Episode #286:
Robert From, Chief Growth Officer at Rail Europe, explores how trust drives long-term growth in complex ecosystems. He explains why businesses must move beyond transactional models and align incentives across partners. By focusing on customer value and ecosystem alignment, companies can build a durable competitive advantage. His insights show how trust compounds over time to create sustainable growth.
“In a constantly changing environment where competitors become partners and partners become competitors, you need to go beyond technical solutions and build a foundation of trust to grow together.” — Robert From
This episode explores how trust, empathy, and customer-driven alignment create sustainable growth. Robert breaks down how leaders can move beyond transactional relationships to build long-term partnerships that drive measurable business impact across complex ecosystems.
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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 we’ve got an interesting conversation because we’re going to go into what it takes to be successful. And we’ve heard lots of things like how we create value, how we focus on the customer, how we build trust.
[00:00:26] Steve MacDonald: And we’ve heard those things so many times that they just kind of blend into the background. But we’re on with Robert From today, and Robert’s the Chief Growth Officer with Rail Europe. And I just love the way that you break it down and you think about the greater ecosystem that we’re working in.
[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: And you’ve worked across a lot of ecosystems. I mean, you’ve been in a number of different countries. You’ve been in a number of different kinds of businesses, not just FinTech or this or that. You’ve been at Google, you’ve been at YouTube, you’ve been at startups. You’ve been in environments where it’s B2B, it’s B2C, it’s B2B2C.
[00:01:07] Steve MacDonald: It’s like you add in all the little acronyms there. You’ve kind of seen it from all different angles, but at the end of the day, it’s all about whether it’s a customer at the end of our customer relationships. It’s a user. It’s somebody that’s consuming our product. They’re consuming the experience that we create for them.
[00:01:29] Steve MacDonald: I can’t steal any more thunder than that because it’s just the way you think about it. I want to get right into it. But you also have a very creative mindset in terms of being a team player. And you told me that since you were seven, you’ve been on basketball teams and sports teams and everything, and you still are today in your forties, and you hate to lose that competitive team spirit, right?
[00:01:52] Steve MacDonald: So I want to take all of that mentality and let’s talk about it because, in the end, what you’re going to help us talk about is how do we not be a vendor, right? How do we be seen as more of a peer, more of a colleague, and how do we learn from the customer and make that learning the key differentiation that we actually create into competitive advantage.
[00:02:15] Steve MacDonald: So I’d love to just give you the opportunity to expand on your background, areas I didn’t cover there, before we get started.
[00:02:24] Robert From: Alright, thanks Steve, and thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. I’m looking forward to the discussion. If we can even cover 50 percent of what you just set up, it should be an interesting one, hopefully.
[00:02:31] Robert From: So you’re right. I’ve kind of had the opportunity to work in commercial roles in different parts of the world over the past couple of decades. And I think what it really, like for me, the biggest value maybe has been is that it highlights the power of empathy.
[00:02:48] Robert From: When you’re put into a context that you don’t know that well, in a culture you don’t know that well, in a business you don’t know that well, with a part you don’t know that well, the natural instinct at some point becomes to try to look at the world from their perspective because that helps you to then figure out how to find that common ground of value creation, like you mentioned.
[00:03:08] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I’d love to do. I’d love to just kind of start off with your role. You’re a Chief Growth Officer, which means you don’t think about one part of the business, or you’re not focused on just marketing or sales or customer success. You’re focused on the total success of the business.
[00:03:26] Steve MacDonald: I asked you at the very beginning, Robert, what are your two greatest challenges for creating long term sustainable growth? So I’d love to talk about sustainable growth foundations. And you talked about building trust before scale. What does that mean in your mind?
[00:03:41] Robert From: Yeah, it’s always context dependent. But if we think about Rail Europe as a company where our mission is to really make European rail as simple and easy to plan, book, and buy as a flight ticket would be, and then bring that experience to the world.
[00:03:57] Robert From: So whether it’s a consumer using raileurope.com, whether it’s a travel agent in Sydney setting something up for a customer, or a large online travel agency, or connecting rail into their inventory and creating the right services for their partners.
[00:04:12] Robert From: Or like an OTA where we help them embed rail into their system and into their structures. And of course there is a transactional piece to what we do. So if you look at the technical part in taking in a lot of complexity in a fragmented supply, bundling all of that into one API or into one agent portal and making that available.
[00:04:36] Robert From: That’s important. That’s what we do technically. But we’re like many other categories in travel. We’re operating in an environment that is constantly changing. Right now we’re probably in the biggest upheaval that travel has seen in the past two decades.
[00:05:04] Robert From: There’s different layers of competition and partnership between vendors, between actors in the space. Even today, we had a session with four of the largest OTAs on the planet in our office here in Paris. They all compete, but they also all look to solve for some of the same challenges.
[00:05:24] Robert From: So I think in this type of environment where the future is shifting, customer behavior and demand are shifting, business models are shifting, today’s competitor can be a great partner tomorrow. Today’s partner can be a competitor again the next day.
[00:05:43] Robert From: You need to go beyond a technical solution and start building a foundation of trust to really be able to perform and grow together.
[00:05:43] Robert From: And in every context then, where that trust is coming from, there are different mechanisms for it. Sometimes it’s rooted in legal and business interest. Other times it’s rooted in deep personal relationships and investing.
[00:05:56] Robert From: In some cases, it’s this feeling that, okay, I know that this is, like in our case, Rail Europe has been around. We’ve been solving for this same topic with our suppliers, with our carriers for nine decades.
[00:06:14] Robert From: Like when you have that type of longevity, when they know that these guys will not optimize for the quick win today, but we intend to be around for another 90 years, it shifts the expectations and the dynamics in the relationship in a completely different way.
[00:06:24] Steve MacDonald: So I want to dig in a little bit because when you talk about creating scalable growth and trust, you look at it kind of differently than a lot of people do, in a really cool way.
[00:06:36] Steve MacDonald: You talk about how trust first compounds over time. So it becomes a larger competitive advantage the more that you put into it. And we have, like in the states here, Forrester came out and they said, for C-suite executives today in B2B companies, the number one thing you should be doing is creating trust.
[00:06:58] Steve MacDonald: It’s the currency to get into the deal. It’s the currency to win the deal. It’s the currency to keep the deal long term. That’s the level of importance they put on it. You talked about not only how it compounds, and I want to hear your words about what does that mean, but it has to have a consistency, you said, in alignment with the greater ecosystem.
[00:07:21] Steve MacDonald: And so I want to hear what you mean by trust compounding, and then what this ecosystem is, and how you think about that in creating trust.
[00:07:29] Robert From: Yeah. So first on the compounding piece, I think what is interesting to me is that when we put on our work hat, or our suit, and go into the office,
[00:07:39] Robert From: we seem to sometimes forget what the human condition is all about. I think great relationships and trust are not built in the blink of an eye. It is not built in an instant. You can do great things in the short term, and you can earn credibility and so on. But if you think about the people in your life that you really, really count on, these are almost always relationships that have continuous exposure over time. It is all of these things of when you know that a partner is having a tough time, you figure out a way to adjust the deal, even though you might be losing a bit in the short term, or when it is about going the extra mile and opening a door for them. These are so obvious things, right?
[00:08:24] Robert From: But we tend to forget these things. And we kind of live in this time where we are so preoccupied by data and technology and the pace of change and everything that is going on. And those are important. I am sure we will talk about that in this session as well.
[00:08:40] Robert From: But at the end of the day, between human beings, we need to find those ways of building that common ground.
[00:08:48] Steve MacDonald: And how do you build that, like the ecosystem component of this, right? Alignment, trust, and alignment with ecosystem. I have never heard anybody talk about that before.
[00:08:59] Robert From: Let me take an example from our business, what that means. So it starts with how we approach strategy and competition and value creation at Rail Europe. Like I said, we are part of this broader travel value chain and ecosystem.
[00:09:23] Robert From: On the one hand, we have our suppliers, our train carriers in the different markets, more coming in, more than 200 already today. And we have tens of thousands of partners on the demand side providing them these services forward. And around this, we are partnering with destination marketing organizations, with European Travel Commission, with cities, with governments, and so on.
[00:09:55] Robert From: If you try to build your business model around something where you are just maximizing for the revenue potential based on one part of that system, even if in the short term you can see it is the most lucrative one, in the long term that approach really does not work.
[00:10:23] Robert From: Instead, what we are doing is that we try to consistently do the same when we reevaluate how we think about our bets. If we do not understand the incentives, motives, and objectives of each side of this business, and then find our sweet spot where we can credibly claim to build for both sides of the market,
[00:10:40] Robert From: I can go to dinners and I can try to be a nice guy, and that is all fine. But if we do not design a system where the actual incentives are aligned within the ecosystem overall, you will just not be successful in the long term. People will find out. They will see that you are taking actions that are not in their interest.
[00:10:57] Robert From: But if you can find that nugget, and this is something that really got me excited almost two years ago when joining Rail Europe, when you can find a position in the market, in a marketplace type setup as I think we have, you can just speak the truth in those interactions, and that changes the dynamic again.
[00:10:57] Steve MacDonald: Really interesting.
[00:10:59] Steve MacDonald: You know, I said we ask that question of you, what are your two greatest challenges for creating long term sustainable growth? We ask every C-suite executive that comes on the podcast. We have done that over the last one hundred episodes, and the number one challenge, this is going to come back to what you were just saying, was internal alignment.
[00:11:17] Steve MacDonald: Over 70 percent of C-suite executives said their greatest challenge for creating long term sustainable growth was internal alignment. Now, a lot of the time, mostly what we try to do on internal alignment is we try to align at the top and we try to communicate it down throughout the teams.
[00:11:41] Steve MacDonald: But you talked about incentives to help alignment. We are all products of our compensation. We are all products of how we are reviewed, how we get our raises, everything, right? And so how does internal alignment, how do those incentives play into earned internal alignment and change management?
[00:12:03] Steve MacDonald: Like you are saying right now, you are in one of the biggest upheavals in your industry. You are, I imagine, having to take that in, decide what does that mean for us, communicate that to the entire company so that we are doing something different as a result, right?
[00:12:26] Steve MacDonald: And so I love when you started talking about these internal incentives. How does that work into the practical? How does that work into communicating and actually getting teams acting together, but as high performing teams? How critical is that piece?
[00:12:34] Robert From: Here, it does start, like you mentioned, like most companies do this relatively well at the company or top level in setting incentives. But instead of looking at this from a financial performance lens only, especially in times like this where no one can predict where the market is going, not in two years, but maybe even in two months,
[00:12:44] Robert From: the starting point for any business that can survive has to start with creating customer value. If you create customer value, then you have the opportunity to capture it down the line.
[00:13:06] Robert From: Now, what are the KPIs or what are the leading indicators of creating customer value? That means that customer satisfaction or recommendation scores or the Sean Ellis test, or whichever ones you want to choose, they have to be at the very top of the incentives that you are setting up.
[00:13:24] Robert From: If you push your sales teams only to hit targets, if you push your customer success teams to only be incentivized based on upsell and cross sell metrics, you will make a bit more money in the short term.
[00:13:48] Robert From: But you will not start consistently making choices in the company that benefit long term value creation and, in that way, long term competitive ability.
[00:13:48] Robert From: And that is also then the way to start creating. We always look for the commonality in how do you bring different teams of product, technology, customer success, sales, marketing, and finance. How do you bring these teams to the table in a way where they can find a north star together?
[00:14:05] Robert From: Usually, by far, the best way to do that is to actually use the customer as a tool. Using the needs and understanding of servicing that customer in the best way, because they are paying our bills. They are keeping the lights on in the company in the first place, right?
[00:14:26] Robert From: So how do you take that and how do you use that as the storytelling device for, okay, this quarter, okay, this is how we are thinking about making product priorities.
[00:14:26] Robert From: Okay, now, right now, yeah, we can push on this cross sell or retention opportunity. But actually right now, we see this gap in how quickly we are answering the needs of the customer with this critical issue.
[00:14:46] Robert From: Or how do we set targets for the tech teams on the downtime of an API? That becomes a metric that is equally as important as a dollar sign. And then you push that into your overall performance reviews, into your individual OKRs that you set up, how you incentivize the bonus payment structures, and so on.
[00:14:46] Robert From: It is about finding the balance between those different things and then adjusting over time.
[00:15:07] Steve MacDonald: I had a woman on, a three time B2B CMO. She is now a partner at a consulting company. All she does is her entire firm. All they do is consult on go to market with mid market B2B companies. And she said the greatest force of internal change is the voice of the customer, exactly what you are saying, right? And it is what nobody can argue.
[00:15:32] Steve MacDonald: Left to our own devices as CROs and CEOs and CMOs, guess what? We have all risen to our positions not because we do not know what we are doing. We know what we are doing. We know how to make decisions, right? And we can do it.
[00:15:55] Steve MacDonald: And in a vacuum, which we do not ever all work in a vacuum, but without a unifying force, this is what I am taking away from what you are saying. Without a unifying force like the voice of the customer, we are all left to our own devices to make individual decisions that are good for our department, good for the company. But if we are not aligned on the north star, which is the voice of the customer, that is what we should be optimizing for, but we optimize for revenue outcomes.
[00:16:17] Robert From: Exactly this. You will end up optimizing for a bunch of local maximums in the different teams. And this has two consequences, right?
[00:16:38] Robert From: The first one is that the company will not reach its full potential. You will not be able to have this orchestra of teams and functions working together to create something amazing for customers. If you think about how little friction there is in most categories and industries today to switch to a different provider, a different service, a different app, whatever it is, when switching costs go to zero, value creation is not a nice to have. It is not about doing it once. That product market fit is so elusive now.
[00:16:56] Robert From: You see this especially with the AI native companies that are coming up in the market, where you will have PMF this week, but the next week it is gone. So that is one part, is that you will not optimize for a global maximum, but for a bunch of local ones.
[00:17:28] Robert From: But the second part, and this to me can be dangerous, but even more demoralizing for the teams, is that we are usually working in quite networked companies. We are quite dependent on each other. If you cannot create that commonality that you were talking about between the teams, work will just not feel as meaningful and fun.
[00:17:28] Robert From: Because you feel like I am doing my thing, but these other teams, they just do not understand why we are doing this and what we are doing. And this leads to so much slowness and friction that I do not think we can afford. But when you find that commonality, it feels different. It just does.
[00:17:44] Steve MacDonald: So one additional level in our last conversation that you went to in terms of focusing on the voice of the customer and optimizing around that is you said, are you selling peace of mind? Are you selling certainty, right? Like especially, you are a tech platform, right?
[00:18:03] Steve MacDonald: It is all about the product. It is all about the usage patterns and feature sets. But you know what? There is major upheaval going on. ChatGPT is writing code for your competitors. Like when you said trust compounds, I started thinking about those comments.
[00:18:20] Steve MacDonald: Trust that I build peace of mind. I build certainty. You can rely on us. How important, you could say, I am sure you have never been in a board meeting where anybody said, hey, how are we doing on building peace of mind, right? But we are talking about how important this really is to optimize for this. So how do you think about this and how do you work it into the business flow?
[00:18:46] Robert From: Yeah. What helps us is that if we think about the business that we are in, and I mentioned the different categories and partners all the way, so at the end of that chain, there is always a consumer. There is always a person who is traveling, probably spending the most important week of their year on a trip across Europe. And for that user, that customer, it is very natural that the real value that we create for them is not having a ticket in their pocket or saving five euros on a discount.
[00:19:18] Robert From: It is safeguarding their trip. It is making sure that they get to those experiences, get those fantastic days or weeks or weekends with their loved ones. And that to me is one hundred percent about selling peace of mind. So our mindset already is how do we enable peace of mind for that traveler.
[00:19:37] Robert From: Now, this very easily then extends to how we work with our sales teams, with our customer success teams, with our product and technology teams. If you have that same mindset of, okay, we are in the business of creating and selling peace of mind, then you just need to translate that into the terms of your partner.
[00:19:57] Robert From: For someone, it means I need to be able to build things today on top of your API, where I know it is setting me up for success three years down the line, and I am not doing an investment here in the wrong spot. Or it means that when a sales team is negotiating a business plan together for the upcoming years, they know that how we approach commissions, incentives, and targets are fully aligned, not just for selling the right thing for their customer today.
[00:20:25] Robert From: But they know that there will be the right type of flexibility in place if the market conditions change, like they now did with what happened in the Middle East, or when their customer’s customer has a big group that is coming into Europe and suddenly there is something dramatic that changes.
[00:20:47] Robert From: And typically, they would have to wait for six months to get any kind of answer on a refund from a carrier somewhere in Europe. Instead, we will turn around and take care of that issue right away, and they just know it will be managed more quickly. So I think the execution of this will, of course, be context dependent, but the mindset has to come from almost like the values or the mission of the structure of the company and how we view the world.
[00:21:15] Steve MacDonald: And just to be clear, I clearly understand a customer, their ticket, the emotional connection there. As B2B marketers and sellers that are on this podcast, from CROs to CMOs to CEOs, we live in the world of B2B mostly. Those saying, selling peace of mind, selling certainty, those softer metrics, are they less important? Are they equally as important in that mode?
[00:21:47] Robert From: I think they are just as important. They just take a slightly different shape. Of course, at the end of the day, we all have our fiscal responsibility when we are buying, when we are selling, and so on. This is all fine.
[00:21:57] Robert From: But let me take an example of someone who owns a business line inside of a large online travel agency. For them, peace of mind means that I do not need to be called into a boardroom meeting six months from now and get screamed at, or potentially fired or reprimanded, for having made and advocated for choices that backfired.
[00:22:22] Robert From: That is where we painted ourselves into a corner with a technology choice that did not make sense. And for some people, it is about, am I going to get that next promotion? What is going to happen with my career? We are all, again, going back to this idea of empathy and human beings.
[00:22:37] Robert From: So the way we make choices, the way we think about this, I am sure we are all professionals, like you said, in those roles. And we make choices with the best intentions of the companies that we represent in mind. But when you can shape your offer, shape the partnership, so that it also considers those uncertainties and that doubt in a changing world, that is where you elevate from a transactional partner to something that is much more of a true partnership.
[00:22:58] Robert From: And again, going back to the Rail Europe example, we had partners in the room we have been working with for a decade. We have partners that we have worked with for decades and decades. And I think we get so enamored with fast growth and what company hit a billion in revenue in the shortest period of time.
[00:23:13] Robert From: And it is good. But I think there is something around this idea that something that you can build up super fast can also disappear and go away just as quickly. So I think not getting distracted by the pace of change around us is not super easy to do, but I think this is what will set up the next phase of successful companies for the ones who will struggle going into 2027 and onwards.
[00:23:51] Steve MacDonald: Well, you know, what I love is the spotlight that you put on something most of us have probably heard. And if we have not, then we need to pay attention to the fact that in the world of B2B buying, more than half the decision making is emotional.
[00:24:12] Steve MacDonald: Like all the stuff you just said there. Am I going to limit myself and my career? Am I going to get in trouble? Like this big acquisition to my tech stack or whatever the purchase is that I am making impacts the ability for my company to be successful, right?
[00:24:32] Steve MacDonald: And I do not want to make the wrong decision. When you started talking about how trust compounds at the beginning, I think we have to put those two together, right? Trust, there is the intangible.
[00:24:32] Steve MacDonald: I am a two time SaaS founder. I know the mentality of, holy crap, nobody else built anything like this. As soon as they just understand what we do, the floodgates are going to open, right? And it just does not work that way.
[00:25:04] Steve MacDonald: In fact, those one hundred interviews where I asked what are your top challenges to creating long term sustainable growth, not one even came close to talking about the product, not one.
[00:25:04] Steve MacDonald: Now, it does not mean for all the CPOs out there that we do not have to have a great product. I mean it has got to be more than table stakes. We have to be able to dazzle. We have to be able to wow on the product side.
[00:25:25] Steve MacDonald: But getting on that day one short list is not about the product. We have to be trusted that we serve the category that they are looking at. But we have got to be known and trusted first, right? And then we are going to dig in.
[00:25:25] Steve MacDonald: It blew me away. Not one of one hundred C-suite executives said anything about product. And then what else? Not one of the challenges were external. They were one hundred percent internal.
[00:25:47] Robert From: That is interesting. But it kind of goes back to what we talked about a bit earlier, which is that delivering maximal value to the customer, which again gives you the right to capture value as well, cannot happen if you do not have your orchestra playing the same tune.
[00:25:59] Robert From: So figuring out what that tune or what that song needs to be, I can really empathize with why your guests, or the people interviewed, would focus on that as a major topic to solve.
[00:26:15] Robert From: What I would also challenge is I think we are being a bit too literal about what product means. Because to me, yes, of course the product is a technology. It is a piece of code that we ship, or it is an experience or whatnot.
[00:26:33] Robert From: But I think it is just as much about how that product makes you feel. How integrating and partnering with this company looks like, what it feels like, how it gives you energy, how it helps you go back to your own organization and build better things and make better choices.
[00:26:52] Robert From: Because in so many of these cases, it is this constant trade off of where do we put our resources. We all battle with this, right? And if you think about your product not just as a piece of software, in this case, or an API, but if you think about this as the overall customer experience or customer journey and you try to design it around this,
[00:26:52] Robert From: I think that is where you start again. You can go back to compounding trust or we can come back to building a truly valuable and meaningful relationship instead of being a vendor.
[00:27:21] Steve MacDonald: So I have got just one last question for you. And we have covered so much already in this conversation. If there was one thing that you wanted your C-suite peers to take away from our conversation, like the most important thing, like remember anything, remember this, what would that be?
[00:27:42] Robert From: I would say it is a combination of two things. I have been, for the past 20 years, looking to build growth in different contexts like we discussed, and never has there been more flashing lights around us because of the technological change and what is happening.
[00:28:00] Robert From: And again, we need to understand that deeply. It is super important. But to me, the unintended consequence of all the technologies is that we tend to forget about the humanity. And here the point is going back to empathy as a superpower. It is something that we need to lean into much, much more.
[00:28:20] Robert From: And because that empathy unlocks, I think the only true competitive advantage that any company can have, and that is being able to learn faster than your competition about what your customer needs. If you can develop that skill, if you can develop that practice, if you can develop that attitude, all the other things will be so much easier and work so much better.
[00:28:46] Steve MacDonald: What a great way to end this. I wish we had another couple of hours. But the mission behind this podcast is to bring unique insights, unique perspectives, and years of experience. We have all been in different industries and different situations. We have been kicked to the curb.
[00:29:04] Steve MacDonald: We have had massive successes and we have learned from it. And if we can all just share, then that is the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were a phenomenal part of that rising tide today. So I just wanted to say, Robert, thank you for coming on the podcast.
[00:29:21] Robert From: Thanks a lot, Steve. It was great being able to spend some time with you today.