Episode #287: 

Paul Gottsegen, CMO and President at ISG, explains why conventional ABM approaches often fail to create real buyer trust. He discusses conversational messaging, customer understanding, and the limits of AI-generated communication. Paul also shares why human connection and customer pain points must guide modern go-to-market execution.

“ABM is the most ambiguous acronym in marketing. Account-based marketing means different things to different people. It’s a maze where you pick apart so many roles within the customer, losing the spark of the mission-critical pain point. If we choose marketing for a living, we need to understand the customer better than anybody else in the room. That’s the core of my ABM for a client.” – Paul Gottsegen

In this episode, Paul shares why many modern ABM strategies fail to create meaningful customer engagement. He explains why conversational communication, customer understanding, and authentic human connection are becoming increasingly important in a world shaped by AI-generated messaging. Paul also discusses leadership, trust, empowerment, and the evolving role of marketing inside enterprise organizations.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today I guarantee we have a conversation that is going to stretch how we think about our go-to-market, how we think about B2B businesses, and ABM go-to-market strategy. And we’re going to talk in ways that, after we’ve recorded here 280 episodes with C-Suite executives, we’ve never covered some of the territory that we’re getting into today.

[00:00:33] Steve MacDonald: So, I’m very excited. We’re going to talk a lot about kind of a reality check on ABM, and why some of the conventional approaches that we’ve tried in the past fail now, why we need to be constantly thinking and innovating, which is kind of, in the day and age of AI, an obvious thing, right?

[00:00:51] Steve MacDonald: But you’ve been around, you’ve done this for a number of decades. You’ve been a four-time CMO, you’ve worked in seven different companies, massive turnarounds, big companies like Dell, all kinds across the spectrum. Before we get started, you’re the CMO and President of ISG right now. I’d love to hear a little bit about what you’re doing now, your career, and then we’re going to dig right in.

[00:01:15] Paul Gottsegen: It’s so great to be here, Steve. Thank you for having me. I work for a fantastic firm. We are a $300 million public company called Information Services Group, and we help Fortune 500 companies undergo major technology transformations and handle contracting, governance, and all sorts of partnering with the service provider ecosystem.

[00:01:35] Paul Gottsegen: So, we’re right, and we thrive when there’s confusion and questions and tumult. Fortune 500 companies are looking for experienced advisors, and that’s when ISG steps in. And with AI creating so much disruption, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer for ISG, which is headquartered in Connecticut.

[00:01:55] Paul Gottsegen: I’m based in New Jersey and, you know, going strong. I love it. I keep learning every day. I’ve been a marketer since the late eighties, always in high tech. The big transition I made is that I used to be a product marketing person at Compaq, at Dell, and at Hewlett-Packard, now HP.

[00:02:13] Paul Gottsegen: And then one of my first big CMO roles was at Infosys, the huge systems integrator based in Bangalore. And so that was a huge challenge. I didn’t really know anything about services, but I knew a lot about marketing, so I thrived. And then I spent the rest of my career, the last about 15 or 17 years, doing CMO roles for services organizations, which is really challenging because the product, you can touch it. The services you’re selling are trust and expertise, but you can’t really, it’s not slots and based like I was used to, and sheet metal in the computer days. But I love all aspects of marketing and leading teams.

[00:02:52] Paul Gottsegen: And AI has re-energized all of us marketeers because it just opens up a whole new world of challenges and opportunities.

[00:03:00] Steve MacDonald: Well, you know, it’s funny because you could talk every podcast, you could talk about AI, right? But I wanted to ask you a question right away because one of the things that you said in our original conversation is, Steve, there’s what I call a conversational messaging gap, right?

[00:03:14] Steve MacDonald: Where human dialogue is what drives engagement. And if you go back in our careers, right, because I’ve got some gray hairs, I’ve been around a little while as well, it used to be all about automation and scale, right? It wasn’t about human connection at all. It was like, I mean, we’re going to automate the world.

[00:03:30] Steve MacDonald: We’re going to have everybody just coming to us, right? And then with AI, it’s a different kind of promise, but we can fake personalization, we can do a lot of things that make amazing content, amazing outreach, right, that personalizes everything that we do. But what you’re saying is, we have got to stop for a minute.

[00:03:51] Steve MacDonald: We have got to put the human back into the equation in a much more effective way. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

[00:03:59] Paul Gottsegen: You know what’s funny is the core element about being a marketing person back in the day was learning how to do messaging or positioning, and there was a lot to it. We learned in the hallways. Nobody was virtual. We learned in the hallways and from our elders and more experienced people.

[00:04:16] Paul Gottsegen: And we had to do a lot of things in the product marketing group at Compaq, my first company, a great kind of computer leader in the eighties and nineties. But until you really mastered the art of messaging, you hadn’t really made it. And as the years went by, pre-AI, it was kind of a lost art.

[00:04:34] Paul Gottsegen: A lot of people got smart about different elements of marketing technology, but sort of lost the magic of how to build a positioning statement and the story around it and the pillars. And we could get into that. But here comes AI, it’s sort of like for a software developer. AI creates code for people that don’t code, and AI creates messages for people that didn’t come up the hard way, the way some of us came up learning messaging.

[00:04:55] Paul Gottsegen: And so the good news is, it’s okay. It’s pretty good, but it’s sort of a path, like a race to mediocrity. Because now that AI has been around for three years, everybody can spot it. Everybody. I was in a meeting yesterday. I’m not going to name names, but somebody was showing me a script for a video, and we all could see, “Oh, this is logical.”

[00:05:22] Paul Gottsegen: But there’s nothing compelling, there’s nothing magical. And marketing is a lot of science and logic and analytics, and it’s a little bit of art form and creativity, or maybe a lot. And no matter how much a prompt understands your tone, you have to be careful. So we can get into it, but no, I’ve actually worked with my team to make sure we don’t use AI to create our messages.

[00:05:44] Paul Gottsegen: We can use AI in a lot of different ways, but what it does is it flattens your story. And for us as a research and advisory firm, we make sure that none of our experts, like our experts in whatever workplace feature, workplace, or something, who are creating white papers, are forbidden to use AI.

[00:06:07] Paul Gottsegen: That would really flatten the thought leadership of our firm. So even though we use AI all day, every day, not to create the core context, as you said, you said the magic word, conversational. There’s something about the way people communicate that AI can’t do yet. Maybe one day it can, and when it can, we’ll have to figure that out.

[00:06:29] Paul Gottsegen: But right now it’s so obvious when something’s created by AI, and we see it. We see it in the emails that you get, websites, video scripts, you name it. And we’re in a very tricky time right here in April 2026. If you don’t understand the new paradigm and leverage AI, you’re going to be in big trouble.

[00:06:51] Paul Gottsegen: If you leverage it too much in the wrong spots, it’s going to be okay. But guess what? Your competitors are smart, too, and they work hard, too. If you’re just okay, you’re not going to win.

[00:07:05] Steve MacDonald: So much to unpack there. I’ve had a number of conversations with CROs who are like, Steve, I’m buying plane tickets like I never bought before. I’m getting out, having face-to-face conversations, and the whole reason is exactly what you’re talking about. They feel like they’ve lost the connection, right? Whether it’s in the middle of the pipeline or whether it’s a longstanding client. And the need to have the face-to-face, the need to have that conversation, to make that connection is getting more important than ever.

[00:07:43] Steve MacDonald: And so how do we do that? You’ve talked about, you know, using AI appropriately, but you’re working with Fortune 500 companies. What do we need to think about and do to create that connection more often?

[00:07:58] Paul Gottsegen: Being in person is the best, but we cannot all do that for different reasons, logistics, or budget. Before COVID, it was actually common for people on video calls to not be on video, which never made any sense to me. But a lot of people just thought, no, I have got reasons why I cannot be on video. And then when COVID hit, we all sort of figured out that you need to be on video. But to this day, people do not recognize that communication is 90% body language, facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice. And it all connects together. And that is part of the conversation of being human. And that is just a baby step one. We do not get to work with clients in person as much as we used to back in the day, when we would spend every week on planes.

[00:08:43] Paul Gottsegen: But just the way we outreach to them, it could be, say, in an email. I am just talking like a basic outreach, trying to get, you know, it might be somebody you know, but you are trying to get a meeting. That is what we all, as marketers, want to do. Try to get a meeting for the sales team. That is the goal.

[00:08:59] Paul Gottsegen: And whenever I see an email that has bullets and a lot of formatting, let us say, you know, bold headlines and maybe a really, really polished HTML, or just a nice graphic up top, maybe my corporate headshot, I delete all that. If you are going to be conversational, it has to be. And it has to be written not in the type of formality that we all learned in school.

[00:09:25] Paul Gottsegen: It has to be like I am speaking to you. I am always trying to train my team. Just write it just as if you are talking to me, sort of almost like you are speaking to me. And people, there is something about coming out of COVID, even though it has been five years. People want that human touch and communication. Back in the day, the old days with brochures and formatting, and this is true, by the way, we are talking about clients, but the same exact rule applies for internal communications.

[00:09:55] Paul Gottsegen: I will send notes out to our whole company, our whole firm, or parts of the firm. And even when I was at, you know, Dell and Infosys and Mindtree, my previous firms, I would never make it formal with my corporate headshot photo or HTML. It would always come from Paul. They knew it was from me because people want to connect with other people.

[00:10:17] Paul Gottsegen: You are trying to create an emotional connection to your team or somebody at your firm, or a client or a prospect, and you have to be a little bit personal. For me, I am the class clown, so my persona is funny. But your personality has to come through.

[00:10:36] Paul Gottsegen: LinkedIn is the same way. Go look at my LinkedIn feed. I did one today about the Masters Tournament. It cannot all be just about business. People are not so interested in that. They want to know who you are as a person. Then they will start to create some interest and recognize the humanity in you. And that is, people sometimes put on their game face when they do marketing and get overly formal.

[00:11:02] Paul Gottsegen: It is almost like the marketing version of, you know, a young adult when they, you know, meet with you and say, oh, Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Gottsegen, and like, what? No, that is ridiculous. But they do not know that they are doing what they think is proper.

[00:11:16] Steve MacDonald: That can be perceived as, at a time when teams are decreasing, not just because of budgets.

[00:11:25] Steve MacDonald: We are all looking to reduce size because we think we are gaining so many efficiencies with AI, right? And so doing things more personally, more conversationally, does not scale as well. It might even take a little bit more time to do that. A little bit of thought. How do you, when you are advising your Fortune 500 clients, handle the tug-of-war there, right?

[00:11:51] Steve MacDonald: Because we all want more efficiencies. We want to do more with less. But how does that objective work with your recommendations here to be more genuine, be more conversational, be more personal?

[00:12:05] Paul Gottsegen: No, you nailed it. You got it. We use AI to connect the dots across all our data, do analytics, and realize, oh, look what happened on the website, and look what happened in our email.

[00:12:20] Paul Gottsegen: And look what happened on social media. AI is really good at connecting all these dots and helping us make smart decisions. And then when we have a campaign, we will spend all that time, you are right, we will invest time to create a conversational message, but then we have an agent where we effectively push a button. And in the old days, it would be, okay, you do the website update, you create the email that our salespeople need to send to clients.

[00:12:47] Paul Gottsegen: And, you know, you do the social media posts, and there are like 12 core deliverables. Well, now the agent takes the core message we did without AI, feathers it into these 12 deliverables, and then we will still review it. What a time saver that is. Yeah, and we can do a lot more with less.

[00:13:04] Paul Gottsegen: So a lot of it is the analytics, and a lot of it is what I would call the multimodal creation from the foundation of a human-made message. Those would be two examples that are working with that. Now, that is within my own marketing team. With our clients, you could tackle a lot of governance issues.

[00:13:23] Paul Gottsegen: Governance is a huge deal. And so when you are using AI, you know, we are careful. We are careful. We have our own enterprise version of ChatGPT. We do not use anything else. And there are many other guardrails. And for our clients that are huge Fortune 500 companies, some of them are regulated industries.

[00:13:43] Paul Gottsegen: It is the exposure and the governance. And then the other thing we can get into is having the workforce change. Like, I had to go to my team, Steve. It is just a little bit extreme, but a year ago, when we were really making our push to transform our own marketing, it dawned on me as I was looking into the eyes of the video, and suddenly, I just blurted out.

[00:14:06] Paul Gottsegen: None of you will get fired because of AI. I had not planned to say it. It was just a judgment call. And since that moment, we have done great. It is like everybody, their shoulders dropped. Yeah. And it is not just my team, nor is it just marketing. Not everybody can say that.

[00:14:22] Paul Gottsegen: There are some situations where you probably cannot make that statement. But no, you have to give people the freedom to know they can invest the time. And if they do not invest the time, then they will be in trouble.

[00:14:36] Steve MacDonald: So here is what I want to do. I want to come back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier in terms of, you know, being more conversational.

[00:14:45] Steve MacDonald: So now we are more conversational, and we are having more personalized dialogue, and what that requires is a deep understanding of the voice of the customer. And you talk about a decline in the voice of the customer. And just to give a couple of reference points, a couple of years ago, Forrester did a customer obsession study and found that less than 3% of B2B companies are customer-obsessed.

[00:15:14] Steve MacDonald: But guess what? One hundred percent of us, including those other 97% that are not customer-obsessed, say we are, right? Say we are customer first. We are customer-obsessed, right? Could you clarify what you mean by “we are in a voice-of-customer decline,” and what we should do about it?

[00:15:33] Paul Gottsegen: I think from a marketing standpoint in particular, and I’m a, I’m not a contrarian, I want to be clear about that, but I just.

[00:15:42] Paul Gottsegen: I also have my own judgments, and I’m not a believer in this whole concept of personas. I know everybody loves personas. I actually think that’s a detriment because what will happen is we will try to get the voice of the customer in a campaign, and somebody on my team will say, ” Well, we’ve got the CMO, the CFO, the Chief Procurement Officer, and it falls under its own weight.

[00:16:04] Paul Gottsegen: It’s just not practical. And I think the decline happened because people forget that, in marketing, if you think about the word marketing. Like for your audience, did you ever really think about the word? It’s the market. So what does that mean?

[00:16:20] Paul Gottsegen: So if we choose to be in marketing for a living, we need to understand the customer better than anybody else in the room. So if I’m with the CEO and the head of engineering and the head of consulting, and there’s something in the discussion around the client and what their pain points are, not so much their needs, but their pain points, right?

[00:16:40] Paul Gottsegen: The marketing person has to stand up and say, yes, I’ve done the research in whatever way. I’ve talked to a bunch of clients, done the surveys, and I can confidently explain in detail to this target segment what their pain points are. Obviously, the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Procurement Officer at that customer are going to have very obvious slants.

[00:17:07] Paul Gottsegen: But the pain point for a hotel chain, you need to understand that. And I think we end up declining a little bit in the voice of the customer because it’s a maze when you start to do account-based marketing, and you pick apart so many different roles within the customer. I’m sure some people have figured it out.

[00:17:26] Paul Gottsegen: I’ve been around, I’ve been around, and to me it just seems like a detriment, and it creates so much extra effort, and there’s only so many hours in the day and so many people on the team. And at the same time, you lose that spark of like, what is the mission-critical pain point? That client, they’re trying to say everybody wants to make more money or save costs.

[00:17:51] Paul Gottsegen: It’s got to be very specific to that segment. That’s sort of the core of my ABM to that client. You have to know it, you have to figure it out.

[00:18:01] Steve MacDonald: So there have been studies that have shown when we do try to segment so much, head of procurement, CFO, CTO, CEO, CRO, CMO, I mean, that it’s actually a detriment.

[00:18:15] Steve MacDonald: It works against us, and we’ve been trained that to reach the buying group, the hidden buyer that has half the influence on the decision-making purchase, we have to talk to them. We have got to walk a mile in their shoes, right? And we don’t have a really good mechanism. We’re not in meetings with them.

[00:18:31] Steve MacDonald: We don’t really have direct communication with them. It’s difficult. Therefore, the fact that we’re going to actually take a really difficult communication strategy to reach the rest of the buying group, and on top of that, we’re going to divvy it up into about eight different ways, making it much more complex and harder on us.

[00:18:48] Steve MacDonald: Kind of seems crazy.

[00:18:49] Paul Gottsegen: I didn’t know there were studies. That’s good to hear.

[00:18:52] Steve MacDonald: I’m going to send it to you. I will look it back up. And because it is absolutely, 100%, the recommendation from the study was exactly what you said, go to the pain point that the company is having, their challenges that they have to achieve long-term sustainable growth. That’s where we focus 100% of your time there.

[00:19:14] Paul Gottsegen: If I can jump in there, let’s flip it around. I’m a CMO, and I’ve been, I’m a persona. I’m a target. I’m in every database. I want every list. I get all the emails. By the way, if I replied to each one, I would not have a job. I wouldn’t have any time in the day, but I get a lot of them.

[00:19:30] Paul Gottsegen: But you can learn a lot. I’ll forward it to my team. We’ll talk about different approaches people make. It is very rare when somebody does what you and I are talking about, Steve, where I look at, usually it’s an email, or I look at an email and say, “Oh, wow, they must have read our annual report and our earnings script and must have listened to a podcast I did with somebody.”

[00:19:52] Paul Gottsegen: And they, you know, it’s interesting. Usually it’s something, it’s anything. It might be a half-sentence about my latest LinkedIn post just to show, like, I saw you. It’s sort of a veneer of personalization that almost backfires, and so the voice of the customer declines. I see it as a target when I’m capturing communications coming to me.

[00:20:14] Steve MacDonald: So let me say something, have you commented further on something else you said? You said it’s the responsibility of the marketing guy or person to really be the voice of the customer, right? And Gartner has told us that. Forrester told us that. Deloitte, McKinsey, everybody’s told us that. In B2B companies, there isn’t a Chief Customer Officer.

[00:20:36] Steve MacDonald: There’s no Chief Experience Officer, which is really all about the customer, and they’ve been recommending for years that we as CMOs stand up and represent the customer. Yet we don’t go into any of our board meetings and have any of us ask, tell us what’s going on with the customer, what’s changed this year versus last year?

[00:20:59] Steve MacDonald: How are we missing the mark? What are the new challenges and the things that we need to be thinking about to hit the mark with a customer? We’re not asked that. We’re not held accountable for that, and in fact, we’ve got every other department that has every idea about what the customer needs, right?

[00:21:15] Steve MacDonald: We’ve got sales that are talking to the entire pipeline. We’ve got customer success. They’re talking to customers every day. We’ve got the Chief Product Officer. I mean, everybody is a customer expert, which leads, by the way, to the number one challenge that B2B companies have. You know what it is?

[00:21:36] Paul Gottsegen: No.

[00:21:37] Steve MacDonald: Internal alignment.

[00:21:38] Paul Gottsegen: Okay, I’ll buy that.

[00:21:40] Steve MacDonald: And we can talk about how we found that out.

[00:21:42] Paul Gottsegen: But we know this from the work we do with our clients, which actually resonates with me. Yes.

[00:21:47] Steve MacDonald: Yep. And the number one source of internal alignment is the lack of a north star. Everybody’s left to have their own opinion on what makes the most sense for them, and it’s draped, it is clouded, and it’s packaged as what’s best for the customer, but there’s no central operating system. There’s no operationalized voice of a customer that is the north star that just says, guys, this is how we align around it. So when you said that, how does the CMO take that role? How do we stand up and do that when we’re not even being asked to, even though we know we have to?

[00:22:22] Paul Gottsegen: I like the way you framed that up because, right, it’s a proactive move. We’re not being asked. You know, I learned this in my computer days. As a marketing person, I can’t do engineering work. I’m not a mechanical engineer, and I do not claim to be one. But the mechanical engineer pretended to be a marketing person and thought he could do my job. So I learned early on, yeah, I mean, everybody thinks they can do it. So, understanding the customer better than anyone else is a weapon that you use internally to build respect and build credibility. And I always viewed myself as the Chief Experience, the Chief Customer Officer. I mean, CMO is just a label, but everything you said, you have to own it and just decide this is your company. And as the CMO, you get the free, and of course, you know, maybe you have a different boss, different. I’ve always had these wonderful bosses who give me as much rope as I’ll take, and I’ll take a lot.

[00:23:15] Paul Gottsegen: When I got my first CMO role at Infosys way back in 2010, I said, “Look, put all the marketing team, they’re all embedded across the company.”

[00:23:22] Paul Gottsegen: I put all under me, the whole McGill, and it really worked out well, and it gave me a platform. But then you have to earn it. You have to not only understand the client or customer, but we also call them clients, you have to be a great evangelist. So they go, it’s the flip side of that word, marketing. So the first part was the market, understanding the pain points and the clients, and then being proactive.

[00:23:48] Paul Gottsegen: And the other side of the coin in marketing is you’re the one bringing your story to market, whether it’s a product or service. As the CMO, you need to be visible. You’ve got to be the one leading from the front, internally and externally. And people, it’s actually a tough role.

[00:24:07] Paul Gottsegen: I made every mistake in the book and got my nose bloodied. If you can survive in advance, it’s the most powerful position because you get that freedom to represent the market and then direct that to the people who are crafting the offerings, and they will respect you, but you’ve got to earn that respect.

[00:24:29] Paul Gottsegen: That is the crux of it all. It’s not just project managing and making sure the website’s fast and your SEOs. No, that’s the stuff we do with our eyes closed. You really touched on the hidden secret of a successful CMO: proactive ownership of all those roles. You talked about putting it into one.

[00:24:52] Paul Gottsegen: You’ve already done all the groundwork to be able to explain what’s happening in the market, and then you’re able to evangelize it. So that’s why the CMO is one of the toughest roles because it’s not for the faint of heart. And you’ve got to lead with your chin. And sometimes there will be bad days, I’ll make a mistake, and you just have to pick yourself up the next day and go at it again, as long as they’ll have you.

[00:25:15] Paul Gottsegen: And it’s fun. I think it’s the key leadership role in any company. I feel like it’s the key leadership role. It’s the one with the most ambiguity around it that you can grab and shape as you will.

[00:25:29] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting, there’s not going to be anybody that doesn’t buy into what we’re saying, but the difference is actually doing something about it.

[00:25:35] Steve MacDonald: And so I had a conversation with a VP of Growth and Demand Gen at an enterprise company in 40-some-odd countries across the world, and she said, “Steve, we go flying in blind a lot of the time. As we know, the challenges depend on the industry. We’ve been to all the conferences, we’ve read, and we’ve researched AI. We know the vertical that they’re in.” But you said something earlier, it’s like, “But what’s going on in that company? What do they think their challenges are?” We are all proud to be able to create our own unique go-to-market strategy. We should recognize that we have our own unique challenges, too, in what we’re trying to do, how we’re trying to do it, and how we see it, right?

[00:26:26] Steve MacDonald: And so the reason why this reminded me of our conversation here is, we think we know a lot. We get very familiar with the data, the NPS surveys and scores we receive, and the feedback from sales and customer success. And it might be controversial, but I think the conversations that we have inside of sales conversations are so important, so valuable, but also very, very limited.

[00:26:57] Steve MacDonald: When I’m being sold to, I have my cards on my chest. I’m not revealing them. I’m looking at them here, but I’m not opening up. I’m trying to figure out what I can glean from Paul as he’s selling me. And what we really need is why most CMOs, when they go into a new position, the first thing they do is start calling up, they start talking, having a conversation, non-sales conversation with customers, and like, “Tell us the real deal,” right? You know, we come out of CAB meetings, and we’re like doing high fives and belly bumps because we’re like, what we learned, we’ve got to do this more often, right? But we don’t. And we will rely on the regular business motions to feed us insights and the data that we have coming in from our tech stacks and all kinds of things.

[00:27:42] Steve MacDonald: I have a feeling I know what you’re going to say to this question. I feel like we lose the human element there. I feel like there’s a lack of connection, and therefore the conversation, the relationship, and the trust, right?

[00:27:54] Paul Gottsegen: No, it’s tricky because I’ve been tinkering with ABM technology kind of since it came out because I’ve been involved in its marketing for so long, and I bought in. I spent a lot of money. ABM is the most ambiguous acronym in marketing. Account-based marketing means different things to different people, and there’s so much interesting technology, and some of it can help out, but it doesn’t so much help you on the human side.

[00:28:18] Paul Gottsegen: It can give you some good intelligence, but no, that’s what makes it such a challenging role, because you’re just trying to get a meeting. Forget about the old days of awareness and interest and that whole thing. That’s good. It’s too convoluted now.

[00:28:35] Paul Gottsegen: I just want to get a meeting, and if I get a meeting, I want to be there with the sales team because a marketing person who’s not getting face time with clients or any direct interaction with clients, it’s sort of like you’re losing oxygen. How can you really understand the market? So you’ve got to be there and participate in the discussion.

[00:28:53] Paul Gottsegen: So let’s say I did get a meeting with you. Here’s an example. Let me give you just one little anecdote, and there was a lot around it, but we won a very large, this is years ago, at a prior company, the last company I was in. And you know how, if I’m pitching you, somewhere toward the end, I’m going to tell you about our corporate social responsibility. It’s toward the end and important, but everybody does it. It’s sort of like table stakes about how we give back. It’s really nice and really important.

[00:29:14] Paul Gottsegen: And one time, years ago, a CIO kind of stopped me in my tracks, and she said, “Paul, I get it. You guys are out trying to save the world. It’s important. Just leave it out of this conversation. It has nothing to do with this technology.” And just, you’re right.

[00:29:32] Paul Gottsegen: So then I was in a tough battle with this one client, with another competitor at this one client, and I just took a picture. Mindtree had this great program of taking very underprivileged people, who are actually in India, called rag pickers. They just go on top of piles and pick junk that they sell for pennies. And Mindtree, with such a wonderful culture, created a program, gave these people badges, uniforms, and a job, and it was about recycling. And the picture was so powerful, these seven people proudly wearing their badge and their uniform.

[00:30:13] Paul Gottsegen: And I told the story around it while this company was looking at the picture, and I found out later, I mean, it was almost a tearjerker, like it cut through. It was a human story about how everybody has a CSR program. So then I had to figure out how to tell that story after I got shot down a couple of years earlier.

[00:30:35] Paul Gottsegen: I had to tell the story in a way that created an emotional bond. There are ways to do it. At that same meeting, I memorized their mission statement because I liked it a lot. It was like a healthcare thing. And I was up there talking to them, and I rattled off their mission statement without notes and connected it to Mindtree’s.

[00:30:59] Paul Gottsegen: We won that business. Here’s the key. I really did believe there was a connection. It was no BS. People can tell. When I told the story about the rag pickers, I got a little emotional now telling you. People can tell. You have to express humanity, but you have to have humanity.

[00:31:18] Paul Gottsegen: It’s sort of like when you’re working with people. You have to care about people on your team. You have to act as if you care about them, and then you really do have to care about them. People will know.

[00:31:29] Steve MacDonald: Oh my goodness, I want to talk for two hours. But we’ve covered so much on this podcast. If there was one thing that you wanted other B2B C-suite executives, they’re going to be tuning into this conversation, the one thing that you wanted them to take away, what would that be?

[00:31:46] Paul Gottsegen: I’m just going to pivot a little bit and build on what we spoke about because I think we hit the ABM stuff well. I’ll just tell you my big secret, which is about empowerment. It’s something I’ve learned over the years, and I just kind of do the opposite of what I was trained in the early days. I don’t give any action items to my team. I don’t give any directives. I force them to think for themselves, to come up with insights, not data.

[00:32:13] Paul Gottsegen: I have a whole sort of bag of tricks of how to do this, but in the end, everybody on the team has better ideas. They work harder because they’re inspired and feel so empowered. And I really catch myself, if I ever am being a boss, I’m like an anti-boss. I want them to come into the office and feel like this is their frame.

[00:32:36] Paul Gottsegen: It might be a 10,000-person company. We’ve got 1,500 at ISG, but I want my team to feel like, no, this is my company. If I’m working for Paul and I’m running the website, if they come to me and say, “Oh, I just want to get your approval on this,” I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no.” The way to say it to me is, “I’m making this decision. I’m going 100 miles an hour. I’m letting you know. So if you want to course-correct me, Paul, fine, but I’m giving you that opportunity by just informing you.” That’s what I train them to do.

[00:32:57] Paul Gottsegen: And that empowerment, I know it sounds so old school. It is. The team blossoms and flourishes, and I’ve seen so many great case studies of people on my team. I have such an amazing coaching tree of people who used to work for me who are now in leadership positions all over the world. And that was really the key, not making any decisions for them, not giving them any action items. There might be an exception or two, but that’s kind of my big secret.

[00:33:38] Steve MacDonald: I ran a podcast for a long time in the HR industry, and so I talked to tons of CHROs, CPOs, CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, CROs as part of that, and I never really appreciated how important the culture inside of a company is. But if you just think about it really simply, high-performance teams are what create success, right? Like, we can have okay products and have phenomenal teams, and I’ll take that every day, right? And so what you created sounded like psychological safety, like they have the safety to do what they think is right. And they’re not worried about making the wrong decision because Paul’s going to come slam me with, you know. And so I’m going to restrict what I do, and I’m just going to stay within my lane.

[00:34:24] Steve MacDonald: I’m not going to innovate. I’m not going to think outside of the box, you know, but Paul’s going to let me do that. That’s so important.

[00:34:30] Paul Gottsegen: Paul’s got their back. They know.

[00:34:32] Steve MacDonald: They’ve all got their back. That’s a great point.

[00:34:35] Paul Gottsegen: That was a fun discussion.

[00:34:38] Steve MacDonald: Well, the whole mission of this podcast is to bring vastly different perspectives, ideas, experiences, and insights to do one thing. Like, I love how you just boiled ABM down to, it’s all about getting the meeting, right? So it’s like, I love that, but there’s a million different ways to do that. And if we can all share, then that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were a phenomenal part of the rising tide today. I just want to say thank you for coming on.

[00:35:05] Paul Gottsegen: Thanks for having me. I’m a subscriber. I’ve loved, I’m loving all the episodes. Keep them coming.