for not knowing this, I'm not sure if we ever talked about this, but is it platform driven? Are you just delivering the analytics and sort of reporting or like, how does that work with you guys?

So for example, if you look at a CRM system like sugar, CRM, or Salesforce, we've embedded our analytics into a CRM. And what that means is we become almost contextual data that sits on top of an account record or an in, contact record. So we can start to, add from the communication. Back into a contextual frame, same thing with HCM systems with.

So we're working with a number of HCM systems where we're taking our med, the school O a scores and metrics and bringing them back into an HCM frame. So combining it with other employee attributes and records, which gives you a census as to what someone's we, we like to describe this in.

Interestingly enough is, how everyone talks about IQ and EQ. The metrics that Prosper's building out is what we call RQ. It's the relationship quo. And it's the level of the network structures. It's the activity levels on those networks, the breadth, the strength, and the level of influence as well as the diversity of

Very cool. And just for, for folks who may not, HCM as human capital management systems, like a Workday or something like that, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Let's talk about business outcomes that you're seeing with this work, like real, whether that's improved revenue. Retention. We just talked about, are you using this to, to improve maybe revenue and top line growth for organizations or are some using it that.

And the biggest problem with sales teams is sales sales people don't like putting data into the CRM. They don't

[00:18:36] Manish Goel: We capture that benignly and passively and bring those contacts back in. So if they, if a salesperson then leaves you, at least the relationship, there's a map of that relationship in a record of that relationship in the CRM system.

So tactically that's one. What, from an onboarding perspective, we worked with a large SAS company and what they found was they could actually accelerate time to productivity or time to effectiveness contribution by about 70% so they could reduce, reduce it by 70% by giving it was around the, around the onboarding, use case that we were talking about earlier.

If you give someone a map of key relationships that they need to build from day one, it means that they're not guessing and not having to work that out themselves. They know where to go and they can start to be more effective at driving there so they could, what would typically take three months for a new sales rep, to come up to speak could be reduced to less than a month.

Which was really powerful.

[00:19:33] Manish Goel: sales. Absolutely. And again, it's an incredibly simple, but very powerful way of empowering the individual. And not just that, it means that you tend to retain them longer as well.

Now I'm gonna ask you to really geek out for a minute. Manish

[00:19:54] Bill Staikos: I am really curious to, to hear from you where you think this work is going over the next, let's say three or five years, like what's on the horizon for this capability specifically. And what maybe are you most energized and jazzed about when you think about that?

A lot of the work that we've done so far is around B2B. It it's around B2B teams, sales teams and knowledge workers. I think where this goes is we, because we're increasingly using different digital platforms, being able to bring further telemetry into, into this is incredibly valuable.

So moving it away from just knowledge workers, but, but also out to field workers, I think there's a, there's real value in. The second thing is around predictive with there's a lot of work that we've been doing in the labs around machine learning and AI. I steer back from AI a little bit. I like to think of what we do as being augmentative intelligence rather than artificial intelligence, but from a, from a machine learning perspective, being able to correlate, set sets of big, big sets of data together allows you to start to become somewhat predictive or preemptive in terms of understanding where change is occurring.

And if you can understand where change is occurring, where issues. You can act, leaders can act ahead of the issue becoming, a big, a real, a real problem. So they can, they can nip it in the button. I think that's where we are taking this. How do we use the network signals that we have as a way of being able to provide that additional telemetry and that, that proactive telemetry to identify where issues happen

So just one, if I can, maybe first of all, I mean the ability to peak around corners, Yeah, as quickly as, as much as possible, obviously you can't fully peak around corners, but, but that ability that predictiveness. So I just wanna just kind of maybe bring in a real example. So maybe predicting the possibility of a customer churn yeah.

Based on those interactions, whether they've slowed down or not, or how they've changed employee churn, you mentioned before, which I think is a really powerful one in terms of that predictive piece, what else do you think. Might be really interesting as we start to evolve this capability.

I think we're also what we're fundamentally seeing, in terms of future of work is we're all working very differently. And as a we're working differently, the question becomes, are we actually going to, it comes back a little bit to the employee retention piece, but are we going to retain the right people?

Are we actually building the right structures to make sure whilst people are working remotely? We're being inclusive and we're still promoting the right people. I mean, we're gonna start to see different groups of people who aren't necessarily being included with their working remotely versus those who are coming back into the office, where they're building the network structures more, more rapidly.

And what does that mean for the composition? Of the workforce as we move forward. So if you think about this more futuristically, I think, the future of the, the whole hybrid, the whole COVID environment, the whole hybrid environment has had a huge impact on the way that we work and collaborate.

And what, what's the impact going to be from a network perspective, on how we collaborate. I'm

[00:23:29] Manish Goel: with? I'm curious. Yeah, the typical buyer for us, it's either sales.

So chief revenue officer and the team under the chief revenue, often around sales excellence. It's the HCM within the, within the human capital. It's the C H R O and generally speaking, it's the, head of workforce analytics or people analytics where this becomes another piece and the other increasingly, it's around digital transformation.

It's the organ. It's the, the C level of exec who's. Being charged with digital transformation. So trying to understand change, how do we identify who the influences are in the organization? Mm-hmm who are the information brokers that I need to bring together to drive the change and, and drive the impact I'm looking for.

So it's those three buying centers.

[00:24:19] Manish Goel: I think, in terms of leadership, I think the key leaders, there's a couple of leaders that I really admire in business.

one, someone like Stuart, Butterfield, I think, is doing an incredible job. if you look at what he's doing from building out diverse, he's really building out diverse, employee sort of recruiting diversely and bringing in nontraditional employees, I think is really it's out there. It's cutting.

Can tell. So I think, and I think inclusion is just such an important part of how we can, we, as leaders can bring the best outta the people that we, that we work

I wish that not that DEI was. Was a slogan or just a talk track. I mean, I, I really do think that the leadership and others in the organization really believed in the importance of it. Mm. I just wish that we were taking a much more data centric approach to measuring and understanding, that, performance and, and what we were doing.

Were we doing the right things to drive? Diversity and inclusion in that organization.

the whole notion of it, of diversity of network structure. people who have those, who have opportunities to, who are connected to, the right people across the organization, have those promotable opportunities, those who aren't, or who remain in the periphery often don't get the promotable client.

[00:26:27] Bill Staikos: Such important work that you're doing am final question. Where do you go for inspiration

I like people I'm. If you think about what we're doing, it's all about social network analytics and organizational network analytics. I like people. I like the conversations and just, I'm inspired by and energized by ideas that come by talking to people like yourself. So I, that's kind of where I go generally over a cup of coffee as well, but that's a, that's a separate conversation for you.

And I, I know that we've had

And, I really do hope for our listeners. If they're not familiar with relationship analytics, O a organizational network analytics, please go start looking at it. Manish. Where can folks find you if they want to get in touch?

So, I'm on LinkedIn, or, you find, find me, obviously my email address, manage dot go trust fair.com. Otherwise Trust's.

[00:27:41] Manish Goel: everyone. Thanks for listening to be customer led with bill stagos.

We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we're doing or tell us what you wanna hear more about until next time. We're.