Ben Liebert has been heading up residential sales and marketing at Shaw Industries for a little more than a year. After learning the ins and outs of the company and the industry, Liebert was ready to make the requisite changes he said Shaw needed to maintain a leadership position within the floor covering industry. While change is never easy or comfortable, Liebert says it’s all about adapting to the present and preparing for the future as opposed to repeating the past.
FCNews publisher Steven Feldman sat down with Liebert earlier this year at the Shaw Flooring Network convention in Orlando to talk specifics.
You’ve been here a year. Tell me what needed fixing, and how you addressed that to make this a better company.
Let me answer this question by beginning with what makes this company special, which is unequivocally our focus on people—our associates, customers, suppliers and community. We operate by a set of values that are noble and bigger than the industry we serve. We have a long legacy of trust with our customers and, as a result, a leadership position in most of the categories in which we compete.
I like to think about our future in terms of continuous improvement opportunities. It begins with embracing the concept that our industry and the market in general are changing at an accelerated pace, and we cannot expect history will be a good predictor of the future. As a company, we are taking a long, hard look in the mirror and asking, “Are we adapting our business fast enough to keep pace with where the world is going?” Therein lies the opportunity as we map our future.
Did you find that not to be the case when you got here?
Anytime you are making changes in a business, it is very difficult. There are over 1,000 people in Shaw’s residential business unit and job one was to inspire their hearts and minds about our future. You may have heard me quote the need to win in the locker room before you have any chance to win on the field of play. I really believe this. We recognized this as an early opportunity for us collectively. That means everyone must clearly understand our strategy and, most importantly, get inspired with the role they play in bringing it to life with our customers every day. In parallel to this, it is clear we need to get even closer to our customers—learn what makes them unique, understand their goals and recognize the challenges they are facing so we can work more deeply to be a partner.
What is the story?
Our residential strategy is made up of five pillars, which were developed using three lenses—what are the trends we see in our industry in the overall market, how do we (Shaw) see ourselves fitting into these trends and last, an enormous amount of feedback directly from our customers. The most important thing to know about our strategy is our success is 100% grounded in the success of our customers.
- Pillar 1: Build stronger brands together—through our customers, with our customers.
- Pillar 2: Create value by using the full breadth of our portfolio. This is about building a curated playbook using three strategic levers: brand mix, product mix and channel/customer mix.
- Pillar 3: Hyper-local execution. We want our teams to have a “distributor mindset,” which means our teams are deeply integrated with their local partners and we move from a push model to a pull model in local markets.
- Pillar 4: Deeper partnerships. Customers have differing shapes, sizes, goals, ambitions and business challenges. Therefore, our teams must curate and tailor our products, services and support based on these customer needs to create a sustainable win-win.
- Pillar 5: ONE team. Whatever we do, we’re going to do it together as one. Manufacturing, supply chain, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, customer service—we are all lined up on a common mission of being the best partner to our partners.
ONE team isn’t just about how we work together at Shaw, it’s also how we work with our customers, suppliers and partners.
Other changes you’ve made?
Building stronger brands with our retailers is the first pillar of our story by design. I believe you can create strong brands in this industry, and Carolyn Haicl, our new senior vice president of marketing and brands, will lead this charge for us. She knows how to create brands in a long-cycle, consumer durable business. We are also moving away from brands that compete with one another to a portfolio of brands that complement one another. This means we need to “pull our brands apart,” making them more distinct and clarifying their stories. Strong brands aren’t created in a year, but it begins with a clear architecture and radical consistency in how we take them to market with our customers.
You made a lot of changes on the sales side. What needed to be fixed and why?
Rather than saying it needed to be “fixed,” we believe this is the natural evolution of matching our sales structure to our strategy ambitions. What worked well for us in the past isn’t necessarily a winning approach for the future. The goal is to give our sales teams a robust portfolio of brands, products and services that can be prioritized and matched to our customers’ needs.
Any other focuses?
Another significant focus for us is the installation of what we call “heartbeat operating rhythms.” Without getting into the weeds, I will share that we’ve spent a considerable amount of time and energy standing up robust processes within our business that will help us work smarter, faster and better for our customers. This is how we will drive speed and accountability into the fabric of everything we do.
The other exciting evolution is how we plan to take a national sales strategy and execute it effectively at the local level. It begins with a strong channel or customer group approach, which is why we have made some recent changes. Jon England is now leading builder and multifamily sales, and Elizabeth Hurley is now leading retail sales. Their sales teams will set the playbook for those respective channels, but most importantly, our four empowered general managers have some autonomy to adapt that strategy to execute and win in their local markets.
Tell me your biggest accomplishment at Electrolux that you’ve recognized needed to be done at Shaw.
Going back to 2016 at Electrolux (Frigidaire), we were myopically focused on ONLY doing what our customers asked us to do. We would ask our retailers for feedback on products and brands and they would tell us about a feature, a competitive product or a price point. And I want to be clear, we will continue to have this type of dialogue with our customers, because great ideas come from everywhere. But, we realized we were not a very good partner if we were not bringing insights and opportunities to them proactively. We should be playing a more active role in bringing insights or tools that improve “draw” and “close” with our partners. This means we should have programs to bring more customers through our retailers’ front door and provide them training and tools to effectively close the sale. When we do this properly, more customers will shop from our retailers. We really transformed the Frigidaire brand by doing this, and there are major parallels to the flooring business.
Any other parallel changes?
We have shifted our approach in how we communicate. We are radically transparent with our team internally and our customers externally. For example, every month we host an internal call with our entire residential business unit and we give them a live business update. We celebrate our wins, review financials, discuss urgent topics and then we give everyone a platform to ask questions or give us real-time feedback anonymously. We actually encourage difficult questions and hard feedback on what isn’t working with our customers. By design, this is a humbling process that helps our leaders focus on being more customer and associate centric. We want our team to feel like they are part of the business and our vision for the future.
Word on the street is there has been an increased focus on the customer since you’ve been here. True?
I can’t speak so much about the past, but I can tell you customers will be at the center of everything we do. I spent a tremendous amount of time with customers in my first six months at Shaw. For example, we established a rule that if a customer is visiting Dalton for a mill tour or a business review, I want it to be on my calendar so I can, at minimum, stop by to meet them. I love that this is an industry that values relationships. We are not perfect by any means, but we will continue to invest in creating trust and a sustainable win-win environment with our partners.
The post Ben Liebert of Shaw keeps focus on the customer appeared first on Floor Covering News.