Episode #280:

Jason Cimino, Chief Growth Officer at Bond Brand Loyalty, explains how growth leaders must take accountability for client business outcomes. He shares why executives should balance strategic thinking with hands-on involvement. He also discusses prioritization frameworks and alignment across leadership teams. His perspective highlights how execution and alignment drive sustainable revenue growth.

“My job as Chief Growth Officer has one singular focus, and that is growing our clients’ business. If I can grow our clients’ businesses, every single client we work with, the business on our side will take care of itself, and the accountability starts with me and leads into our teams.” – Jason Cimino

In this episode, Jason shares a practical perspective on modern growth leadership and revenue ownership. He outlines how executives must balance strategy with operational understanding, align leadership teams, and prioritize customer outcomes. His approach highlights how hands-on leadership, accountability, and team alignment create measurable growth and sustainable revenue performance.

Follow Jason Cimino on LinkedIn 

Follow Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn

[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 very special guest, Jason Cimino. And Jason, you’re a Chief Growth Officer right now. Your background has been different than anyone that I’ve interviewed on this podcast, and we’re up to almost 300 C-suite executives. You actually started out as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, doing investigative reporting, and have transitioned into a sales career, and now you’re heading up as a Chief Growth Officer.

[00:00:36] Steve MacDonald: What we’re going to talk about today, and I want to, it’s going to be interesting for you to connect all those dots, but we’re going to talk about how you own revenue outcomes. And you think about this in very different ways that are very unique, that I just love. When we were talking earlier, you also mentioned you are an avid athletics fan.

[00:00:55] Steve MacDonald: NBA fan. You played college hoops. That’s fantastic. Go, Knicks this year. I’m not from there, but I love watching them play. I’d like to expand a bit on your background and how you became Chief Growth Officer, and then we’ll dive into owning revenue outcomes.

[00:01:17] Jason Cimino: For sure. Well, thank you, Steve, and thank you very much for having me. I’m very excited for the conversation today. So, to set a little bit of context and background, I actually was never a reporter for the journal, so I’ll sort of give you the journalism background and then how I got to the journal, and then the winding road that got me here to Bond today. But growing up, I always loved media. I always loved journalism. I always loved writing. I actually wasn’t a huge reader, which is funny, but like a voracious consumer of news and digital content during my teens and into my college years.

[00:01:53] Jason Cimino: And then, as you mentioned, I did go to Washington and Lee University, where I was fortunate to be able to play basketball, and I did major in mass communications and journalism. I got a crash course in how to communicate, how to write, how to do that succinctly and briefly, and I still think back to some of the journalism classes I took with Professor Dean, Maria, and others, where you do not bury the lead, right? You have to be able to structure things in a way where the most important information comes quick and fast and is thoughtful to the point. And when I try to communicate today with my teams or with other executives, I’m constantly using some of those journalism lessons.

[00:02:35] Jason Cimino: My first job out of school, I actually did work for the Wall Street Journal, as you mentioned. It was more in the corporate strategy realm, and it was very interesting because I got to use the media side of my background and the things I was excited about. But then I learned pretty quickly in my career that business development was for me because one of the first things I got to work on there was how do we get the journal, the digital version of the journal, behind the paywall, or excuse me, into large B2B institutions, how do we sell them more access to the digital version of the journal. So I worked on a couple of really interesting deals. The biggest one of note: if you think of a large coffee distributor and retailer, and you log on to their WiFi, you can actually access the journal behind the paywall.

[00:03:23] Jason Cimino: So any consumer anywhere can get access to that high-quality information. And as a young kid coming out of school, I realized so I could sell the content and the information my company has to a large institution that can then provide that to their customers to create a better experience for their customers. And I think for years growing up, I had thought of sales as a bit of a dirty word. You know, used car salesman, all movies, everything we’ve seen. But what I found really early in my career was that, hey, you can actually make one plus one equal 11, and you could do something really interesting for your company, your partners, and the folks you’re selling to.

[00:03:58] Jason Cimino: And ultimately for consumers, who I really cared about, because I cared about the journal and I cared about journalism, and I still do. And then that led me into a variety of roles within Dow Jones, which then led me, at a certain point, to a startup called Game Face Media, a really fun startup in the endurance sports space where we were selling access to individuals’ photographs at endurance events. So it was a media play, right? My media background led to that. We used to call it the most compelling content in the world: a photo of an individual that the brand could sponsor and give to them.

[00:04:23] Jason Cimino: From there, that led to my time at Rightpoint because I had worked on a project where we were potentially going to build a mobile application, and we vetted the best mobile app firms in the world. We were going to go with those folks. We did not end up building the app, but I ended up working at the company, which was pretty fascinating. And then I had a 10-year run at Rightpoint, which then led me to where I am today at Bond as the Chief Growth Officer.

[00:04:56] Jason Cimino: I’ve kind of done it all in the B2B agency world at this point. So I’ve led marketing teams, I’ve led new business teams, and I’ve led existing customer and sort of client-partner teams, as I call them, all of which fall under my remit today. And we’re at a really interesting time in Bond’s ecosystem, and I was brought in to help take this amazing infrastructure. Bond is the greatest hidden gem in all of North America from a professional services and agency consultancy perspective, given what we’re trying to do and where we’re taking our business next, helping lead our existing customers, our new business engine, and our marketing as well.

[00:05:33] Steve MacDonald: What a well-rounded background in a lot of different roles, and here’s what I’d love to do. I’d love to start at the top of this kind of accountability. And you think about how you even redefine C-suite ownership, right? They’re accountable to the board.

[00:05:51] Steve MacDonald: They have like the ultimate amount of ownership in the business, but I’d love to hear your perspective on that and redefining the C-suite ownership role.

[00:05:59] Jason Cimino: I think it’s funny, right? Like the way I sort of think about these things is my job and my title as Chief Growth Officer, I have one singular focus, and that’s growing our clients’ business, and if I can grow our clients’ businesses, every single client we work with, the business on the Bond side will take care of itself, right? If we accomplish our objective, which is to do that for our clients, now to do that, the accountability starts with me, and then sort of leads into our teams.

[00:06:24] Jason Cimino: But I really try to be in the work as much as I can. And I think the balance that every executive, especially in the modern era, has to balance is that you can get so wrapped up in the minutiae that it takes all of your time, and you cannot ever do the strategic thinking, and you do not force yourself to think bigger and move the biggest rocks up the hill.

[00:06:45] Jason Cimino: But I would also argue that the executives who just spend their time moving rocks up the hill and do not actually understand their business, they do not actually understand what’s happening on the ground, they are not actually listening to their teams or their people, or they are not challenging their priors and they are not challenging their assumptions and the assumptions that their growth plans are built on every single day.

[00:07:06] Jason Cimino: That’s the gap and sort of who’s successful, right? It really sits in the middle of being able to modulate yourself into the weeds to get an understanding, right? When the data tells you something that’s different than what’s actually happening, being able to sort of have the blue collar mentality of rolling up your sleeves and being able to do any job in the company, versus the ability to also think strategically.

[00:07:29] Jason Cimino: I think that’s why we’re in the seats that we are in, is to make sure you can do the trade-offs and find the right balance there. But personally, as I’ve sort of grown up in my career, I will not get far away from being able to do every job because I think it’s really important that you understand what’s actually happening.

[00:07:47] Jason Cimino: And again, some of that’s listening to people, some of that’s reading, some of that’s consuming. Some of that’s talking to external partners, right? Third parties. But it’s the amalgamation of sort of all that information that you get that helps you make some of those more strategic decisions. So, in my mind, I joke all the time, like it is much more of a blue-collar-style executive, and our team at Bond.

[00:08:07] Jason Cimino: We all pride ourselves as a leadership team on that. And I think that’s one of the exciting parts about working for or with us as an organization, is that we are all in it together. I often say it’s about getting the right team in the boat and making sure everyone’s rowing at the same time, in the same direction.

[00:08:22] Steve MacDonald: So here’s what I hear often is that we have way too much on our plates. And there’s always that list of proactive things, right, that we’re desperately trying to get to. If we can tick one of those off a week, we’re excited, right?

[00:08:37] Steve MacDonald: And we just keep moving and moving them to the next week or the next week. What you’re talking about makes complete sense, right? I talk to other C-suite executives who say, I have to spend more time close to the customer. If I’m not actually talking to the customer, you’re the Chief Growth Officer, right?

[00:08:54] Steve MacDonald: As you said, expanding customer relationships, right? That’s a whole other area that you could devote time to. How do you prioritize? And then, because at the end of the day, to make those decisions is a decision not to do something else, right, because we cannot do it all. So I would love to hear a little bit about how you rationalize or prioritize your time for the things you think are most important.

[00:09:22] Jason Cimino: Yeah, it’s a good question. I know in some of our prep, we talked a little bit about some of the sports background, right? And I did play hoops in college, still love it, still follow it, and am still fascinated by it, and I do have a little bit of a mental model. Like, you know, the book Moneyball stands out as one of my favorite books of all time.

[00:09:38] Jason Cimino: So, as I think about investments in sort of internal things and people and new opportunities and things we go after, I do try to apply that sort of sports analytics Moneyball angle to the work that we do every day. From a personal perspective and sort of what’s my personal framework on that, I think number one is alignment across your executive team, across your board on what you’re after, right? So we have really clear alignment on what we’re headed into our fiscal year in April for, and what we’re after for next year. Beyond that, we have our three-year roadmap and plan.

[00:10:14] Jason Cimino: Beyond that, you know, we have been thinking a little bit longer term and longer horizon. Nowadays, I think anything outside of three years, the pace that things move is, that it is a fool’s errand, but it is really hard to predict outside of that. So, if we have agreement on that as a team, which we do, and we are in lockstep and we are all rowing against that, then the next thing you start to do is say, okay, if these things are true or if I need to make them true.

[00:10:37] Jason Cimino: How do I then do that? And what are the bets I am going to make against that? Some of it is funny, right? Like on the sales side, I put myself back in the individual contributor mindset from 2016 to 2017. And it was, go hit a quota, right? Like, you have a $5 million quota or a $6 million quota, and what is your revenue walk to get to that quota? I used to do this every month where I would be thinking about, okay, has my sales math changed? Do I have to have more conversations or less, or grow the pipeline? When I was more of an individual contributor, I was never volume-based, as that was not my style. I actually did not carry a huge pipeline.

[00:11:14] Jason Cimino: It was a little bit smaller, but I prided myself on being able to close at a higher percentage than, you know, some of the reps that I had worked with or seen in the market. So I tell you all this to say, right, like, if you have your assumptions and your plan, and you are constantly working your plan.

[00:11:30] Jason Cimino: Then you can constantly be adjusting and evaluating, are the bets we are making the right bets? Is there a perfect formula? No. Like, do I feel like I have this nailed all of the time? No. And I tell the teams this all the time, right? Like we get into a lot of analysis paralysis where you are now taking a month to make a decision where your two paths, one might have you three to five percentage points better if you make that decision.

[00:11:56] Jason Cimino: But if you wait a month, that gain that you might have gotten is probably lost, right? So it’s about being able to say, “Okay, here are the assumptions we are working under.” We have the alignment we need. Here are the bets we are going to make, and here are the metrics we will track to change course if needed.

[00:12:11] Jason Cimino: Um, and if I can do that, and I can make, you know, the right three to five decisions a week, that is how I know I am in a good groove and sort of prioritizing well. I find that if I am making 50 decisions a week or, you know, a number of a giant magnitude, I am probably too far in the weeds. I am not empowering the team enough.

[00:12:31] Jason Cimino: And then my prioritization work is definitely off. The numbers and advice I would give others is to get to a place where you understand the most important decisions and move week over week, which then bleeds to day by day.

[00:12:49] Jason Cimino: Right, and all of it starts with that sort of broader alignment that if you do not have as a leadership team, you should be fighting every day as an executive to get to. I’m fortunate that we have that big-picture alignment. So much of my work is downstream.

[00:13:03] Jason Cimino: Not to say we are not challenging those assumptions every day as a leadership team and all that stuff, but it gets a little bit easier when you feel like you are in a good operating cadence at the executive team level.

[00:13:15] Steve MacDonald: Really interesting. You bookended that answer with alignment.

[00:13:20] Steve MacDonald: And one of the things that we do in this podcast is we ask every C-Suite executive that comes on the very same question, and you and I talked about this in our last call. What do you see as the two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth? The number one challenge by far, 72% of C-suite executives said this was their number one challenge, internal alignment.

[00:13:44] Steve MacDonald: And what is fascinating is that of the top 10 challenges, nine out of the 10 were 100% internal, or they were hybrid, where the very first step to address the challenge was an internal step. So the big takeaway on all of this is that, and I think you just nailed it on the head when you talked about we are lucky, you said we are lucky, we are internally aligned.

[00:14:12] Steve MacDonald: That is not an easy place to get. That is why it is the number-one challenge among all B2B C-suite executives. So I would just love to ask, because you guys have achieved something that a lot of companies have not, like how did you get that alignment, knowing that it is very, very difficult. That you said, because of that alignment, I now know, downstream in my department, what my mandate is and what I need to be doing.

[00:14:37] Steve MacDonald: It trickles down and affects everyone in the organization. So how would you recommend to the listeners here to get internal alignment amongst the C-suite that then trickles through the organization?

[00:14:51] Jason Cimino: Yeah, it is a great question. I think if I had all of the answers, I think I would be, you know, way more successful than I even am.

[00:14:58] Jason Cimino: But I would say, I think a lot of it does start with, and this is a weird way to say it, but it starts with getting uncomfortable a little bit and driving some of the tension in those leadership and alignment sessions. I think we all want to be extremely collegial, right, with the people we work with and that we are closest with.

[00:15:16] Jason Cimino: Like, I spend more time with a lot of my coworkers than I do with my wife, right, and, you know, from a day to day perspective. Tension does not always feel great, but it is really good in business and really healthy, right? So, working through big issues. Now I would say one area where we are getting better every day at Bond is like we get to an agreement on a decision.

[00:15:37] Jason Cimino: How fast can you then turn around that decision and execute it? Like, how do you actually measure that? So that is an area where I think we are taking a big step, because even with alignment, if you are not measuring it, that is where it can start to fall apart. So I would advise folks to push really hard.

[00:15:53] Jason Cimino: In those leadership and executive conversations, like, do not leave things unsaid as a group. Because if you are thinking it and it is unsaid in your belly, you can bet it is unsaid in someone else in the leadership team’s belly. I also tell my group that all the time, right, in either the existing business or the marketing team, or like, if you have something and you do not agree, say it out loud.

[00:16:14] Jason Cimino: I do not even want to use the word safe space because I do not think that is the right term for this. Right. I want a space where there is disagreement, you know, tension, and the chance to challenge each other’s ideas. Where I want the safety to come is that when we make a decision, we are going to agree, we are going to get aligned, and then we are going to operate against that decision and those assumptions that we have agreed on.

[00:16:33] Jason Cimino: So I think what I would say, the advice for folks is force those conversations. And do not sit back, and if you are feeling it, one of your other executive partners is likely to. I joke all the time, I think I thought I had everything figured out probably until around the pandemic.

[00:16:48] Jason Cimino: And then, you know, March of 2020, I realized, you know, we are all going to be making it up from here on out. No one has gone through this before in the business world. Right. And it was a really good life lesson for me that even when you think, oh, I have done this before, the conditions are completely different today than when you did it three years ago, than when you did it a month ago, right?

[00:17:08] Jason Cimino: Like, the world is just changing so fast nowadays. The velocity and the pace at which things are moving. I tell you that to ultimately say, like, we are all figuring it out and everyone should feel comfortable and confident that you are figuring it out as you go and articulating that to your colleagues.

[00:17:25] Jason Cimino: And if that environment is not created, really push for how you create it and also look for, you know, leaders that you want to work for that provide that. I am really lucky that we do have that, and then I am trying every day and I ask my team to hold me accountable to this, like make sure I am fostering that same alignment and, you know, disagree and commit in our individual teams, right?

[00:17:40] Jason Cimino: Like once it breaks down, because I think to get to the big picture vision, like I told you, it is a workback plan, right, under a bunch of assumptions that can be constantly changing. Ensuring teams work the same way as the leadership group is paramount.

[00:17:59] Steve MacDonald: You know, it is interesting, like one of the things you are not going to paraphrase in there is you said that you have got to keep innovating, you have got to keep figuring it out. The moment we think we have the playbook for how it is supposed to be done, I literally just got done last week recording a podcast with a four time B2B CRO and he said, Steve, there are things I am doing now that I was not doing three months ago.

[00:18:23] Steve MacDonald: He goes, things are changing that fast. So anybody that thinks that they have it, they got it all figured out. The world’s changing on us, the market’s changing. Our ICP is changing, you know, our company is changing, and if we do not embrace that change, I think that is a big part of what I am taking away from what you are saying here, right, is that there is going to be that dynamic, there is going to be change, there is going to be innovation, but how we quickly align on it and then act on it.

[00:18:51] Steve MacDonald: Is really, really important. There was a four time B2B CMO that came on and she said, Steve, execution is where all good strategy goes to die, right. So we can talk about it, we can align on it, but if we do not have a plan to act on it, be accountable, and come back together on it, it does not matter.

[00:19:11] Steve MacDonald: The decisions we made do not matter right now. You introduced another level, another dynamic in all of this in our last conversation, and you said, “Steve, I have changed the way that I hire, so I hire for agency now.” Tell us what you meant by that and why you made that change.

[00:19:35] Jason Cimino: I think the last couple sentences you just laid out are why I have really shifted my mindset on this, right?

[00:19:42] Jason Cimino: So a prior assumption was if you have done it before, you can likely do it again. Right. And if you sort of have repeatable steps and processes, specifically for hiring in sales, right, like there is a science to sales, you know, I probably err a little bit more to the middle on the science art spectrum than other sales leaders do.

[00:20:02] Jason Cimino: But the reason I have sort of really shifted in what I am looking for, and I keep coming back to that word agency over the last couple of months, is to get to the outcomes that we all collectively want as leaders in our business. The individuals driving execution and strategy forward need to have agency over the outcome, right?

[00:20:24] Jason Cimino: Because there will be reasons to get blocked. Every single day, multiple times. Especially in the professional services realm, where this is not a widget-based environment, right? We are dealing with human beings who are having challenges and struggles, and, you know, there are different things in a professional services business than you might get in the SaaS business.

[00:20:46] Jason Cimino: And so the agency side of things is, when you have your biggest challenge to go get a deal done, to go produce a webinar on the marketing side, to get alignment between two leaders on the content you are going to produce in that webinar, to get two executives who are competing in a client’s organization to get lined up and make a decision for you, right?

[00:21:10] Jason Cimino: Like you have to feel as though you have agency in that outcome. And then do everything you can to make that thing happen on our organization’s behalf, right? Whether that is the internal work and working the internal machine, or the external work. But I have found the people who are in the river, letting the river take them where it goes, versus the people who are saying, “No, I want the river to go that way, and I am going to build a dam to get it that way.”

[00:21:36] Jason Cimino: That is sort of the dichotomy that I see, right? Like the agency element of that is, you know what, no, the river is going the wrong direction. I am going to build a dam and move it to another place. Because building a dam might not be in your job description, right? It might be the description of how to get the outcome we want.

[00:21:52] Jason Cimino: And the people that I have found are most successful in B2B growth roles or marketing roles are people who fundamentally believe that they have agency and can control the outcome. Again, I am not a lunatic. I understand there are circumstances beyond our control, but ultimately, you should be doing everything within your power, as Bond, to help the organization achieve the ultimate outcomes.

[00:22:16] Jason Cimino: And then obviously if you do that on your client’s behalf as well, that is how you create real, trusted relationships and the client feels like you can do things for them and you can break down walls and barriers that they have not had other partners be able to do, right? Which, in my mind, all comes back to agency.

[00:22:36] Jason Cimino: The question is, how do you assess for that? I think from an athletics perspective, right, I love that as a profile. I love that as a background. I love in interviews being like, “Oh, okay, so you were successful there. Well, what were the three challenges that you had to blow through to do that?”

[00:22:52] Jason Cimino: Oh, you were successful in that thing? Well, was it cookie-cutter or was it completely out of the box? Like, did you do that 50 times, or was that unique and really trying to understand through difficult interview questions and a little bit more getting into the weeds of like, did you actually go create this? Was it handed to you? What challenges did you have to get through? Because I will say in the modern business era, as you touched on, right, this stuff is harder than ever. Growth is increasingly difficult for our clients, as it is for us. So that agency is super important.

[00:23:22] Steve MacDonald: And this is decades-old information, so I do not know if this is a mantra inside of Nike, but like with your athletics background, they used to call what you are saying here a corporate athlete. You did not need the exact right background on your resume, but if you were someone who could get in, figure it out, and make it happen, that was who they wanted in their organization.

[00:23:46] Steve MacDonald: And we do every single day. Every single day, we run into a roadblock, a challenge, something we did not see coming, something we have got to get around, and our ability to do so. I am just going to tell you right now: you have personally changed the way I look at talent, and it is true.

[00:24:07] Steve MacDonald: It is true. It is the reason why people stay on the team, or they leave ultimately, and churn in our team, in our companies, is so corrosive, right, for getting that growth that we need. The last thing that your clients want is your team changing over on them, right? Absolutely. So I have to tell you, this has been fascinating.

[00:24:27] Steve MacDonald: You talked about something else, so I am going to take a right turn because I want to get into these new lanes of thinking that you have. You called the demand creation mastery and explained what that is and why it is important, if you could.

[00:24:42] Jason Cimino: Yeah. So I think if I pile onto the last conversation around agency, I mean, I am looking for in our organization right now, as we do have aggressive growth plans, people that are very growth-minded and they want to grow and to do those things, right, to help grow our clients’ portfolio. I think no one wants to be sold to anymore. Like, how many times does your phone ring from a random number? You are not going to answer it right now.

[00:25:04] Jason Cimino: Like I think the days of pick up the phone a hundred times and call a bunch of people, this is sort of moving away from the science of sales into a little bit more of the art. I think those days are gone. Modern growth and demand generation come from looking across the entire ecosystem and solving problems before clients see them.

[00:25:30] Jason Cimino: And reaching out to them based on valuable information and intelligence. Like I just, I do not think, I should not say, it is very rare that even myself, like when I am being sold to, I pick up the phone or I respond to an email if there is not a really valuable, like hey, here are three things I know about your business or your company, your team, or the problem you are trying to solve.

[00:25:54] Jason Cimino: And I want five or 10 minutes of your time to talk that out. Or using introductions. A candidate recently came in for a role through a third-party partner, and the partner asked them to reach out to me on their behalf. And I think really highly of that partner, so when he did that, I was like, yes, of course.

[00:26:11] Jason Cimino: And again, some of this is really basic old school relationship building from a demand gen perspective, but for me it comes down to really thinking about the ecosystem of the problem that the client is trying to solve.

[00:26:26] Jason Cimino: And then really systematically working your way through, how do we provide valuable information to get to that outcome that can start a conversation. And then once you get a conversation going, you have to do all of this stuff, you know, all the table stakes prerequisites. You have to be well-researched, you have to be well-read, and you probably have to have three or four conversations with other people in that organization before you meet the person you got the meeting with, right?

[00:26:44] Jason Cimino: And all of that sort of valuable prep work, that is how you start to generate demand. And if you do that constantly, conversations beget other conversations and beget other interesting people that you meet. And it becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

[00:27:04] Jason Cimino: Like, and this is not busy work to be busy, right? With the best salespeople, I use my journalism background in this work, and it doesn’t pass my smell test. I won’t take that at face value; I’ll dig deeper into that topic because I am not sure I trust it.

[00:27:23] Jason Cimino: Or you know what, I have now heard this two or three times from two different people. Where there is smoke, there is fire. I am going to keep going down this path. So that is what I think of as demand generation mastery. It is really this ability to have a vast amount of conversations, process that information, and use it to take what we can provide.

[00:27:40] Jason Cimino: Because we do feel as though we are well-positioned in the market. We have valuable service offerings, right? And if we can get in and showcase that to our clients, there is a lot of work for us and a lot of growth ahead, which is why we feel so confident about where we are in the market.

[00:27:55] Jason Cimino: But to do that, it requires a whole bunch of work that has to happen all the time. You know, I joke all the time, it is like being in shape, right? You cannot. As soon as you get out of shape, it is way harder to get back in shape. As soon as you get out of this mindset of consistent conversations and sort of thinking through your sales math, right, it is really hard to get back on that.

[00:28:12] Jason Cimino: So long-winded way of saying demand generation mastery for me comes down to can you have the right conversations and then use those conversations to provide value to the clients that need it most, right, and need the most help from a services org like us.

[00:28:31] Steve MacDonald: I actually love it. It comes back to what we were talking about earlier: there is no playbook. We have to constantly innovate, and what I took away from there is that we have to get into the right conversations. If we can get into the right conversations and feel good about the trust and the value we can provide, then we will make the most of it.

[00:28:51] Steve MacDonald: Getting into those conversations is the hard part, and it is getting harder and harder. The B2B buyer today, the self-service journey, they are waiting longer and longer and longer to want to even talk to us, and people have more and more on their plates, right? Teams are not being increased; they are being decreased, so people are spending more time trying to get less done in less time.

[00:29:08] Steve MacDonald: So for us to carve out space in their time and get a piece of that valuable time, we have to really think through that, right? And that is what I took away from your demand mastery: we have to treat that conversation with such respect that we earn the right to have it. We are not owed that conversation at all.

[00:29:41] Jason Cimino: Nope. And it is funny too, because we have been working on our new go-to-market, and I think a lot of agencies and consultancies are guilty of this, right? They are like, “Hey, we actually do not want to pitch ourselves. We want to hear what the problems are, and then we will help you solve your problems.”

[00:29:57] Jason Cimino: And I say to our team all the time, right, that is the goal of the conversation, is to listen, but you also have to earn the right to ask, hey, what is your biggest problem? What is keeping you up at night? And you earn that right by the research you do and by everything we talked about in that last little segment there.

[00:30:15] Jason Cimino: And I push our groups on that all the time. Like I would love to get on the phone with some of our CMO clients or prospects and just say, “What is the biggest thing keeping you up at night? I can solve that, but I need to credentialize us and the value we bring based on our external knowledge before I proceed.”

[00:30:32] Jason Cimino: And I often say to folks, hey, look, we have a 50 to 60 percent of the way they are baked perspective. If we are going to have this conversation, we will give you some of that intelligence. We expect you to say, “Hey, you are wrong in these two or three areas, but you are right in these three or four. Lean into those a little bit further, and in the next conversation, we will get you 50 or 60 percent of the way, but you help us bake the cake to get to 70 or 80 percent.”

[00:30:53] Jason Cimino: But that first tranche of work, you have to do that, right, in a modern sales growth role or trajectory, and it is incumbent upon you. I do not always think that was the case. I think the best was always doing it that way, but I think you could have gotten away with it maybe five or seven years ago, not having done that.

[00:31:12] Jason Cimino: Nowadays, you have no excuse, right, with the tools we have at our disposal to do research better, to understand things faster, the tools our clients have, we have too, right, to understand these things. So I think that is really important as just table stakes in being successful in any role in any growth or marketing org.

[00:31:31] Steve MacDonald: Here is what I know. We have at least another half an hour of podcast to keep going on, right? We didn’t even get through half of the stuff we wanted to talk about today. It is so fascinating. The mission of this podcast is to bring different perspectives from C-suite executives around the world who are solving the biggest challenges to their business growth.

[00:31:51] Steve MacDonald: We are all in a B2B ABM go-to-market motion, and if we can help each other and bring in different insights and perspectives like you did today, that is the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were amazing. Thank you, Jason, so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it.

[00:32:09] Jason Cimino: Thank you very much for having me. I am very, very excited to have it released, get feedback in the market, and help everyone I can. To your point, Steve, I loved your turn to corporate athletics and corporate athletes. I am happy to help, support, and grow other businesses.

[00:32:23] Jason Cimino: I think it is fun. It is why I like going to work. I like solving problems, and I am happy to do it with the audience or any folks who reach out to you. So thank you very, very much for having me. I appreciate it. Enjoyed your time together.