Episode #215:

Cindy White, Chief Marketing Officer at Mitek Systems, traces a global path from B2C brand building to purpose-driven B2B leadership. She explains how advanced AI and biometrics at Mitek safeguard real people and real identities. Her focus is on stopping bots and fraudulent actors before they cause harm. Her personal passions and philanthropy underscore a career centered on using technology for good.

“Integration matters in this world of too much information. It’s the consistency of message, consistency of approach, and how it’s integrated across all the levels in the organization.” – Cindy White

Cindy highlights how internal alignment and a proper understanding of the customer’s voice fuel durable growth. She maps practical steps for making trust repeatable across experiences, reframing ICP beyond demographics, and using customer evidence to guide investments. Her approach centers on one consistent story that teams can execute against to drive ROI.

Follow Cindy White on LinkedIn

Follow host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn

[Transcript]

[00:00:10] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and I guarantee you we have one of the most important, most interesting conversations with our guest today, Cindy White. Now, Cindy, before I get into what we’re going to talk about here, you’re currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Mitek Systems. You’ve been in technology a long time, but what’s really interesting about your background is that you’ve got an early blend of B2C. Now predominantly B2B, but so many expectations from the B2C world come over onto the B2B world now.

[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: It’s like Microsoft and Amazon blending together, right? We can get packages delivered sometimes the same day. We expect the level of service, and quality and customer experience is blending between the two and so I love that in your background.

[00:01:01] Steve MacDonald: But when you and I met and we had our first conversation, I could say nothing other than we just had a complete mind meld and you nailed what were the top challenges in the industry that we all face as B2B C-Suite executives and in fact, we’ve done a study, we’ve talked to over 70 different B2B C-Suite executives about what are the two greatest challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth, and you nailed the top two, and we’re going to talk about those today.

[00:01:32] Steve MacDonald: The top two are internal alignment and a true deep understanding of the voice of the customer. So, these are the foundational things, but we’re in crisis a lot when we talk about these things. So, we’re going to unpack that today in a big way.

[00:01:47] Steve MacDonald: I would love to know just a little bit more about you though before we get started. You’ve got a South African accent that we can hear and so I’d love to maybe start there, but I’m going to turn it over to you and just for you to explain a little bit about your background.

[00:02:01] Cindy White: Well, thanks, Steve. As you said when we met last week, it was just a connection point because we had so much to talk about, and I think the study being at the center of that was just great conversation. So, I’m really looking forward to this morning as well.

[00:02:15] Cindy White: So, yes, the accent is South African, born actually in a country called Zimbabwe, which is just north of South Africa and raised there and now have been in the United States for a little over 15 years. So, it’s really great to have international roots and to be in a technology environment, which is why I ended up here through Microsoft.

[00:02:38] Cindy White: As you said, I started on B2C with Yum Brands in a classic B2C environment, a lot of advertising, a lot of big brand work, and subsequently moved that big brand work over to Microsoft in the very early 2000s, and spent 15 years with Microsoft, and just a natural progression of B2C and how Microsoft segment their markets. Microbusinesses are obviously in the consumer category and quickly that was SMB, and I started my journey in B2B marketing.

[00:03:10] Cindy White: I like to say that I’ve progressed and, as I moved through my career, I work on technology that has more purpose for humankind. So, leaving Microsoft was really a family decision to relocate to Sunny Shores and started the work in financial crimes work that I did at FICO, and then most recently, where I am now at Mitek Systems where we use our very advanced AI technology to help individuals and businesses protect what’s real. So, is that a real person connected to an identity? Is that a real person that I’m talking to on the call on proving my verification, or is it a bot, or is it fraudulent, nefarious?

[00:03:56] Cindy White: So, a lot of biometrics, a lot of capture, and I just feel like it’s on the right side of good is what I say. So, we do some amazing things with innovation. So, that’s a little bit about my progression.

[00:04:10] Cindy White: I’m a mom. I am loving this period in my life where adult children, if you can call them that, are part of my life and watching them shine post-college and I’m very committed to rhino conservation. So, my family in South Africa are involved in endangered rhino conservation, and so that’s a big part of my philanthropy as well.

[00:04:33] Steve MacDonald: Oh, fantastic. I mean, it’s interesting, your passion as a mom, it helps define the CMO role because you’re not only a Chief Marketing Officer, you’re a Chief Mom Officer, and that really never, never goes away.

[00:04:44] Cindy White: It does get more enlightening as you watch them and you say, “Oh boy, that mattered all those years ago when you thought it didn’t. That it did.”

[00:04:52] Steve MacDonald: Yes. Hopefully a Chief Marketing Officer is what we do matter too and that’s what I want to, like, get into right away because as a Chief Marketing Officer, you have a functional role, obviously, of overseeing marketing in the organization, but as a C-Suite executive, you also have a role of looking at the long-term sustainable growth of the business and defining a strategic plan to create that and maintain that.

[00:05:14] Steve MacDonald: So, when I asked you the question at the beginning of our last call and I said, “Cindy, what are the two greatest challenges, from your perspective, of creating long-term sustainable growth?” You immediately answered with internal alignment, and that was the number one of all the C-Suite executives we’ve asked that question of. So, over 70% of them identified internal alignment and it amazed me at first. Now, I’ve heard it so often, but it amazed me because it’s always easier to point fingers, right? I’d say our challenges are external. It’s not us, it’s them. Tell us what you mean and why you thought that was one of the challenges to creating growth and success.

[00:05:57] Cindy White: Well, I think we all naturally focused on the external or the macro challenges. In a world where we have more information, we are laser-focused on competitors. We are laser-focused on the market shifts, the market pressures, and we have a responsibility as a publicly traded company to our investors. So, all of your focus tends to be external. How do I respond? How do I show proactivity in a world that’s changing in the market that’s shifting?

[00:06:23] Cindy White: So, that’s where your natural time goes and it’s frenetic. There’s a lot of change at the moment in this world that we live in, so it’s easy to focus there. It’s easy to get your teams to focus there. Internal alignment demands time and when there’s macro pressures or there’s customers that are always going to take priority, it’s hard to prioritize time so that you can find internal alignment.

[00:06:51] Cindy White: You know, we are a virtual-first company and so we have programmatized our rhythm of the business and when we will meet weekly, daily, monthly, quarterly, whatever the case may be. But it’s hard to prioritize those and you always show up and the topic of conversation is the macro environment or an external environment. So, I think internal alignment needs to be on the agenda and higher up on the agenda for sure.

[00:07:17] Steve Macdonald: It’s interesting because I remember seeing a study that even just alignment on something as so critically important as who is our ICP—who’s our ideal customer profile—and if you were to go around the executive table and have everybody, in private, write who they think the ICP is, if there’s 10 people in the room, you might have 10 different definitions. But that has to be part of the North Star of where our organization is headed and going.

[00:07:44] Steve Macdonald: A lot of conversation has been around that we are, as humans, our behavior is mapped to how we’re compensated internally within our companies, and you’re like CROs (Chief Revenue Officers), a big part of their responsibility is, obviously, sales, and they have a quota over their head. We go into the boardrooms and nobody’s asking about the brand. Everybody’s asking about, “Hey, how’s this quarter turning out? What does next quarter look like?” All KPIs seem to be very short-term focused. Quotas and behaviors are short-term focused, but I know your responsibility as the Chief Marketing Officer has to be short-term pipeline development. There’s no doubt about it.

[00:08:25] Steve Macdonald: But we all know that today’s brand sets up tomorrow’s demand. So, there is this tension that exists between long-term goals and objectives, and short-term goals and objectives. How do you try to bridge that gap? Because it is a gap, and it does create a lot of internal misalignments.

[00:08:46] Cindy White: Those 12 months are so important because you have guided to particular earnings; you’ve got to deliver on that. So, the 12 months become ten and six as you get closer to the end of the fiscal year. So, we think as a marketer, it’s that second point you spoke about—if you truly understand the potential in the business, you’re going to want to know everything about your customers, and that customer intimacy becomes a boardroom topic.

[00:09:16] Cindy White: I like to think that every human has a head and a heart, and when you’re thinking about customer intimacy, you’re not only appealing to the decisions that they make in their head. If I was to take all my B2C environment, you’re creating an emotional connection and a relationship with your buyers. So, in this digital world, we are trying to form trust, and that is multi-year. That can’t be a decision that’s 12 months. “Oh, this year we’re going to do X, Y, and Z,” or “This year we’re going to do…” That is really truly understanding what they say.

[00:09:48] Cindy White: And so, to go to this head-and-heart thing, I have this North Star quote from Nelson Mandela, being South African. He said, when he was trying to get the country to integrate and really respect one another as different cultures and different value systems, “If you speak to somebody in a language they understand, they will think with their head. But if you speak to them in their language, you’ll go to their heart,” and what that is about is that’s really that long-term relationship if you’ve made that emotional connection. So, it’s a little bit of my North Star as I think about a customer.

[00:10:26] Cindy White: We’ve got so much technology that can help us define the ICP, but it’s all going to be segmentation and style, putting them in an archetype that looks like this, and if you were to ask around that boardroom table, everybody would probably have the same demographic actually, but they haven’t spoken once about how that person behaves and when in that person’s day they might be open to thinking about a new technology that they need, or do they only think about it when their hair is on fire and they need to figure out a solution really quickly.

[00:11:02] Cindy White: So, really understanding the voice of the customer—how that customer behaves, how long they contemplate, when they react—is really, really important, and it’s multi-year. It’s part of the brand. Your brand has to stand for that, and it has to be multi-year in the way that you think about it and develop it, and the only way to do that is actually to have conversations with customers, which is harder in today’s digital world, and when you’ve got macro environments encouraging you to be more efficient and not to engage in big research studies and things like that, we spoke about where focus groups went.

[00:11:39] Cindy White: Think about focus groups. What were you doing? You weren’t just listening to what the consumer or the buyer was talking about. You were seeing how they behaved. Did their eyes light up? Did they get frustrated? Did they visibly do something that made you aware that they were more emotionally connected or less emotionally connected? Were the people in the room introverted? And that way, it means that you’ve got to keep giving them information until they want it. They don’t want to engage with a human. So, all of these things, and certainly it’s been at least 15 years since I’ve done a focus group. I’ve done a ton of surveys, and I’ve done a ton of this, but I haven’t seen the human behavior for some time.

[00:12:26] Steve Macdonald: So much to unpack from what you just said there. Let me start with this. If you look up online and you do research—do a ChatGPT deep research or Perplexity deep research or something—into the importance of the voice of the customer, it is always aligned with, one, the highest voice of authority in your business. Two, CX. Creating the customer experience that’s going to keep loyalty, increase our NRR scores. All of that.

[00:12:55] Steve Macdonald: And I think it was in 2023, McKinsey came out with a study, and they had talked to over 400 highly profitable companies, B2C [00:13:05] and B2B, and largest return on shareholder value, and they came out with a conclusion that the number one differentiator in the market across all those companies was CX—was customer experience—and I was talking about this with a CMO recently, and he said, “Steve, here’s the way I look at it. If I know my customer better than my competition, I’ll create a better experience and I’ll ultimately win,” because it’s not about product and price, like the bastions of differentiation from the past. It’s not.

[00:13:37] Steve Macdonald: ChatGPT is writing code these days. Any feature that we roll out that’s significant, it’s going to be copied. It’s not long-term sustainable differentiation, but understanding and knowing that customer and creating that experience and the products and everything for them, that’s where the game is played.

[00:13:55] Cindy White: A hundred percent. When you think about experience, if there’s repeated positive experiences, this word “trust” comes into play, and when we have trusted relationships, they’re lasting relationships because we trust one another. So, it’s not just a one-time event, which your product can do, to one-time event that it was quicker than competitor A or to another one-time event that it’s smarter than competitor A. But if it’s consistently delivering the experiences that make a difference to me, then I’m going to have trust, and sometimes those experiences to buyers are personal.

[00:14:35] Cindy White: This product performance is one thing. But it’s pretty much table stakes on which vendor provides. But if vendor A is going to do something for me, help me look better, give me the tools to present this up the chain so that we can have a faster decision, show me how I’m going to be more efficient, or just provide validation that this is going to work, then that’s easier for me—saving me time, giving me stuff that I don’t need to create—and it’s giving me confidence. Maybe I even get promoted, right? These are sorts of things that we consider when we think about a buyer—what do they need out of this relationship, as much as what does the tech or the product need to do. 

[00:15:16] Steve MacDonald: It’s great. You’ve multiple times brought up the idea of trust, and we all know in B2B, it’s a relationship-based business. If you’ve lost trust in a relationship, you don’t have anything. That’s why our brands are called trust marks. We learned that early, early on in our careers.

[00:15:34] Steve MacDonald: But all you’ve got to do is look to some of the bigger studies, like the LinkedIn Edelman Trust Barometer. All over Europe, all over United States, North America, decades, trust has been going down and down and down, and in their most recent study, 32,000 respondents worldwide, 61% thought that we as B2B organizations were intentionally misleading them. 61%.

[00:16:03] Steve MacDonald: A totally different study called the Trust Barometer, it showed that as we package what we do for our clients in case studies and the way we represent value of what we do for our clients and what we can do for you, 74% don’t believe them. They don’t believe them. So, now you wonder why all these trends of the self-service buyer journey where they’re waiting longer and longer and longer to want to talk to us, and by the time they do, they’ve already picked the top winners in their mind. It’s because they don’t trust us and unfortunately, I know you and I don’t operate that way and the majority of the people here, but we are in an industry that has those perceptions.

[00:16:43] Steve MacDonald: So, to me, what you are saying and why you’ve kept bringing up trust, and I’m asking you your thoughts on this, is it true that the more that we can understand about our customers, the more that we can create products and experiences that truly meet their needs, that builds that trust? That we need that voice of the customer, we need that deep understanding, in order to really play that trusted advisor role, as Gartner would put it: right role.

[00:17:13] Cindy White: And I think some of the greatest innovation comes from listening to customers. The concept of a customer advisory board, for instance, there was a ton of focus on that in the mid-2000s, like the 2010s. What did your customer advisory board do? How did you listen to it? And you really did listen. Yes, you spoiled your customers, and you showed appreciation for everything that they could do, but incredible innovation comes from that because they are telling you what they need, and relationships are built, and those relationships stand the test of time. So, that is important. Innovation comes from truly having a trusted relationship.

[00:17:52] Cindy White: The other part that happens is that in our world, the common enemy is fraud. So, if you have a network of trusted relationships, nothing says product validation or performance or brand validation better than a peer endorsing, right? So, in these user groups or these customer advisory board types of environments, they get to network with one another and share common problems, and we have a common enemy in fraud. We have a common enemy in cyber-attacks. This is how we can help fight it. We come together in an environment, and we are listening to one another. Again, innovation happens and you are solidifying this trust relationship because you’re all winning against that particular macro problem. But again, it’s trusted relationships.

[00:18:40] Cindy White: And then I would say the last one is really around how you think about experience in the way that they use the technology. So, we call it use cases or whatever the case may be, but we spend so much time on our screen that customer experience is now about how they use the technology.

[00:18:57] Cindy White: So, again, doing user groups that make it easy for them, make it quick for them, but listening to them and saying, “What is it about this tech that’s going to get you to the answer quicker so that you can be more sure that that is a fraud attempt,” or whatever the case may be. So, the customer experience actually now presents itself inside the product and UI/UX, and it has for years and years. But it really is important now that we truly understand it, so it becomes fluid for them, and it talks to them in their language and something that fits like a glove.

[00:19:31] Steve MacDonald: So, I want to expand a little bit more on this idea of trust. Your top two challenges were internal alignment and lack of deep voice of the customer understanding. How does a deep understanding of the voice of the customer and building that trust help create internal alignment? If they’re the highest voice of the authority in the business and we truly, deeply understand it, isn’t that one of the biggest things to help bring alignment inside of the company itself?

[00:20:03] Cindy White: A hundred percent, because you take all subjectivity out of a debate with your internal peers when you put the customer in the middle because it’s not, “What does Cindy think?” or “What does Steve think?” It’s, “What would the customer think?” It’s not what Cindy thinks or believes is a game changer to the environment or what Steve thinks is going to win the share of voice or whatever target that we’re choosing. If you put the customer in the middle, they’re going to answer the question. So, that unanimously brings alignment.

[00:20:41] Cindy White: It’s not my opinion, it’s not your opinions, but it’s ours because it’s the customer’s opinion. That’s just one element. When you’re thinking about how much investment to assign to innovation, to research and development, or how much investment to assign to marketing, if you put the customer in the middle and what we have to achieve in order to win that customer, retain that customer, grow that customer, where to make those investments. We’re behind on innovation, we’re behind on brand trust, and then you know where to place the investment. So, that’s just an example of how I do it. I do it with my team as well, something as simple as a creative brief. But we’ll get to integrated marketing.

[00:21:21] Cindy White: Somebody asked me two days ago which creative execution on Slack, and I was like, “I can’t choose one because I don’t know what the brief is.” Asking for my opinion, I can tell you directionally from a brand perspective which one I like, but I’m not the customer. So, the answer is in the brief. Go back to the brief, understand what the customer we’re trying to communicate and how. So, I just think it takes subjectivity, and it aligns everybody onto the simple goal. This is what we set out to do.

[00:21:52] Steve Macdonald: You know, as articulated so well here, it’s so important to the organization and everything that we do; left to our own devices, we’ve done pretty well in our careers. We’re C-suite; we can make decisions. I can tell you which one I like. Go with that one. I’ve never met a Chief Product Officer that didn’t have ideas, plentiful, about the roadmap and where to go and what to do, and that’s what we end up doing: we end up making a lot of decisions on our own because we have to have fast decisions when we’ve got way too much to do in a day.

[00:22:27] Steve Macdonald: But I had the privilege of interviewing somebody on the podcast that was in customer experience for Amazon, and they still have, to today, their empty chair policy, where it used to be in the physical meeting—and there’s still physical meetings, but now a lot of virtual meetings—there was an empty chair. Physically an empty chair, and it was designed to be there to say, “If the customer was sitting here with us today, how would we be making different decisions than we are?”

[00:22:57] Cindy White: I absolutely love that.

[00:22:59] Steve Macdonald: It could have been an operations meeting, it could have been a sales meeting, it could have been a marketing meeting, it could have been a finance meeting, but there’s not one of us that says we don’t want to be customer-obsessed, we’re not a customer-first organization. We all say it, but it’s to the degree that we actually act on it.

[00:23:21] Cindy White: Love that. I might even adopt it. It just takes the emotion out of any conversation because it creates focus. That’s what we focused on. It’s easy then.

[00:23:31] Steve Macdonald: So, here’s a big question for you because if you look up and do the research on the voice of the customer too, the McKinseys of the world, the Forresters of the world, they’re going to tell you most B2B companies falter when it comes to a voice of the customer program and having a deep, ongoing understanding of their customers—that they falter. So, what do we have to do? Like, what’s your recommendation to the audience here, other C-suite executives that are tuning in, about the importance of investing in a voice of the customer program.

[00:24:09] Cindy White: Yeah, I think for me it is consistency. We are moving fast, particularly in technology environments. We move fast, and so the customer’s needs, wants, change really fast, and now add the dynamic of AI, in how human intelligence and artificial intelligence are working together. So, consistency. Don’t do a once-and-done survey, a one-time survey. Make sure that when you use programs like NPS and CSAT environments, that you’re not just sending it to the buying committee that are going to give you a good score. Be intentional about getting responses from across the organization because that one person just has to move, or that one person might not have the opinion of their whole company; to have it as an integrated approach. But it really does have to be felt right in the bellies of everybody across your organization.

[00:25:02] Cindy White: So, voice of the customer programs, yes, make it consistent, but actually get their voice too, and do it in ways that they are prepared to share it. So, in a technology environment, we have analysts that evaluate vendors, and you’ve got to go and knock on a customer’s door, and you have to have six or seven, and they have to give validation that your product works, and you do that, that’s great. But that’s a lot of tax on your customer. So, how else can you reward your customer?

[00:25:30] Cindy White: Maybe they’ve got a problem. How can we innovate together? And you can be our alpha testers or our beta testers, or you are in a premium environment where we get the product established. But again, consistency and layered approach to how you’re getting voice of the customer into the organization.

[00:25:45] Cindy White: And then for marketers, I guess it’s staying close to the CEO, the founder, wherever you happen to work, and making sure that that voice of the customer starts off any internal engagement, that voice of the customer is really felt through the purpose, and that your teams are in touch with the purpose. It’s not just something on the wall of the building or something on the logo lockup or whatever the case may be, but they actually feel it, and they know that they work at a company that is committed to this purpose because that purpose is going to make you customer-centric as well.

[00:26:20] Steve Macdonald: Well, I wish we had like two more hours to talk, but we’ve already gone over a lot of territory, and what I’d love to do now is—our human brains—we can only remember about two or three things at a time. If there was one takeaway that you wanted everybody that’s tuning into this podcast to make sure that they took away from the conversation, what would that be?

[00:26:45] Cindy White: It’s integration. Everything matters in this world of too much information. Consistency of message, consistency of approach, and how it’s integrated across all the levels in the organization would be mine. So, if you put the customer at the middle and then say, “Let that customer experience permeate in the way in which we innovate, create products, deliver products, create the UI/UX. How do we tell our stories from the CEO to the investor, from the CEO to the customer, from the customer to the other customer? How do we consistently tell that story?”

[00:27:24] Cindy White: And you’re right. There’s just so much information, and we can only remember a few things. So, just make it one thing that they have to remember about your brand, over and over again. Don’t overcomplicate it and say, “I want to prove it.” There’s going to be a time in that relationship that they’re going to want you to prove it, but when you’re building it, just put them in the middle and say the same thing over and over again, and be committed to it and each other.

[00:27:47] Cindy White: You said the other one was internal alignment, and just make sure that you are aligned on that, and that even if you have to have a tough conversation to get aligned on it, have the tough conversation because it’s easier to be aligned. Everybody wins when you’re aligned.

[00:28:02] Steve Macdonald: Well, here’s what I know, Cindy: people are going to have questions. Is it okay if I give out a link to your LinkedIn profile so people could reach out?

[00:28:09] Cindy White: Yes. I would love that. I think in this virtual world, we don’t do enough networking. So, anybody listening that has ideas for me on how they see this topic evolving, I would love to be connected and networking and so forth.

[00:28:25] Steve Macdonald: Well, fantastic. You know, the mission of this podcast is to bring together C-suite perspectives and insights from our years of experience in the trenches, and if we can share with each other on how we can all create success, then it’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats, and I just want to say that I think you’ve been an incredible part of that rising tide today, and just thank you so much for the conversation.

[00:28:50] Cindy White: Well, thanks for doing what you’re doing and connecting us so that we can all learn from one another. I really appreciate it, and I’ve loved chatting with you as I did last week.