Episode #240:
Peter Dibbern, Chief Marketing Officer at COSMO CONSULT, explains why customer understanding shapes every part of a modern GTM system. He details how SaaS models require deeper, continuous customer relationships. He discusses how data supports but never replaces real conversations and emphasizes that trust grows through honest stories, not polished marketing claims.
“The customers are a lot better informed today, so we have to create solutions together in a dialogue. If you respect the customer, you will get insights from them, and those will be the best sellers of your product for future prospects.” – Peter Dibbern
This episode moves beyond the usual alignment conversation and shows why a modern GTM system cannot function without a living connection to the customer. Peter highlights how customer insight becomes the signal that guides every strategic decision and why authentic stories carry more influence than any crafted message. It reinforces the idea that customer truth is not an input but the operating force that shapes the entire GTM engine.
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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 have a phenomenal conversation in mind. Here we’re gonna be talking about how to make the voice of the customer your entire go to market operating system. And now we all know that the highest voice of authority in any business is the voice of the customer.
[00:00:26] Steve MacDonald: And none of us would say we’re not focused on the customer. We’re not customer first. We’re not customer obsessed, right? We all would say that, but how we actually execute on that and how we think about that, how leadership adopts that is a whole different story and that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today with Peter Dibbern.
[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: Now Peter, you are not only a chief marketing officer, you’ve been on the C-Suite for a while. You work with a company called Cosmo Consultant, and I want to have you explain a little bit about what you do there. What was fascinating, well, we just had a really good conversation when we first started talking and it was electric, and we’re gonna recreate that here today.
[00:01:06] Steve MacDonald: But you’ve got a very interesting background in that you’ve always been kind of back and forth in marketing, sales, biz development, and sometimes it’s hard for marketers to really understand how to support the sales team across the buyer’s journey when you really haven’t walked in their shoes, right?
[00:01:29] Steve MacDonald: And so that’s a perspective that you really own and think it’s an important part of creating a go to market strategy overall. And I would completely agree with that. You also spent time in the Swedish military, and one thing that I know, you can say a little bit about your military background, but in the military we’re usually trained in how to be a good leader. Where in business we just kind of tend to move up the ranks, and it’s not like anybody says, oh, now you’re a CMO.
[00:02:02] Steve MacDonald: Here’s the CMO training. Right. Here’s how to be a really good leader. We just think, well, you’ve been doing the job a while, you’re doing pretty good, let’s bump you up. It’s a very different mentality and you learned a lot in terms of how to be a good leader when you were in the military, so I would love to have you maybe expand a bit more on that background and your sales time and leadership time, and then we’re gonna dig right into the topic today.
[00:02:30] Peter Dibbern: Yeah. Thank you, Steve, for the introduction. Yeah, actually you are absolutely right. Suddenly you are a CMO and you don’t really know why, more or less, you know, you have done a good job for a while and then someone says, oh, maybe he can take over the entire topic in an organization.
[00:02:49] Peter Dibbern: And I personally still benefit from what I learned in leadership during the military service, and then of course along the job, the different jobs I had, and especially one of those big advantages I have in comparison to pure marketers is that I also worked in sales positions and in business development positions.
[00:03:13] Peter Dibbern: And of course that makes me someone that understands the requirements and the needs from sales, and at the same time, I can also translate those things to my own team and vice versa. And actually in my organization, we are not talking so much about marketing. We are talking about smarketing. So we added the S from sales
[00:03:39] Peter Dibbern: to our organization. So actually I’m a customer marketing officer, a chief smarketing officer, and not a Chief Marketing Officer. So I believe a good differentiation from what I do and what most of the CMOs do.
[00:03:58] Steve MacDonald: Here’s the first thing that I take away from that is a lot of marketers and Chief Marketing Officers, they see themselves in a baton race, like where you run the first leg and then you have the baton. You pass it off to sales, they take it over, you go back to trying to create more leads. They’ve got it, right, we’re done, versus a real aligned relationship, a real team sport where we’re all out on the court or on the field at the same time, and we’re looking at deals across all the different stages of the pipeline.
[00:04:31] Steve MacDonald: And where are they and what are their needs? Do we need more nurture around this? Even though it’s in the evaluation stage, right? This game is not a baton pass at all. It’s a relationship based business and we have to think about it collectively as a team from all of our points of view all the way through the very end where we get a closed win, right?
[00:04:54] Steve MacDonald: We can mark it off, right? And even at that point, it’s not a baton pass to customer success. So we tend to look at this in silos, and I love the idea of smarketing because it puts it together, right? It makes sure that it’s not separate entities, but your one team working together across the buyer’s journey.
[00:05:15] Steve MacDonald: That was my takeaway from what you were saying there. Here’s what I would love to do. I would love to talk to you about your point of view just overall in reinventing the ABM go to market process, based on what you said was the most important factor, the real customer voice and what you meant by that.
[00:05:38] Peter Dibbern: Yeah. You know, if you don’t know your customers, then you don’t know what you want to offer them. So actually a lot of your offer has to do with the customer. In our case, we are delivering ERP CRM and BI solutions based on Microsoft technology. So this is a complex topic and of course it’s also a complex buyer journey, and it’s a complex
[00:06:04] Peter Dibbern: customer journey as well. It’s all today software as a service. So it’s actually, one colleague once said, Peter, isn’t it a never ending sales process now? And then I said, no, it’s a never ending customer lifetime circle. Because in the past we were selling licenses and we implemented something.
[00:06:29] Peter Dibbern: And today we are delivering a service that a customer can use but can turn off as well. So we need to have a continuous deep and trusted relationship with our customer. And of course, what is special about software actually is sometimes you think you have programmed a software for a certain use case, but the customer is using it
[00:07:00] Peter Dibbern: totally differently. So maybe even speaking to your existing customer can help to position your product better to future prospects. So you need to be learning from your customers and of course also learning why they might not use your tool in the way you thought it should have been used. So you really need to have this in depth conversation with the customer.
[00:07:32] Peter Dibbern: And today everything is data driven. So we also have a lot of data on how customers use the different software tools, and then we can see whether they are using it the way they should, if they are using it intensively, and those topics are extremely important. So it’s not only a question of
[00:07:58] Peter Dibbern: knowing your customer and the existing customer. So we also need to listen to the needs of the prospects, and then we can have a look whether they match the ideas from the existing customer base and the prospects. And that’s why it’s so important to have reference customers, not those shiny success stories.
[00:08:20] Peter Dibbern: Real, honest reference stories, how customers use your solution in daily work. Those, let’s say, trust elements are a lot more important than the knowledge of your own sales staff.
[00:08:40] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, I’m remembering parts of the conversation that we had before and preparing for this, and you talked very, very eloquently about the B2B buyer today being extremely informed.
[00:08:57] Steve MacDonald: They are educating themselves all the time. This is not the Steve Jobs before he had passed away, said, you know, I’m never going to get the idea of creating a phone without buttons, you know, a keypad on it. Right. You know, focus group customers would never suggest that. We have to lead the way, and there’s truth in that.
[00:09:20] Steve MacDonald: Right. But what you’re saying is, hey, we gotta pay attention to our customers. They’re really smart. They’re in the market. They’re doing their research, and by the way, they’re talking to a bunch of companies like ours and they’re getting a bunch of different point of views that we don’t have. We can learn a lot by just listening to them.
[00:09:39] Steve MacDonald: And you talk about that component of just shutting up and listening. And by the way, that came from a McKinsey study that I just read like a couple of days ago. Their conclusion was, shut up and listen to your customers. That literally was the conclusion of the study. But tell me about then the key to listening, because you talked about data
[00:10:00] Steve MacDonald: and we’ve got more data than we’ve ever had before. We’re drowning in data right now. That’s a whole nother story. But can we use that data to be a substitute for proximity to the customer? Or do we actually need to listen to the customer in other ways too?
[00:10:20] Peter Dibbern: Exactly. I think data is one truth, but at the end, we are in a people’s business, you know, especially when it comes to software investments that we provide to the customers.
[00:10:31] Peter Dibbern: You know, this can be 500,000 euros. This can be 3 million euros. This can be a huge dimension of investment for those customers. So that’s why we have to discuss those topics in person with the responsible people on the customer side and on the prospect side.
[00:10:51] Peter Dibbern: And just as you mentioned, the customers are a lot better informed today. You know, I have been in this
[00:11:00] Peter Dibbern: industry for 30 years. Thirty years ago, we were experts. We knew everything about the technology. We were only talking about technology all the time, and we were telling the customer, oh, this is the way it is, and eat it or leave it, and today,
[00:11:17] Peter Dibbern: Of course there is a generation shift and so on and so on. The customers, very often, they might even be smarter with respect to the technology than you are as a provider. If they have an expert in their own organization, they might even have a better clue around certain topics.
[00:11:38] Peter Dibbern: Not, of course, within the technology of Microsoft, but in general, you know, and that’s why we are talking and the conversation is a lot different than it was 30 years ago. Thirty years ago we were, let’s say, arrogant techies and there was low maturity on the customer side. Now we are looking
[00:12:00] Peter Dibbern: into each other’s eyes, and we have to create solutions together in a dialogue.
[00:12:07] Peter Dibbern: So we have to respect, let’s say, the customer in a totally different way, not only with respect to their process knowledge. Also, we have to keep in mind that they have technology knowledge and they are doing a lot of research. You know, now the web is full. I am one of those kids that were more or less socialized on the CeBIT, on the big fair in Hanover.
[00:12:33] Peter Dibbern: It was the biggest computer fair worldwide. You cannot imagine what kind of parties we had there.
[00:12:39] Peter Dibbern: And in order to get new technology, first they had to go there. Now you have it at your fingertips. Now you do the research yourself. Now you ask Gartner. You do not even need to ask Gartner anymore because there are so many experts. There are so many white papers. There is so much research that is accessible.
[00:13:00] Peter Dibbern: So very many people, they are better informed very often than someone on our side because they have read, let’s say, all the different papers from all the competitors, and then they already have done, let’s say, a pre decision before they even contact us.
[00:13:20] Steve MacDonald: And they are waiting longer and longer and longer to want to contact us because they know that entire world of information is exploding. Right. As much time as they want to spend digging into it on their own, they can because it is never ending. Right? So we tend to overlook something, and you and I talked about this before.
[00:13:43] Steve MacDonald: As the trust gap, right? Part of the reason why, a big part of the reason why they are doing all of that research is a, it is available, right? They can do it on their own time whenever they want. But here’s the other part of that, and this came out of
[00:14:00] Steve MacDonald: the most recent LinkedIn Edelman study. Thirty two thousand respondents worldwide.
[00:14:06] Steve MacDonald: Sixty one percent of them think that we as business leaders in the selling organization are intentionally misleading them, not just stretching the truth a little bit, intentionally misleading. Think about that, right? Why would I talk to somebody that I think is going to be intentionally misleading to me? A whole other study showed that seventy four percent of B2B buyers, they do not trust the customer evidence we present to them.
[00:14:37] Steve MacDonald: This is how we package it. We do. Here is the value we create for our clients. We can do it for you too. And they are not buying it. And that same LinkedIn Edelman, they put at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of trust was the salesperson. And we wonder why they are waiting longer and longer and longer to want to talk to us, right?
[00:14:58] Steve MacDonald: So this trust gap. How do we break that down? How do we get past that, you know? And everybody, you know, you talked about that we have to be aligned on the experience that we are creating for them, and I just wanted to give you time to kind of dig into that, because if we do not address this trust gap or this trust epidemic or whatever we call it.
[00:15:25] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. And we just say, let’s just kind of keep going on like we always have. It will just work, right?
[00:15:32] Peter Dibbern: No, no. But Steve, you know, that is why the customer is getting more and more important because the customer that is truly talking about his or her experience with a supplier,
[00:15:46] Peter Dibbern: not delivering a shiny success story that is, let’s say, overselling is a lot more trustworthy than if you only show how shiny this
[00:16:00] Peter Dibbern: world is. And this is, let’s say, our own fault. We have been overselling. We have really been overselling in the past. And maybe also tried to show to the customers that there is a tremendous return on investment and so on, and tried to generate, let’s say, new trust elements for the investment.
[00:16:23] Peter Dibbern: And I think we are really coming back to the truth, coming back to the customer, talking with the customer, making events on customer side in order to show to the prospects. Talk to this customer. I am not going to do the selling. Talk to the customer if you trust what he has experienced.
[00:16:50] Peter Dibbern: Within the project with our competence, then this is probably the best selling USP you can get. And it’s not us doing the overselling. You know, I think this is extremely important and you can see this also on the different marketplaces. Now, they want to have references. They want to have customer videos.
[00:17:16] Peter Dibbern: They want to have the real experience. They don’t want to have, oh, you know, we decided for Cosmo Consult and suddenly all the problems in our processes were gone. This is not true. And we know how bumpy the way is to implement a huge software project. This is going to be a bumpy process if you do it with us, if you do it with our direct competitor or someone from a different ERP solution in their portfolio, it will be a bumpy project.
[00:17:52] Peter Dibbern: But the question is, what is the experience around the entire customer journey? Do you trust this partner? Do you have a partnership or is this just a supplier? And this is what we are trying to do. And we know, you know, once you decide for an ERP solution, you’ll definitely use it at least 10 years.
[00:18:18] Peter Dibbern: Most of them here in Germany are 12, 15 years old. So the duration of the usage of an ERP solution is longer than the average marriage in Germany, you know.
[00:18:33] Steve MacDonald: You drew such a vivid point there, and that is, we have all, ’cause we’ve been B2B buyers too. We tend to look at our buyers and think they’re like professional buyers, like that’s all they do. Right. You know, we’re buyers. We try to fit it into something like in our MarTech stack or from the sales tech stack or something like we’re buyers all the time too.
[00:18:53] Steve MacDonald: But it’s about this much of what we do. We’re also Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Sales Officers or Revenue Officers, and what is important there that you said amongst everything is if we come in with a point of view as a vendor or a supplier — here’s what we have, here’s what we can do for you — versus coming in and listening.
[00:19:13] Steve MacDonald: And taking in and understanding and learning. That’s absolutely the best sales strategy, hands down, right? We don’t want somebody that’s just gonna come in, we don’t wanna be sold to. We wanna learn together. And if we can provide value by helping them in this world where they have all this information that they can peruse through and they can learn from, the stakes have gotten higher in terms of what we then as the Gartner trusted advisor, what we can do to advise based on their level of knowledge increasing here, we gotta up our game quite a bit.
[00:19:56] Steve MacDonald: How many times do we go into a boardroom meeting and does the board say, how are we upping our game to be that trusted advisor, that peer, that colleague to our buyers? Nobody talks about that, but we gotta really think about it because if we’re not upping our game all the time, we’re falling behind.
[00:20:17] Peter Dibbern: Yeah, and just imagine, you know, we are providing, today we are providing a service. Of course, it’s a digital service, but at the end it’s a service. So we need to understand us as Cosmo Consult as a service provider. This is totally different from a software seller. But we sell licenses. No. The customer can turn off the service in the next moment.
[00:20:49] Peter Dibbern: And this is what we have to understand, and software as a service means that we have to fight for the customer in every stage along the customer lifetime circle. So actually the idea is to never lose that contact to the customer anymore, and this is what most software vendors have done in the past, including us.
[00:21:13] Peter Dibbern: So actually for me, this is a really good sign that we are shifting from a license model to a software as a service model because this needs us to rethink the relationship with our customer.
[00:21:27] Steve MacDonald: That relationship with a customer, you called it — I love this term — you said it should be love at first sight.
[00:21:36] Steve MacDonald: You said that’s the ultimate customer experience, right? Love at first sight. Tell me what you meant by that, please.
[00:21:44] Peter Dibbern: It’s like this, you know, love at first sight means you can never make a first impression twice. So once you get into contact with your customer, you have to make a good impression. And the best impression is to create the feeling of love at first sight. And then of course, along the buyers journey and the customer journey, because we do not want to do overselling.
[00:22:13] Peter Dibbern: We need to continuously keep this feeling, you know. And I do not know what you say in the Anglo Saxon world, but in Germany you say you want to have butterflies in your stomach. When you fall in love, then you want to have a lot of butterflies, you know, so we have to keep on this feeling of having butterflies in your stomach, you know, and this is actually the experience that I want to create with Cosmo Consult for our entire customer base and of course for every new customer as well.
[00:22:49] Steve MacDonald: I gotta tell you something, so this is a hear me out on this. This is a title of a book written as like in the marriage counseling world, right, and it said the title of the book was Love Is a Decision, right. If you can create those butterflies, if you can create that, you know, love at first sight, even in our marriages, right.
[00:23:09] Steve MacDonald: It is really hard to keep that up, right. But what keeps our marriage or our relationship, and here is the connection, because B2B world is all about relationships. It is all about trusted relationships, right. And so if we can create an environment where they trust us, that is such a deep level of connection that they will not want to give it up even if things kind of go down.
[00:23:33] Steve MacDonald: Because we are gonna go through hills and valleys, we do in every relationship in our life, right. We need to build up the trust credits, that butterflies in the stomach, because it is not always gonna be there, but it should be something that they say, you know when push comes to shove, Peter is gonna be there for me.
[00:23:51] Steve MacDonald: I get it, right. And that is hard to find in this world. It really is too. Proving that we are in this together, right. So at the beginning, that is like, that is a very different experience, right, that butterflies in the stomach or something like, wow, that is different, right. But it should be an expectation of the relationship with us.
[00:24:15] Steve MacDonald: That is what I am taking away from.
[00:24:17] Peter Dibbern: Yes, absolutely. And you do not marry someone that you do not trust, you know. It is like that and the marriage is, let’s say, the contract that you have with your customer, so this is exactly, I really think that this is a good picture and that is why I always talk about love at first sight.
[00:24:36] Peter Dibbern: And next week I am going to be on a Microsoft event, and I will talk about love at first sight, of course.
[00:24:43] Steve MacDonald: There you go. So, you know, Peter, we have talked about so much here. I wanna ask probably the most important question, which is this, for the C suite and the other leaders across sales and marketing that are gonna be consuming this podcast.
[00:24:59] Steve MacDonald: We have talked about so much. What I want to know is if there was one thing that you wanted people to take away, if there was the top thing you wanted to make sure they leave with this, if nothing else. What is that takeaway you would want them to have
[00:25:14] Peter Dibbern: Actually, I think the most important is always respect the customer.
[00:25:21] Peter Dibbern: This is the most important, if you respect the customer, you will get insights from them. You will also get bad feedback here and there. This is, if you do not know what problems they are facing, then you will not do any better in the future. Respect your customer. Have a look in, let’s say in our industry, how they are using the tools yet that you provide.
[00:25:49] Peter Dibbern: Maybe you can find some new ideas around, let’s say, new customer segments that could also use the software, even though you have never thought about it, because you listen to your customer. So respect the customer because they are the ones that pay your bills and on the other hand, those will be the best sellers of your product for future prospects. Just imagine if every customer in your customer base could be a trust element in your sales strategy for the future, just imagine that would be the perfect world.
[00:26:30] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. So I have to tell you my number one takeaway from this conversation is that we cannot spend enough time talking one to one with our customers, right. It does not replace it. In fact, last week I had on this podcast a four time B2B CRO, and he said, Steve, I just wanna make a point.
[00:26:53] Steve MacDonald: He said those personal conversations are so important, but he said, I am not talking about sales conversations. I am talking about conversations outside of the sales environment and that we all need to have them. So he put it on. It was not just a marketing thing, it was not just a sales thing, right. It was not just a customer success thing, it is that we all need to have those conversations and personal conversations that are not framed by
[00:27:24] Steve MacDonald: This is a sales conversation where I have an objective to sell you on something. The objective is to learn. To listen. And he said that is the key. And so I just thought I had that in the background in my mind. And everything that you said here today, I thought completely validated that same point of view, that is just what we need to do.
[00:27:48] Peter Dibbern: Yeah. And Steve, you know, my marketers, when I came to Cosmo Consult, all the marketers were specialists in some kind of marketing discipline, but they have never been at the customer. No one of those people never had been at the customer to talk to the customer, to see where the solution is in place, what the solution is doing, which kind of users are using the software also to get a picture.
[00:28:20] Peter Dibbern: To get a picture of the persona that we want to address with our marketing activities. They did not know about that, and of course I had to change this. They need to know their customer. They need to know how they need to touch them in order to feel, oh, this is a real customer. Okay, now I understood who to address.
[00:28:43] Peter Dibbern: You know, because otherwise we are only talking about theory. You need to see the customer, how they are addressed, what they are working with, which tools they use. You need to know your customer.
[00:28:56] Steve MacDonald: It could not be stated more clearly. And I have to tell you the mission of this podcast. It was, let’s bring a bunch of different leaders from across the world, C suite executives all across the world, all in B2B ABM go to market focused companies. And if we share our unique perspectives, our insights based on our experiences together, we all benefit. Here is what I think the evolved mission of this podcast is that we have to remind ourselves, these are the basics in our business.
[00:29:31] Steve MacDonald: They are 100 percent under our control. You and I were talking about this right before we hit the record button. Nobody is telling us how much or how little we can talk to the customer. No, that is 100 percent dependent upon us, right. So we need to get better at being customer obsessed, customer first, right.
[00:29:55] Steve MacDonald: If there is anything that we should set out for our next year goal, starting today, it should to be, how do we really execute on being customer first, customer centric. And follow what you have been talking about here. That is my takeaway from our conversation today.
[00:30:12] Peter Dibbern: I am going to pick that up, customer first.
[00:30:16] Peter Dibbern: Because I think this is a topic that is extremely important, especially in markets like that we are in where 95 percent of the target audience that we are addressing has already an ERP solution. So you really need to have a very, very good reason why you want to change this.
[00:30:38] Peter Dibbern: So it should probably end up in a partnership with a provider that thinks in long term relationships, and hopefully they will do it with us.
[00:30:50] Steve MacDonald: Peter, I know people are gonna have questions. Is it appropriate that I give out a link to your LinkedIn profile that people could reach out and ask questions
[00:30:58] Peter Dibbern: Sure, they can ask questions, they can connect, and I would love to learn from all the people that are watching your podcast because I would probably be smarter after the conversation than before, just like in this conversation. I am very, very open minded and I think this is something that I enjoy with podcasts like this one.
[00:31:22] Peter Dibbern: We are open to share knowledge.
[00:31:27] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. I just have to say thank you for coming on today and sharing your knowledge and being a part of that rising tide that lifts all boats. I think you just did a fantastic job today. Thank you very much.
[00:31:41] Peter Dibbern: Thank you, Steve. It was great to talk to you and I am a lot smarter now than I was before.