Episode #300: 

Casey Carey, Chief Marketing Officer at TCP Software, discusses how buyer behavior, trust, customer understanding, and AI are reshaping modern B2B growth. He explains why earning a place on the buyer’s shortlist before a purchase process begins has become critical. Casey also shares practical strategies for creating preference, improving alignment, and increasing win rates.

“That day one list is the qualifying race. The decision may be made without you. If you’re not on that day one list, your chances of winning are in the single-digit percentage.” – Casey Carey

In this episode, Casey shares how B2B organizations can improve their chances of making the day one list by investing in customer insights, preference marketing, internal alignment, and AI-powered execution. The conversation explores practical ways to build trust earlier in the buying journey and to create sustainable growth through a stronger understanding of the market.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a very interesting guest, Casey Carey. Now, Casey, this does not define you, but you’re a three-time B2B CMO. You’ve kind of been around for a little while. Part of what we’re going to talk about is taking some things we think about a lot today and looking at them through lenses we don’t always use.

[00:00:26] Steve MacDonald: And we’re going to focus on how we get on that day one list. Just to underscore that, research shows that, on average, four out of five vendors make the day-one list. And 95% of the time, buyers purchase from that list. Most often, they buy from the vendors that are number one and two on that list.

[00:00:47] Steve MacDonald: So if you’re not on that list on day one, you’re out of the game.

[00:00:52] Casey Carey: Yeah. That’s very true.

[00:00:53] Steve MacDonald: So it takes a lot to plan for and make sure that we’re part of that day one list. We’re going to break all that down. I would love to know a little bit more about your background, though.

[00:01:05] Steve MacDonald: You were part of the Peacekeeper missile program. I want to hear a little bit about that. You’re an avid beach volleyball player. I would love to hear a little bit about you and your life, and then we’ll get into the podcast.

[00:01:17] Casey Carey: Sure, absolutely. My undergraduate degree was actually in electrical engineering. I came out of college writing software and designing hardware, and went to work for a DoD defense subcontractor. One of the projects I had the pleasure of working on was the Peacekeeper missile, specifically its flight computer.

[00:01:36] Casey Carey: I’m probably dating myself a little bit because they’re not around anymore. But it was a major program under the Reagan Administration that tipped the balance of power. It has since been replaced by submarine-based missile systems. The whole idea behind the Peacekeeper was a mobile launch vehicle that was hard to target.

[00:01:54] Casey Carey: So that was a very interesting project. Obviously, there are some moral questions you have to ask yourself when you’re working on something like that. But yeah, it was much different than my day-to-day, for sure.

[00:02:05] Steve MacDonald: I’ve got a son right now who’s in school for engineering, and he’s hoping to get a job with Lockheed Martin.

[00:02:10] Steve MacDonald: So he’s been asked all those same kinds of moral questions and everything. He said, “I’m not worried about it. We have got to have the programs. It’s the people we put them in the hands of who have got to worry about the morality of that.” I thought that was a good answer.

[00:02:22] Casey Carey: It was a great answer. I’m not the one pushing the button at the end of the day. I’ve been an avid volleyball player for many years now, specifically beach volleyball. I started indoors, but then kind of transitioned to beach volleyball. I’ve built a great community of fellow volleyball players around the world, and I can kind of drop into any city and find a game.

[00:02:42] Casey Carey: And it’s awesome. One of my proudest moments in beach volleyball was when I took down a two-time gold medalist, an indoor gold medalist, while playing outdoors. But let’s just say he was not happy about losing to someone like me.

[00:02:55] Steve MacDonald: And now you get to tell that story on podcasts and things like that. Here’s what I’d love to do. There’s a new reality for the buyers we’re trying to influence. You talked about how they feel more empowered than ever before. It’s kind of like who has the cards, right? That’s in the news a lot these days.

[00:03:23] Steve MacDonald: So tell me a little bit about the empowered buyer reality as you see it and what we should be thinking about and doing as B2B vendors.

[00:03:23] Casey Carey: Yeah, sure. It’s interesting if you think about it. Almost from day one, when the World Wide Web happened, people started talking about empowered buyers. When we put up that first B2B website, it was, “Oh my God, the power has shifted. The buyer is empowered now.” So it’s been happening for a long time.

[00:03:40] Casey Carey: AI has accelerated it even more. Five years ago, buyers had Google. That was kind of their primary way to find information and use third-party information and all that stuff. Now AI has made that much simpler. I think your opening point is spot on, and it really forces us to think differently about the buyer journey.

[00:03:58] Casey Carey: On day one, they most likely have a shortlist. Research says that list is three to four vendors. It will also tell you that there’s a preferred vendor. I think it’s interesting if you think about it like F1 racing. I’m not an expert on F1 racing, but it’s a pretty cool sport.

[00:04:13] Casey Carey: There’s qualifying. There are 22 cars that race and determine their position for the start the next day. The difference for us is that there are not 22 cars in the race the next day. There are three or four. So that day one list is really the qualifying race. The decision may be made without you.

[00:04:33] Casey Carey: And to your point earlier, pole position is premium. There are some stats. I think 68% of buyers have a day-one list that includes three or four vendors. Eighty percent of the time, the preferred vendor wins the deal. Quick math says the preferred vendor wins about half the time. To the point you made earlier, if you’re not on that day one list, your chances of winning are in the single digits. So, at the end of the day, the new game is the day-one list, for sure.

[00:05:01] Steve MacDonald: Here’s where I think the gap and the opportunity really start to open up, and I would love to get your point of view on this. Getting on the day one list means you’ve got to be known and trusted before the day one list is formed, right? And you have to do it in an environment where they do not want to talk to you.

[00:05:29] Steve MacDonald: They’re waiting longer and longer to talk to the selling organization, and they’re doing more and more of their research without us. One of the things behind that, you and I were just talking about the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer, which said that among 32,000 respondents worldwide, 68% think that guys like you and me are intentionally misleading as business leaders.

[00:05:51] Steve MacDonald: That’s an unbelievable statistic, and it’s been consistent for years. It has actually been growing over the years. Trust has been in decline for decades worldwide, especially in Europe and the United States. So it’s not something we can just disregard.

[00:06:16] Steve MacDonald: I had a CRO on recently, and he said, “Steve, if I’m not talking to them a year before the RFP or before day one, then I’m out of the game.”

[00:06:16] Steve MacDonald: Here’s the question I have for you. That’s a lot of work before they’re BANT qualified, right? They’ve allocated a budget, made a decision, set a timeline, and started searching. If we’ve just established BANT qualifications, we’re already too late if we’re not on that list. We have to spend a lot of time and effort on our ABM list.

[00:06:44] Steve MacDonald: We cannot necessarily rely only on the sales team because they’re qualifying based on attainment and short-term quota. How do we organize ourselves to get on that day-one list, have the right resources to reach out, and build trust in advance? Because it’s not happening with a lot of companies.

[00:07:00] Casey Carey: No, and a lot of companies have either been unable or unwilling to make those investments because the focus has been on a three-month pipeline, clear ROI on media spend. We’ve been praying at the altar of demand and performance for a long time. We’ve kind of avoided all the stuff that comes before that.

[00:07:18] Casey Carey: That’s really the point. You cannot do that anymore. You cannot avoid making those investments and thinking about things in those terms. Your comment around the Trust Barometer is a gut-punch metric for me personally.

[00:07:30] Casey Carey: We’ve done it to ourselves. There’s plenty of marketing out there that is hyperbole. It’s often driven by VC funding. If my team ever puts something in front of me saying we’re the leading, next-generation, best-ever company, I’m like, “No, take that out.” Those are nonsense words. Nobody believes any of that.

[00:07:48] Casey Carey: Getting to the core of your question, I think there are a lot of levers we can pull to help us get on that day one list. It’s hard to say this word in B2B, but part of it is brand. It’s awareness, perception, and preference.

[00:08:01] Casey Carey: You have to invest in creating those things. A lot of people refer to it as mental availability. I know there are three or four vendors I’m not ready to buy from today, but when I am ready to buy in that space, I already know who I’m going to talk to because of my experiences over the last couple of years.

[00:08:18] Casey Carey: It could be people I’ve talked to, what I see on social media, what I’ve seen at events, conversations with peers, whatever it is. I’ve already formed an opinion about those vendors. I have no need right now whatsoever, but when I do, I know where I’m going.

[00:08:29] Casey Carey: All those things they’ve invested in to create perception and awareness will ultimately pay off for them at some point in the future. It’s a big leap of faith.

[00:08:49] Steve MacDonald: So here’s the thing. I talk to a lot of CMOs who feel like they do not have a seat at the table. They struggle with imposter syndrome. They feel like they’re only as good as their last lead. They feel like they’re viewed as one of the biggest cost centers in the business because of paid media and everything else.

[00:09:08] Steve MacDonald: What you’re talking about here is really stepping up. We’ve all been trained to be more revenue-focused. If we’re not even saying those words, we’re already 10 years behind the game. We know we need to be more pipeline-focused and more revenue-focused. We need to build relationships earlier.

[00:09:25] Steve MacDonald: We know the sales team is not going to do that. They’re going to play their role. But how do we get involved earlier? How do we add additional value to the equation?

[00:09:36] Steve MacDonald: You talked about understanding the customer and having a deep understanding of the customer. You explained it so eloquently because we all say, “Yeah, of course. We have got to do that.”

[00:09:51] Steve MacDonald: We have got to provide value. We have got to build trust. We have got to know the customer. Those can become words we just repeat until they lose meaning because we’ve heard them so many times.

[00:10:05] Steve MacDonald: But here’s the underpinning behind what you’re saying, and I want to put it into a framework. Forrester released a customer obsession study in 2024 and found that less than 3% of B2B companies were truly customer-obsessed. Less than 3%.

[00:10:28] Steve MacDonald: Yet 100% of us would say, “Yeah, we’re customer-obsessed. We’re customer-first. Of course we are.”

[00:10:28] Steve MacDonald: When you’re talking about the voice of the customer, that puts it in perspective. There is a massive opportunity and a competitive advantage in being seen as a customer-obsessed organization.

[00:10:45] Steve MacDonald: What does it mean to you to be customer-obsessed and understand the voice of the customer?

[00:10:48] Casey Carey: It’s a great question. I think one of the things I always talk to my team about is that our number one job is to be experts on the market, to understand who buys, what problems they have, why they buy, both the benefits to the company and to them personally. What are their hopes, dreams, and challenges? Then ultimately, communicate them in a way that resonates and tells them we are the best choice to help move them forward. Really starting with that audience, understanding them, and talking to them in their language. For us, a big focus is verticalization.

[00:11:24] Casey Carey: Part of being relevant, resonating, and having that emotive connection is that I am using your words. Our story matches your story. Investing the time and effort to be able to do that. We see more pipeline and higher win rates when we do that than when we use generic problem-solution messaging.

[00:11:47] Casey Carey: It’s hard to do. AI makes it much easier to do at scale now. It makes a huge difference if you can accomplish that. The thing that’s interesting about it, and I will add this, is that it tends to be a reductive exercise. The day you say, “I need to stop being everything to everybody, and I need to be very specific things to a few people,” it changes everything.

[00:12:08] Steve MacDonald: Then all of a sudden, you are not trying to carry that heavy weight across an entire TAM, and that is the goal of ABM anyway. It is, like, the sweet spot. This is where we are going after. Something you just said there about how AI really helps a lot with this. But AI is like a lot of other tools: if it is garbage in, it is garbage out. Right now, everybody has it. If you just put in your ICP, the persona, and everything, it will spit something out and say, “Okay, I would reword it this way.” Everybody has that. All your competitors have that as well.

[00:12:44] Steve MacDonald: What they do not have is a dedication to understanding the customer. In this day and age, that means dedicating time to them, asking questions, and listening. If you can take that, I had this brilliant conversation with a CEO. The gentleman spent 17 years at Accenture, and he said, “Steve, there is structured and unstructured data you want inside of AI.” He said, “Structured, that is the CRM, Excel sheets, that is your output from your NPS survey.”

[00:13:14] Steve MacDonald: All the structured data. The rest of it is unstructured data. Gong recordings are unstructured data. Podcast recordings like this are unstructured data. That unstructured data is very underrepresented because we tend to feel like we have more data than ever before.

[00:13:36] Steve MacDonald: But if you are going to do the kinds of things that you said have an impact on pipeline and revenue, about speaking in the voice of the customer so they feel like you actually get it, that means you understand them. Not just the right choice of words, but the right elements. Am I taking this away correctly? Is that what you are saying?

[00:13:58] Casey Carey: I think if you take it to its end state, you think about this idea of a synthetic persona. We have tested this, where we went out and found buyers, either existing customers, customers of our competitors, or potential buyers. We loaded in their LinkedIn profiles and basically said, “Access all public information about these people.” Bring in the Gong conversations, bring in all the data we have, and create a synthetic persona. It is essentially a live focus group.

[00:14:27] Casey Carey: Now I can test messaging, I can test ads, and I can do a lot of things with that. But if it is deep, what are the trigger events? What words should you avoid? What words should you use? All the psychographic stuff. Once you have that, which was almost impossible to do five years ago, things like survey panels and focus groups become obsolete because you have much better real-time and dynamic data that serves that purpose for you.

[00:14:56] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. What it is, I guess in the end, the way I think about it, is that what you are saying allows us to speak like an insider.

[00:15:03] Casey Carey: Yes. I love that. I love that. Yeah.

[00:15:05] Steve MacDonald: Gartner and Forrester would always say that, ultimately, as a selling organization, we have got to play the role of a trusted advisor. I would say we have the ability today to be seen more as peers, as colleagues. If we are in the middle of a conversation and we come across as so informed that we feel like an insider, it is not a bad goal to have when the peer is someone they trust.

[00:15:33] Steve MacDonald: Why would that not be our goal? To be perceived more that way. In all of our organizations, we hire peers. We should be able to do that. I am extrapolating what you are saying here because if we just say, “Yes, we have to understand the voice of the customer,” we are leaving so much on the table. We have got to be much more determined about that, all the way down to the execution.

[00:15:55] Casey Carey: Yes, I totally agree. Then the next piece is that execution. How do you establish that you actually understand them at that level?

[00:16:02] Casey Carey: It is working and mapping content to the buying journey.

[00:16:05] Casey Carey: What questions do they have? What problems or challenges are they trying to solve? How do you help take them down that journey in a way that, to your point, shows that you understand them and that you are an insider? It is like they basically look at it and go, “Yeah, that is me. Okay. I am in. Tell me more.”

[00:16:22] Casey Carey: If we can achieve that, that is when the magic really happens. Because ultimately, when you get to the end, they are like, “Oh my God, they were so helpful. They understand me. They are super valuable. They have great solutions.” People talk well about them. They are on the list, and they may actually be in the pole position.

[00:16:39] Steve MacDonald: Here is what is interesting, too, as I am thinking about this and the uses of AI. There is a thing nobody talks about: insight decay. The last time you went into a CAB meeting, coming out of a customer advisory board meeting, we were all doing high fives and belly bumps because we were like, “Oh, we have got to do this more often.” You are thinking, “Oh my God, the things that I just learned there.”

[00:17:15] Steve MacDonald: Then you go and tell your team. Maybe it makes it into the sales team meeting. It ends up as two points in a PowerPoint deck somewhere. You talk about it at the next board meeting, and all of a sudden, you are excited.

[00:17:15] Steve MacDonald: A month later, maybe you remember it. Three months later, nobody remembers it. Six months later, the CRO is no longer working at the company, so he no longer remembers it. Twelve months later, half the sales staff is different, and so is the marketing staff. AI can take all this unstructured data, never forget it, utilize it, and democratize it so that literally any team member who comes in at any point in time has access to it. It is overseeing what they are doing and producing things automatically. It does not forget. It does not let anything decay like that.

[00:17:54] Casey Carey: Yeah, I think it is an interesting point. As humans, we overvalue recency. I see it happen all the time. Someone says something on a call with a customer, and it becomes the new thing. There is no notion of frequency, like how often that is actually said. This one data point is now the best thing ever. I think your point is right about AI. It can help rationalize that and maybe offset some of our own unconscious biases when we do things like that. The question would be, “That is awesome. How many other customers is that important to? How many are talking about it, and how is that strategically important to us?” Really analyzing that whole thing to say, “Okay, yes, this is a winning idea. Let us go.”

[00:18:35] Steve MacDonald: Yep. Maybe that was a phenomenal idea, but it was said twice in the last six months, whereas these things were mentioned eight times. I was talking to a gentleman who was a Chief Strategy Officer, a Chief Growth Officer, and a Chief Commercial Officer, and he said, “We tend to stop at the shiny object, the thing that we think is the most important, and then we do not go any farther.”

[00:18:59] Steve MacDonald: We are like, “Oh, we dive in and we have got solutions for that.” He said, “But every pain point and every challenge has four or five surrounding elements that we need to dig into and understand.” What this does, what you are talking about here, is using AI to not forget that.

[00:19:18] Steve MacDonald: To not just focus on the one most recent thing, the shiny object, but in the end, what are the things that are most important that we have got to take care of? Whether we are designing onboarding for a new client, designing a demand generation campaign, or designing the next sales proposal. How does it meet those needs? How does it talk to them like an insider? How do we make sure it covers the points we know it really needs to, not just the ones we assume because they align best with our product roadmap?

[00:19:50] Casey Carey: Yeah, and I think the really important thing is that AI helps us make that happen. In the past, it would be me giving sales some materials. They may or may not use them. Ultimately, the consistency and quality decay as it moves away from whoever initially owned it, whether that is marketing or somebody else. Now, if we apply AI at the end, at the delivery point, and say, “Here is all the context and reference material. Make sure it is represented,” we can have much higher quality and much more consistency in those communications. Whether it is emails, proposals, demos, or whatever else has those engagement points, we can bring that knowledge to bear.

[00:20:31] Steve MacDonald: So I want to ask you something about this. When you and I first talked, we discussed what we wanted to cover. I asked you a question. I said, “What are the two greatest challenges you see to creating long-term sustainable growth?” I’ve asked that question of just over 100 guests, and the number one challenge that came up was internal alignment. It is the number one challenge to creating long-term sustainable growth.

[00:20:57] Steve MacDonald: The second one was what you’re talking about right now, a lack of deep understanding of the voice of the customer. Third was trust, internal and external. What was interesting was that the entire top 10 was internally focused. The answer was 100% internal, or step one was an internal solution that then went external.

[00:21:23] Steve MacDonald: What it said is we’re our own biggest problems. We’re our own biggest challenges. I was talking to this woman, a CMO who is now a consultant at a company, and she just does go-to-market strategies for mid-market B2B companies. She said that over 70% of the time, it’s all about internal alignment.

[00:21:43] Steve MacDonald: They’re saying it’s this. They’re saying it’s the quota system. They’re saying it’s the competitor that just launched something. They’re saying, they’re saying, they’re saying. She said that the voice of the customer was the number-one driver of change management and internal alignment within the organization. In other words, nobody argues with the voice of the customer. So here’s my question. Who’s in charge? Who owns the voice of the customer?

[00:22:09] Casey Carey: Yeah, that’s a hard question. But I think it makes sense. If you think about startups, they always seem to do a really good job of representing their buying group. They understand them. Usually, they came out of that space. They know how to talk to them. They’re super aligned, and it works great. You get to be a $150 million or $250 million company, you’ve got multiple segments, multiple personas, multiple products, and all that gets diluted and lost. You no longer have that close connection to the customer or the way you bring it in.

It’s a great question. I think, ultimately, the CMO and the marketing team have to force alignment. That’s probably our job number one. I see way too many marketing teams off doing their own thing, and that’s a career-limiting move at some point.

[00:22:51] Casey Carey: I think we talked about this. It starts with the ICP and the TAM, who you’re selling to, what problems you solve, and product-market fit, making sure there’s alignment on those. I still experience every day where somebody says, “Oh, I need a bunch of materials for manufacturing.” And I’m like, “That’s not on the list.” That means there are no decks, there are no case studies, there are no shows, there are no ad campaigns. It’s like, “Sorry.” I do not know who told you.

[00:23:20] Steve MacDonald: We’ll just create that. We’ll ask AI, and we’ll just create a whole bunch of stuff for you. Sure.

[00:23:25] Casey Carey: Yeah.

[00:23:25] Steve MacDonald: Yeah.

[00:23:26] Casey Carey: It becomes, in some ways, a master class in saying no. But I literally have the air cover conceptually because we’re aligned. Then I’ve got to go back and make sure we’re still aligned at the highest levels and let the chips fall where they may.

[00:23:42] Casey Carey: The thing I think we talked about, which is interesting, is that sales teams hate reductive exercises. We have a short list of ICPs. We have a short list of personas. We have right-to-win markets, and we’re going to go deep there and win as much as possible.

[00:23:55] Casey Carey: They hate that. They want the aperture to be as big as possible. I think it was Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm who talked a lot about the number one way companies fail: trying to be all things to everybody and refusing to focus. He talks a lot about the bowling pin analogy and all that stuff. But yes, the more focus you have, the more you’ll win, which gives you permission to open the aperture a little more and go after more. But you’ve got to go through that process. I think, for a lot of companies, it’s hard. Ultimately, it’s a leadership problem. It’s a leadership challenge.

[00:24:29] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting. For years, the Gartners and the Forresters of the world have been saying, “CMOs, you’ve got to play the role of the chief customer officer. You’ve got to be the voice of the customer because nobody else is picking up that mantle.” Then I always think back to all the CMOs I talk to who don’t feel they have a seat at the table. They feel like they’re only as good as their last lead. I’m like, “Well, your seat at the table is representing the customer.”

[00:24:55] Steve MacDonald: You represent the highest voice of authority in the business. You should be the most important seat at that table in the executive room. It changes the mentality of how we look at this. But it also means we’ve got to be very intentional about not just looking at surveys and not just listening to Gong conversations.

[00:25:17] Steve MacDonald: Inside a Gong conversation, somebody is being pitched. Somebody has their cards close to their chest, and they’re wondering what they can learn from you. They’re not there to open up. It is not that it cannot happen. Things can happen in sales conversations. But you would never say, “I’m going to run a voice of the customer program through a commercial sales operation.”

[00:25:36] Steve MacDonald: You would laugh at yourself and say, “What a terrible idea.” But we rely on it. Sometimes, that is one of the biggest ways we get feedback on the voice of the customer. What you really brought to light here today is that we cannot give lip service to this. If we’re going to get on a day-one list, we’ve got to be early, we’ve got to be trusted, which means we’ve got to be seen as a peer, we’ve got to be seen as an insider. We’ve got to do the things necessary to make that happen. We’ve got to put in the time and effort to do that.

[00:26:03] Casey Carey: Yeah. And you cannot do it if you do not understand the market or your customers. That’s what’s required.

I’ll share a hack with everyone that really works for me. Whether it’s in a QBR, a board presentation, or any high-stakes presentation, I always include an executive summary slide before I dive into the details. I always share at least one customer insight in the executive summary, something that no one else knows. I do that very intentionally, and I think it ultimately establishes the credibility for everything else you have to say.

[00:26:35] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. You’re like, “What else does Casey know?”

[00:26:38] Casey Carey: Yeah. Exactly. It is hard. It takes some work, but it’s a good forcing function to make sure you make that important.

[00:26:45] Steve MacDonald: So we’ve covered a ton of territory here. If there was one thing out of everything we’ve talked about, the most important thing you want the other C-suite executives who are going to be consuming this podcast to take away from the conversation, what would you want that to be?

[00:27:01] Casey Carey: I would say this is interesting. I’ve been talking about and using different terms. Initially, I started talking about pre-purchase preference four or five years ago, and I used it not to talk about brand but to discuss adding strategies beyond demand capture. Why is this important? It’s been interesting to see the evolution. John Miller and Sydney Sloan, at the Forrester Summit, are now starting to talk about preference marketing. This whole idea of creating preference, pre-purchase preference. I think it’s really starting to catch on as a concept within B2B marketing.

[00:27:38] Casey Carey: I would recommend and highly encourage everyone to think about what that means to you. It means different things to different people. There are probably four or five levers you can pull and really start to invest in to create that. You also have to understand the metrics that represent that success. Unfortunately, nobody is going to tell us where we’re ranked on day one. We’re not going to know. I would love it if our sales team would ask that question. They will probably not get a true answer, but still. I would love to go to the board and say, “Yeah, we’re ranked 2.4 on average in every deal we’re in,” but we’re not going to have that.

[00:28:13] Steve MacDonald: That would be phenomenal to know, wouldn’t it?

[00:28:15] Casey Carey: Yeah, it would be phenomenal. But I think the easy one is that it’s just getting more at-bats. If you’re doing that work, you will get more at-bats because you’re on more lists. Then you can start looking at win rates, and everything should flow from there. Really, it’s a way to grow your pipeline and increase the efficiency of everything you do, ultimately driving outcomes.

[00:28:38] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. I love it. That’s my big takeaway. Focus on preference marketing because that kind of summarizes it all at once. I actually love that. The mission of the podcast is to take everybody’s perspectives, all C-suite executives from across the C-suite, from all over the world, all B2B, and ask what we have learned.

[00:29:00] Steve MacDonald: What are we doing differently? We all know that the game is changing underneath our feet as we speak. We are on quicksand, trying to figure this out. If we can keep in touch with each other and learn how we’re all thinking about managing in this new world, then it’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. This was a great conversation. You were an amazing part of that rising tide today, and I just wanted to say thank you for coming on the podcast.

[00:29:26] Casey Carey: Oh, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. It’s been a pleasure.