Episode #321:
Cynthia Gumbert, Chief Marketing Officer at Litera, explains how established companies can compete confidently in an AI-first market. She shares how customer trust, long-range innovation, and a dedicated Voice of the Customer program strengthen brand relevance and revenue growth. Cynthia also reveals why customer advocates often outperform traditional marketing and sales messages.
“Get customers to be your advocates and spokespeople, and never lose sight of the fact that they are your best marketers. They can be your best salespeople. In this age of AI, it is easy to get distracted by product innovations and features, but those customer connections are most important.” – Cynthia Gumbert
Cynthia explores how established B2B technology companies can compete with AI-native startups by treating their history as market pedigree, not baggage. She connects long-range product strategy, customer trust, and a dedicated Voice of the Customer program to stronger positioning, shortlist access, and measurable pipeline impact. The conversation also shows why simpler messaging and continuous customer value help leaders navigate AI fatigue without losing focus.
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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. Today, we have a phenomenal guest, Cynthia Gumbert. Now, Cynthia, what I love is the richness of our conversations. You’re a Chief Marketing Officer. You’ve been a Chief Marketing Officer four different times over.
[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: That means being a part of four different executive committees, four different companies, B2B tech, right? But every company has its own personality and its way of approaching marketing and the whole go-to-market strategy. One of the things that I just love that you’ve done, you started it at your last company, and you’ve brought it over here, is that you actually dedicated a team within your team that you call Voice of the Customer.
[00:00:52] Steve MacDonald: One of the things that is so important about that is there was a study done by Forrester that I think just accentuates what you’re doing and the importance of it. They did a customer obsession study. We all say we’re customer-obsessed. We all say we’re customer-first, but it’s the actions. It’s the deliberate actions to learn and execute on the voice of the customer that really matter. They showed that only 3% of companies were actually customer-obsessed. But the ones that were, I think if I remember this correctly, had 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and retained customers 51% longer.
[00:01:33] Steve MacDonald: This is actually tied in a big way to revenue and the growth of the business. CMOs have been asked to be more revenue-focused for a long time, and we tend to think it has to be core pipeline demand generation. It has to be more leads coming in. But there’s an ecosystem that we live within, and we’re going to get into that today because we’re going to be talking about how, right now, you’re inside of a really strong, well-positioned legacy company.
[00:02:03] Steve MacDonald: But in this AI world, there are all these startups, right, that are the shiny objects we suddenly have to compete with in really big ways. We’re going to put all that together, and we’re going to talk about how you’re approaching the market and how you think about that. But I would love to give you a few seconds to expand a little bit on your background and what I didn’t say there before we dig right in.
[00:02:26] Cynthia Gumbert: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been in B2B tech my entire career, in marketing as well as product management in the early days, and way back as an engineer. I came to marketing with a very quantitative mindset, and I have expanded a lot since then to, you know, it’s not just the numbers. It is the relationships. It’s the brand. It’s how people feel about you. So, being a full-stack CMO, you’ve got to flex both sides of the world. You know, a lot of my playbook is really not a playbook. It’s just about what is most needed and where the biggest gaps are that we need to fill. Sometimes, it is the numbers.
[00:03:01] Cynthia Gumbert: Sometimes, it’s the relationship, the brand, or the message. The one thing I’m bringing to the table is just it. This is a big Swiss Army knife, multi-tool kind of role, and that’s what makes the CMO job a lot of fun.
[00:03:17] Steve MacDonald: So, I want to start us out with this, and I’m finding it more and more. I’m talking to a lot of CROs, CEOs, and CMOs who are suddenly feeling like, wow, we have to reinvent ourselves. In this world of AI, there are these AI startups, and they seem to be getting all the credibility. It’s kind of like our kids looking at us and going, “Dad, you don’t get it,” right? “You’ve been around too long. You’re not in the cool crowd anymore.” Why are we, as legacy companies, not given the credibility that we need, and what do we start to do about that?
[00:03:50] Cynthia Gumbert: AI is the latest wave of technology innovation, or just a big technology transformation. But this is not the first wave of transformation, and this is not the first time this kind of massive transition has happened and generated a ton of startups, with a lot of companies that, you know, were kind of in the old way and either had to bridge or become irrelevant. There are plenty, plenty of success stories throughout history of companies that have been around, bridged the gap, and accelerated out of it, beating out some of these newer startups.
[00:04:29] Cynthia Gumbert: This was the transition to the cloud. Way back 20-something years ago, it was the .com era. It was the transition from brick-and-mortar to the internet. So, this is nothing new, and there are some very tried-and-true ways to approach it. You’ve got to innovate. You’ve got to walk the talk, not just talk the talk. But beyond product vision, it comes down to the relationships you have with those customers, how much they trust you, and whether they trust that you are there for the duration.
[00:05:06] Steve MacDonald: Where you ended there, trust. At the beginning of the year, or the end of last year, Forrester came out with its whole prediction for this year, which was that trust was the currency to get into the deal. Yeah.
[00:05:20] Steve MacDonald: Win the deal. Keep the deal. It was all about trust, which underpins that it’s all about the relationships, right. And you have, yeah, longstanding, trusted relationships. But yet, AI is one of these things that we’ve just been bequeathed to change the world, right? Everybody is being asked by their board. Our buyers are being asked, “What are you doing?”
[00:05:45] Steve MacDonald: “What are your AI strategies,” right? When you’re looking at new vendors and partnerships, what is their AI strategy? How is it going to help us? How are we going to compete? It’s almost like this feeling that if we don’t make the right AI decisions, suddenly we’re going to be a step behind.
[00:06:01] Steve MacDonald: So, suddenly, these AI-native companies have all this credibility, right? First off, what kinds of conversations are you having internally about trust, the relationships we have, and the way we’re working with our customers, yes, to develop the AI solutions that are tested and that we know are right for the market.
[00:06:28] Steve MacDonald: A lot of the startups don’t have the big customer base that we have. They don’t have the ability to do that. Start from the inside, if you could, about the conversations that you’re helping steer, and then how that makes it into the go-to-market strategy.
[00:06:42] Cynthia Gumbert: Yeah, the conversations really start with a product strategy. So, it starts with our engineering and product teams and looking at what we’re developing, which is now completely AI-native.
[00:06:54] Cynthia Gumbert: Just the benefits of what we call it. We’re coming up with the words for how to talk about it. So, we’re calling it pedigree, not legacy. That has some, mm, connotations of being old. But we’ve got this multi-year pedigree of history, deep knowledge, and understanding of our market. Everyone has access to the latest models, and we’re innovating on top of them while maintaining what’s worked well. For me, as a marketer, and for my team, it is that conviction and just confidence that what we are coming out with is of greater benefit to customers because we know what they need.
[00:07:38] Cynthia Gumbert: We’re not looking at the next year of playing and piloting, or the next six months. When I look at just my own teams over the past year and a half or two years, it was all ChatGPT. Then it was, oh, let’s try Gemini, then Claude. These models and the AI tooling, I’ve cycled through them twice now, two cycles of different AI tooling within my own organization. I feel like that’s a lot of what’s happening now, just piloting, testing, and playing. We have got to bridge our customers for more than just the next six months of playing. It’s got to be five years, 10 years, or 15. We’re looking at the long horizon of where they will be many years from now and what the right situation is for them in their technology stack, but also for us as a vendor partner to last with them for the long run.
[00:08:36] Cynthia Gumbert: We’ve got a long-horizon view of this and confidence that we know what they need the most. That is the trust that we’ve built human to human and the trust we’ve built in our products as well.
[00:08:49] Steve MacDonald: So, I’d like to play deeper into that world of trust because here’s where it’s so important these days. The shortlist forms, and our buyers lock in an average of four to five vendors. Then they pick from that group 95% of the time. So, if we’re not in on day one, we’re not in. Getting on that list isn’t about this. You and I both come from the tech world, the SaaS world. We know how we can fall in love with our own technology and our own products.
[00:09:21] Steve MacDonald: But building trust, being known and trusted, is about knowing them more than it is about having the right tech and the right product features, especially in a world of AI where new features roll out, and they’re copied. They’re, you know, they’re. Like, AI can develop a roadmap at lightning speed, right?
[00:09:44] Cynthia Gumbert: You can Vibe code a roadmap in 15 minutes, absolutely.
[00:09:47] Steve MacDonald: Minutes, absolutely. So, in a lot of respects, with AI, we’re having to rely more and more heavily on relationships and our understanding of the customer. That’s why I wanted to ask you about the team you’ve created within your team, which is the Voice of the Customer team. If you wouldn’t mind, take us through why you did that.
[00:10:13] Steve MacDonald: And how it’s actually making a difference, right? So, when you’re in a board meeting, or you’re meeting with your CEO or the CRO, you’re putting time, effort, and resources into this dedicated team. The first thing that a CFO or CEO is going to want to know is, okay, how is it impacting the bottom line? How is it going to help me spend, right? If you could, connect all those dots. That was like five questions in one.
[00:10:36] Cynthia Gumbert: No, it absolutely made sense. So, the statement that I tell my own organization that annoys them the most, and they hear it from me probably at least once a month, and they hear me tell the sales team this, is customers are better marketers than we are. We will never be as good a marketer as a customer who is an advocate telling a peer to buy our product. Hands down, period. Sales cannot get enough of customer stories, reference calls, and connections. That is just the bottom line of having a Voice of Customer team: creating an environment where our customers can bring up their stories.
[00:11:19] Cynthia Gumbert: We are doing this for them. We are helping to support not just, “Hey, tell us your case study,” but we are supporting them along the way and making the connections through the customer success organization and advisory boards. We do surveys. We do polls. We ask them if they want to speak on our behalf at conferences and events, or just take that reference call once in a while.
[00:11:40] Cynthia Gumbert: There is no bigger ROI than when we take the reference call, or there is not even an RFP, or you are on the shortlist of one before there even is a shortlist being created, you know, if a customer is a good reference. It is very important. It is measurable in the sense that these stories, these case studies, and these references are connected to our opportunity pipeline. We can track it in Gong, Salesforce, and all the tools, so you can see the impact. But the snowball effect of having more and more customers, and then seeing each other talk about what we are doing and seeing ourselves or each other on stage, is compounding and critically important.
[00:12:22] Steve MacDonald: It was amazing, and this has been happening for a long time. But if you were to go look at just the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer of, I think it was, 32,000 worldwide respondents, 67 percent think that business leaders like you and I are being intentionally misleading. Those are the exact words out of the study. Two-thirds of our buyers are thinking we are being intentionally misleading. The idea that you say that customers are better marketers than we are is because they are more trusted, right? Yeah. We trust peers at the same level we trust scientists. I remember seeing that in a study, right.
[00:13:00] Cynthia Gumbert: Mm-hmm. Exactly. Mm-hmm. Exactly.
[00:13:00] Steve MacDonald: And so, the idea of bonding our voice that should be leading the marketplace, right. Understanding their challenges, navigating, making recommendations, not being a vendor that supplies just technology, very important, but also helping them wade these waters, right. Yeah. And being looked upon as somebody who has that kind of credibility and that kind of background. We have to work at maintaining that credibility every day, and we have to learn about it every day.
[00:13:31] Steve MacDonald: I am sure that what we are finding from our Voice of Customer team versus a year ago is very different. We cannot just write an ICP definition out, hand it to everybody, and go, “We have got it covered,” right? It is always changing. But do you find that? I would love to evolve into that question. Do you find that, with it evolving and always changing, we need to constantly be in front of the customer? Let us just start with that.
[00:14:01] Cynthia Gumbert: Absolutely. So, when we look at the Voice of Customer program as well, 80 percent of it is probably getting their input and distilling it for us to become better marketers, salespeople, product developers, and product managers. It is their voice coming internally to us, and it is, of course, what I mentioned earlier: their voice to other customers to help us sell as advocates. The words we use and the way we talk about what we do are heavily impacted by our advisory boards and our steering committees. We have different titles and functions and different steering committees of customers, and we bounce not just product ideas, but marketing ideas off them.
[00:14:48] Cynthia Gumbert: If we said it this way, are you going to believe it. Or how do you talk about this thing, and what do these stats mean to you? So, there is so much interaction and so much benefit from just having a forum to listen to them. They love talking. We can send a quick two-question poll, and they will answer it back to us, and it does change. We have new competitor entrants probably weekly in this market that, wow, I am in. Probably every week, there is a new announcement about somebody getting into the market. With all of this competition, it is very grounding, I would say, to hear from our customers that there is so much noise. Just keep doing what you are doing. Because it is tempting to be very reactive and just keep zigging and zagging based on, oh, this competitor said this, and they say it really well, and it looks good. Let us copy that.
[00:15:42] Cynthia Gumbert: And we have customers saying, “No, no. Just please stop copying. Just stay your course because it is working,” even if it might not sound quite the same. It is also a grounding function for us to, again, keep bridging this wave and this transition.
[00:15:59] Steve MacDonald: I was talking to a CRO yesterday about how, in a day and age where we are having a harder time getting into conversations, those conversations are fewer and farther between, and they are shorter than they have ever been before. And so, we were talking about, then, how do you get into those conversations? How do you make the most out of those conversations? It very quickly came back to, we have the best insights in the industry.
[00:16:27] Steve MacDonald: Because when we get into the conversation, we prove that it was worthwhile. It is worthwhile spending longer on that conversation and having another conversation. So, what you are doing inside of the Voice of Customer team is, yes, absolutely about creating better demand generation campaigns and creating better thought leadership. But it is also about empowering our entire sales force, right.
[00:16:51] Steve MacDonald: And the customer success organization, mm-hmm, about what is true and what is meaningful. The voice of the buyer is supposed to be our North Star, and I think it was 2023 when McKinsey came out with a study, and they said, “Only 15 percent of companies actually use the voice of the customer to help them make decisions.” It is crazy.
[00:17:09] Cynthia Gumbert: That is, yeah.
[00:17:09] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely crazy.
[00:17:10] Cynthia Gumbert: This is beyond a marketing initiative, too. It is so important for our CEO to work on sentiment and work on brand with a capital B. It is not branding. Our brand is how they think about us and how they feel about us. This has been a very top-down initiative across the entire leadership team for us. And when you say, just giving them a reason to want to take your call, the default for many SaaS companies that I have seen, been exposed to, or been on the receiving end of is that you hear from them when they are selling to you, and you hear from them when it is renewal time. Or they want to sell you something more.
[00:17:55] Steve MacDonald: Yes.
[00:17:55] Cynthia Gumbert: And that is another, yes, benefit of having this Voice of Customer organization. They are hearing from us when we have something to give to them, not when we are asking something of them, or when we just want to talk and get feedback and get input. So, it gives us a lot of opportunities to maintain a relationship, even when there is no active “We need to renew. We need to sell you something more” conversation. That alone is such a benefit, and I do not see many vendors. I am a buyer of a lot of technology, and I can name only a few on one hand that really maintain that relationship over time.
[00:18:36] Steve MacDonald: Yes, maintaining the relationship. You and I talked before we started here about how, really, a big part of the decision to hire or partner with a new company is what it is going to be like when I actually start, yeah, working with you, right? That relationship is so important. And it is interesting because I have so many conversations with C-suite executives, and I always ask, and I asked you this question too, “What are your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?” And what is really interesting is that I have seen a shift over this last year: the challenges are coming more and more into how I keep up with the pace of the market. How do I stay relevant faster? How do I provide value faster? All of our clients are expecting more in a shorter period of time, right?
[00:19:33] Steve MacDonald: They are expecting more with less and in less time. And so, staying grounded in the buyer truth and staying grounded in those relationships keeps us connected, keeps us top of mind, and keeps us relevant while we are learning. Mm-hmm. That is what I am. That is a huge part of many things that I am taking away from what you just said. Is that a good takeaway?
[00:19:58] Cynthia Gumbert: That’s a great takeaway, and I think that’s the balance, the tightrope that we’re all walking in this market right now, where AI is just what you said. There are so many new things coming at people so quickly, and with the pace of keeping up with the changes, everybody’s running fast. Our customers are, our vendors are, our employees are, and everyone’s running really fast. But yet, there is change fatigue as well.
[00:20:25] Cynthia Gumbert: How many new AI tools do I need to bring in and experiment with until there’s some stability? How many new releases a day? There’s a new model here. There’s a new model that’s come out, and, “Here, play with it.” There’s so much fatigue with, “I cannot absorb all of this coming at me. I just need to do my job well.” And thinking, putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes, and also in what we do best. Yeah. There’s a common thread that goes across that. We’re going to try to avoid complicating things with so many new changes and just have a through line of, “Here are the benefits that we provide you today, that we will always provide you, and continue to increase in the value you’re getting from our products.”
[00:21:15] Cynthia Gumbert: And just simplifying the message, and the story, and our mission, and our position is so important. Because, yeah, I think everybody’s just really a little bit overloaded. It’s overwhelming right now, and it always comes back to home base. This is what we do best, and they’re going to like us for that.
[00:21:34] Steve MacDonald: If we, yes, if we can be the calm in the middle of that storm of everything that’s coming at them, the constant change, and a trusted voice saying, “Within all of that, here’s where you really need to focus,” right. Yeah. That’s a huge benefit that wasn’t really even around a couple of years ago, right?
[00:21:53] Steve MacDonald: But now, that’s a major challenge that they’re all facing: how do I make sense of all of this and make the right decisions? Because we know B2B decisions are about risk avoidance, right? As much as anything else. There’s a huge emotional component, yeah, you know, factored into that.
[00:22:10] Steve MacDonald: If there was one thing that you wanted the C-suite executives who were going to be consuming this podcast to take away from our conversation today, the most important thing, what would that be?
[00:22:21] Cynthia Gumbert: I think it is getting customers to be your advocates and spokespeople, and never losing sight of the fact that they are your best marketers. They can be your best salespeople. In this age of AI, it’s very easy to get distracted by the product innovations and the features, but those connections with customers and what you are actually doing for them at the end of the day are most important.
[00:22:46] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, that’s my number one takeaway. Mm-hmm. From everything you’ve talked about here, it seems like such a basic thing sometimes, and we get very familiar with our customers because we talk about them all the time. We track them all the time, and we have sales conversations with them all the time, and we do surveys, and we have customer success conversations. So it’s very easy to say, “Hey, through our normal go-to-market process, we know a lot.” What we really have is just a lot of familiarity.
[00:23:18] Steve MacDonald: And what you’ve proven here is something. I’m going to call you a pioneer in this because I talk to a lot of C-suite executives, and I have never talked to anybody. We’ve recorded our 300th and, I think, 22nd podcast. Wow. And I’ve never talked to anybody who had a dedicated team that they called Voice of the Customer. Wow. And I just want to call out that that’s a huge accomplishment. I hope you’re really proud of it, and I hope that your board on down is proud that you’ve done that for the organization.
[00:23:48] Steve MacDonald: And a teaching moment for all of us because this whole podcast, the whole mission, is how do we learn from each other. We all have different experiences, different perspectives, different insights that we can bring. Mm-hmm. And if we all share them with each other, then that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats, and you were an amazing part of that rising tide today. And I just wanted to say thank you, Cynthia, for coming on.
[00:24:11] Cynthia Gumbert: Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure spending a few minutes talking to you.