Episode #312:

Christine Ravanat, Group CMO and Executive Committee Member at Expleo Group, explains why customer obsession is becoming the foundation of sustainable B2B growth. She shares how organizations can replace assumptions with deeper customer understanding to improve alignment, trust, and revenue outcomes. She also outlines practical leadership changes that help customer insights influence strategic decisions across the business.

“You need to forget about what you want to sell and really have the deep will to understand where your customer sits, what problems they are facing, and how you can genuinely help them. It all comes down to trust at the end of the day.” — Christine Ravanat

Customer relationships are no longer built by simply responding to buying opportunities. In this episode, Christine explains why lasting growth comes from understanding customers before they enter a purchasing cycle. She discusses how stronger executive alignment, authentic conversations, and continuous customer learning enable marketing and sales to influence strategic decisions, build trust, and create measurable revenue impact across the organization.

Follow Christine Ravanat on LinkedIn

Follow Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn

[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspective Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a very special guest, Christine Ravanat. Now, Christine, you’re a Chief Marketing Officer, and you’re part of the Expleo Group, and I’m going to let you explain a little bit more about yourself and who they are.

[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: But what I’m really excited about is that you’re helping us today kick off a whole series on the revenue logic of customer obsession. How does that impact our entire go-to-market strategy? Now, you’ve been doing marketing for a long time. You have covered every aspect of marketing, a 360 marketing expert.

[00:00:42] Steve MacDonald: You’ve lived in both the U.S. and, mostly, in Europe. You’ve had your professional life in Europe. You are from France. But what’s interesting also is that you’ve been in PE-backed listed companies, companies that require not just a kind of dotted Securitas line between marketing, customer, and revenue, but a direct correlation.

[00:01:11] Steve MacDonald: You have been in umpteen different board meetings where that is a requirement, and so we’re going to unpack that today. And another thing about your background that I just love is that you’ve been in B2C and B2B companies. And customer obsession, I mean, this is kind of a stereotype, but B2C companies have Chief Customer Officers, Chief Experience Officers, and we don’t tend to have that in the world of B2B.

[00:01:36] Steve MacDonald: That falls a lot on the shoulders of the Chief Marketing Officer. So I love the background you have, but I’d love to maybe give you a chance to explain a little bit more about your background before we get started here.

[00:01:49] Christine Ravanat: Sure, sure. Do you want me to say a few words about my company as well? Because Expleo is a B2B company. The thing is that the names are not as well-known in the industry you’re in. We are a global service company providing engineering, technology, and consulting services. We’re about a 1.4 billion company.

[00:02:06] Christine Ravanat: We have 17,000 experts across 30 countries, just to give you an understanding of the company. And before that, I was working at the hospitality business group Accor, which I’m sure everybody knows now because they’re across the world, and managing the marketing for different hotel brands, and also being the Chief of Staff of the person who led the digital transformation, which was a major disruption stage for the hotel hospitality industry, let’s say, 10 years ago.

[00:02:34] Christine Ravanat: So that’s just to give you a slight understanding of where I come from. So, as you mentioned, listed companies, and more recently, PE-backed companies. Not the same rhythm, not the same expectations on the impact on the business. Revenue, revenue, revenue. PE-backed is all about revenue and profitability, which is a very, very good environment to learn how to demonstrate impact quickly for a marketer.

[00:02:59] Christine Ravanat: A whole lot of things to say on that scope. I think it did accelerate my understanding of what we need to be doing in marketing since I’m in a PE-backed environment. And I would say a broad understanding of the different cultures, as I grew up in the States, I lived in Europe, I’m French, and I’ve been exposed to multiple countries in the different organizations that I’ve worked with. So that’s just to give you an understanding of where I come from.

[00:03:23] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. I’m going to dive right in. And the idea, I’m just going to lay the foundation for customer obsession. A couple of years ago, Forrester conducted a customer obsession study and found that fewer than 3% of companies were actually customer-obsessed.

[00:03:41] Steve MacDonald: The ones that had a 49% lift in revenue, a 51% lift in profitability, and a similar lift in customer retention and loyalty. So when we talk about customer obsession and the revenue logic of it, there’s a direct correlation there. And a couple of other things. McKinsey had a study in, I think it was 2023.

[00:04:04] Steve MacDonald: They found out that only 15% of companies were actually using the voice of the customer to help make strategic decisions. This leaves a big void, a big gap, right, in the marketplace. I would love to hear, just to get us started here, from you, what the revenue logic of customer obsession is, what that just means to you when you think about that kind of phrase?

[00:04:30] Christine Ravanat: The first thing that comes to my mind is that there still is a pretty big gap between how you approach this in B2C organizations and in B2B organizations. I’m going to talk a little bit more about where we stand in B2B, because this is where I currently sit, and this is where I think there’s still much to do.

[00:04:47] Christine Ravanat: In B2B, salespeople, delivery people, they all have the feeling that they know their customers very well because, at least in our business, it’s a service we provide in the long run. It can be a three-month, six-month, one-year, or two-year project. So everybody’s convinced they know the customer by heart.

[00:05:03] Christine Ravanat: The reality is that they know the customer for a specific offering they’re delivering. They know specific people in that organization, which, at the end of the day, just makes an understanding of the customer, but just one chunk of the customer. And usually, those B2B companies are missing the whole other spectrum of what the company could look like.

[00:05:22] Christine Ravanat: Where could we be pushing other offerings? What are the stakes of the company beyond what we are currently doing? Okay, we know the head of R&D, but do we know the head of IT? No, we don’t, and we never have. So it’s all this, I would say, internal culture which needs to change step by step, and helping salespeople and delivery people understand that it’s not a bad thing to have other people than them ask questions, polite, smart questions, to the customer, so we get information which will help the whole organization.

[00:05:55] Christine Ravanat: It really is something which needs to be tackled in a subtle way because the current relationship is important, but it is not enough. It does not bring enough insights and inputs in terms of making a big difference, in terms of knowing exactly what’s going to count for the customer, what can be new to the customer.

[00:06:15] Christine Ravanat: It requires insights from a different angle. That’s probably the most important thing, I would say. It’s having an understanding of what the customer is looking for from an angle that you are not dealing with on a daily basis. And that insight is what’s going to bring you new ideas, a new understanding of what the stakes are, and to position yourself on other topics.

[00:06:37] Christine Ravanat: So, it’s a whole chapter on which we’re working. But I would say it’s a cultural thing. It’s getting into the step-by-step understanding that I, as a salesperson, will benefit from this.

[00:06:49] Christine Ravanat: And it’s not like, okay, you’re stepping on my territory, and you’re talking to my customer. It can sound a little bit like the past, but it is still our reality today.

[00:07:00] Steve MacDonald: So I’m going to tell you what my big takeaway is from what you just said, because you just said a lot of really important things.

[00:07:07] Steve MacDonald: But I was just reading and doing some research as well, and with this big trend in B2B, where the buyer is waiting longer and longer and longer to want to talk to us, the sales organization, right? What ends up happening is they’ve made their shortlist, they’ve decided what they think they want, and they’re in a validation mode.

[00:07:30] Steve MacDonald: That’s the context of the conversation we’re having in sales versus earlier in their buyer journey, where they’re formulating the hypothesis around their problems and the priorities around them, and what they really need to focus their time on. That’s the area where we learn tremendously, right? Where we’re learning about how they think, not how they’re deciding, validating what they’ve already decided.

[00:08:01] Steve MacDonald: And so here’s something I just wanted to ask and get your opinion on. Voice of the customer and understanding are so important. And the second takeaway that I had from what you said was that we have to be proactive in getting the right voices in front of the right people at the right times, in the right context, and that takes time, and that takes effort.

[00:08:24] Steve MacDonald: You said a lot in there about how a lot of us think we already know the customer, and you’ve just debunked that, right?

[00:08:35] Christine Ravanat: The thing is that we, as a service provider, think we already know the customer. And the reality is that the customer thinks they already know us, but they only know us through a specific angle.

[00:08:47] Christine Ravanat: So it’s kind of two different angles which can totally miss each other. When it comes to selling big deals, you usually have a whole lot of people involved in the purchasing process. But actually, before even buying, they already have their set of suppliers, their potential set of suppliers, and they have those in mind for months already.

[00:09:09] Christine Ravanat: So if you don’t find a way to come into those people’s minds way, way, way ahead, there’s just zero chance you’re even going to be on the list of potential suppliers. So it takes a long effort ahead of time. Sometimes it’s years ahead to be sure that your company’s going to be listed as one of the potential suppliers for this or that service.

[00:09:31] Christine Ravanat: So it’s like customers are convinced they know you. You are convinced you know the customer, but both have, I would say, a partial reality of who the other is. So when you look at that, you see, I mean, there are so many holes that we can fill. So it really takes a strategy. And it’s not a short-term strategy.

[00:09:52] Christine Ravanat: It’s a midterm, sometimes long-term, according to the length of your purchasing cycle. But it is an effort that needs to be understood from the top of the organization. If you don’t have your CEO who’s sales-minded, and you don’t have a Chief Revenue Officer or sales head who has that understanding, it’s not going to happen.

[00:10:10] Christine Ravanat: It really needs to come from the top. It needs long-term investment in terms of relationship touchpoints with different people, not just the one who’s going to buy, but the ones who work on the strategy. So it also means that usually you need to have salespeople who are able to talk to C-level executives.

[00:10:30] Christine Ravanat: And in most companies, the salespeople have a relationship with the people who are going to support the delivery. And part of them do not have the experience or the posture to talk with the C level, whereas it is when you talk to the C level that you get an understanding of what the real stakes are, what are the stakes on which you can position your company or your offering, and how do you build, I would say, the different touchpoints so they put you on their list when the decision is going to be made on buying the service.

[00:10:59] Christine Ravanat: So, definitely, it takes a strategy, and it takes some convictions from the top to make it happen.

[00:11:06] Steve MacDonald: And to have those top conversations with top executives in the organizations, the ABM targets you’re having there, executive access is one of the hardest things, right? Getting those conversations is one of the most difficult things to do.

[00:11:21] Steve MacDonald: But if you don’t have an intentionality to have those kinds of conversations, which are maybe outside of the traditional, right? I had, about eight months ago, a four-time B2B CRO on, and he was all about the voice of the customer. And he said, “But let me tell you, Steve.” He said, “I’m talking about conversations with a customer outside of the sales environment, outside of where they’re being pitched,” right?

[00:11:46] Steve MacDonald: And that’s what I’m getting from you. And you had also said in one of our earlier conversations that we’re not even asking the right questions. You know, it’s different. What are the questions that we should be asking, right? We’re opening up a whole area here of insights and learning. And what is it that we should be learning?

[00:12:08] Steve MacDonald: What are the questions we should be asking?

[00:12:11] Christine Ravanat: We should be asking questions that give us information on the bigger picture. We tend to be very focused on, you know, the direct information we’re looking for. Do you need this or that? But it’s really about understanding in which environment the customer is.

[00:12:26] Christine Ravanat: What is the current state? That’s what it is all about. Having them discuss where the company is going. What are the difficulties they’re encountering? What’s been different this year? What are the competitors doing?

[00:12:41] Christine Ravanat: What are the suppliers that have surprised you? For what reason? What have they provided? Just having a conversation that is not related to what you’re trying to sell, but a conversation that is giving you information on the environment in which your customer is, is going to provide you with tons of little bits of information, which at one point are going to build something that’s going to hook them and help you do the next sale.

[00:13:07] Christine Ravanat: You kind of need to forget about what you want to sell and really have the deep will to understand where your customer sits, in which state they are, what problems they’re facing. It’s very often also a very personal relationship, just being a good listener.

[00:13:26] Christine Ravanat: I mean, if you ask the right questions, people like to talk. Of course, you need to be subtle. I mean, you need to be interested in what they’re telling you. That’s the thing. That’s the reality. There needs to be some sort of authentic relationship between two people.

[00:13:38] Christine Ravanat: And it’s kind of taking it from a higher perspective, in some sense. And that higher perspective is going to give you tons of information to help you then be very relevant in terms of what you’re going to explain, how you’re basically going to help them.

[00:13:52] Christine Ravanat: The idea is, how am I going to help you? But pushing your idea on how you’re going to help them is going to come very naturally once you understand the context and the environment in which they are. But it takes maturity in the conversation. It takes, I would say, maturity in the sales approach.

[00:14:07] Christine Ravanat: And it probably also takes time. Time builds this quality of relationship. I think time is important when it comes to building trust with a customer. All this comes down to trust at the end of the day, you know? It’s very linked to trust. How do you build trust with a person?

[00:14:23] Christine Ravanat: Whether it’s in your personal life or in your professional life, it’s pretty similar. How do you build trust? It kind of comes down to that.

[00:14:31] Steve MacDonald: Right before the beginning of the year, Forrester came out with their predictions for 2026, and they basically said that trust is the currency that gets us into the shortlist, right?

[00:14:44] Steve MacDonald: Gets us into the deal. Trust is what helps us close the deal. Trust is what keeps the deal, right? Keeps the client. And so when you were talking about the kind of conversations to have, two things came to mind. First is McKinsey. Another study that they did said that 90% of the data that we have as companies is conversational data, and that’s where the true golden nuggets are, right?

[00:15:12] Steve MacDonald: Especially if you’re proactive about the kind of conversations that you’re talking about, those interviews, those transcripts, right? We all have all of our workflows and work processes now running across AI, but everybody has the exact same AI tools, right? The tools themselves are the commodity.

[00:15:32] Steve MacDonald: The insights that we put into the tools are what’s going to differentiate us, right? And the kind of conversations that you were talking about, I thought of two. You know, as CMOs, usually when we go and start up a new business, we start calling customers, right? And we say, “This isn’t a sales conversation.”

[00:15:51] Steve MacDonald: “I’m new here. I just want to learn.” And asking all those questions that you were just talking about. And then also, I was thinking about CAB meetings, right? Customer Advisory Board meetings. We always come out thinking, “Oh my gosh. We have got to do this more often. We learn so much.” But we don’t have CAB meetings all the time.

[00:16:10] Steve MacDonald: They’re hard. We stop having those CMO-to-customer conversations because we get busy, right? But what I’m hearing from you is that we need to have those conversations. And do we need to continue to have them? Do we get to the point where we just understand the customer enough that we go, “We get it,” right? Or is this an ongoing process that we always have to be in?

[00:16:35] Christine Ravanat: It’s ongoing, and it needs to take place in different ways. It’s all about the touchpoints you’re having with your customer, and you’re having different types of touchpoints. For instance, you’re all going to go to the same industry convention.

[00:16:49] Christine Ravanat: That’s one touchpoint. Once a year, you’re going to organize dinners on a specific theme, and you’re going to invite certain customers. I know AI is the big topic. You know, over the past two years, the only topic we’ve been discussing is AI. So you invite people, you find a nice angle, and people are happy to come. And that’s another type of touchpoint.

[00:17:07] Christine Ravanat: You’re going to have your regular monthly phone call. That’s a third type of touchpoint. They’re going to invite you to some sort of supplier event. So all the other types of interactions companies come up with, all these build a relationship with a person and are sources of understanding where the person sits, where the organization sits, where the company itself sits.

[00:17:31] Christine Ravanat: So I’m a true believer that face-to-face interactions remain very important. Of course, you cannot do that. But having real face-to-face meetings, to me, still has a lot of value. But okay, you’re going to do this, and you’re going to do a Teams video, and you’re going to do webinars, and you’re going to do different types of formats.

[00:17:51] Christine Ravanat: But it’s the combination of all this that is, in the long run, going to teach you a whole lot about your customer.

[00:17:58] Steve MacDonald: So I have to ask you something on a completely new level here. When you and I first met, we were preparing for this call, and I asked you a question. I said, “What do you think are the two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?”

[00:18:11] Steve MacDonald: I’ve asked about 120 C-level executives that exact same question. And by and large, over 70% of the executives said internal alignment is our number one challenge for creating long-term sustainable growth. Now, when you dig into it, the number one alignment factor, the number one change agent inside of a business, is the voice of the customer.

[00:18:38] Steve MacDonald: It’s not the CRO saying, “Here’s how I think it is.” It’s not the CEO or the CPO or the CMO. It’s the customer. Nobody argues if you do it well, right? Nobody argues with the voice of the customer. So how important is internal alignment? I think it was a Bain study that said that internally aligned organizations, well-aligned organizations, have two times the revenue growth.

[00:19:04] Steve MacDonald: So the whole idea here, the revenue logic of customer obsession, what I’m asking is, does customer obsession lead to better alignment, which leads to better performance and revenue?

[00:19:18] Christine Ravanat: The answer is yes, for sure. However, you need to get there, and getting there is a journey. You know, I often give this example in my current organization, which is a B2B, and I’m coming from a B2C.

[00:19:30] Christine Ravanat: B2C, you were driven by what the customer was saying. Whenever you had a customer survey with whoever, everybody was waiting, waiting, because the whole, I would say, company’s strategy could change according to that. In my current environment, B2B, there is a yearly customer satisfaction survey with an NPS. It’s an event among other events. It’s not taken, I would say, seriously, but it’s not the major information, which it should be. So once you have that, let’s say, for instance, you see that, for whatever reason, from one year to the other, your customers do not perceive you as good in innovation.

[00:20:05] Christine Ravanat: In my business, wow, that’s a major piece of information. And information like that should stretch to the CEO taking some decisions, and then, okay, what does that mean for our R&D? What does it mean for the speeches our salespeople hold in front of the customers? The offerings: how do we present our offerings? Do they not look innovative enough? I mean, it should drive all that, and everybody kind of aligns behind this perception the customer has of us. So this is where we should be going. But all companies do not have that maturity, and I would say in B2B, there are a lot of different industries in B2B, but I tend to think that it’s changing now.

[00:20:47] Christine Ravanat: There’s something about B2B organizations that makes them accelerate and become more and more customer-focused. They were mostly coming from the product’s strength, which is its number one asset. The product did it all. I mean, you know, the product did it all, and that kind of held them for like 20 years.

[00:21:06] Christine Ravanat: It’s a bit different today. It’s been different for a couple of years. So they’re coming back to some foundations of what marketing is about, and how you should be listening, anticipating, and paying attention to what your customer says. But I would say there’s kind of a discrepancy between what B2C knows and what B2B is rediscovering.

[00:21:26] Christine Ravanat: Rediscovering in its own way. It’s not exactly the same way. You don’t do it the same way. It’s, I would say, probably even more interesting because now, with all the digital, you can have very personalized information. I mean, you can be so detailed in terms of understanding what, within a company, let’s say you have five stakeholders in the company, you can know exactly what each of those five people’s worries are. What do they wake up every morning and think about? And even what their objectives are by the end of the year. You can even get to know that. So how much more do you need to show up and say, “I can help, if you’re able to tell me I understand what your problem is?” You’re going to want to listen.

[00:22:04] Christine Ravanat: You’ll decide to go ahead or not, but at least you’re going to want to listen. So I think B2B is in a great moment right now. There’s so much we can do.

[00:22:12] Steve MacDonald: You know, a big takeaway is that culturally, customer obsession isn’t as naturally occurring in B2B organizations as it is in B2C.

[00:22:24] Steve MacDonald: As you come out of a company like Procter & Gamble, and everything, everything’s about the customer. The customer is first and foremost. Amazon still does this. I interviewed somebody just over a year ago who was at Amazon. They had an empty-chair policy where every meeting, whether in person or online, had an empty chair representing the customer.

[00:22:47] Steve MacDonald: So this could be a pricing meeting. It could be a distribution meeting. But if the customer were here with us today, how would that impact the decisions that we’re making? It seems like what I’m taking away from what you’re saying is that we need to be more culturally obsessed with the customer inside of a B2B organization. Is that a good takeaway from what you’ve been saying?

[00:23:08] Christine Ravanat: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And usually in B2B, you do not approach the customer as a mass. You approach the customer through specific personas. I would say the difference is that you can get into understanding and hearing that voice, for sure.

[00:23:22] Christine Ravanat: As you know, what we’re saying is this new way of seeing the customer and so on. What I’ve experienced in this B2B environment is that unless you are able to demonstrate that what you’re saying, what your approach is, has a direct impact on business, you’re not going to be heard.

[00:23:37] Christine Ravanat: You need to be able to do things that are going to demonstrate your impact on revenue. Otherwise, you’re not going to get much backing internally. So it’s very important that marketers manage to track what business has been influenced by their initiatives.

[00:23:51] Christine Ravanat: That is key because if you want to sit on the board, and if you want the board to listen to your voice, until you are able to say, “Okay, this year, because of the different marketing initiatives, we’ve influenced 8% of the revenue generated,” you’re not going to have the same weight as if you can just talk about, “Okay, I’ve developed the brand awareness, that amount of digital impressions, and we had that number of articles in the press.” They’re going to listen, but it’s not going to resonate as much as how much you impacted the business. All the other KPIs are super important, but they’re super important just for me to drive my teams. They’re not that important for the extended ExCom.

[00:24:33] Christine Ravanat: What’s important for them is how much did you help us bring business. And once you’re able to demonstrate that, then you start to have people listening to what you’re saying when you’re talking. We need to listen to the customer much more. We need to be focused on understanding, per industry, what their main stakes are.

[00:24:52] Christine Ravanat: Are our offerings well positioned according to what they’re going to need, and so on and so on. To be able to have an ear of the CEO, the sales head, and so on, you need to first of all be able to demonstrate that you’re bringing business. That’s my learning from the past years.

[00:25:09] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. You’ve got to translate. Everybody, a CFO, a CEO, the board, they’re going to look at whatever you’re doing in marketing very differently than we typically look at it ourselves, right? So I would love to ask you, we’ve talked about so much, but if there was one takeaway that you wanted the C-suite executives who are going to be consuming this podcast to take away from our conversation, the most important thing about the revenue logic of customer obsession, what would that be?

[00:25:41] Christine Ravanat: Marketing and salespeople need to team up to make it work in a way that functions for each organization. There’s no miracle recipe, I think, to have a marketer and a salesperson work together. But, you know, this has been an everlasting story on how do you have those two groups of people working together.

[00:25:58] Christine Ravanat: I think that now, because of AI also, which can ease the work of everybody, it’s probably easier, and there’s probably a better understanding from each party of what they can benefit from each other to make the impact on the customer. So I would probably recommend making those two groups of people work, and spending time to make them work efficiently together.

[00:26:24] Christine Ravanat: And the consequence of that is that you’re going to be able to demonstrate that there is an impact on the revenue. If they’re split away, you’re going to have problems in your tracking. You’re going to have problems in understanding the reality of this, and then you’re going to spend your time trying to reconcile information.

[00:26:40] Christine Ravanat: Whereas if they understand that it’s a win-win, wow, it can be so powerful, and everybody’s going to be proud of saying, “Okay, we’ve influenced that amount of business thanks to the marketer, and overall, the sales team generated that amount of revenue.”

[00:26:53] Christine Ravanat: And then everybody’s proud. The salespeople are proud of the marketing team. The marketing team is proud of the sales team. And it’s a collective win. So getting those two populations feeling like the right partners is, to me, one of the keys to really generating growth.

[00:27:07] Christine Ravanat: That’s how you succeed in diversification. That’s how you succeed in entering new markets. That’s how you succeed within the same organization to address new stakeholders. It’s very powerful.

[00:27:19] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, Christine, that the whole mission of our podcast here is to bring different voices from different C-suite executives across the board, from CEOs to CMOs, CGOs, CROs, you name it, and talk about how do we overcome our challenges in the world of B2B.

[00:27:38] Steve MacDonald: How do we create long-term sustainable growth? And this kind of conversation is just amazing. You were an amazing part of that, what I call the rising tide. If we all bring our ideas together, then we all benefit. And I just wanted to say thank you for coming on today.

[00:27:55] Christine Ravanat: More than welcome. I love to talk about my job.