Fabian Wilckens, CRO of Mindfuel, shares insights on developing an effective go-to-market flywheel for B2B companies. He explains how the rise of digital channels and AI has reshaped sales strategies, underscoring the need to reintegrate the human element to create meaningful customer connections. Fabian also emphasizes the value of transforming traditionally siloed marketing and sales operations into a cohesive, circular model that drives growth, customer engagement, and feedback.

“We’re working to build a flywheel-type sales process with the product at its center. Our goal is to keep the wheel spinning: the more leads we generate based on the references we’ve observed, the more revenue we can create, and the cycle continues and accelerates over time.” – Fabian Wilckens

Fabian’s insights highlight the importance of adopting a go-to-market flywheel for effective B2B sales strategies. By focusing on holistic growth, human interaction, and continuous feedback, organizations can move beyond transactional relationships to accelerate market relevance. This integrated approach fosters sustained competitive advantage, proving that authentic connections are key to driving impactful and lasting sales outcomes.

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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. Today, we’ve got a really interesting conversation with Fabian Wilckens. Now, Fabian, you’re the CRO of MindFuel. You have a lot of experience working across the world, bringing U.S. startups into Europe and vice versa—bringing European startups out and introducing them all over the world.

[00:00:36] Steve MacDonald: But what we’re going to be talking about today is, throughout all those experiences, how you, as a CRO, create a go-to-market flywheel. How do we get it up? How do we get it operational? How do you define what that is? We’ve talked for a bit before this, and I’m excited.

[00:00:54] Steve MacDonald: What I’d love to do, though, is expand a little bit more on your background before we get into this. So maybe you can give us a little bit more than the few tidbits that I threw out there about your background.

[00:01:04] Fabian Wilckens: First of all, thank you, Steve, for having me. I’m greatly appreciative because I think your content is amazing, and I hope that our viewership will enjoy this episode as well. A little bit about me: what I’ve been doing over the last decades or so is working for U.S.-based scale-up startups and also large corporations, bringing their sort of SaaS business to Europe. Now, MindFuel is my first company that’s European-based. It’s a Swiss company, partly German, and we are expanding into the world.

[00:01:32] Fabian Wilckens: What I love about it is that I have different perspectives. So far, I’ve taken an American perspective and tried to adopt it in Europe with some success, and some great success, but also some learnings along the way. Now, it’s taking a European style to the U.S. and finding the best of both worlds and hopefully making this work as well. One thing I did learn—and this is what we’re going to discuss today—is this whole idea of challenging the status quo a little bit in modern-day sales. I’m very much looking forward to the discussion with you, Steve.

[00:02:04] Steve MacDonald: Great. Well, as we start talking about challenging the status quo, we first have to understand what the challenges are in today’s modern B2B sales environment. There’s a lot there. So, I think that’s a good place to start. From your vast experience, what do you see as the main challenges to succeeding in sales and B2B today?

[00:02:26] Fabian Wilckens: I think one of the things is that the world has changed quite a bit since COVID hit us a few years ago. Everybody was focusing a lot more on digital channels, and with digital channels came more tooling, more processes, and a lot more outbound activity. Then, generative AI and all the wonderful AI models started to impact our work, and people forgot a little bit about the human interface between each other. We are relying a lot on technology these days in sales, be it metrics or tools that can automatically detect our ICP target personas, which messages fit where, and can automatically draft messages.

[00:03:03] Fabian Wilckens: All that is great, but it keeps the human out of the loop. I truly believe that now is the time to bring humans back into the loop because AI is easily accessible. I remember that, about 15 years ago, we had this slogan that you could start a business from the couch, which was, back in the day, a lot of jokes about it.

[00:03:22] Fabian Wilckens: All you needed was a laptop, and you could manufacture goods, say, in China. You could ship them across the world and build your online empire without even leaving your sofa. I think these days it’s even worse because there are a lot more tools available. All you need is some money to get started. The problem is that a lot of people can do it, and you can portray yourself as a very different company.

[00:03:44] Fabian Wilckens: Bringing back the human element is a challenge in modern-day sales because we rely so much on automation. Nothing against it, but automation doesn’t eliminate the need for human intervention. We are an AI company, so we work a lot with AI, and this is what we preach to people.

[00:04:00] Fabian Wilckens:  You can do amazing things with AI, but human supervision is still something you might want to consider. I get the feeling that a lot of companies these days are looking at it from a cost perspective because AI is much cheaper than humans, believe it or not. But from an effectiveness perspective, think output versus outcome.

[00:04:20] Fabian Wilckens: It may not be the same. You may hit your metrics, but you may not hit your sales goals, and that’s not a good trade-off that anybody wants to be in these days.

[00:04:30] Steve MacDonald: As I’m thinking about getting more of the human factor, I immediately start thinking about how we get into more conversations in the sales environment, and how that’s getting so much harder to do. Gartner has talked very eloquently about the B2B self-service buying journey, where 80-plus percent want to go way down the buyer’s journey before they ever even talk to us as a sales organization. So, it’s incumbent upon us to then ask how we get earlier in that buyer’s journey. How do we spark conversations earlier?

[00:05:04] Steve MacDonald: So, as you’re talking about this human element, it seems like it’s more important than ever because we don’t want to just talk about the tools that we have; they have their tools now to survey all the content that’s out there and available to help them make their decisions and avoid these conversations. These tools help them avoid human interaction. So, there are a lot of dynamics happening here. So, what do we do about it?

[00:05:32] Fabian Wilckens: It’s a good question. I always tell one story, which I love, because to me this illustrates the problem that we are facing regarding what you said. I’ve got a great friend, and he’s the chief data officer of one of the largest European companies—a very smart guy. I asked him this question a few weeks back: How many people try to get in contact with you to sell you something? He said, “Honestly speaking, I get a lot of emails. I get a lot of LinkedIn messages, but I don’t feel I get a lot of people.”

[00:06:03] Fabian Wilckens: So, I get a lot of these emails that say, “Hey, download the latest and greatest Gartner white paper on why our company matters the most to a specific challenge. Read the latest benchmark reports on how our engine is faster than anyone else’s.” He said, “The problem is that they all feel the same, and they all read the same. At some point, you just switch off.”

[00:06:23] Fabian Wilckens: I think this is a great example. But what he said is, “I don’t get these salespeople who say, ‘Hey, I’ve been working with these many people across your organization. I’ve been doing interviews with those people. I’ve been listening to your challenges. I’ve been reading your annual report.’” He said, “None of that is coming through anymore because it’s all very personalized, but it’s all very automated at the same time.”

[00:06:43] Fabian Wilckens: very email is pitch-perfect. There is no unique writing style; all are very eloquent, and the grammar is perfect. It’s just unnatural. To him—and I think this is a great example that I believe is universally applicable—it feels like there’s no one interested in him as a person and what his challenges may be in overcoming organizational hurdles and obstacles to bring his career and, obviously, the organization forward at the same time. I do believe that one of the things is that you’ve got to do your research; you’ve got to listen. Nowadays, Steve, you know this better than anyone else probably—we rely heavily on playbooks these days. Our playbooks are typically designed by product organizations.

[00:07:27] Fabian Wilckens: Everybody builds an amazing product, and it has all its reasons for existence. But to your point, people don’t buy early in the cycle anymore; they buy late in the cycle. If you swamp them with information—not just you, but thousands of other people or companies—and they all feel the same way, it’s very hard for a decision-maker to make a decision. What makes a difference is having a human in the loop.

[00:07:51] Fabian Wilckens:  A human who understands what challenges exist, and who can break out of this automation hurdle to a degree—or this automation vicious circle—and get to know you, understand your challenges, and, I think this is important, do so without pitching your product too much.

[00:08:12] Fabian Wilckens: Modern-day salespeople are not experts in their specific field anymore. I love methodologies like MedPig and other frameworks; they all have their reasons for existence. But they can train you to be a robot instead of a good communicator.

[00:08:31] Fabian Wilckens: That is something you have to bring across, whether this is a non-perfect email, a personalized postcard that works particularly well, or sending someone a cake or a video message, or whatever it may be. But you’ve got to be the one who’s making a difference and genuinely wanting to help without just pitching your product. Everything is metric-driven these days, and everybody has the best metrics.

[00:08:57] Fabian Wilckens: I worked a lot in the database space in the past, and guess what? We could invent metrics from one day to the other that made us look better than anyone else. The market was relatively new, so nobody knew what was good or not. People were just basically comparing apples to oranges all the time. Nobody knew what was going on. Nowadays, it’s even worse with AI and so many different technologies out there and so on.

[00:09:20] Fabian Wilckens: So, to make a long story short, humans need to be in the loop, and I don’t know how often I can stress this, but I felt that we lost sales a little bit, and I think, what we have to change. Hopefully, we will change that again because AI is great and everything, but my favorite example is when you take a scientific calculator.

[00:09:39] Fabian Wilckens: Sure, you can do easy equations on it, but if it gets to the more advanced stuff, you’ve got to be an expert there to use the tool correctly. It’s the same with AI. You can get results fast, but they’re not super results. Everybody can get to these results fast with some basic knowledge of how sales work. The difference is trying to understand what the other party wants. How can you help? Also, to qualify out fast if you can’t help—not to follow shiny objects too often, but to drop out as early as possible and not waste anyone’s time.

[00:10:13] Steve MacDonald: Here’s a huge takeaway from what you’ve just said there. By the way, we remember things 22 times more when it’s told in the form of a story. So, the story that you told there of the experience when he was being sold to this chief data officer, and it just felt like a sea of sameness. Everybody’s approach, everybody’s pitch, everybody’s email. That is backed up by B2B companies today having, on average, between 20 and 30 competitors.

[00:10:40] Steve MacDonald: I’ve talked to chief customer officers, chief data officers, chief security officers, and revenue officers, and asked that same question: how do you decide this kind of environment? You know what they said? They said I want to know what it’s going to be like working with them. If it’s a cybersecurity company, they’re all going to have a platform that does this and this and this and this. So, everybody’s going to pitch that they have you covered, right? It’s very, very hard to differentiate on products, especially in the age of rapid innovation. Even if there was a platform that did something, it’s going to be replicated. It’s not a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage.

[00:11:21] Steve MacDonald: So, what the number one thing—and a Gartner study came out with this—said the number one sustainable competitive advantage for businesses today is customer experience. What you said to me is that customer experience starts at the very beginning of an ABM sales cycle. If you can create an experience that is different, more personal, and more human, like I care, I’m not just sending out blank pitches and hoping that the numbers and the masses are going to be in my favor. Is that a good takeaway from what you were talking about?

[00:12:00] Fabian Wilckens: I would agree 100%. I would add one thing, though. I think you genuinely have to live your product because you have to convince yourself that what you sell is actually helping people and not just on slides. But it’s helping people because I think a lot of times—and I know this from recruiters that approach me day in, day out—they would look for three things: like framework A, B, and C. Awesome, you are the guy. But I’m not a cybersecurity guy.

[00:12:27] Fabian Wilckens: If a cybersecurity company would approach me, I have zero to little knowledge in that domain, so I cannot help people. Sure, I want to learn if I get into that space, but I won’t be the most effective seller. You’ve got to get really into it.

[00:12:41] Fabian Wilckens: It’s not like, oh, I’ve sold all different sorts of enterprise stuff in the past. Awesome. However, I think nowadays the difference is that you’ve got to be in-depth. I guess you could almost say that salespeople should be full stack, which I know is a big deal when it comes to marketing and development.

[00:12:57] Fabian Wilckens:  But I do believe that we need something that full stack salespeople as well, who are, to a degree, technical if required, to a degree, commercial, but also to a degree, political and smart and genuinely curious. I think there are many out there these days because we look for different things.

[00:13:11] Fabian Wilckens: We look for closers, we look for hunters, we look for commercial experts, but we rarely look for in-depth knowledge in sales anymore. I think that is something that we have to change. I’ve interviewed many salespeople in the past, and typically we had an interview guideline, but none of the questions were in-depth technical questions. They were like, all right, rank your patch. Give me 10 accounts in your patch that you would pursue. Where do you have connections? How would you approach these companies? Give me an example of an outbound email.

[00:13:41] Fabian Wilckens: That’s all perfect, but you genuinely just test the sales skills, which, quite honestly, all these people that you hire that are experienced will be able to just throw out at a moment’s notice. But when it comes to technical knowledge and in-depth value add, it’s very hard. But not a lot of companies test for that anymore.

[00:14:01] Steve MacDonald: In this idea of deeper knowledge, I’m pairing that together with something you said earlier. You just can’t sell products. You can’t just pitch products because what B2B buyers want is they want to be advised. This is the trusted advisor role that we know we need to play.

[00:14:18] Steve MacDonald: To be that advisor role, you have to understand them at a much deeper level than just the product you’re pitching. Your product might be this much of their job, their responsibilities, what they’re trying to do, their goals. You have to understand this bigger portion that they play to be an advisor and not just a pitcher, not just a seller.

[00:14:43] Steve MacDonald: When you start to say you have to be deeply knowledgeable, you would have all the right sales skills, but if you’re going to be considered a consultant and not a seller, you’ve got to have that larger frame of reference.

[00:14:56] Fabian Wilckens: Yes. When you say the consultants, I think one of the best things that works for us, or for me in the past, is to state your intentions clearly at the beginning. I said, I’m here to sell you something, but I don’t want to sell you something unless you want to buy it. So, I’m not here to convince you to buy something you don’t need, which means that I need to understand where you are right now. I’m genuinely here to understand it.

[00:15:18] Fabian Wilckens: Yes, I’m a salesperson. Yes, I do carry a quota. Yes, I’m very interested in positioning my product at your respective company, but for the right reasons. Because otherwise, it’s going to end up on the shelf, and that’s no help to any of us. So, it’s got to be a mutually beneficial situation. And for that, I may play a consultant to a degree. But as every good consultant, at some point, I would give you a recommendation, and my recommendation may well be that my product is exactly what you need, or it may be that you are not ready for it yet for many different reasons, or that there’s just no need at all that we can help you with, and then there’s no point in continuing discussion much further because we would just literally waste each other’s time, and that’s not a good thing.

[00:15:59] Fabian Wilckens: So, that’s my open up, and it works extremely well because people appreciate the honesty because they want to be sold to still. It’s nice to learn about new things that happen in the market and always learn about things that can help their respective challenges. But I think to make clear from the very beginning that I’m here to sell you something, not for any reason, but for the right reasons, I think that does make a difference. But that requires in-depth knowledge to understand and react to questions, to statements, to what you are being told almost in real-time. That is not something you can read off a playbook, unfortunately.

[00:16:32] Steve MacDonald: No, but the authenticity that comes in with the motivations and the intentions. If you just literally say, I don’t know if I can help you, then they at least know you’re just not here just to intentionally dispatch, and that’s it. I would call them nuances or adjustments in the sales strategy.

[00:16:46] Steve MacDonald:  How do you think about the sales strategy adjustments for the challenges—the nature of the beast of what we’re in today? How do you translate that over into now training your team and getting them ready?

[00:17:01] Fabian Wilckens: That’s an excellent point. My key learning over the last years or so was that I think so far, every process that I worked with, I’ll start with product to marketing, to sales, to customer success, or after-sales, or professional service, or whatever. And it was always a straight line with an arrow pointing left or right, depending on how you look at it. And it was always, okay, well, first we do this, then we do this, then we do this, then we do this. And then after we finished this whole journey, what happens next? And then all these questions came up like, oh, who owns revenue attrition?

[00:17:30] Fabian Wilckens: Is it customer success, or is it sales? Then people started with account tiers, and then there were things like, oh, marketing needs a digital channel, but a digital channel to small and medium businesses is a different sales motion all of a sudden. And now you had all these parallel pipelines, but they were never linked up.

[00:17:46] Fabian Wilckens: But general practice, in the industry to design those pipelines like a CRM system dictated you to design those pipelines because we’ve just evaluated CRM systems, and there are differences, but fundamentally, when it comes to pipeline management, they’re all the same.

[00:18:02] Fabian Wilckens: You’ve got stages, and they always go from left to right. And you can have many in between, and you can have quality gates. But the end of the stage goes back to the beginning. It never turns into a circle of sorts. And what I believe, and what I found, and something we’re trying right now, is to build more of a flywheel-type sales process, which is we have the product at the center. The product is what keeps the wheel spinning. We need something to sell. And then we have little elements around it: marketing, sales, and what we call value acceleration, but effectively customer success. 

[00:18:35] Fabian Wilckens: Every one of these little aspects around the wheel, they have outcome metrics, not output as an MQL or something. We don’t incentivize marketing people by creating a lot of leads, but we incentivize them by creating the right leads. So, they own the first stage of our sales funnel. Of course, we still have a CRM system with a standardized sales funnel, but the first stage of an opportunity is owned by marketing and not by sales.

[00:19:00] Fabian Wilckens: So, effectively, we eliminate the sales-qualified lead stage, if you will, and have that stay with marketing. Then the sales team has one goal, and that is to create purchase orders. That’s it.

[00:19:13] Fabian Wilckens: At the end of the day, it’s that. Forget about revenue for just a second, because ultimately a PO will translate into revenue. If you don’t close any business, you can talk revenue as much as you want, but you still need POs to drive revenue growth.

[00:19:25] Fabian Wilckens: And then the last piece of the puzzle, if you will, is the customer success team or value acceleration. Their outcome metric is effectively customer references, which then can again be used for marketing purposes. Because we know more about a certain industry and how certain people respectively use our product.

[00:19:43] Fabian Wilckens: Then we like keeping the wheel spinning. The more leads we create based on the references that we observed and got public, the more POs we can create, and it keeps on spinning. It hopefully accelerates over time. But what I like about it is that there’s no end to the process. It’s effectively a wheel.

[00:20:01] Fabian Wilckens: So, yes, we do create leads based on references to create deals, and it just keeps on spinning. The good thing is that every little spine in the wheel is connected to the product. So, the product gets feedback in all stages of the process. What works in sales? Where are we not successful? Are there maybe some obstacles in the product that need to be resolved fast? What’s with after-sales support with the value acceleration now to people? Because it’s very different to sell a product and to operationally use it. But also, how do we market it?

[00:20:30] Fabian Wilckens: I think combining all these into this flywheel motion is something that hopefully is going to work for us. The only challenge is that you need a lot of different systems because traditional CRM systems aren’t built to do that. Product people have their product tools. They have their whatever, Jira ticketing systems of the world to do product stuff.

[00:20:51] Fabian Wilckens: Marketing people have marketing tools, salespeople have sales tools, and customer success people have their tools. Getting it all into one platform is the hard piece because the systems weren’t necessarily designed to do that. So, if there was a wish that I had, please, someone out there, build this CRM system that covers the entire flywheel.

[00:21:11] Steve MacDonald: If a year from now you see that Fabian and I have started a new startup, you’ll know where it started right here, right today. So, I want to ask a question about that flywheel because gone are the days where marketing people are like, “We’re going to create our MQLs, throw them over the wall at sales, and then we’re done.” CEOs know they have to be pipeline-focused, and pipeline-driven. They have to own much more of this; it makes perfect sense.

[00:21:39] Steve MacDonald: In sales, nothing else matters other than the purchase order; that makes perfect sense. So, the part of the flywheel that I want to ask you about is this customer success you called a value acceleration that comes around the top of the circle and back into marketing. What are the elements of this value acceleration that take customers? Is it referrals? Is it testimonials? Is it case studies? What are the elements that you’re bringing together that then feed back into the marketing organization?

[00:22:13] Fabian Wilckens: That’s an excellent question. To be honest, it’s all of them, ideally. I feel like case studies are the least important ones these days because, just my opinion, so don’t quote me on this. I know it’s public, but still, I always feel like they have some shady background to them because sometimes I read metrics on these case studies and think, “Okay, great. Sounds great on paper, but there’s no way this resembles reality in any shape or form.” To me, the best type of reference is customers talking to prospects without our involvement. If we have a database of people that we can refer to say interested folks, that is something that I think is the best, and I don’t need to be involved in that. If I just trust my people that we keep them happy, that we make sure we overcome their respective challenges, that we develop the product in their direction, and so on. Why would I not just put them on the phone and say, “You know what? Don’t talk to us. What does it matter what I say? I stand behind my product.”

[00:23:11] Fabian Wilckens: But talk to these guys. The more of these people in different industries that we have, we use a lot of quotes; we ask people for a lot of social quotes that we can use. But not like these, “We achieved an ROI of 700,000%,” and I know I’m exaggerating this quite a bit, but those numbers aren’t real. I’ve not seen a single ROI calculation in my life that would pass the test of actually being tested. They look great on paper. They’re good at convincing people. But if you do the math, none of them actually may add up.

[00:23:44] Fabian Wilckens: This is why I hate when people use ROI. But what does matter is experience: how did it change my job? Did I get home on time? Was my team more productive? Did we get more done? Although this may all be very subjective, emotions and subjectivity are very important because objectifying something and making objective, let’s say, decisions, is an easy thing.

[00:24:06] Fabian Wilckens: Because you will always find something to convince finance people who are involved in every major transaction these days. If you build a case that’s good enough, you need to convince the people that it makes their lives better, easier, faster, more productive, whatever it may be. So that’s what we try to get out of those references; maybe a strong word here, but that’s what we try to get as an outcome of our value acceleration phase: to get a positive reusable asset if you will.

[00:24:35] Fabian Wilckens: So, we call it marketing reusable assets, which is not a standard metric, but something that marketing can take and put back into any of the channels, be it advertisement, social, email, or more traditional marketing, be it events, whatever it may be.

[00:24:52] Steve MacDonald: So, there was a three-time B2B CMO that was on the podcast a few months ago, and she said the campaigns that work the best across marketing and sales are where the voice of our customers leads ours. That’s validation from the peer community of who you’re selling to.

[00:25:12] Steve MacDonald: I love it because when we say things, and even if it makes all the sense in the world, and eyebrows are raised and people are like, I haven’t thought about that way, it means this much. If we get the peer community of who we’re selling to to validate it, it means this much. Now I see the flywheel and trying to create these marketing reusable assets that come back in and accelerate the voice of the customer; I could see how it doesn’t fly.

[00:25:41] Fabian Wilckens: Maybe a funny proof point, that’s quite actual, that happened literally three or four days ago. So, we have a super smart SDR in our company. She’s amazing, right? A rockstar, world-class SDR. She’s just amazing, and she took a lot of the quotes that we had from customers and ran it via whatever Gen AI model and said, okay, how would these people, if they all meet, send emails to each other?

[00:26:07] Fabian Wilckens: So, the traditional marketing emails read: hey, find out the latest about X. Here’s our free whatever learners guide or something. Read our most amazing white paper, something like that. She said that nobody writes emails like that to a colleague, and that’s true. I thought it was ridiculous in the beginning because I said, this is not going to work. So, we ran an A/B test with a maximum of two words in the subject, all lowercase. It’s something like, check this out, whether it’s three words now, but super useful or something like that.

[00:26:38] Fabian Wilckens: The opening rates make a material difference. They’re substantially higher. And the reason why I believe that is because this feels like an email that someone would forward to you. So, it’s not check out our free resources like this long subject line. It’s very condensed, and nobody would think I would open this up immediately because, well, this is just not super professional, but it’s personal.

[00:27:02] Fabian Wilckens: So, it’s a very quick call to action. It looks unprofessional to have an all-lowercase email subject. I mean, think of what marketing people would think about it. That’s like, we can’t do this. There’s no brand voice in it or whatever. But it works.

[00:27:14] Fabian Wilckens: So, we work a lot with people who know statistics better than I do, but they said it’s statistically relevant, and it’s good. It’s ten percentage points or so more opening rates on this particular one. I love this as an example of how you can use the data to even change tiny little bits of making even modern-day automated communication more personal and more human because people think that it’s a human writing this and not a massive campaign with a lot of banners and things in it.

[00:27:43] Fabian Wilckens: Then we found a study that an email without logos and an email without images works best, which I can also confirm. So, we’re collecting a lot of data now, but it’s all based on what customers told us and said what email would you open? Especially when we build a relationship where you can ask these questions, and the learnings were just super cool so far.

[00:28:02] Steve MacDonald: I love this. It ties back to what you said at the very beginning that we have to be more human. You’re bringing it all the way around and sharing from one human to the next. These marketing reusable assets are just bringing the human element in: the humans that are using the product, that have benefited from it, that have had that experience. So, it all makes sense.

[00:28:26] Steve MacDonald: I want to ask you because I have a feeling we could talk for another hour easily here, but if there was one main takeaway that you wanted people to take away from what we’ve already talked about here or what we haven’t covered yet, what would that be?

[00:28:43] Fabian Wilckens: That’s a loaded question, of course. I can give my personal opinion, and I think that’s what’s needed here at this point. I think we need more responsibility under a role like we would call a chief growth officer because I believe that one of the challenges is that all these things I talked about are very siloed in reality.

[00:29:03] Fabian Wilckens: Because marketing rolls up into a CEO. So does revenue. So does customer success, to some degree. I know some organizations put it on the revenue. But I wish there was a role that’s responsible for getting this wheel spinning. And I’m taking the wheel just as a visual example here.

[00:29:19] Fabian Wilckens: But I feel like there’s still a rift between marketing and revenue, so marketing and sales. And there’s another rift between sales and customer success because everybody loves to build their little kingdoms and their little castles. And I don’t think there is an overarching role that combines all these three elements as they are essential to a go-to-market lifecycle in a SaaS product.

[00:29:41] Fabian Wilckens: And it’s not the CEO typically because he’s got other deals and things to worry about: the company valuation, which should be every CEO’s goal; stakeholder happiness, whatever it might be; product as well, but not the operational side of getting the whole go-to-market motion going. If you think about it, I heard and read some articles about it—that chief growth officers are coming up more often nowadays—but that discussion about it, I think that’s a vital role.

[00:30:07] Fabian Wilckens: It’s someone who understands the dynamics of it, but it’s not a marketing expert. Someone who understands how sales works, but it’s maybe not the best salesperson in the world. Somebody who does understand how people adopt products, but it’s maybe not the perfect person to drive adoption. It’s someone who can bring this whole thing together and get it into a state of visionary agile methodologies so that it keeps on spinning. In the U.S., I guess they call it a military drill sergeant—someone that’s pounding the drum a little bit without being the super soldier himself or herself. So, that’s how I would love to see that role being established in outbound and go-to-market organizations.

[00:30:49] Steve MacDonald: It makes sense. That breaks down silos. I do a series on why the B2B CMOs fail so quickly, why the B2B CROs fail so quickly—two shortest tenures in the C-suite—and different silos. Different goals and different definitions of the ICP to begin with are right at the top. I love this, and I know people are going to have questions. Would it be appropriate if we maybe gave a link to your LinkedIn profile so that people could reach out and ask you those questions?

[00:31:21] Fabian Wilckens: Anytime. I love the interaction because, of course, I don’t know everything. It’s just my learnings, and whether it works or not, that’s a whole different discussion. But I love to get feedback, and I love to interact with people to share knowledge because it’s on us to learn how to be better sellers and how to delight our customers much more.

[00:31:39] Steve MacDonald: Well, thank you for coming on and sharing all these insights and giving us new ways of thinking about creating our flywheel, and even nuggets down to how to create these marketing recyclable assets or usable assets. So, thanks for coming on, and I’d love to have you back on because I think there’s a lot more we could talk about.

[00:31:56] Fabian Wilckens: Thanks for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to the next time!