Episode #313:
Bettina Isabelle Berntsen, Chief Marketing Officer at SuperOffice, explains how customer obsession becomes a measurable growth strategy when it drives every business decision. She shares how combining customer insight, market research, and internal alignment strengthened positioning, increased pipeline, and improved deal quality. The result is a practical framework that connects customer trust directly to sustainable revenue growth. It demonstrates why customer obsession must become an operating model rather than a marketing initiative.
“The one most important thing is not to say that you’re customer-obsessed, but make sure that you truly are in how you’re building your GTM strategy and function.” – Bettina Isabelle Berntsen
Discover how customer evidence, cross-functional alignment, strategic brand investment, and continuous market learning create measurable business outcomes. Bettina shares practical lessons on strengthening positioning, improving deal quality, increasing pipeline, and building long-term trust, giving B2B leaders a proven framework for sustainable revenue growth driven by genuine customer obsession.
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[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and we have the continuation of a very special series on the revenue logic of customer obsession. We have with us Bettina Isabelle Berntsen. And Bettina, you’re not only a three-time B2B CMO; you’ve spent your whole career in B2B and in tech, but you also have, very much, and have been hired for this, a focus not only on lead generation, everything marketing is supposed to do on that front, but all the way through outcomes, right? Not just pipeline focus, but actually, how do we land deals? How do we keep deals? How do we focus on things like NRR?
[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: These are really important things that, as marketers, we’re being asked to think about. But not all of us do in the way that our CEOs, our CFOs, or the board wants us to. That can be a really important part of our conversation. But what’s interesting is you’re a living case study of customer obsession. You doubled down on it, and you’re now reaping the benefits. You’re actually seeing the impact on the pipeline and outcomes. So this is a mini case study on the revenue logic of customer obsession. I’m really excited to get going here. But what I’d love to do is give you an opportunity to expand a little bit more on your background and what I didn’t cover before we get started.
[00:01:25] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on, Steve. It’s really great to be here and hopefully share some insights for the audience. I work as CMO at SuperOffice. It’s a CRM company, and we’re on a mission to become Europe’s most loved CRM. I would say we are quite well on our way to getting there.
[00:01:44] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: As you say, we work across the whole customer journey, or as we say at SuperOffice, the relationship loop, all the way from finding them to keeping the customers and having them become advocates.
[00:01:58] Steve MacDonald: So what I love is that not only are you a big believer as a CMO in this, but as a CRM company, understanding the customer journey, tracking the customers, the conversations, what’s happening there, and the data that you collect and help us as CMOs or C-suite executives in B2B companies with is so important. So I just wanted to say that. That’s another reason why I’m excited to talk about it.
[00:02:21] Steve MacDonald: But here’s what I’d love to do. I would love to hear your philosophy on how you connect revenue. What is the revenue logic, in your mind, behind customer obsession? How does customer obsession impact the growth and revenue of the business?
[00:02:39] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yeah. You know, I think that’s a big question, but a really important one. For me, it’s definitely not just believing your own assumptions, but truly using the data you have at hand, while also going out to seek the truth among the customers that you are selling to and among the Ideal Customer Profile, so that you always take your outset in the customer’s wants and needs and not just assume what they want at any given point in time. That’s integrated not only in marketing, but also in how we do product development, how we develop our sales methodology, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:03:17] Steve MacDonald: At one level, I hear what you’re saying, and I’m thinking, “Absolutely, 100%,” right? On the other level, that’s what we learned in Marketing 101 when we were in school, right?
[00:03:27] Steve MacDonald: Why is it so important? And to underscore this, I ask everybody who comes onto the podcast, and we have a whole conversation in advance. I always start it out by saying, “What do you think are the two greatest challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth?” Right? And a lack of deep understanding of the voice of the customer is number two, behind internal alignment. Everyone agrees that the voice of the customer is the number one way to get that internal alignment.
[00:03:53] Steve MacDonald: And so when you and I were talking before on the prep call, you said that the voice of the buyer, gaining those insights, but not just giving it lip service, right? Gaining the insights proactively, not just relying on what happens in the commercial process of the go-to-market strategy and saying, “What do we hear? Let’s listen and see what we can do with it.”
[00:04:18] Steve MacDonald: But you actually are very proactive with it. Why are those insights so important? And why is being so proactive about getting them important when we have customer success talking to customers, and we have sales talking to customers all the time? What is your viewpoint on that?
[00:04:35] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yeah. I think having, like you say, sales reps speaking to the customer every day, having customer success, and having support speaking to customers every day.
[00:04:44] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: The results of those insights are very important. It kind of enables you to keep a finger on the pulse. But I also believe that you have to look at it in the bigger picture because, for example, in a sales rep call, you are discussing maybe contracts or more short-term things, like how onboarding is going, et cetera.
[00:05:05] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: But when we build the GTM strategy and the plan for this year, for next year, and beyond, it’s also about understanding the big picture. What is our Ideal Customer Profile? What are they worried about? How are they planning for growth in the coming years?
[00:05:22] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: How are they feeling and thinking about AI? Should we become the AI-first CRM, or should we become the CRM that our ICP really wants and needs, where they have certain AI capabilities that help them solve really concrete challenges? And that’s just one example of how we combine the voice of the customer in our daily work with quite extensive market research within the ICP, talking to those who are not customers today but whom we want to become customers. Then we truly tailor the GTM to that because then we also know we’re addressing the pains and the opportunities that the customers want to grasp.
[00:06:04] Steve MacDonald: So to accentuate what you’re talking about here, McKinsey did a study a few years back, and they found that only 15% of companies actually use the voice of the customer in their strategic decision-making process, you know? So what you’re doing is not something that’s just the basics. You’re not relying on what’s just there and easy to grab. Even taking transcripts from sales conversations is hugely important. Customer success conversations are hugely important. Doing the market research, right? I think McKinsey, in a different study, said that 90% of the data we have is unstructured. It’s conversational data.
[00:06:45] Steve MacDonald: But it’s about bringing that together, spanning across fragmented silos of information, and making sure that you’re doing your own primary research and talking to customers. That’s what I took away. If you could, just before we go too much farther, and I don’t want you to release any numbers or anything, but I said up front that you’re a good case study, that you’re actually seeing it hit the pipeline.
[00:07:10] Steve MacDonald: You’re seeing outcomes happen. Without the numbers or anything, can you tell us a little bit about what you’re seeing and why the rest of the company is so excited, and why the board is excited about what you’re doing?
[00:07:23] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yes, definitely. So one of the key things that we did across the company was when we laid out and created our new growth strategy, our next journey, and we’re in it right now.
[00:07:34] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: We aligned on what our KPIs would be that tell us if we are on the right path. And of course, one of them is, okay, what’s pipeline? How is ARR growth, et cetera? But we were equally interested in understanding how PNPS and RNPS are increasing. Is it increasing? Or, let’s say, if it’s a month where it’s stagnating, okay, why is that? We need to go back. We need to look.
[00:08:02] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: But what’s interesting to see from that perspective is that it has increased consistently over time. That’s because we truly bring in the customers when it comes to listening. How is the relationship going? How are we maintaining and building our relationship?
[00:08:16] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: How are you liking the product? Are we prioritizing the right things? Then, from a marketing point of view, what we’re seeing is that not only have we been able to create more pipeline within new business over the two years that I’ve been at SuperOffice, year over year, but we’ve also been able to increase the deal size and increase where in the ICP we are winning.
[00:08:40] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: So that tells me that, okay, we have done some really great things that are showing in the outcomes, and that we are on the right path. You know, without disclosing numbers, I think that’s also telling the truth that we made some good decisions, and we’ve also stuck by them.
[00:08:56] Steve MacDonald: So I have to ask, because nothing like that ever happens. And you used the word aligned in what you were just saying there. Unless the entire company, the C-suite, the C-suite with the board, everybody is aligned, right? And that’s really difficult to do, just like listening to the Voice of the Customer, right?
[00:09:17] Steve MacDonald: And it’s actually the number one challenge, not only in my own survey of C-suite executives, but I talk to go-to-market consultants and partners in those consulting companies that deal with hundreds of companies, and they said, “That’s always the first place we look,” right? But you talk very positively about how you were able to align, and it wasn’t pulling teeth, right? And that the Voice of the Customer was a really important part of that. Can you tell me a little bit about what happened internally and why it went so well on alignment?
[00:09:50] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yeah, definitely. And before I do that, I think just sharing, you know, one of my greatest learnings within this topic is assuming that everyone outside your function either doesn’t care about what you do or should understand what we’re doing because, you know, it’s really important and we have a good plan.
[00:10:08] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: So, taking a step back and prioritizing both time and capacity to ensure that you bring your peers with you and explain the why. Why are we doing it, and why are we doing it this way? So truly prioritizing that has been such an important learning, but also an important priority to make.
[00:10:29] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: But then, to answer your question, why it hasn’t been hard to convince people to get on board with the path and the strategy that we have is that we took our outset in the Voice of the Customer, and not just, you know, transcript calls or our own CRM data. We combined all of that with market research, where those we want to sell to also told us, “Yeah, this is how we are buying CRM systems. This is the type of functionality that we want. This is what’s most important to us. This is how we believe we should grow in the future, and these are some of our greatest challenges,” et cetera. Then, combining all of these things into one is the strategy itself, as well as the internal narrative you keep repeating to your colleagues to explain the why.
[00:11:18] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Why are we doing it this way and not that way, or jumping on every single trend? No, it’s because this is what the market has told us. This is what our current customers have told us. And this is what our own data tells us. In combination, this is the path that we should go down. At least in my experience, that has resonated very well with the organization.
[00:11:39] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: In our prep call, we also discussed positioning, and we did a big project last year where we refined our positioning. We didn’t do a full rebrand because we learned that wasn’t necessary. It was necessary that we do something. We became clearer and had a stronger position. Who are we, and who are we for, and what are we solving for?
[00:11:59] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: And also, to again take our outset in the Voice of the Customer, the voice of the market, and the ICP that we’re serving made it so much easier to bring everyone on board, and also to ask for people’s thoughts, opinions, and perspectives. If they weren’t met, they understood why. There’s a group of customers and ICP prospects over here that tells us this, and that’s what we need to move towards.
[00:12:24] Steve MacDonald: In one of our previous conversations, you said something that really stood out to me. You said you actually have sales, a lot of the time, coming to you and asking, “How do we…” I forgot how you phrased it: learn more or understand better. Instead of pushing something on different departments, you actually invoked curiosity. People wanted to learn more because they wanted to be able to serve the client better. I’m not articulating it well. How would you articulate what actually happened in that interdepartmental kind of interaction?
[00:12:57] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yeah. So, how we came to create a strategy, create the plan, is definitely through internal involvement. So it’s not just something we create in marketing, and then it’s like, “Here, you have to go spread the word. This is great. We know it. You might not, but, you know, it’s great.” I think internal involvement, and of course being very close to sales to understand what their challenges are, what they are hearing every day, and also pick up on some of the trends that we’re seeing from them.
[00:13:25] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: But then combining that again with, okay, we know right now in Europe, for example, that European-hosted software is super important. Local regulations are super important. How to adopt AI, and just how to grasp that opportunity in a compliant and good way, is super important. When we then create content around that, and we have product launches and how we position, I just feel it resonates very well with what they are hearing in customer calls. In that way, we’re able to, what do you say, piggyback on each other. Sales, they really want to engage with the assets we create. They use them not only on LinkedIn but in customer conversations, when they are doing BDR outreach, cold calling, or working with signals. I think we’ve managed to create a good, truly good marketing and sales alignment, and I know that’s quite rare.
[00:14:19] Steve MacDonald: Uh, very rare. And here’s the underlying current that I’m hearing under this. The third challenge, in response to the question, “What are your top two challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth?” was building internal and external trust. What I was just hearing, by taking the Voice of the Customer, working with and involving the different departments, understanding what they’re hearing from the customer, what you’re hearing from the customer, what our internal objectives are, and what their objectives are.
[00:14:48] Steve MacDonald: But working together to arrive at a final decision in terms of, okay, here is how we’re going to move forward. Here is our unique go-to-market strategy. That meant you built trust internally. You didn’t just come up with it from on high and say, “Hey, everybody, here’s what it’s all about.” Which I think a lot of departments feel like happens a lot of the time, and they don’t feel involved.
[00:15:14] Steve MacDonald: Do you feel like building that trust internally was well worth the time and effort? Because you’ve got a lot. You’re a Chief Marketing Officer. There’s no lack of things for you to do. But it seemed like that rose pretty high on the priority list. Was it worth it?
[00:15:28] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yes. Yes, it was. Uh, yeah, it was so worth it to take the time not only to do the work, but also to understand and do the discovery first. What is it that my peers in other functions might not understand about what we’re doing? What are they skeptical about, or what do they believe is right? Truly curious to understand that. And I also think then not just speaking to the sales directors, or the CCO, or country directors, but what I did was like, “Hey, we’re coming to all of you, all markets, all employees, and we want to explain and put this forward with language that is common for all.” No CTR, or SOV, or MQLs, but in plain language. Why are we doing what we’re doing, and what’s the plan, and what do we need from you, and what do you think about it?
[00:16:26] Steve MacDonald: So here’s another area that is typically very hard, that marketing has to think a lot about. Long-term focus, as well as short-term pipeline attainment. Typically, the sales team is going to be more focused on the short term because there’s, like, a quota, right? When we go into the board meetings, it’s usually all about, “Hey, what does this quarter look like? What’s next quarter looking like?” It’s not, “Hey, Bettina, how’s that long-term brand-building process going and building trust with our customers? Tell us about that,” right?
[00:16:54] Steve MacDonald: It’s important. We know it, even if we’re not really being held accountable to it. How did you bridge that gap internally? The last thing I’ll say here is, I had on, about a year and a half ago, a CMO, a three-time CMO as well, and she said, “The way that I think about it is that today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand.”
[00:17:14] Steve MacDonald: You can’t have the demand short term today if you’re not seeding the demand and building the awareness and the trust in the marketplace. How do you think about bridging the two, long-term and short-term objectives, and how do you do it in a way that everybody buys in internally?
[00:17:29] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yeah, that’s a big one, and I think, as you say, it’s a challenge for any CMO. But again, taking the outset in the customer voice, understanding that two years ago, it wasn’t super clear who we were, who we were for, and why should our ICP look to us first?
[00:17:46] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Why should we be on their day one list, for example? But understanding that, and then clarifying and strengthening the positioning, strengthening our own narrative, and uniting around one common story that not only marketing tells but everyone in the company tells. We’re not telling 100 different stories. But that’s the theoretical work, and then you need to put it into practice. I think finding, or striking, that balance between capturing demand and generating demand with the brand is tricky. I also think it shifts. It’s not a constant.
[00:18:23] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: But what I’ve found that has been useful, one thing is to clarify the positioning and the brand and the narrative and everything, but also finding ways to experiment because you might have a hypothesis. If you’re asking for X million dollars to test it in a small SMB or small SaaS company, for example, it’s not an immediate yes.
[00:18:44] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: But then finding some ways where you could say, “Okay, we could experiment with this, and we need to do it over time to see if we can get some indications that we’re on the right track,” and we did that. We chose one of our core markets here in Europe. We singled it out, worked really closely with the country management and the sales teams. And we said, “Hey, if we want to become more known to the ICP in this market, and we have X budget to test it, we have some KPIs that can give us an indication. We need to figure out exactly which audience we want to be on the day one list for tomorrow, and in the months and the years to come.”
[00:19:28] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: We did that, and after we ended the experiment, and you know, it’s brand, so it’s still going on. But after we had said, “Okay, after X time, we will evaluate,” the results were through the roof. They were mind-blowing. I was like, okay, this is crazy because from a brand awareness and top-of-mind point of view, it’s not necessarily translating into pipeline right away.
[00:19:53] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: But in addition to exceeding the brand KPIs that we had set, we could see an immediate correlation also on pipeline generation from the channels where we were running this experiment. So that told us that, okay, not only are we more visible and more top of mind to the target audience that we want to be in front of, but we have now effectively also increased our pool of companies that we can capture demand from.
[00:20:22] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: And that’s the thing. Balancing the creation of the pool of audience and then efficiently capturing it is so important. And then showing that experiment, with the results, to the organization, to the board, and to the management team, the conversation is much different than saying, “I believe we should invest in brand because I know it’s important, and it does take time,” et cetera. But those were great, great learnings to have for a very fruitful conversation around the next steps.
[00:20:54] Steve MacDonald: We hear reports like 6sense saying the day one shortlist that you talked about there is, on average, four to five vendors. It gets locked on day one. And 95% of the time, the vendor that wins the deal is on that shortlist. So if you’re not on the shortlist, you’re out. What you just proved is that spending the time and the resources to build awareness and trust in advance of day one has direct pipeline implications.
[00:21:28] Steve MacDonald: If I could take our whole conversation, building that awareness and trust was founded on your understanding of the voice of the customer and what they truly needed. It wasn’t just about building awareness and trust. It was done this way. So if I put our entire conversation together, is that the revenue logic of customer obsession, end-to-end?
[00:21:55] Steve MacDonald: I have never had it explained so succinctly, especially with your own test data that proved the correlation between using the voice of the customer, building brand, and doing the work in advance. I hear all the time, I had a four-time B2B CMO say, “Steve,” no CRO, and he said, “Steve, if we’re not out talking to them a year in advance, we’ve lost the deal.”
[00:22:24] Steve MacDonald: By the time we start to see the intent signals and they issue an RFP, they know who’s on their shortlist. If we get included at that point, we’re the spoiler that’s there to be able to say, “These guys can do it at this price, and they do this,” but they’re not really considering us.
[00:22:38] Steve MacDonald: So doing the work in advance, connecting, and there’s a lot that’s been written lately on the rise of the brand. If you break it down to the very basics, brands are trust marks. What we’re really saying is, how do we develop awareness and trust in our brand in advance of them really making their decision? Because if we’re not in that set where they know and trust us, we’re out.
[00:23:03] Steve MacDonald: So I just wanted to say thank you for being very eloquent about that. What am I missing? Did I miss a component of that? In this equation of the revenue logic of customer obsession, what haven’t I asked? What haven’t we talked about, or did we talk about it all? Are we leaving anything out?
[00:23:20] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: No, I think we’ve definitely touched upon the most important things. One of the things that could be interesting to hear, also from other perspectives, is in this AI era. We’ve talked a little bit about trust, building trust, and also the consistency and the continuation of that conversation. Also, from the revenue logic perspective, it could be really interesting to hear.
[00:23:42] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: And I guess one of the final things for me as well is building trust with the customer, truly listening to the customers when you build your GTM and the strategy and everything. But we have also seen, from a product and customer experience perspective, that we were recently awarded top CRM in the Nordics on G2 by our customers.
[00:24:04] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: So that’s just another testament that tells me that, okay, we are doing the right things because at the end of the day, our customers are noticing and are also taking the time to tell us. I think, yeah, that’s also a valuable thing in this attention economy.
[00:24:19] Steve MacDonald: So I’m going to ask you the toughest question so far, which is this. We’ve covered a lot of territory here, but if there was one thing that you wanted your C-suite peer community to take away from our conversation, what’s that one most important thing?
[00:24:41] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: That’s a difficult one. The one most important thing is not to say that you’re customer-obsessed, but make sure that you truly are in how you’re building your GTM strategy and function.
[00:24:57] Steve MacDonald: I love it. It’s easier to say you’re customer-obsessed than to be customer-obsessed. “Don’t believe what I say, but what I do,” right? Let our actions prove it. Every single one of us would say we’re customer-obsessed, we’re customer-driven. But it really is the rare few. And to accentuate your point there, when Forrester did a customer obsession study a couple of years ago, they found that only 3% of companies were actually customer obsessed. But the ones that were had 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and much better, 51% better, customer retention.
[00:25:40] Steve MacDonald: Everything you’re saying here is validated by the outside world, by the leading analysts in the world who focus on our industry. The revenue logic of customer obsession: you live it, you feel it, you prove it. And it’s only substantiated by the analysts who spend their lives analyzing our entire industry and all the companies within it.
[00:26:02] Steve MacDonald: I just wanted to say that the mission of this podcast is to bring different, unique perspectives together in a way that we can really understand, take notes, and have action steps afterward. If we can do that, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were truly amazing at it today. I just want to say thank you for coming on.
[00:26:21] Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Thank you so much for having me, Steve. It was a really good conversation.