Episode #221: 

Amit Shankardass, CMO at VXI Global Solutions, explains why client centricity must guide decisions. He demonstrates how to strike a balance between today’s needs and both near-term and long-term horizons. He explores human biases that block honest listening. He shares practical ways to institutionalize customer voice.

“A customer should be the North Star that guides how we begin to think, process, and evaluate.” – Amit Shankardass

This conversation demonstrates how leaders can anchor decisions within the buyer’s frame, mitigate bias when processing feedback, and foster alignment across sales and marketing. Amit outlines habits that scale trust and revenue, from strategic reviews that anticipate tomorrow’s needs to advisory boards that surface hidden opportunities.

Follow Amit Shankardass on LinkedIn

Follow host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn

[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a really interesting conversation with a very interesting guest. Now, Amit Shankardass, that’s your name, and you are the Chief Marketing Officer at VXI Global Solutions. And I’m gonna let you explain a little bit more about what you do and about your career, but you’ve been doing this for a long time.

[00:00:28] Steve MacDonald: You’ve been in the service industry the whole time, service marketing, and so I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. But what we’re gonna be talking about today is what really our North Star should be, right? That’s a concept we all know. It’s where we’re headed. It guides us, it points us. But your point of view is that client centricity should be our North Star.

[00:00:52] Steve MacDonald: But it isn’t always, right? Yet the client is the highest voice of authority in our business. It’s a natural that should be, but why isn’t it? And I think we’re gonna kind of unpack that, why it doesn’t always make it into businesses as our North Star. But before we do that, I’d love to just have you have an opportunity to explain a little bit more about your background.

[00:01:13] Amit Shankardass: Sure, Steven. Thanks for having me on this podcast. Yes, you are exactly right. I’m a services marketeer, that’s been my career. I’ve done it for 30 years now, in the B2B space. So I’m not a consumer-based guy. I’m very much a B2B in the B2B space that I’ve covered. It covers the spectrum of training, consulting, IT, help desk, pick, pack and ship logistics.

[00:01:34] Amit Shankardass: Customer management, customer care, CX space or CRM space, and some technology play too. And early on, I’ll tell you just a quick story. Early on in my career, when I was a young guy starting up and, you know, had all these great ideas, I remember also a young entrepreneur who just started a company.

[00:01:52] Amit Shankardass: He was a Microsoft associated company, and he said, listen Amit, if you wanna be a smart marketeer, go learn how to sell. Get out on the street, carry a bag, and go speak to customers. Don’t ever become what he called an Ivory Tower marketeer, a guy who sat up and just thought and pontificated. Get out, get real.

[00:02:12] Amit Shankardass: And I think, you know, fortunately, that was literally the first year of my career, and that set the precedent for how I began to think about sales and marketing, marketing customer centricity. But I tell that story because in all our careers we have these moments.

[00:02:26] Amit Shankardass: That are pivotal. Many years later I realized how pivotal it was. But yeah, I’m based in Southern California and love it. Here you can see a little bit of the sunshine back here. That’s natural light, because that’s what it is, sunny and shiny in Southern California.

[00:02:40] Steve MacDonald: I lived in Orange County actually.

[00:02:41] Steve MacDonald: You’re from Orange County. I lived in Orange County for six years. Yeah. So here’s what I’d love to do. I’d love to start off with just this idea of customer centricity as our North Star and that North Star in business. We’re for-profit organizations, right? It’s gotta be leading to revenue growth, long-term, sustainable growth of the business. Tell us maybe your philosophy of client centricity.

[00:03:05] Amit Shankardass: Absolutely. And you know, Steve, you can ask people that have worked with me and my teams. One of the things I always ask them to do is literally write the phrase think like a customer and stick it in front of your device. Because I mean this holistically. When I say it should be the North Star, it should be the point with which we begin to think, process, evaluate, et cetera.

[00:03:31] Amit Shankardass: There’s two things, and you used a very important word: sustainable, a long-term sustainable relationship. So what’s sustainable? Sustainable means if you’re building a long-term relationship, it means you’re solving a problem today, a need, a problem, whatever it is. And we talk about both, you know, needs both from a rational perspective and an emotive perspective.

[00:03:51] Amit Shankardass: We’ll talk about that in a minute, but it’s solving an immediate need. It is anticipating a need or a situation or a problem for tomorrow, the short term. And then it’s preparing and adapting for a longer-term need. And when you balance those three out from the buyer’s perspective, from the customer’s perspective, and remember, I’m using customer from a B2B buyer perspective, right?

[00:04:16] Amit Shankardass: But when you start from there, then you’re building a sustainable relationship. Even in the sales and marketing realm, Steve, the same holds true. If you think and put yourself in the shoes of the buyer, and then you start working backwards into what it is that you provide, the services, your proposition, et cetera, it will be so much more meaningful. So I literally, I kid you not, when I say I literally have think like a customer. I remember it. I have it in front of me. Even though it’s been 20 years that I’ve used the phrase, I still have it as a reminder.

[00:04:50] Steve MacDonald: Well, here’s what I’d love to do before we start talking about like how we apply it in our business.

[00:04:56] Steve MacDonald: I’d love to ask you why we don’t regularly do that. Because you and I were talking before we started here about a McKinsey study, right? And it said 63% of B2B leaders, C-suite leaders, they literally recognize that the client is the source of almost every good idea that we have inside of our business. They’re the innovation engine, yet only 15% of them really incorporate customer input into what we do. So there’s this gap, right? Why is there this gap if it should be our North Star?

[00:05:32] Amit Shankardass: Steve, it’s a great question, and I think for that we might have to tap into a little bit of human psychology. Not that I’m a psychologist, but by the way, in our professions as marketing professionals, sales professionals, or even as leaders, we are somewhat psychologists.

[00:05:45] Amit Shankardass: But I think you’d have to tap into human psychology because it isn’t easy. It isn’t easy to take criticism. Let me ask you this: how many times have any of us, or you, sat in a meeting where somebody comes in and says, here’s what a client says. And very quickly, somebody around the room, one of the C-suite persons says, you know what?

[00:06:04] Amit Shankardass: We gotta watch what that client says because blah, blah, blah. They begin to justify it. I’m not saying, by the way, that’s always wrong, right? Or they go, you know what? This client is too junior, not important. They’re not the decision maker, the individual. Or, you know, this client is such a, you know what?

[00:06:24] Amit Shankardass: They’re always whining. There’s so many times, I think, human nature, we are not really built to take criticism well, and very often client feedback is critical. Not for the purpose of being bad or mean, but it’s critical because it’s different from what we think. One, two, sometimes, you know, a few Steve Jobs, by the way.

[00:06:46] Amit Shankardass: He believed that the client didn’t know, the customer didn’t know what they want, and only Steve Jobs knew. But there’s few of him. There’s very, very, very few of him. The vast majority of people, we tend to trivialize what we hear or justify or overlay our thought process, our mindset.

[00:07:02] Amit Shankardass: So that’s why I use the word think like a customer. If you put their frame of reference, their thought process, you get to a different place. But I think very often we kind of go back into our shell, our human psych shell, so to speak, and trivialize, not pay enough attention, overlay our biases.

[00:07:20] Amit Shankardass: So whilst we all say like, you know, the Jeff Bezos, put the empty chair of the client customer in the room, right? But how often do we look at that chair and go, you know, this is what the customer says, and it’s not what the customer says. It might be what I think, or I hope I want the customer to say, or I use it as a proxy.

[00:07:41] Amit Shankardass: So I don’t mean to say that a lot of folks are disingenuous in trivializing what the client feedback is. But what I am saying is there is a general human bias to do so. So then that means you have to cognitively, very cognitively, and make even larger effort to remove those biases as you’re processing that customer feedback.

[00:08:06] Amit Shankardass: That makes sense.

[00:08:07] Steve MacDonald: Yes. That’s the gap, right? We all know it’s important. That study from McKinsey said it, but we don’t really seek it out and we don’t really use it. And you know, when I was listening to you and kind of the psychology behind this, we are all very good at rationalizing our decisions.

[00:08:24] Steve MacDonald: And guess what? We’re smart people. We’ve risen up in our careers. We’ve done pretty good, right? You know, we know how to make decisions. We don’t have to look around elsewhere. We know what to do. So when the customer’s voice isn’t in lockstep with the decisions we’ve made, maybe resources that we’ve dedicated, plans that we have in place, our natural reaction is gonna say, hey, whoa, hang on a second.

[00:08:53] Steve MacDonald: So this leads to another area, and you’re always talking about staying ahead and kind of looking at the future, and you can get a lot of that from customers, but not all of it, right? You have to be looking at the market dynamics and the trends and the changes. We can never look at the market and our customers, our ICP, and say, wow, I get it.

[00:09:17] Steve MacDonald: Right. That’s the first time you’re gonna fall behind. What do you mean by staying ahead of tomorrow’s needs and how do you do that?

[00:09:26] Amit Shankardass: Doing it is not easy. Doing it is not easy at all. And just like, you know, taking that feedback and not rationalizing it to our decisions is not easy.

[00:09:35] Amit Shankardass: But I think I’ll go back to what I said earlier. You know, it’s anticipating a need for tomorrow and preparing and adapting for the future. These companies that have done this well, I mean, look at IBM and how it pivoted from being a hardware company to a services company, right? It was anticipating the future. Not easy to do, and not without a lot of pain.

[00:09:56] Amit Shankardass: But it did do it successfully. And by the way, it kept many of its customers through that journey and even grew after that. There’ve been several organizations that have been able to do this. Again, I think it goes to having a very conscious, very mindful, conscious, deliberate process and method to incorporate that into the company and having cultural alignment across the organization.

[00:10:19] Amit Shankardass: So from the C-Suite across the organization, it also requires all of us to take a step back or two. Sometimes so many of us in our roles are in the here and now. What’s the pipeline today? What’s the sales forecast? How many leads did we get in our sales and marketing world, right?

[00:10:37] Amit Shankardass: Versus taking the time to step back and say, hey, how are we preparing ourselves? How are we going to help our clients prepare for the future? We run in our business, for the companies I’ve been in, our clients run these frequent quarterly business reviews, QBR, and it’s very metric operation oriented.

[00:10:55] Amit Shankardass: Some of, I would say, our more leading-edge clients will run SBR strategic business reviews. Less frequent, not on a quarterly basis, but it will be, let’s not talk metrics, we’ll talk about none of that. Some of them that do this really well will go to the vendors and say, hey, each vendor bring back two innovations you think we should be doing.

[00:11:15] Amit Shankardass: We’re not gonna tell you anything else. Just bring back two innovations you think we should be incorporating into our business, or two things that you think will happen three years from now. Super smart. They get the collective intelligence of the vendor community to help make them better, right? And direct them.

[00:11:30] Amit Shankardass: So I think the second part of this is taking that step back and taking a moment to think through what that will be. And separate, you know, SBR, the strategic business reviews that our clients run for us, actually, they’re more exciting, quite honestly, because they’re creative and there’s no wrong answer, and you’re thinking out of the box.

[00:11:50] Amit Shankardass: And I think it takes that, and I like that initiative as kind of an initiative to say, hey, semi-annually or annually we do strategic business reviews and we look at the future, look at what’s next, look at what’s happening outside of just our environment. 

[00:12:03] Steve MacDonald: I mean, to be able to say we don’t have all the ideas internally, we don’t have, you know, the view on the market that our outside partners have, and to open up.

[00:12:16] Steve MacDonald: To what can be and just the ability to draw in the kind of information that we need to make the kind of decisions and innovate. Right. I’d love to have you, if you could, apply that back to the customers or North Star, because how we get information from the customer—we also fail at pretty bad as business leaders, right?

[00:12:40] Steve MacDonald: And we have to innovate how we do that. Tell us a little bit—like, you had talked about, we gotta go beyond NPS surveys, right? To get the voice of the customer. Tell us a little bit about that.

[00:12:49] Amit Shankardass: Well, a couple of things, since you mentioned NPS survey. You know, the worst space you can put an NPS survey is sit with the operations team.

[00:12:56] Amit Shankardass: The client services teams or account management, whatever you wanna call them. ’Cause an NPS survey has to be—absolutely has to be—done by an outside third-party organization. That is great, but if you’re doing it internally within an organization, within the company that has no vested interest, per se, in the specific responses, but a very unbiased approach.

[00:13:17] Amit Shankardass: One-to-one has to—the verbatims are, if not more valuable, than the pure NPS score because the verbatims begin to trap emotion and sentiment. And I’ll digress for a quick second. In our B2B world, we know that decisions are made much more from an emotional perspective than a rational perspective. If I remember right, in a—I think it was a Google CEP Market Leadership Council survey, they talked about how—

[00:13:47] Amit Shankardass: B2B buyers put a lot more credence—I’m paraphrasing—and are much more emotionally connected to their vendors than they are rationally. So bring that back to my point about the verbatims, because you’ll track more of the emotion there than you will in the NPS score.

[00:14:04] Amit Shankardass: That’s a simple score. But I think a couple of things that one should do—maybe two or three things. One is, for every C-Suite executive, whether it’s the CFO, the CMO, you know, even the Chief HR Officer, whoever it is, they should spend some time with customers. They should spend time with buyers face-to-face, and it can be as easy as, you know, a two-and-a-half-hour dinner event where you have a conversation, because they will each begin to understand how buyers think, where they are, what’s important to them.

[00:14:40] Amit Shankardass: So when a buyer comes and says, “Listen, I need you to cut your price by 10%,” you understand where they’re coming from as a CFO, and you can figure out ways and means to deliver what they need without necessarily eroding your own margin.

[00:14:56] Amit Shankardass: So I think it’s hugely important—one is for every C-Suite executive, in particular, to spend time with customers. And across the C-Suite, one, face-to-face individual time. Two, one of the other things that I’ve done really well in my past is establish client advisory boards. But again, you have to go into this with everybody from the company, the C-Suite around the company, saying, “We are going to sit and listen and we are going to take some punches,” right?

[00:15:24] Amit Shankardass: We might be performing really well with the client—and this has happened. I remember this so vividly. One of our major clients where we were ranked number one, number two performer among five, six, seven. You know, everybody thought that this client would give us a glowing review, and she walked in and she said, “Here’s what you guys are not doing. Boom, boom, boom, boom.” And it was incredible. On paper, we were number one, number two, we were top performer—we had nothing, we couldn’t do any better. But what she was telling us was her emotive feel. “Here’s what I feel, and my organization feels, you’re not doing well or you can do better.”

[00:16:01] Amit Shankardass: We talked about long-term sustainable relationship, right? She’s helping us anticipate her needs today and for the future. So I think these client advisory boards can be hugely important. But I’ll underscore it with one very important point, which is what we started this conversation with: you have to be willing to really, really listen.

[00:16:21] Steve MacDonald: Yes, yes. You know, I talk to a lot of C-Suite executives and they talk about their advisory boards, and here’s the one takeaway they have from all those:

[00:16:32] Steve MacDonald: It was amazing, because you learn what you’re doing well and what you’re not. But nobody ever comes out of a client advisory board going, “That was a waste of time,” right? Like, it’s a time for deep—it’s a non-sales environment. It’s all about how do we learn, how do we share, how do we help each other, right?

[00:16:52] Steve MacDonald: That’s the atmosphere of these advisory boards, right? And the same thing—the conversations that you talked about, like C-Suite executives should be having conversations with customers every day, right? Again, that’s outside of a traditional sales environment. There’s no shield up, right. It’s why a lot of CMOs that I talk to, as an example, they get into a new position.

[00:17:13] Steve MacDonald: They’re like, “I start talking to 10, 15, 20 different customers.” Because it’s all about learning, and it’s a genuine conversation about that. So I love that. You said one other thing that I wanted to highlight there, which is—you said that one customer was talking from her heart about the experience of working with you.

[00:17:35] Steve MacDonald: The experience is the number one differentiator in business today. That’s CX, right? You brought it up, I wanted to underscore that. And that was another McKinsey report that actually said that the top-performing, the top-profitable companies they looked at, analyzed—

[00:17:51] Steve MacDonald: And CX was the number one differentiator. And the way you create better CX is you understand your customers better than your competition, right? So it goes back to your North Star. So I just wanted to pull that out from what you were saying there. But you also talk about—you’ve gotta be really good at uncovering hidden opportunities, right? You’ve gotta go looking for what isn’t apparent and right there, right out in the open. Tell us a little bit more about that, these hidden opportunities, and the process—the way you’re thinking about this. 

[00:18:26] Amit Shankardass: You’re exactly right. And because, you know, the metrics—I go back to that example that I alluded to earlier, where the metrics were all, you know, green, green, green, you’re number one, number two, all good. And then you have a conversation and you realize the places you can be better. But also, these—what happens, see, we all know it’s, in particular, where the businesses I’ve been in, our average deal size is 10, 15, 20, 30 million.

[00:18:51] Amit Shankardass: Analyzed, the total contract value is much larger. So they’re pretty complex deals and they’re pretty complex processes. But when buyers engage with you, they don’t engage and select you easily. It’s pretty tough. It’s a competitive place. And then once you start working with them, you have to mean more to them.

[00:19:13] Amit Shankardass: Mean more than you mean—than you deliver today, but for the future. And you know, this conversation happens all the time at the organizations I’ve been. In the past, I remember conversation around wallet share, and somebody saying, “Hey, you know, we have maximum wallet share.” And you go, “Well, yeah,” and as you peel the onion back, you realize, well, you have maximum wallet share in one line of business, but there are five others. And if we think about this, that means five other opportunities.

[00:19:37] Amit Shankardass: But that goes back to two things. One is listening and hearing very carefully, but also peeling the onion, right? So you’re peeling the onion and you are asking the question. You are engaging in person, you are engaging across different organizations. We all hear and process things differently.

[00:19:55] Amit Shankardass: One of the things that you’ll always hear within organizations is you’ve gotta have multiple points of contact and multiple conversations. Because Steve, you and I can have a conversation with the same person and you will hear something different than I will. And you’ll come and say, “Hey, Amit, did you hear Joe say this? There’s an opportunity.” And I’ll go, “I didn’t hear that,” right? So those multiple points of contact are hugely important. But it comes from engagement, right? It comes from engagement—whether it’s a survey (less so, like I said, the verbatims), but more of that person-to-person engagement. Back to listening really carefully and having multi-levels of engagement, but then having the curiosity.

[00:20:35] Amit Shankardass: Right. Some of the best executives I’ve worked with and leaders I’ve worked with, particularly in sales organizations—I don’t know how they do this. That’s why I said it’s great to work with super smart people. They’re always finding an opportunity, an angle, a door, somewhere in a conversation.

[00:20:51] Amit Shankardass: That’s a unique skill set. I mean, that’s a really cool skill set. So I think it’s really important to have these multiple interactions at multiple levels with multiple people, but continually peeling the onion. You can go Six Sigma on this and just go, “Why, why, why,” until you get to the root cause.

[00:21:06] Amit Shankardass: Right? Uh—

[00:21:08] Steve MacDonald: You know, this whole idea of customer centricity—you brought up an entirely new benefit that we haven’t talked about yet. And one of the biggest challenges that we have as C-Suite executives is misalignment, especially between sales and marketing. Right. In fact, it’s proven. You know, I talk to C-Suite executives all the time and I ask ’em what their biggest challenges are to growth.

[00:21:34] Steve MacDonald: By far, the number one challenge that all these C-Suite executives say is internal alignment. But you talk about how the voice of the customer provides alignment across departments. Could you explain a little bit more about that?

[00:21:52] Amit Shankardass: That’s exactly right. And by the way, not speaking—I certainly can’t speak on what Jeff Bezos was thinking—but it’s the similar type concept of the chair in the room, because that’s the alignment.

[00:22:02] Amit Shankardass: That should be where we start from a North Star. From a sales and marketing perspective, to me, even more so, this is that. My career—like I said, I’m a services marketing professional. When I say marketing, I’ve been in sales, marketing, operations, product—different roles.

[00:22:15] Amit Shankardass: But in the commercial organization, that alignment in particular is hugely important. And I think, quite honestly, it’s more incumbent on the marketing organization to ensure that alignment in the sales organization. Sure, it takes two to tango—it’s a 50/50 relationship. I put this at a 60/40 relationship, maybe 60% being marketing owners in guiding that relationship. It starts from having a common goal again—the North Star.

[00:22:45] Amit Shankardass: In our sales and marketing organization, myself and everybody on my team have a goal, which is a revenue generation goal, which is the same goal that the sales organization has. And I do that purposefully, because we are part of the equation in the sales process. We are an important part of the equation, and I want to ensure that everybody on my team is thinking about what’s really important for the organization, for us as a commercial group, which is revenue generation—through existing accounts or through new logos. That alignment—that’s one way of doing it.

[00:23:11] Amit Shankardass: I will tell you that there isn’t a sales meeting without a marketing team member in it, or vice versa. I’ll tell you, when I’m talking branding, I’m going to my sales organizations, my client-facing organizations, my commercial organizations, and saying, “Hey, how do you think your clients will react to this?” They’re my brand ambassadors. As a B2B marketeer, I tell stories, truly to the market. But truly, the folks that bring those stories to life are the frontline sales execs, client services, account managers, operational leaders. They’re my clients, and I have to think of it that way.

[00:23:49] Amit Shankardass: So do I think like a customer? Mantra. My sub to that for my team is: your customers are internal also, and we have to think of it that way. So if a salesperson comes and says, “Hey, this is the worst marketing idea ever,” I’ve never heard that—there could be some truth in that.

[00:24:02] Amit Shankardass: I know. I’ve never heard that. Hypothetically, right? Hypothetically, yeah. It’s important because it might be for that individual, or it might be across the organization. Our job is to figure it out. If it’s an individual, then maybe there’s some other help they need. Maybe there’s some other tweaks we need to make there. If it’s for a specific vertical, maybe we need to adapt to that. My rule of thumb: three people say the same thing, it’s a trend. Then systematically, there’s a systemic era change that we need to make. The internal alignment—hugely important. We can’t be misaligned, otherwise we miss a trick for sure.

[00:24:37] Steve MacDonald: That voice of the customer is the number one path to bring that alignment in because it takes all of our own independent, good ideas and puts them in perspective—one perspective, the customer’s perspective. I love your point there.

[00:24:50] Steve MacDonald: We’ve talked about so much. Our poor brains can only take in and retain like two or three things at a time. I would love to ask you, if there was one thing that you wanted your B2B C-suite peers to take away from our conversation here today, what would that one thing be?

[00:25:11] Amit Shankardass: Oh wow. If there’s one thing, I would say is truly—I’ll use an emotive phrase—from your heart of hearts, listen to what the buyers are saying, and try and make a very cognitive effort to remove biases, prejudices, previous perspectives, etc., and just listen really carefully. If you can, and when you do that, I think it’ll help organizations so much more than they truly understand.

[00:26:00] Amit Shankardass: The sub to that—since I’m a CMO—I would say to my CMO colleagues: if you’re not spending 20% of your time… actually, I shouldn’t say just my CMO colleagues, to all my colleagues—spend that time to go meet clients. Ask the organization, irrespective of what role you are, meet clients, speak to them, understand where they’re coming from. And for the CMO organization, spend that time with the sales organization or the account management organization too. I think it’s incumbent on us to build that bridge, demonstrate the value, but I think we’ll get 10 times as much as we give because we’d have access to the real buyer versus manifestations we might make up.

[00:26:21] Steve MacDonald: I love that you actually even put a percent on that because it demonstrates how important you think it is. Twenty percent of our time—that’s a lot of time. It’s really interesting. We had another woman on—three-time B2B CMO. She’s also a value accelerator advisor for Goldman Sachs. She said the exact same thing. She actually even said the same number. She was like, we have to be spending at least 20% of our time actually talking to customers. That’s a massive takeaway. Thank you.

[00:26:51] Steve MacDonald: Here’s one thing I know for sure. People are gonna have questions. Is it okay if I give a link out to your profile, your LinkedIn profile? Absolutely—so people absolutely reach out and ask questions?

[00:27:01] Amit Shankardass: Absolutely. More than welcome to. Loved the conversation, and I appreciate sharing. But I’m sure folks will have much better ideas than I have, and I’d love to hear from them too. We all learn together.

[00:27:10] Steve MacDonald: Well, that learning together—that’s the mission statement of this podcast, right? If we can all share our perspectives, our insights that we’ve garnered over our careers from our experience, then that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. Absolutely. And you, my friend, were a massive rising tide today. So I just wanna say thank you. Thank you for coming on.

[00:27:28] Amit Shankardass: I appreciate that. Thanks for having me, Steve. It’s been a pleasure.