Ep. 229 - Jon Picoult - Tactical Ways to Build Credibility for Personal and Business Success

My guest today is Jon Picoult, Founder and Principal of Watermark Consulting. Founded in 2008, Watermark Consulting offers consulting services to top brands around improving customer experience. Prior to founding Watermark Consulting, Jon served in leadership roles at both MassMutual Financial Group and American International Group. He holds a degree in Cognitive Science from Princeton University and an MBA from Duke University.  Find Jon Online: LinkedIn Twitter Website: watermarkconsult.net CX ROI Study: watermarkconsult.net/cx-roi Find Us Online:  Social Media: @happymrxp LinkedIn Website: happymr.com This Episode’s Sponsor:  This episode is brought to you by HubUx. HubUx reduces project management costs by 90%. Think of HubUx as your personal AI project manager, taking care of all your recruitment and interview coordination needs in the background. The platform connects you with the right providers and sample based on your research and project needs. For more information, please visit HubUx.com. [00:00] On Episode 229, I'm interviewing Jon Picoult, founder and principal of Watermark Consulting. I've got to say this is a marquee episode for Happy Market Research podcast. I have referenced Watermark Consulting's report on their analytics over the last 10 years of the S&P 500 overperformers and underperformers. The one central theme: Overperformers all leverage customer experience, whereas under-performers are laggards. They are not leveraging it. We are seeing mainstay companies, CBRE and others, who have historically not really had research as a primary function in the organization, but they're all investing in our field. This is an exciting episode. I know you will find a lot of value in it, but first a word from our sponsor. [00:54] This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those ...