Matt Best
speaker
698 appearances
21 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2024
last heard 14 Sep
Matt Best’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And Leslie, how about you?
So thank you so much. And it's interesting you say around the childhood piece. I was listening to Simon Sinek on the High Performance podcast recently, and he was talking, you know, in order to help people find their why, it always starts with a childhood memory because it's such a guiding principle in life. Who we become and how we become that way.
And I think it's a really interesting thing to reflect on. I think it's that time away, right? It's that time out of the day to day. And like you said, out of the numbers and out of the data and out of conversations about specific accounts and specific situations and into something that's a little bit freer and allows everyone to be their self a little bit.
It's just great to get to know people like that. And yeah, thank you for sharing that story with us, Leslie. That's fantastic. And I mean, as we go into the heart of today's conversation, really what we'd hope to get your perspective and insight on. And as Johnny said, you've already dropped a couple of insight bombs, if you like, on us and the audience, which is fantastic.
But we know that, again, going back into that sort of looking at your career, that you're passionate about sort of customer centricity and how important that is to a business. And that's really what we're looking forward to diving into in a little bit more detail with you.
Before that, though, it would be really great, I think, for the audience and for Johnny and I just understand a little bit more, hear a bit more about your journey so far. You know, you've held some incredibly senior roles in a really competitive market and a really competitive space. Could you just talk us through your journey so far?
You're never leaving. You heard it here first. I'm sure the rest of your team are thrilled to hear that, Leslie. Thank you so much for sharing that history with us. Again, some really great insights. I think there's this one key thing that jumped out to me as you were talking about SaaS. And I think it's such a... I have a background in SaaS as well and in delivery.
And one thing that SaaS did to the market was...
to really throw the challenge back to the vendor when it comes to that customer centricity because it gave the end buyer options right the days of huge monolithic change that was involved in in swapping out between technologies where you had like deployed implemented you spent a whole bunch of money in data centers and stuff just to host particular technology sas kind of tore up that rule book and sort of turned the spotlight back at the vendors to say what are you going to do
to make sure that your client values this? What are you going to do to drive that important customer centricity? How much do you care about your clients? It's something that really resonates with me. And you see those organizations, I was in an organization going through that transition from that sort of deployable into SaaS. And it's a big transition and it's quite eye-opening.
So yeah, and clearly why you've been so successful since then in understanding where customer centricity comes from, why that's so important. So customer centricity, what is it? Well, I mean, Forbes defines it as the ability of an organisation to understand and meet customer needs and expectations. But what is it to you?
Yeah, that's fascinating. And some might be listening to this and saying, well, that's about the product. No, it's not that, right? In order to make that product sing, you need the people behind it. So, you know, thinking about that and we think about why that's then important as a unified approach across your whole business. How do you take that from a product initiative? We drive everything.
This is why our customers love it and make it something that lives and is the sort of foundation of a business.
A whole load of stuff in there to unpack, Liz. I mean, you talked to me about roles and responsibilities and Johnny will know without that clarity of process, that clarity of ownership. But then you also said something which some might think that contradicts that in the sense that the whole business needs to be customer centric and the whole business needs to be focused on the customer.
And I think some people say, well, that means that everybody owns a bit of it. Yeah, but people still have jobs and people still have certain responsibilities that talk to their skill set. It's finding that balance, isn't it?
It's peer pressure, Lesley, but I think the devil's in the detail with that example in that you've been in at that client. You're not sitting there from an ivory tower pushing people to commit stuff they're not comfortable to commit. You've been on the other side of the table to that customer.
You're translating your confidence back into the team and back into... And I think that's the difference. It's that you talk about teams win deals and tribal knowledge, and you just simply can't... It doesn't matter how long someone's been in the business. They will not know everything. You've got to... And things are constantly evolving and constantly changing.
So the ability to pull teams together like that and go... And then have that psychological safety net that allows you to put their hands up and go, I'm a bit blocked here. I need some help. Can someone help me? And someone goes, you know what? I've done this over here with this customer. Come have a chat afterwards. We can unblock this together. That's the magic.
That's where we start to get that collaboration.
Yeah, I think from what you just shared there, I mean, it's not quite a blueprint, but it's almost getting towards that, Leslie. I think we always came full circle. We talked about sort of how exposed you are in a SaaS business versus the old days. And I think what you're talking about there is how to... stay competitive against yourself as well, right?
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