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Beyond Templates: How Leaders Evolve ABM for Real Results

C-Suite Sales & Marketing Perspectives
C-Suite Sales & Marketing Perspectives
Beyond Templates: How Leaders Evolve ABM for Real Results
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Episode #231:

Nicholas Ghitti, Chief Revenue Officer at Native Teams, explains why trust and alignment beat shiny tools. He breaks down living playbooks, voice of the customer, and shared KPIs. He shows how rituals and AI can coexist to drive execution. He closes with a call for leaders to stay close to the front lines.

“Most of the right answers in life are boring. We just don’t like it to be that way, but rituals and processes go a long way if they’re done properly. This is how we can try to overcome challenges and many others in the company.” – Nicholas Ghitti

This episode examines how go-to-market leaders can strike a balance between human connection and modern tools. Nicholas explains why alignment, rituals, and customer understanding create durable systems that evolve beyond templates and drive measurable business impact.

Follow Nicholas Ghitti on LinkedIn

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[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 very special guest on with Nicholas Ghitti. Now, Nicholas, you are a multiple times CRO. You are, would I call it, a reluctant CRO? Like you didn’t even want to get into sales, and I’m gonna let you explain that.

[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: But you’re also, when I say multiple time, you’ve been the CMO at Zendesk and Pipedrive. So you have a very deep MarTech background, which I think gives a really interesting kind of vendor perspective on our conversation here, because if there’s more vendor solutions on how to innovate in our go-to-market strategy, our pipeline, than ever before, which can really confuse our success rates.

[00:00:48] Steve MacDonald: And a lot of those you talked about are really old ideas, just repackaged. But we’re gonna talk today about what is it really? What’s the foundation? What does it really take to create success in our go-to-market strategies? And so I’m really excited to do that. I would love to maybe have you explain a little bit more about your background.

[00:01:09] Steve MacDonald: I’d love to hear more. You talked about a story about going to Japan and buying a bunch of vinyl records. That’s right. Tell me a little bit about that as well.

[00:01:18] Nicholas Ghitti: Okay. Look, Steve, thanks so much for having me. It’s great. I’m really excited for our chat today. And you’re right, I’m a reluctant salesperson, CRO, because growing up, my father was a full-time salesman selling machinery to the textile industry.

[00:01:34] Nicholas Ghitti: And I remember watching him work, and I remember early on in my teen years, I was telling myself that I did not want to be a salesperson. It was a very stressful, very stressful life for him—professional life. And funny enough, my first role doing a summer job was as a salesperson at a stainless hood company.

[00:01:53] Nicholas Ghitti: And it was great. I did really well, even though I didn’t want to be a salesperson. I was the top seller for those six months that I stayed there, and I nudged my career into selling, and then I moved into selling technology. But it was never really something that I wanted. On the contrary, I didn’t want to be a salesperson.

[00:02:11] Nicholas Ghitti: And then, long story short, I spent the last 15 years working for tech companies—Brazilian, even in Portugal—mostly MarTech in the FinTech space. So companies like Zendesk, Pipedrive, Ebanks, and AllNativeTeams, my current company. And it has been a pleasure, right? Coming from being a salesperson, going into revenue operations, marketing, CX, having that end-to-end perspective of how to grow companies.

[00:02:35] Nicholas Ghitti: And the story about Japan is, this year I went to Japan for the first time ever with my wife. It was a long-term dream of ours, and I am a music collector. And I was really looking forward to going to Japan and trying to find the most underground vinyl shops in Tokyo and Osaka. And it was a blast. I found on Reddit, and we’re gonna talk about community later,

[00:02:59] Nicholas Ghitti: someone made an amazing PDF ranking all of the record shops in Tokyo. I think it’s like a 50-page document. And I spent the whole flight going through the whole document and making notes in my notebook on which ones I wanted to go to based on the feedback of the community. So it was great.

[00:03:16] Steve MacDonald: It’s the whole revolution of vinyl collection that, like, my kids—they know what vinyls are because of the retro aspect of it.

[00:03:23] Steve MacDonald: Interesting.

[00:03:24] Nicholas Ghitti: Yeah. It’s coming back. It’s coming back.

[00:03:27] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I’d love to do. I’d love to start out with the big elephant in the room, and that is, you and I talked before about how there’s so much confusion in the marketplace, and we’re all bombarded with vendors that are out there and talking about solutions and technologies about how to innovate in our go-to-market.

[00:03:44] Steve MacDonald: And you want to recenter the conversation right around sales enablement and focus on pipeline and the basics of trust. I’m gonna throw out just a few stats to set the stage here. According to Forrester, only 29% of us as business leaders trust salespeople. That’s to start with. In the latest, I think it was Edelman LinkedIn Trust Barometer,

[00:04:11] Steve MacDonald: 61% of worldwide respondents—32,000 respondents—61% thought that we were being intentionally misleading and grossly exaggerating. 61%. Another study, third study overall, 74% of B2B buyers don’t believe the customer evidence that we present to them. Okay. And now you wonder why there’s this self-service B2B buyer’s journey where they want to wait longer and longer to even talk to us.

[00:04:41] Steve MacDonald: So this is one of the biggest, I think, gaps in the go-to-market strategy, that we can’t just say, let’s keep doing things like we’ve always done it, right, and still have success. So I’d love to open up with that and just get your thoughts on all of this.

[00:04:59] Nicholas Ghitti: That’s great. There’s so much to talk about around that topic, but maybe let’s start with the basics since we’re talking about the lack of the basics within the sales process currently. I remember that when I started selling 15 years ago, all of the methodologies that I was seeing online were about how to improve my sales skills as a human—MEDDIC, SPIN Selling, SPICED.

[00:05:24] Nicholas Ghitti: All of those different metrics were human-first, right? And I remember being bombarded with that kind of content at the time—marketing and other platforms, going to events, talking to people. When I look at what my junior account executives have access to on their LinkedIn, one out of five LinkedIn posts are around AI.

[00:05:44] Nicholas Ghitti: And the methodologies that they’re seeing are all based on software, based on tools, based on AI. Besides this whole trend now that is a thing that is RIP Outbound, RIP Marketing Agencies, everything is dying, only AI is going to save us. And I imagine it’s very overwhelming because they are not learning how to…

[00:06:06] Nicholas Ghitti: Do the basics, right? And what I mean by the basics is building trust with the customer, which is tightly connected with the numbers that you mentioned. Do proper pipeline management, learn how to do proper time management, specifically when you have so many things to take care of—so many tools, so many things grabbing your attention—and listening skills. Because the way that I see the market today is that all of these AI tools are helping us on specific pieces of the puzzle: how to do better research, how to send a better email, how to build lists faster and better, how to gather knowledge.

[00:06:41] Nicholas Ghitti: But these are still tools that need to be used by someone, especially in the B2B selling landscape. And I feel like the modern juniors and salespeople that are joining the market in the past two to three years, their attention is focused on, “Oh, this tool is going to fix my selling problem,” instead of, “How can I learn something new to help me sell better and use those tools better?”

[00:07:06] Steve MacDonald: Such an important focus there, right? Because we can hide behind things like tools and data. We have more data, we have more tools, we have more ways to go about the go-to-market strategy than we ever have before. But I love your kind of takeaway, which is that’s confusing, right? That’s muddying the waters and giving us a false sense of security, to the point where playbooks are almost a dirty word these days.

[00:07:37] Steve MacDonald: Because the minute you think you have a playbook, it’s out of date. It’s gone. You talked about replacing it with a living B2B system, and what did you mean by that?

[00:07:47] Nicholas Ghitti: Yeah, I think that’s a nice segue because, well, we have—I have—a playbook with my team, right? So the sales team has a playbook, which is 50 pages long.

[00:07:56] Nicholas Ghitti: This is where AI comes in. We have an AI connected to the playbook to help with searching, connecting the dots, and making it easier to access those 50 pages. But it was a human-made playbook, and what we realized is exactly what you said. By the time we finalized the first version, we had already changed the sales process, and we were looking at a different ICP.

[00:08:16] Nicholas Ghitti: And at the time, the playbook was managed by the sales leadership—me and the sales leaders. One of the changes that we did—like two big changes—one of them is we started to add, “Okay, what are the best practices that would lead us to build a playbook?” The best practices are listening to the customer, checking product usage to understand the user’s behavior in our platform to help us understand how to better serve them, analyzing everything that’s leaving our funnel—the wins and the losses, and why, and how, and when, and where—connecting with the community, and again, listening to the customers even more. So by doing that process, the playbook was a consequence. We already knew what the playbook needed because we had a deeper understanding of our market, our customer, and the way that we operated.

[00:09:05] Nicholas Ghitti: But keeping that a living organism was something that I don’t think the sales team is ready to do. They have other focuses—they need to focus on selling. Even the leadership needs to focus on managing the team. So what we did is, today the playbook is a shared responsibility between the revenue enablement team—so the sales enablement team—and the product marketing team.

[00:09:27] Nicholas Ghitti: So the revenue enablement, the sales enablement team, handles all of the internal side of the playbook: internal processes, new tools, new methodologies—for example, how to do the handover process with the CXT. And the product marketing team is handling all of the external side: ICPs, trends, partners, battle cards for competitors.

[00:09:49] Nicholas Ghitti: And this is a way that we found to embed all of this learning that the sales enablement team and the product marketing team are gathering and feed it back to the playbook so the sales team makes use of it. It’s critical. I give feedback to those teams, but it is managed by teams whose core is to manage content or knowledge in a way, shape, or form.

[00:10:12] Steve MacDonald: It’s a living document. That’s what I’m taking out of this. And that’s where I think the playbooks get their bad name—it isn’t the way that you’re doing it, but it’s like it’s a completed document, it’s done, it’s final, put final stamps on the top, right? And it just never can be that way.

[00:10:29] Steve MacDonald: And you mentioned something at the very beginning. The number one thing that you said was important in that playbook was listening to customers. That’s the voice of the customer, right? If we all think we’re a customer-focused, customer-centric, customer-first organization, McKinsey, I think, in a study said that only 15% of companies actually act on that—actually implement on that, right? So what does listening to the customer mean to you, and how does it impact this living playbook that you’re talking about?

[00:11:03] Nicholas Ghitti: I love those metrics, because it seems like a basic thing, right? We’ve been talking about the customer-centric, listening to the customer for such a long time, and it seems like a no-brainer. But as you said, the actual amount of companies who actually do that—it’s crazy.

[00:11:19] Nicholas Ghitti: I’ve worked for companies or mentored companies that did not want to listen to the customer’s feedback or advice because they thought they knew what was best for the product roadmap because they are building the product, they are in this industry, they know it better.

[00:11:33] Nicholas Ghitti: And 10 out of 10, that fails. And I think the biggest—and I’m gonna try to bring the CRO, the growth side of the equation—to listening to the customer, because I think this is something that every single team of the company should be doing, from finance to CX, to sales, to growth, to product, of course.

[00:11:52] Nicholas Ghitti: But I feel like the growth team has a big responsibility in making that happen. And the main reason why I say that is because the growth team—marketing, sales, and customer experience—they are in the market every single day. They go out of the company, virtually or in person, and they go meet a customer, a partner, a prospect, and they come back with information that sometimes your product marketing team is paying a research agency 50K to come up with the same answer that you did on a customer call. But…

[00:12:24] Nicholas Ghitti: The growth team, especially the sales team, is not trained to share that information internally properly. They’re trained to fill out the CRM to close deals. And something that I’ve been trying to do ever since that clicked for me is try to turn the sales team—or the growth team in general—into a knowledge-sharing or feedback-sharing machine for the rest of the company, and building processes and rituals that are slowly ingrained in their way of working. That, look,

[00:12:50] Nicholas Ghitti: If I hear important information that one of our competitors is adding this new feature that no one knew about, I just don’t want to use that to close the deal, but also, how can I, as a salesperson, share that information with the wider company? It’s a challenge, but I think this is one of the ways that we found out how to try to bring that voice of the customer—the voice of the market—more into awareness.

[00:13:13] Steve MacDonald: So if I could recap, I think three really important points from that are: when you talk about voice of the customer, you’re not talking about another survey, right? You’re not talking about just usage data and things like that. You’re talking about actual physical conversations that are taking place across the growth team.

[00:13:33] Steve MacDonald: That was one thing that really stood out. The second one was that knowledge can’t be just internal and siloed. Because everybody’s learning something different, right? Something valuable—but it can’t just stay in the individual minds of everyone who collected that data. And third, that was what we talked about earlier—you have to be able to execute on that shared knowledge base.

[00:13:55] Steve MacDonald: Right now, that’s where it gets really tricky. It’s hard, and I know it’s what you guys do as a company. It’s what you’re passionate about. How do we do that? How do we execute on that? How do we gain that shared knowledge—the conversations—how do we share it internally and execute on it? I think that’s the bigger thing.

[00:14:18] Nicholas Ghitti: That’s absolutely true, yeah. And my usual answer to those “how do we do it” questions—when it’s a hard thing to do, especially when it involves a lot of people—is a boring answer. But to be honest, most of the right answers in life are boring. We just don’t like it to be that way. But I believe that rituals and processes go a long way if they’re done properly.

[00:14:38] Nicholas Ghitti: And again—boring—but I think this is how we can try to overcome that specific challenge and many others in the company.

[00:14:46] Steve MacDonald: So when we say rituals and processes, we’re in the day of AI, and has this gotten easier or better? Because I feel like we’re doing two things—properly, like your interest in vinyls—we’re going back to the basics of customer conversations, right? And rituals and processes.

[00:14:58] Steve MacDonald: There’s nothing new since the 1950s or so in that, but we’re living in a day and age where change is happening at an exponentially faster pace than in the past. Our credibility—our trust factor—is so much significantly in the toilet versus where it used to be. So our complexity of go-to-market, our ICP, and how we’re viewed in the market is nothing like it was even 10 years ago.

[00:15:20] Steve MacDonald: So how do these rituals and processes overcome that hurdle—that add all those added complexities in what we have to do to be successful today?

[00:15:49] Nicholas Ghitti: Yeah, and I think you mentioned something that I totally agree with—the challenge behind that. But I don’t think that the rituals and processes need to overcome; I think they need to coexist. They need to work together.

[00:16:00] Nicholas Ghitti: Because if we think about it—I’ll use this example that I have internally, right? The rituals for us are making sure that we are talking enough with each other in a structured manner about the topics that we need to discuss on a weekly basis, monthly basis, and annual basis. Budgeting is every three to six months, but pipeline reviews—we do those every week.

[00:16:06] Nicholas Ghitti: And I think AI has really helped us cut out the noise or the little tasks we had around that topic and allowed us to focus on the human part, which is talking to people, getting feedback, putting our brains to think. But then we have an AI tool that’s going to keep notes and then already create the tasks for us in Asana, for example, so we can follow up.

[00:16:44] Nicholas Ghitti: It’s going to help remind us that we need to cover those tasks. AI is helping us understand which deals we really need to talk about this week because of the activity side, the importance, and the due dates. So it’s helping us be more effective—if we do it right, if we’re using it to support our human nature.

[00:17:04] Nicholas Ghitti: And I think on the buyer’s journey—which is a very interesting question—and I went through that myself because I changed cars a month ago. The process that I did was, at least for me, I had a car in mind, and I wanted to understand if that car was good or not. I didn’t rely on AI for that.

[00:17:21] Nicholas Ghitti: I went to community. I went to YouTube. I went to Reddit, and I wanted to see real people talking about their experience with the car that I wanted to buy. When I decided that, okay, I like this car, I used AI to help me find the best deal—to find the best vendor—and that was really helpful. But I didn’t trust AI to help me decide which car I wanted or if that car was the right one for me.

[00:17:44] Nicholas Ghitti: So I think that combination of community—of learning that other humans trust that product—I think that’s not going to be replaced. But AI can help you understand what is the best deal that I can get or how to compare that solution with others.

[00:18:00] Nicholas Ghitti: But the human side of the community—of product evaluation, of knowledge sharing—I think that still plays a big role in the buyer’s journey, from a car to a B2B or B2C tech solution.

[00:18:14] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. And we’re all selling in this podcast. Everybody who’s attending here and listening in—we’re in B2B, ABM-focused companies, right? And so that buying decision impacts our career as the buyer, right? There’s a ton of risk around that. And what you’re saying is we have to bring that voice of the customer from that community forward and make it a part of our pipeline, right?

[00:18:41] Steve MacDonald: Part of our go-to-market strategy. It reminds me—about a year ago, I had a three-time B2B C-suite executive on, and she said, “Steve, the bottom line is every time the voice of the customer precedes ours, everything works better. All of our enablement, all of our campaigns, everything.” And it goes back to—I think that we have a lack of trust.

[00:19:04] Steve MacDonald: We’ve got skin in the game. Of course, we’re going to say things that paint us in the very best picture, right? It’s like politicians—and I shouldn’t even approach that subject, especially coming from the States here today—but I think the idea of what you’re talking about here is bringing the voice through the community, through those one-on-one conversations.

[00:19:29] Steve MacDonald: And not only understanding it, but you’re talking about empowering our buyers with it. And how do we become an aid in that process? So that’s something that I think I wanted to really underscore. But there was something else that you said earlier I want to make sure I go back to—you talked about pipeline reviews.

[00:19:54] Steve MacDonald: So here’s what happens in a lot of companies: those pipeline reviews happen, but they happen between kind of a junior marketing person, a junior sales person, and it’s just like checkpoints, right? It’s not a consultative process of Where are we? What are we doing? How do we do it better? How do we bring in the rest of the team?

[00:20:17] Steve MacDonald: A lot of times your go-to-market success motion between customer success, sales, and marketing are baton passes. Marketing created an MQL or an SQL—baton passed to sales. “You guys take it. We’re done. We’re going to go back to focusing more on MQLs,” right? How do you make sure that you’re not having baton passes, but your team is operating as a team?

[00:20:44] Steve MacDonald: This is a team sport, and it never ends. And even when the deal is closed—retention, NRR, and focus on growth and revenue expansion from existing customers—it’s all a team sport. Like, how do you ensure that you’re operating as a team like that?

[00:21:02] Nicholas Ghitti: That’s the challenge, right, Steve?

[00:21:04] Nicholas Ghitti: And especially, I think—and I may go back to the CRO position—I think the Chief Revenue Officer position came from that need of having this. And if you look at the CRO ads or job postings today, most of them will say, “Look, we need someone that will help us connect and align marketing, sales, and CX.”

[00:21:24] Nicholas Ghitti: Which is a hard task to do. It’s definitely possible, but that’s the challenge. And some things that I feel like really work in our favor once we’re doing that: first of all, for me, everything starts with the company itself. Does the company have a clear vision—as clear as it can be, depending on the size and maturity of the company, right?

[00:21:43] Nicholas Ghitti: But does it know where it wants to go? What kind of company it wants to be—to a certain degree? So we have the team aligned on what the company is and what the company wants to be, at least on a mission level. The second stage of that is having shared KPIs between sales, marketing, and CX as much as possible—making them accountable for a bigger portion than just their own silo.

[00:22:07] Nicholas Ghitti: For example, I had cases when we were building out the team and native teams where my head of marketing was so focused on the number of SQLs, because this was an important metric that we had at the time—also for investors—but the sales team was focused on higher sales tickets because it was a healthier sale to do.

[00:22:25] Nicholas Ghitti: We were trying to move upmarket, and they were not communicating, right? We were doing SSMB strategy with lead generation, and the sales team was getting specialized in moving upmarket to meet large enterprises. And they were not wrong—but it was missing alignment.

[00:22:44] Nicholas Ghitti: And one of the key things that we did was creating shared goals. The SQL goal is shared. The win rate is shared with the CX team. The churn is shared. The ROI of the accounts is shared—to help leadership be seen and have the same horizon. I think that really helps a lot.

[00:23:00] Nicholas Ghitti: And I strongly believe that the role of a CRO is really helpful because, also on the C-level, you have one person that is trying to orchestrate all of those different pieces instead of multiple C-levels trying to do their own thing.

[00:23:12] Nicholas Ghitti: And then from that shared vision—and I know it’s boring—but I’ll go back to the rituals and processes. What are the rituals and processes that we need to put in place to make that vision come true? Of course, it’s so much harder to do that than to talk about it, because it’s all about people, right?

[00:23:28] Nicholas Ghitti: And egos, and a fast-paced environment, especially with startups. But I think that’s the way to get things going, and it comes with the maturity of the operation. You need to understand what your KPIs are, what you need to do, do you trust the data you have available, and how to connect those teams under a single goal or a set of shared goals.

[00:23:50] Steve MacDonald: So you’re obviously on top of the entire go-to-market team—the growth team. And I just wanted to underscore that’s not the case for every CRO, right? There are a lot of CROs out there that came up through the ranks of sales, and they have a quota on their head. And there’s a short-term versus long-term perspective that happens internally.

[00:24:10] Steve MacDonald: But personally, I’ve interviewed a number of CMOs and CROs that came onto this podcast together. And whether you are a CRO that oversees all of that, or you are a team—a CMO/CRO—that is like glued at the hip in terms of “We are a hundred percent aligned on what we’re doing,” I think the takeaway that I have is:

[00:24:35] Steve MacDonald: You have to have someone—or a dynamic duo—that is overseeing all of that together. Because without that, you have misalignment, you have silos, you have different game plans, different compensation structures, different KPIs, and that’s where it all starts to fall apart. That’s my takeaway from the last thing that you were just saying there.

[00:25:01] Nicholas Ghitti: Yeah, no, I fully agree. And if we look at a CRO and a CMO working together, they need to—I think it’s the same methodology that I apply with the head of sales and the head of marketing. The CEO applies to the CRO and the CMO: shared vision, shared goals, working together.

[00:25:19] Nicholas Ghitti: Bring the CRO or the CSO—the Chief Sales Officer, Chief Commercial Officer—to the marketing budget meetings, so they understand how the marketing team is drafting the budget, what challenges they’re going to have, and how they plan to spend it. Bring the CMO to the pipeline management meetings so they understand what the current discussions within the sales team are. As knowledge is shared and you have a better understanding on each side, it’s so much easier to connect the dots later and work together.

[00:25:45] Nicholas Ghitti: And the role of the CRO is even more important to make sure that those two pieces—or all of the C-level—are fully aligned and don’t have competing KPIs. We are working in the same rhythm. But I fully agree.

[00:26:03] Steve MacDonald: Again, this seems like back to basics, right? We’re all on the same playbook, right? We’ve got shared KPIs, we’re headed in the same direction. It seems insanely basic, right? But I ask every C-suite executive that comes onto this podcast, “What are your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?” The number one challenge, mentioned over 70% of the time by C-suite executives, is lack of internal alignment.

[00:26:31] Nicholas Ghitti: It is basic, right? And back to basics doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s a basic understanding, but sometimes it’s really hard to do. And I think that goes back to our first topic about all of the noise that’s in the market today. Sometimes I feel like it’s more important to drive AI efficiency within the company instead of fixing the basics of internal communication.

[00:26:53] Steve MacDonald: There you go. We’ve covered so many topics here, and our poor human brains can only take in about two or three things at a time and retain them. If there was one thing that you wanted your C-suite executive peers to take away from our conversation today, what’s the single most important thing you want them to leave with?

[00:27:13] Nicholas Ghitti: Besides the whole alignment and understanding each other’s roles—which I think is, again, one of the basics—I’ll try to bring something different that I learned with my first C-level position: don’t distance yourself from the front. It doesn’t matter if you are a CRO, CMO, CFO, or CEO—it doesn’t really matter.

[00:27:32] Nicholas Ghitti: I think what ends up happening, especially for me in that case—because it was my first C-level role—was that I was so involved with the strategy and the high-level discussions with the rest of the C-level that I wasn’t connected enough with my sales team, the partners, the customers, the market. And I was distancing myself from reality.

[00:27:53] Nicholas Ghitti: The market had already changed. We were talking about different terms, different players, different dynamics. And because I was hearing all of that filtered by people and not really being there myself, I didn’t have a good understanding. I think this is true for every single position—from finance to sales.

[00:28:11] Nicholas Ghitti: So really take the time off your week to go down the ranks. Talk to your customers, talk to the team who is managing the invoices, talk to the salespeople—and you’re always going to learn something essential that’s going to feed back into the strategy, the fundraising, the board meeting discussions that you’re having.

[00:28:30] Nicholas Ghitti: I always feel like whenever I go back and spend time mostly with them—or talking to customers—I always come back with a fresh mind, more ideas, and more things to implement than just focusing on what is the core of my responsibility as a C-level.

[00:28:45] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you—the mission of this podcast is to bring different perspectives, different insights from all of our experiences: from sales, marketing, customer success, and product; from every point of view—from the CEO’s point of view, the CFO’s point of view.

[00:29:01] Steve MacDonald: And if we can bring the best of the best practices together—whether they sound insanely basic or not—it really is that the basics are not happening. They just aren’t, right? And you explained it in a very eloquent way today. But if we can bring all these perspectives together, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[00:29:24] Steve MacDonald: And you did an amazing job today at being part of that rising tide, and I just wanted to say thank you. And is it okay—because I know there are going to be questions—is it okay if I share your link to your LinkedIn profile so people can reach out to you and ask questions?

[00:29:42] Nicholas Ghitti: Yeah, of course. I would love to. By the way, thank you so much, Steve. It was a fantastic conversation—thank you. It was great. And look, anyone—feel free to reach out to me. As I said, that’s how we learn, how we get better: talking to each other, sharing information. So of course, I’m more than happy to do it.

[00:29:59] Steve MacDonald: Well, Nicholas, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. I see an additional podcast coming up in our future here, because I think this could be an entire conversation that we didn’t get to yet—that we need to extend. So thank you for coming on. I appreciate it.

[00:30:15] Nicholas Ghitti: No, thank you so much for the invite. It was amazing. I would love to do a part two at some point in the future.

[00:30:20] Nicholas Ghitti: I’m still seeing where this loop marketing thing from HubSpot is going to go. Maybe we can give it some time and bring it back at some point in the future to see if it’s actually real—or just another selling tool from them.

[00:30:32] Steve MacDonald: Alright, fantastic. We shall do that. Thank you, thank you.

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