Episode #214:

Baris Vural, Chief Revenue Officer at Smartlinxs, and Rhiannon Staples, Chief Marketing Officer at ClearCompany, unpack the top growth blockers their peer C-suite leaders face. They connect internal misalignment, weak customer insight, and low trust to stalled revenue and show how ABM, if executed through brand and VoC, solves these gaps. As a result, you can expect practical guidance on aligning teams, refining ICP, and ultimately turning trust into pipeline momentum.

“People buy because they trust, and how do you build trust? You build it through your brand and through your voice of customers.” – Rhiannon Staples

Baris and Rhiannon demonstrate how alignment, brand, and customer voice translate into measurable outcomes through ABM. You will learn why ICP must go deeper than firmographics, how regular listening disciplines sharpen priorities, and how trust improves win rates and retention. Expect practical steps, such as utilizing churn and win data, aligning leaders in a single room, and rebalancing spend toward brand and expansion.

Follow Baris Vural on LinkedIn 

Follow Rhiannon Staples on LinkedIn 

Follow host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn

[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 have an extraordinary opportunity. We have on Baris Vural and Rhiannon Staples. And Baris, you are a Chief Revenue Officer, but you are the new breed of Chief Revenue Officers. You actually oversee sales, marketing, customer success, basically the entire go-to-market motion, right?

[00:00:30] Steve MacDonald: Which is really the way I think a lot of organizations are going these days. And Rhiannon, you are a three-time B2B CMO. So you’ve been around the block a few times in this game, this ABM game that we’re playing, right? And so what we’re going to be talking about today is a report from your industry peers. Other CROs, CMOs, CEOs, CGOs, 45 have been asked a very specific question.

[00:00:58] Steve MacDonald: And that question was, what are the top two challenges that we face as C-Suites going and creating long-term sustainable growth in our businesses? And we have the top three challenges that we’re going to be talking about, and we’re going to get right into that. But before we do, I would love to just start off maybe Baris with you, if you wouldn’t mind just giving us a little bit more background on you before we get started.

[00:01:26] Baris Vural: Sure. Absolutely, Steve. I appreciate being on the podcast. I do appreciate the invite. These are great topics that are near and dear to our hearts, and I think we all face some of these challenges in our positions. So I’m Baris Vural. I’m the Chief Revenue Officer, like you said, Steve, at a company called Smartlinxs.

[00:01:42] Baris Vural: We’re about a $50 million revenue ARR company. I’ve spent all of my life literally in B2B SaaS, especially in complex enterprise settings, across different verticals. My current remit is the entire revenue lifecycle, anywhere from acquisition all the way to retention and growth, and everything in between—solution engineering, marketing.

[00:02:04] Baris Vural: So literally, all of my team that touches the revenue and the buyer’s journey from the top to the bottom is my remit. It comes with its own challenges. It comes with its own opportunities as well. I know we’re going to dig into it, but that’s a little bit about me, and I’m really happy to be on the podcast.

[00:02:20] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Rhiannon, if you wouldn’t mind giving us a little bit more on your background.

[00:02:25] Rhiannon Staples: Yeah, happy to. Steve, you and I go way back. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had a chat on your podcast. I’m glad to be invited back. I’m a B2B CMO, as you mentioned, three times. Really focused on working with global organizations.

[00:02:38] Rhiannon Staples: I’m currently the CMO at a company called ClearCompany. We’re in the HR tech space. We’re a talent management platform for mid-size and small enterprise businesses. And I really focus companies on identifying ways to push up market. And part of that is getting the right balance between demand gen and brand.

[00:02:56] Rhiannon Staples: You see a lot of small startup tech companies really focusing quite heavily on demand gen. And I think as organizations recognize the need to push up market, brand becomes a stronger imperative. Building brand and helping establish account-based go-to-market strategies in partnership with CROs like Baris is kinda my sweet spot.

[00:03:16] Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic. I’m going to take all of that, that world of experience, and we’re going to start talking about how do we solve some of our biggest challenges. So right away, what are the biggest challenges? And it was really interesting because over 70% of the C-Suites said that internal challenges were our number one challenge to growth, which blew me away.

[00:03:39] Steve MacDonald: Because we like to say that we point our fingers outside, right? It’s our competition, it was COVID, it was—right? There’s always something external that’s keeping us from doing what we want to do. But what it said is that we’re in our own way, right? We’re our greatest issue to creating long-term sustainable growth for our businesses.

[00:03:59] Steve MacDonald: That’s number one. Number two was a lack of understanding of the voice of our customers, yet everyone recognizes it’s the highest voice of authority in our business. None of us are going to say we’re not a customer-obsessed organization, right? But if you look even beyond what we said as our C-Suite peers, and you go to the McKinsey’s, the Forrester’s of the world, they’ll say we falter as a B2B industry.

[00:04:27] Steve MacDonald: We don’t spend the right amount of time, the right amount of dedication to learn the voice of the customer and therefore embed it into our go-to-market strategies. So that’s the second one. The third one I call the hidden challenge, because nobody talked about it, but as soon as we started bringing it up, everybody agreed and actually Forrester agreed it was the number one challenge.

[00:04:51] Steve MacDonald: It’s trust. And I’ll accentuate it with a stat that came out of the LinkedIn Edelman Trust Barometer. The most recent one talked to 32,000 B2B buyers across the world. And what they said—61% of those respondents said that they think that we are being intentionally misleading.

[00:05:17] Steve MacDonald: In the information that we are giving them. Not that they didn’t distrust it, but it went to another level, like we’re intentionally misleading them. And I know that’s not the way that either of you operate, but we are all lumped into the perception of how we sell in the B2B world, right? So we’re supposed to be trust marks. And I’m going to kick us off there, and I’m going to pick on you again first, Baris, that you actually said in our last conversation that the most important thing that we need to fix is trust. And I just love to get your thoughts on that as we get started here.

[00:05:57] Baris Vural: I’d love to hear Rhiannon’s thoughts on this, but if I look at my calendar as a CRO—and I’m sure a lot of CROs, probably facing looks like from the survey, facing the same challenge—which is, how do we gain the trust of our customers and the prospects and the community?

[00:06:14] Baris Vural: And I look at that as an outcome of, you know, if an organization is aligned, which was the number one topic that you mentioned, that 70% people. I believe alignment is important. I think lack of alignment internally, that means, do we have our act together as a company? Is product speaking the same language with sales?

[00:06:35] Baris Vural: Is sales speaking the same language with marketing? Is marketing speaking the same language? When we talk about ICP, do we all agree on the ICP? Do we all agree on the market opportunity? Do we all agree on our value proposition? And if you lock every one of those key stakeholders across functions in the company—because I’ve done that in the past, where you ask the ICP question, you know, who are we serving and who’s our ideal customer profile?

[00:07:01] Baris Vural: You ask that to six executives, you get six different answers. Mm-hmm, right? And then you extrapolate that and you ask that same question to cross-functional leaders, your Chief Product Officer or your Chief Customer Success Officer, and then you go ask the same question to your CFO, and you ask it to the leaders, and you get 10 different answers or 20 different answers.

[00:07:24] Baris Vural: Right? And that to me shows misalignment. And if you start there, then of course your customers are confused. Of course you’re not building the trust with your customers because that’s the outcome. Your lack of alignment internally shows in your customer’s belief in what the heck you’re doing, right?

[00:07:42] Baris Vural: What problems are you solving? Which is the second issue, which is the voice of the customer that you mentioned. So I strongly believe trust with the community of your customers, trust with the customers, starts with your internal alignment. I think, and I see this over and over again, we as CROs and CMOs and CEOs, and you look at the peer, I think that’s our job.

[00:08:04] Baris Vural: Our job is to get our ducks in a row and our people in a row. Because honestly, I think the biggest assumption that we make is we believe our people are communicating. We believe our leaders are aligning on the ICP or aligning on the value proposition or aligning on the metrics that are really important.

[00:08:23] Baris Vural: We assume that’s happening, but sometimes when we dig in, it doesn’t. It’s not happening, right? And that shows in the trust with our customers. So I’ll leave it at that. I know we can unpack every one of those things, but that’s the kind of framework that we all get challenged with. But then I think that also creates opportunities as well.

[00:08:42] Steve MacDonald: I love it. Rhiannon, I know you got a ton to say here.

[00:08:46] Rhiannon Staples: Yeah, I laugh at us in the B2B space, we often act like our buyers aren’t human. Of course, trust is at the center of what they do. They’re betting their careers on some of the decisions that they take and the companies they choose to partner with.

[00:09:01] Rhiannon Staples: And people buy because they trust. And how do you build trust? You build it through your brand and through your voice of customers. So I’m not surprised to see that as another factor that’s cited in the challenges that are coming up. We constantly need to build that brand through the market, through the customers that we serve.

[00:09:20] Rhiannon Staples: And that’s ultimately what gets you on day-one lists. So the challenge, I know personally that a lot of CMOs are facing—because I face it myself sometimes and certainly amongst my peer community that you hear time and again—is marketing is being ratcheted down to focusing exclusively on demand gen and overspending on programs that are designed to drive revenue, net new revenue for the business, at the top of the funnel.

[00:09:46] Rhiannon Staples: And I think more strategic organizations—and Baris, to your point, I think about alignment—more strategic organizations and more strategic CMOs recognize that the responsibility is actually full lifecycle, and making sure that the investments that we’re making don’t just support new revenue acquisition, but also retention and expansion.

[00:10:06] Rhiannon Staples: And that’s building trust and confidence amongst your client base. And if you do that effectively, that then becomes the referral channel for your business, but one that doesn’t show up on spreadsheets and can be very difficult to quantify in a conversation when you’re accustomed to walking in with charts and data that support the ROI investment of marketing dollars.

[00:10:26] Rhiannon Staples: So I think all three of these topics from a CMO perspective absolutely intertwine. Full lifecycle CMOs surely must be feeling spread a bit thin because there are so many challenges that we’re trying to face simultaneously. And that lack of alignment at the executive level, Baris, that you spoke to quite extensively, feels very real.

[00:10:50] Rhiannon Staples: But it’s on us as CROs and CMOs to figure out what do we prioritize. It’s not that anything on that list isn’t important. We just can’t do it all at once. But deciding where to start our focus is critically important, and then making sure that the investments we’re making in the business, and particularly in the marketing organization, are aligned to that strategy—super important.

[00:11:10] Steve MacDonald: You know, Rhiannon, and something that you said in our previous conversation I thought was so profound, right, is because this lack of alignment is the number one issue. We all know we have it. We all do. You said there’s one really important way to get alignment, and that is to follow the voice of the customer, right?

[00:11:30] Steve MacDonald: If they are the highest voice of authority, then all of a sudden our individual opinions on what we need to do and how we need to do it, there’s really a divining rod, right, that points us in the right direction, and it’s the voice of the customer. And I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about what you meant about that.

[00:11:50] Rhiannon Staples: Yeah. I think another interesting behavior of B2B SaaS in a lot of regards is this feeling of talking inside out, thinking about what we want to say to the market, thinking about what we want to build for, without really taking the time to validate that against the voice of the customer, taking the time to listen to customers in the market.

[00:12:10] Rhiannon Staples: And doing that with enough regularity that we can keep pace with, you know, the changing landscape that our customers in the market are facing. The other part of that, and Baris you touched on this—and I can get on a soapbox about this, Steve, as you know quite well for quite a while—is getting alignment on the ICP.

[00:12:30] Rhiannon Staples: That voice of customer shouldn’t be the outlier. Customers you serve, the one-offs—you know, I have to talk about this. It’s not about that one whale customer that you hope to land, but really your ideal customer profile where you win and grow time and again. And focusing on what they need, that helps you cut through the noise.

[00:12:47] Rhiannon Staples: It helps drive greater alignment. It helps drive greater focus. You can identify what is at the center of that target: the ideal customer profile. Not the potential customer profile. Not the aspirational customer profile. The ideal customer that stays and grows. That’s the voice you’re listening to.

[00:13:04] Rhiannon Staples: They will tell you what’s important to them and what’s strategically critical for them to continue the relationship and continue to deepen the partnership. So that is—it’s a truth serum, I think, for executive teams. If you can align on listening to that, it’s objective input to drive that alignment.

[00:13:22] Baris Vural: I wholeheartedly agree with Rhiannon. And, you know, I think a lot of companies—and I’ve made this mistake myself—they go surface level with the ICP, meaning we think if it looks like this, and it’s this size, and it’s this vertical, it’s a good customer, right? And those three parameters are never enough, right?

[00:13:43] Baris Vural: I think a lot of organizations—marketing, sales, product, the cross-function alignment—they never lock themselves in a room and look at their wins and then look at their losses. They look at what are the types of customers that are the most profitable. Not only profitability, but they really get the value out of our solutions.

[00:14:05] Baris Vural: And how do they become advocates? Like, if we were to build a community of a customer advisory board and then we lock these people in a room, you know, what’s the value that they’re getting out of our product, number one. Number two, if they’re maximizing the outcomes from the products that we sell—this is a B2B business, right?

[00:14:24] Baris Vural: We’re either helping them with their top line—we’re either helping them grow their revenues—or we’re helping them with their bottom line, basically efficiency. Sort of, you know, doing things better, more productively, and helping them, you know, gain more profits either way. I think those are the metrics, and then that kind of helps you further define your ICP.

[00:14:44] Baris Vural: It’s not surface-level ICP, it’s not just size and segment and vertical or whatever it is. It’s really deeper than that. And I think the moment you build those characteristics of your ICP and you really go down to the granular level of what an ICP looks like, then all of a sudden your total addressable market—because every company starts drooling over their total addressable market—

[00:15:09] Baris Vural: But then you really bring it down to the relevant market and relevant accounts that you believe are the best customers that you would have. And I think, again, I’ve made this mistake myself, just keeping at the surface level and telling the sales team and the marketing team, go after these thousands of accounts.

[00:15:27] Baris Vural: And then the result just becomes, right, it’s not the type of customers that we want. Then you start spinning, and then you start fine-tuning it. I think taking that time—taking really the time as an organization—to define your ICP and going really granular is huge.

[00:15:44] Steve MacDonald: You know, Baris, that can be tough, right? Because you have a quota over your head, right? And so just meeting the quota, maybe they’re a little outside that ICP, but you know, we’ve got to bring the revenue in.

[00:16:00] Steve MacDonald: But one of the hardest things as a Chief Revenue Officer to do is to say no. Right? To say no, that’s not a deal we want to bring in. Because it goes right to what Rhiannon was saying before—those are not going to be the ideal. They’re going to churn. And ultimately it’s going to cost the organization a lot more. We’re going to be working a lot harder to really service and make happy these customers that aren’t the right fit for us.

[00:16:33] Steve MacDonald: And I know inside of your organizations—and SaaS organizations are no exception to this—our NRR score is one of the most important key metrics that we have, right? And that is so tied, so tied to existing customers and growing existing customers. And we can’t just look, oh, it’s time for renewal, how’s this going, right? You know, how’s the relationship going? We better jump in there and see if they’re going to renew.

[00:16:54] Steve MacDonald: Rhiannon, you brought the subject up of the importance of focusing on our existing customers. We can be very new-logo focused, but I think it was Forrester that said 73% of B2B new annual revenue should be coming from existing clients. Why aren’t we as focused on our existing clients, as Baris was just talking about, right? Get in the room, doing the customer advisory board, really learn the voice of the customer and help it drive. Why are we so new-logo focused, and is that hurting us?

[00:17:35] Rhiannon Staples: Listen, I think a balance is important. There’s a philosophy that if you’re too focused on existing customers, you kind of cap the revenue potential and earnings potential for the business.

[00:17:45] Rhiannon Staples: And to be sure, not all businesses are set up in a way that they have additional expansion capabilities for existing clients, right? I mean, Baris and I tend to work for organizations that have a wider product suite, plenty of upsell opportunity. That’s not the case for all B2B companies. But you know, new-logo acquisition is obviously—just like any consumer business—new-customer acquisition is a super important metric.

[00:18:08] Rhiannon Staples: Net tends to be where the board focuses, where the executive leadership team focuses, and where you ultimately see the growth potential in businesses. But in times like these, when customer acquisition costs are becoming increasingly higher, you might want to shift that balance a bit to focusing on existing clients.

[00:18:25] Rhiannon Staples: If you have new products to bring to them, new value to offer—we definitely see in the market consolidation of vendors. You know, particularly at times like now, a lot of companies are not out looking for new solutions. They’re actually going to their existing solution providers and asking for more capabilities rather than trying to add on to their tech stack.

[00:18:45] Rhiannon Staples: So leaning into that—organizations that have the opportunity and the potential to listen to customers and lean into that to develop their capabilities and new things to bring to offer those clients—not only deepens the stickiness with existing customers, but equally offers additional revenue potential.

[00:19:01] Rhiannon Staples: But it’s just not, you know, conditioned in this hypergrowth phase that we’ve been through over the past couple of years with tech acquisition, which has long fallen off. There was this concept of land grab and wanting to go out and acquire new logos, and I think there’s a bit of a hangover from that.

[00:19:15] Steve MacDonald: Well, I would love to make a transition here from discussion of why we have these challenges to what do we do about these challenges? And Baris, I’ll let you pick—whether it’s internal alignment, trust, lack of voice of the customer, or all put together—what do we do? We’re obviously not doing the job that we fully want to do.

[00:19:42] Steve MacDonald: If we’re not aligned, we don’t have the true voice of the customer the way that we really, truly want, and there’s a massive trust issue that’s rampant throughout the industry. Why do we think the B2B buyer is waiting longer and longer and longer to talk to us, right? That’s been so well documented—because they’re not trusting. That’s what it comes right down to. What do we do?

[00:20:08] Baris Vural: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I’ve got a lot of thoughts. I think it goes back to—I strongly believe in the alignment first. I think if your marketing, your sales department, your customer success, and your product team do not agree on what type of customers we want and what kind of customers we don’t want, then we need to look at that.

[00:20:35] Baris Vural: I think data doesn’t lie. If you are a $5 million company, or a $2 million company, or a $50 million, $100 million company, you’re going to have data proof to tell you: where’s your churn coming from? What type of customers is that churn coming from? What type of good quality revenue, and what type of customers is that coming from?

[00:20:57] Baris Vural: And I think you can answer a lot of questions by just looking at the data, number one. Number two, by asking and trying to get a very healthy conversation with all of your leaders in the room. And you lock them in the room, and nobody leaves. I’ve seen this play out over and over again when the CEO has an idea of what a good customer looks like, but your CPO and your CTO don’t. You literally need to lock them in a room and hash that out, right?

[00:21:22] Baris Vural: Because if you don’t get to the bottom of that, then of course trust with your community and everything is going to get broken—because your executives cannot even decide on what a good customer is.

[00:21:45] Baris Vural: It goes back to the earlier question. As a CRO, there are deals—and it shouldn’t be a gut feel, right? I mean, Rhiannon, you probably see this every day. There’s a deal that comes in the pipeline. It’s really not an ICP. It’s not in, right? And it looks good because it’s going to save the quarter.

[00:22:05] Baris Vural: Nobody says this is going to be a bad customer. Everybody kind of knows it’s not an ICP. Everybody knows that it could churn, but nobody wants to call it out. So what you end up doing is you close the deal, nine months later, horrendous implementation, product doesn’t fit. We’re trying to customize things. Oh, guess what? The customer churns.

[00:22:24] Baris Vural: Right. So I think answering that question early on and really getting that alignment—because a lot of companies believe they have alignment, but they really don’t. It has to be a meaningful discussion. It has to be a debate. It can turn into executives, maybe not fighting, but really trying to agree to disagree. You need to get that out of the way.

[00:22:50] Baris Vural: If you don’t, it’s going to keep dragging forever and ever and ever. And you’re going to have bad GRR, you’re going to have a struggling NRR. You’re going to be looking at your whitespace, wondering how we cannot sell to this whitespace and how can we not get to the expansion. I think it goes back to locking people in the room and getting that answer.

[00:23:05] Steve MacDonald: I love it. Rhiannon?

[00:23:08] Rhiannon Staples: Amen. Everything you just said. I think the one thing that all exec teams can universally agree on is this notion of trust and it being at the center of every major buying decision for a B2B buyer. And if we can agree that is fundamental to business success, then it should be a strategic imperative to identify plans, initiatives, and priorities that support trust building.

[00:23:32] Rhiannon Staples: So back to the example, Baris, you just gave of that whale opportunity that comes in—it’s on the parties in that executive room, someone to raise a hand and say, if our strategic priority this quarter, this year, is trust building, we know that this particular deal actually is in opposition to our strategic priorities in business.

[00:23:58] Rhiannon Staples: Ultimately, that churned client not only means you’ve burned trust with them naturally, but it also does brand damage in the market. That word will absolutely get around. So thinking about all the ways in which you build trust in the market—through your customers, through trusted industry partners, through influencers like analysts and other objective third parties that are assessing market conditions and companies—and making strategic investments in that is probably not how most executive teams are operating, and it should be.

[00:24:24] Rhiannon Staples: And this is, you know, I mentioned before, it ties back to brand. We know a lot of companies aren’t investing in brand. And not everything that we’ve talked about here has a dollar value associated with it necessarily in terms of expenditures, but some of it will.

[00:24:49] Rhiannon Staples: And making sure that in executive team conversations, in the board conversations, you’re tying back those investments to that top-level strategic objective of building trust—and justifying why 30 to 40% of your budget actually needs to be spent on activities that are not related to clicks and conversions and attribution on a spreadsheet—is super important.

[00:25:10] Steve MacDonald: So I’m going to ask how we swim upstream and do all of this, because we tend to be creatures of compensation. We tend to be creatures of, you know, what is put on us as requirements. And you all have been in enough board meetings to go in, and nobody at the board meeting is coming in and saying, Baris, how are we doing on our trust-building program? Right?

[00:25:37] Steve MacDonald: You know, and hey, have you continued to refine the ICP? I’d love to know how that has evolved. Right? We tend to react, and we know every time we have the board meeting, all hell breaks loose. Nothing happens. We’re just—you know, it’s all we’re doing. So now we get back from the board meeting, but what we’re talking about here are foundational.

[00:25:58] Steve MacDonald: I mean, Forrester said the same thing that you just said. We need to be focusing on—we don’t have a trust-building plan. We need one. Right. Even if we’re not being asked for it. And I think that’s one of the big things that I’m taking away from what you’re talking about here: the activities that we need to focus on, that we need to spend more time on.

[00:26:21] Steve MacDonald: Right. Typically in the board meeting, nobody’s saying, How many customers have you guys talked to since the last time that we met, and what did you learn? Right? These are the kind of things that we know we need to do, even if we’re not being asked to do them. And I think that’s a big part of the problem—we tend to do the things that we know are going to get us through and not get us in trouble. Right?

[00:26:56] Steve MacDonald: So how do we do this? You talked about communicating, Baris. You talked about identifying the ICP. But then, where there’s a lack of communication—because we can lock our leadership into a room and we can align on it—but if everybody who is delivering the product, the technology, and the services to really cater to that ICP doesn’t know it, how important is that communication strategy, our own communication strategy internally?

[00:27:17] Baris Vural: So, I mean, I’ll caveat this—might be a career-limiting comment that I’m about to make—because the boards don’t know what they don’t know.

[00:27:24] Baris Vural: I’ve reported to a lot of different boards. They’re wonderful people. They’re a lot—100 times smarter than all of us, especially me. But the board doesn’t know what they don’t know. Right? I mean, I think they have an investment thesis, they have their own sort of vision and mission and strategy and growth targets, and it’s all in their head and it’s on a spreadsheet somewhere, and they kind of measure you against it.

[00:27:45] Baris Vural: But I think it’s how we control the narrative as the C-level suite going into these board meetings. And really, if you’re going into the board meeting and the board is setting up the agenda, you’re in the wrong board meeting. You always have to sort of set the agenda, right?

[00:28:01] Baris Vural: And the objectives. And to Rhiannon’s point—okay, how do we talk about trust? Well, let’s talk about our pipeline. Let’s talk about it in the context of all of this. Let’s look at our pipeline and let’s look at our forecast and let’s look at our brand activities and all of those things.

[00:28:19] Baris Vural: And how much of this ties to our ICP? So in other words, hey look, wouldn’t we all be successful and get to the outcome of top-line growth and bottom-line growth? Because the board cares about EBITDA growth and top-line growth at the end of the day, right? So as long as you can get them there through this meaningful conversation—

[00:28:39] Baris Vural: Look, 100% of my pipeline is my ICP, and my win rates are going in the right direction. By the way, we are disqualifying bad deals and misfit ICPs, because look, they’re causing us churn. Right? So look at my churn bucket, look at my GRR bucket, and we’ve identified CSOs. Now we’re making a strategic move to make sure we’re filling the funnel with the right accounts, with the right target market and opportunities.

[00:29:31] Baris Vural: And look, our win rate is going up. My customer acquisition cost is coming down because I know what I want, I know the type of customers. Oh, by the way, we have a customer advisory board of 20, 30 of our top customers, and they’re constantly feeding us with the value that we’re driving for their business.

[00:29:50] Baris Vural: Right. And we’re incorporating that into our sales playbook. We’re incorporating that into our customer success retention and expansion playbook. So that kind of loop—as we’re learning from the customers in the community—we’re feeding that into our new logo pursuit. We’re feeding that into our content strategy with our account-based marketing strategy.

[00:30:00] Baris Vural: So this is sort of the cycle. I think as long as you can control that narrative with the board, they’re going to look at it and go, Okay, these executives seem like they know what they’re doing. So now you reframe the conversation, right? And then all of a sudden you’re educating them, you’re reframing the discussion based on these topics.

[00:30:08] Baris Vural: And hopefully, if it’s the right board, they’re leaning in. They’re leaning in and asking you, “Where can we help? Do you need more investment? Should we double down on this or that?” That’s the right conversation to have. As long as you can frame it that way. Now, it’s easier said than done because if you’ve got 12 people in the boardroom, everybody has their own perspective. But you need to manage that, and I think that’s why they pay us the big bucks—to manage the board.

[00:30:33] Steve MacDonald: You know, the big visual I had there was this: we spend so much time understanding our ICP so we can speak their language. But we also have to speak the language of the board—EBITDA and those types of things. We have to tell the story of how we’re going to impact the KPIs that really matter to them. That’s what they care about, and honestly, if we were on the board and had invested, that’s what we’d care about too. It’s not wrong.

We pride ourselves on being storytellers, but maybe when it comes to the board level, we need some more practice. Rhiannon, I’d love your reaction.

[00:31:13] Rhiannon Staples: Yeah, I agree with what Baris said. It’s our job to connect the dots. They hired us because they trust that we’re experts in the domains we lead, and we have to be confident in that. They don’t live our day-to-day, so they don’t naturally see the connections between the programs we want to talk about and the metrics they care about.

It’s our job to draw those connections for them. Baris, you outlined it perfectly—the common thread that ties everything together. Helping the board see and understand that thread builds their trust and helps them feel confident investing in the programs we’re designing.

[00:31:57] Steve MacDonald: If you were to give a recommendation to your peers—your fellow C-suite leaders—blank sheet of paper, cards on the table… What are the top three priorities we should be focused on daily? Not the crisis of the day, but the proactive things that ensure we’re building trust, understanding the voice of the customer, and staying aligned. Big questions, but that’s why you’re on this panel.

Rhiannon, I’ll start with you.

[00:33:00] Rhiannon Staples: I feel like it’s been threaded throughout this conversation. First, get really clear on your ICP and align on it across the organization. That’s central to strategy. Second, listen more to the customer. It unlocks insights the business needs to operate efficiently and attract more of the right clients. It also fuels every department by showing them how they can contribute to strategic value. And third, invest in both short- and long-term value creation. From a CMO perspective, that means a balanced budget—not just focused on capturing in-market demand, but equally on building long-term brand confidence. Make sure the ways prospects and customers learn and educate themselves are being touched by your marketing efforts.

[00:34:07] Steve MacDonald: Love it—massive words of wisdom. Now you have to beat that, Baris.

[00:34:12] Baris Vural: Well, I’ll try. I’d love to just say “ditto” and walk away, but I’ll add a bit more tactical color. I call it “no shortcuts” and “lock people in the room.” Here’s what I mean: lock your go-to-market team—cross-functional leaders—in a room. Bring the data. Pull up wins and losses. Have a good RevOps person prepare the data, because that data will tell a story. Then observe how your leaders react. Don’t jump to solutions immediately—just watch. And then, see if there’s real alignment. I like meetings where people get uncomfortable—where marketing pushes back on customer success, customer success challenges sales, sales pushes on product. That’s healthy. You don’t want everyone nodding in agreement. You want that debate, because the outcome is usually much stronger. You’ll be amazed what comes out of that room. And after the hard conversation, take everyone out for drinks and dinner.

[00:35:54] Baris Vural: And it’ll be very productive. So lock ’em in a room. Lock your customers in a room, whether you call it a customer advisory board, whatever, but lock ’em in a room and have the same type of conversation, because I think that’s going to help you with your ICP, some of your customers. I think Steve Jobs said customers don’t know what they want. So, like, you tell them what they need. And I think that’s the philosophy behind Apple or iPhone. So you need to listen to some customers, but I think even within your customer base, you’re going to have ICPs within the customer base. You’re going to have some high value ICP customers and you’re going to have some low value ICP customers.

[00:36:29] Baris Vural: So just lock them in the room and get all that learning. And then, and again, you don’t have to do this in this order. You can do it in whichever order you want. You’ve got to lock your executive team in a room and take all these learnings, right? And then ask the tough questions like, is this the kind of the market that we want to go after? Are these the type of customers that we want to go after? Here’s all the learnings that we’re getting from our customer advisory board and our go-to-market team. Here’s where the misalignment is, here’s where the alignments are, so here are the good news and the bad news and the ugly news. And then get your executives to align on that.

[00:37:02] Baris Vural: I think if you can do those three things, I mean, you’ll make a big, big, big, you know, leapfrog into taking your organization to the next level. And I think the result of all that will help you build the trust, the community, and all those things, which are the outcomes.

[00:37:19] Rhiannon Staples: Baris, your comment, an appropriate comment about the fear that, you know, if we just listen to our customers, we won’t be building new and innovative things. I think that’s kind of the concept there, which is so far from the truth, right? That doesn’t mean you’re going into that room with customers to take orders.

[00:37:34] Rhiannon Staples: You’re going into that room to ask questions, to drive discovery, to learn and develop. So don’t mistake the conversation. I know you agree with me on this. Listening to your customers is not taking orders from customers, insofar as understanding them more deeply and then using that as a foundation for your ideation, creation, and innovation that will be spoken from that.

[00:37:56] Baris Vural: Appreciate that clarity, absolutely, Rhiannon. And that’s so true, right? I mean, I think when you lock people, customers, in a room, you want them to talk about the problems.

[00:38:03] Rhiannon Staples: Yes.

[00:38:03] Baris Vural: Right? And all the common challenges, because those are the things you’re solving for them. Right. So, absolutely. I totally agree.

[00:38:10] Rhiannon Staples: And then the other part of this, and Steve, you started to go down this path before. I’m not sure that we closed loop on this discussion, but okay. So you’ve got all of this alignment. You’ve got all of this intelligence, Baris, and these conversations that we’re having in these locked rooms. How do we communicate and cascade that to the business?

[00:38:24] Steve MacDonald: Yes.

[00:38:24] Rhiannon Staples: How do we make sure that we’ve got really strong communication and enforcement after those conversations have happened that brings the rest of the organization along on that journey and along on those decisions? Thinking about immediate communication coming off the back of some of those strategic conversations and decisions, what is that rhythm of communication that’s ongoing?

[00:38:46] Rhiannon Staples: After that, you know, you might decide to do some sort of big SKO, right? Where some of this information is shared with the organization in a broad base way. But what is that rhythm of communication then throughout the course of the year? What is the data or the insights that you’re putting in front of the business with some regularity to help them understand and see how the strategic decisions that have been made and you’re implementing are influencing business outcomes?

[00:39:09] Rhiannon Staples: I see a lot of decisions get stuck at the C-level or VP level in the business because that communication plan hasn’t been well thought through and or carried through, you know, three months, six months after some of these big strategic planning sessions occur. So identifying that, deciding on it, documenting it, and then coming back to it time and again throughout the coming quarters or months, whatever your cadence is, is a super important part of making it stick.

[00:39:33] Steve MacDonald: I’m really glad you asked that question because it was literally the next question I was going to ask. Assume we get everybody into the room, assume we get alignment, assume we do a better job at talking with the customer, getting the voice of the customer, assume we start building trust. How do we execute then with that alignment, with those insights, right? And that’s where you were going there.

[00:40:03] Steve MacDonald: I’m pretty sure we could have four or five of these sessions and there would be enough to talk about. So what I’d love to do is just ask for each of you to, in like 30 seconds, just give us, if there was one takeaway that you wanted as C-Suite executives to take away from this conversation, what would that be?

[00:40:24] Steve MacDonald: And Baris, I’ll ask you first.

[00:40:26] Baris Vural: One key takeaway is, I mean, it is so hard to come up with one key takeaway, but I would say ICP-ICP-ICP. That’s the only key takeaway. I mean, go granular, go deep, not on the surface. Dig deep into your ICP. Spend the time, get everybody to agree on what it is, what it’s not. That’s my only recommendation, or that one key takeaway, that was the only one.

[00:40:53] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic, Rhiannon?

[00:40:56] Rhiannon Staples: For me, it’s making trust a strategic business objective and looking at the programs and initiatives you’re building in the business through that lens.

[00:41:06] Steve MacDonald: Well, I’m going to say this. Thank you. I think we don’t talk about the right challenges enough, and I don’t think we talk about what are the solutions to those challenges enough.

[00:41:20] Steve MacDonald: And this has just started the conversation, but it’s been so important and I just wanted to say thank you to both of you for coming on and shedding light onto these challenges and these issues that we have and what we can do. So thank you.

[00:41:33] Baris Vural: I appreciate the opportunity, Steve and Rhiannon.