Episode #309:
Margaret Dawson, Chief Marketing Officer at SUSE, shares a practical framework for turning customer insight into measurable business growth. She explains how customer research, AI, cross-functional alignment, and integrated campaigns transformed marketing performance and executive confidence. Learn how customer-first thinking creates a stronger pipeline, better decisions, and sustainable growth.
“If you can make your customer a hero, that is your ultimate goal. Your business goals are revenue and sustainability, but how do you achieve them? You make heroes out of your customers.” — Margaret Dawson
Discover how leading organizations combine structured and unstructured customer data, AI, primary research, and cross-functional execution to create customer-led campaigns that improve pipeline quality, strengthen marketing and sales alignment, and accelerate measurable business growth. Margaret shares practical frameworks any B2B leadership team can apply to build trust, improve decision-making, and create lasting competitive advantage.
Follow Margaret Dawson on LinkedIn
Follow Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn
[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, when I say we’ve got a special guest and we’ve got a special topic, boy, do I mean it. Now, Margaret Dawson, who’s the CMO at SUSE, and that just begins to kind of tell who you are and what you’re doing.
[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: But you’ve been on the podcast before, and then at the end, we kind of started talking afterward. You had this amazing case study about how, throughout your career, you have been very customer-focused and customer-obsessed, right? That’s made it into how you tell the story, build the go-to-market strategy, collect the customer voice, the data, structured, unstructured data, and weave it together, especially with AI today, and really make an impact on growth and revenue in the business, and you’ve done that.
[00:00:58] Steve MacDonald: And so this is a case study of sorts, a podcast today on what you’ve been able to do and how and why. But what did I leave out of there?
[00:01:08] Margaret Dawson: No, I think that captures it. You always make it sound so great. This is a journey that we’re all on. And I think the importance of this in any conversations we’re having with our peers is how do we learn from each other?
[00:01:19] Margaret Dawson: And I think the point you and I were making is: are there things that we’ve all learned that we can share and help others? Because I think we talked about this last time, that there are foundational things that make a business, whether it’s, you know, marketing, sales, product management, product marketing, engineering, work just better, more optimized.
[00:01:40] Margaret Dawson: A lot of it is just clarity of who you are and what you do and why anyone should care, you know, if anyone’s been in a startup, and this is true even for large companies, like that initial understanding and clarity, whether you’re pitching for funding or going to a customer or partner, is so important.
[00:01:56] Margaret Dawson: Yet so often we jump over that, and we immediately want to start talking about our products and features, right? Which
[00:02:04] Steve MacDonald: So I’m going to put a couple of, like, industry studies on the table here, kind of the things that you’re talking about foundationally that we know and actually have been proven, and then how you’ve kind of taken that foundation and applied it.
[00:02:17] Steve MacDonald: So, talking about customer obsession, there was a 2024 study done by Forrester, and they found that only 3% of companies were customer-obsessed. But the ones that actually had a 49% lift in revenue, 51% lift in profitability. McKinsey released a separate study and found that only 15% of companies incorporate the voice of the customer into their decision-making. Can you believe that? 15% of companies, right?
[00:02:47] Margaret Dawson: I mean, I don’t. You know, the company that we always talk about here in Seattle is Nordstrom, right? And it’s gone through its own journey, and, you know, I can be objective ’cause I have never worked for Nordstrom. But, you know, we hold that up as a company that, regardless of your industry, you look at and say, this is where the customer was always right.
[00:03:05] Margaret Dawson: The times in their history when they’ve lost, that it’s directly impacted their revenue. Even though people would say, “Oh my gosh, but if you take a product back and, no questions asked, not even a receipt, and it wasn’t even sold at your store and you still do it, you’re gonna lose money.”
[00:03:19] Margaret Dawson: But as we all know, that’s not the way it is because enough people say, “Oh my gosh, they treat me like I’m special even if I’m buying a $20 shirt versus a $1,000 suit.” And if you feel like you’re being treated the same and you just keep going back and back, that’s what they’ve gotten: customer loyalty.
[00:03:35] Steve MacDonald: And that translates directly over into the world of B2B. Our expectations on B2C are exactly what they’re becoming in B2B. We know this is a relationship-based business, and we want to feel special and do business with people we know and trust. And that’s the other part of this, that we’re in this trust epidemic, is the way I like to say it.
[00:03:54] Steve MacDonald: You know, the recent Trust Barometer from Edelman showed that 68% of worldwide respondents think that business leaders like you and me are being intentionally misleading. Intentionally misleading. That significantly impacts trust, which is why B2B buyers are waiting longer and longer before even considering talking to us.
[00:04:16] Steve MacDonald: Earning trust early is key to getting on the day-one shortlist, and 95% of the deals that get won are because they were on that day-one shortlist.
[00:04:27] Margaret Dawson: I find that interesting. Did they ask the same question about agentic AI? ‘Cause you keep hearing the trust around AI, can I trust it? But I wonder if people are almost giving AI trust before it’s proven, and that could be good or could be proven to be very dangerous, but they’ve stopped doing that with humans, is what you’re saying.
[00:04:47] Steve MacDonald: You know, the C-suite executives that I’ve been talking to have been taking AI and making their teams more productive. ‘Cause we know B2B is all about relationships, so it’s the human communication that really matters. We can be more present, we can focus more time on the communication because our preparation, our work in advance, is so much easier.
[00:05:09] Steve MacDonald: But if we’re not customer-focused in, like, the customer data that you were talking about earlier, if we’re not gathering that, then the AI tools are commodities, right? Everybody has Claude; everybody has Cowork, everybody, you know?
[00:05:22] Margaret Dawson: I mean, here’s what I’ll say, you know, ’cause I know we were talking about this.
[00:05:24] Margaret Dawson: One of the greatest ways to initially understand your customer data without necessarily talking to a customer, if you just want to get a sense of it, is that every company has sales calls that are now recorded, whether you’re using Gong or, you know, there are like five different tools that do that.
[00:05:41] Margaret Dawson: They also have customer support data sitting in a platform somewhere, a CMS or a support platform, right? They probably have emails. They have other communications. They’ve got a bunch of data about customers. Telemetry from their product, like what the customer is using? How’s our adoption? You can today, most likely, use AI to aggregate all that data, bring that in, and analyze that and say, “Okay, are our products being used? Are our customers happy? What is our renewal rate? What is our churn? Is that aligned with the pains that we’re solving? What is the number one thing that is coming up in sales calls?”
[00:06:15] Margaret Dawson: Right? Is there a trend there? Are there words that are showing up? You combine that with LLM prompt data, with SEO search data, from the market, and you bring that all together. And from there, you have a starting point that you can then go out and validate, you know, with prospects and customers in real situations, whether it’s primary or secondary, you know, using analysts.
[00:06:36] Margaret Dawson: But I think you’ve got to go meet with the people and get that primary data yourselves. And that’s pretty much what we did. And so AI does make it easier and faster, especially in aggregating trends. Whereas, I mean, I’ll be honest, like I’ve done this my whole career, and I used to spend weeks sometimes doing that because you’re just, you’re trying to understand, you know, or you’re doing primary data, but then you find out, “Oh, I wish I’d asked these three questions.”
[00:07:00] Margaret Dawson: So all of that can inform, okay, we kind of know here are the top 10 things. Like, it just keeps getting repeated. And that’s what we saw: there were these themes that, no matter what data source we looked at, were just repeated. Then we went out and got validation and actual quantitative data, and then put that together and went back out to customers and said, “Does this feel right?
[00:07:22] Margaret Dawson: This is what we’re hearing. This is what you told us.” And they said yes. And so from that, you know, we said, “Okay, if we look at these top pain points, challenges, whatever you want to call them, these are the things that people are trying to solve for.” And the other thing that I find really helpful is not just saying, “These are like my top pains.”
[00:07:43] Margaret Dawson: You want to then say, “Okay, are those showing up then as the top priorities at your company?” Because sometimes the pain and the business priorities ain’t aligned. You can be in a lot of pain, and the company says, “Yeah, I hear you, but you know, we need to focus on these two things.”
[00:07:58] Margaret Dawson: Then throw in investment. So the three areas that we talked to customers about and that we got data around were, like, you know, what would you say are your top 10 business priorities? What are your top IT priorities? You know, how does that translate into what you are investing? And then it all starts with, like, what are your biggest pain points, right?
[00:08:16] Margaret Dawson: You kind of get a point. It’s like, okay, where do we have permission to play within that area? Because obviously, not all the pain points can be solved with our solutions, right? Cybersecurity is a huge pain point. We do not have a cybersecurity solution, but that tells me that whatever we are doing with our customers, security is just gonna always be that drumbeat, you know, especially for the CIO, CISO, CTO.
[00:08:40] Margaret Dawson: Same thing with AI. I mean, at first, when we did this study, it was a distinct area of pain, priority, a disproportionate amount of investment, which isn’t surprising, right? But then, now it’s almost like it’s just integrated in everything. So it’s even getting harder to separate and say, “Okay, is this AI investment separate from I need to reduce cost ‘?”
[00:09:06] Margaret Dawson: Or, you know, and now it’s a hardware shortage, so they can’t do their AI, but they want to, so you’ve got to solve this problem to answer this problem. So, even when you have these buckets or areas that you feel really confident about, they’re not necessarily always on an island, right?
[00:09:21] Margaret Dawson: They’re integrated in many ways. So, can I help you reduce costs so you can move more money towards AI innovation? And that’s the conversation you need to be having. So you’ve got to make sure when you go out to market, and you’re training your field to have these conversations that they don’t think, “Oh, if they say no to this, I’ll walk out the door.”
[00:09:38] Margaret Dawson: Like you pivot and go, “Okay, well, what’s stopping you from doing that? Because you just said that was a priority,” right?
[00:09:44] Steve MacDonald: So tell me how you took all of this customer data, structured and unstructured, and I love how you even said you got to go out and meet with the people, right? Because actually, in an organization, 90% of the data is unstructured.
[00:10:01] Steve MacDonald: It’s the number one form of data that isn’t connected to our AI tools, that isn’t being analyzed in the trends and the patterns and things, and that’s where a lot of the real insight comes in. Call transcripts, you know, that you’re talking about, things like that, interviews. You know, as CMOs, when we take on a new role, what is the first thing we do?
[00:10:22] Steve MacDonald: We go out, and we start talking to customers, and we say, “Hey, this isn’t a sales conversation. I’m just here to learn,” right? You get some of our customer advisory board transcripts. I mean, some of the most important data that we have is unstructured. So you brought all that together, but tell us about some of the results you’re getting, and then we’ll kind of backtrack on how you got there.
[00:10:46] Margaret Dawson: As I said, the first point was going to all these different sources and then doing primary research. So I have always been a true believer in doing your own research, getting your own data set, and being able to use it, you know, in marketing as well. Like you can create assets from it. So it’s not only helping you understand how to better go to market, but from all that we created, you know, what I call an integrated campaign.
[00:11:08] Margaret Dawson: And, really simply, it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a synchronized marketing and sales framework that builds a narrative aligned with the buyer journey around a specific theme that reflects what customers are trying to do. And while that sounds really fundamental, I can’t tell you, I think every time I’ve entered a company, you know, I have moved marketing and then, you know, the sales plays that go with that to this construct.
[00:11:38] Margaret Dawson: There’s a whole integrated calendar and, you know, editorial thing that goes with it. But at the end of the day, it’s like creating that framework for integrated campaigns. Because what people want to do, even if they are super customer savvy, is they go back to wanting to go to market the way they’re organized as a company, so by BU, which then means you’re doing it by product.
[00:11:57] Margaret Dawson: It happens over and over again. And a lot of you out there, I know, are nodding your heads, because it can’t be that I’ve worked for, like, you know, six companies that are the only ones in the world that do this. Because I’ve talked to so many leaders that are, you know. And it’s not revolutionary, but it does take a culture shift because there’s so much pride in your products, and we all fall in love with technology.
[00:12:18] Margaret Dawson: The only reason we’re in B2B tech is that we want to lift up the hood and go, “Oh my God, that engine just makes me so happy.” And so you want to yell to the world. But we all know nobody buys products, right? And then add to it: we are an open-source software company, so everything we do is in that open-source development model. And no one thinks, you know, in the morning, “I’m gonna go buy open source software,” which is almost like an oxymoron, right?
[00:12:41] Margaret Dawson: But that is a very common model that we now see because the greatest innovation comes in open source communities. So if they don’t want to buy a product and they definitely don’t understand why they’d want to buy open source, then obviously leading with those things isn’t what you want to do when you’re talking to a customer.
[00:12:56] Margaret Dawson: You want to understand, you know, what is keeping you up at night? How do I make life easier for you? How do I solve a big problem? And do I bring in partners? Do I show you how I integrate well and play nice with others, right? That’s what they want to hear. And you’re right, they’ve already done all that research beforehand, which means you’ve really got to address that pain in everything you’re doing in content.
[00:13:16] Margaret Dawson: So first, it’s taking those, and you create three or four buckets. I don’t know what it is. There are always, like, you know, three legs of a stool. Sometimes it ends up being four, depending on how big your portfolio is. But in this case, what I’ve learned over time is that you always want to have what I call an enduring brand campaign.
[00:13:32] Margaret Dawson: So there’s kind of this always-on heartbeat that is a little bit above all of those pain points or customer challenge campaigns. And normally that happens around the emotion, like at the highest level. And the thing, and I’m just gonna read this because I have this underneath that campaign.
[00:13:47] Margaret Dawson: It says, “I feel trapped in a loss of control,” which was something I was just hearing again and again in all of the data and things that we were seeing. “I need to do everything from cutting costs to implementing AI without compromising customer experience, security, or reliability.” So every IT leader is on this balance beam, right?
[00:14:10] Margaret Dawson: And at the end of the day, especially with AI and cybersecurity and costs, they feel like they are losing control. And by the way, it was interesting because the company I was at previously, Chronosphere, was an observability company that was later acquired by Palo Alto Networks.
[00:14:25] Margaret Dawson: We heard the same thing. It was about a loss of control. My telemetry data is out of control. My observability cost has now surpassed AWS. And so this feeling of control, at first, it kind of surprised me. I’m like, “Wait, what’s happening?” But then I realized, oh my gosh, this is a bigger issue than observability.
[00:14:43] Margaret Dawson: Like this feeling, like I’m stuck, I’m trapped in these black boxes of vendor contracts, you know, these proprietary solutions. I can’t get out. I can’t move out. I can’t do whatever I want. I can’t modernize as fast as I want to because I feel I don’t have control over the situation.
[00:14:58] Margaret Dawson: That is the worst feeling in the world, if you think about it. So that was kind of a choice campaign, which is that customers want choice, flexibility, and increased control. So think of that at the highest level. And then underneath it was: how do I improve operational efficiency and reduce costs?
[00:15:13] Margaret Dawson: Which never goes away, by the way. That’s been the story for the 25 years I’ve been in IT. You know, our budgets are cut. We have to do more with less. We have to, you know, do something different with everything we’ve got. We need to modernize our workloads, right? We’re continuing to figure out how to improve our modernization play across hybrid cloud and other environments.
[00:15:33] Margaret Dawson: We have to manage and secure everything we’re doing, all the workloads we’re doing across that hybrid cloud, right? So there’s a huge security management pain point. Then, the newer one is that we always have to innovate, right? And now it’s more around AI and Edge are the terms, you know, in our world that really come up because things are becoming pushed to the furthest and furthest edge, sensors, the tiniest things, and then AI is on everyone’s mind.
[00:15:55] Margaret Dawson: So those were the four kinds of pain-based things. And I always find I’m using verbs, you know, like I need to innovate, I’ve got to optimize. And these are words that came up, right? And that is where we will always do a qualitative part of the research before the quantitative part, too. So I missed that. So aggregate all this data, everything you’ve got, unstructured, structured data.
[00:16:16] Margaret Dawson: Now we use AI to say, “Okay, what are the themes? What are the words? What are the pain points?” Right? We go out and do interviews, you know, with a subset of our customer base, and have them just talk freely. You then use those two inputs in quantitative research to generate datasets around them. So you can say, “Eighty-five percent of people are now taking a hybrid cloud approach.”
[00:16:35] Margaret Dawson: You know, many people are staying on the premises. This much of the workload is containerized today, right? What is the trend around that? Whatever it is. And so then, as you go to market, you know, with those campaigns, you’re leading with that customer message. You have customer stories that validate that, right?
[00:16:52] Margaret Dawson: And you have data from those customer stories. This customer reduced cost by, you know, 65 percent by doing this solution, right? You work with partners, so you bring them into it, right? Because it’s not just your product. It’s always solutions that are being brought together. So all of that works together, and then eventually it does go to products, right?
[00:17:11] Margaret Dawson: Because they do have to buy an SKU. So you do want your field to know, you know, what that lead product is. And marketing does need to show data to the business units and to engineering. How are we driving demand and revenue for your product? So you still need that association. And the thing that I’ve always done that I think works well is, for each of those campaigns, you have what I call a lead or land product and a lead or land service.
[00:17:37] Margaret Dawson: One of the things I’ve noticed is that if you have services, you know, as part of your portfolio, they often get missed in that sale. And data will show you- you’ve probably seen this- that, first of all, people love to buy services because it makes the deployment more successful, or it helps narrow down, you know, what that implementation is going to be, right?
[00:18:00] Margaret Dawson: So it’s either before or after, or both. And so, for example, in the modernization campaign, our lead product is SUSE Virtualization, because the number one pain right now is, frankly, getting off VMware or other legacy virtualization solutions.
[00:18:16] Margaret Dawson: Like, people just need to move to the future. They want to get to the containers. They may need to keep things on hypervisors, but they’re trying to move that forward. And we have something called Virtualization Test Drive or a Kickstart. So those are our lead products and services, right? Then you’ve got things that follow that you can pivot to, or maybe it’s an upsell, you know, or a cross-sell later.
[00:18:35] Margaret Dawson: So it all works together, and it’s not going to be perfectly linear, but it kind of gives you this map and discovery landscape of how you can have the conversation.
[00:18:46] Steve MacDonald: So if you could take us through kind of the basics of understanding these pain points, and then you’ve got to turn that into something that’s going to get attention, right?
[00:18:57] Steve MacDonald: You still can’t talk product at that point. But there are a million of us out there trying to talk about pain points, right? And that’s something we’ve been drilled into our heads. But it sounds like you captured some of the most emotional aspects of what they’re feeling, like the loss of control.
[00:19:15] Steve MacDonald: And what I’m taking away from what you’re saying is, when I communicate that I truly get, I truly understand not only your pain point, but what that means to you and how that affects you, then you start to break through, right? And so tell us a little bit about, like, how do you. You went about it differently to market with this.
[00:19:38] Margaret Dawson: Yeah, you said something really important, I think. Because at the end of the day, if you can make your customer a hero, that is your ultimate goal. I mean, sure, your ultimate business goals are revenue and sustainability. But how do you do that? You make heroes out of your customers, right?
[00:19:56] Margaret Dawson: We have the campaigns; then you build, okay, what is that plan? And one of the magical pieces that also sounds very foundational when I say it out loud is that you then create a calendar where you can do this. It depends on how agile you are. I tend to have a quarterly theme. That tends to be the timeframe.
[00:20:15] Margaret Dawson: I’ve worked for companies where I’ve had to do six months because we just can’t move the ship fast enough. But your quarterly theme takes one of those campaigns, and I call it the 80 20 rule. Eighty percent of your marketing focuses on that theme. So we’ve been in the modernization campaign for this quarter, and it means that all marketing levers- think PR, AR, content, video, social media.
[00:20:42] Margaret Dawson: Like, I’m just thinking, like, every lever you have, you are emphasizing this pain point, and you are emphasizing, you know, this go-to-market campaign. And what I’ve seen happen every single time- it has never failed- is if you do that and every lever is moving and everybody’s focused on that, right, and your field is, by the way, out there having conversations, right?
[00:21:02] Margaret Dawson: Because you’re bringing in so many leads and pipeline, you’re generating pipeline around this pain point, which all builds on each other, but it moves the needle. And it may move the needle where you end up, you know, having five new pages on the first page for SEO, or your AI visibility. Literally, at one point, some of our prompts jumped like 12 points or something.
[00:21:23] Margaret Dawson: It was insane, and granted, it was early times, right? All of that, ideally, helps your brand awareness because it only works if you’re also associating it back to your brand. So I should have said that in the beginning, right? This is all based on brand awareness as well. But it’s that combination of having those customers in themes and then focusing on a theme each time period where you really can get the content.
[00:23:09] Margaret Dawson: Like, there’s still the, you know, the baseline. That campaign is running. We’re still investing in that area. It’s just not the absolute focus we are doubling down on. And then lastly, I would say, with all of that, you’ve got to have that distinctive point of view, that differentiation of, you know, why do you want to listen to us?
[00:23:26] Margaret Dawson: Why can you trust us? And then I also say, have a little fun, because the more you can just insert a little humor into it, the better, since life is short and we’re all so busy. And so we’re testing something that’s about to launch: a human ad, like an old-fashioned ad.
[00:23:43] Margaret Dawson: It’s a company I’ve worked with before that is hysterical. I’m gonna see if it translates globally. We’re gonna start it in North America. It’s very tongue-in-cheek humor. And we’re doing it around the black box, and I’ll just say we make that black box literal and just have some fun with it. And so, you know, I think that kind of adds some energy to your marketing team, because at the end of the day, we all want to be creative.
[00:24:07] Margaret Dawson: You know, yes, we’re technical, but there’s something about exercising that creative muscle and having something that literally makes you laugh out loud when you look at it. That is just joy.
[00:24:17] Steve MacDonald: So I have to ask: in our last conversation, you were about ready to go into a board meeting, and so we talked about that.
[00:24:24] Steve MacDonald: And a lot of times, as CMOs, we kind of dread the board meetings, right? You know. And you were like, “Oh no, I’m excited.” And like my CRO and I, we are locked, we are aligned, you know, we know what we’re doing. We’ve got great performance numbers. When you talked about focus amongst the team, alignment across the teams, for you to have that kind of alignment with sales and then that kind of performance, you could go to the board and be as excited about what you’re doing.
[00:24:55] Steve MacDonald: Tell us a little bit about that and why you were so excited to go onto the board, what you were taking onto the board.
[00:25:02] Margaret Dawson: There were two things, and I remember talking about this, that while we were doing this integrated campaign work, we were also really focusing on the quality of people, not just the numbers of people. You know, quality over quantity, and really looking at marketing contribution to pipeline and closed deals.
[00:25:20] Margaret Dawson: And there were two things that we were able to show that I think were, you know, why I was excited. And it did go very well. One was just looking at pipeline creation each week, broken down by both marketing and sales, and the portion contributed by marketing. For the most part, we have gotten over who sourced what, and we’re looking at, you know, what we are creating together.
[00:25:46] Margaret Dawson: I will say that marketing’s contribution to the pipeline has been averaging 40 to 45%, which is very high. And at the end of the day, I don’t care if we’re all hitting our numbers, because it doesn’t work if marketing is at 45% and we’re still not hitting them.
[00:25:58] Margaret Dawson: So whether it should be 30, 35, or 45, I don’t care. It’s more like, what are you able to do? And we should just celebrate. Are we hitting pipeline numbers or not? I think that’s part of it: marketing has to own that number. And I think we spoke about that before. So that was one thing: we could show that trend over multiple weeks.
[00:26:14] Margaret Dawson: And then the second thing was a really simple diagram. And while I do believe the funnel is gone as we know it, we still have to show conversion and close rates somehow. Like, there’s data we still need to show. And by focusing on quality, what we showed was our numbers at the very top of the funnel had gone down.
[00:26:33] Margaret Dawson: So if I had just focused on what I thought we needed at the top of the funnel based on conversion rates going into this year, we would be behind. But conversion to qualification had also gone down, and you’re like, “Oh, shit.” So we’re getting fewer in the top, and we’re converting fewer to qualified. However, the conversion from qualification to the number of meetings increased significantly.
[00:26:59] Margaret Dawson: And the number of meetings that ended up being pipeline and then closed deals surpassed, went up again by multiple points. So at the end of the day, what we ended up with, pipeline and revenue, was higher than our original targets, even if we had brought in tens of thousands more people at the top.
[00:27:16] Margaret Dawson: And that was intentional, right? So at the top of the pipe, or funnel, that was very intentional. Like, we locked it down. We made it harder for you to be qualified. So, yes, the number of people who were going to our ISRs and MDRs was lower, but they were highly qualified. So many more of those went to that meeting where, you know, you got to pitch and kind of set up the next steps and went to the pipeline.
[00:27:37] Margaret Dawson: And at the end of the day, where does it matter, right? It matters that you are talking to the right people. Are you having the right conversation? And are they becoming opportunities? And are you helping them solve that problem? So if we can continue to do that, and it’s all because of the same thing, focus on the problems. Make sure they actually have that problem and are raising their hand and saying, “Oh my gosh, yes.”
[00:27:59] Margaret Dawson: They’re at the stage where they’re starting to consider, because, as you said, you’ve got to reach them early, right? So that was the data set I showed. And I didn’t think we’d only done this one quarter; I didn’t think we would see results of that work for nine months. So the fact that the ship moved, and by proving this out over a quarter, actually flipped so quickly, I was shocked.
[00:28:26] Margaret Dawson: And so I had to show that to the board, and I showed it to everyone. It’s like everyone has to see this. Like, I’m not even sure what we did. And so it’s very different. Ooh, we did this, we changed this, we changed that. Like, there were so many things going on. You couldn’t say, “Oh, it’s one thing.”
[00:28:37] Margaret Dawson: It was literally 20 things all working together. But it all lines back up to this focus, intentionality, and integration, you know, with everybody moving against the same things and asking. And there’s this great book called Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? And it all goes back to that.
[00:28:52] Margaret Dawson: Like, are you working on something that’s going to make the boat go faster? And as you know, if you’ve got a bunch of people rowing and one of them is going this way, you know your boat is going to go nowhere.
[00:29:01] Steve MacDonald: Well, internal alignment is the number one challenge for B2B C-suite executives. Behind that, second is the lack of understanding of the customer.
[00:29:10] Steve MacDonald: Third behind that is a focus on internal and external trust. And so my takeaway from what you’ve talked about here today is that you took customer obsession to a new level to make decisions that aligned the company. I had a CMO, and she’s at a mid-market go-to-market consultancy, so, you know, mid- to low-enterprise-level, and she said 100% alignment is the biggest issue inside B2B organizations today.
[00:29:47] Steve MacDonald: And the number one change agent that aligns people internally across teams is the customer. So you solve alignment with the customer, build trust with the customer by understanding them better, and actually act as a customer-obsessed organization.
[00:30:06] Margaret Dawson: And then I think you have to celebrate the customer.
[00:30:08] Margaret Dawson: So the last part of that, you know, whether you do that through customer awards, which we have, you know, case studies obviously that also help the customer, because the customer is the hero of their own story and of your story, right? And I think the other thing that I’ve seen be really successful is that people love to get those case studies, love to do PR with customers, but are you also helping them internally, right?
[00:30:30] Margaret Dawson: That helps you, and it may help them externally, but why are so many companies struggling to get customer stories? It’s because they’re not seeing the value to them, right? And so you’ve got to align that. And all kudos to my customer advocacy team. They’ve built amazing relationships. And another thing they’ve done is develop this peer-to-peer advocacy program where, you know, a prospect or another customer can find and reach out to another customer and just say, “Hey, I saw you were using this product. How is it working?”
[00:31:01] Margaret Dawson: We’re not there. Like, this is peer-to-peer. That’s another value, right? Oh, you work with us, and you get access to this network of peers. Because what does one CIO want? They want to know what the other CIOs are doing.
[00:31:15] Steve MacDonald: Right. Right. Absolutely.