Episode #282: 

Gethin Nadin, Chief Innovation Officer at Benifex, explains why trust now sits at the center of successful B2B growth. He shows how companies can improve ABM performance by helping buyers build internal business cases, using expert-led outreach, and nurturing relationships long before an active buying cycle begins. The conversation also reveals why tailored relevance, trusted voices, and deeper industry understanding help teams open better conversations, influence hidden stakeholders, and win larger deals with more consistency.

“You have to start all of these conversations with, I am tailoring this to you based on what you need. I am not a product first. That is why trust has become so important, and why thought leadership has become so successful in deals: you start with that other person. It is about them, it is their problems, it is not about you and what you have got to sell.” – Gethin Nadin

This episode explores how modern B2B teams can shift from product-led selling to problem-led engagement. It highlights practical ways to build trust earlier, support internal decision-making, and influence buying groups. The discussion offers a clear path for improving deal quality, accelerating momentum, and winning larger enterprise opportunities through relevance and credibility.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today, I guarantee you, we have a conversation that any executive in a B2B company that’s going through an ABM go-to-market motion needs to hear, the conversation that we’re gonna have with Gethin Nadin.

[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: Now, Gethin, you are a two-time Chief Innovation Officer, and even though we don’t really all know what an innovation officer does, I think that’s individually up to the individual company and you and your responsibility. But I’m gonna turn it over to you in just a second. You sit across sales, marketing, product, right? You are not heavily influenced by one versus the other, the mandate, the KPIs of the other.

[00:00:52] Steve MacDonald: Your goal is to create a successful go-to-market strategy. And so I would love to just hear a little bit more about your background, and then we’re gonna dig into the ways that you’ve been re-engineering a go-to-market strategy and putting trust, and the way that we create trust, and how that helps accelerate deals, take it to a whole new level. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about your background before we get started.

[00:01:19] Gethin Nadin: Yeah. The company I work for now, Benifex, I joined when we were a 20-person startup. That was 15 years ago. We just received our big investment, and we were about to scale up, and when I joined the sales team, that was to do partnerships.

[00:01:32] Gethin Nadin: When I had my interview and I spoke to the founder, I decided, look, there’s an opportunity here for us to grow significantly via other people. So rather than us having a huge sales team, we set up those partnerships, and the company agreed. They thought it was a little bit early in our evolution for us to be doing that, but they agreed, we think you’re the right person, so we’re gonna offer you this job, and you can come and work with us.

[00:01:53] Gethin Nadin: And yeah, I went straight to the sales team and, within my first few months, set up a partnership that brought us around 12 new customers. All that happened almost immediately, so I was able to prove the point, because we basically took someone else’s partnership off them and moved all those customers to us, so that was great for us.

[00:02:08] Gethin Nadin: I then set about creating a partnership that brought us Barclays, and that ended up being one of the biggest deals we’d won to date. And that was in my first year or so. By the time I stepped away from partnerships, I’d set up partnerships, all pretty much the first of their kind in the industry, really, with EY, PwC, and Barclays, and that really significantly supported our already global expansion.

[00:02:29] Gethin Nadin: Although I moved out of the direct sales team, my job was always, and continues to be, very sales-adjacent, and over the last couple of years, I spend probably back now more time with the sales and marketing team than perhaps I did before. I think my background in psychology, as a psychologist, influences a lot of how I see the world because I’m interested in human behavior, what makes somebody open an email, what makes somebody turn up to an event, what makes somebody download a document. But I would really say that where I sit over, like, product, sales, and marketing, they’ve all got their own kind of go-to-market functions.

[00:03:02] Gethin Nadin: What I’m trying to do is connect those three things together, but then also make sure that we are resonating with the market. So using my own subject matter experts so that our messages land in the right place, that we’re talking about the right problems. The products we sell might not change, but the way we angle them, the problems we solve, how we target those will change based on what’s happening in society, what’s happening in that specific target’s industries. I think that’s where I’ve really been able to add value over the years, by sitting above those three kind of teams and making sure that the way we talk about our products, the way we sell them, the way we market them, is aligned with what the market needs.

[00:03:39] Gethin Nadin: Even just the wording that you use resonates with the buyer at that time because clearly when you’re selling to B2B, they’re impacted pretty heavily by the prevailing economic climate, with things that go on in society. That could be a pandemic or a cost-of-living crisis. You can’t continue to sell the same way through these things. You’ve got to evolve the way you sell based on what’s happening to them and their organization.

[00:04:00] Steve MacDonald: I’d love to start there because evolving the way that we sell or the way that we go-to-market is based on a problem with how it was working before. What’s the problem that you see with a typical ABM go-to-market motion that just isn’t working these days and why you’ve done things differently?

[00:04:22] Gethin Nadin: This is where I’ve spent a lot of time in the last 12 months, in research, and where a lot of the focus of my talks and writing is gonna be for the next 12 months. When you’re selling to B2B, you sell to the department or area that is gonna get the most benefit from the product or service you’ve got to sell. So in my world, that’s the HR team. And if you’re a large global enterprise business, it’s not just the HR team, it’s a reward and benefits team. So it’s a subsection of a bigger team, which is in an even bigger organization. What we found really early on is you’ll buy our products and services if you are an HR director or you are reward and benefits or VP of total compensation. You’ll buy what we’ve got to sell because you know the industry, you know what we’re selling, you know what our products do.

[00:05:01] Gethin Nadin: And you’re like, I love this. It’s gonna help me streamline my admin, save time. It’s gonna create a better employee experience. So they get it. What we found in the really early days was when they then went internally to ask for the money or the investment they needed to then say yes to a provider like us, that deal goes into what I think is like quite a big risk area because that’s out of your hands. They’ve taken that internally, and you’ve got little control over that, and it’s at that point that we found your chances of losing them significantly increase because they’re out there having conversations that you don’t know what’s happening, you can’t control or influence those conversations.

[00:05:37] Gethin Nadin: We realized that in our world, but I think this is probably true in lots of B2B areas, HR people were not very good at asking for money, so when they went into the Chief People Officer, the finance director, the CEO, their business proposals just didn’t stack up. You were competing against other departments that had pretty strong metrics attached to them, and there’s loads of evidence to back this up. There’s some great research from people like Willis Towers Watson and EY and PwC and KPMG over the years that has shown that people aren’t very good at asking for money. So, when they go to the FD and ask for money, those proposals are typically never very strong, and the overwhelming reason why somebody doesn’t get investment is not because it wasn’t a good purchase or wasn’t a good idea, it’s because they weren’t able to make the argument internally.

[00:06:21] Gethin Nadin: We really started down this route of, so how do we control that piece when it’s out of our hands? Where I’m at this point in time is any proposal that I sell, if I was in front of you now and I was selling a pitch, I would pitch to you like you were the FD or the CEO. I would ignore the direct buyer, and I would go straight to the CEO. Even though I’m pitching to the HR director, because what I am able then to do is give them the information that I know is gonna resonate with their CEO, as well as the information that resonates with them, and I almost equip them then with the skills and knowledge to effectively go internally and sell that.

[00:06:55] Steve MacDonald: What’s interesting is, the hidden buyer concept, the buying group concept, is well known. Typically, around 50% of the decision making comes out of the hidden buyer. Typically, we don’t get into the meeting with a hidden buyer. We have very little influence, and the answer has been the thought leadership. Now, you have a different thought on thought leadership, and you actually combine that with getting meetings that are not sales-oriented. They don’t sound like sales meetings. They’re not sales meetings that are easier to get. They have a different outcome. Can you explain maybe how do you get these meetings? Who are those meetings with, and what’s your philosophy behind that?

[00:07:41] Gethin Nadin: Yeah, so if I start with the philosophy first, having set up partnerships, it almost felt like I needed to not just sell a car to you. I needed to convince you to sell the same car to everyone, and to tell everyone else and all your customers how great this car is. I think that’s a more difficult sell. Running partnerships means you are arming someone else’s salesforce effectively, and then also having to give them more detail than if you were directly selling yourself. I realized that knowing our own product suite was like knowing how to drive a very specific car. I could learn every button, every feature, every capability of the car, but selling effectively wasn’t about mastering that car or our product. I needed to understand almost like the entire road system, so I needed to learn the industry landscape, the rules of the road, the traffic system, the traffic patterns, the obstacles, the pressures that drivers faced.

[00:08:31] Gethin Nadin: If I really connected with buyers, I needed to understand this wasn’t just a vehicle I was offering, but the whole environment in which that vehicle was being used. That’s when I started to realize that I needed to build that knowledge. What I realized quite quickly as well is that if you became a source of expert counsel to somebody, they would open the door. If I went to them and said, look, I’ve won all these awards, I’ve been in Forbes Magazine, I’ve done all these kind of things, I would love to talk to you just about your strategy and if there’s any way I could help. People respond to that kind of message. People respond to that kind of LinkedIn message. Sometimes, they do that because people want to be in the sphere. There’s a lot of evidence that says people want to be closer to the people that have done great things.

[00:09:12] Gethin Nadin: That’s enabled me to open the door to customers and prospects that we haven’t been able to get in front of before. It’s enabled me to kind of tease that we might be able to help you with something, and I’d love to bring one of our sales guys in to have a chat with you. Then I become a source of leads in that sense now. That works really well because I’m able to sit in those meetings and basically say, I don’t care whether you buy from me or not. That’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to help you solve a problem. We have sales guys and salespeople who will come in and sell these things to you, and I feel really strongly that’s been so beneficial.

[00:09:44] Gethin Nadin: That the conversation candidly happened recently with our CEO, who said, we should be commissioning you. I was like, I don’t think it works if I’ve got this plausible deniability to sit in front of a prospect and say, I’m here to help you, and if I think one of our products or services can help you at some point, I’ll tell you that, but my primary focus is not here to sell to you. That has really worked in my favor over the years.

[00:10:08] Steve MacDonald: So a couple of things. Makes perfect sense. You’re targeting people that are outside of the direct ideal customer profile that are maybe decision makers above and around that person. But not all of us have an accolades background. Sure. Not all of us have the ability to say, look, I was published here. I’ve spoken three times at these conferences. I’ve got a book in the works.

[00:10:34] Steve MacDonald: How does this translate to a mid-level market, B2B company deploying ABM, they’ve got their target account list. They’re trying to get in, they’re trying to sell, they’re trying to build trust. And that’s what I’m taking away, is that you come in with the ultimate amount of credibility and trust because you’re not selling, you’re helping. But how do we scale that, and how does that apply to the audience that’s listening here today?

[00:11:02] Gethin Nadin: And I think it’s a really fair challenge, because it’s one thing that we’ve really struggled with, is how do we scale me? It’s been impossible. We haven’t been able to do that. To a certain extent, the role I’ve got now and where I am with the awards and everything is almost by design. Some of it’s been luck. I read a story about a guy working for Microsoft who did a similar role, and I went to the CEO and said, this is what I think I should do for Benifex. That’s what we set about creating, was if I could hone my knowledge so much that I could sit in a room with somebody and convince them, or just talk about the industry and their problems, then that might get us a foot in the door.

[00:11:32] Gethin Nadin: And might that lead to more, not just new business, but also cross-selling, but really successful relationships with lots of our customers where I’ll go in and talk about a problem in the market or a problem they’re facing and lead them down a path of saying, I think this product can really help, and we’ve taken a product from being not on their radar to on their radar. So you’re magic-ing in revenue in that sense. But what we realized is, so first of all, some of the sales guys, it’s just really about finding who is your subject matter expert. Who is your equivalent of me in your organization that you can start to use and lean on? Give that person more time to be able to research your target industries, your target accounts.

[00:12:06] Gethin Nadin: One really great example was a European utilities company that had been with us as a longstanding customer for kind of 10 years or so. We’d never really sold them anything more. They were almost considered like, this is a customer that’s great and we love them, but they aren’t gonna buy anything more from us, and that was the kind of pervading thought. In the UK at the time, we were going through a fuel crisis, and in the media there were all these fuel businesses, gas companies, who were going out of business. I just read a news article one day, and it basically said that this provider that used to work with us was called a provider of last resort, so that meant if a gas company went out of business in the UK, in order to ensure their customers still got gas service, they would move all these across to this provider that was really well established and had great backing and everything.

[00:12:50] Gethin Nadin: Immediately, I just thought, they’re gonna require a lot more customers, so how many more customers are they gonna get? And it was about 350,000. I used that to reach out to them and said, look, you are getting a lot more customers in a very short space of time, that’s gonna put pressure on your people, that’s gonna put pressure on your contact centers, that’s gonna put pressure on your, whoever’s delivering gas to people’s homes, and I used that as an opportunity to reach out and say, look, this looks like it’s gonna be a challenging time for you. How are you navigating that? Can I help?

[00:13:16] Gethin Nadin: The response was, would be good to chat, actually, because this is something I’d like to kind of talk through with somebody. I had that conversation, learned a lot about their business, the type of people they wanted to recruit, what other changes were coming, what the CEO was proposing to do over the next couple of years, how their HR strategy was gonna change. I put all those notes to one side, kind of four pages of A4, didn’t do anything with them. Three months later, an opportunity arose where we thought we could sell them something, and we had a new product that we thought they might be interested in.

[00:13:43] Gethin Nadin: Rather than just generically pitch it, we re-pitched it based on my four pages of notes. How do we solve the problems they’ve told us they’re gonna be facing in the next couple of years? And it ended up being a kind of almost a 50% upsell opportunity, which they signed, and then also renewed contract with us for five years, and if they’re listening, I think they’re very happy with this, and they were happy with the whole process.

[00:14:02] Gethin Nadin: But that was a really good example. Salespeople don’t really like this approach historically because it’s a lot of upfront work, and that’s the difficulty. You’ve got a contract, you’ve gotta get a contract signed by the end of the quarter, you’ve got targets to hit, and taking three hours out of your day to really research and find out the best way to pitch this can be really difficult. But I find a lot of the work I do is very repeatable. You can take the same formats to a similar company experiencing the same chain of challenges, and you can just go out and find them, or you find out real challenges that are facing that industry.

[00:14:33] Gethin Nadin: At the moment, for us, and we look at our ABM campaign that’s gonna come out from us, at the moment, is directly targeting West Coast tech businesses because of a skill shortage and a skills-hiring issue that we know most of them have got. So we’re like, this is one universal issue that’s affecting all these big tech companies across kind of Silicon Valley and California. We’ll go out to all of those with this very specific, you’ve got this problem, this is how we solve this problem for you. You might only have 200 target accounts in that campaign, but we think that’s gonna be quite effective because you’re playing then to the person as, you understand me, you understand my industry and what the challenges are to me right now, rather than us doing product first, buy this car because it goes this fast and it’s got this many doors and that kind of stuff.

[00:15:19] Steve MacDonald: So much to unpack there. One thing that I wanted to say that I think is just an underlying truth here is you’ve taken an approach that builds trust and credibility. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer said that 32,000 respondents worldwide said that business leaders like you and I, 68% said we’re being intentionally misleading. Intentional.

[00:15:43] Gethin Nadin: Interesting. Yeah.

[00:15:45] Steve MacDonald: And we wonder why the B2B buyer is waiting longer and longer to talk to a salesperson, because they don’t trust us. They wanna do all of their research in advance. They think that we’re biased, and what you’ve done is you’ve taken the bias and you’ve built it with, you’ve gotten around it with trust and credibility.

[00:16:03] Steve MacDonald: In November, Forrester came out and said their 2026 prediction was all about trust, that it’s the currency to get into deals, keep deals, close deals, and keep the deals. I love the story you told about the existing customer in cross-sell and upsell, 73% of new annual revenue for a B2B company should be coming from existing customers.

[00:16:25] Gethin Nadin: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s the trust I think is really important, and I don’t think it’s ever not been important, but I think it’s become more important. We live in a post-truth world where leaders of countries can say whatever they like, whether it’s made up, whether it’s got evidence or anything like that. You can say whatever you wanna say. Anyone online is now an expert. Social media has allowed anyone to have an opinion on anything, and that means trust as a currency has rocketed in value, because if you ask most people who you trust, it generally is now a very small list.

[00:16:55] Gethin Nadin: You used to trust government, you used to trust politicians, you used to trust healthcare providers and hospitals, but now people don’t trust those places in the same way they used to. When I was going through this, I think there’s a new role for me in the business, I was thinking about people like Jony Ive at Apple and Steve Jobs, and I was thinking, you’ve almost got celebrities that are working for a business. Apart from Walt Disney, we never felt like we really had that before. I theorized at the time that people don’t trust brands, really. I felt like trusting brands was gonna disappear, but that we will always trust people, so if your brand cannot become a person, but if you can elevate people in your business as your company expert, would that break through some of the trust?

[00:17:34] Gethin Nadin: As I then started to do the research, it consistently showed that B2B buyers preferred expert voices over brand messages. They didn’t care. People don’t really care about Benifex as a brand, but they care about the people that work with us and the people that stand on stage and do podcast interviews. My theory was, especially with younger people, they were used to having influencers in their life. Any young person you speak to, even people who aren’t, if you’re over the age of 40 perhaps, but mostly under the age of 40, have grown up with YouTube and people being the trusting voice.

[00:18:04] Gethin Nadin: I’m the tech expert that’s gonna try the new iPhone and I’ll tell you whether it’s any good or not. I’m the travel expert that’s gonna go to Disneyland Paris and tell you whether you should bother spending money and travel over there to do that. You have across every industry, as a consumer, whether it’s wellness, tech, whatever it is, you’ve got an industry influencer that now owns that segment, that is the voice of that industry. I was like, why don’t we do that in the B2B space? Why can’t we have the same influencers if consumers are saying, I’m not gonna buy something until enough of these certain types of people who I respect tell me this is worth investing in? I was like, why can’t we do that? And I think that’s where we were ahead of the market, was we bypass that trust by getting them to trust one person and not trusting an entire organization.

[00:18:47] Steve MacDonald: You know what that means to me is that we need a different kind of trust-building program. Yeah. And Forrester said, look, companies, we have demand generation programs, we have brand-building programs, we don’t have trust-building programs. What you did is you said, okay, people buy from people, right? Yeah. They don’t accept meetings from a company, they accept meetings from a person that they feel is that trusted advisor that can actually help them understand their problems, not just pitch to them.

[00:19:19] Steve MacDonald: You built up your trust, credibility, and what I’m taking away from our conversation here is we all need to, in the B2B world, have a trust-building program. Part of that means we need to lift up the key individuals inside of the company and make sure that they’re credible, that they are trusted.

[00:19:39] Gethin Nadin: And I think you can bypass that, right? Nobody has to be featured in Forbes and win loads of awards to get to that point. What you can do, and I try to do this with our sales guys and lots of people I mentor as well, is just get them to understand that cold outreach, if you can tailor that by showing, you remember the best interview advice would always be, you’ve gotta know the company you are applying for a job with. You’ve gotta be able to ask questions about their mission and values.

[00:20:05] Gethin Nadin: If you haven’t read the group accounts of a customer you are about to cold call, I think you’ve missed the trick, because I think if you read the group accounts, even if you just read the first couple of pages, the CEO or the chairman’s gonna tell you what the most important thing going on in the next 12 months is, what the biggest area of risk is. Even if you just know that, even if you just did that and you went onto Glassdoor and you said, this is Acme Limited, their score’s 3.7 out of five, why is it not five? What are people saying they don’t like? And then I take all those three bits of information, and then I think, if I was pitching my product, how does our product or service solve those problems? How does it make these things get better or get worse? And it’s a short amount of work to then reach out to somebody and say, I know this is a challenge for you. This is where I think we can help. It’s a much, much better way than cutting and pasting the same message and putting it on LinkedIn or emailing it to somebody or having a talk track on the telephone.

[00:20:57] Gethin Nadin: It is a little bit more hard work, but the research we’ve got now, even from 2025, is that play significantly helps. I think it was like three in four B2B buyers, in one LinkedIn survey, said that they will engage in content that they think is relevant to them before they’ll say yes to a meeting or say yes, and so you almost make these mini content creators out of your sales guys who can just arm themselves to have those conversations.

[00:21:22] Steve MacDonald: Now, one of the things that you said when we were talking before is we talked about the typical gap in a B2B ABM company, where marketing typically creates the leads, can help initiate an initial conversation, but isn’t necessarily the team that’s gonna then take the meetings and nurture the relationship over time. But most sales organizations are very budget-focused. There’s gotta be a budget that’s been allocated. You’ve gotta have authority, there’s timing, because you’re typically trying to close deals this quarter.

[00:21:58] Steve MacDonald: Sure. Your compensation is based on that. So what it does is it leaves, in the middle, especially in ABM-focused companies, but the goal is to say, here are the 200 or 300 companies that we want to do business with. So therefore, we have to, at some point, initiate the relationship before the buying journey has started. Once the buying journey has started, they put four to five of the vendors that they’re gonna consider on the list, day one. The gap is that there’s not a role, there’s not a department that lives in the middle that nurtures that relationship. Is that a problem that needs to be fixed in today’s B2B organizations? Is that what you are doing? If you could frame that for us a little bit.

[00:22:39] Gethin Nadin: I think it does need to be fixed, and I think it is something we’ve started doing. Many years ago, we really crunched the numbers on our deals won, and we started actively phoning up people to ask why they didn’t choose us and asking if they’d give us feedback, but also phoning up the people that became customers and saying, what was it that swung it? Like, why did you say yes?

[00:22:56] Gethin Nadin: And just one metric that became really interesting was something like our chance of winning a customer increased by about 50% if we could get them to come to one of our annual customer events. So we had annual customer events, we now do them all around the world. If we could get them there, they got to see our expertise on stage. They got to see me and other people like me at our business, who are the experts in what they do. They got customers to come on stage and talk about the great work they’ve done with us. They got to mingle and meet with a community of customers. That all did the work for us.

[00:23:26] Gethin Nadin: For a certain period of time, it was like, okay, just get them in the room. If we get them in the room, our chance to get them increased significantly. But it started to change. This is probably 10 years ago, it changed our thinking of what do we need to do to win somebody? Historically, it was a numbers game. If you’ve got somebody cold calling and they’ll make 30 phone calls a week, we knew that 30 phone calls a week would lead to five meetings. If we got five in-person meetings, two of those would go to the next stage, one would end up being a contract. The calculation was for every person we had making phone calls, we’d win one customer every quarter, whatever.

[00:23:57] Gethin Nadin: Let’s double that and double that. Let’s get five people answering the phones. We’ll get five customers, and obviously, it just doesn’t stack up like that. The math doesn’t work, or the math is a bit shaky because you end up increasing your overheads pretty substantially. But we got really clever with what is an ideal customer for us, who are we really good at winning, and why do we win them? We really defined the ideal customer profile, and we had to be really brave with, we then had to say no to people.

[00:24:24] Gethin Nadin: So, people would contact us and say, we’d like you to pitch for an RFP or complete an RFI. We again realized if we’d never met them before the RFI came in, we had no chance of winning it. If we didn’t have an existing relationship, we wouldn’t win it. The position really for us was, okay, so we need to find a way of making sure we have a relationship, to your point, before they even think of sending an RFI out, or we just exclude ourselves and we qualify out. So we started qualifying out of a lot of work. But then we also realized what you said, which is a deal is not won in our six-month sales cycle. The deal starts probably 12 months, even two years before.

[00:25:12] Gethin Nadin: You start building a relationship with someone who’s got a contract with your competitor, not because they’re unhappy, but as soon as they become unhappy, you don’t then start selling to them. They know exactly who you are. They’ve done some, they may have come to your events. And I think that’s what people forget as well, is sometimes that takes a long time. And sometimes, in the big enterprise world where we are, you are, one buyer is not usually one decision maker. It’s influenced by the team that sits around them. So sometimes you have to pick off 20 people so that when they get in the room and they’re like, we’ve got Benifex and we’ve got this other provider, which one do you want to choose? Half the room puts their hand up and says, we want to go with Benifex because we really like them. Again, it just really changes the way you think about almost like the science of winning a deal rather than the maths of winning a deal. It’s not a numbers game, it’s how smart do we have to be to win these people, and I think where we’ve really succeeded now is exactly what you said earlier on as well, is what does our ideal customer look like? We’d love to work with Netflix. What have we got to do to win Netflix? How do we campaign just to win Netflix as a customer?

[00:26:00] Gethin Nadin: Again, I think that’s really changed how we win deals. It’s not just me doing it. I actually do it far less than the sales guys do, but they will build those relationships even if it’s, we’ll go for a coffee, we’re not interested in buying, we’re happy with our current provider, and that’s great. Let’s just check in six months’ time. If I see you at a conference, I’ll make the point of coming over to you and just having a chat with you. We’ve done some really nice things in the past where someone’s mentioned a book, and we’re just like, we’ll send you the book. We’ll buy it and we’ll send it to you. It doesn’t come out your L&D budget then, and you do little things like that. By the time I wrote my second book, we were able to really do that effectively. We’re able to just kind of say, look, if you’re interested in employee experience, we’ve got a free book here. Our Chief Innovation Officer has written a book. We’d love to send you a copy.

[00:26:36] Gethin Nadin: What happened then is when, by the time we came to pitch, I remember several times I got feedback where someone would say, as soon as the pandemic hit and all of our pitches pretty much became Teams or Zoom, they’d sit in a room and say, I’ll tell you a little bit about Benifex before we get started. We’ll do some introductions, and we had Chief People Officers saying, wait a second, and they’d reach behind them and they’d pull my book off the shelf, and they’d say, no, Benifex. That was evidence, really, that we were selling way before even somebody knew who Benifex was and knew anything about our brand.

[00:27:03] Gethin Nadin: When you start to realize it that way, you start to realize the power of not just marketing breadcrumbing, because I think marketing have done this quite well over the years, but individual salespeople just saying, if you’re not ready to buy now, what can I do now, mid-year 2026, that’s gonna benefit me even in 2028, 2029? And do a little bit of work now to make your targets over the next couple of years a little bit easier to achieve.

[00:27:26] Steve MacDonald: How does this change the compensation, the philosophy, the structure of the typical sales department that doesn’t want to be thinking, I need to be a year out in front of that RFP or an RFI. I need to be investing my time and resources to reach out, and what I took away from what you’re saying is building trusted executives within the companies that we want to do business with, right?

[00:27:54] Gethin Nadin: Yeah.

[00:27:54] Steve MacDonald: Like, what kind of a change needs to happen in the sales department for that to happen?

[00:27:59] Gethin Nadin: We’ve had Chief Sales Officers in the past who have targeted salespeople with not just what you’re gonna win this quarter, but what are you doing to get you 30% along for the next quarter, because they’ve realized how important that was. Anyone knows, if I bring on a million-dollar deal to the business and the quarter ends, nobody cares about that million anymore. That’s the last quarter, right? It starts again. It doesn’t matter how good you were before, this starts again.

[00:28:26] Gethin Nadin: It just feels like a mistake to not hit the ground running and just go cold into the next quarter or the next month and be like, I’ve got a blank sheet again. There’s that Glengarry Glen Ross thing about always be closing or whatever, but I think there’s always be thinking what else is coming down the line, and one of the really big deals we won many years ago, the salesperson responsible for that closed that, I think, in November of that year and hadn’t closed anything else for the entire year. They put all their eggs in one basket on this one deal, and it worked. It was a gamble. They put everything on red, but it worked, and they spent that whole year picking off those buyers, building a relationship, understanding them as a customer, understanding the challenge. That’s an extreme example, but that really worked well. It could have gone terribly wrong, because if we hadn’t signed that, that person didn’t sign anything pretty much that year.

[00:29:14] Gethin Nadin: But again, that started to change us because we were like, there is no way we’re gonna continue to win deals with that size unless we do it in that way. I’m not gonna win a million-dollar business from a 50,000-person tech company in California in six months. That’s just never gonna happen. So my target had to reflect the smaller deals I was winning, but this almost underlying, you know, like when you watch a film, you’ve got these small storylines that are happening, but there’s one serious storyline that’s taking place under all of them. It’s almost like that’s what you’ve gotta think about. What’s the big deal I’m nurturing whilst I’m winning all those smaller deals?

[00:29:53] Steve MacDonald: We’ve covered so much here. So much great advice. If there was one takeaway that you wanted the audience of C-suite executives at B2B ABM-focused companies to take away from our conversation, like the one most important thing that you want them to remember, what would that be?

[00:30:14] Gethin Nadin: I would say, the analogy I use quite a lot is I can’t sell the same shirt to 20 men. If I had an extra-large white shirt and I tried to sell that to 20 different men, it might fit three of them. It’s not gonna fit the rest of them. I think the way that we build our sales decks, the way we position it, the way we do demos, we learn it by rote, and we deliver that by rote. So we’ll tell you, this is Benifex. This is how our product works. These are the product features. These are the awards we won. These are the customers we work with. We pitch it the same way to everyone. If I pitched that shirt to you now, but it didn’t fit, but I was telling you how great the cotton was and who made it, and it was made by some artisanal Italian family, it pales into insignificance if it’s not right for you.

[00:30:57] Gethin Nadin: You have to start all of these conversations with, I’m tailoring this to you based on what you need. I’m not product-first. Steve Jobs did, I think, a Stanford address in the 1990s, saying, if you talk about a product in the first 30 minutes of a pitch, then you’ve probably failed. You talk about the problem first. I really think that’s the reason why this trust has become so important and the reason why thought leadership has become so successful to deals, is because you start with that other person. You start with the person you’re selling to. It’s about them. It’s their problems. It’s not about you and what you’ve got to sell, and I still think that’s a really solid way to be selling whatever it is you’ve got to sell.

[00:31:35] Gethin Nadin: There’s a lot of research as well to understand that what B2B buyers still have emotions involved. You’ll sell a car to somebody by just showing a car driving around hills in California, and that’s how they sell your car. They’ll sell you perfume or aftershave with an attractive man or an attractive woman standing on a boat, not selling you the smell or anything. But that’s an emotive sell, and that still works now, and I think we forget in B2B circles as well that, how does this make your person who’s gonna buy this look good? How does it solve for them? How does it make them look good in front of their executive team? I think we forgot that as well.

[00:32:08] Gethin Nadin: Some of the thought leadership stuff is you get to build some of that out a little bit more. I completely get that there are people who are gonna be listening to this saying that that seems like a lot of that front work. But we’ve found ways to make it repeatable. You put the work in for that utilities company, and then suddenly you’re like, okay, what other utilities companies could we sell to that we think have got similar problems? Then you’ve got the pitch. So you’ve done it once, but you might deliver it five times, and suddenly the effort-reward starts to balance out a bit more.

[00:32:35] Steve MacDonald: So much to take away. I have to tell you, one of my biggest takeaways from all of this is that we want to think it works the way that it used to. The amount of research that was being done, the amount of trust in our voice as the selling organizations, used to matter more than it did than it does today. The B2B buyer is behaving quite differently. The self-service buying journey is real. There’s reasons behind it, and if we don’t adapt, then we’re gonna get left behind.

[00:33:08] Steve MacDonald: Doing the harder work, doing that work and making sure that we’re compensated and our philosophy and our alignment internally is all in sync, in order to be truthfully what Gartner or Forrester would say is that trusted advisor, right? Like you are doing the work, and you’re targeting executives to build trust way in advance of the actual deal, even going into a buying motion.

[00:33:33] Gethin Nadin: And we know it works because I had something recently. A large global grocery chain Chief People Officer messaged me on LinkedIn. We weren’t connected. I never did any work with this business. They said, one of my colleagues saw you speaking at an event. We think you are the person to convince our CEO that we should go with a product like yours. Would you get on a plane and convince him? That’s what I did, and I went and pitched to the board. That has never happened to me in my career before. I’ve never pitched to the CEO, especially not of a $6.7 billion business.

[00:34:00] Gethin Nadin: I sat in the room and told them why they should do it, and because I had the knowledge and because I had the research, I could debate with this CEO. This is where I think you’re wrong, and what you’re saying doesn’t come through in the research and the data. It literally got to the point where they said, okay, you’ve convinced us. Let’s go into the lead. By the time I got off the plane, I got the email saying, can you introduce us to one of your sales guys to get a demo? And they became a customer, and they’re a customer of ours now. So you do the thought leadership so well that the leads come to you in that way, then you’re probably doing something right, I think.

[00:34:28] Steve MacDonald: I would love to have another hour of conversation. Maybe we’ll have you come back on. But the goal of this podcast is just to bring different points of view that make us think differently. We want to feel like we’ve got it solved, and we don’t wanna rethink the motion of what we do every single day. But the market, the buyer, is changing. If we’re not rethinking how we sell, how we market, we’re just falling farther and farther behind. I just wanted to say thank you for coming on today. Such an enlightening conversation.

[00:35:00] Gethin Nadin: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It’s been very, really interesting.