Episode #315: 

Gregory Banning, Chief Revenue Officer at Rithum, explains why customer obsession is the foundation of sustainable revenue growth. He shares how internal alignment, company culture, and customer feedback systems help organizations stay focused on what truly matters. Gregory also reveals why leaders should regularly pause and audit whether the customer remains at the center of every decision.

“Are customers interested in engaging you, talking to you, and then ultimately partnering with you? This isn’t about us. We don’t exist if the client isn’t served, if the client isn’t gaining value, if we’re not going to where the client wants to be” – Gregory Banning

In this conversation, Gregory shares why customer obsession is much more than a business philosophy. It is a practical framework for driving revenue growth and building long-term relationships. He explains how internal alignment, employee engagement, and deliberate customer feedback systems help organizations stay focused on what matters most. Gregory also offers leaders a simple but powerful reminder to pause regularly and ensure every decision still serves the customer.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. And today we’ve got a really interesting guest, Greg Banning. Now, Greg, you are a CRO at Rithum, and I want you to tell us a little bit more about that leading e-commerce platform. So I want to learn a lot more about that before we get in here because you head up sales globally, and everything under the sun, revenue, sales, whether it’s RevOps or sales engineering, reports up to you globally.

[00:00:35] Steve MacDonald: You’ve got a really demanding job, and one of the things that was just interesting when you and I were talking about just your background, one of the things that we talked a lot about was that at age 18, you were thrown into a sales position because you needed the money to help support your family.

[00:00:55] Steve MacDonald: Where other kids were going off to college at major universities and everything, you were helping support your family. What I loved about that is how much it shows about your character, right? But also, there’s no way you get to be the CRO of a major global enterprise without knowing how to overcome obstacles and hardships. It just, yeah, it’s just not going to happen, right? Yeah.

[00:01:18] Steve MacDonald: So I would love to hear from your perspective a little bit more about what you’re doing right now, a little bit more about your background before we dive in because we’re going to start talking about revenue in a big way, actually the revenue logic of customer obsession and what that means for us today as we’re planning and strategizing and growing our companies. What do we do? What does that mean? How do we take new insights and advice from you? But first, I’d love to hear a little bit more about your background.

[00:01:47] Gregory Banning: Sure. Sure, Steve. First off, thanks for having me on the podcast. Really appreciate it. You’ve built an amazing platform over the past few years, and I couldn’t be more privileged to be here with your audience. Thank you for that. Yeah, so, yeah, I head up as Chief Revenue Officer globally for Rithum. Rithum is one of your leading enterprise commerce companies. So really, what we do is we help brands, channels, and marketplaces come to life in commerce worldwide. So that’s connecting companies and consumers on commerce platforms, things like marketplaces, like Amazon, for example, throughout the world.

[00:02:27] Gregory Banning: We’ve been doing this for almost 30 years. Very sizable, very well respected in the enterprise space. We are not going to mention any names, but select your Fortune 100, and in some way, shape, or form, we are either partners or they’re a client of ours today. So that’s a little bit just on the Rithum background. So that’s what I do today. And yeah.

[00:02:50] Steve MacDonald: So I would love to just start out broad and then dig deeper. And the idea of the topic here, the revenue logic of customer obsession, it sounds very provocative. When you think of the revenue logic of customer obsession, what comes to mind? What’s important to you, heading up revenue globally for the company?

[00:03:15] Gregory Banning: Sure. It’s overused terminology, but voice of the customer, really. How hard we run today in the business world, just period overall, but in the business world, I like to say you’re either unemployed or overemployed today. We have a lot coming at us. I get asked all the time, “Hey,” in sales. I get your folks just starting out in sales careers, or younger in their leadership careers, saying, “Greg, what’s the number one skill set I should focus on or work on?” And I’m like, “Geez, get your time management down. Get your priorities down, your organization down. And if you happen to be in sales, make sure that’s focused on the client, the customer.”

[00:03:49] Gregory Banning: I spent the entire week in Dallas with our executive leadership team planning for the second half of the year and the start of FY ’27. I wish I had a picture I could share. I don’t think anybody took a picture, but our CEO, Lou Keyes, took a bright orange chair from our lobby area, brought it into our executive boardroom, and placed it at the head of the table to represent the customer as we went through our strategy and planning. And the purpose of that is that we recognize here at Rithum that we can get sidetracked. We can get easily distracted by all the noise and the fluidity of the marketplace. AI, right? The exponential growth of AI and what that represents and what that means. The expectation of investors, the marketplace itself, competition, et cetera.

[00:04:42] Gregory Banning: It’s super easy to forget about the customer, the client. Not that you ever want to, and you believe intrinsically that you’re keeping them at the center. But when you’re chasing after profits, when you’re fending off competition, when you’re trying to be innovative and not only just survive but thrive in the marketplace, you can lose track of or lose sight of the customer. You can forget to stop and pause and say, “Wait, what does this mean to our clients? Is this what the client would want?” And really put yourself in their shoes. For me, at least, and I’ve been around a long time, I tease all the time that I’m a 500-year-old vampire.

[00:05:20] Gregory Banning: I’ve been around a long time, and I can promise you, before technology really went on steroids, it was the pace of business and just life. You definitely had more time to consider and keep front and center the client, the customer. If you, being companies, organizations, executives, don’t keep that at the forefront of your collaboration, your communication strategies, your plans, et cetera, and you don’t force those conversations, if you don’t do things like visually putting an orange chair, visibly in a room full of black chairs, an orange chair at the end of the table in a long executive conference room and say, “That’s our client. In any conversation we’re having, we need to keep the client, the customer, in mind. This isn’t about us. We don’t exist if the client isn’t served, if the client isn’t gaining value, if we’re not going to where the client wants to be.” And so that’s how I would sum it up.

[00:06:21] Steve MacDonald: So I got to tell you, I’m, like, coming out of my seat. I did an interview about a year ago with an executive at Amazon, and Amazon has become known as one of the most customer-obsessed organizations in the world. Big case studies, reviews, major universities talk about it, and they have an empty chair policy that at every meeting, whether it’s a distribution meeting, there’s an empty chair there. And so a year ago I said, “Is that still a thing?” And especially as we’re, like, in a lot of virtual meetings and everything, they’re like, “Absolutely. It’s a standard part of our customer obsession.”

[00:06:58] Steve MacDonald: We get so distracted. We have so many things on our list to do that even on the proactive things we’ve got to get done, and we never, ever even get to things that are important, that are basic fundamentals. The customer is our North Star. Everything we do is for the customer. But it becomes so fundamental that we don’t do the things, like you mentioned one word in there, that we’ve got to be, I forget what it was now, proactive. You’ve got to be active in going out there and making sure you’re talking and understanding the customer’s point of view.

[00:07:36] Steve MacDonald: And I literally just today, and there’s a question for you coming at the end of this next 20 seconds. She said, “AI is so amazing, but it’s one of the biggest distractions we have in our company because everybody’s saying we have to, without understanding why.” And she said, “One of the things that suffers is understanding our customer, putting our customer first.” It was a really amazing point of view.

[00:08:00] Steve MacDonald: So here’s my question for you. We know, back, call it marketing and sales 101, the customer comes first. What is the revenue logic of that, though? How does that impact revenue? You’re the CRO. You guys are focused on revenue like there’s no tomorrow. The next board meeting, the first thing they’re going to talk about is, “Greg, how does this quarter’s quota look? What is next quarter stacking up as?”

[00:08:25] Gregory Banning: Yeah.

[00:08:26] Steve MacDonald: How does customer obsession impact short-term and long-term revenue attainment?

[00:08:34] Gregory Banning: I think it sounds simple enough. Do the right things for the right reasons. We’re in business because of whatever marketplace, whatever client customers we decided that we want to focus on and serve, right? I think, like most things, it sounds great, right? Customer obsession, client obsession, delight the customer. It’s one thing to say it. It’s another thing to put it at the center of everything that you’re doing, your communication strategies, your annual planning, your systems, your technology, your processes, the people that you hire, the roles, et cetera. I think that if you’re struggling, I would say, as a business, if you’re not hitting your numbers, you’re not meeting expectations, I would just tell you, you have a client issue. In some way, shape, or form, broadly, you’ve got a client issue.

Are your solutions no longer relevant, or less relevant than they once were? Have you built solutions that clients no longer value, in whole or in part? Maybe you’ve got a great solution. Are you servicing the customer? You start talking about onboarding and that ongoing customer obsession. Once they become a customer, they go from a prospect to being onboarded, and now they’re a customer.

[00:09:45] Gregory Banning: How are you servicing them on an ongoing basis, right? Do you have a customer advisory board? Do you have a vehicle for Voice of the Customer? When you’re developing your products, solutions, and services, are you getting input from your clients or potential clients in the marketplace? So I think that, how does it impact revenue? I think a leading indicator is whether customers are interested in engaging with you, talking to you, and then ultimately partnering with you. And again, if you’re not hitting your numbers, you probably have a gap somewhere with the clients.

[00:10:26] Gregory Banning: Again, whether it’s the solution, the servicing, et cetera, you’ve got some kind of a gap there. So that’s always the first place that I look: the client and how we are approaching all those pieces.

[00:10:38] Steve MacDonald: The idea of revenue and connected customer obsession. Forrester did a whole customer obsession study in 2024, just a couple of years ago, and what they found was that only 3% of companies are truly customer-obsessed.

[00:10:53] Gregory Banning: I don’t, I don’t doubt it. Surprised it’s that high, Steve.

[00:10:57] Steve MacDonald: But we all say we are, right?

[00:10:59] Gregory Banning: Yeah.

[00:10:59] Steve MacDonald: Sure. If we’re ever asked, “Are you customer first? Are you customer-obsessed?” Absolutely, right? Yes.

[00:11:04] Gregory Banning: Yes.

[00:11:04] Steve MacDonald: But it’s like you’ve got to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. And they said if you are customer-obsessed, your revenue grows 41% faster, profits grow, wow, 49% faster, and loyalty retention is better by 51%. I believe it. So there is a direct connection. And so what I loved in our last conversation was that you took that connection, that focus on the customer, and then you started going in kind of concentric rings around what that means for how we operate as a business. And one of the things that you said, and you actually said this was the biggest challenge to creating long-term sustainable growth, is internal alignment.

[00:11:49] Steve MacDonald: The connection here to the customer is that if they’re our North Star, then internal alignment means we’ve got to align around them. A woman was on the podcast a few months ago. She’s a partner at a go-to-market agency for B2B companies, and she said it’s the number one problem. She said, but the voice of the customer is the number one change agent. Everybody’s willing to rally and align behind the voice of the customer if it’s articulated correctly. It’s not the opinion of the CEO, CMO, CPO, or CRO. Opinions don’t get wholesale adopted by every department. But if we’re not aligned, if we’re all going in different directions, why did you bring it up as the number one challenge to creating long-term sustainable growth? I’d like to hear it from your voice.

[00:12:42] Gregory Banning: Yeah, sure. I’ve been focused on this for probably at least the past 15 years, what I call the connective tissue within an organization. And again, listen, you go back, everybody has the best intentions. Every department, every individual within that department. I always say nobody shows up to be a zero. Everybody wants to be a hero.

[00:13:01] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:01] Gregory Banning: You know, if you’re not getting the kind of results that you want, in this case, your clients aren’t delighted, they’re not obsessed with you, your company, or your solutions and services, you might have a connective tissue issue. Yeah. So that’s why I bring that up. I’ll give you a recent example. Our customer success management team is managed by a different part of our organization from the sales organization.

[00:13:28] Steve MacDonald: Yeah.

[00:13:29] Gregory Banning: We were working with a client, a large client of ours, been a client for quite some time, on a renewal. At the end of the day, sales was off working with the client in a certain department, working on expanding the relationship, working on A, B, and C. Unbeknownst to us, the client success team was over here working on X, Y, and Z with different folks within that organization, and they were unaware of the sales piece.

[00:13:58] Gregory Banning: Now, obviously, we had a breakdown in what should be collaboration, communication, systems, processes, whatever. But at the end of the day, we did not delight the customer. We actually created confusion with the customer, and nothing detrimental, right? I would say we irritated, slightly or maybe more than slightly, the customer.

[00:14:19] Gregory Banning: Now, we found out about our blind spots there. We course-corrected, and we’re now back to being obsessed with that client and showing them that. But if you don’t have the communication vehicles in place, you don’t have the processes, the systems that are interlocked, you’re gonna miss out. It’s a great example of organizations and businesses running so hard, so fast, attempting to do the right things.

[00:14:42] Gregory Banning: If you miss one, if you don’t have the communication strategies, cadence, processes, these things in place, you’re gonna miss. If you do have these in place, but you don’t have the commitment as an organization around them, hence the discipline around them to make sure you’re not skipping steps in the process, you’re gonna miss the mark.

[00:15:05] Gregory Banning: And it’s really easy to do, right? So I think, you know, in product development, they’re running hard and fast, heads down, trying to create the next great solution for clients. And they might forget to check in on, “Hey, we’re at this phase. Let’s check in with our client base.

[00:15:26] Gregory Banning: Let’s check in with the marketplace. Let’s check in with sales and marketing and see if this is actually something that’s resonating.” We have established the Founding Customer Program here. And what that means for us here at Rithum is anything substantial that we’re gonna do, so a new solution, an enhancement to a solution, a new service, right? We’re going to add something, maybe take away something. Anything that’s on a pretty big level that’s gonna impact the client, then we go out and we find clients that want to be a part of our Founding Customer Program. What we want is for you to participate in what we’re developing and doing. In return, here’s what we’re gonna offer you. We understand that your time and energy are very valuable. And so they might now have access to our Chief Product Officer if it has to do with the product. They might have a major say in our product roadmap for the next year or two, and that’s valuable to clients, right? Because in today’s world, in our case, you’re not just slinging software. It really is about the partnerships and truly growing together.

[00:16:34] Steve MacDonald: I love that. I love that connection, right? That’s a component of customer obsession. But I wanna get back to this idea of concentric rings that all lead back to customer obsession, which is really how I’m kinda thinking about it as we’re talking here: to optimize for customer obsession, you’ll optimize for revenue. But how you optimize in internally aligning is, one, you started talking, and you lit up about company culture.

[00:17:05] Steve MacDonald: If we’re aligning as individual departments, as leaders, down to individual team members, why is culture so important to this entire equation that gets us to where we are obsessed and focused on our North Star, the customer? Where does company culture play in all that?

[00:17:29] Gregory Banning: Sure. Listen, company culture is so important to employee engagement, discretionary effort, taking initiative to go above and beyond what I call the extra degree of effort by folks. So all the way down to the individuals on the front lines who are doing things maybe above and beyond their job description or the responsibility of their paycheck, that the CEO never even knows, that delights the client. You won’t get that without a culture, a meaningful culture, where people feel valued and they have a purpose.

[00:18:03] Gregory Banning: I don’t believe that with any generation any of us are just showing up to collect, or want to show up just to collect, a paycheck. You’re gonna get the minimal amount of effort if you have a culture that’s based on that. If you have a culture rooted in your employees, making them a priority. Our true north here in our sales organization is to create a winning, predictable sales organization where everybody feels valued, supported, and enabled, so they can do the best work of their lives. And the underpinning to that is ownership, grit, character, and teamwork.

[00:18:40] Gregory Banning: We talk about this in our ongoing leadership meetings, and we have a lot of vehicles to remind ourselves and our people, our sellers, that they come first. We want our sellers and our sales organization to feel like they’re doing meaningful work and they’re not just showing up to collect a paycheck, that they actually have purpose. They’re making a difference. That’s what we convey to our sales folks all the time, and to our support organizations. Listen, whether the company is large or small, how you serve, how you help, how you enable, and how you partner with that client might, in large part, determine whether that company thrives and stays in business or goes out of business.

[00:19:25] Gregory Banning: When companies go out of business, individuals are impacted, and families are impacted. We don’t try to go overboard with it, right? We’re not curing world hunger by any stretch of the imagination. But it depends on how you want to build your culture and what lens you want that culture to look through, and so it’s foundational in everything. Because if you are truly customer obsessed, you have got to create a culture where people are doing discretionary work, they’re engaged at every level, they’re not hitting the snooze button in the morning, they’re excited to get up and get into work because they have purpose at the company organization that they work through, and they’re not just going through the motions.

[00:20:08] Steve MacDonald: You know, and you said things in there. I’m sure everybody on your team feels like you have their back, right? Part of a culture is that you’re not just going to do what’s expected. You’re going to take risks, and you’re going to do things that you think, because we all know we have to rewrite our playbooks all the time. Yeah. Especially in this day and age, right? Yeah. So we’re trying new things, and if we feel like we’re going to be punished for trying something new and it doesn’t work, that’s a part of a culture that fails. Everybody has to feel like we’re all in this together.

[00:20:39] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I was thinking throughout our conversation, and it started when I asked every C-suite executive who comes on the podcast, “What are your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?” After 120 conversations, I’ve had that question answered now; not one challenge has been based externally. Culture, you control it one hundred percent.

[00:21:04] Steve MacDonald: Nobody is telling you how to define your culture. Nobody is telling you how to create your own internal communication systems so two different departments aren’t going into the same client recommending two different things.

[00:21:17] Steve MacDonald: Nobody’s telling you how to do that. Yeah. Nobody is telling you how to internally align from the executive level on down. Nobody is telling you how customer-obsessed you need to be, how proactive you need to be at that. Nothing we have talked about on this entire podcast so far has been external.

[00:21:38] Gregory Banning: Agreed.

[00:21:39] Steve MacDonald: We tend to think of challenges using a SWOT analysis, right? Where will the greatest challenges be? Oh, our competition, what’s going on out there, right? And market forces, dynamics, and different things. But it really comes back to the fundamentals of how we want to build a business, how we want to operate, how we want to come together as a team. Am I off, or does that resonate with you as well?

[00:22:03] Gregory Banning: Oh, absolutely. I think it goes back to getting easily distracted, especially by things you don’t directly control. I always say, as individuals, we control our mindset, our actions, and our reactions. To your point, in a company, you absolutely control 100% of what goes on internally. But, as you used a few examples, it’s really easy to let your organization get distracted by the marketplace, macroeconomics, competition, and so on.

[00:22:31] Gregory Banning: Now, going back to where we started this conversation, we want to keep customer obsession and the client at the center of the equation, but that’s how we get distracted: through all the noise that we don’t control out there. Now, all of a sudden, we’re off our game because the client now, unbeknownst to us and definitely not on purpose, is no longer at the center of the equation in what we’re doing. So I think you bring up an outstanding point there.

[00:22:58] Steve MacDonald: We’ve covered so much territory already, but I have one last question. Sure. And it tends to be the hardest one. If there was one thing that you wanted the C-suite executives who will be consuming this podcast to take away from the conversation today, one thing you want to make sure, if you’re going to leave with anything, leave with this, what would that one thing be?

[00:23:24] Gregory Banning: I think, pause on a regular basis. Take an audit on a regular basis. You might not think you have the time or the convenience to do it, but you do. That’s what I would say. Pause and audit. What does the organization look like when you start talking about being customer-obsessed? What does it look like with the connective tissue within the company, the controls internally, that you have to be a catalyst to delight the customer and be obsessed with the customer?

[00:23:51] Gregory Banning: We’re all running hard and fast. But if we’re not stopping regularly to consider the empty orange chair at the end of the executive or boardroom table, then I think you’re setting yourself up for a miss and a fall.

[00:24:06] Steve MacDonald: I got to tell you, one thing I’m going to do, and I’m really physically going to do this, is I’m going to go to ChatGPT or something and say, “Create me an executive head of the table, big, high-back orange chair image.” And I’m going to do something old school. I’m going to print it out and put it up on the wall right behind my monitor, where I look at it every day. Because we need to remind ourselves of that. We need to not lose sight of that. I love the recommendation to stop when you think you don’t have time, because every day we have too much to do.

[00:24:38] Steve MacDonald: The mission of this podcast, Greg, is to bring together diverse perspectives from C-level executives around the world. We’re all in B2B; we’re all in an ABM go-to-market motion, but we can all learn from each other, and just that recommendation: if you take one thing away, pause. Find the time to pause and think about what you’re really doing and what’s important. So important to do. I just want to say thank you for coming on and being a part of the podcast today.

[00:25:07] Gregory Banning: Yeah, absolutely, Steve. Thank you. I appreciate you having me on. Excellent.