Ramya Kumaraswamy, Vice President of Growth and Demand at TaskUs, addresses the identity crisis that many CMOs face in today’s fast-paced environment. She explores why marketers struggle to gain respect within their organizations and how technology complicates that issue. She highlights the value of genuine customer advocacy as a path to trust. She also underscores that aligning with customers’ needs can reinvent a company’s go-to-market approach.

“There’s nobody else within an organization who knows how to be an advocate for your customer better than marketing. We’re the ones who are always talking about it. Our customer is the reason we’re in business. Their business is our business in so many ways.” – Ramya Kumaraswamy

This conversation dives into the complexities of marketing’s role in modern organizations, revealing how tech optimists like Ramya see both challenges and opportunities. She explores the power of customer advocacy as a way to rise above the noise. By delving into why trust is breaking down and how marketers can reconnect with their audiences, this episode provides tangible steps to drive real growth.

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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 have a super interesting conversation with Ramya. And Ramya, you are the Vice President of Growth and Demand at TaskUs. And TaskUs is a big company. I want you to explain a little bit about TaskUs and your role there, but here’s what’s interesting.

[00:00:19] Steve MacDonald: You call yourself a tech optimist, and you said, we’ve lived through this app economy, cloud infrastructure—now AI’s taken over the world. And all of that means that we have more tools at our disposal than ever, right? And so, in charge of marketing, it should be getting easier and easier.

[00:00:39] Steve MacDonald: But here’s one trend that’s happening. There’s a consistent line that we’re not getting the respect inside of our organizations that we need to. We’re looked upon as the support department, as, “Hey, if you’re not creating really high-quality leads, what’s your role here?”

[00:00:56] Steve MacDonald: So there’s a bit of an identity crisis, and this is very real. I talk to chief marketing officers, CROs, CEOs every day, and inside of some of the biggest CMO communities, the imposter syndrome is talked about on a regular basis. So this is not just a, “Oh, that’s a funny thing to say.”

[00:01:13] Steve MacDonald: This is real. So we’re going to talk about CMO turnarounds, addressing the identity crisis head-on. But before you help us do that, I’d love just to hear a little bit more about your background before we get started.

[00:01:26] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Steve. Absolutely. I think it’s been really fascinating.

[00:01:32] Ramya Kumaraswamy: We’ve been really lucky—part of every single kind of esker work technology that we’ve been going through over the past, I want to say, 20 years. And being in marketing, communications, and brand management through that—and helping brands navigate that—has been fascinating, because you’re absolutely right.

[00:01:52] Ramya Kumaraswamy: It’s been watching the shift in how consumers, end users, all of us, are changing the way we live, operate every single day. Tech has made it easier for us in many ways, but it’s also created gaps in the ways we connect with each other. All of social media’s promise was that we would make the world more connected and that we would

[00:02:18] Ramya Kumaraswamy: be more closely connected with each other. But instead, we find that we’re more disconnected from each other. We’re living more isolated than we were. Ideas now feel more siloed than they were. And in this reality, as marketers, how do you take that idea, how do you bring it to life, and how do you attach your brand to it?

[00:02:41] Ramya Kumaraswamy: And how do you really create that art of the possible when the connectivity feels weaker rather than stronger? And if we are the arbiters of trust within our organizations and within our communities, what is the role that we play? How do we bring that to life? And it’s really changed the way I view marketing.

[00:03:05] Ramya Kumaraswamy: It’s changed the way we talk about it in the C-Suite. It’s becoming incredibly difficult for us to continue using the same tools that we had, right? Like, the strategies that we used previously—they’re not working anymore. So it’s an interesting time.

[00:03:25] Steve MacDonald: Let’s get into that, because we’ve got to figure our way out of the fog here a little bit, right?

[00:03:30] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I want to do. There was, I think, a study that kind of sets the tone for our conversation here. It was called The Trust Gap, and it was done a little over a year ago, and it identified something really interesting. Seventy-four percent of B2B buyers don’t trust the customer evidence that we present to them.

[00:03:48] Steve MacDonald: This idea of trust in B2B, in ABM—it’s a relationship-based business. If we don’t have trust, our brands are trust marks. So we have an identity crisis as companies; we have an identity crisis as marketers leading the charge in our organizations. This is not a small topic.

[00:04:11] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I want to ask you: What do you believe are the core reasons behind the issues here? The trust gap, as we talk about it—what’s driving that?

[00:04:23] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Yeah, there are a lot of factors. I think, in many ways, the sources of authority that we would go to as our sources of truth are under question.

[00:04:37] Ramya Kumaraswamy: News now is more fragmented. When we think about where we would go to look for information to make our—whether you call it your buyer’s decision journey, or whether you would go to look for information to figure out how do you source a particular piece of information—all of those we went from not having enough information to having way too much information.

[00:05:05] Ramya Kumaraswamy: The information is now fragmented. Beyond being segmented, now there is a lack of trust in the sources of information. We then went to have third-party validation through—did we then trust whether it’s the analyst firms, or maybe we were trusting the reviewers, or maybe we were trusting said influencers?

[00:05:30] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Every time we tried to create these pockets of high-authority centers of trust that would help drive people toward particular decision criteria, it didn’t land. It didn’t stick. Because we would end up with yet another piece of information. Now, with the advent of having direct access—for both the consumers, like the users of the product, to the buyers of the product, to the providers of a product or a service all the intermediaries and channels are now coming under threat. So is there a reason for that? There’s too much for our consumers, our customers to navigate—for them to go from point A to point B. And so in that environment, how do you make a decision? And then when you layer on top of that the pressures of like, when you’re an enterprise in a B2B environment—when you layer on top of that, these cost pressures that every single enterprise is faced with, right?

[00:06:38] Ramya Kumaraswamy: There’s a lot of tension and pressure on making a decision, so people are avoiding making decisions. It’s almost—the risk is just too high to make a wrong decision. So it’s almost better to not do something than to make a wrong decision. And that’s adding to the entire equation in itself, and it’s leading to people waiting instead of moving forward and making the right decision. The entire decision-making framework is at threat because of that.

[00:07:06] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s interesting. There was a conversation I had recently, and the analogy that was given to me—it was another B2B CMO.

[00:07:14] Steve MacDonald: And he said, we’re making decisions—we’re asking our buyers to make decisions—at such a rapid pace. And hang on, we’re in the ABM model here. This could take eight months; this could take a year. And he says, I know. He says, but we’re making decisions every single day. And the velocity, the number, and the amount of decisions that we’re making…

[00:07:34] Steve MacDonald: And think about it, like all of us—we are B2B buyers. The last time that you added to your tech stack, guess what? You were the B2B buyer, right? And you’re not a professional buyer, right? That’s not what you do for a living, right? You run marketing in your organization, and on the side, you’ve gotta make these big decisions, right?

[00:07:54] Steve MacDonald: As you’re in this fast pace of constant decision-making, you’re at a velocity. It can be our worst enemy, right? He said, think about it. Think about what can go bad—what can go wrong—when you’re going 75 miles an hour on the freeway versus 10 miles an hour in your driveway. Velocity can really lead to bad things. And he said, if we’re in this fast-paced world and we’re trying to make decisions, we’re gonna default…

[00:08:22] Steve MacDonald: To the decisions we’re comfortable with. We’re gonna default to the people that we’re comfortable doing business with—the names that we’re comfortable doing business with, right? How do we become part of that inner circle of who is trusted, right? If we can do that, our conversion rates are gonna go way up.

[00:08:43] Steve MacDonald: So now the question is, how do we become part of that, right? So this is the question: how do we navigate this self-discovery journey that they’re on, where they’re making all their own decisions, and by the time they even get to us, right? They’ve got their shortlist of two or three, and they’ve got their winner in mind—before they start kicking the tires and actually wanting to talk to us. How do we earn the trust to get into that small, elite group at the end?

[00:09:10] Ramya Kumaraswamy: How do you go from the winner’s second to the inner second? Yeah, I guess that’s a good way to put it. Yeah.

[00:09:16] Steve MacDonald: Like, just knowing that’s the world we live in now, right?

[00:09:21] Steve MacDonald: We get ourselves into that elite group that is actually gonna be the people they want to talk about—or maybe another way to think about that is: how do we get earlier and earlier in the buyer’s decision, with them, in the buyer’s journey? Like, how do we have that conversation actually with them before they’ve picked their finalist, right?

[00:09:42] Steve MacDonald: Once they pick the finalist, that’s gonna be hard to break into.

[00:09:45] Ramya Kumaraswamy: We always talk about this with our teams. I think previously; the traditional model followed the funnel. But now you can’t wait and see. There’s no such thing as creating demand in many ways, right?

[00:10:05] Ramya Kumaraswamy: If you’re not talking to your potential customer base even before they know you are their target partner to solve a particular problem, you’ve lost them. You have to grow with them as they’re growing their business model. You have to attach yourself to their business journey and life cycle, which is why I’m going back to the identity crisis of the marketing function within a company.

[00:10:38] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Nobody else within an organization knows how to advocate for your customer better than the marketing. We’re the ones who are always talking about it. It’s not about us; it’s about them. Your customer is the reason why we’re in business. Their business is our business in so many ways.

[00:11:01] Ramya Kumaraswamy: And how do you help figure out your business model to almost map and grow along with your client or customer base’s ecosystems? And how do you figure out your inflection points in the market along with the growth curves and the milestones of your customers so that you know that commitment to your customer’s growth is at the heart of your entire existence, right? And there’s nobody else advocating for that within your business better than your marketing stakeholder within your company. If that’s not part of your rhythm and not your go-to-market engine, it’s tough to orchestrate that as an add-on to your go-to-market motion. Then trust becomes deep into every single engagement you have with those clients. That way, you’re never talking about a prospect. Every prospect is a future client at that point, right? Because you are just growing with how your vertical or segment is growing.

[00:12:11] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, I’ve had over 160 different interviews with B2B C-suite executives, and you just said something that made more sense than I’ve heard so far. You said, how do we become advocates for our customers? We’re sellers right now, right? We’re selling organizations, right? That’s what we do.

[00:12:34] Steve MacDonald: That’s why we have an issue, right? We’re gonna position ourselves in the best light. But the idea here is, if we can position ourselves not as sellers but as advocates—and guess what—we come alongside. That transcends the Gartner trusted advisor, right? I want to hear more about this idea of advocacy. That is so intriguing.

[00:12:56] Ramya Kumaraswamy: We talk about it, right? We’ve heard the importance of authenticity. We’ve heard the importance of personalization. It’s the holy grail. We hear about how cold email and cold prospecting are dead.

[00:13:10] Ramya Kumaraswamy: They’re all signaling the same thing—everyone is looking for a champion. Everyone’s looking for their champion, and if we can demonstrate that we’re in business to help them win, then we win together. We say that internally, right? Every sales kickoff, every year, when you do your internal rally cry, you talk about one team that wins together.

[00:13:37] Ramya Kumaraswamy: It mustn’t be an internal rallying cry. It should be an external rallying cry as well—for our customers. I think some companies do it very well with their partner organizations, where they have a robust partner ecosystem and partner go-to-market. But it’s that same concept of extending to their customers, where we say, “What’s your business rhythm? How can we help you win? Where can we attach ourselves to it?” We can figure out the sales motion around it, but let’s first solve your problem, and the business will take care of itself. The consulting industry does that to a certain extent, and maybe that’s the same mindset we can look at attaching to even the product companies.

Like the whole notion of building a roadmap together, co-developing together, the idea of bringing a team that is aligned to making a customer successful in a particular implementation—where we create a custom solution for our clients and then scale with them—whatever it may be for a particular business.

[00:14:49] Ramya Kumaraswamy: But your entire marketing function is not—it’s not just about the promotional aspect. It’s about how you build an entire campaign for that customer that is a PM beyond the promotional aspect of a BM. That’s when you win that trust—when you are committed to putting resources behind it as well. But that takes a lot of alignment with leadership.

[00:15:13] Ramya Kumaraswamy: It’s a huge lift. It’s not gonna get executed if it doesn’t have alignment from the top. And maybe it’s something you do for a few specific accounts, and then you figure out how you scale. But looking at a BM beyond promotion—beyond gifting, beyond microsite and targeted messaging—but truly building your product, your program, your business model

[00:15:39] Ramya Kumaraswamy: beyond just the marketing and campaign portion of it is what helps you win.

[00:15:46] Steve MacDonald: I think we’re all a hundred percent bought in with you, right? I love this idea of being the advocate of the customer. Is this also a true statement: the way that you are gonna become the best advocate for your customer is  to understand your customer better than your competition? That has to be foundational underneath this—and is that foundational to being that advocate?

[00:16:11] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Absolutely. It starts with that, right? Like you 100% have to understand them. You have to be embedded in their core needs. You have to understand them better—maybe better than their competition—which means you have to understand the entire ecosystem that they operate in. You have to be open to communicating, which means there is a level of transparency that is required on both sides. There’s a level of commitment that is needed.

[00:16:40] Ramya Kumaraswamy: There’s a level of openness to feedback that is required on both sides, right? Both to learn and be open to the feedback that you receive and also to provide feedback based on what you are hearing. Because many times, what we hear too is, our customers are hungry for insights themselves. Because it’s really like your external antenna. It’s hard for you to have your finger on the external world, and you then end up becoming that trigger of information from the outside to them. And the insights that you can provide become invaluable for them to make certain business decisions—that then make them trust you even more.

[00:17:26] Ramya Kumaraswamy: And so always looking and figuring out what are those insights you can bring to them because of your place in their business is super valuable.

[00:17:37] Steve MacDonald: So what you just said is hard. I’m going to give you another example of how hard this is. Usually what we do in the world of ABM is we take those insights and that understanding—that advocacy you’re talking about—and it’s what Forrester calls the foundation for ABM, which is content, right?

[00:17:56] Steve MacDonald: Like we share content that helps them, right? So there was a recent article that came out from Forbes. There was a study that was in this article that graded B2B content. Okay? It gave it a grade, like we were back in school, right? You know what the grade was for all B2B content?

[00:18:21] Steve MacDonald: So I’m gonna tell you—’cause you’re never gonna guess, you’re gonna be disgusted, right? It was a D minus. They graded B2B content as a D minus because it didn’t help. Like we are thought leaders of our own products and our own service, our own tech.

[00:18:38] Steve MacDonald: We could talk all day, right? We could talk all day about what we do, and that’s what we do, right? Here’s my next question. My belief is that we have a really deep, meaningful familiarity with our customers. We talk about everything in terms of their challenges—from what we do for them, what our product, our tech does for them—and it might be a meaningful, like this much of their total challenges, that are this much. But we talk about this, ’cause this is the world we live in, right?

But what you’re talking about, I think, is being meaningful in advocacy. You gotta understand this. Yeah. And that takes work. That takes effort. Resources. So how do we learn this? How do we focus on this, when we’re comfortable focusing on this right here?

[00:19:34] Ramya Kumaraswamy: It all comes down to trade-offs, right? Going back to my tech optimism—I think this is where we have a great opportunity.

[00:19:43] Ramya Kumaraswamy: AI couldn’t have come at a better time, and maybe this is where we get really smart about using technology and figuring out how we could apply that internally—so that we figure out a way to make that trade-off feel less painful than it needs to be. Because you’re absolutely right—it is an investment of time. It’s an investment of resources. It’s costly when you think about it from a people-resource standpoint.

[00:20:09] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Again, if you are looking to grow your business with your biggest clients, and you’re looking to grow share of wallet—and we see this data over and over again—it is more profitable in the long term and you can do the numbers for your individual business. If you look over your customer lifetime value, the numbers will tell you.

[00:20:31] Ramya Kumaraswamy: It is better to invest with clients and accounts that grow with you over time. Wouldn’t it be better to invest a portion of it in becoming true experts of your client’s business—investing time in better understanding their business, creating opportunities, figuring out solutions that you can then provide answers for—and serving that up as a solution to them as part of the other offers that you provide? And then creating a revenue line for yourself around it?

Companies that evolve from being just one product provider to providing services and service lines around it are the ones that figure out how to grow with their customers. And that’s what it means, right?

[00:21:21] Ramya Kumaraswamy: You have to figure out ways in which you attach yourself to your clients and grow with them. Understanding your business—truly running deep analytics on it—you run into questions that require your customer to share data with you. It requires them to trust you, for you to have access to that information. It requires a level of trust, again, for you to have access to that and to be able to provide that level of insight for it to be meaningful.

[00:21:49] Ramya Kumaraswamy: And I think that’s where content becomes less meaningful—when you are doing it from the outside, and then it becomes cookie cutter compared to what you’re finding. Those are some of the things that you might have to work with. And this is where working with partners and building an ecosystem around your customer base may be useful.

[00:22:12] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Maybe there are industry groups where there is a way for you to gather data that is anonymized—and yet you’re able to provide insights and data that could apply to your customer’s business. And the insights could be applicable in that way. That’s another angle to it. Either way, I think the trade-offs of figuring out—are you looking for a short-term gain or are you looking to grow with your customers over the long term?—it’s a strategic decision that your C-suite and the board have to make.

[00:22:42] Steve MacDonald: Here’s the thing—I’ve never met a company that said, “I don’t want to be customer-obsessed.” Your idea of investment there is, if we went to our executives if we were in our board meetings, and we said, “Our goal is to invest in our customers. Our goal is to invest in being advocates for our customers,” which means our goal is to invest in learning and talking with our customers and doing it on a regular basis. That’s the foundation of our go-to-market plan.

[00:23:14] Steve MacDonald: So, there was a woman—she was a multiple-time, two-time B2B CMO. She was a former salesperson. She was a Chief Experience Officer. Like, she’s got a really well-rounded background, and her perspective was: we need to listen more. If we invest in listening, that will drive differentiation. That will drive innovation.

[00:23:41] Steve MacDonald: So, if we’re gonna invest anywhere, let’s invest in listening to our customers, right? Like, I think you have echoed that so eloquently, in such a different way. I love this idea of customer advocacy. So I’m gonna say one thing, and then I’m gonna ask you my last question. All right? I have such a great job.

[00:24:01] Steve MacDonald: I get to talk to people like you. So here’s this woman—a Chief Customer Officer at BlackBerry. She was the head of the customer support group. And she said, “Steve, each member of my team is attributed to bringing in over $2 million a year in revenue.

[00:24:17] Steve MacDonald: Each person in the sales group—they’re attributed to bringing in over $200,000 a year. We have our customers calling us just to spitball with us, just to run ideas by us.”

[00:24:33] Wow.

[00:24:34] Steve MacDonald: And you know why? Because of what you said. Because they are true advocates for their customers.

[00:24:43] Ramya Kumaraswamy: That’s amazing.

[00:24:44] Steve MacDonald: And that’s a big—that’s a massive difference. That is a transformational difference. That’s not an organization focused on sales. That’s an organization focused on customer advocacy. I think what you’ve said here today, in different words—but I just wanted to put, like, an outside perspective on what you’re saying and your point of view here—is: it works.

[00:25:08] Ramya Kumaraswamy: It’s hard to get buy-in, though. And it’s hard to get past the chase of the quarter. It’s hard because it takes investment of dollars, and it’s really the reality of going up in front of your board and asking for investment dollars on a listening program to better understand your customers.

[00:25:31] Ramya Kumaraswamy: It’s tough, which is why the more we can get buy-in amongst senior leadership, the more we can get people understanding the value behind it, the better it is for all of us.

[00:25:44] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I’m gonna say—our original topic, if we think way back to half an hour ago—original topic was this identity crisis.

[00:25:52] Steve MacDonald: You just flipped it around 180 degrees. It’s: if we take our rightful role as being the leaders of advocates for our customers, guess what? That translates then into: how do we work with sales? How do we work with customer success? How do we work with operations?

[00:26:10] Steve MacDonald: How do we work with product? All of us. But if we lead as the voice of the customer, to be an advocate, then maybe think about our role as the voice of the customer—as a service to every other department in the organization. That gives us a whole new level of identity in the business.

[00:26:29] Ramya Kumaraswamy: I love it and figuring out, like, how do we—that’s exactly it—how do we help every single piece of the business? We talk about being customer-centric. We can help them understand what it means for them to be customer-centric and give them that identity.

[00:26:48] Steve MacDonald: I think that’s the perfect place for me to say: I’m sure there’s gonna be more questions that people have. Would it be appropriate if I gave out your LinkedIn profile so people could reach out and ask questions?

[00:27:01] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Oh yeah, absolutely. I’d love to talk about this all day, every day.

[00:27:05] Steve MacDonald: I want to thank you, because the goal of this podcast is just to bring in different perspectives, right? Different perspectives about how do we help each other be more successful. And the way I like to think of it is: if we all can do that, then that’s a part of the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[00:27:25] Steve MacDonald: So I think today you were a massive part of that rising tide, and I just wanted to say thank you for coming on and doing that.

[00:27:32] Ramya Kumaraswamy: Thanks, Steve. Thank you for creating this platform for us to have these important conversations.