Episode #234:

Joni Helminen, Chief Marketing Officer at Barona, explores how CMOs can orchestrate growth by mastering the constant balancing act between short-term results and long-term brand building. Speaking from his experience leading marketing for one of Finland’s largest staffing and recruitment companies, Joni explains why alignment, trust, and creative courage are the cornerstones of sustainable success. 

“We need to align only on what’s important at any given time, talking to stakeholders internally and figuring out the current balance in business, and then we adjust and support.” – Joni Helminen

In this episode, Joni highlights how internal misalignment weakens business impact, how CMOs can earn credibility by speaking the language of sales and finance, and why balance across B2B and B2C efforts drives measurable results. Through practical insights and a data-driven perspective, Joni shows how alignment transforms marketing from a cost center into a growth engine.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspective podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we’ve got a super exciting guest on, Joni Helminen. Now, Joni, you are currently a CMO. You’re in Finland-based, and there’s a lot of interesting aspects that we’re gonna talk about today that are true in the Nordic companies.

[00:00:26] Steve MacDonald: True worldwide, but are even accentuated in the Nordic countries. And so, we’re gonna talk about how we deal with the CMO balancing act that we have all the time, whether it’s alignment, whether it’s our perceptions as a cost center, whether it’s how we’re building the brand versus how we’re driving deep pipeline penetration.

[00:00:47] Steve MacDonald: We always seem to be in a balancing act, right? And so, how do we orchestrate growth within that? And you’ve got an interesting position because your company, you have both a B2B and a B2C side. And today, the lines are blending and merging in terms of expectations on the B2B buyer that are driven on the B2C side.

[00:01:09] Steve MacDonald: And so, there’s a lot of really good learning there as well. But what I would love to do is I’d love to maybe just turn over to you for just a minute or two and ask you about your background and maybe expand on it a little bit more, and then we’ll dig right in.

[00:01:24] Joni Helminen: Yeah, sounds good. So yeah, my name is Joni.

[00:01:27] Joni Helminen: I am currently the CMO at a company called Barona. So Barona is kind of the biggest staffing and recruitment company in Finland, you know, aiming to become the foremost working life company in the Nordics, about 30,000 recruitments a year. Top 10 biggest employers in Finland, growing in Sweden and Norway.

[00:01:43] Joni Helminen: So, you know, we do solutions related to work like expert recruitments, blue-collar outsourcing, but also learning solutions and well-being services, including the public sector. Our purpose is to build kind of sustainable working life, and working life is a combination of work, learning, and well-being of people, and it needs to be built sustainably.

[00:02:00] Joni Helminen: And, you know, we wanna own that space, not just to be known for kind of recruitment and staffing that we are currently. So, my personal intro is that yeah, I’m currently the CMO. Let’s go a little bit back. So, when I got my master’s in marketing in 2016, I actually ended up as a trainee in a media agency at Omnicom Media Group, actually, and it ended up being kind of like a really good spring and growth ground. You know, got to learn ad ops data, programmatic pretty early and, you know, became a team lead and then helped do a lot of stuff there.

[00:02:23] Joni Helminen: Got to see a lot of different marketing organizations and how brands operate and how marketing was executed. And I think that was really key in kind of seeing what I thought made sense and what didn’t really make sense in leading a marketing organization.

[00:02:38] Joni Helminen: And then five years on the agency side, I thought it was, you know, time for a change. So I jumped to the in-house side. So now at Barona, I’ve been about four years, a bit more, to run our digital marketing team originally. So, you know, paid ads, marketing automation, analytics, MarTech, all of that.

[00:02:53] Joni Helminen: Got to learn a bunch more again. And then, I figured workflow automations are pretty key and started building those in about 2022 before the AI craze. And then, slowly towards leading the team, marketing strategy, business discussions, budgeting, and then, you know, eventually as a director and now as a CMO.

[00:03:09] Joni Helminen: I’m really happy that our CEO saw value in kind of how I approached things and I got to continue growing and learning and was lucky enough to have good mentors and examples around my career so I can, you know, stand here today and talk about it.

[00:03:22] Steve MacDonald: Good. You know, that kind of programmatic, marketing automation, AI background is gonna be really helpful today because as CMOs, we have more data, we have more analytics, we have more attribution points than we have ever had before.

[00:03:39] Steve MacDonald: And how does that help us, and how do we balance that, the data side, right? With more qualitative measures, and we can’t ignore or avoid those as well. So I’m just gonna get right in, and I’m gonna ask you because it was interesting. We started talking about the trust epidemic and, you know, you didn’t have to look any farther than like the LinkedIn Edelman study to see that 61% of the business buyers out there worldwide think that we are being intentionally misleading as sales organizations.

[00:04:10] Steve MacDonald: That’s just the tip of the iceberg, right? But you say it’s even more prominent or important here in the Nordics. I’d love to just talk about why it’s important but why it’s even more important where you operate and what we can learn from that.

[00:04:25] Joni Helminen: So for sure. So like, the Finlands and maybe the Nordics as a whole are kind of a market where the trust angle is a little different.

[00:04:33] Joni Helminen: So I would even venture to say that our markets are kind of entirely based on trust, especially on the B2B side. You know, obviously the four Ps and especially price have an effect, but you can’t really understate the importance of kind of trust, sales, and account management that have like very personal relationships to make sure that needs are met, but also that we have the right solution for them, for the customer.

[00:04:55] Joni Helminen: And, you know, we wouldn’t be able to operate if customers didn’t trust our messaging, trust our customer references, or trust the results that we bring. So it’s really integral, I feel like, to show the kind of customer pain points and hear the customer’s voice, but do it in a relatable and personal way.

[00:05:10] Steve MacDonald: So it’s interesting because building that trust, you know, B2B relationships worldwide, every C-suite executive I’ve ever talked to absolutely believes that the B2B world works on relationships. It’s a relationship-based business, which means it has to be founded in trust, right? But we’ve got this big trend where the B2B buyers are on the self-service journey and they’re waiting longer and longer to wanna even talk to us.

[00:05:36] Steve MacDonald: So trust is under attack. They’re doing that not because they trust us more. They’re doing that because they trust us less. And as wonderful as AI is, that’s another level of distrust that’s being brought into the equation. Is this really the company talking? Is this AI talking? Can I believe it?

[00:05:57] Steve MacDonald: Is it hallucinating, right? How do you think about that? Because AI discovery is super important. And how does that, and how are you thinking about using that and building trust for your brand? 

[00:06:12] Joni Helminen: Yeah, so I think it’s twofold, right? So like, AI’s here to stay, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

[00:06:18] Joni Helminen: What I would like to say is that, yeah, we need to care about that side for sure, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it later today, but it also makes it more important that we bring the human element. So like, we do a lot more in-house events or like, you know, in-person events. We do a lot of thought leadership content.

[00:06:34] Joni Helminen: For example, we show the people that we are, our personality, what our brand is about, and what we stand for. And I feel like that has a lot more kind of pull in a time when there’s a lot of AI slop around, if that makes sense.

[00:06:47] Steve MacDonald: You know, a lot of what you’re talking about there not only does it help get you and your executives and your team out in front of the customer and build your thought leadership in your brand and everything we’ve gotta do,

[00:06:58] Steve MacDonald: But at the same time, those are some of the same things that we need to be doing more of to build our presence inside of these AI engines. The world of SEO is changing dramatically right now. How do you think about then, you know, utilizing those kinds of activities, the content that you create, which is always the foundation, right,

[00:07:21] Steve MacDonald: For SEO, but also being discovered inside of the AI search tools as well? How are you thinking about making that change?

[00:07:31] Joni Helminen: Yeah, so just to touch on the previous point a little. So, for example, we put a lot of effort on kind of public references on our site. So, for example, Barona has about 65 to 70, I think, public references with, you know, videos and case descriptions and more. And, you know, we wanna be very specific about specific industry, size of the customer company, plus service pairs so that, you know, we can show that experience that we have. That’s for the people, right? So we do that for the people, we don’t do that for AI. But then specifically for AI,

[00:07:56] Joni Helminen: You know, we obviously do a lot of SEO, but we need to understand how AI talks about us. Where does it get its information? Do we need to do more PR? Does it pull its stuff from LinkedIn? Do we need to do more person-led thought leadership? Do we need to do, for example, more content in English for other markets, even though we might do a lot of business in Finland, in Finnish?

[00:08:14] Joni Helminen: And, you know, it’s an interesting balance, and I think that’s a goalpost that will keep moving these next months or years. Right now, I’d say the initial data says that there’s a lot of PR, there’s a lot of organic earned, there’s a lot of LinkedIn, and very little kind of the classic website authority where,

[00:08:29] Joni Helminen: Like, you know, with Google it used to be or is, and how LLMs decide to pull their info depending, of course, on what you’re querying. You know, like, are you looking for learning services near me, or are you looking for best staffing service in Finland for construction companies? But who knows? In six to twelve months, I think it’s really interesting but also kind of dizzying to try to keep up with this.

[00:08:47] Steve MacDonald: You talked about a change in your creative messaging. You called it creative courage, and I wanted to hear a little bit more about what that is and why, not only just from more of a standpoint of standing out more, right, and being noticed and provocative, but there’s a strategy behind this as well.

[00:09:08] Joni Helminen: Yeah, so yeah, it’s a term I like to use, creative courage. So what does it mean? Let’s define it first. So it essentially means that, you know, what type of messaging can we craft that really makes customers kind of stop scrolling and think? So how do we make it, and then how do we make it with enough courage that it’ll stand out and leave a memory?

[00:09:28] Joni Helminen: So, for example, in our case, is it sustainability? Is it transactional value and kind of price? Do we talk numbers and cost-of-mis-hire calculations? Or do we talk our company’s societal impact and the long-term values of what, you know, we as a brand represent? And how do we make sure that our brand actually resonates and leaves a feeling for what we stand for?

[00:09:47] Joni Helminen: And then, does the customer’s voice and pain point get heard? What’s the angle? And, like, importantly, how do we create space or partnerships to iterate creative ideas to stand out from competitors with messaging that really hits home and resonates? And I think it’s a really interesting topic in today’s B2B ecosystem of kind of creating long-term sustainable growth.

[00:10:05] Joni Helminen: It’s quite undervalued and under-thought, in my opinion. You know, companies tend to pick the safe and easy creative option, which leads to a lot of, I feel like, mediocre or even boring, you know, B2B content and white papers. Like, have we met B2C consumers? If we did B2B like we did B2C, with a lot of creative photo focus,

[00:10:23] Joni Helminen: I feel like we wouldn’t have this problem, but somehow we don’t think the business executives are not people themselves.

[00:10:27] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. And at the same time, our messages have to be provocative. They have to be. I remember reading a Forbes article that talked about how you have to have a unique point of view, right?

[00:10:41] Joni Helminen: There’s no other way. You can’t, like, kind of break out from the rest of the competitors. You’re all gonna talk the same thing if you don’t find your unique angle.

[00:10:48] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. And you can’t be scared about taking a little bit different point of view and path in life, right? Because if you don’t, then to your point, you’re gonna be lost in the middle.

[00:10:59] Steve MacDonald: Right. And there’s a lot of generic, I think, is a good way to kind of, I’m taking away from what you’re saying, is how do we get away from generic messaging that just gets lost? And how do we stand out? And there’s a lot of work that’s been done in this area in terms of what are the messages that matter the most and get the most engagement, myth-busting, contrarian points of view.

[00:11:22] Steve MacDonald: In fact, that was the word that Forbes used. You’ve gotta have an appropriate level of a contrarian point of view that’s gonna make people think. And it’s like, “I haven’t quite thought about it that way,” right? So that’s a big part of the balancing act, right? Because that’s how a brand message builds a brand, but it also starts to get people to take action, right?

[00:11:42] Steve MacDonald: There’s something unique, there’s something different. And I think I’d love to talk a little bit about this kind of long-term, short-term balance, right? Brand building versus deep pipeline, short SQL, MQL kind of thing. How do you think about that? And here’s, I’m gonna preload this, there’s a myth that needs to be busted, that those are separate activities, separate budgets, right, separate things that we’ve gotta do.

[00:12:10] Steve MacDonald: But we all know that there’s a massive overlap in this, and so I’d just love to get your point of view on it. 

[00:12:17] Joni Helminen: Yeah, so I think it’s an interesting, you know, point of view. So for example, in our case, we have to develop and build a brand—the big picture of what we are. And then the B2B challenge is kind of how do we communicate that in a way that resonates with buyers.

[00:12:29] Joni Helminen: And then we also have, in our business, B2C marketing. So, our business doesn’t work if people don’t think we’re a solid and preferred employer. So there’s the kind of employer branding angle, both for us as well as our customers. And I also think it’s funny kind of talking about B2C in our context—we call it B2C even though applying for jobs happens online, and the digital experience is online just like e-commerce, but it’s not e-commerce.

[00:12:52] Joni Helminen: We’re more, it’s more so like in our case, we need to find the exact right amount of right applicants for the right positions—not too many, not too little, but you know, the right ones that tick the boxes our customers set. So it’s a balancing act for sure. And then, depending on the job market—in our case, the balance switches.

[00:13:07] Joni Helminen: So right now we’ve got to support sales a lot more. But go a few years back and the job market was a lot more open in Finland and the Nordics. We were desperate to get great job candidates. So from a team-building perspective, we need to build the right processes and competencies in our marketing team that can, you know, match this balance when required.

[00:13:22] Joni Helminen: But I think it has a lot to do with the right metrics, really, and, you know, wanting to make sure that we align only on what’s important at any given time—talking to stakeholders internally and figuring out the current balance in business, and then we adjust and support. But I think what you touched on is also important—that there are a lot of programs and a lot of marketing that can hit both.

[00:13:39] Joni Helminen: So you can, you know, build brand and still affect pipeline, I feel like. And that’s the kind of goal that you need to find—but it’s not easy, for sure.

[00:13:51] Steve MacDonald: You mentioned something in there that I want to kind of dig into more because you mentioned internal alignment, right?

[00:13:58] Steve MacDonald: And that CMOs—we have worldwide, we have the shortest tenure in the C-suite. And a big part of that is because of misalignment. And in fact, of all the C-suite executives that I’ve talked about, over 70% of them say the number one challenge is internal alignment. So this balancing act, just what we’re doing and fighting these perceptions of us as the big cost center, right?

[00:14:22] Steve MacDonald: Not having, you know, really being seen as having a seat at the table, as good as our last lead—you know, you keep going on and on. Imposter syndrome—you could put it all there. There’s a lot that goes on in the ranks of the CMO and CMO communities that are really well discussed. How do you think about this balancing act with sales and the rest of the C-suite?

[00:14:47] Joni Helminen: Yeah, I mean, that’s the big crux of it, right? It’s a combination of what we, you know, already discussed. So I feel like in my case, ’cause, you know, we have a relatively big team—at least in Finland, we have over 20 people.

[00:14:59] Joni Helminen: So that helps build the structure to, for example, align budgets correctly, but also a big internal team helps to have conversations and do that internal alignment more than maybe a small team is able to. So that works in my case. And you know, it’s funny ’cause I used to lead performance at some point in my career, but I’ve turned completely 180 back to the basics.

[00:15:18] Joni Helminen: It’s no secret that, you know, I like to do less performance and boost a lot more of the awareness and consideration, and I try to steer us there and then kind of have those conversations that help us steer there. But it’s a lot about, I feel like, making sure that we align the business needs between the long-term and short-term—in our case, B2B and B2C.

[00:15:36] Joni Helminen: Figure out what’s important right now and in the next six to twelve months, and then kind of do the tough sacrifices elsewhere to keep the balance and the total in line. It’s about educating the C-level and sales on kind of why long-term matters and why it will, you know, eventually bring the results they want.

[00:15:50] Joni Helminen: Like I feel like part of my job as a CMO and also as a kind of classically trained marketer is making sure that sales leaders, our CFO and CEO, and other stakeholders, they understand kind of the trade-off. If we become like a sales support machine, we’ll only focus on today and we won’t survive tomorrow.

[00:16:07] Joni Helminen: So, you know, the cascading effects would lead to ruin and death by a thousand cuts from competitors eventually. But yeah, I think it’s an interesting balance that I think everyone kind of deals with differently. And it depends on the company and the stakeholders that you gotta deal with.

[00:16:21] Steve MacDonald: And have you found, kind of from an automation of RevOps—I mean, we all love numbers, like in the board, they love to see numbers and dashboards and KPIs, you know—so how do we reflect this in the KPIs, the dashboards that we track inside of our companies?

[00:16:40] Joni Helminen: Yeah, I mean, so I guess I’ll start with this—that it’s also funny as a marketer that you spend all this time learning how to talk marketing and talk to marketers, and then, you know, get them on board to lead a marketing function and become an expert.

[00:16:53] Joni Helminen: And then at some point, you realize that it’s actually about the business and how you communicate value in a language the C-suite and sales understand. So, you know, for instance, marketing loves to talk about leads and volume and quality of marketing-qualified leads, and you know, that’s great—but if those leads don’t turn into meetings that turn into opportunities that turn into closed-won, the C-level kind of, you know, they won’t give you that seat at the table.

[00:17:13] Joni Helminen: They won’t respect you or the discipline of marketing. And vice versa, if you can’t put a monetary value and formula for how long-term brand investments will enable shorter sales cycles, or lessen SDR costs, or give higher opportunity values, and how that ties into revenues and earnings—

[00:17:33] Joni Helminen: —and if you can’t do this in a language, you know, that the finance team understands, you won’t get through. But marketers have a lot of metrics, and we like to use a lot of them. Many of them, I feel like, are vanity and a means to an end—something we think matters. But, you know, we need to know our audience.

[00:17:48] Joni Helminen: So I, for example, when I was on the agency side, I felt like it was even more difficult because you often didn’t have access to drill down to the business and dissect where the pipeline leaks were happening. So now that I’m on the in-house side and I get to have that 360° vision, it’s more about having the metrics in place—and then I have to make sure I really use them to, you know, create metrics that drive that internal alignment.

[00:18:10] Steve MacDonald: So what’s an example of a KPI metric, right? That is a non-traditional marketing metric, that is a business metric that you influence, and how you track it?

[00:18:25] Joni Helminen: I’m sure, you know, you guys in the States do this a lot, but I’m pretty sure in Finland we don’t. We don’t look at the kind of quality of conversations happening with clients.

[00:18:33] Joni Helminen: So, for example, shorter sales cycles, customers are more likely to be shortlisting us, they’re more likely to be interested in us or picking up the call if we have a better brand or we communicate the right things before sales reaches out. So there’s a lot of metrics that are business-valid, but marketing doesn’t tend to follow because we’re interested in the impressions and MQLs, right?

[00:18:54] Joni Helminen: So there’s a lot of cool stuff that you can do when you start thinking about, you know, where does marketing really add value and what kind of metrics could it affect for.

[00:19:03] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because we’re supposed to be very, very pipeline-focused these days, right? You know, go back ten years ago, we weren’t talking about marketing and impacting pipeline. And so, how are you helping, like, the quality of those conversations?

[00:19:19] Steve MacDonald: That’s really interesting because in a relationship-based business, the conversations are like everything, the content that gets you there. And there was a three-time B2B CMO, she was on, and she said two things. She said, one, today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand. So we can’t not build the brand.

[00:19:38] Steve MacDonald: You mentioned it, like, you know, we’re selling ourselves short, right? The other thing that she said was that it takes cycles away from the sales process because they aren’t having to establish the brand, establish trust, establish their role as a consultant and advisor in the industry, if we are helping to set that stage beforehand.

[00:20:00] Steve MacDonald: And so, when you were talking about that, I thought, we don’t look at branding necessarily that way, and we don’t talk about it in a business sense all the way through. Like, in a sales-led culture, which all of our companies are, we have to be, right? How we make shorter sales cycles and how we make more powerful conversations in the middle.

[00:20:23] Joni Helminen: Yeah, for sure. And there’s a lot of toolkits that, you know, marketers have at our disposal. We can help with the sales materials, we can help with crafting the message, we can listen to the customer. There’s a lot of things that we can do. But maybe, you know, it’s kind of the classic misalignment issue between marketing and sales that doesn’t necessarily happen, and then translate into better discussions or better value.

[00:20:43] Steve MacDonald: So you just said something really important there, we can listen to the customer, right? So go to any of the top consulting firms in the world, the Deloitte, the McKinseys, Boston Consulting Groups, you name it, and they’re gonna tell you that the voice of the customer is the highest voice of authority in the business.

[00:21:01] Steve MacDonald: Which we all know, right? And every single one of us says, in one way or another, we’re customer-focused, we’re customer-obsessed. But it’s about actually executing on that. It’s like having a voice of the customer program so we truly are listening and then executing on it. And McKinsey said that only 15% of companies actually do that, only 15%.

[00:21:28] Joni Helminen: I was just about to say that. I don’t think that’s very common. You know, we tend to kind of, because we work at our companies and we know our services, we like to love to talk about them and how good we are. And then we kind of get lost in the sort of how great we are instead of listening to what the customer really needs. And, you know, it’s a hard thing to get right, I feel like.

[00:21:45] Steve MacDonald: We are thought leaders in our own tech, our own services, our own products. And it’s like being proud parents, we can talk about ’em all day long, right? But you know, it was really interesting. I had a woman on the podcast and she said, we went into one of the biggest new business presentations we had ever had as a company.

[00:22:05] Steve MacDonald: It was one of those shoot-for-the-moon kind of opportunities. And she said there was a two-hour presentation that we gave, and we didn’t talk about us once. All we did was talk about them and their customers.

[00:22:20] Joni Helminen: I feel like that’s impressive. You know, if you can get to that state, that you can angle your pitch in a way that you can make that happen, yeah, that’s really good. Yep.

[00:22:28] Steve MacDonald: They won the business. And they said it was the best new business presentation they’d ever heard. So how do we get customer-obsessed, truly to the point where we’re actually, like, operationalizing the voice of the customer, right? And there’s the data side to it.

[00:22:48] Steve MacDonald: And then, like you said, there’s the listening, right? And then there’s the one-on-one side of that. Like, how do we create that operationalized, like you said earlier on, before we even started recording, you’ve got kind of like an engineering way to think about marketing.

[00:23:01] Steve MacDonald: And so if we were gonna systematize this, how would we do that? Or how do you think about that?

[00:23:07] Joni Helminen: I’d love if I would have some kind of silver bullet, right? But in my case, I tend to go to the quality of data a lot. So I tend to figure out: where do we source that data? Where do we make it so that the data quality is as good as it can be and reflects the customer opinion in a way so that we can look at it at a systematic scale kind of way.

[00:23:24] Joni Helminen: But it’s also about the quality of engagement that we have with our business units. So marketing often tends to kind of sit on the sidelines and do a lot of our marketing, you know, we do our campaigns and we like to get absorbed in that. But maybe it’s a lot about how much, you know, what kind of dialogue we have with our business.

[00:23:43] Joni Helminen: And then, you know, what can they tell us? How much can we listen to the customer? How much time can we spend there? And maybe it’s a resource thing, but like, you know, we tend to kind of push a lot of outcomes, and, you know, we wanna get more stuff out. But maybe it should be a lot more about the quality of the things that we do put out.

[00:24:00] Steve MacDonald: And tell me your thoughts on the data side. We have more data than we have ever had, and it’s incredibly useful, but we can also hide behind our data. And think about the last time we went to, like, a client advisory board meeting or something, right, where we had just a group of clients…

[00:24:20] Steve MacDonald: We always come out and we’re like, oh my gosh, we gotta do this again. We gotta do this more often. We learn so much by just talking. And we can think that in our sales processes, we’re talking to prospects all the time. Customer success, they’re talking to customers all the time. The thing is, those conversations are sales-led conversations, not true discovery conversations. And it’s not to say there aren’t incredibly important things in those, but the task there is to sell, right? To bring in a prospect and sell what we have. And in customer success, it’s ultimately to cross-sell and upsell, keep loyalty, cross-sell, upsell.

[00:25:06] Joni Helminen: It’s an interesting point that you raised, that’s also how sales works. But I feel like what marketing has learned in the last few years is that we need to provide kind of unconditional value first. So I feel like if sales also took the time to just go and listen to their customers and talk about their problems without trying to sell, every once in a while you would probably end up having more quality conversations with the customer. That would then lead you to be able to offer a solution that makes more sense, and the customer would appreciate it. So maybe a little bit less direct selling actually leads to better selling. I don’t know, I’m not a salesperson, but just a thought.

[00:25:40] Steve MacDonald: But as an organization, we can be better at less direct selling, right? That’s what they don’t want. That’s what they don’t trust. That’s the trust epidemic that we’re in the middle of, right? And so having those conversations, most CMOs that I talk to when they take on a new role, the first thing they do is they go out and have 10, 15, 20 different conversations with customers. Non-sales conversations that are like this, right?

[00:26:06] Steve MacDonald: “What is it in your job and your position and in the business that are the difficult things, the biggest challenges, right, to creating success?” We don’t get into those kinds of conversations. In fact, Gong told us that in a big study they did with thousands and thousands of sales conversations, the sales rep talks two-thirds to three-quarters of the time. So the question is, where do we have those conversations that open it up wide and build trust, where we can learn? It’s interesting.

[00:26:37] Joni Helminen: I think it’s an interesting kind of balance between, well, obviously sales leadership, but also account management leadership. You know, do we have space for those types of conversations? And then is there another kind of leg in the organization that could do that? Could marketing kind of fit in there? Or could we have, in the course of doing, for example, studies to make sure that we do our operations better, maybe those are the types of places to have those kinds of conversations. But it’s a lot about how we lead ourselves so that we get to have those conversations.

[00:27:03] Steve MacDonald: Yep. A hundred percent. You know, we’ve talked about a lot here, and I wanna ask you just one last question, and this question is: if there was one thing that you wanted people to take away from our conversation, the most important thing, what would that be?

[00:27:18] Joni Helminen: So I feel like, learn the business. If you can talk with your customers, kind of become the solution yourself. I feel like that’s one I like to put a lot of focus on. Take care of your data quality from day one. I think that can go a long way.

[00:27:34] Steve MacDonald: I love it. I love the brevity of that. I have people go on for three, four, five minutes and tell about ten different things. Here’s one thing I know, people are gonna have questions. Is it appropriate if I give out a link to your LinkedIn profile so that people could reach out to you?

[00:27:48] Joni Helminen: For sure, feel free to. I’m always happy to have interesting discussions with different kinds of people from different kinds of backgrounds. You end up learning a lot that way.

[00:27:55] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you. You know, the goal of this podcast is to bring different perspectives from different C-suite executives from different parts of the world. But we’re all on a B2B ABM motion, and what can we share and learn from each other? And if we do that, and do that well, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And I just want to say thank you, you were an incredibly important part of that rising tide today.

[00:28:22] Joni Helminen: Thanks for inviting me, Steve. It was really fun to be here.