Dawn Werry, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer & Partner at Chief Outsiders, and Jamie Gier, Chief Marketing Officer at DexCare, dissect the top challenges B2B C-suite leaders face. They reveal why internal alignment, customer understanding, and balancing short- and long-term goals matter most. They share hard-won insights on building plans to restore trust in selling. Their practical advice equips executives to drive sustainable growth.
“Having a trust-building program and seeing and embracing it as an imperative, not just a value that sits on the shelf, is strategic for the organization.” – Jamie Gier
In this conversation, Dawn and Jamie share strategies for uniting go-to-market teams, using customer voices to guide messaging, and embedding trust-building into company DNA. Their actionable guidance blends leadership wisdom with real-world examples to help executives navigate today’s trust crisis while driving measurable growth.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we are going over the challenge report, which is a report that we’ve interviewed over 45 different B2B C-suite executives, and we’ve asked them one simple question: What are the two greatest challenges?
[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: To creating long-term sustainable growth in our businesses, our B2B businesses, and we’ve taken all those answers together, and we have the top three challenges that we’re gonna address today. And on as our experts are Jamie Gier and Dawn Werry. Now, Jamie, you are a three-time B2B CMO. You’re a founder of a CMO group, the CMO Huddles.
[00:00:48] Steve MacDonald: You’ve worked with startups all the way through Fortune 500 companies. You are also one of the most quoted guests from our podcast, I’ll have to say that, and I’m gonna talk to you about a few of those today. We’re gonna dig into those. And Dawn, thank you for coming on, by the way. So you have a very unique background.
[00:01:06] Steve MacDonald: Right now, you’re the Chief Revenue Officer and partner at Chief Outsiders. Now for those of you who don’t know who Chief Outsiders are, they are fractional—would I say C-suite firm, is that right? You lead an entire team of folks that are operating as C-suite executives within companies all the time.
[00:01:25] Steve MacDonald: So between all of your own particular backgrounds, the CMO Huddles, the conversations you’re having there, the conversations your C-suite executives are having with your clients every day, I think you’re really well positioned here to have this conversation. And Dawn, you also have a very big background in marketing, and you are now CRO.
[00:01:44] Steve MacDonald: So you’ve looked at this from two different lenses and angles. So all of this to say, I’m really excited to have you on today. If you wouldn’t mind, Dawn, I’ll let you start. Maybe expand on that a little bit in your background before we get started.
[00:01:58] Dawn Werry: As you said, I am a CRO for Chief Outsiders, which is a hundred-plus fractional chief marketing officers, chief sales officers, chief revenue officers who go into companies to help them grow, reach their next level. My personal background is, as many of my colleagues, I’ve worked for multiple Fortune 500 or multi-billion-dollar companies before becoming a fractional, which I love the change because it’s just wonderful to work with mid-size businesses where you can make an impact quickly.
[00:02:31] Dawn Werry: And my unique thing is I’m an engineer by training. I love the data side of it.
[00:02:36] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Jamie, how about yourself?
[00:02:38] Jamie Gier: I haven’t switched professions, so I must have found what I really love doing, which is marketing. And while I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies, GE, Microsoft, I particularly enjoy working with the high-growth companies. I don’t know if that’s just self-inflicted pain, but there’s something special about being able to create and help scale a company and grow a company.
[00:02:59] Jamie Gier: Beyond just the functional role that you do. And I find in these smaller, mid-size organizations, you can lean in more around culture and product requirements and other areas of the business that I find particularly fascinating. But the fact that I’ve been doing it within the realm of a marketing executive, I consider myself very blessed that I found exactly what I enjoy doing every single day.
[00:03:25] Jamie Gier: When I’m not a chief marketing officer, I’m a chief mom officer to a young man. Now, I guess I can’t say kid because he’s getting ready to go off to college, so that’s been a big joy. I’ve probably learned more about business through being a mom than I have as a marketer.
[00:03:41] Steve MacDonald: What we’re gonna talk about today in this challenge report—there are three top challenges that came out of asking the question about what are the top three challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth. Here’s the number one challenge.
[00:03:53] Steve MacDonald: It was very surprising to me: internal alignment. We love to talk about things that affect us from the outside, the competition, the market, COVID, our competition. Over 70% of C-suite executives said that internal alignment was their greatest challenge to creating long-term sustainable growth.
[00:04:14] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely amazing. The second one was the lack of deep knowledge and understanding of our own customers, and using that—the voice of highest authority in our business—to drive our entire go-to-market strategy. The third one was balancing short-term versus long-term objectives internally and how we do that.
[00:04:37] Steve MacDonald: I know, Dawn, I’m gonna love to hear from you because CMOs are very revenue pipeline focused. We also have to be very brand and very long-term focused. Yet as a CRO, you usually have a quota over your head on a regular basis. So it’s an interesting dilemma there. But there was a fourth challenge that we’re calling the hidden challenge. That wasn’t mentioned by almost any of the C-suite executives, but when we talk to them about it, everyone agreed this is one of the absolute top, and it’s about the trust crisis that we’re facing in this country, actually all over the world. If you looked at the most recent LinkedIn Edelman report, Trust has been going down for decades in Europe, even worse than the United States.
[00:05:15] Steve MacDonald: And we’re gonna talk a lot more about that because there are some interesting facts that came out of that Edelman study. But we’re gonna title overall, so we’re gonna end on trust, is how to keep the trust crisis from killing our pipeline. We have plans on marketing, we have plans on sales, we have plans all over the place, but we very rarely have a plan to build trust. This is a dedicated plan that everybody’s behind. So, I’m gonna start us off—the very first question is about the challenge that was voiced as the number one challenge, and that is the internal alignment crisis and how it’s undermining our growth. And Jamie, I’d love to get your thought on this just to start out with and kick us off here.
[00:06:04] Jamie Gier: Sure. I was not surprised at all by the research on this, mostly because, first off, I’ve seen it time and time again in different organizations. I think the misalignment largely stems from the how on driving execution against priorities. I think it’s easier to land on what are the imperatives for the business.
[00:06:28] Jamie Gier: It’s more challenging to align across the organization on who owns what aspect of the execution against those priorities. Even though you might have functional areas—we intellectually know or fundamentally know what customer success does, or marketing, or sales—the reality is there’s a lot of dependencies and common threads throughout, and you have to have clarity on who owns what, especially related to go-to-market.
[00:06:57] Jamie Gier: And so in my experience, I’ve seen more of the misalignment when it gets down to the brass tacks execution, largely around accountability. And accountability around the customer, which I know we’ll talk about, less so around what are the priorities of business. So if you don’t have super clear alignment on who is expected to drive and who is a participant, a lot of the times you walk out of the room thinking you have alignment, and then progress isn’t made.
[00:07:26] Steve MacDonald: How many times have we all been in meetings, we’ve all been in agreement of what we need to do, and you get together for the next meeting and half of it hasn’t even been started, and three months later it’s the same thing. I got really important insight there because even if we do get agreement, that doesn’t mean that we’re moving forward. So that’s a really important point. Dawn, I know you have plenty to say on this subject as well.
[00:07:47] Dawn Werry: Well, I will start with I am in a hundred percent alignment with Jamie and that it did not surprise me at all to hear that. And I do think people sort of intellectually agree on things. They might be aligned. At least they know the goal. But sometimes it is hard to remember how my work specifically contributes to the goal, and I have seen a lot of times, I have actually seen a number of studies about how much we spend time firefighting internal things.
[00:08:16] Dawn Werry: I have seen anything from a day a week to three days a week. Basically, 20 to 65% of your time is spent firefighting internal things. I mean, you have got all that. You kind of forget at the end of the day, there is a customer, a prospect that you are trying to engage and bring into the fold or reengage. So I see the alignment as there are just so many things going on that I forget what my real role is, and imagine the impact to the business if you could recapture that time, that 20 to 65% that is firefighting internal things, and focus on what you are doing. Those teams that are too busy, suddenly you do not have to hire new staff, or you make more impact with the team you have got.
[00:08:58] Steve MacDonald: That is probably a big reason why the execution does not happen, driven by those fires. And those fires are not always the things that we know we proactively need to do to move the business forward.
[00:09:08] Jamie Gier: And two, when you make heroes out of people who are doing the firefighting that are self-inflicted, fires that were generated by the business, and so we even reward the wrong behavior when it comes to that.
[00:09:20] Steve MacDonald: That was my next question. How do we reward the right behavior? We all know that compensation drives behavior. It is one of our big levers we can take here, but what have you both done internally to help this misalignment and missed execution as opportunities to help grow the business? What do we do about this?
[00:09:43] Dawn Werry: I think one of the things is keeping it front and center and recognizing the fact that I think part of the reason that we reward the internal things is it is quick. We see it. You do something about it. It is very easy sometimes. That brand building, the bigger trust building that we are going to talk about later, takes time.
[00:10:03] Dawn Werry: It is hard to see those milestones. So knowing what the milestones are, reward at every phase, and reward the fact that people are working together on it.
[00:10:11] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. Jamie, what do you think?
[00:10:15] Jamie Gier: I would say that when you have, in driving alignment, so let us just say if it is related to execution, I am a big believer in SLAs, playbooks, and then shared KPIs. I spend a significant amount of time making sure that there are really good SLAs among the GTM members. So what is my role as a marketer, and when I do a handoff, what is the expectation that happens when that handoff is made to either the sales executive, solution consultant, or an RSD? And what does that mean? Being super, super clear. This gets back to how to execute and the fundamentals around that. I am a big believer in SLAs. I do not mean to over-engineer or over-process, but I think [00:11:00] it can be very helpful.
[00:11:01] Jamie Gier: Getting everyone to sign off on that and then having the shared KPIs. If you are not all feeling skin in the game around something, then you are more inclined to go off and do your own. But if there is a shared number, we are going to be checking in with each other to make sure that everyone is marching toward it, that we are contributing in the way that we are supposed to in meeting that number and that goal.
[00:11:22] Dawn Werry: Yeah, and if I can add onto that real quick, just the simpler the better on those KPIs. If you have got too many things you are measuring, everybody is looking at a different one. If you have just a few that everybody is accountable for, it is much clearer.
[00:11:35] Steve MacDonald: You know, it is interesting. You would be amazed, or maybe you would not be amazed, how many CMOs understand SLAs, what they are, but do not utilize them. There are no SLAs between marketing and sales and the rest of the go-to-market team. Just having those is a really good start. And then I love, Dawn, your thoughts, because we can become data happy, we can be KPI happy, but you are right. If it is diffuse and you are trying to track too much, then the accountability factor goes down.
[00:12:04] Jamie Gier: Well, here is an example. One company that I worked for, we had to implement a completely new, built-from-the-ground-up go-to-market engine. It was a combination of data, systems, tools, processes, agreement on ICP, all of those things. When you are introducing so much of that change, the SLA becomes really important because in a case like that, to get even lift and value out of it, it has to be very clear who owns which aspects. So down to the brass tacks, for example, your CRM data needs to be very clean and up to date. Who owns doing that at the account level? Who owns doing that at the contact level? Who owns making sure that the processes that are in place, that the handoffs are very clear, and what those definitions mean?
[00:12:56] Jamie Gier: I think definitions and language are really important. So when [00:13:00] you are trying to drive that much change, you have to have that in place so it is clear and people are bought in. There cannot be ambiguity. There is always going to be a little bit of ambiguity, but you have to remove as much as you possibly can.
[00:13:11] Steve MacDonald: I talked to a company just yesterday, and when you talked about the CRM and making sure that everything is up to date and up to speed, they were having problems just getting their leads into Salesforce. Something as simple as that—really important leads too. So that is just the basics, and getting that down—the systems, the processes, the workflows that keep everybody aligned—cannot be understated in terms of importance. So there is another thing, and I am going to take a right turn here in terms of importance. It gets into the area of the second big challenge that came out of the report, which is that we do not have this deep understanding of our customers.
[00:13:52] Steve MacDonald: We have a high degree of familiarity because we talk about them all the time. We track them all the time, so we think we know. But [00:14:00] in the end, if we are not constantly in a conversation with our customers, then we do not really know. And Jamie, this is one of the most quotable quotes that you said.
[00:14:10] Steve MacDonald: You said, “Our campaigns always perform better when the voice of the customer precedes ours.” Now that has two factors. First, you have to understand deeply the voice of your customer. And then, in terms of execution, like you talked about before, you have to put that in place, not only internally but into all of your campaigns and sales enablement materials.
[00:14:33] Steve MacDonald: Expand on what you meant when you first said that over a year ago.
[00:14:37] Jamie Gier: Well, what I meant by that is we all know that you need to have really good case studies in ROI or impact data to effectively sell. It is one thing, and that is all customer-driven, and where the data comes from is from your own customers. However, there is a big difference in the vendor promoting that data versus the customers out speaking about it themselves.
[00:15:01] Jamie Gier: Whether they are on stage giving a presentation or if they are in dark social on their Slack channels, where they are making recommendations, there is more credibility and authenticity when it comes directly from the mouths of your customers and not necessarily from the technology partner. To provide clarity as to what I was saying, those voices matter just as much as the data. Who is saying it is as impactful as the data itself because of the trust and the credibility around that. One thing I do want to add is you mentioned we do not know a lot about our customers, and I think you are correct in stating that. Part of it could be we wait for that quarterly QBR.
[00:15:42] Jamie Gier: We wait for that NPS data to come in. What we should be doing is just random check-ins with our customers, or dinners, or dine-arounds, or going to visit. The other thing is we need to spend more time visiting our customers and not doing it over Zoom. You just have to do a random check-in, like, “How are you doing today?”
[00:15:59] Jamie Gier: Do not necessarily wait for that QBR, which is mostly a report out and less of a conversation. Sometimes that is the trap that companies fall into, but just make sure you are getting very close. And then there are other things that you can do, CABs and that sort of thing.
[00:16:15] Steve MacDonald: You had mentioned a story when we were talking before this about who says it. The message, but who is saying it, means the most. You talked about a speaker at one of the most recent conferences that you went to, where all the speakers get rushed by the crowd. They all want to come up and everything, but if you could recant that story of what that speaker asked and what happened afterwards, I thought that was brilliant to accentuate your point.
[00:16:41] Jamie Gier: It was a kind of a cool presentation—potential buyers for what I was selling to an audience of largely vendors, technology vendors. The panelists were talking a little bit about how to best build a relationship with us and how we want to, quote-unquote, be sold to, which is you do not sell to [00:17:00] someone, you develop a relationship and you become a trusted advisor or partner to them.
[00:17:05] Jamie Gier: The points that she was making are, number one, the messenger matters just as much as the message. They are actively listening to their own peers on how they are solving problems and who is helping them solve those problems. So that is number one. The second, and this is not surprising, but it was interesting that she added this, is that she is out on the speaking circuit. She goes to a lot of events and conferences and speaks, and it is not uncommon for, when she exits the stage, people to come up and want to do an introduction.
[00:17:38] Jamie Gier: The fatal step that many vendors take is they go right from introduction to, “Hi, I am your account manager, and I want to tell you about my solution.” What a turnoff. You should be more curious and inquisitive in building the relationship by simply saying, “Hey, that point that you made about X, Y, or Z, I would love to follow up and chat a little bit more about what you meant.” Have a dialogue and do not go in with the hard sell. Those were two points that she made.
[00:18:05] Jamie Gier: And did not somebody come and approach while you had a conversation? You approached her afterwards. Well, this was a different same session. A different panelist was walking down the hallway, and I happened to see him come down as I was talking with a group of people. I stopped him and said, “Hey, that was a really great panel that you did, and I appreciated these points that you made.” He stopped and said, “Great, what in particular did you appreciate about it, and how did you assess that?” We started to have a conversation, and then a colleague came up who went right in with, “I am so-and-so, and I just took over this territory, so I wanted to introduce myself.”
[00:18:27] Jamie Gier: I was like, oh no. You could just see the energy drain from this person who I was just about to have a really good conversation with and probably exchange contact information and keep in my network. Talk about pulling the energy out of that.
[00:19:04] Steve MacDonald: Oh my gosh, the exact wrong thing to do. Dawn, I could see you over there. You could feel the pain of that situation. I am inviting you into the conversation. What are your thoughts here?
[00:19:13] Dawn Werry: I have a million of them. The immediate thing I think about is this idea of—I have two other quotes I use related to what you are talking about, being trusted advisors. One is this idea that people love to buy but do not like to be sold to. And the other is be more interested than interesting.
[00:19:33] Dawn Werry: Be listening for things. I think that really gets to—I know we are going to talk about trust later—but if you know the trust equation, I think it came from a book called The Trusted Advisor. If you look it up online, you will find it. The trust equation is credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, but it is eroded by self-orientation. When Jamie is talking about this company that came right up and started saying, “Oh, I am your account rep, and let me tell you about me,” it erodes that trust equation.
[00:20:12] Dawn Werry: Especially in something like a professional services environment, you should be more interested in the success of the customer, the prospect, and their business than in the success of yours. That is the difference between self-orientation and customer orientation. I often take a look at your website—are you leading with “me, me, me, this is what we do,” etc.? Yes, you have to have those things, but have you even recognized the customer has a problem or something they want to solve?
[00:20:31] Dawn Werry: Immediately as you were talking, Jamie, that is where my head went.
[00:20:34] Steve MacDonald: The trusted advisor nomenclature, it is used all the time, almost to the point where we have to add value. Then it becomes so ubiquitous that you have to ask, what does it really mean? We have to work harder than ever to earn the right to be a trusted advisor.
[00:20:51] Steve MacDonald: I think this goes really well into what we have talked about before, but I want to dive right into the trust issue. Not only are we on the decline in trust, but out of that same LinkedIn Edelman report, 32,000 respondents—61% thought that businesses selling to them were being intentionally misleading.
[00:21:13] Steve MacDonald: Intentionally misleading. There is another report that came out that said that of the materials we put together that represent the value we create for our clients, 74% do not believe them. They think they are not worth the time. Then there was a third study that came out.
[00:21:31] Steve MacDonald: This goes right back to Jamie, what you were saying earlier—that we trust our peers more than anyone else. We trust our peers at the same level as scientists in terms of credibility. So when you talk about the voice of a customer leading ours, what we are doing is putting the most trusted voice to our audience in front of ours, because unfortunately, we are lumped together. No matter how trustworthy each and every one of us is, we are lumped into that crowd of the B2B sellers, and we are at the bottom of the totem pole. We have something in this, we have skin in the game, and we have a lot to benefit from if we make the sale.
[00:22:12] Steve MacDonald: That is why there is always a conversation that is a seller to a buyer. There is a shield that is up. You are being sold to. So I want to ask—in that state, we talk about pandemics, we talk about epidemics—we are in the middle of one called trust. Trust, where our brands are trust marks.
[00:22:31] Steve MacDonald: Remember back to branding or marketing 101 in school. What do we do about the trust epidemic? Jamie, I will kick it off with you.
[00:22:42] Jamie Gier: Sure. By the way, I am not surprised by the data. We have to reflect on the fact that those sentiments are derived from actual real-world experience. If trust is eroding, it is because somewhere along the way, the experiences people have had in buying products or working with vendors or services have eroded or been breached in some capacity. That is why trust is super important—because we know that other studies indicate that when a buyer or customer trusts you, they are two times more likely to purchase again or expand or do more business with you.
[00:23:23] Jamie Gier: You need to be sure of that, but the reality is trust takes time to build and to earn. It is not just when a buyer becomes a customer; it starts from the first moment they begin having a conversation with you or hear about you. I add on the “hear about you” because they are more likely to trust the information that is coming from their peers. You want to make sure that your customers are armed with the information they need to effectively advocate—and they are only going to do that if you have actually delivered. Let us be super clear on that. Part of the trust equation is you have delivered the things you promised that you would.
[00:24:01] Jamie Gier: If you have breached that trust, your net retention rate is going to go out the door. You have to be careful about that. One of the things we have talked about before is having some kind of trust-building program and seeing it and embracing it as an imperative, not just a value.
[00:24:20] Jamie Gier: This is not something that sits on the shelf where we occasionally go back and look at it and say, “Oh, these are great values.” No, this is an actual strategic imperative for the organization, and every single department should define how they execute on trust as it pertains to the customer. These are things like the number of bugs that you manage to fix in software—because you are always going to have something—or making sure you meet milestone deadlines. Or, if there is a failure point, that you are transparent and you communicate.
[00:24:42] Jamie Gier: There is a lot of emotional equity you can gain when a customer trusts you. If something does go haywire, they are more forgiving, and they sometimes want to come to your defense if it becomes public.
[00:25:04] Jamie Gier: To instill it into the DNA of the organization, you have to define what trust means from the marketplace perspective and how every single department builds it, maintains it, and manages it. They have to have that clarity. This means getting really prescriptive about what that means for engineering and the quality of the code they release, for customer support teams meeting implementation timelines, and for marketing ensuring truth in advertising.
[00:25:33] Steve MacDonald: Just to accentuate your point—on another podcast, I recently interviewed the executive director of GRC at one of the world’s largest banks. The whole point of the conversation was about governance, risk, and compliance, and how that impacts CX and trust. Fast forward to another conversation with a trust and safety expert at another large financial institution—same thing.
[00:25:56] Steve MacDonald: All these different departments have the ability to impact trust, delivery of services, and the experience that our customers and clients receive. It is not just CMOs or CROs. It is not just the C-suite. It really has to be—this is what I am taking away from your comment—a company-wide effort.
[00:26:21] Jamie Gier: Everyone has to feel it, understand it, and realize that everyone in the organization has an impact on it. Down to the receptionist and how he or she treats a person who is calling in. It is everybody. When you have that collective power of focus, it is the greatest currency that a company can have. Truly.
[00:26:47] Dawn Werry: I am just going to follow on to that. I agree. I like to think of it as the whole experience—it is a trust bank. Every time they have a good experience with your company, it adds a little bit into the trust bank or with you personally. Every time they have a bad experience, it takes a little bit away.
[00:27:04] Dawn Werry: You do not want to get below zero. I will share a couple of examples, and I am going to reference back to that trust equation again, specifically talking about reliability in one of these examples. I worked with a company based in Paris, and in contrast, they made custom floor coverings that went into office buildings.
[00:27:23] Dawn Werry: Designers relied on those to be there the day they expected. Otherwise, it kills their schedule, it may mean they do not get a bonus because they do not deliver on time, and they have a lot of firefighting to do—back to that theme. I remember getting a call from someone who had to contact 27 different people in the company to find out why her delivery had not shown up that day. It had not even been manufactured yet. The company knew weeks earlier it was not going to arrive, but they did not bother to tell her.
[00:27:43] Dawn Werry: I am a big fan of communications—if you just let a customer know where they stand, it goes a long way. That was a bad one, and I guarantee she never bought from them again. In a different comparison, I worked with a company that made materials for the military during wartime. They were not the first choice, so we were low on material.
[00:28:25] Dawn Werry: We met every single day to decide who was getting material and had a communications plan to notify anyone who was not getting material immediately. We built customers for life because, even though they did not get the product, they knew what was going on and they were communicated with. That built a lot of trust.
[00:28:25] Dawn Werry: Just those simple things—mapping out where you can win, being transparent with customers, building reliability, and aligning with what they need—versus where, if you ignore it, you will deplete that trust bank.
[00:28:46] Steve MacDonald: The idea in that trust bank is so important too, because we have all seen the studies that one poor customer experience can be the end of the relationship. Unfortunately, it is not equal when you put good experiences into the bank. It is not equal to the bad experiences.
[00:29:03] Steve MacDonald: Those far outweigh the good. I remember my wife when we first had our kids and we were raising them, she said, for every 10 things we tell them that they did wrong, or one thing we tell them we did wrong, we have to tell them 10 things that they did right. They are going to remember the one thing they did wrong the most.
[00:29:19] Steve MacDonald: So how are we, and you talked about, that we have to have a plan. Even Forrester talked about that, that we do not have a trust-building plan. We have plans for so many different things, and Forrester put out that trust was the number one strategy that business needs to work on today.
[00:29:38] Steve MacDonald: That is how important this is. I just wanted to ask a little bit more about now we are getting into this balance. The third challenge that came out of the report is the short term versus the long term. Building trust is not just a brand thing, like you mentioned, Jamie, it is every single day. It is every activity down to the receptionist.
[00:29:58] Steve MacDonald: Our C-suites and our boards tend to look at short-term KPIs. Nobody really ever goes into a board meeting and everybody sits up and goes, “How is the brand doing these days? Dawn, tell me a little bit about the brand.” That does not happen. We tend to naturally get focused on the short term.
[00:30:16] Steve MacDonald: We have quotas that show focus on the short term. Our boards and our C-suite are driven by the short term. Knowing that the brand and the trust we have just talked about is one of the number one things we need to be doing, how do we balance that? I am going to let you take the first crack at this one if you are all right.
[00:30:36] Dawn Werry: I think it is harder, not as easy, to just measure an ROI on brand. But you can do it over time. For me, it is lifetime customer value and the stickiness of customers, as well as how easy it is to get in. I worked for some major brands and I worked for smaller brands, and I will tell you it is a lot easier to knock on the door as a major brand and get that call because they know who you are, especially if they trust you.
[00:31:03] Dawn Werry: Now, if they do not trust you and you have a bad reputation, that is a whole other story. One of the easiest benefits to measure is if you are building trust, your customers are going to stay for a while. They are going to be stickier, they are going to be repeat buyers, and it is so much less expensive to keep selling to the same customer and a trusted customer.
[00:31:22] Dawn Werry: Plus, it is a much more friendly, wonderful relationship than having to go build a whole new set of customers every time. If you look at your churn rates, your retention rates, and your lifetime value, that is your ROI on brand to me.
[00:31:37] Jamie Gier: I completely agree with what Dawn just said. I think if you can start educating the board—let us be clear—many of them have a board seat by way of being an investor, PE firm, VC firm, whomever. They want a return on their investment. Yes, of course, they are going to be thinking of the short term because they want to see what is happening, if the momentum is building for when that three-year mark hits or that five-year mark.
[00:32:00] Jamie Gier: I understand that. But that three-year and that five-year mark is predicated on building momentum, which takes time. I have spent a lot of time in enterprise sales. When you have a 12-month, 18-month, sometimes two-year sales cycle, you are building a relationship during the course of that time, and you have these moments of trust that you have to create.
[00:32:21] Jamie Gier: Along the way, they need to stay with you. Oftentimes, even in the earliest stages of a deal, the majority of buyers turn away, not necessarily because there is not product-market fit, but because of the experience they are having with your team. They think, “If this is going to be a five-year contract with this company, this is a marriage. Is this who I want to be married to?”
[00:32:42] Jamie Gier: Even if there is a good benefit to the product, they can go find another product. I think you have to explain it to a board so they do not equate brand to the latest advertising campaign or a tchotchke or the t-shirt that says the company name. They have to understand that it is an aspect of the business strategy.
[00:33:01] Jamie Gier: It is the DNA and everything is connected to trust. They have to start seeing that and how people purchase based on it. My forward path has always been that you have to balance both. I am going to invest in some of the longer-term programming that naturally builds that, while in the corridor I have specific campaigns and programs that are helping to generate pipeline or advance deals already in the pipeline.
[00:33:23] Jamie Gier: At least there is a bit of a balance to take the pressure off of “Why are you focusing on these other things?” It is a balance. The other point to be made is that you only have so many buyers that are in-market at a given time. Others—which we can debate how many, but let us just say it is 90%—are not in-market at some point.
[00:33:59] Jamie Gier: They may be later. You want to have the recall so that when they are in-market, after going through a search process to identify potential problem solvers, you come to mind. They need that brand recall. We have to remember people are on information overload. We are not lacking data or information. Your ability to be recalled at a moment in time is absolutely critical, and that recall stems from your brand-building efforts.
[00:34:27] Steve MacDonald: One of the things you said in our podcast a year or so ago was that today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand. I would love to know, Dawn, what you think about that, because I ran that by no less than about 15 different CROs, and every single one of them agreed that if we are not talking to that market—that 90%, 95%, whatever it is—then our short-term opportunities are going to dry up quickly, and we will not have the kind of stature and trust built with them to even take advantage of it. So Dawn, I would like to have you reflect on what Jamie said there. Today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand.
[00:35:08] Steve MacDonald: What do you think about that as a CRO?
[00:35:09] Dawn Werry: I agree. It is exactly what it is. I think it is also the reason people get concerned because today we want immediate gratification, and there is this worry that I am not going to see the benefit until tomorrow. So I think that is a little why we see the challenge around brand building.
[00:35:28] Dawn Werry: As I was thinking, as you were talking, all I could think of are two things. One is it can be, to your point, your point of differentiation by default. I was thinking about companies that I have worked with who came in and said, I am competing against huge brands. You need to build my brand.
[00:35:46] Dawn Werry: That is not the right strategy for some folks. For them, they could never be on brand. So I think you need to think about what is your strategy. Is your strategy to be a big brand? Or is your strategy, no matter what, you have a brand? Is it a more differentiated brand? Is it an innovation brand? Is it the reliable brand?
[00:36:04] Dawn Werry: Is your brand a bad experience? So I think people think about brand as just the name recognition. But it is so much about who you are, what you stand for, and what that promise is that people are getting from you. It can be more than just the product and the name recognition.
[00:36:21] Steve MacDonald: So I would love to have you help us here debunk a myth that most boards and CEOs, quite frankly, have, which is brand building and short-term pipeline development are separate activities. That if you are going to say, I am going to build the brand, everybody starts thinking, oh gosh, that is going to come at a sacrifice of resources and time in developing the pipeline.
[00:36:47] Steve MacDonald: Help us bring those together because we all know that those are not exclusive and always separate activities. How do you think about that, and then how do we help articulate that to our boards and to the rest of the C-suite?
[00:37:04] Jamie Gier: I am going to play on something that Dawn said. Dawn mentioned that your brand gets your feet in the door and it is your reputation, it is what other people are saying. So if you have not taken the time to build that, you may not even get the at-bats in the quarter in the first place to hit your pipeline targets.
[00:37:22] Jamie Gier: If you do not have a recognized brand, a way that people show up and trust you, you do not even get a shot at it. That also feeds into your customers making recommendations. So there is a direct correlation between your reputation, your brand, your trust—whatever we want to call it—and even getting an at-bat to begin with.
[00:37:44] Jamie Gier: Yes, you have to have a product that solves a problem. Of course you do, but you are not going to get the at-bats because you are competing for time, attention, budget, all of those things.
[00:38:00] Dawn Werry: So I went right there—same thing. But even once you have that at-bat, your customer takes a risk every single time they choose you. If they make the wrong decision, they could look bad, they could lose their job. That is that whole concept of no one ever got fired for choosing IBM.
[00:38:18] Dawn Werry: So having a good, strong brand gets you in the door. It makes it less risky for your client to choose you. It makes your sales more efficient.
[00:38:28] Jamie Gier: All of that goes back to trust too. You described a real-world scenario for most of us. Risk-averse people are investing political capital when they take a chance on you. There is a trust impact there, and they can lose their job if something goes haywire, or they have their own reputational risk. I think that is a really important point.
[00:38:50] Dawn Werry: Yes, they could lose their job. It could also just be a hassle. I do not want to be here until 10 every night having to fix your mistakes. So if I trust you and you have a great reputation, I am less likely to have to deal with that.
[00:39:01] Steve MacDonald: This trust factor goes far beyond getting the deal—it is about retaining the deal. I have talked to many C-suite executives, and they said the basic point was, to your point, you have to have a good product. It has to check all the boxes, but what they really want to know is how you show up after they sign the contract.
[00:39:21] Steve MacDonald: What that experience is like, and that they trust that you are going to be there and support them, is huge. Absolutely huge. I want to ask one last question of each of you, and it is the most important question yet. In the overall conversation, this is about adding color commentary to how we overcome the biggest challenges we face as B2B C-suite executives.
[00:39:44] Steve MacDonald: If there was one thing that you wanted other C-suite executives and other go-to-market leaders watching this today to take away from this podcast, what would that be?
[00:39:59] Dawn Werry: For me, it is this idea that you build or degrade your trust at every single touchpoint for the customer. Building your brand, building trust, is not a marketing thing. It is not a sales and marketing thing. It is not even a customer-facing thing. If everybody is not as interested in the customer, does not know as much about the customer, and why they are in business, and is not working toward that same goal, then you are not going to create the experience. You are going to lose folks.
[00:40:31] Jamie Gier: I will just add to that—if you do not have that trust intact with your customers, they are not going to recommend you. They are not going to be advocates, and they are not going to be champions. If they are some of your greatest salespeople, then you have compromised both the short term and the long term because you do not have customers willing to help you.
[00:40:56] Steve MacDonald: I am going to add one thing on top of both of those, [00:41:00] and this is another Forrester stat. Seventy-three percent of our revenue as B2B companies comes from our customers. Customer focus is at the core of our entire go-to-market strategy. It is the way we become successful.
[00:41:14] Steve MacDonald: I know people are going to have questions. Is it appropriate and okay if I give a link out to each of your LinkedIn profiles so that people can reach out and ask questions?
[00:41:26] Jamie Gier: Absolutely.
[00:41:27] Steve MacDonald: The mission of this podcast is to bring together executives from all over the world. We talk to C-suite executives across Europe and Asia as well.
[00:41:40] Steve MacDonald: If we all bring our own unique experiences, insights, and perspectives to the table on how we succeed, then that is like the rising tide that lifts all boats. I just wanted to say thank you for being a very important part of that tide today. Thank you for coming on.
[00:41:56] Dawn Werry: Thank you for having me.
[00:41:57] Jamie Gier: Thank you so much.