Episode #253: 

David T. Roberts, Chief Executive Officer at SugarCRM, explains why loyalty is a primary growth lever for B2B. He shares how curiosity, process, and data make customer focus real. He breaks down how teams can activate feedback to improve retention. He also explains why context is essential for using AI well.

“We try to show the customer, through every part of that lifecycle, that we’re doing things to support their journey. We at Sugar, as an executive team, talk about making sure that every part of our business is focused not only on solving the instance, but on solving the root cause of the issue that may be negatively impacting that customer journey.” – David T. Roberts

In this episode, David breaks down how retention becomes a growth engine when teams operationalize customer insight. The conversation covers curiosity-led discovery, activating NPS into real action, and why process and data must lead software decisions. He also explains how context-driven AI can support sellers without eroding trust.

Follow David T. Roberts on LinkedIn 

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspective podcast. I am Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a super interesting guest, David Roberts. David, your background is very interesting. You have a lot of accolades. I mean, you are a three time B2B CEO. You are a two time Chief Operating Officer, Chief Services Officer.

[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: You were a partner at Accenture. You spent 17 years there. But I am going to let you explain. You took an interesting path and deviation in your career, and you worked for the mayor of Denver, but I am going to let you tell a little bit about that and why, because it was all about serving the customer. And that is our main theme today, which is a customer retention strategy.

[00:00:48] Steve MacDonald: A customer, you know, cross-sell, upsell, expansion strategy, making loyalty the true engine of growth in our business, is something that we all know that we should be doing. Accenture and several other big consulting firms have covered that territory well. But we spend so much time and effort developing new logos and building new pipeline; the amount of time we spend on that versus the time we dedicate to understanding and expanding our current customers.

[00:01:18] Steve MacDonald: It is probably a little bit off base, so we are going to go down that path pretty big time today. But I would love to just ask you, if you would not mind, maybe expanding a little bit more on your background before we get started.

[00:01:29] David T. Roberts: Yeah, thanks Steve. It is great to be with you, and I love the topic.

[00:01:33] David T. Roberts: Customers are at the heart of what we do here at Sugar, and it has really been a theme throughout my entire career. I started in Accenture’s CRM practice and was part of that practice for 17 years. What is a little unusual is I was recruited away as a partner at Accenture to help the mayor of Denver, a guy named John Hickenlooper, take more of a customer orientation to the way the city ran.

[00:01:54] David T. Roberts: Its operations and its services, and the Chief Services Officer title was really something that John created to focus on how we engage the residents of Denver and make them feel like the city cared about how we supported them. So I did that for a few years. I probably would have stayed longer.

[00:02:11] David T. Roberts: He went on to be governor, and now he is one of our senators from Colorado. But that was a little bit different. Since then, I have been back in the private sector and focused on, as you said, B2B software businesses. And it has been a fantastic ride.

[00:02:27] Steve MacDonald: Here is what I would love to do. I would love to have you maybe kind of take us through the experiences in your career that have really developed the way that you think about customers and creating long-term growth today, because I think it is just fascinating.

[00:02:43] David T. Roberts: Yeah, I think it all starts for me from my time at Accenture. I still say we when I talk about Accenture a bit, because it was my, you know, it is where I grew up professionally, and I am not even sure how this happened or the process. It is not like we went through training at Accenture on this necessarily, but we were walking the halls at our customer, and our ability to grow and expand was based on that trust, the view that we were critical to those customers’ businesses.

[00:03:07] David T. Roberts: I remember running into an IBM Global Services person that said we are so jealous of Accenture’s ability just to be able to walk the halls in the Fortune 500 businesses around the world and be that trusted advisor.

[00:03:25] David T. Roberts: And I was raised by parents who did not love the idea of me walking around the neighborhood and reselling candy bars or doing things for fundraising. So it was not really part of how I was brought up. But selling became easy when all you were doing is helping customers be successful with their objectives.

[00:03:42] David T. Roberts: So I think the roots of that customer obsession, that focus on customer, came from the culture that I was part of for the first 17 years of my career.

[00:03:51] Steve MacDonald: You know, here is what is interesting. We have more data about the customer than we have ever had before, and it is really important.

[00:04:01] Steve MacDonald: What you are talking about there is one-on-one interactions, actually living with your customers. I was just listening to a podcast, and they talked about how this gentleman, extraordinarily successful online, I will not mention his name, but he literally had a mentor that came and said, I want to sit with you.

[00:04:20] Steve MacDonald: For a day, I want to understand how you operate, how you think, how you problem solve, what you do in order to really be a good mentor for you. And what you just described there is to be a really good, trusted advisor. You have got to really understand, at a deep, innate level, your customers and how they think and how they live and what they fear and what they think are the biggest opportunities.

[00:04:43] Steve MacDonald: It is interesting because all the big consulting firms have said this is important, but they have all said that literally, I think this was a report that came out in 2023, less than 15% of companies actually activate the voice of the customer in their business. Right. So this seems like a Marketing 101.

[00:05:00] Steve MacDonald: It seems like a growth strategy 1 0 1. Know your customer and know them innately. But why do you think that most companies do not understand their customer at the level that you wanted to, that you enjoyed when you were at Accenture, and you have taken now on throughout your career?

[00:05:25] David T. Roberts: I will give you two answers or stories about this.

[00:05:28] David T. Roberts: First, I think we talk a lot in sales training, and we are a CRM company, so we talk a lot about helping salespeople be better as account managers and as salespeople. A lot of sales organizations focus on the back half of the pipeline, right, like how you go from negotiating to closing, to signing, and working deals at the back half of the pipeline.

[00:05:48] David T. Roberts: I think what matters, what scales, is focus on the front half. Usually, in all sales processes, there is an initial sales stage called discovery or discover or learn or something like this. And I think the best salespeople are really curious about two things. They are really curious about the business.

[00:06:06] David T. Roberts: They want to understand the business. We will often say on good discovery calls, you should be listening about 80% of the time and talking 20% of the time. So curious about the business, and then curious about the person. I think in business sometimes we do not want to be vulnerable, we do not want to talk about the challenges, what scares us, what we are worried about.

[00:06:24] David T. Roberts: If you ask people, they will tell you. And I think being curious about the person and being curious about the business is kind of the fundamental foundation of being customer oriented. And then I could talk a little bit about the voice of the customer and how that can be activated, but let me pause there for a minute.

[00:06:41] Steve MacDonald: No, I would love to do that because, you know, it was interesting. I had a woman on the podcast recently, and she is a three-time B2B CMO, some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies around. And she said, Steve, all I want to do on your podcast is talk about one thing. Okay, well, what is that. She goes, well, this is a lack of execution.

[00:06:59] Steve MacDonald: It is where all good strategy goes to die. So I would love to learn from you. From Accenture, you were at a company, talk to us a little bit. You were at a company that literally was a voice of the customer company, right. I mean, this is not something that you have not thought through.

[00:07:14] Steve MacDonald: And then now you are leading a company that is a CRM, SugarCRM, right. Taking the voice of the customer and activating it in the sales process is what a good CRM is all about. So I would love to hear your thoughts on how you activate the voice of the customer.

[00:07:30] David T. Roberts: Well, I love your guest comments, because execution is what matters.

[00:07:33] David T. Roberts: I often describe myself as a mechanical strategist, meaning I love strategy. I love getting up on whiteboards. I have got one right behind me that I am using all the time. But unless you can figure out the mechanics of the execution that support that strategy, it becomes theoretical. And businesses do need to figure out how they execute on that.

[00:07:50] David T. Roberts: So the example, everybody has probably heard of the net promoter score. Something invented by a partner at Bain many, many years ago, and it is super simple. It asks people, how likely you are to recommend a company or a service.

[00:08:03] David T. Roberts: And it is on a scale of one to 10. Nines and tens are promoters, one through six detractors, and you have got some passives in between. And I remember interviewing, when I was running Alchemer. Alchemer is a voice of the customer company, a survey company. And I was interviewing CFOs years ago.

[00:08:20] David T. Roberts: And I used to ask every one of them, have you heard of NPS, of course. I have heard of NPS. Great. How do you use it. We present our NPS score to the entire company at the all hands meeting once a quarter. I am like, great. And then what. And they are like, we refresh it every quarter, and we present it at the next meeting.

[00:08:35] David T. Roberts: Fundamentally, that does not do anything to move the needle. What we talked a lot about at Alchemer, and it is absolutely what we do at Sugar, is we take the top promoters, the nines and tens, and we engage them in marketing cadences. Those are the people who are fierce advocates.

[00:08:51] David T. Roberts: They want to go tell the world how much they love Sugar. So we take those nines and tens and we ask them to go share their love for Sugar with the world. We take the detractors, who are the one through sixes, and we say, usually in the verbatims, they will tell you why they are unhappy, and you can turn that into a supportable event.

[00:09:11] David T. Roberts: We actually turn that into a support case, and we reach out to those customers, and we try to engage them in whatever has got them concerned. And then the passives. And here is the funny thing about passives. Promoters and detractors renew at a higher rate than passives. That is a little counterintuitive.

[00:09:28] David T. Roberts: You would think passives would be higher than detractors, but it is the old thing people have always said, love me or hate me, just do not ignore me. Those passives do not renew as well. So we take the passives and we send them off to our customer success team, and we ask them to go engage them proactively and try to turn them from passives into promoters.

[00:09:46] David T. Roberts: Right. So each one of those, in the simplest of frameworks, that simple NPS framework, can be used to drive marketing cadences, support cadences, customer success cadences, to engage customers and make them feel like you have really heard them when you have asked them for their opinion.

[00:10:03] Steve MacDonald: So two things I want to ask you from that, it is just amazing.

[00:10:06] Steve MacDonald: Just as an observation, you activated your NPS score, right. You created follow up conversations. You engaged. You learned. But at the same time, you are turning detractors into more revenue. You are retaining them. I mean, we all need to track our NRR scores, right. You know, we need to make sure that we are retaining customers, but we are expanding them.

[00:10:28] Steve MacDonald: So you are engaging. That is the first thing. You know, like you are actively having conversations with all of these folks, rather than a survey that goes out and we take a look at the results, which is important, but you took it to the next level. The next thing that I really took away from this is.

[00:10:42] Steve MacDonald: You started taking those nines and tens and engaging them and activating them through your outbound marketing campaigns. And there was a brilliant woman that came on the podcast about a year and a half ago, and she said, Steve, she goes, bottom line is every time the voice of the customer precedes ours, it works better.

[00:11:02] Steve MacDonald: That is the trusted peer community of the people that we are selling to. We have got skin in the game, right. We are a selling organization. So no matter what, and you do not have to go farther than LinkedIn or the Edelman Trust Barometer to see that, as an industry, we have some pretty major.

[00:11:18] Steve MacDonald: Trust issues. You know, no matter who we each individually are, we are all lumped together, right. And we are not trusted. So we need to be replacing our sales strategy in a lot of ways with indications of things that can be trusted. And the people that are doing the same kind of jobs that we are, it is one of the top ways that we look for validation and how we are going to move forward.

[00:11:42] Steve MacDonald: So I love that you are taking something that, in a lot of organizations, is kind of a survey that ends up on the server and a bunch of data that does not really get activated. And that is something that you and I talked a lot about before, which is you talked about, you know, you are a software company, right.

[00:12:01] Steve MacDonald: That a lot of organizations and leaders see that like, hey, as soon as I turn on this software, that is what is going to really make the difference, right. That is what I need to solve all my problems. But you have a very different point of view on that, and I wanted to talk about that.

[00:12:18] David T. Roberts: Well, it might be odd coming from a software executive that software is not the solution to all your problems.

[00:12:24] David T. Roberts: It absolutely can be. But this is from my Accenture days, through my time at the city, through all the companies I have run. People think that they go buy software and it solves the problem fundamentally. If you do not understand how your processes are built to serve your customers, if you do not understand the data that is required to be able to either guide that process or report on its impact, the software is not going to get you anywhere, right.

[00:12:51] David T. Roberts: So we used to talk, forever ago at Accenture, about people, process, and technology. The technology piece can allow you to drive efficiency and go faster. But if it is a messy, broken process, it is going to allow you to speed up your time to a bad destination. Right.

[00:13:12] David T. Roberts: So even with my teams today, when they are like, we would like to use some additional software, I say, great. Like, what has got to be in place before we go talk about implementing software to help us perform better. And we at Sugar want to do that with our customers.

[00:13:24] David T. Roberts: We really want them to understand the business value they are trying to drive, the data that is required, the business process that is required to go make an account management process work better, a customer service process work better, a sales or forecasting process work better.

[00:13:36] David T. Roberts: And then our software does a phenomenal job of helping you automate, and especially, we will get into AI a bit, but leverage the power of technology to do it better.

[00:13:47] Steve MacDonald: Interesting, kind of a backdrop to what you are saying here is I went in a couple of weeks ago and just asked ChatGPT what are the top five reasons why businesses do not use the LLMs like ChatGPT correctly. Eighty five, ninety percent, whatever the number is, of AI implementations do not work, right. So I was like, hey, why. A couple of things that came out that you just talked about there. Fragmented, siloed data, right. If you do not have the right data feeding the machine right then, like the best AI tool, the best CRM out there that has all the AI components, if it does not have the right information being fed into it, it does not matter.

[00:14:25] Steve MacDonald: This does not matter, right. They talked about not well defined use cases. So in other words, what do we really want this tool to use. And that is one of the biggest things with AI right now is the hype. It is just like, I need it. So I know you have been asked by the board, I am sure you have, what is your AI strategy, David.

[00:14:44] Steve MacDonald: Right. And you probably turned around and appropriately showed, you know, ask your CMO, your CRO, you know, hey, what is our AI strategy. Because we better have one, without saying what do we need to do and how can AI help us. We kind of is the cart leading the horse, right.

[00:15:00] David T. Roberts: Yeah, let me share a little bit about that. First, as a guy who has been in CRM for 30 years, there has been this promise of CRM, right. That sellers will get more value out than they put into it. And I do not think we still are yet to crack that code. One of my engineers said to me a while ago.

[00:15:16] David T. Roberts: Structured data is the language of business, and unstructured data is the language of relationships. Again, AI presents enormous promise at us, helping understand the language of relationships, unstructured data fundamentally. But I think we take technologies that we use in our personal lives and we think we are going to apply them to our.

[00:15:36] David T. Roberts: Business lives, and this ask me anything kind of metaphor I do not believe is the right strategy for AI within business. I think it has got to be highly context driven. And that context is the business process, the data, the content that really helps guide these LLMs to meaningfully support, in our case, sellers in their sales processes.

[00:15:59] David T. Roberts: I think I said to you on the pre call, Steve, that I joke about the ABCs of intelligence, right. There is artificial intelligence. Everyone is talking about AI. There is business intelligence. A decade ago, everyone was talking about BI, and they are still talking about analytics and insights that are driven by BI.

[00:16:16] David T. Roberts: I talk a lot about CI, which is contextual intelligence. And if we can take AI and BI and put it in the context of a sales process, in the context of a sales methodology, in the context of what we know about a customer, we can have a huge impact using those technologies. But absent that, an ask me anything kind of approach without putting the work in to provide these LLMs with the context they need to be helpful is probably more distracting or more of a science experiment than it is a real business, a valuable business tool.

[00:16:49] Steve MacDonald: You know, here is what is so interesting about this. I am sure when you were at Accenture, the whole big wave was digital transformation. Like the difference between the business of today and the business of tomorrow is data, right. And how we digitize and utilize that data and put the data into the hands of the teams, right.

[00:17:09] Steve MacDonald: The execution, high performance teams. Well, here we are. How many decades later, and now we are still talking about the same issue, right. And AI has put a whole new level on. I mean, nobody talked about digital transformation the way we are talking about AI, right. It was going to change the world, but not at the level of AI, right.

[00:17:32] Steve MacDonald: So when are we going to learn. Like what are the fundamentals. What are the building blocks that you have learned from, you know, being a partner at Accenture, three time B2B CEO, about digital transformation, AI, the importance of data, the importance of customers. Like what is the foundation, what are the lessons that we need to learn here that really get us to that contextual intelligence. Like what do we need to do that we are not doing today.

[00:18:00] David T. Roberts: I think actually we always learn a lesson. These cycles, in my experience, follow a similar pattern, right. If I go back to the very early days of CRM, people are like, we are going to install a CRM and sales are going to get better immediately, right.

[00:18:12] David T. Roberts: And then out of the gate, some of these projects did not go very well. I remember one of my clients, in the early days, said they were probably three or four years into the CRM cycle and they said, we are going to approach this differently. We are going to spend a whole bunch of time before we ever show.

[00:18:29] David T. Roberts: Back then it was Siebel, a Siebel screen. We are going to go and we are going to inform everyone on what a good sales process looks like, what good entrance and exit criteria look like, how we actually drive solution selling for their business. They spent a bunch of time working on that before they ever turned on the Siebel screens.

[00:18:47] David T. Roberts: And they were way more successful than the people who took a different approach years earlier. You look at the internet, you know, I lived through the dot com bubble as many of us did. Same sort of thing. The hype got ahead of the execution. Stocks, I remember the former CEO of Accenture went to go start a company called Webvan and they were going to go deliver groceries.

[00:19:07] David T. Roberts: The idea was right. And many of us have groceries delivered to our front porch today. It is done in a different way with different companies who actually figured out some of the prerequisites required to make that work. And today, I think with AI, it is the same thing.

[00:19:21] David T. Roberts: I think people are learning. I think you are going to see the technology, the processing power, is what makes all this possible. Data centers and chips, and that is what makes all this possible. And I think we will see, just like every other time, we will see the business practices catch up, the context catch up with the technology.

[00:19:39] David T. Roberts: And I am super optimistic about lots of things, but we will see that happen again here over the next few years as businesses figure out how to leverage the power of AI.

[00:19:51] Steve MacDonald: So right now, AI is a double edged sword, right. It is flooding the internet with content. Yet we are trying to build trust in B2B.

[00:20:01] Steve MacDonald: It is all about relationships. It is all about the foundation of trust, right. Yet now. And content, go back to like the Forrester of the world, you know, like the underpinnings of ABM is content, right. Because yeah. It is the way that we get known. We get discovered. Absolutely. So now we have got this flood of AI created content out there and it is confusing and it is not personalized always.

[00:20:29] Steve MacDonald: It is more genericized. And so AI can, in the right way, with the right data and the right tools, be something that absolutely does what we have all wanted. Hyper personalized ABM notions, right. That is the way the world goes, right. So that is kind of the promise of AI, what we are doing. But at the moment it is almost eroding trust.

[00:20:54] Steve MacDonald: Because this is flooding, right. It is flooding the internet with content. So, what does it take to use AI and the recommendations that come out of AI to build trust behind our go to market motions and our sellers.

[00:21:10] David T. Roberts: Yeah, I think the answer is again, context. I mean, if you go out and we’re all using Google differently than we used to, right?

[00:21:16] David T. Roberts: We used to put in three words that would prompt search. I just put a ski rack on my car this weekend. In the old days, I would have put in best ski racks, and then Google would have returned some things. Now, what AI is training me to do is say, what’s the best ski rack that I should use with a factory OEM, Bronco Ski Rack, right?

[00:21:38] David T. Roberts: Like we’re putting a lot more in because we can get a lot more out. So we’re investing the time to do that. But what Google does is they give you all sorts of links where you can click in, right. In the AI summary, you can click in to actually understand why they said that, where it came from, the transparency, the backing up.

[00:21:56] David T. Roberts: Its recommendations is what builds trust for me anyway, in what Google is returning in an AI summary. To use a business context example, Sugar is investing really heavily in being able to guide sellers to the right next activities, right? So if we, for example, put a prompt up there that says the following customer is reducing its spend with these products, sellers are gonna wonder like, why do you think that?

[00:22:21] David T. Roberts: Show me. If you’re an account manager and you wanna really engage that customer and you don’t wanna look stupid, you don’t wanna follow up with the customer and say something that erodes trust with the customer, you’re gonna wanna know what’s being showed to you is based on like facts and data. So the same kind of principle applies. We wanna be able to click in and say that recommendation came because Sugar ingested tons of order data about the customer.

[00:22:47] David T. Roberts: We can show what that buying process has been, what that buying cycle has been, and we can guide the seller back to the underlying evidence that makes the recommendations feel trustworthy. Right. So I think that context, backing it up, showing the kind of back in the old days when you and I were writing papers in college, they always said, cite your sources. Nothing has changed here. We’ve gotta cite our sources when it comes to AI.

[00:23:11] Steve MacDonald: It goes back to, it’s like a framework, right? Like we’ve gotta validate, we’ve gotta prove, we can’t just say this is the way that it is, right? We need to back up what we’re doing. And if we do that and we can be relied on to do that, then that’s gonna build an immense amount of trust.

[00:23:29] Steve MacDonald: I love that you’re trying to create that framework inside of Sugar. Here’s what I’d love to do in the time that we have left here. I’d love for you to take us through the path of activated customer feedback as kind of a way to end this, because we talked about at the very, very beginning of this conversation is that loyalty is the new growth engine, right?

[00:23:51] Steve MacDonald: So if you were to kind of say, hey, here’s what you need to know, right? Loyalty, your customer base is the new growth engine. What do you wanna leave us with? What do you want us to know to make sure that we’re taking the right things away?

[00:24:06] David T. Roberts: I think to connect a couple dots from our conversation, Steve, like you talked about execution.

[00:24:10] David T. Roberts: I think what we’ve just redefined our core values at Sugar and the number one value is all about customer. We’re a CRM business. We’re focused on the customer. Like everything you do has to back that up, and customers have to see that you’re doing that. In software businesses, there’s a lot of TLAs, or three letter acronyms, that we like to throw around.

[00:24:31] David T. Roberts: And there’s a lot of metrics that tell you whether a software business is doing well or not. One of them is GRR, which is Gross Retention Rate. One of them is NRR, which is Net Retention Rate. The biggest thing you can do in a software business is have a really strong gross and net retention, and we’re lucky that we do here at Sugar. It’s because we try to show the customer through every part of that lifecycle that we’re doing things to support their journey.

[00:24:55] David T. Roberts: Right? This customer journey management is a little bit of a buzzword, a little bit of a buzz phrase, but if you’re thinking about like how when you go from a sales process and somebody trusts you to purchase your software, how do you make sure that the engagement and the implementation backs up what the seller told you?

[00:25:13] David T. Roberts: How do you make sure once the customer has gone live that you’re helping them through the adoption process and that they’re starting to use that software effectively? How do you make sure that if they make a support call into your organization that your primary objective is to get the problem addressed as quickly as possible and to solve the root cause?

[00:25:29] David T. Roberts: That means no one else has to call about that customer, about that same problem. Like that whole journey management. People talk about it a lot. We at Sugar, as an executive team, talk about making sure that every part of our business is focused on not only solving the instance, but solving the root cause of the issue.

[00:25:47] David T. Roberts: That is maybe negatively impacting that customer journey. And then it’s just like that activated MPS example. It shows the customer that if they’re gonna bother telling you about what’s going on, if they’re gonna bother engaging with you, that you’re gonna listen and you’re gonna do something about it.

[00:26:03] David T. Roberts: It’s really not rocket science. It’s just being customer obsessed and following through, making sure that customers see and hear you acting against that value.

[00:26:14] Steve MacDonald: It is interesting, there’s not a company out there that wouldn’t say, yeah, we’re customer obsessed, we’re customer focused.

[00:26:22] Steve MacDonald: We’re customer driven. You know, like everybody would say that, right? Yes. But to your point, it comes back to how do you execute on that? How do you actually activate the voice of the customer? And when I read that survey from a couple of years ago that less than 15 percent of the companies actually activate it, we’ve just spent the last half hour talking about it’s the number one thing we need to be doing.

[00:26:44] David T. Roberts: Right. A lot of companies, even though they say that they’re customer oriented, are inside out thinkers. And it’s a little bit of a play on words, right? Inside out, meaning they’re thinking about things internally and projecting them back out into the market, right?

[00:26:57] David T. Roberts: You talked about the voice of the customer that your marketing guest talked about. Listen to customers. They’ll tell you the words they use in terms of what they’re looking for. And great marketers aren’t proud about coming up with a smarter word or a better word. They just listen and they use the words that customers use over and over again in the way they engage those customers.

[00:27:18] David T. Roberts: And like, surprise, surprise, that’s what drives lead volume. It’s what drives customer retention and satisfaction. Listen, customers will tell you how to talk to them. They’ll tell you how to meet them where they need to be met. So it is all about the customer.

[00:27:33] Steve MacDonald: There probably shouldn’t be a sales conversation that ever happens without a draw and a reference to our own customer base.

[00:27:42] Steve MacDonald: Right. And the learning that comes out of that. That’s what they want to learn. That’s what they want to know. People like me that have done this before me, what have they learned? How have they benefited? Right? What are the problems that they found, and how did you overcome them?

[00:27:55] Steve MacDonald: Like that’s what they really want to know. And that means you’re drawing on the well of the voice of the customer. And if there’s not a well to draw on there, then you’re gonna be playing the game with one hand tied behind your back.

[00:28:10] David T. Roberts: Yeah. We decided a year ago, Steve, that 80 percent of the press releases we do in the market are gonna be telling the stories of our customers.

[00:28:16] David T. Roberts: Right? Like it’s so easy to wanna tell people that you’re launching a new product or you’ve hired a new executive. First of all, nobody’s all that excited about press releases anyway. But customers love when we go tell their stories and talk about the success they’ve had leveraging, in our case, our software.

[00:28:33] David T. Roberts: But we’re mostly issuing press releases that tell the stories of our customers, because that’s what we’re proudest of.

[00:28:40] Steve MacDonald: I see a second podcast coming here because I’ve got about 500 more questions to ask. But I know there’s gonna be questions that come in, and is it appropriate if we give out a link to your LinkedIn profile so people could reach out?

[00:28:51] David T. Roberts: Oh, of course. And reach you. Yep. Very happy to do that.

[00:28:55] Steve MacDonald: Well, so here’s the thing. The mission of this podcast is to do one thing, one thing very well. It’s talk to C-suite executives, B2B C-suite executives from all over the world. Because whether you’re a CMO, a CRO, a CFO, a CEO, you have responsibility outside of your functional area.

[00:29:14] Steve MacDonald: To grow the business. And so those are the conversations we love to have. And if we can take everyone’s individual experiences and perceptions and insights and perspectives and bring them all together, then that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were amazing today and a big part of that.

[00:29:33] David T. Roberts: Well, thank you. I love doing this, and it’s great talking to somebody who’s got customer at the core of their podcast. So thanks for inviting me, Steve.