GreenBook Future List Spotlight: Lance Worley

What’s a fun fact about yourself that would surprise people to know?

It always shocks people when they learn that I was the lead singer and guitarist of a Dave Matthews cover band. A group of friends and I were jamming together over a decade ago and things just fell into place. We went from a group of three guys casually playing on the front porch to a traveling party band (with a violin player to boot!). I was the worst musician in the group by far – the other members’ talent was out of this world. But I could put on a good show and believe it gave me a major confidence boost before entering the working world. Performing on stage is excellent preparation for a board room. Being able to navigate a crowd, steer the energy of a room, and yes – entertain – gives you a leg up when trying to win executives to your idea.

 

Who is your career role model or source of inspiration?

Clayton Christensen is someone I’ve admired for a long time. The famous Harvard professor and author of some of the greatest books written on innovation, I discovered to Clay’s work in the early 2010s. I have always found Clay’s writing to be intuitive, insightful, and easy for any business person to get their head around. To that end, I have leveraged Clay’s Jobs to be Done in every job I have ever had. Sadly, we lost Clay in 2020 but I and many others will forever be indebted to his work.

More recently, I have been enamored with the work of Greg McKeown, Stanford lecturer and author of the book ‘Essentialism‘. My experience at large client-side organizations has been consistent: there are a lot of well-intended people moving in a lot of different directions. The principles of ‘Essentialism‘ are focused on doing what he calls ‘less, but better’. Honing in on the few areas of your business that truly add value to your customers and excelling in those areas, vs. a ‘straddled’ strategy in which you try to be all things to all people. It’s been tremendously helpful to think ‘less, but better’ both personally and professionally.

 

When did you know you wanted to enter a career in insights, and what inspired you?

Like many college students, I bounced around several majors before landing in Marketing as a sophomore. My brief time as an Economics major left me better off analytically but unsatisfied intellectually. I watched the world around me behave irrationally again and again. There came a point where ‘supply and demand’ were not enough to explain much of my life experience. So, I sought a more creative pursuit, a bit more ‘art’ to supplement the science of Economics. I remember sitting in Sirrine Hall at Clemson University with our Department Head for Marketing. “I wish that I could do something like research in marketing,” I said casually to her. She gave me a curious look. “Have you considered Marketing Research?” I had never considered that there were people pursuing insight generation to better market their products and services more effectively. And that was history. My thanks to Dr. Mary Anne Raymond for the nudge into a wonderful career path.

 

If you could go back in time to when you first started your career, what advice would you give to your younger self?

Relax. I was eager to please as a young professional right out of school and I recall how tightly wound I was when I began my career. I felt a burden to know everything about our products, our industry, our competitors, our customers. I remember the anxiety of walking into a room of senior-level professionals and feeling inadequate. What if they asked a question I didn’t know the answer to? What if I said the wrong thing? This manifested in a lot of 60-80 hour weeks, which candidly did no good for me or the company at the time.

I would tell my young self and any new member of the insights community to go more slowly. Take the pressure off. Those executives surely knew that I was 23 and had no idea what I was talking about. And that was OK. Life has to be experienced, to be lived to be understood. I came out of graduate school very bright, but very inexperienced. Life couldn’t, and cannot, be learned in a classroom. Be diligent, professional, but also be humble. The experience will come with time.

 

How do you advocate for others on your team or your customers?

Customer advocacy is my life’s work. I have never been satisfied with simply selling packaged goods or credit cards or business services. Those are a means to a far greater end. Every person reading this has the ability to leverage our products or services to make life better for the people we serve. In practice, this means ensuring business leaders have a vivid picture of who customers are and what needs they have. It means giving designers and engineers crystal clarity on how our products and services can fill those gaps. It means demonstrating how resolving these problems is good for business – tying recommendations to revenue wherever possible. None of the ‘methods’ above should surprise anyone. They are not novel, nor original, nor surprising. But far too often do I see ‘insights’ passed along that are full of data but devoid of story. I believe we underestimate what a good insight can do in the hands of a passionate person.

As Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says, “Business is the greatest platform for change”. Studying ‘customer experience’ is not enough. We are all stewards of the ‘human experience’, and whether we know it or not our actions are either improving or worsening those experiences. My hope is that our community will be intentional about leveraging the power of business for good.

 

If you could change one thing about insights, what would it be?

I was struck by this comment from a Marketing executive at a Fortune 500 company: “If our company knew everything our company knew, we would be unbeatable.” How alarming! This leader knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the answers he needed to gain market share were within his reach. But they were disparate, disorganized, unstructured, and out of sync with one another. Despite their close proximity, these insights were as evasive as the wind.

If I could change one thing about insights, it would address the leader’s comment above. We ‘should’ know everything our company knows. We ‘should’ have a single source of truth about our customers and a powerful narrative for our co-workers to go with it. We ‘should’ have intelligence from marketers, salespeople, developers, engineers, customer service representatives, and third-parties cleverly woven together in one place. Yet I have not seen it… anywhere.

All of us have had the experience of an executive ask for something that is totally unattainable. But I don’t think this executive’s request is like that. If I could change one thing about insights, it would be our curious habit to silo. To rely solely on formal channels of data collection. To be poor marketers of our marketing research. And, like the executive, I believe teams that do change their models will become the insights leaders of the future.