CMOs: From PowerPoint to Profits - Bridging the Gap

CMOs: From PowerPoint to Profits – Bridging the Gap

Meet Daniel Christian, Senior VP of Marketing at Tradesmen International, renowned for his adeptness in bridging marketing strategy and profitability.

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Introducing Daniel Christian, the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Tradesmen International. Daniel is a proficient bridge builder between marketing strategy and profitability. His distinctive perspective stems from his leadership experience in marketing, running customer support, and the incorporation of insights from all internal departments. This collection of experiences forms his unique approach, termed “internal thought leadership.”

Daniel Christian, SVP, Marketing – Follow Daniel on LinkedIn

By bringing together external perspectives with internal teams and anchoring them to the company’s vision and mission, marketers can become thought leaders, propelling growth. Daniel aligns the company’s internal focus with customer needs through the concept of a common unit of measure, effectively closing the gap between customer desires and corporate profitability.

“Because of the absolute focus on the customer and extensive internal touchpoints across departments, marketing has a unique opportunity to establish internal thought leadership by aligning the external and internal strategies of the company into a roadmap that the team can take to stay one step ahead of the competition.” – Daniel Christian

Topics covered:

Establishing internal thought leadership
Visualizing the story for internal teams
Customer KPIs in a new light
Filling the marketing gap
When done right, content is more than vital
The one measure that moves the P&L

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube. To watch the 3-Minute summary video, CLICK HERE.

Introduction to Daniel Christian

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the B2B Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. And today, we have Daniel Christian here.

Daniel has an incredible perspective on how you actually take strategy like a PowerPoint marketing strategy and turn that into the right kind of growth and P&L for your business. So bridging that gap from strategy to P&L is what Daniel’s an expert on. Now, Daniel’s also the SVP of Marketing.

He’s been to the Kellogg executive business school. And Daniel, I’d love to have you give us a little bit more about your background, and then we’ll get right into the meat of the subject here.

Daniel Christian: Sounds good. So, thank you for having me on a call. First, it’s an incredible privilege to talk to other marketers.

Because the more we share and learn from each other, it’s the best way to grow. And I have learned a lot from my previous mentors and the people I work for. And the greatest mentor in my whole journey has always been the customer. Particularly being in a B2B environment, business to business.

As you think about it, many other factors are involved with your customer. You have an influencer, you have people making decisions that don’t use your product, and you have a user of the product. So really boiling it down and learning who your customer is has been my growth journey. And I started as a product manager, taking on less than 10% of revenue when I first started to build out the product journey and focusing from their point of view on always solving the customer’s problem. They probably don’t even recognize their problem, but identifying and becoming that authority of voice for a customer is my real passion.

And that’s what I do as a marketer. And that’s what I do internally with my teams and the people I mentor. And also managing up with my board of directors, CEOs, and other colleagues of senior vice presidents with whom I work together.

Steve MacDonald: So you’re being a little bit modest there because understanding customers is certainly at the core of what you’re talking about here. But you have a concept that I’m really intrigued by because, as marketers, we’ve all heard of thought leadership, thought leadership content, establishing ourselves as experts in the industry, and therefore someone to be listened to.

Establishing internal thought leadership

Steve MacDonald: But you have a concept of internal thought leadership. Could you explain a little bit what that is and what you mean by that?

Daniel Christian: Absolutely. I think that is a unique way of thinking about how you take the external view by researching, knowing the market, you’re talking to customers, looking at the industry data, and all these other things and aligning that back with your internal teams. Establishing yourself as an internal thought leader is very important because of two reasons. Number one is everyone has some sort of vision or mission statement, and sometimes it just stays on the wall. So, when you’re talking about things, the best way to align as a thought leader is to connect all the dots to your vision and mission.

So your CEO, CFO, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Sales Officer all know about your vision and mission. And now you’re telling a story of why it is important for us to do this from the customer perspective while establishing the internal thought leadership to say this is why we do what we do and also really helping them understand the nature of marketing is not just put out a new flier.

Or create a new demand for the problem that existed yesterday. We cannot drive a car looking at the back mirror. And most marketers are driving cars looking at the back mirror of the customers that we lost yesterday, the operations challenge we had yesterday of internal stuff will bog you down looking at the back mirror.

You have to drive forward looking at a venture. What is the opportunity that arises in front of you? What are the challenges that we have to foresee before our competitors foresee them? Because of the absolute focus on the customer and extensive internal touchpoints across departments, marketing has a unique opportunity to establish internal thought leadership by aligning the external and internal strategies of the company into a roadmap that the team can take to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Steve MacDonald: And you know what’s interesting we talked about right before we hit the record button here was that marketing is one of the key players internally that really touches every single department, right? And not every department touches the customer. Not every department is in the executive team leadership meetings and understands how they, individually in that department, can help fulfill that vision, right? And make it a reality.

And so what I took away was that as an internal thought leader, you’re bringing the vision, problem, and customer together and the departments together so that there’s one unified team. And you might say that’s a CEO’s job or something like that, but marketing has a very functional role in doing all of that.

So maybe explain a little bit. You talk about the problem, but you talk about not only defining the problem, but adding color to the problem, visualizing the problem, and that helps the rest of the organization as well. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts there.

Visualizing the story for internal teams

Daniel Christian: Yeah, absolutely. So what I mean by visualizing the problem is to visualize when you understand the external perspective, you start to walk in the shoes of a customer. You start to realize the challenges they may face when dealing with us as a company and the industry in general. So you kind of start thinking about all the different things you’ve got to look for when you visualize a problem by connecting your internal vision and mission to developing the end statement of what your press release might look like.

For example, consider if you have to write up a press release of the product you’re working on or a marketing initiative you’re working on. What would you tell somebody? Because it’s a very powerful tool to use to say, in four sentences, you have to say something impressive. Why is it important?

Why should anybody care? And how should it solve the problem differently? So that’s how we visualize in a way of looking at a 360 view of the whole thing you’re working through. Then you start to add data to that, and that is where most companies still stumble because they start adding data that they present to the board of directors.

Revenue, gross profit, operating income, and CapEx, all of those are important. But when you’re building a brand, you’re building a new category and establishing yourself as a thought leader. Have data that I generally call one unit of measure that you will go after that is focused on a customer as a whole.

What does your customer care about? So external thought leadership now comes into play. What would that data set be? What would be those KPIs that you can actually present to your customer that is digestible for them?

Customer KPIs in a new light

Steve MacDonald: So that’s a different way of thinking about KPIs, right? We always track KPIs that are internal to us, right?

But tracking KPIs that are customer-centric, that they care about. Because if you know that you’re addressing their KPIs, you’re accomplishing their KPIs, guess what? You’re going to accomplish yours. So it’s an entirely new set of data, an entirely new set of KPIs that you’re talking about here.

And if you could maybe talk to us a little bit about how you then translate those customer KPIs internally? Is that a part of that thought leadership, that internal thought leadership that you’re talking about that keeps everybody focused on the customer? Because it’s very easy to get focused on our own KPIs. We’re all very, very good at that, right? But we’re not always good at customer KPIs.

And as soon as you’ve developed what they are, then, like any good dashboard, you can track them, right? So, is that an important part of that internal thought leadership that you were just talking about earlier?

Daniel Christian: Yes, I think it’s paramount. And when you’re talking about those aspects of customer and I, depending on the journey of the company and where they are, some of them are still focused on acquiring new customers and getting out that message and getting more customers on board and things like that, right? So those KPIs could be different because we are looking at the first acquisition for sale or shipment first download on different things, right? So that could be a part of your messaging and part of your KPIs.

Flip it. And if a company is established for 10, 20, 30, or 40 years now, one of the challenges is retaining those customers they already onboarded. Those KPIs are different, right? So I also have customer service reporting to me. It’s a very unique situation, but it’s a blessing because you can now see what my first call resolution looks like, right?

Who are those customers calling? Who has called more than once in certain time frames? You can start developing other operational KPIs that might give you some insight as to why are 30% of my customers calling me twice a month. Are there underlying challenges that we need to address? Are there unmet needs we need to uncover?

Or is it some digital solution that we could have that probably eliminates some of those issues? Don’t think it’s from cost saving because people jump to that if I just reduce 30-40 percent of calls. So many hours, all those things, and cost savings. No thought about the opportunity cost. What if the customer hadn’t called you? That means they have called somebody else.

They’re still going to make a call, right? Don’t look at it as a burden. Look at it as an opportunity. So that’s what I also consider in painting a picture is to think about the opportunity cost associated with that for your corporation and, at the same time, for a customer to be dealing with that.

So new customers, different KPIs. Retaining customers is a different set of KPIs and a different set of thought processes. And then developing evangelists. People who are loyal to you. Think about just looking at the data and seeing what percentage of your customers have been loyal to you for the last four years, as an example, and how much of the revenue growth and everything is driven by that percentage.

Most companies would be surprised to see that that bucket is 20, 30%, or less. But it’s producing the majority of the growth for the corporation because there you have already invested the new customer KPIs, all the thought process, the retaining. Now, this is a fruit that you have. How do you grow that 20% nurture and make it a much stronger evangelist for you as you move forward with it?

Steve MacDonald: Because we all kind of have the knee-jerk reaction to say new customers equal the biggest impact on revenue and our profit loss, right? And you’re eloquently pointing out here that we all know growth from existing customers is the easiest. Yet, how much marketing do we spend our time and resources on growing those customers?

Understanding who those customers are? How do we serve those customers better? It’s probably very lopsided in terms of how much time we spend doing that, where from PowerPoint to P&L, the impact on P&L will be significant if we spend a good percentage of our time doing that.

Filling the marketing gap

Steve MacDonald: So I want to come back just a little bit. You talk a lot about addressing gaps, right? There are industry gaps, there are delivery gaps within the company and the operations. And then there are actually marketing gaps. Gaps between all of your ICPs and your industries and the verticals you’re going after.

Because content represents your expertise and what you can do when you can deliver, there are marketing gaps and content gaps too. So tell us a little bit more about how you think about those gaps and filling those gaps.

Daniel Christian: Yeah, I think that’s a very good question because, as a marketer, as you said before, it’s going after new. Showcasing your capabilities and bringing onboarding new customers is excellent. And most companies do a good job on that front of creating that.

But now, the other marketing, the real marketing gap, exists when you are talking with your base customer and looking at the unmet needs of those base customers that you already have and uncovering the needs and solving it without solving it. Because people don’t want to be told, they want to be taught as a journey.

So a lot of emphasis is on thinking about the gaps and the actual case studies that matter. How did you solve the problem that they had? What solutions actually turn that customer into more profitable, more productive, or more efficient in a process and tell that story by different verticals, customer segments,

Or by a different product offering and addressing those gaps and not just jumping to the copy-paste solution that everyone probably has. Let’s have so many searches, or let’s have so many social posts. Let’s have so many other things, but really understand that. And sometimes, you might find that you have a talent gap within your team because everyone has done the front-end stuff so well that all the solutions fall into the same bracket.

And it’s a humbling experience. You might find you have a talent gap. Also, I don’t have a problem addressing, Hey, I don’t know this. I need to learn. And so, what is the best source to learn, or who has the best expertise? Like a podcast like this, listen to and learn from it. But it’s a humbling experience.

Know your own gaps in your own talent pool and your own self at the same time, addressing those unmet needs in a way the customer wants it to be addressed.

Steve MacDonald: Yeah. It’s interesting. The whole idea of a talent gap because in educating yourself, and that’s what our buyers do. I liked it when you said they don’t want to be told they want to be taught.

Right. In teaching, that’s the notion of thought leadership right: experts have the position, authority, and trust to be a teacher, and we need to establish ourselves in that position. And if we have the talent pool internally, fantastic. Most companies are very much subject matter experts in what they do.

They’re not always subject matter experts in the overall industry, especially in all the verticals and industries they serve. And that’s relying on and bringing in the expertise and talent pool that’s all around you that makes a huge difference to those you’re trying to influence.

I love that idea of the talent gap because it’s not something even within your own marketing department, but you’re talking about the subject matter experts, right? Internally I would guess the majority of companies have a subject matter talent gap internally, but tapping into the external talent and bringing it in and validating what you’re doing and what you’re saying, because this is something we talked about earlier, too, right?

In the end, you’re a company that’s selling, right? So the case studies that you put together and all the content you put together will be from the company’s point of view. But when you bring in conversations, discussions, and points of view from other subject matter experts, that isn’t necessarily a replacement for your talent gap, but they add, right?

And then you get to get the rub off of that talent and have them validate what you’re saying. That’s huge. Just reviews or customer validations of what you’re saying, subject matter experts externally are validations of what you’re saying as well in a very different and positive way.

Daniel Christian: I think that’s why it’s important to bring in other team members throughout the company and get their perspective because they might have a different view. A great example I have is from my past life when I was leading product and marketing. I had brought on board a procurement manager as a product leader, and everybody thought, why do we do that? Because it’s a procurement manager, it’s a procurement guy. He knows how to buy stuff.

I was like, yeah, but he knows where the new innovations are coming from because he’s talking to all these external vendors that call him every day with the new solutions. So he at least held that view of things that you and I don’t know today. And so it’s okay to have an external view like this, and plus, he’s a great negotiator because he knows where the things are and how do you find them and was a great hire. It’s a great promotion internally.

But we understood internally that if I need to go outside my bounds, I need a subject matter expert to bring that. As I said, just an example of talent gaps and where you can look for those talent gaps within the resource pool that you have.

Steve MacDonald: So, I want to ask you something before we run out of time. And that is in terms of marketing gaps and talent gaps, what that turns into is content gaps, right?

Because of our expertise, our recommendations, and what we do, our entire demand generation is from the content that we create, so before we get into those specific content gaps if you could just give us an understanding, in your opinion, of the importance of content in representing what the company does and the solutions and its expertise?

When done right, content is more than vital

Steve MacDonald: How important is that content to the overall growth and success of the company? One is not important at all. Ten, it’s vital. Where would you put that and why?

Daniel Christian: I would say it’s anywhere from eight to nine and a half as a high. I would almost say 10, it a vital, depending on the journey you are on as a corporation and who you are going after.

So if you truly discipline yourself in growing the whole pie, and not just new customers, but growing the whole pie as a corporation and contributing to growing the whole pie, it becomes extremely vital to have appropriate content for the appropriate audiences. As I said earlier, do not copy-paste content as is for everything because nobody wants to be told, they want to be taught.

So the way I can be taught is very different than the way that you can be taught, so you have to have appropriate content. And it is hard for marketers to put on that content hat and say how this would be consumed.

And if we can do that effectively, it’s more than 10. It’s 11, 12, 13. If you can really produce that level of content, most marketers produce content that basically is copy-paste or some old post. And that’s when internally it becomes harder to sell that because they’re like, I don’t see a value. But if you can truly connect the dots in the right way, everyone would get on board.

It’s extremely vital in that sense.

Steve MacDonald: So you talk about the degree of difficulty, right? Because that is the hard stuff. We all can talk about and write about our products and services where we are the ultimate subject matter experts. But that content that teaches from an expert’s perspective is the hard stuff, right?

And that’s where you have to understand the industry, the trends, the knowledge base, and the new things happening. And you have to be able to see into the future. And so that’s why it’s hard, right? That’s why it’s hard to create, but if you can do that, you broke the scale.

It’s a 12 or 13, right? Because that’s going to spark conversation. That’s going to be the kind of content that our buyers want because it’s going to help educate them and not be told but taught.

So if you could wrap up everything that we’ve been talking about here and say, if there was one thing that I wanted you to take away from this conversation, what would that be for our audience of executive marketers?

The one measure that moves the P&L

Daniel Christian: Yes, I think if I were to pick one thing, I talk about customers and journeys and painting a picture, but the way you can boil down everything to one is I call it a unit of measure as a singular point. What is that unit of measure in your business or in your area that you are solving that matters to customers?

Just one simple truth. And it cannot be gross profit, it cannot be revenue, it cannot be operating income. It’s something that’s tangibly different. It’s what customers care about. And if you can uncover that unit of measure, and you can expand on that and write everything around that, how is that helping from content to marketing to business strategies or even having a Powerpoint that’s powerful enough to generate P&L?

If you surround yourself in that one sense and really grow it, it becomes a very, very effective way of going from Powerpoint to your P&L journey and profitable P&L. And profitable growth as a product for your company.

Steve MacDonald: So when you’re talking about a unit of measure, you’re talking about a unit of measure externally, internally? Can you give us a little bit more of an understanding of that?

Daniel Christian: Yes. So I believe the unit of measure is rooted in external and internal bridging in a sense. So something that the customer cares about. At the same time, something that the internal team can also understand. It is generally one level below what a lot of people might think. If you’re building a product, a window manufacturer, a garage door, or a front door, you might refer to units, right?

Like how many units I sold, well, that’s very subjective because depending on the market, depending on whatever, those all have up and down values, but the underlying measure could be linear feet. If you talk to your customer and say, I can help you sell more linear feet automatically, you’re going to sell more units automatically.

It’s going to generate more revenue automatically. It’s going to create better optimization and fixed cost because you’ve got a lot more linear feet going out the door. And so, in a B2B, you have to pick that unit of measure. That is a bridge between you and your customer that could really help both of us grow profitably because I can look into the eye of the garage door dealer and say, I can help you sell more linear feet.

And it’s excellent because it will help them grow. It can help us grow. So I find that that’s one level below what you usually consider you need today.

Steve MacDonald: I love that. Here’s another analogy: I was just talking to a company and its executives. And their ICP is CFOs, and the company has an online cash flow management tool, a whole system for CFOs in these companies.

And they said, really, what these CFOs want is they want more cash on hand in order to help grow the business. So that unit of measure could be cash on hand, right? Yeah. It’s not necessarily subscriptions to the tool that they’re selling, but that’s a unit of measure. And I like that in terms of a unit of measure that bridges the gap between what they want and what we sell.

And if we both focus on the same thing, more doors, more cash, right? Then we have a common language that we can talk about internally, affecting everything.

Thank you. I’m glad I asked that wrap-up question there. Well, Daniel, if somebody wanted to talk to you, is LinkedIn a good place if we put up a link to follow you or message you on LinkedIn?

Would that be the best way to get a hold of you?

Daniel Christian: Yeah, that’s the best place on LinkedIn. It’s my up-to-date profile there, and on LinkedIn, there is a link to my website also so they can connect with me anytime if there are any questions about what I just talked about, want to learn more about the unit of measure or something, I’ll be happy to facilitate a call and see how can I help out.

Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Well, thank you for sharing the insights today. As we said earlier, I’m sure this could have gone on a lot longer, but I’m glad we got the highlights and your insights. I appreciate you coming on the show.

Daniel Christian: I truly appreciate you for having me on. Thank you.

Next Steps

Daniel refers to the concept of internal thought leadership, ultimately creating better products, services, and compelling content that educates both buyers and customers. To elevate your content’s ROI and revenue impact, don’t miss the opportunity to CLICK HERE and schedule a 20-minute strategy session with Steve MacDonald, founder of ConstentStrategies.io.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies. Follow Steve on LinkedIn.