Episode #222:

Stephanie Davis Smith, CMO at The N2 Company, demonstrates how to mitigate channel overwhelm by focusing on areas where execution excels. She explains a six-stage franchise psychology that converts excitement into loyalty. She details budget-efficient content reuse and ROI rigor. She ties it all together with the voice of the customer alignment.

“Get down to the people on the ground and talk to them because they always know what they need. Don’t create too many levels where you lose sight of what’s happening on the ground. That’s where the great decisions and ideas come from.” – Stephanie Davis Smith

Marketers will learn how Stephanie trims channel sprawl, repurposes content for efficient reach, and uses customer psychology to turn early excitement into lasting advocacy. She shows where to double down, when to pause experiments, and how the voice of the customer aligns teams to measurable outcomes that support revenue and retention.

Follow Stephanie Davis Smith on LinkedIn

Follow host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn

[Transcript]

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a very, very special guest on with Stephanie Davis Smith. Now, what makes you so special? I’m gonna take a crack at it here. All right, so not only are you a Chief Marketing Officer and you have an amazing background, you’re at The N2 Company, and I want you to explain a little bit about who N2 is and what you do there, but.

[00:00:29] Steve MacDonald: I’d like to say you’re a CMO two times over, because you’re not only a business CMO, but you are a Chief Mom Officer as well. And you do things like, you just told me that you took a red-eye flight back so that you could be there in the morning so that you could be there with your kids, and I think that’s amazing dedication.

[00:00:49] Steve MacDonald: So I just wanted to say thank you for all of us Chief Dad Officers that you help us make us look good and take care of the family in so many different ways. But we’re gonna talk today, the topic is From Channel Chaos to Customer Psychology: A Growth Blueprint. And when we talk about channel, we’re not necessarily talking about like our channel partners, right,

[00:01:11] Steve MacDonald: which a lot of businesses have, but you’re talking about the number of ways that we have to actually go to market, how many channels we have these days, and the chaos of that and making sense of it. And combining that with a real passion of yours, which is the psychology of who we’re reaching out to, our customer psychology, and how we work that in.

[00:01:34] Steve MacDonald: Actually, how we work with our teams so they understand that. Our first conversation was just electric, so let’s recreate it here again. But before we do that, I would love to give you a chance to maybe just expand a little bit on that background before we get started.

[00:01:50] Stephanie Davis Smith: Okay, thank you for having me, Steve.

[00:01:53] Stephanie Davis Smith: I am the Chief Marketing Officer of The N2 Company. I’ve been in affluent luxury marketing for a long time, event marketing, and with different audiences, but I feel like it’s the same no matter where I go. It’s really about people and what drives them to take action, what speaks to them, the emotion.

[00:02:11] Stephanie Davis Smith: That’s when we talked about customer psychology. How do I tap into emotion that drives them to come to whatever business I’m doing or working with in a real authentic way? I have a background, I don’t know if you want me to talk. I do have a blog for fun. I have this Two-Sided Southern blog, which appeals to women mostly that enjoy high and low kind of marketing.

[00:02:34] Stephanie Davis Smith: So the idea of Two-Sided Southern came from, I was sitting front row at a fashion show, and the next day I went to Waffle House, and I like that I can enjoy going to a luxury fashion show and then going to have grits and scattered, smothered, and covered hash browns at Waffle House. And so tapping into two sides of me, I kind of use that framework with whatever we’re doing.

[00:02:54] Stephanie Davis Smith: Let’s tap into two sides. So I know what we’re talking about today is about the trust recession and tapping into trust but authenticity at the same time. So that’s kind of my background. That’s where I come from.

[00:03:07] Steve MacDonald: I love it. Anybody who could connect a fashion show and Waffle House and have it make sense, I’m telling you, you’ve got some talent right there. So let’s start out, and what I’d love to do, ’cause I threw out a bunch of stuff, right? We’re gonna talk about channel chaos, we’re gonna talk about trust, we’re gonna talk about psychology. But let’s start with overwhelm.

[00:03:37] Steve MacDonald: There’s so many different channels that we can take to the market these days, and everybody looks at us as the CMOs and says, okay, you’re the expert. Navigate this path for us. But it can lead to less success actually. Tell us a little bit about your thought and your philosophy on this.

[00:03:45] Stephanie Davis Smith: Okay. Well, I was saying my team can sometimes feel very spread thin. Like, which one do we tackle first? One of my things is we entered into the TikTok sphere and we were like, does this make sense for us? Do we do a bunch of channels? Right now I have a few team members and we’re working on five brands, possibly six, across three social media platforms, and that’s just social media.

[00:04:00] Stephanie Davis Smith: So we’re doing LinkedIn, Facebook (which I have many thoughts on Facebook—I think it’s actually a really strong driver that we kind of ignore ’cause it’s not the shiny new thing), and Instagram. And we dipped our toe into TikTok and my team was like, I don’t think we’re doing this well, and I don’t think we have the bandwidth. You almost, I think Gary Vee says, you need like one person full-time on TikTok.

[00:04:37] Stephanie Davis Smith: And we just didn’t have that. So we pulled back from that ’cause we weren’t seeing results, we weren’t doing it well either, and we’re like, I know we gotta be out there, so we’ll tackle that later. Let’s do what we’re doing well over here. But I see that with my team all the time. I’m like, okay, we gotta be on YouTube. Do we have to do YouTube Shorts? How are we gonna pull this off? Now we have a podcast for one of our brands.

[00:04:53] Stephanie Davis Smith: How do we do that? So I feel like marketers and our teams are kind of getting spread thin—be over here, do this, do that—and then they’re not doing anything really to the best that they can. So I have decided to pull back with my team on the things we weren’t doing well and focus on the stuff we are doing well lately.

[00:05:13] Steve MacDonald: And you know, this whole idea of like kind of channel proliferation and overwhelm, it’s not just for B2C, right? It’s B2C and B2B. I talked to a Chief Marketing Officer the other day, and their audience was Chief Financial Officers, so CFOs, and they were having tremendous success on TikTok.

[00:05:35] Steve MacDonald: It just adds to the overwhelm even more, ’cause you’re like, okay, there’s no way that LinkedIn’s gonna be the only way we go. Why would we talk to CFOs on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook? But we can’t overlook these channels, right?

[00:05:48] Stephanie Davis Smith: You can’t. And I’m looking now, I’m hearing, are you on Threads? Are you on Bluesky? Are you on these like emerging platforms that could be the next TikTok? And it’s really tough for marketers to figure out where to put their time, where to put their dollars. We have email mar—we have an email marketing team, and they speak to B2B. So we have a lot of businesses that we speak to.

[00:06:10] Stephanie Davis Smith: We have, at Michael, we have almost 29,000 small businesses that we’re also speaking to. Two audiences: franchisees, potential franchisees, and small businesses. So B2C, B2B, and there’s just the overwhelm. It’s, ah, what direction am I being pulled in today? And if you’re trying, like I said, if you’re trying to do one thing, or if you’re trying to do everything, are you doing anything really well?

[00:06:34] Steve MacDonald: So you know the idea of, I love it. You’re like, okay, let’s pull back. Because we have to execute. It can’t just be like, okay, we’ve gotta be everywhere, but we can’t do everything really well. So how do we do the few things that we’re gonna do and do them really well, but then test the waters, right?

[00:06:53] Steve MacDonald: Because we don’t wanna miss the opportunities. From our conversation before, it was like, okay, how do we focus on what we can do with our existing teams while we’re still testing the waters? And that was one of the big things that I took away.

[00:07:06] Stephanie Davis Smith: I would say this too. I have an example. We have a new brand called Uniquely You, and it’s only—it’s not only—we’ve launched eight magazines in that space, which is great. It’s for special needs communities. It’s a great resource. It has so much heart in it. I have a lot of passion about it. We’ve gotta start social media, and everyone was like, we need a plan for the social media, we need a plan, and that was delaying us because they’re overwhelmed with all the other platforms. And I finally was like, we have 30 followers on this platform right now. Let’s just start. Let’s just up. It doesn’t have to be amazing. It’s a picture, let’s just get something up and not overthink this one while we’re building it.

[00:07:45] Stephanie Davis Smith: It’s great to be a strategy person, and I am, but also there’s a moment when you’re like, the stakes are low. Let’s just get some stuff up. Let’s just start, because with TikTok, we sat on that a little too long because we didn’t have a strategy and we were like, we gotta just go.

[00:08:02] Stephanie Davis Smith: So there’s that too, that delay of perfection that you also don’t wanna get stuck in.

[00:08:09] Steve MacDonald: You’re gonna learn just putting yourself out there, and nobody’s gonna say, hey, that N2 Company, they really screwed up on TikTok. I saw that short and oh my gosh. Nobody’s—we think we have to be perfect every single time. That desire to be perfect, to have the right plan, to do it exactly right, keeps us from trying, keeps us from testing. Here’s another thing that keeps us back.

[00:08:34] Stephanie Davis Smith: Yeah. Gimme another thing. I need to hear more.

[00:08:37] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. So you know, we are also being tasked with doing more with less. So I think you called it the budget efficiency crisis or something. Tell me how that affects how we’re thinking.

[00:08:49] Stephanie Davis Smith: I feel like marketers are sometimes the first to go in a group, like, oh, what are they really doing? I would think my fellow CMOs would hear that. Oh, can you do this with one less person, or any of these things? And you’re like, fighting for bodies just to do this. Using platforms like Sprout Social or using things for scaling. Canva Enterprise is one we use for scaling to put our marketing materials out there at scale. So there’s all of that. And then you’re looking at people, and they’re like, can you do this with us?

[00:09:18] Stephanie Davis Smith: And already, we’re already struggling when they want, wait, can we be on YouTube? Can we do this? Like I was saying, and you’re like, hmm, can I have more people to do that? So we get creative. Obviously, you’re gonna hear a lot from any marketer about using content in different ways. Just use that same content in 20 different ways if you can.

[00:09:37] Stephanie Davis Smith: That’s really what we’ve been trying to do. How do we use one thing 10 different ways to be smart? But yeah, I think this rubbing the pennies together, nickel-and-diming and trying to do is a really tough thing for marketers, and especially with budgets. I can blow it out on a paid social campaign if you give me a million dollars, but what about organic?

[00:09:58] Stephanie Davis Smith: What about people that’re just not responding to whatever you’re doing, and you don’t have a budget to get over the algorithm or do that, and all your efforts aren’t paying off as much as if you would have had a really high budget? I think all marketers are struggling with people, budget, audience, now there’s no attention span.

[00:10:18] Stephanie Davis Smith: It’s like I’ve been reading, you need to get ’em in the first second—in the first second! What am I gonna say in that first second to get this, like, low attention? So we have a lot of challenges, which can also be opportunities. And how do we solve those problems? I think we’re all dealing with that right now.

[00:10:38] Steve MacDonald: You know, at the same time. Let’s just pile on the challenges here, right? Can I have a new team member? Lots of times as CMOs, we’re looked upon as like these huge cost centers, right? So when we’re having our C-Suite conversations and the CFO or the CEO, they’re looking at us. They’re like, okay, well if you want more money, what are you gonna do with it? How many more leads are we gonna get? How is this gonna impact revenue? And you’re like, oh, well hang on, let me put it into my magic little algorithm calculator over here. So how do you have these conversations where everybody’s looking at you and saying, okay, I get it. But how do I get ROI out of this? How do I understand what the company’s gonna get as a result?

[00:11:19] Stephanie Davis Smith: Yeah, I mean ROI is something my COO and my CRO and my CEO are constantly asking me about. How did this work? So data, clean data, measuring everything, and measuring it well from the full lifecycle is super important. But sometimes we’ve tried some things that somebody wanted to try, and it cost a lot of money and the results weren’t great. And so luckily I have the boss that’s like, if it’s his idea and we’ve done it and it works, they’re excited. If it didn’t work, they’re like, okay, we tried that. But you really gotta show the measurement.

[00:11:55] Stephanie Davis Smith: In our business, we know exactly how much one new franchisee is worth to us, and so we measure a lot of times by that. So if we get that one person in, then the cost analysis works out. So that’s nice that I have that.

[00:12:09] Stephanie Davis Smith: I have to say, sometimes in brand marketing plays, you don’t know what affected that purchase or what it is. Did they go over to your website and then they dropped off your measurements, and you don’t know? Then they saw a Facebook ad, then they saw or heard a podcast ad, and somewhere in there they went off and came back — and we lost them.

[00:12:30] Stephanie Davis Smith: And who gets that measurement? It’s a tough world. But I feel like when I came on, the measurement tools that are available to marketers now are outrageous — which is lovely, and we can show a little bit. But sometimes the stuff doesn’t work and you’re like, it didn’t work. We measured it, we had some money, and it still wasn’t bringing it in. And what do you say at that point?

[00:12:53] Steve MacDonald: So here’s what I love — you’re helping us all advocate for ourselves because we have to be our own internal salespeople. We’re like, in marketing, we’re like, “Yeah, we’re not like sales. That’s not us,” right?

[00:13:03] Steve MacDonald: We help, but we have to sell. And what I’m hearing from you is there are two sides of the internal advocacy. One of them is, “Okay guys, the market is changing all the time. When I’m asking for money and we’re testing, it’s because we have to constantly be in the mode of testing what’s working and what isn’t.”

[00:13:26] Steve MacDonald: As soon as we say, “Yeah, we’ve got the marketing playbook,” is the minute we’re behind — and the minute we’re gonna stop failing. So if you want more MQLs, you want more SQLs — we all do — it means we have to be testing. Which means, guess what? We’re not always gonna be right. A portion of this budget we just have to say, we have to be constantly in the market out there and testing and putting forward, and everybody’s gotta understand that.

[00:13:50] Steve MacDonald: On the other side, though, I hear you say lifetime customer value. If you were to go to ChatGPT today and say, “Okay, I’m going to the executive team — help me frame this in a way that communicates to our internal customers and puts this into their language and builds the case,” we have to be doing that. And there are plenty of tools, plenty of data to do it.

[00:14:14] Stephanie Davis Smith: Right.

[00:14:14] Speaker: Is that a good takeaway from our conversation so far?

[00:14:18] Stephanie Davis Smith: I think so. I think so. Social media too — every week it changes. I just had to have this discussion that now social media is interest media. So it’s almost like a search engine.

[00:14:27] Stephanie Davis Smith: Your followers don’t even matter to reach them. The money you’re spending isn’t even reaching them — it’s reaching a new audience that you don’t even know is out there. So forget about your followers. Cookie-less — now we have cookie-less marketing where we used to know exactly who we were hitting, and now they’re in these vague boxes. And we’re like, “Are they interested in these things? Let’s try to play with that.” So we’re constantly having to adapt — and adapt the spend.

[00:14:58] Stephanie Davis Smith: And the owners of those platforms are saying to us as marketers, “If you only spend a little bit more, if you would spend a little bit more, you’d reach this.” Your competitors are spending more in this space. It’s kind of a fun, constant struggle where you’re trying to figure it out. No two days are the same because once you figure it out, they change the rules on you and the line gets moved.

[00:15:16] Stephanie Davis Smith: The good news is when we do really well in this one area — social media marketing — probably about two weeks later, we have this lift that comes in from franchisee candidates or small businesses coming in. So I can see the lift, and it’s continuing. It just changes, and I have to roll up the changes.

[00:15:39] Speaker: So I want to add in one more big challenge before we get into an area that you’ve brought up that is an amazing solution to help with all of this. So here’s the one more challenge — and it actually is the number one challenge that B2B C-suite executives say is holding them back from creating long-term, sustainable growth in the business. And you talked about it too, so this is — I love this — it’s called internal alignment. It’s the hidden growth killer. Talk to me a little bit about the challenge of internal alignment within all of this.

[00:16:13] Stephanie Davis Smith: Yes. We were talking about this, and I think I was saying — very smart people in different silos of the business go their own way. They’re like, “This is the way we should go,” and “This is the way we should go,” and we don’t align. So we’re both going like this — or into different directions, pulling at each other. Or they’re doing some kind of solution that we didn’t even know about, and we’re over here doing something that’s either counterintuitive to that or the same thing, using dollars.

[00:16:40] Stephanie Davis Smith: It happens everywhere. I was at this dinner with C-suite execs from Disney and Equifax — these huge billion-dollar companies — and we are much more of a mid-size company. And they were in the same struggle, and it actually made me feel so much better because I thought they had it together. And they’re like, “Nobody has it together.”

[00:17:00] Stephanie Davis Smith: Every internal alignment issue is real. So the more you can come together and even just talk about what you’re working on day to day, a lot of dark spots get illuminated when you do that with your other team members. That is a struggle that I was happy to hear was not just a mid-size company struggle — it happens with the big players too.

[00:17:22] Steve MacDonald: So, if you could help us, maybe talk about how you understand the voice of the customer, but how you think it can be used as that unifying factor to address this internal alignment challenge that we all have. 

[00:17:36] Stephanie Davis Smith: Right. I think the voice of the customer is so important. I think we said it — like, in the Cracker Barrel case, I’ll use that as the ultimate experience for all of us. The CMO, I’m sure they did market research, I’m sure they went to their franchisees, and they all thought they had it great — nailed it. And then the customer spoke up and was like, “No, I don’t want that.”

[00:17:55] Stephanie Davis Smith: You said, it’s the great equalizer. They rolled back their rebrand to what the customer wanted. And so a lot of times, our customer really is our franchisee — and I’ve learned that over the years. We have all these small businesses, but when the franchisees start saying, “That’s not what we need. We need this. We need that.” Sometimes I’ve done something that I believe very passionately we needed to do and had to incorporate all of their feedback, or roll something back.

[00:18:13] Stephanie Davis Smith: I’ve rolled back a brand refresh once because the franchisees did not like it — and it was tough, because I was like, “I know this is gonna help you.” But they’re the boots on the ground. The customer is your audience — you have to listen to them.

[00:18:31] Stephanie Davis Smith: I think about Unreasonable Hospitality — it’s a great book for marketers, and their whole thing is the customer and what they want, and listening to them. If you’re not listening to them constantly and adapting — or you’ve shut yourself off to that — that’s a bad move. You’ve got to stay in touch with them and hear what they’re saying.

[00:19:01] Speaker: So I’d love to ask you kind of like, on a scale of one to ten — one being voice of the customer, not important at all, could care less, right? And ten being vital to a deep understanding of the voice of the customer as the divine rod, the north star for our business — where would you put that?

[00:19:23] Stephanie Davis Smith: I think it is the North Star. And I think when you watch people lose it, you’re waiting for them to sort of fall. I’ll give you this example: we did this amazing internal poll — I think this is a great idea for any marketers — of every department in our company, and asked, “Who do you think our customer is?”

[00:19:34] Stephanie Davis Smith: Fifty percent of them said something different than our franchisee. We were wowed by this, and we set to work. I don’t know if it was legacy employees who had lost their way, or new employees that had never heard it, but we started messaging that internally — they are the customer. We have to listen to them. Whatever they need, we’re gonna do.

[00:20:00] Stephanie Davis Smith: One of the questions was, “What does our customer do all day?” And there was one answer that said, “Nothing.” And we were like, “Who is this person?” It was anonymous, but we thought, “They work so hard, and this team member thinks they do nothing?” So we need to educate our entire company on how hard they work — all of the pieces of their business, what they’re dealing with — because it affects whether you go the extra mile out of empathy to help them, or you say, “No, we’re not doing that.”

[00:20:47] Stephanie Davis Smith: It’s been a very eye-opening thing, and I thought, man, we need to do this every year — just poll our internal teams: What do they think? Who do they think the customer is? And make sure they know.

[00:20:47] Steve MacDonald: You can’t walk in their shoes, have empathy, design programs, products, or services that meet their challenges and needs if you’re not talking to them.

[00:21:00] Stephanie Davis Smith: And with that mismatch of challenges — you’re not gonna be able to help them.

[00:21:04] Steve MacDonald: Oh my gosh, it just hit me — that story about, and I know it wasn’t one person because the whole survey designed a lot of changes internally — but that misalignment between what we think the customer walking in their shoes is like versus what it actually is. Oh my gosh, there can’t be a more important thing to uncover.

[00:21:24] Steve MacDonald: What’s interesting — so McKinsey came out with a study recently, and they talked about how two-thirds of C-suite executives say that the voice of the customer absolutely defines not only our direction, how we ideate, how we innovate — but only 15% of companies actually take that customer input and put it into action and execute on it.

[00:21:49] Stephanie Davis Smith: Right. They’re the great innovators. Our franchisees are the great innovators. All these ideas come from them, and it’s just our job to vet them, make sure they’re good, and [00:22:00] then make them scalable. That’s really what I’ve been looking at. I can innovate all day and give them stuff, and they’re like, “That’s not what we need. We can’t go to market with that.” And I’ve lost them if I don’t understand them.

[00:22:12] Steve MacDonald: The number one thing they want to know is that you get them. That’s what the Gartners of the world would say — or Forresters would say — the trusted advisor. You get me. You understand me.

[00:22:25] Steve MacDonald: On the B2C side, you have a whole framework that you call the franchise psychology framework, but it has an application to anybody that’s listening from any business today. And I wanted to make sure we had time to go over that — just however you want to articulate it — so we can understand what you’re talking about.

[00:22:45] Stephanie Davis Smith: I will not take credit for this — it’s from a book about franchise psychology, the six-stage framework. But it’s been really eye-opening for me, because basically, we took this ideology from someone who studied the psychology of franchisees. It’s a six-stage [00:23:00] psychological framework, and we’re rolling it out to our employees so they understand where our customers — our franchisees — are within those six stages. Our goal is to move them from the first one to the sixth one.

[00:23:13] Stephanie Davis Smith: The first one is when they’re so excited — it’s like when you buy something and you’re like, “I’m so excited for this product!” And then doubt sets in. Then it’s like, “I could do this on my own. I don’t need the franchisor.” Then there’s the fee stage, that’s one of them — they all rhyme. It’s like the me stage, the fee stage, the free stage, and then you want to get them to the we stage, where they feel like they are part of it — that they are in it.

[00:23:38] Stephanie Davis Smith: I see this in any kind of brand relationship. Let’s say you bought a vacuum — you’re super excited, and then it starts to go south or it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. Or you buy a piece of software — you’re super pumped, and then eventually, “I could do this on my own.”

[00:23:54] Stephanie Davis Smith: What was eye-opening is that I’ve seen franchisees in all of these stages and never [00:24:00] knew that it was part of a process. So it feels less personal if you know they’re going to go through it. It’s just — how fast can I get them to the we stage? And I think that to get them there, we have to go above and beyond.

[00:24:13] Stephanie Davis Smith: We have to give them tools to help their business. We have to listen to them. And then they feel like, when they get to the we stage, those become your raving fans. As Seth Godin says, you want raving fans, because then they go amplify your message.

[00:24:28] Stephanie Davis Smith: This year we had a record in what’s called a PR — a personal recruit — where our franchisees try to get other people they know to come in. And I think we doubled that, which says a lot: they love it so much, they want other people to do it as well. And I hope part of that is that we moved them through the psychology faster because we stopped taking it personally.

[00:24:52] Stephanie Davis Smith: Sometimes when someone’s upset with you, you think it’s something you’ve done. But if you realize, “Oh, they’re going to go through this — I just have to [00:25:00] get them through this and hold them through this,” the win is a raving fan every time. That’s how you know you’re doing well.

[00:25:07] Steve MacDonald: So I’m big on kind of reflecting, and here’s what I took away from—’cause I love what you’re saying—is that we’ve known for a long time in the world of B2C that most purchases are emotionally motivated. If we don’t understand those emotions and we don’t pull them apart and put them into these stages and go, okay, here’s our buyer journey—we like to look at things very rationally, like in terms of the actions that they’re making in that buyer’s journey, but not the emotions. We are all learning in the B2B world all the time that B2C expectations are defining B2B expectations, right?
And that in the world of B2B, we forget, but there are plenty of studies that are out there that are telling us, guess what? That’s an emotional decision as well. There’s more emotion that goes into that decision than rational decision making.

[00:26:00] Steve MacDonald: And so this idea of the psychology, the empathy behind it, and understanding and breaking it down, I think is brilliant.

[00:26:09] Stephanie Davis Smith: I was gonna say, I think too, what’s interesting is we have our franchisor using that, but then they have small business advertisers who probably are going through the same thing—the excitement of buying the ad and the partnership, whether we have digital solutions for them and all that. Then it’s like, eventually, they get to a place: “Is this working for me, and could I do this on my own without them?”

[00:26:29] Stephanie Davis Smith: Our job then becomes to arm our franchisor with all the materials we already know are gonna help them convince the advertiser that this is working and here’s what you’ve gotten from this partnership and all that. So it actually can be amplified down the chain of our buyer’s journey—all of that.

[00:26:48] Stephanie Davis Smith: So it’s not just our customers, but their customers. So I would think any franchisor would have those same challenges and could use that psychology as well to help them get through and become a raving fan.

[00:27:00] Steve MacDonald: But in the world of B2B, right? We know that the vast majority of the decision making is made emotionally as well. So breaking this down—this framework again—and that question that you asked, which is, “Can they do this without us?” Because every business knows we can’t have churn. So we work really hard to create loyalty, right? Which is basically, Hey, can they do this without us? I love that question.

[00:27:30] Steve MacDonald: So here’s my last question for you, okay? We’ve covered so much territory here. Our poor human brains can only remember about two or three things at the same time. If we had to break this down and you had to say, okay, here’s a B2B audience of C-suite executives—all kinds of different industries that are listening to this—if there was one most important takeaway that you wanted them to have, what would that be?

[00:27:56] Stephanie Davis Smith: Okay. My most important, I would say: listen to your customer. I think have empathy for your customer. They’re, like you said, the North Star. And I think when we get in our own way, or we think we know better than them, or any of that, that’s when we end up making a misstep or doing something. Pulling them, talking to them on the ground.

[00:28:17] Stephanie Davis Smith: I was just in a conference with our franchisees and stopping and talking to every person I could in the hall, letting them tell me their ideas. Not saying, “That won’t work,” or “This doesn’t work.” It was just like, let me take this in. Let’s figure out how this could work. So I think sometimes when you get to the C-suite—and I’ve heard Kat Cole is an amazing executive, she’s been in franchises, she’s with AG1 now—she always says, “Get down to the people on the ground and talk to them.” Because they always know what they need, what’s going on. And the further you get removed, where you’re listening to like levels of people and not getting straight to your customer, that’s when you lose your North Star.

[00:28:57] Stephanie Davis Smith: Like you said, like Cracker Barrel, they lost their customer. They over-anticipated that they would be thrilled about a rebrand. That has been the biggest lesson for me as a marketer. Don’t get too far removed. Don’t put too many levels where you don’t know what’s happening on the ground anymore, and those are where the great decisions come from—or the great ideas come from.

[00:29:16] Steve MacDonald: Yep, a hundred percent. And here’s what I’m gonna say: the mission of this podcast is just to bring different perspectives and different ideas in. And if we can do that all with C-suite executives and help each other, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. I have to say, I think you were an amazing tide today—coming in and giving us all kinds of new ideas and thoughts and perspectives. So, I just wanna say thank you for coming on the podcast.

[00:29:44] Stephanie Davis Smith: And as you learned, yes, I’m a CCMO and a CMO mom, and so I’m rushing off now to do dinner for my children and do all of the things. So I know those C-suite executives have a lot on their plate as well.