Episode #270:
Kamron Kunce, Chief Marketing Officer at RJ Young, explains how marketing is evolving into a company-wide growth driver through customer experience, data, and sales alignment. He shares how integrating CX into marketing transforms strategy and creates scalable growth. He also outlines how aligning teams, leveraging data, and focusing on real customer insights improve both conversations and outcomes. His approach demonstrates how modern CMOs shift from support roles to strategic revenue leaders.
“When you embed customer experience within your marketing, it shifts strategic priorities and creates a foundation that is scalable and sustains growth. It’s one thing to talk about it, but when you’re very intentional about it, and you align internally, that’s the difference.” – Kamron Kunce
This episode explores how modern CMOs redefine their role by connecting marketing to revenue, aligning with sales, and leveraging data to improve customer conversations. Kamron shares practical examples of how internal alignment, AI, and customer insights create measurable growth and stronger business outcomes.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives Podcast. I am Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a very special guest on with Kamron Kunce. Now, Kamron, you are a Chief Marketing Officer. You are redefining the role of CMO within your company. In fact, your company is long-established, but this is the first time it has had a CMO role.
[00:00:30] Steve MacDonald: So that puts kind of an added bit of pressure on you as a CMO, but also how it defines how you work with other departments, right, and in particular, sales. Today, we are going to talk about a new sales experience model you are very passionate about, and I want to spend a lot of time getting into it.
[00:00:50] Steve MacDonald: But I want to have a little bit of an opportunity to get to know you just a little bit more. I know you are a family man. You have got two boys, married your high school sweetheart. Fantastic. You are a big Toyota Land Cruiser fan, which I used to call land crushers when I was a kid. But if you would not mind giving us a little more about your background, we will dive right in.
[00:01:12] Kamron Kunce: Yeah, Steve, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate this conversation. As you noted, I take this seriously, and I am the first CMO at RJ Young. And if you look at my professional background, it’s been really fun to review my experience, and we can dive into all of that.
[00:01:26] Kamron Kunce: But it has really been direct to consumer, business to business, even me trying to start my own business on my own at one point, so being an entrepreneur. So, seeing my experience and how it translates in my current role today, I am so grateful for that, and I cannot wait to unpack it with you.
[00:01:41] Kamron Kunce: Yeah, from a Land Cruiser standpoint, it is really cool. I have a classic Land Cruiser. It is 1980. It is an FJ40, so it has that short-wheelbase design. And my grandfather had the exact same model and color. It is a full-circle moment for me, especially since I can pack my two boys into the back jump seats and we can drive around town and get coffee.
[00:02:00] Kamron Kunce: So I just tell my wife all the time, I am like, I am in my prime right now. I feel like I am living in my prime.
[00:02:07] Steve MacDonald: Well, good. Let us take that. Let us take your professional prime. I want to start out. You talked about how you think there is a new mandate for marketing, a redefinition of what marketing does within a B2B organization. I’d like to start by hearing your point of view on that.
[00:02:27] Kamron Kunce: I think, you know, my role at RJ Young, I have all of marketing rolling to me, and I have all of customer experience rolling to me, which is unique. I’ve worked at companies where customer experience is under operations or similar. So the fact that customer experience falls under the marketing umbrella makes it really attractive to me. And what I will say, Steve, is if you are not really intentional about the customer experience within your marketing, you are completely missing the mark.
[00:03:00] Kamron Kunce: To your point, I think people are kind of shifting their mindset on how marketing is really defined, and now it is including things like customer experience.
[00:03:04] Steve MacDonald: Just to accentuate your point here, there was a study that McKinsey did, I think in 2023, and they looked at over 400 highly profitable companies, you know, big, huge return on shareholder value, B2C, B2B, and they came up with the number one differentiator in the market across those companies was CX.
[00:03:26] Kamron Kunce: Yes, like you said, profitability, but also scalability and growth. Customer experience is so very important.
[00:03:33] Steve MacDonald: So, you know, it is kind of easy to understand on a surface level. We have ChatGPT writing code for us today, right? If you are a technology company, it is not your latest feature. Your product, service, pricing, and that model used to be the competitive advantage, but they just are not today.
[00:03:52] Steve MacDonald: And we have more competitors than we have ever had before in every single category, right? There is more expectation coming from every category. So, in terms of putting CX at the top, was that something that you had to sell leadership on? I am just curious.
[00:04:12] Kamron Kunce: It is a great question, and my answer would be it takes action. I feel like when you take action instead of just talking about it, it makes a difference. And so, when you embed customer experience into your marketing, it shifts strategic priorities and creates a scalable foundation that sustains growth.
[00:04:29] Kamron Kunce: It is one thing to talk about it, but when you are very intentional about it, and you align internally, that is the difference. It is not me doing it in a silo and not talking to other departments. It is sitting down at the leadership table. It is talking to the other departments and integrating CX into that.
[00:04:46] Steve MacDonald: So if you could tell me one of the biggest benefits that you see from a marketing mandate, which really means, yes, marketing and you are overseeing it, but you are talking about this really as a mandate, like a reformation, a reframing of a mandate for the entire company, right?
[00:05:00] Steve MacDonald: This is not a marketing issue, this is not a customer success issue, right, or a contact center issue. This is a company-wide issue. And I know you go into board meetings and you have executive meetings all the time. Does anybody ever ask you, well, how you attach this to ROI? How does this attach to revenue? Where the rubber really meets the road.
[00:05:29] Kamron Kunce: Yeah, so historically and in the present day at RJ Young, at the end of the day, we are a sales-oriented company. And in the past, the marketing team had become very siloed. They were kind of doing their own thing. They really did not listen to the sales teams, and they would work on this project or initiative in the background, launch it, and then be like, ” Hey, sales, we launched this thing, why are you not excited about it.
[00:05:52] Kamron Kunce: Sales would be like, what are you talking about. Why did you work on this? I do not care about this. So it is just, Steve, it is a classic mishap between sales and marketing. Marketing needs to enhance the lives of our sales teams, especially for RJ Young, because we are a sales-oriented company.
[00:06:12] Kamron Kunce: And so I came in, and I truly took the time to listen to the sales team, to understand and uncover their main problems and issues, whether it is out in the field or in the office.
[00:06:33] Kamron Kunce: And so those conversations just opened up so many doors and built trust with our sales teams to realize, oh, marketing is more than just a billboard or a paid media social campaign. They can actually help me close deals. And so it has been a lot of fun to be a part of that journey.
[00:10:06] Kamron Kunce: How they define it and what their priorities are. So that is kind of part one. Part two: even thinking outside of sales and your leadership team, like, I cannot tell you, Steve, how many internal conversations I have with different departments, and they say something along the lines of, “How am I affecting what marketing is doing?”
[00:10:23] Kamron Kunce: And I just kind of smile and shake my head. I am like, actually way more than you think you are on a regular basis. And so, for example, people in admin, in the service or operations departments, they are contributing to marketing-related things, mainly on how they deal with clients. And so instead of just writing marketing off as another internal team, they need to understand that they are actually part of our team in a bigger way than they realize.
[00:10:50] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, you had mentioned this on our previous conversation, everyone influences the brand, right? What I love about that perspective is that when we say it influences the brand, we can stop thinking there. But the way that you took it is that everyone impacts the customer experience. When does the customer experience start, and where does it stop, and does it really? What is your perspective on that?
[00:11:18] Kamron Kunce: This is not unique to RJ Young, but through the tremendous growth that we have had over the last couple of years, our customer data has really become siloed across multiple platforms internally. Over the past year, I have tasked my team with working cross-departmentally to clean up that customer data. Really, before we focus on anything else, Steve, because if your data is not accurate or helpful, then what are you even doing at that point?
[00:11:43] Kamron Kunce: You cannot understand your ICP. You cannot understand your clients’ needs. Over the past year and a half, we’ve built a data lake that is becoming our single source of truth internally for understanding all aspects of the business across multiple platforms and Excel spreadsheets.
[00:12:05] Kamron Kunce: Those data queries that our sales teams need, that leadership needs, in the past, it might have taken weeks or months to get that back. Well, now we are talking about a couple of clicks through that work. And so the goal is to create clean, accessible data that transforms sales conversations into a consultative approach. And so that is how we have kind of started it, with the client and their data, and us truly understanding that before we go talk to them or before we market to them in the field, which has been tremendous for us.
[00:12:38] Steve MacDonald: It is interesting, I have got enough gray hairs to know. We were talking about digital transformation 15 years ago, right? It was McKinsey calls the difference between the business of today and the business of tomorrow, and it was about transitioning beyond those siloed, fragmented data, right? Where one side of the fence cannot talk to the other, things that we learn go in here and are maintained there and never shared with anyone else, right?
[00:13:04] Steve MacDonald: If you could, without anything proprietary, give me an example of bringing that data together, how that helps marketing support sales, and ultimately, at the same time, the overall customer experience. If there is just something that comes to mind.
[00:13:23] Kamron Kunce: Yeah, and what we have discovered is that it actually helps spark executive priorities, that data and being able to clean it and have confidence behind it. A real-life example is marketing and sales at RJ Young, which had never gone hand in hand to create a go-to-market strategy.
[00:13:30] Kamron Kunce: And so listening to the sales teams, they were really overwhelmed. One of the advantages that we have at RJ Young and Velocity One is multiple offerings. Well, as a salesperson, that can get quickly overwhelming because you do not really know where to start.
[00:13:50] Kamron Kunce: And so through this data cleanup that we did in the backend, we then aligned with sales to say, hey, would it be helpful on an annual perspective, on a quarterly breakdown, if we just focused on one of our offerings for you to start a conversation with your client? See how that goes, knowing that the ultimate play is to start other conversations to fully show the breadth of our product.
[00:14:10] Kamron Kunce: And it was a resounding yes, that would be great to have something to start on. Steve, we looked at the backend to identify the most profitable offerings we excel at, which partners are in play, and which have state-of-the-art technology.
[00:14:27] Kamron Kunce: So, a combination of those things, we sat down and blocked off quarterly pushes. And so the narrative from a sales perspective changed from, Hi, I am RJ Young, we have 130 things, or Velocity One, what would you like to buy?” to “Hi, Steve, I have reviewed your account. I know you have been a client of ours for three years, and, knowing what I know about you, you are the perfect fit for this conference room technology package.”
[00:15:00] Kamron Kunce: Can you spot the difference there? It is such a dramatic difference. And I even had salespeople come up to me and say, “Cameron, this is amazing.” It is starting conversations, but this client really did not need a conference room package; they asked me about managed IT service. They are like, “Is that okay?”
[00:15:17] Kamron Kunce: I am like, that is perfect. That is the whole point of this exercise: just starting somewhere with intentionality with your client, because you understand their accounts based on the customer data, and then you go out and have real-time conversations with them.
[00:15:31] Steve MacDonald: Almost every company, and it might be much worse, it sounds like it is a very large breadth of services that you provide, every company has a deep story, right? And we want to have everyone know that full story, because when you really understand it, you really get it, like there is the obvious choice, it is us.
[00:15:55] Steve MacDonald: So, you know, it is hard. It is hard because this is our own baby, right? And we do not talk like that about your kids and your boys. If I asked you about them, you might be able to go on for an hour and a half, right?
[00:16:00] Steve MacDonald: Yes. So the thing is, pick something that is going to spark interest and open the dialogue. And so that is one of the biggest things that we talked about, how do we get the conversations with sales started, right? And how do we do that in a way that gives momentum that then starts to sell and expand?
[00:16:36] Steve MacDonald: And so you and I had talked about more than just bringing the data together, more than just bringing the story together in an entry point way. You talked about a human balance. And you could kind of say, what does that have to do with this conversation, right? But it was about blending insights with real conversations.
[00:16:49] Kamron Kunce: Yeah.
[00:16:49] Steve MacDonald: And we are B2B, it is a relationship based business. It is all about getting into a conversation and making the most of it. So I would love to understand your insights on this blending insight and real conversations, this humanity balance.
[00:17:05] Kamron Kunce: So here is what I will say, and this is what I have learned throughout my course of career as well, is as a today’s marketer, you have got to understand how to actually listen. And there is a difference between hearing and listening. So you have got to understand how to listen.
[00:17:15] Kamron Kunce: You have also got to be able to critically think through things and have an enterprise-level mindset, and then ultimately use this data to help you make decisions. And so those things are very, very important.
[00:17:33] Kamron Kunce: But I also tell my team all the time, the data piece is only half of the story. This ties into what you are talking about. If you are just making decisions on data alone, well, then you are missing the most important piece, which is the human side of it, and then to build on top of that, the client side of it.
[00:17:52] Kamron Kunce: And so you have got to understand the data piece, but you also have to go physically talk to your salespeople in person, hear the human side of the story. Also, do not forget the client feedback; the mix of all those things is where you are going to find success.
[00:18:09] Steve MacDonald: So, really interesting, McKinsey again came out around the same time with a different study, and this time they said that less than 15 percent of companies execute well on a voice of the customer strategy.
[00:18:22] Steve MacDonald: And so the data is hugely important, but we all know that the customer is the number one authority in our business, right? And so, listening to the customer and incorporating the customer’s voice into everything we do is super important.
[00:18:46] Steve MacDonald: Listening to the sales team, what objections they are getting, what roadblocks they have. Marketing, what I am taking away is that marketing has got to be a really good listener.
[00:18:51] Kamron Kunce: It is so true. And this segues into the hottest topic right now: AI. And so, because listening is so very important, both from a marketing and CX side of things, people often approach me, and they are like, ” How are you guys dipping your toe in the water of AI?
[00:19:02] Kamron Kunce: And what we have really done internally at RJ Young and Velocity One is we have started small, and we have really doubled down on focusing on the client. So a real-life example is that when customer care receives a call, we run AI agents in the background to generate call summaries, live transcriptions, and sentiment tracking.
[00:19:21] Kamron Kunce: Well, all those tools are extremely important to improve documentation quality, but also to reduce wrap-up time. And so that is helping us enhance the client’s experience.
[00:19:43] Kamron Kunce: From a marketing perspective, we are sharing those learnings internally on a monthly basis, so people have a sense of what people are talking about, what the sentiment is, what issues they have, and then working those same things into our marketing efforts.
[00:19:58] Kamron Kunce: And so that is kind of a full picture of how we are using AI to scale and grow our efforts, but also be very intentional with our clients.
[00:20:03] Steve MacDonald: So tell me if this is a takeaway, because, you know, from everything you are saying, and then you start talking about AI, I started thinking about the data lake. You brought together all this different siloed data, the transformation that is happening, and talked with the sales team, understanding day-to-day what they are going through.
[00:20:24] Steve MacDonald: That is a whole other voice data set, the customer themselves. Not only the tickets and, you know, all the AI transcriptions and things that you are talking about here. The surveys that you have, the one-on-one conversations, CAB meetings, you name it, right? There is no way that any one of us as a human could actually take all that together and start to make some sense out of it. Usable sense, like correlations and causations, and what it really means.
[00:20:56] Kamron Kunce: It is so true, and it is funny that people get threatened by AI, and I am like, I wholeheartedly disagree. It is your mindset of how you are viewing it, because, to your point, it makes you more efficient.
[00:21:06] Kamron Kunce: It scales you, it becomes your partner in crime, if you will, to scale your abilities. And so, to your point, as a human, there are only so many hours in the day. And so, to use AI to enhance what you are doing, that is how it should be viewed. Not as a threat of, oh, it is going to replace me or my job, it is going to help me.That is the truth.
[00:21:25] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, I geeked out last night until like one in the morning. I loaded up all kinds of transcripts from the podcast and conversations with our clients, and I was just doing exactly what we were talking about, and it amazed me. I was like, ” That is a really good point.
[00:21:45] Kamron Kunce: Well, I cannot take credit for this; this was not my idea. But we have an internal director who is using AI to scale our sales training. And so what this platform does is, again, to your point, it would take so many manual hours to take all of the product information from all of our different products, or partners, rather, and products.
[00:22:08] Kamron Kunce: To train our sales team, it is an ongoing thing because technology has changed so quickly. So you can understand the breadth of what I am talking about. So this AI platform essentially allows you to dump all that information in there. And then, in the backend, as a sales manager, you can create very specific criteria that your sales teams need to know and understand to navigate.
[00:22:30] Kamron Kunce: And so you are building these criteria, you are setting up a test for your salespeople for them to go through an AI bot, if you will, that looks like a human and has, again, based on the criteria, you could say, hey, this person is having a bad day, or this person might be stubborn. But it teaches them how to interact with those people based on very specific backend factors. So, as a sales manager, you are scaling your efforts by using technology to train your sales team.
[00:22:56] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, it is lean in. I mean, this is, you know, it amazes me. I talk to a lot of C-suite executives who tell me I am constantly getting questions from the board and my CEO, “What is my AI strategy, right?”
[00:23:07] Steve MacDonald: And I am like, do you not have one, right? Like, you know, I mean, just making sense, like collect the data. We cannot live in a world of segmented, siloed data sets. You have got to collect your data, and then you have got to go out, and you have got to proactively get them, you know, not even just more data, because data in and of itself has a connotation behind it. But those conversations you have with the sales team have to be codified in some way. Those have to be brought into the mix somehow. The conversations with customers have to be brought in.
[00:23:52] Steve MacDonald: And so, I think we could go on all day talking about the AI here, but here is what I wanted to ask, because I want to make sure we have time.
[00:23:52] Steve MacDonald: All of this leads me to, at the end of the day, at the end of the year, you have got to be accountable, right? And it is not accountable for leads. It is not accountable for, you know, how much content you created. It is not accountable; even if you created this amazing data lake, you are accountable for growth in the business.
[00:24:11] Steve MacDonald: You are an executive, and you are in the C suite, right? So at the end of the day, how do you think about the modern CMO and accountability, and how you should be judged?
[00:24:22] Kamron Kunce: Yeah, accountability is one of my favorite words, honestly. It is funny, my team eye rolls every time I use the words transparency and accountability, but they are so very important.
[00:24:32] Kamron Kunce: And, you know, I think if I am looking at my career, the thing that I am most proud of is that it is really helping shift the mindset just around marketing. As with the last, marketing is typically seen as logos, brochures, and campaigns. That is all really important work. But it is not always connected to revenue and strategy.
[00:24:51] Kamron Kunce: And so if you are not doing that, to your point, there is going to be a shelf life to your career. And so I have had the opportunity to change perceptions by aligning closely with sales, building better data systems, and focusing on the customer experience.
[00:25:00] Kamron Kunce: And so when you do those things, today’s marketing team, especially, you know, even at RJ Young and Velocity One, we are a true partner to the business. Like we are helping guide those decisions with data, and we are working hand in hand with sales to drive growth.
[00:25:15] Kamron Kunce: So again, it is that shift from a support function to a strategic driver. And that is what I am most proud of, especially at RJ Young, when they just have not had that.
[00:25:32] Steve MacDonald: I have got one last question, and, you know, we have covered so much territory here, and our poor human brains can only take in about two or three things at a time. So I would like to ask, for the other C-suite executives that are going to be listening into this conversation, if there was one thing that you wanted them to take away from the conversation, what would that one thing be?
[00:25:54] Kamron Kunce: So I am going to cheat a little bit here, Steve, if that is okay. I am going to give you three things I have noticed: when companies grow organically, they do these three things.
[00:26:04] Steve MacDonald: Okay.
[00:26:04] Kamron Kunce: They are listening to their customers. They are ensuring they have the right people in the right seats and aligning them around a clear strategy.
[00:26:13] Kamron Kunce: And then finally, they are building systems and processes at scale. And so if no one listened to a word I said throughout this whole podcast, but that is the one thing they took away, I would be at peace with that. Because when those three things come together, that is when growth becomes predictable.
[00:26:28] Kamron Kunce: And that is when you are adding value as a CMO into a company that has historically been a sales company. There is no argument, there is no gray area about the value that you are bringing. And so that would be my main takeaway for your audience.
[00:26:40] Steve MacDonald: I love it. I wrote them down. Good.
[00:26:45] Kamron Kunce: Well, I am glad you let me cheat there a little bit.
[00:26:47] Steve MacDonald: Well, you know, the mission of this podcast is just to bring together different C-suite perspectives, different roles within the C-suite, different geographies. We have people on from all over the world, at different stages, right? If we can share our experiences, our insights, our perspectives, then it is like the rising tide that lifts all boats, right?
[00:27:09] Kamron Kunce: I am such a believer in that. I get so much value, you know, listening to your podcasts and other podcasts. It is like, let us not just talk about high level generic things. Let us talk about real life examples, because that is what the value really is there.
[00:27:20] Kamron Kunce: So I appreciate you and your show. I have gotten a lot, tremendous value from it.
[00:27:23] Steve MacDonald: Well, thank you, and right back at you. Thank you for being a part of this and sharing something really important. Those three, I just circled them, are going to be something I am going to take away for sure.
[00:27:39] Steve MacDonald: And I think there is an opportunity to come back on. If you were up for it, I would love to explore the relationship with you and your CRO. Yeah, and maybe even have you guys come on and talk about this kind of symbiotic relationship, because that is not the standard, that is not the norm.
[00:27:57] Steve MacDonald: Thank you for everything that you shared here.
[00:27:59] Kamron Kunce: Absolutely. Thank you again for having me on. I really enjoyed the conversation. I hope your audience was able to take away something.