Podcast Guest: Ron Carson

Host: Steve MacDonald

Watch or listen to the full episode.

Introduction

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C Suite Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, the host, and today, Ron Carson is our guest. And Ron, you’ve been in marketing for 25 years as a CMO. You’ve been with startups, you’ve been in Silicon Valley, and you’ve been with multibillion-dollar behemoths, right?

You’ve kind of done it all, and through your career, you’ve developed a real point of view on what CMOs should be doing. One of the most important aspects of our jobs that we should be focusing on is creating success for us in our roles as CMOs, because, unfortunately, as CMOs, we fail quicker than anybody else in the C suite.

That’s a proven fact. We last half as long as CEOs. So, part of what we’re going to talk about today is the critical role that a CMO role plays and how you add value to the organization. And there’s a saying that you said many times during our calls leading up to this on the just ask.

And so I want to get into that. Please explain a little bit more about your background on what you’re doing at Terra Dotta right now, and then we’ll get started.

Ron Carson: Yeah, thank you for that. So yeah, I’ve got 25-plus years. I did the math on LinkedIn of when I started, and I was a little shocked about how long the career has been, thought I’d be on the cover of some business magazines by now, but no, no such luck.

I have a mixed background, coming from Silicon Valley initially, working with some of the larger, well-known companies out there to some consulting, and now a CMO at Terra Dotta. I guess the interesting thing about the experience is the ability to move from within a company to being a consultant on the outside, from being a marketing leader to being a quota-carrying sales rep, and back and forth a couple of times has really kind of rounded out the experience.

The Just Ask Concept

Ron Carson: And being a quota-carrying sales rep sharpens your marketing skills along the way and really helped gel this idea. I tell my customers and colleagues at work about this “just-ask” concept. 

If you take the time to “just ask,” just talk to the people you want to sell to and ask them how we sell and market to you. They will tell you. It might not be what you want or expect to hear, but they will tell you.

Steve MacDonald: See, that’s fascinating, right? I love that. Just ask, and they will tell you how we should be marketing. And that’s what we spend our careers and our lives trying to figure out. Right. So, get me into that a little bit more, please?

Obviously, that’s what all of our goal is. Right. And we all know it’s important, right? We’ve got to talk to customers. We’ve got to represent customers. In fact, you talk about representing the customer as the marketing voice inside the company. Tell us your philosophy behind the “just ask” and how you draw that information out.

Ron Carson: In the normal day-to-day operations of a marketing department or a company, marketing loses touch with customers for various reasons. Like in large companies I used to work in, marketing wasn’t allowed to, right? The sales team owned those relationships. Therefore, marketing should not be touching them. 

In smaller companies, at least not without permission. In smaller companies, everybody’s so busy trying to get the product out the door, that minimum viable product, and they do some of the market validation at that stage, but in terms of how do we take this better mousetrap and actually talk to the market in ways that it will resonate?

How do we make them want to get our product? That gets lost. And so it has to be this purposeful part of what a marketing department does. To just go and talk to customers is one thing, but non-customers could be former customers or prospects. And by removing all hint or sense of a sales pitch, a hidden sales pitch in there, you can really get them to open up. 

Steve MacDonald: So right there, you’ve given us one of the biggest keys, right? Because there are certain things that there’s tremendous learnings. From sales and using technologies like Gong and listening to them, the sales call recordings, but hey, that’s a seller selling, and they’re supposed to be the trusted advisor, right? They’re supposed to be advising, educating, and helping their clients. And so they’re supposed to be in the know, right? They’re not supposed to ask the questions you’re talking about. Right? 

So there’s a different level of conversation when you take away that this is a sales call. This has a different higher purpose. And so, that right there is one of the biggest clues. 

The Just Ask Call vs. a Sales Call

Steve MacDonald: Tell me, how do you get on the call? Like, what’s in it for the customer or the prospect? How do you get them involved in this kind of conversation that they want to share this kind of information with you?

Ron Carson: Yeah. Well, it can vary by industry. So if you’re trying to get investment bankers, type A personalities, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley on the phone to talk shop, that can be a little harder. Granted, other markets are easier, but generally speaking, people want to be experts. They want to be heard. They want to be listened to. 

And then, at the sales call, trying to extract the insight and intel out of there, it’s different, right? They, the buyer, have their guard up, right? They do not want to disclose too much information that the sales reps can use against them.

It’s just a very different conversation. Let that person on the other end of the phone be the expert, let them talk. But also having the business, you don’t delegate this to the summer interns or newbies fresh out of business school. You need a little bit of business acumen to know what are the things we’re fishing for.

We’re looking for messaging, positioning, value propositions, buying motivations, buying objections, and being able to pull on those threads as they come up in a conversation so that you can get to the answers you need as a marketing department. It keeps you in sync with what they’re thinking, their priorities, the preferred channels, the mode of communication, and the right value propositions you will take to the market.

It’s not always what you think it is. 

Steve MacDonald: So here’s the two dots I’m just connecting. And that is because you start us out by saying just to ask. And if you ask, they’ll actually tell you how to market. You also just said that they want to be the expert, right?

They want to share this information with you. Innately, some of us want to say, yeah, we know what we’re doing, right? We should be listened to. We’ve reached this pinnacle in our career. So what you can also ask is, I don’t quite understand your problem.

Right. I don’t understand the risk this poses for you and your company. Please explain that. I can’t ask that in a sales conversation. And that is how you’re saying they tell you how to market to them, right? It’s in the questions that you ask and the responses that they give.

Ron Carson: That’d be a good take. Yeah, absolutely. You can absolutely approach the questions that way. And that’s a good way. I self-deprecatingly call it play the stupid card. I don’t get it. Tell me. And they love that. Right. That helps get their guard down because they know you’re less of a threat. 

But you can also ask very specific pointed questions and go, all right. So, in a very crowded environment, we have this solution. You understand what it does. How do we get your attention? You can approach this in different directions once their trust level is up. They’re less worried that you’re about to spring a surprise sales pitch on them.

Then you can be more direct and really ask them to give you the answer.

Questions for a Just Ask Conversation

Steve MacDonald: A company CMO on the podcast recently shared about how to create hockey stick growth. And he would literally ask customers, where do you do your research? This is what we’re trying to find in this omnichannel world, right, where we’re going to dice up our resources, marketing spend, and everything.

He literally would ask them, where do you go to do your research? And we know they’re doing more and more and more research these days, 83 percent of buyers are done with their research before they want to talk to anybody inside of the company. So that’s just an example of the kinds of questions you can get to that will lead to what is the right way to market to you and how you have them help you.

Ron Carson: Can I pile on with one other example? That was a great example of the right channels, right? Where do we put our content? But if the example I wanted to throw out there was related to the value proposition, right?

I’m sure that a number of people in the audience sell software of some kind or market software of some kind. So, a number of years ago, we were working with or for a company in the procurement space, e-procurement. So controlling spend, getting the best price, those kinds of things. The value proposition they were going to market with was essentially to save time and control spending. The hook those chief procurement officers cared about was not so much those pieces. That’s a given. 

It was what it allowed them to do, which was negotiate better contracts. That’s where they had the most strategic impact for their organizations. So when we led with that as the marketing value proposition, the conversion rates, the attendance on webinars, all that kind of stuff went up to the right, as marketers like to see.

Steve MacDonald: It was perfect because you just asked. So all of this ask then turns into marketing campaigns and programs fueled by content. I’m going to ask an opinion on something here. I’m going to ask you to rate something. Ron, in terms of the importance of growth and success of the company, how would you rate content as fuel for that growth and that success? One, it’s not important at all. 10 it’s vital to the importance of the growth and success of the company. How would you rate content? And why?

Content is Vital to Create Buyer’s Journey Stepping Stones

Ron Carson: Oh yeah, it’s a 10 for sure. If you refer back to some of the earlier comments about how much of that buyer’s journey is happening, such that the buyer would prefer not to have to deal with a salesperson, they’re doing all that and living that journey through the content.

It’s important for marketers to align the content to the journey. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t define the journey, you can’t control the journey. As marketers, it’s our role to lay out the stepping stones they may choose to step on during the journey. So those are the thought leadership contents, the best practices, the how-to guides all the way down to the solution demos, and those kinds of things.

If you start trying to map an individual buyer’s journey, it’s a ball of spaghetti. It does not follow a linear path. If you then take the concept of the buyer’s group that we know exists in most enterprise B2B sales, that’s multiple balls of spaghetti all tangled up in a mess. So trying to dictate how that’s going to flow is just, it’s a, I don’t want to say fool’s errand, but that’s the word that comes to mind. It’s not going to be a productive exercise, having witnessed attempts before. But if we approach it from the perspective that we need the relevant topics to capture their interest at the top and those things to help nurture their understanding of the solution over time, you can lay out those stepping stones for them.

Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. The buyer’s journey is spaghetti these days. And you don’t have any idea, but right at the end of the process, somebody could be consuming a thought leadership piece of content that helps them accelerate, or it’s one sheet you’ve created.

You don’t know, but you do have to have those stepping stones, and you do have to have at least an idea of how you think they should be laid out. 

So what I want to do is talk a little bit about what it is that you think is the priority when you’ve had these conversations. You’ve done the just ask, right? You’ve gotten into the buyer’s journey. You’ve laid out these stepping stones. How do you interface with sales in terms of translating what you’ve learned into content? You’ve expressed it in the buyer’s journey.

Tell me a little bit about then, is it along the way that you’re sharing with sales? Is it a big reveal at the end, which I don’t think it is? Right. But how do you translate all of this valuable content and marketing for use in the sales department? 

Bringing Sales into the Just Ask Learnings

Ron Carson: I know you’ve had multiple people on the podcast talking about the metrics and passing qualified leads to sales. And that whole metric, this is just the front end of that. This ensures that we’re attracting the right people with the right interests and the right motivations into the early stages of the process and then feeding them all the way through. 

So, in our world right now, every time a mark, a sales prospect, touches any one of those marketing deliverables we’ve come up with after doing this exercise of just asking, making sure we’re dialed into the needs, wants, and interests of the market, our sales team knows about it at each step of the way. 

I don’t know if that answers your question directly, but we don’t bore them with the front end. We’re going to talk to some people, but they see the benefits as every single campaign rolls out and every single time a customer interacts with a piece of content. And doing it this way makes more of the content evergreen than you might otherwise have expected.

We’ve got some very well-performing marketing campaigns with evergreen content still on the website, still attracting people today.

Bringing the Voice of the Customer to the Decision-Making Table

Steve MacDonald: You’ve talked about having a seat at the table and representing the customer’s voice at the seat of the table. What does that mean? Can you kind of explain that concept?

Ron Carson: So, and this is where I think working in big companies, small companies, and having clients in a number of different sized companies, I’ve seen different company personas go by, if you will, where there’s a locus of control or clout.

So sometimes we’ve all experienced this, right? Sometimes, there’s the braggadocious CEO kind of leading the charge, and we all will follow that. Sometimes, it’s a sales-led organization where there may be more bias to the near-term opportunities, and the strategic decisions are made based on closing that next big deal. In other places, it’s product-led, right? The engineering department and the people building the market tend to be the loudest voices. 

And unintentionally, marketing can become the quieter voice, has fewer proof points, and has fewer things that would drive decisions in the short term. And having that voice, not just the voice of the customer, but the voice of the market. It’s more than just the voice of the customer. You need the voice of those people who aren’t customers or not customers yet. 

And so when decisions are being made around the executive table, and these discussions are happening, having these conversations, these just ask conversations, can put marketing in the position of, I hear what you’re saying, but we’ve talked to these 20 clients or prospects, and they’ve said something a little different. Maybe we should compare notes. It changes the dynamic quickly if you have those proof points to bring forward.

Steve MacDonald: Without having to say, hang on a second, I’ve got a trump card for what you just said. Without having to have a heavy hand, everybody knows that the customer is the highest voice of authority in the company. 

Identifying Your Blind Spots

Ron Carson: And so there, I’m going to pile on for half a second. There are blind spots. We all have them. Every company has them, and in the age of automation and net promoter score, you finish that little chat support window and whatever app you’re using. And how would you rate the performance? Having interviewed dozens of Net Promoter Score respondents, we know that most of them just click anything to get that thing off the screen, best case, or you’re only capturing the sentiment in a moment.

Completely ignores the rest of the customer journey. Then, newsflash: the customer journey is rarely what you intend it to be on paper. It looks really good, right? Sales handoff, implementation, training, support, customer success, and all of those things are supposed to play nicely together in a joyful, pleasant customer experience, but it rarely happens that way.

This is another way to uncover those blind spots and becomes an important source of valuable insight for the company to ensure that what they intend the customer experience to be is reality.

Steve MacDonald: You mentioned before we clicked the record button here that marketing departments tend to have good familiarity with their customers, not the depth of learning that you’re talking about here and in the ways you’re talking about here. One of the biggest roles I think in marketing, what a CMO can bring to the organization – and it impacts sales, marketing, customer success, and the growth of the business – is being that voice for the customer in the meetings, in the decision making, in the planning sessions. 

I don’t know how we do it if it’s not there because we are proxies for our customers. We are not our customers, right? So, if we think about it in that sense, how do we represent them in everything we do?

I just talked to a gentleman. He was anointed CRO of the year, and I asked him about how do you get to be CRO of the year? Right. It is a pretty good question. And one of the things that he said is it starts at a cultural level in our company. They call their customers partners because they know their partner’s success is theirs.

So that’s just the cultural, customer-centric point of view that has to be backed up by a customer. A dogged curiosity and determination to ensure that we understand and represent them and the market, to your point of view there. 

So you talk about this as a lost art. Tell me what you mean by that.

Bringing Back the Lost Art of Talking to Clients

Ron Carson: I just think, as we have touched on this a little bit already, but if you think about the pressures that are on a given marketing department, and listening to some of the other podcasts and some of the other CMOs, there’s a persona there too, right? It’s like, we’re coming in, we got the metrics, we’re driving pipeline, and we’re charging ahead.

Absolutely agree. None of this that we’re talking about today dilutes the importance of that in any way. But that can be an all-consuming effort and process for a marketing department. This is a little softer, and many companies lose the ability to do it. They don’t have the bandwidth.

I spoke to a CEO in recent history and described the value of marketing, having these conversations and just asking, and he was perplexed. And why is marketing talking to customers? Not even kidding. So it is a little different. It’s changed with all customer success and support and all these measurement tactics, this simple old-fashioned, let’s just talk to people and have a conversation.

We have two ears and one mouth. It just got lost, and it feels like a contrarian and old school to be advocating for it, but the value derived from it repeatedly throughout my career has just been, I don’t know. I don’t say incalculable. It sounds a little dramatic. 

But I would challenge CMOs out there. Do it personally, or have someone on your team do it. I call it the 10-customer challenge. Talk to 10 of them. Just let them talk. You’re going to learn stuff, guarantee it. And it won’t be what you’re expecting to learn. You’ll find blind spots. 

Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting. It’s literally two days ago in the LinkedIn feed, I was tagged in a post, and it was a gentleman who had been mentioned on one of my podcasts by a CEO. And he was talking about the importance of what you’re talking about here. And he said he was an outside consultant and he worked with companies, and he said, it’s amazing how many times I asked marketing, can you give me a list of customers that I can start to talk to? His takeaway was that most marketing departments scrambled to come up with that list of customers, not because there wasn’t a list of customers, but because they didn’t have any familiarity with these customers. And that’s the dynamic you’re saying we have to avoid.

And it should be a part of our job because with that, the functional responsibilities of being a CMO, we can get up to here in what we have to do. When you step back, you say, okay, but what are the most important things I need to be doing? That’s where my time should be allocated.

And you’re saying there’s no higher responsibility for you as a CMO to create success within your organization than to constantly talk with your customers.

Ron Carson: Absolutely. In my opinion, it is the most important thing we can do. It feeds everything else marketing can, would, and should be doing.

Steve MacDonald: That places the priority and the emphasis. So everybody should be thinking right now, and I don’t want to diminish this to a percentage of time, but how much time would you recommend spending talking to customers? Is this something that’s a daily, a weekly thing? Does it ever end?

Or is it a constant part of the role and responsibility of today’s CMO? What’s your opinion on that?

Just Ask as Standard Operating Procedure

Ron Carson: I feel a little guilty about espousing this. I’m personally feeling a little untethered from our customer base because I haven’t had personal conversations with customers in a month.

It feels unnatural to be in this information void. There are other people on the team having conversations. So we’re covered. I’ve seen companies do it, and I’ve approached it in different ways. Sometimes, we need to figure out something. So let’s talk to 20 as fast as we can.

But ideally, it’s just normal operating procedure. If you’ve got a content team and they’re coming up with a content strategy, and we’re going to put together this content, and it’s going to drive leads and do that stuff, this should be part of their operating procedure.

That would determine what their content is going to be. What are we going to talk about? Write about? Is it going to be a podcast? Is it going to be an ebook? Is it going to be a video? All of that can come from those conversations. So that just keeps your marketing sharp. Then, from an executive-level perspective, it’s good to have a handful a month just to keep a pulse.

Steve MacDonald: And so if it’s you having the conversations, a person on your team having these conversations, how does the total of those conversations become known, not only in the marketing department but throughout the company? Because these are, we’ve just got through talking about how valuable these conversations are, right?

Using the Customer Voice as an Internal Learning Program

Steve MacDonald: So how does that get translated to, call it, an internal learning program inside of the company? 

Ron Carson: Great question and not an insignificant challenge. What we’ve been using and has worked well is a qualitative research tool. So we can capture the notes from the interview, and then we can tag every single response.

So if somebody says something positive about the product or negative, we can tag it. And over time, those tags can then evolve. So they can say something positive about reporting. And so we start to build that out. And then that all becomes a repository that other people can access. And it also puts us in a position to summarize periodically and send it back to the organization.

So that is a very important piece. Sticking it all in a Google doc is easy during the interview process, but that doesn’t lend itself to sharing later.

Steve MacDonald: Right. So important. Because we don’t want these things, we’re learning just to be in our heads, right? They have to be actionable in order actually to make an impact.

Ron Carson: And it is worth having the discipline and carving out the time, and I lived this and learned this the hard way. Your 20-minute or half-hour conversation is not just half an hour or 20 minutes time management-wise. Budget an hour sometime in the prior three weeks to set it up and then properly process, get the notes done, and ingest and make sense of the conversation. Give yourself another half hour to an hour.

Steve MacDonald: Good, but well worth it. And I love that feeling you just talked about, I feel a little bit untethered, right? Because it’s been a month since I was doing this. There’s us here saying it’s been a little longer than a month since I’ve done this.

So we’ve covered so much territory here. But if you had a single takeaway for the audience, if there’s one thing we need to remember from our conversation here, what would that be? 

Key Takeaways: Content is a 10, and Find Your Blind Spots

Ron Carson: Content is a 10. The processes we’ve spoken about today ensure your customers will also perceive it as a 10. It will be good, relevant, timely, and all the right channels. 

And that you have blind spots. And so, in addition to using this to get the content, also use it to ensure that that customer experience and journey you intend is the one, or at least close, to the one they’re getting, right?

Nobody intends for support tickets to take too long to escalate and resolve. Nobody intends for the first experience they have with customer success to be a, you’re going to renew, right? Everybody has higher-order aspirations for those services, but it doesn’t always pan out the way we think. This is another way of understanding what’s really going on.

Steve MacDonald: I love that. Ron, if there were follow-up questions or conversations that people wanted to have with you as a result of seeing you here, could you provide a link to your LinkedIn profile for people to get ahold of you? 

Ron Carson: Yeah, that’d be great. I’m on LinkedIn. 

Connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to connect with anybody and everybody out there.

Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Well, thank you for coming on, and thank you for sharing all the insights. You’ve given us a lot to think about and a lot to “just ask.”

Ron Carson: I love that closing. Thank you for having me. It’s been great.

Steve MacDonald: Thanks. We’ll talk to you soon.