Episode #343:
Tim Farrel, Chief Sales Officer at Soleo, explains why customer obsession is the operating logic behind sustainable revenue growth. He shares how companies can replace heroic wins with repeatable systems, build trust before buyers are ready, and align teams around customer needs. Tim also explores how AI can reveal intent within customer conversations. The human relationship remains essential to every outcome.
“The revenue problems are not always just a sales problem. We need to be listening to the customer to bring everything we have planned and visioned down into execution.” – Tim Farrel
Tim Farrel shares a practical view of growth that moves beyond sales targets and isolated wins. He explains how leaders can create repeatable systems, earn executive trust, use customer conversations to uncover intent, and help every team act on what buyers truly need. The conversation shows why human relationships remain the foundation of scalable revenue, even as AI expands access to data and insight.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:10] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, when I say we’ve got a special guest, I am going to introduce Tim Farrel here. Now, Tim, you are not only a multiple-time CEO, CSO, CRO, and CGO. It’s like you’ve got a doctorate in being an executive in a company, dealing with boards, and structuring growth and success for companies in the B2B space.
[00:00:36] Steve MacDonald: What you’ve learned out of all of that, you call yourself not only a strategist and a sales guy, but very much an operator. And what I loved is you connected strategy in our previous conversation to execution. Without that, strategy without alignment and execution throughout the teams, high-performance teams create high-performance companies.
[00:01:00] Steve MacDonald: We all know that. I love the way you make that connection, and you’ve been in the thick of it. You’re constantly speaking at conferences. We’re going to tap into some of that wealth of knowledge today. But I’d love to have you expand a little bit more on your background before we get started, because the topic today is the revenue logic of customer obsession and tying those things together. But I’d love to hear a little bit more about your background first.
[00:01:24] Tim Farrel: Great. Well, Steve, thank you again for having me. I really am grateful for the opportunity to chat today. I guess I would say that I’ve spent most of my career in growth-stage-type companies where something needed to change. I’m coming into a business that might be a closely held family business or a heavily investor-based business, where you have a couple of people making some big decisions. I pretty quickly found myself working from a sales position, whether I’d be in sales or business development, and I found myself kind of migrating into operations, technology, finance, and all those kinds of things, because the problems, in my mind, the revenue problems, aren’t always just a sales problem.
[00:01:55] Tim Farrel: As much of a process guy as I am, I liked taking something that might depend on an individual person, a relationship, or a couple of big wins within a company, and accelerating how quickly we can learn from those things. You know, I think that the most important thing, ultimately, is that the revenue problems aren’t just sales problems; we need to be listening to the customer to effectuate everything that we’ve planned, everything we’ve envisioned. We need to bring that vision down into execution.
[00:02:21] Steve MacDonald: Well, as we start off here, I just want to underscore one of the last things that you said there about listening to the customer. We all know that the customer’s our North Star, right? But in actuality, less than 3% of companies are customer obsessed, and that was a whole Forrester study that was done a couple of years ago. But they tied customer obsession to 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% better retention of existing clients and reducing churn. When you talk about this and connecting, it’s not just sales that impacts revenue; it’s the culture of the entire company, and customer obsession is a big part of that.
[00:03:03] Steve MacDonald: When we first started talking, you said, [00:03:05] “Steve, one of the biggest things is creating repeatable processes that allow you to scale.” And in a world and an environment where we’re ripping up playbooks and rethinking things all the time, I just wanted to get your perspective on why you started out with that as one of the most important things we wanted to talk about.
[00:03:24] Tim Farrel: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think that a lot of times companies can confuse individual success with scalable success, and I’ll give you an example. What I see a lot of times is a company that’s growing through what I like to call heroics instead of systems. There’s some big event that happened, or you have a founder that lands a really large key customer, or you have a salesperson that knows everyone in the business, they’re well-connected, or whatever the case might be.
[00:03:45] Tim Farrel: What you also have, what you can end up with sometimes, is one customer that represents a disproportionate amount of revenue. And so all those things can produce a certain amount of growth, but they don’t necessarily produce a company that can scale. And so when I talk about repeatable processes, I mean, can somebody else execute this process? Can we measure it? Can we predict it? Can we improve it with AI? Can it survive when one person leaves, and another person comes in? That’s what I mean about repeatable processes. But the goal is to move from who can save the quarter to what processes or systems we can reliably put together to produce the next best outcome in our quarter.
[00:04:17] Tim Farrel: If your growth depends on heroes, I’ve always said that you don’t have a growth engine, you have a hero dependency. I think it’s important to get beyond that. In my current role at Soleo, a big part of my focus has been expanding from a relatively concentrated customer base into a broader enterprise marketplace. Winning those relationships is a challenging step, but it’s only the first. You have to win the relationship. But the harder question actually becomes: can you actually support them and scale them? I think the answer many times is no. We’ll get into that as we move down. It’s just having the awareness that if you build something around one or two big companies, you get so defined by their own process that you begin to lose your own. How do you take that process that’s made you successful with that one business or a couple of businesses, and how do you scale it among everyone to get the same result ultimately?
[00:05:03] Steve MacDonald: I want to take a diversion here for a second, because you said something really important. As we scale, we’re constantly redefining our ideal customer profile. Most companies want to move up, bigger, larger fish. But getting executive access is one of the hardest things. As you look to scale and grow the kind of clients that you’re attracting, how do you tie everything that you’ve been talking about here, from customer obsession to the value you create, your entire go-to-market strategy? It’s harder and harder to get executive access these days.
[00:05:39] Steve MacDonald: If there’s just a way that you could share, to scale means access, right? You can’t scale without access, and access is about establishing relationships so that when the day one shortlist closes, you’re not only known and trusted, but you’re one of the ones that gets on that list. So how do you think about that in cracking that code?
[00:05:59] Tim Farrel: Yeah, I think you just said it. I think it has everything to do with trust. When I come into a company having a conversation with a customer, it’s really about taking my products and my services out of the equation for a moment and saying, “Tell me what it literally is. What are your roadblocks? What are your barriers?” To create that trust level, you really need to have that customer really knowing and believing and trusting that you actually care about what they’re doing. I’ve had so many great conversations. I think it’s just important that you always remember that those relationships are the basis. None of my customers care whether I hit my sales targets.
[00:06:29] Tim Farrel: They don’t care how much money I make. They don’t care that our company could be the best company in the world. It doesn’t matter. What they care about is what’s happening with their customers and what’s happening in their own teams, and how do I affect that? And so I think, for me, it’s just always been about that trust factor, and you build that through relationships. But you really just build it through being true to the customer, right? Instead of trying to shove something down their throat, I’ve never liked to be sold to. That’s always been something that’s really annoyed me. I hate pushy people. My level of trust, and my ability to get into these folks, has always depended on me just saying, “Hey, let’s have an honest conversation about something.”
[00:06:59] Tim Farrel: You know, not, “Hey, I have XYZ product that I can, [00:07:05] we can do better than so-and-so,” but, “Tell me exactly where you’re hurting and why, and let me look and see what we have and let’s see if there’s something we can help you with.” And if there’s not, I’m either going to say, “Best of luck,” or I’m going to say, “Hey, we can’t help you, but somebody else can.” Talk to this person I know in the industry.” And so I think it’s just always being that kind of true consultant where, at the end of the day, they don’t walk away feeling like they’ve been sold to. They walk away feeling like they just got, like, they can’t wait to get you into the organization, right?
[00:07:24] Tim Farrel: Because you’ve just built something for them that’s given them the confidence to go to their boss and say, “Hey, this is how we could do this thing. I know this person, I trust this industry, I trust this person, and they have a really good suggestion. I think we should listen to it.” And so I think that’s the basis for what I do, and relative to how did I get into these places, that’s the secret sauce for every salesperson out there, right? As I’ve been doing this for too long, thirty-seven to thirty-eight years, what I’ve recognized is that having a normal conversation with someone will get you a lot further than sending out a million emails.
[00:07:50] Tim Farrel: Talk to people, talk to their customers. Talk to some of the challenges that their own customers have, and just learn about their business. Probably the biggest benefit of what I’ve gotten to do over the years is becoming not an expert, but a very trusted business source within their own community of business and their industry. As I deepen my relationship, I learn what makes them tick, and I also learn about their market. So all these things, I become an expert, and then they’re allowed to say, “I trust Tim, I trust the company, I trust this idea. Let’s move forward.” And so, for me, that’s been the key to success at that point.
[00:08:19] Steve MacDonald: So here’s an interesting question, because we started out with repeatable, scalable processes. Building trust the way that you do it, you have an entire sales team that needs to be doing that as well. You have a marketing team, you have a customer success team that has to have that same philosophy, the same culture, whatever you call it.
[00:08:39] Steve MacDonald: One of the things that we talked about was alignment, that these teams are all in alignment that carry through all the way to execution. And so I’m just wondering, how do you take that philosophy that you have and make it cultural, align everyone around it? Just to underscore how important this is, when new C-suite executives come onto this podcast, I always ask them, “What are your two greatest challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth?”
[00:09:07] Steve MacDonald: Number one, by far, is internal alignment. Studies have shown that highly aligned teams achieve two and a half times the revenue growth of non-aligned teams. So this, back to scalable processes that create success and revenue, alignment is really important. So how do you align the company around the philosophy you just extolled there? Well, I’ve had a lot of practice, I can tell you that, because this is something that I run into in most every company that I’ve been a part of on leadership teams. And so, you know, I think the most important point for me, I guess, to get across is that alignment precedes process. And so you can have all these great processes, but without alignment, they mean nothing.
[00:09:46] Tim Farrel: You can build the greatest processes in the world around the wrong strategy. And I’ve worked with some really incredible visionary CEOs, and I actually love, I love that because I’ve been one myself. I’m an entrepreneur myself, and so I love to see the vision. But ultimately, somebody has to go and translate that.
[00:10:00] Tim Farrel: Somebody has to see what sales, operations, technology, and finance are actually going to do on Monday so that we can make sure we’re keeping that vision. So that’s why I constantly kind of pressure-test what I’m doing against the CEO’s vision and, most importantly, what the market is telling us. Typically, people in the sales role are the people who are on the ground hearing the conversations, hearing the complaints from the customers or from their customers.
[00:10:21] Tim Farrel: It just gives you a little bit of a better insight to say, “How do I make sure that this CEO is aligned with what’s really happening on the ground?” And that can create conflict a lot of times, right? Because now you’re taking this visionary, this person that has founded this business or whatever the case might be, and you’re just trying to help nudge them in a different direction, and that can be a challenge. But ultimately, you always have to be aligned. If you’re not, you’re dead. I’ve written many LinkedIn articles and pieces on this: you can have the best plan, you can have the best company. If sales, operations, and leadership aren’t aligned, you’re dead. There’s just no way around it. And I don’t mind disagreements.
[00:10:51] Tim Farrel: You don’t have to have consensus on everything. I think a healthy disagreement can be super valuable. But I want to disagree at the leadership table because debate makes our strategy better, but it also makes the decisions we make better. Most importantly, once the decision is made and agreed upon, we have to keep that alignment among all of us, because what ends up happening is you might have four, five, or six leaders executing on the same vision in their own little version of it. That’s where the alignment comes back. So it’s just that constant check-in with, “Hey, how are we doing?” And, you know, we all have too many meetings on our schedules and that kind of thing, but it’s just that one time where you say, “Where are we compared to what we discussed? And what’s changed?” Because what we discussed may have changed.
[00:11:26] Tim Farrel: The market may have changed. We’re experiencing a lot of market shift in the insurance industry right now, and everyone’s scrambling. But ultimately, we’ve all been there, done this before, right? We just need to react to the customer. We need to listen to what they’re telling us, and we need to make sure that we’re aligned with what their goals are. If we do that, we’ll be successful.
[00:11:41] Steve MacDonald: Sounds easier than it is, right? Because.
[00:11:44] Tim Farrel: It is. Correct.
[00:11:45] Steve MacDonald: One of the things that’s happening is that we are ripping up playbooks every day, right? The market’s changing, the carpet’s being pulled out from underneath our feet. Expectations are dramatically changing. Clients want things faster, higher quality, more value. They figure because AI is here, you need fewer people, it’ll cost me less money, you’ll do it faster, and it’ll be higher quality. All of these things are constantly shifting. So how do you keep alignment? How do you keep on track when that’s the environment that we’re working in?
[00:12:22] Tim Farrel: Well, I guess when we talk about kind of repeatable processes and alignment with those processes, that repeatable doesn’t necessarily mean rigid. It doesn’t mean changing. We used to always think of process as almost like a Bible or a manual. We have to build it, we document it, we train everybody exactly on it, and then we execute. The reality is the market doesn’t work that way anymore. Companies don’t work that way anymore. And so today I think more about process like a software program. It has this great architecture, this great foundation, but the needs of the users are constantly changing, so you’re making these updates, you’re moving with the market, but you remain on this solid foundation, which is your company or your process or your vision.
[00:12:55] Tim Farrel: You’re always making those little tweaks to make sure that everybody’s doing the right thing at the right time. And so the fundamentals stay constant. You understand the customer, you know, you define the objective, you measure the outcome, but the tactics that you get there might be a little bit different every week. I think that’s really true right now with AI because buying behavior, this digital transformation we’re seeing, is, you can have all the processes in the world, but if you’re going in the wrong direction, AI is only going to get you there faster. You’re only going to get to the wrong North Star faster than the South Star. So repeatable doesn’t mean unchangeable, it just means to build discipline into the process, and then, most importantly, build the learning into the system.
[00:13:29] Steve MacDonald: So you mentioned AI there, right? And you’ve mentioned previously customers, North Star, focus on customers, what they truly need, not what our KPI dashboards are saying, and having that be our truth and decision-making solely, but stay focused on them. What are the inputs that you need in terms of constantly refining, constantly understanding what the market’s doing, what our customers are doing, absolutely, our innovations and our own go-to-market strategy, our product roadmap, our partners that are out, our channel strategy. Like, there’s an ecosystem that we’re living in, and AI has the potential to take inputs from all of that and help us.
[00:14:17] Steve MacDonald: How important is understanding those inputs, the data that’s coming our way, and properly aligning. Like, I had somebody on the podcast say, “Yeah, you’ve got to onboard your LLM, right?” Just like you would an AE. A sales AE is going to get up to speed quicker. They’re going to attain quota much faster if they’re onboarded correctly.
[00:14:36] Steve MacDonald: You can’t just say because you got Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever it is, that it’s just going to know what to do and help everybody in their workflows that they’re doing on the LLMs every day. So how do you think about taking all of this data, all of this knowledge, in informing these processes that you’ve been talking about?
[00:14:59] Tim Farrel: I think if I had to put it in one word, I would say intent. I would say customer intent. What I mean by that is all the metrics that we’ve been measuring in all of our businesses, including mine. I’m in the performance marketing space; they’re all just KPIs we’ve had from day one. What’s the average call length? What’s the conversion rate? All the things we talk about in sales and customer acquisition. But what really matters is, what was the customer’s intent? So, we’ve become really good at measuring all those things, but now we have to go another level deeper. And so, in our world, we listen to phone calls.
[00:15:25] Tim Farrel: In our world, we’re generating consumer-initiated inbound phone calls to insurance carriers. So, we have an interested customer on the line. Instead of saying, “Hey, how long did the call last?” Or, “Did it meet these KPI metrics? Did it meet the conversion?” You could have the perfect KPI conversion and a lousy customer experience. Ultimately, it’s just coming back to, how do we analyze all this data, and then how do we understand what people are actually trying to do? In our world, we actually can listen to these phone calls. We can look at the transcriptions with personal information redacted, and we can say, “What are the buying behaviors of these consumers?”
[00:15:55] Tim Farrel: What was their intent to begin with? Did we engage them properly? Did we qualify them? Was it the price? Were they distracted, and did they have to get off the phone? Whatever the case may be, we need to start using all the data we now have available, going beyond the initial measurements and looking at intent. Because ultimately, instead of just measuring the front load to say, “Hey, was this a successful sale?”
[00:16:15] Tim Farrel: Why was it a successful sale? Or, most importantly to me, what did we learn from the person that jumped off the phone? What did we learn from the person that walked away? Because I think the learnings there are so much more valuable. I think the consumer that might not have converted for you today can teach you a lot more about someone that did convert. I think that’s always kind of a focus: what have we learned from that conversation? Many companies don’t quite have the abilities to do what we might have to do relative to these conversations, but your customers are still talking. They’re still online. They’re still giving reviews. You have access to all this data. You need to get all that data into one place and really understand what they’re looking for. Because, again, you can have the best product and all those things in the world, but if you’re not hitting the mark with them, then it just doesn’t matter.
[00:16:53] Steve MacDonald: You made a huge distinction here because we’re swimming in data these days. We have more data than we know what to do with, but data is one portion of what, like, a company, this was a McKinsey study, they said that 90% of a company’s data is unstructured data.
[00:17:10] Steve MacDonald: It’s conversational data. It comes from emails and messages, reviews, interviews, and transcripts. So these customer conversations that you’re talking about are gold. They’re absolutely gold. And taking all of that in and making sense of it is what most companies don’t do. In fact, less than 10% of companies train their LLMs on ingesting all that data. Less than 10% do anything more than just upload some documents and index them. So, 90% of companies out there don’t do what you’re doing. As I’m hearing it correctly, you’re saying, not only am I serious about the voice of the customer and being customer-obsessed, but we’ve got to put some actions behind it. We’ve got to connect AI to it.
[00:17:55] Steve MacDonald: We’ve got to ingest all these conversations that we’re having, from the ones we’re proactively creating to the reviews they’re putting up online, and really understand the customer. Is that a good interpretation of what you’re saying?
[00:18:09] Tim Farrel: It is. I think, ultimately, as you said, we’re swimming in data. Years ago, when the internet became a thing, and sadly I remember that, back in the early ’90s, I remember someone telling me that we finally have access to all this information. Now we have things in front of us that we could never work with. The people that are going to be successful are going to be the ones that take that information and turn it into action, that turn it into something that someone wants. AI is almost kind of the 10X version of that now. So now we have all this technology that can accelerate everything, and so we can accelerate the learnings.
[00:18:37] Tim Farrel: But we still can’t accelerate consumer behavior. We find out different things in our own business where the technology might be wanting to shoot us down this path that, on the surface, looks great and everything’s going to be great, but we’re leaving people behind because we’re missing the human conversations along with those. I think you’re right. I think just finding all the data that you have, those customer conversations are an absolute pot of gold, I think, in every conversation. And so, make sure you’re documenting those. I take every single phone call that I ever have with a customer, and I put it into AI afterward because I want to know. I really want to know.
[00:19:06] Tim Farrel: I just had an hour phone call. It’s hard for me to read the transcript and go back through it, but tell me the important points. Those are the kind of things that we can really say, “Hey,” because there are things that you’re going to miss along the way. And so, use every tool at your disposal to get it. But ultimately, you still have to have the human factor involved, and so you need to find out what that person wants. And if you find that out, then you’ve won using your own technology.
[00:19:26] Steve MacDonald: You just did something which was my next question, which was, how do you connect the revenue logic of customer obsession? Because there are things in the business that sometimes are very hard. There are so many variables involved; it’s hard to attribute it directly to revenue growth, and customer obsession is one of those things. And every company says, “We’re customer-obsessed. We’re customer-focused. We’re customer first.” But you’ve talked about many things that you’re doing to actually stand behind that.
[00:19:56] Steve MacDonald: When you’re in front of the board, usually most boards don’t say, “Hey, how are we doing on our customer obsession? How are we doing on our learning from our customers? How are we applying that? How are we innovating? How are we creating ideas? How is that impacting the bottom line?” We just don’t get those kinds of conversations, right? So you’re taking on a role and responsibility here that you weren’t really asked for. And in most B2B companies, there’s not even anybody in charge of the customer. Literally, B2C companies have chief customer officers, chief experience officers. That is the void in the world of B2B, yet all those expectations from B2C have not only transferred over, but they have also transferred over, right?
[00:20:40] Steve MacDonald: The expectations are here. So my takeaway from what you’re saying is, we have to have somebody inside that’s acting as that chief customer officer, bringing that voice forward. So, how do you carve out that role when you’re not being asked to do it because you just know it’s that important?
[00:21:01] Tim Farrel: Well, I think it starts with just working with people on our own team to instill that in them. One thing I’ve really enjoyed about this season of my career is the opportunity to mentor folks who are either coming up in the business or have changed industries and want to come into ours. And so, I think it’s just about, again, trying to make that connection with them. But ultimately, that culture of just listening is so important.
[00:21:23] Tim Farrel: We all get caught up in our day-to-day activities. For me, and again, it’s a big, heavy lift, right? It’s very difficult to walk into any company that has been doing something the same way for X number of years and tries to make a change in culture. That’s probably one of the most challenging things you can do. I’ve always been a cheerleader. I’m not somebody who rules by force or by threat. I’ve always been someone that just likes to develop people. I love people. I love to develop them. And so, how do we translate all that we have at the leadership table or the boardroom table into the people that are literally talking to these folks every day?
[00:21:51] Tim Farrel: The first thing is just being proactive. It’s not about waiting for the customer to call you to tell you that something’s wrong. It’s you already knowing, and it’s you just staying ahead of that curve. That’s probably the number one thing that upsets me most, but it’s also the number one challenge I have and the one I’m working on most: why didn’t we know this?
[00:22:06] Tim Farrel: Well, I talked to them in July. Well, it’s September 1st. That’s a problem. And so, that constant contact is so important because ultimately, the relationship I was talking about, where you have that really deep interpersonal relationship with somebody, that you really understand what’s driving them, you have to be able to carry that through to your team, and they have to be able to carry that through to the customer. Maybe not at the level of speaking to a leader of a business that might buy you more clout or whatever the case may be. What really matters is, what was the connection? What was the human connection, and how did we make that customer feel? You know, Maya Angelou talked about that a long time ago: what was the feeling when we got done with that transaction or that service?
[00:22:42] Tim Farrel: Did we make them feel as if they got a good value out of it? I think that, from my perspective, it’s always just about trying to remember the human factor, to remember that these people are people, that we all have a job to do, we all have numbers we have to hit, but ultimately, we also have our lives. We have things that are going on. We have distractions and that kind of thing. I think, probably going to talk about this at some point, it’s kind of that difference between treating someone like a customer, a vendor, or a partner. So that’s kind of where you start to bridge that gap a little bit and really become that trusted partner, as opposed to somebody that they have to worry about just to keep at bay. They really want your counsel, and so once you cross over into that kind of partnership role as opposed to a vendor role, I think that’s where that trust is, and that’s where all the things we’ve been talking about kind of all collectively add up.
[00:23:26] Steve MacDonald: You know, I’ve talked to a number of CROs that are like, back to what you’re saying here, that partner role is getting access. Nobody wants to give access to a vendor that’s going to pitch them unless they’ve closed the shortlist and they’re just validating exactly what they want to buy. There is a role for that, right? But where we get on the list and where we build trust, they’re not looking for those conversations to come from a vendor trying to pitch. They’re constantly looking for help. So, you have to come in as somebody that is that partner that’s looking after their best interest, and that takes time and that takes effort.
[00:24:04] Steve MacDonald: I’ve had CROs tell me, “You’ve got to be out and talking with them a year in advance,” because by the time the RFP comes out or they make their decision, if you’re not known and trusted at that moment, then, like we said before, you’re out of it. So, that partner role that you’re talking about, how do you talk to your team about the balance of, “I’ve got to close business to make money, but I’ve got to foster business?” I’ve got to foster that relationship, be that trusted partner. What’s the balance there, and how do you train your team on that?
[00:24:38] Tim Farrel: Yeah, great question. So, I think probably my most important point here is that we need to stop asking the customer to adapt to our product. We think we have this great widget, and we have to have the customer, we have to have them have it because we have to meet all of our sales goals. But what did we lose there, right? So, stop asking them to come in and say, “Okay, what you have is perfect for us,” because it rarely is. Someone likes their steak a certain way. Somebody likes different seasonings. Whatever the case might be, the base remains the same, but how are you going to make it fit to them?
[00:25:04] Tim Farrel: I’ve never really viewed sales as trying to convince somebody of something. We talked about this a little bit earlier. My job is to try and understand what you’re trying to accomplish and determine whether we can actually help you. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that these organizations make sometimes is, “Here’s what we built.” How can we get you to use it? And the better question might be, “What did you actually need? What are we missing?” In enterprise sales, I think your job is to remove some of that friction that we always feel with a kind of vendor-customer relationship. You don’t want to create another problem for them.
[00:25:31] Tim Farrel: You want to create a true partnership. And I think that we sometimes complain internally within our own business. We say, “Why hasn’t the customer responded to me? I’ve sent them three emails in the last 10 days. They’re not getting back to me. They promised to call me a week ago. Why haven’t they signed the contract?” Why haven’t we launched our program yet? Those are all our problems. They have a company and a business to run. So instead of beating ourselves up asking why they aren’t answering, we just need to recognize that our responsibility is to make what we’re doing so important to them that we can move ourselves up the priority list.
[00:25:58] Tim Farrel: The way you do that is by, again, going back and building that basis of the conversation to build all this trust, because you truly know what they want. If they feel like you’re the solution or at least part of the solution, they will do everything in their power, because I’ve done the same with my own businesses, to get you in and get you working. They want you. They want a solution, and they also want to look like a hero. So, if you come in and make them look bad, that’s not a great start. If your solution isn’t quite what you said it was, it met your needs but not the customer’s needs, then you’re never going to get another customer. I will tell you that it’s very rare for me anymore to have to actually cold call anybody because I’ve connected with so many wonderful people in the business, but your reputation follows you everywhere.
[00:26:32] Tim Farrel: You’re always going to get that kind of label on you, whether you’re the cheesy salesperson that just wants to shove something down your throat for a buck, or if you’re somebody that truly cares about the customer and their business. That’s an easy thing for me because that’s just my personality. It’s very challenging for some people, right? So, you just need to be mindful of that and just making sure that you’re always the one moving yourself up that list for them. You’re not complaining or sending them emails saying, “Why? Why not? Why didn’t this happen?” Ask yourself that question, and you have not made yourself a high enough priority for them to return your call or sign your contract. The moment you start solving their problem instead of pursuing your own goals is, in my opinion, the moment you move from a vendor to a partner.
[00:27:12] Steve MacDonald: You just articulated the solution to the problem of, so these CROs are telling me it’s hard to get the access, and then the time between the first call and the next call is longer and longer, and the time you have on those calls is shorter and shorter, unless you come at it as a partner.The way that you just articulated it, because then they want the call and they want to learn more, and they’re not limiting it, right?
[00:27:30] Steve MacDonald: I have to say, our poor human brains can only remember about two or three things at a time, and so we’ve covered so much here. I wanted to give you the opportunity that, for all the C-suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast, if there was one thing that you wanted them to remember, to take away, could be something you’ve already talked about, something brand new. One thing you’d want them to take away from our call today, what would that be?
[00:28:03] Tim Farrel: I think it would be going back to the word trust. We’ve talked about that in a couple different ways, but we have access to more data, more automation, more technology than we’ve ever had available to us. But that also means that trust becomes more valuable, not less. Customers need to trust how we’re using their data. Partners need to trust the opportunities that we’re sending them. Employees need to trust leadership. Leadership has to trust that the data driving their decisions is accurate. And so, technology, as it becomes commoditized, trust actually becomes a bigger competitive advantage that a company can build.
[00:28:30] Tim Farrel: The more artificial intelligence that we introduce into a business, the more valuable human trust becomes. I think that’s something I really focus on: we have all these ways to accelerate our learnings now and accelerate the consumption of data, but that human element, it has to be that trust that comes from the beginning all the way through the transaction, and that becomes the legacy of you, your customer, and your product, and that’s what people talk about. That’s what grows your business, and that’s how to move forward.
[00:28:58] Steve MacDonald: I’ve got to tell you, the mission of this podcast is to bring C-suite executive insights and perspectives and experiences to bear on how do we create repeatable, growing, successful companies. And that if we all bring all that together and we share it amongst each other, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. You were an incredible part of that rising tide today. So, Tim, thank you. I just wanted to say thanks for coming on today.
[00:29:22] Tim Farrel: Oh, it’s been a real pleasure. I really appreciate the conversation, and I look forward to it. I’ve had a chance to listen to many of your podcasts. I’m looking forward to continuing the journey with you, and again, just grateful for the opportunity.