Episode #339:

Michael Gumiela, Chief Revenue Officer at Rabine, explains why customer obsession is a revenue strategy, not simply a service mindset. He shares how trust, honest conversations, and operational expertise create lasting customer relationships. Michael also outlines how AI can strengthen preparation while sales leaders balance renewals, expansion, and new business.

“Without the customer, the revenue doesn’t happen. The obsession part comes from learning your customer and what truly will help them, and then the revenue comes after that.” – Michael Gumiela

Michael explains why revenue leaders must earn trust long before a buying decision or RFP. He shares practical ways to help customers solve problems, use AI to improve preparation, and organize sales teams around both expansion and new business. The conversation offers a clear model for making customer understanding a measurable driver of lasting growth.

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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. And today, we’ve got a really interesting guest, Mike Gumiela. Now, Mike, you’re the chief revenue officer at Rabine, and I’m going to have you introduce what you’re doing there in the company in just a minute. But what was really interesting is, we all know and we all say that we’re in a relationship-based business. Like, B2B selling is all about relationships. You took it to a whole new level in our conversation. I think you even used the word evangelist in there. And that takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of effort. That’s not at all pitching products or services. That’s understanding your customers, their world, and earning their trust.

[00:00:55] Steve MacDonald: There’s so much that comes behind that, and that’s what we’re going to unpack today. And a huge part of our conversation was around customers, understanding the customers, being obsessed with customers, and so we’re going to be talking about the revenue logic of customer obsession today. I’d love to just have you maybe explain a little bit more about your background before we get started.

[00:01:17] Michael Gumiela: Sure. I’ve been in the service industry for a very long time. All I’ve sold are interior services, exterior services, and the commercial and industrial platform. I was very lucky coming up. I had great leaders and mentors who started early building relationships. Do people trust you? Do you do the right things that make people feel good about calling you for advice? Very rarely do salespeople get asked for advice, right? And so that’s one of the things that really stuck with me. I’ve brought that with me through my career as I’ve built these sales platforms from the ground up, which is what we’re doing here at Rabine.

[00:01:54] Michael Gumiela: Rabine’s a 40-plus-year-old family-owned and operated business, and admittedly, our founder came in and said, “Mike, you got to come in here. We’ve got to make more. We’re growing so fast. You’ve got to make us scalable, and we’ve got all these great customers. We need to do more with them.” So that’s what I’m in the middle of doing right now, and it’s incredibly exciting, and it’s a fantastic company to work for.

[00:02:17] Steve MacDonald: You know, what you just focused on there was such an important part of the revenue logic of customer obsession. Over 70 percent of annual revenue in a B2B business is supposed to be coming from, and is actually, like Forrester documented it, coming from existing customers. But most organizations, we spend 95 percent of our time chasing new logos, right.

[00:02:41] Steve MacDonald: I love that you just opened up with that. And customer obsession, there’s a reason why the word customer is in there. And so I’d like to hear a little bit more about when I say the revenue logic of customer obsession, what does that even mean to you?

[00:03:01] Michael Gumiela: What it means to me is, these are the folks that make [00:03:05] revenue go. Without the customer, the revenue doesn’t happen, and I know that’s super, super simple to say, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s a cop-out answer.” You know, of course, customers get to revenue. But we have to obsess over our customers, and they have to feel that because we’ve got to open them up to really show them everything we can do for them to expand our footprint and take care of things for the customer. So when I’m obsessing over one of my customers, I want to know how I can make their life easier in every single site, every single state, every single country across the world. That’s really important to me, and I think that’s where the obsession part comes from: learning your customer and what truly will help them, and then the revenue comes after that. It does, if you’re true to your word and you deliver on what you say.

[00:04:02] Steve MacDonald: You know, so just to underscore what you’re saying here, the revenue will come. In the study that was done a couple of years ago by Forrester, their customer obsession study, they literally proved that. That truly customer-obsessed organizations have 41 percent faster revenue growth, 49 percent faster profit growth. They have 51 percent better client retention. They found out only 3 percent of companies are customer-obsessed. That stat blew me away because we all say we’re customer-first; we all say we’re customer-obsessed. But it’s really putting the footprints down on the pavement and saying, “No, I’m going to walk that walk. I’m actually going to live that.”

[00:04:47] Steve MacDonald: And one of the things that you said in your opener, I wanted to come back to, so I’ve been remembering it so I don’t forget to ask. Your goal is to have customers actually call you for advice. That’s an incredible goal to have, right? And every salesperson would just salivate and be like, “Yeah, my customers call me all the time for advice.” How does that shape how you approach customer relationships?

[00:05:11] Michael Gumiela: I hate to say this, right, because the board and the founder don’t want to hear that. Sometimes they do not want to hear that this takes time. But you can’t establish a relationship and establish trust in two weeks or in one project. You have to invest and obsess over that customer, and you’ve got to know what they’re thinking inside and out, and you have to understand their company, and you’ve got to have frank and honest conversations. You know, what keeps you up at night. What’s the hardest part of your job? Who’s your favorite vendor in your career, and why were they your favorite vendor?

[00:05:45] Michael Gumiela: When you get those conversations going, and then you do get a chance to throw out a potential offering like, “Hey, you know, we’ve got some really good engineers here. Let me send one of my engineers out,” or, “Let me come out and take a look.” And you point out things, and you educate, and you say, “Oh, here’s the pro to this, here’s the con. But boy, oh boy, based on what you’re telling me, this looks like the right way to go.” And I think that’s how you really peel the banana with those customers: you don’t seem pushy, right. I’m not just trying to get in there. I want them to genuinely feel, Steve, like they can call me and say, “Mike, I’m having a problem with this.”

[00:06:26] Michael Gumiela: Just recently, I had someone call me. Now, we do all exterior services, but we don’t weld, right? So I had a customer who sends a lot of business our way, and this customer reached out and said, “We’re in the middle of a transaction, and we’ve got this issue, and I need a welder to come out. What can you do?” Why would she call me, right? We do paving, roofing, and mechanical services. It’s because she knew that I’d be able to send her somewhere, and I would bust my butt. She was obviously in a place that she couldn’t get the answer she needed. So while I was on the phone with her, you pull up your trusty AI machine, and you look in your CRM real quick, and I’ve got two phone numbers for her, with really good notes that these are really good, reputable companies. So that’s the reward. But I had to put in a lot of time with this specific customer. I think the first time I met with this specific customer was last September, right after Labor Day.

[00:07:21] Michael Gumiela: It’s a slow burn, but I know what makes her tick. I know what gives her anxiety, and she’s not afraid to be brutally honest with me because I can take it. I want my customers to be honest with me because if we screw up or we’re too slow on something, I can’t fix it unless I know. A lot of customers, if they don’t trust you, they won’t even tell you what you did wrong. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that, but losing a contract and not knowing what you did wrong, that’s a horrible feeling, and that means that customer never trusted you to begin with.

[00:07:52] Steve MacDonald: That’s a really good way to look. I’ve never really thought about it that way, right. So.

[00:07:57] Michael Gumiela: Oh, we’ve all, you know, we’ve all lost it. You’ve lost that deal before where you’re like, “How the heck did we lose that?” You think about it, and you do a postmortem on it, and you’re like, “I never really knew those people.”

[00:08:09] Steve MacDonald: The word trust is so used, right. It’s kind of like the word value. But the way that you’re talking about it here is fundamental to the business and how you operate and how you create relationships. How do you break down trust and make it something that we can understand here? That’s like, it’s leverage; it’s tied to decision-making. You can’t build trust at the last minute when the RFP goes out. How do you make it tangible for us?

[00:08:40] Michael Gumiela: Sure. It’s the long play, right. It’s mutual agreement to communicate openly. Nothing is off the table. If you don’t like something I’ve done, or if something you’ve given me doesn’t make sense, have the courage to be truthful and say, “I don’t know what this scope means,” or someone comes back to me and says, “I don’t know what that service is.” You work together, you’re truthful with each other, and you’ll probably remember this, Steve, like the worst thing as a salesperson to get called, like back in the ’80s, when it was like, “Oh, you’re a used car salesman,” right. Big slander on the used car salesman profession, but that was like a hurtful comment because what did those guys, you know, what was it about? I’m going to tell you whatever I can to get you in this used car and get you off this lot. It’s the complete opposite, and that’s how I would break it down.

[00:09:35] Michael Gumiela: Having a legitimate relationship where you feel comfortable enough to tell someone the truth, if something they bring to you just doesn’t make sense to you or just doesn’t feel right, ask for clarification. Make sure that there’s a mutual understanding that if I say something, Steve, you can tell me, “Mike, I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about.” That’s as easy. It’s the long play. That doesn’t happen two hours before the RFP is due. That happens well ahead of time, and you have to be strategic, right? If you don’t have strategic planning and you don’t know who your targets are, you have no chance to do that before an RFP, or you’re not even going to get invited to the RFP.

[00:10:14] Steve MacDonald: Is this more important or less important? Because we all know the macro economy and the industry that we’re working in. In B2B, people are waiting longer and longer to want to talk to a salesperson. They’re making more and more of their decisions. I can find out more and more about Rabine online through a ChatGPT or a Claude review than I ever have before. So, is this less important, more important, and why either way?

[00:10:42] Michael Gumiela: I’m going to say it’s hands down way more important than it ever has been before, because everybody is so overwhelmed by the amount of information you can get in such a short period of time that you start to doubt, “Is this right?” Gosh, this happens to us in our executive leadership team meetings. We’re like, “Hey, I saw this. Is that right?” Or, and the big joke around my house is, “Is that AI?” You know, you see a picture, you see a new movie trailer or something, and it’s immediately, “Is that AI?”

[00:11:14] Michael Gumiela: I think there’s more mistrust, if that’s a word, out there right now, and that’s why I say hands down trust is important. I’m not a machine. I’m not Claude. I’m not ChatGPT. I can give you solid examples from my actions that build trust with you. So, I really do think it is more and more important. And, you know, going back to the trust thing, someone can go online, and they can say, “What does it cost to do this amount of paving?” The AI machine might give you a super small project or a super large project in some crazy area that’s not even in our ballpark, and it might give you just a nuts number, and you have that expectation as a customer, “My number should be this.”

[00:12:02] Michael Gumiela: I’ve got to make sure that they can come to me and say, “Hey, Mike, I saw this on chat,” or, “I saw this on Claude, and it says that we should be at so-and-so dollars per square foot of this many inches of asphalt.” I’ll say, “Oh, that’s a tough one.” And then I’ll show them, “Hey, when we did your project here two years ago, or when we did your project last month, this is where we were, and we’ll talk about what some of those differences are.” So, the distrust or the mistrust is out there because there’s so much information, and I don’t even know if half that information that we see through AI, I don’t know if it’s true or not. I don’t know if that’s how you feel, but you can easily get overwhelmed.

[00:12:43] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what’s interesting about all this is that you mentioned there’s so much information out there. There’s got to be a way that we do trust the decisions we’re actually making. The decisions that your clientele are making, they’re taking a huge risk, right? They spend X amount of dollars and repave an entire parking lot or their customer facilities. And if they’ve got to redo it again next year because they made the wrong decision, that’s their job on the line, right? So, this is building this trust. B2B decisions are more emotional than rational.

[00:13:27] Steve MacDonald: Now, there’s tire-kicking. There are definitely rational components, too, but plenty of studies show otherwise. Do you feel that? How much of the emotional element is involved in the sale in your business, and that you’re seeing? I guess that’s the question I’m coming back to.

[00:13:42] Michael Gumiela: We have that question as a sales team all the time, right? I like to start when we hire sales reps, and we just hired two great sales reps that interned with us last year, and they’re young and aggressive. And one of the first things when we came in and did sales training with them and introduced them was, I always say, “People buy from people they like.” I truly do believe that. I have never bought anything from a salesperson that rubbed me the wrong way or that I just didn’t feel good about. Now, I will say, we’re in the day and age right now where price does matter, right? Price matters. So, I think it’s important, and I think people do buy emotionally when they really do see value and pricing is closer.

[00:14:28] Michael Gumiela: It’s not always a race to the bottom, right? But if you can get within, if you’re right there and you’re not talking about the difference between third base and right field, right? If you’re just talking about maybe third base to second base, then that’s where emotion comes in. It’s like, “Mike doesn’t let me down.” As you said, Steve, if we screw up a half-million-square-foot parking lot, someone’s going to, most likely, we’re going to fix it, but someone’s not going to have a job, right? And it’s most likely going to be the person that selected us. That’s where the emotion comes in. It’s like, “Rabine shows up, Rabine delivers a world-class service, and they’re here if I have issues.”

[00:15:11] Michael Gumiela: And Steve, we get entrusted with things like stormwater protection, and that’s a big deal, man. You run your water off to a parking lot in the wrong spot; that’s a huge mistake. Sometimes, there are competitors out there that haven’t been around as long as we are that don’t even bring those things up. The emotional buy still matters today. It definitely does, because if they trust me and someone else is close to me but doesn’t have that same trust, I’m going to get the nod, and I still see it every day.

[00:15:43] Steve MacDonald: You had talked about pros and cons before, but that example, the stormwater runoff, right? That might not even be a part of the consideration. Might not even be part of the conversation. Might have nothing to do with the bid that another competitor’s putting in, but as soon as you enter that in, you say, “You know what? This is something in this area we really have to think about.” You’re going to get credit for something that somebody else didn’t even talk about, right?

[00:16:08] Michael Gumiela: Yeah. So, and teammates are huge with that, Steve, because my teammates are the ones that make me a heck of a lot smarter. My estimating team, my sales reps in the field, my engineers, my operators, they’re the ones that catch that stuff. And I just close more business bringing my operations team in than I do anything else. So sometimes I think, do they trust me, or do they just put up with me and they can’t wait for me to bring the experts in? I didn’t mean to cut you off, but I thought that was a little bit funny, the way I think about that.

[00:16:39] Steve MacDonald: No, I, uh, 100%, right? Building trust is also building credibility, and bringing the right people in at the right time is a huge part of that. Here’s what I want to ask. The playbooks of yesterday are being rewritten faster than ever today. You mentioned AI as an example; the impact on that? How are you training your team differently internally? So, we know that the customers are using AI. How are we using new technology internally? How are you helping create trust because we have access to tools and information that we’ve never had before? How does that work in our favor?

[00:17:23] Michael Gumiela: Sure. One of the easiest ones, and we’ve trained on this a couple of times every quarter, but it’s something as simple as pre-call planning and building that dossier. The reps don’t believe me, and it’s like when I was a kid, I used to walk uphill both ways to school in December with no shoes. But it’s like, it used to take so long to figure out who you were dealing with and what that company did and what was important to that company.

[00:17:53] Michael Gumiela: Now in AI, we have some prompts that we’ve built to say, “Hey, this is my target. Build me a dossier.” We have our specifics that we want from that dossier. We have the specific segments that we go after, and we’ve built, using AI and our own intelligence, you know, what are the top five issues somebody deals with, exterior services of a facility? Steve, we’ve got that down pat: we click that button with that prompt, and you’ve got a three-to-eight-page document in no time at all. Then what we’re always required to do is, when you’re done with that dossier, say, “Give me a list of the five competitors that have a similar layout.” And it’s like, oh my God, this is strategic, this is strategic sales planning 101 that used to take me a week.

[00:18:43] Michael Gumiela: I remember doing trainings on strategic sales planning and pre-call planning, and it was like, okay, we’re going to take the next three days, and we’re going to pre-call plan all 30 of these dials we’re going to make on Thursday afternoon. And now I can do that, and I find myself struggling a little bit to fill some of the time because it’s so easy with your strategic sales planning. I had an intern group this summer, and they were awesome. And they were like, “Hey, that was really fast. Can you make some calls?” I was like, “You know what? Yeah, what the heck? Let’s do it.” And I made calls in front of them, and we talked about using this tool and what my dynamic conversation or script was going to be, and wow, did it hit home.

[00:19:30] Michael Gumiela: These kids coming out of college, they are so fast on the uptake with this stuff. So that’s number one. It’s pre-call planning, strategic sales planning, number one. Figuring out what the real issues are that some of these folks are talking about on the Reddit boards or the industry boards, and it just pulls it so darn fast, and it lets me then be me. I can read through that, understand it, get on and have a conversation and start to build that trust. When you call somebody, and you know about them, and you ask them if they’re dealing with any of these issues or, “Hey, I see your company’s doing this,” that is the first line of trust.

[00:20:13] Michael Gumiela: Like, this person didn’t just dial and say, “Hi, can I talk to the person who handles your paving at your facility?” That was the first script I was ever taught. Now I can follow a three-step cold-calling process. I can open the door and then ask questions and let the target talk. It’s another thing salespeople don’t do enough of, Steve, is that we don’t shut up enough and listen. Ask a question and let somebody finish, and they feel good when they’re done talking to you, and you get valuable information.

[00:20:43] Steve MacDonald: So, here’s what I’ve been thinking about. We started out, talked a lot about focusing on the customer obsession, building trust, doing that over the long haul, building relationships over time. Typically, that’s the kind of thing that’s like, okay, but if you’re holding me accountable for this quarter’s quota, right? So now, like just in the pre-call planning alone, freeing up time to do the things that are proactive, that are relationship-based, even, and I know not everybody’s right around the corner, but even like maybe one of those 30 calls or three of those calls, you could actually go walk a couple of parking lots the day before and actually be informed, like on-site informed.

[00:21:26] Steve MacDonald: There’s so many things you can do with more time, and so this balance of developing relationships and trust, closing deals short term, how has that dynamic now changed? That has been the typical issue between, like, marketing and sales, executive management, and, “Don’t waste time on things that aren’t going to close today,” right? That mentality has been part of the sales world forever. Is that changing? Can it change?

[00:21:58] Michael Gumiela: I think we’ve got to be really creative when we think about what our sales organizations look like today. All I did was canvass, and I sold. I would walk into every store in a strip mall and try to sell the commercial cleaning, and I would walk into the chiropractor, the dentist, the dry cleaner, and the tax office. That was a no-brainer. That’s what I did. I think what we have to do, when I say we have to look at the sales organization, is that we value customer renewals and customer expansion here at Rabine. It’s probably 75 to 80% of our annual revenue. But what takes you to the next level is the new business, right?

[00:22:38] Michael Gumiela: And you’re right, it is hard keeping those relationships up. We’ve got some phenomenal sales reps that have some great relationships, but you can only have great relationships with maybe 20, 25 targets. So, we look at our targets as A, B, and C, or, easy to remember, it’s whales, cows, and chipmunks. We’re moving towards our new hires because we are expanding our sales team. Our new hires don’t come in with any of the As and Bs. The new hires come in with territory, and it’s all new business.

[00:23:11] Michael Gumiela: We incentivize them differently than we incentivize our legacy reps, who are now managing and expanding. So, there are two different types of quotas, and ultimately two different types of salespeople, right? There is that, “Hey, you’ve got to get me this much organic growth on these specific customers, and that’s your quota or your budget or your goal for the year, whatever you want to call it,” and then the new people are the ones. It actually makes me smile because we’ve partnered with a vendor that provides us with some really cool prospecting tools. It’s awesome seeing these guys leave the office every day, and they’re parking their car, and I’m hearing the stories when they’re coming back the next morning.

[00:23:53] Michael Gumiela: They’re parking their car, and they’re walking. They’re showing some of our drone imagery of parking lots, and nobody else is doing that right now. And it’s really cool stuff. So, as I build my org, my top priority is renewals and expansion, organic growth. But my new, as I bring new people on, they’ve got to build that book of business. And hey, one day you’re hitting it and getting it, and you’re bringing a bunch of new people in, and they’re the right folks. Then you start managing them next year. You know, you’re still bringing in new, but then you start managing them the year after that, and before you know it, you’re managing a really nice book of business, and it’s a natural progression. You’re at the next level of sales rep now, and there’s a lot of cool things that come with that. So, that’s how I think you have to do it. I think it’s incredibly hard to manage relationships and bring in net new logos. Yeah, it’s hard, even with the time that AI saves you.

[00:24:47] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, it’s going to be a balance the whole time. We’ve really covered a lot of territory. I want to have room to ask this last question, which is, if there was just one thing that you wanted other CROs, CMOs, CEOs, CGOs that are going to be consuming this podcast, the one thing that you would want them to remember, to take away from our conversation, what would that one thing be?

[00:25:13] Michael Gumiela: Here’s a big one for me. Don’t be afraid to get involved. And when I say that, don’t be afraid when the interns have no idea what’s going on; pick up the phone and make a call in front of them. Ride shotgun with one of your reps, and don’t dominate the conversation. Get out there, be in the field. Show up for the operations team. That’s the fun stuff that we can still do.

[00:25:34] Michael Gumiela: So many chief revenue officers out there are so uptight and so strategy-focused. Lead by example. Get out there. It’s one of the reasons I love where I’m at because nobody’s title is too high where you might not be; you know, you might be asked to go out and shovel asphalt one day. You might be asked to go out and lay cones out. But then you might be asked to go out and meet with the largest real estate company in North America, you know, in the very next breath. So, stay involved and show your people the best things to do.

[00:26:05] Michael Gumiela: I still, you know, I go to trade shows, and I let my sales reps see my pre-trade show preparation of setting appointments. I’m not hoping for an appointment when I get to the trade show. I’ve got all my appointments set already because I’ve reached out to people and said, “Hey, let’s get together for 15 minutes.” And I’ll tell you what, it snowballs and it builds great behaviors when someone sees that you’re not just blowing hot air; you’re actually doing it. That’s what I wish more CROs would do.

[00:26:32] Michael Gumiela: Take calls from other CROs. Take calls from salespeople. We’re kind of all in this together, and I feel like sometimes people just don’t have enough time. Don’t have enough time to have these conversations. Like when you reach out, I always take these calls. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. But I need to know what other people are thinking, and I need to interact with folks so I stay sharp. But that’s it. That’s what I think.

[00:26:56] Steve MacDonald: I love that you mentioned that, even taking calls from other CROs and salespeople. The whole mission of this podcast is that we can all share as a community our insights, our perspectives, our experiences, and if we can all do that, then I call it the rising tide that lifts all boats, and you were an amazing part of that rising tide today, Mike. So, I just wanted to say thank you so much. Thank you, Steve, for coming on. Absolutely, man. It was, uh, it was a pleasure. I like talking about this stuff, and it’s been a really cool experience.