Episode #331:

Matthias Holder, Chief Sales Officer at Lindner Recyclingtech, explains how customer obsession creates sustainable revenue by helping sales organizations understand customers, their markets, and their needs. He explores how salespeople can become trusted advisors by discussing business needs, market conditions, productivity, quality, costs, and competitive advantage before recommending solutions. Matthias also shows how continuous customer insight can guide sales strategy, product development, internal decisions, and stronger long-term customer relationships.

“Never fall in love with your products. Fall in love with your customers, your customers’ success. Products change, technology changes, markets change, customer expectations and challenges change even faster, so stay in touch with your customers. That’s where we need to absolutely focus on.” – Matthias Holder

Customer obsession becomes a revenue strategy when organizations turn continuous customer and market insight into better decisions. Matthias explains how understanding customers and their customers helps sales teams identify changing needs earlier, build trust, recommend stronger business solutions, and guide product and sales strategy around measurable outcomes that support sustainable 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 have a very interesting guest, Matt Holder. Matt, a number of things make you a great guest. Not only have you been, and currently are, a Chief Sales Officer; I’m going to ask you to talk a little bit more about what you’re doing right now. You’ve been a Chief Technology Officer; you’ve been a Chief Executive Officer multiple times. You started out as an engineer, but you also went into business management, so you’ve been a revenue leader for a long time. You’ve overseen revenue operations for over a billion euros, very large organizations.

[00:00:49] Steve MacDonald: I think right now you’re working with subsidiaries, like 60-some-odd subsidiaries all over the world. So you’re a busy guy, and I really appreciate you taking the time here. What I would love to do, though, is give you an opportunity to maybe expand a little bit more on your background. I’d love to even hear a little bit about your scuba diving expertise and dealing with sharks. That was an interesting part of our conversation.

[00:01:15] Matthias Holder: Super. Steve, thank you very much, and thank you very much for having me around. And also, hi to the audience. Yeah, my background: I spent my whole career in the field of printing, packaging, and equipment around that, and now in recycling. You’re confronted with the outcome of my work every weekend. Every weekend you work for grocery shopping because it’s either the packaging, or it’s the processing of the content, or it’s the recycling afterward. That’s what drives me. What’s the fun part of my life? No, not really, but that’s the fun part of my work, at least, and looking forward to that.

[00:01:46] Matthias Holder: Outside of work, it’s scuba diving. As excitement never can be too much, I really prefer scuba diving in wrecks, and whenever possible, I love diving with sharks, ’cause there’s always a shark tank somewhere. That’s what makes things interesting.

[00:02:02] Steve MacDonald: Well, absolutely. That’s a bit of a thrill seeker that a lot of us don’t have inside of us. I’ve got to hand it to you there. What we want to talk about today is how you have, over the years, the title of our episode is The Revenue Logic of Customer Obsession, and I want to start out asking a little bit about how we understand, as you build revenue, you’ve overseen massive, large revenue engines, that as we start to understand revenue, where do we have to start?

[00:02:33] Steve MacDonald: Starting with market changes and signals, and then leading into how we adapt and understand customer obsession, how that drives our revenue. But if you could maybe start us out by: how do we stay ahead? How do we stay ahead of where the market’s going and the signals that we’re seeing? That’s our big job, but it’s really hard to do. But I’d love to get your perspective on that.

[00:02:56] Matthias Holder: It’s pretty easy. And being in sales, we are really the key connecting point because we talk to customers. We know what’s going on out there. From my understanding, we have to go a step further to understand what is going on with my customers’ customers so we can really help them. This gives us a sense of what is going on. Where do markets develop to, and actually, what does that mean for us? How can we react to that? Our business, how can we adapt our business accordingly? So that’s my basic understanding of how I can make sure that I will be successful in the market with my business.

[00:03:34] Steve MacDonald: What are some of the early warning signs that you see and that you look out for? Because staying ahead of the market is everybody’s job. But again, you said it’s easy. If we could do that and we had that crystal ball, that would be worth a billion euros. How do you stay ahead of the market? What are the signals that you’re looking for?

[00:03:52] Matthias Holder: Of course, it’s the magic sales crystal ball I polish every weekend, uh, to see where I’m going. No, but if you see revenue declining already, it’s too late, or not too late; you’re in a very advanced step of decline. Revenue is very late stage in that process, which always follows a certain pattern. The first warning sign is always if you have a mismatch, if you realize a mismatch at your stakeholders’ level. You realize a mismatch with your customers, with your markets, with the market organizations, what’s going on there.

[00:04:26] Matthias Holder: This always is a point where I see, oh, let’s pay attention, because always from there, the next step really will lead into a strategy crisis. You don’t know what’s going on out there anymore, so you don’t adapt a proper strategy in your business. From there, you go into misaligned products, misaligned sales, and then you stop selling at a certain point. The real warning sign always is when you see my internal organization is mainly focused on their own issues, on discussions, on processes, on internal stuff, and not on what’s going on with the customer anymore. Not on what’s really happening out there. It’s about structures, it’s about reporting, reporting structures, all that. While conversation about the customer itself and customer needs is vanishing in the whole organization.

[00:05:12] Matthias Holder: That’s a very critical point, which I’ve seen many times in the market, and what I always say: markets rarely collapse overnight. They whisper. They really whisper before they scream, and you need to have your ears at that point. You need to know your customers and your customers’ customers and see what’s happening there, and then you can react.

[00:05:34] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s interesting when you and I first got together and we were talking about what we wanted to talk about on this podcast, and I asked you a question that I ask every C-suite executive that comes onto the podcast. What do you see as the two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?

[00:05:50] Steve MacDonald: The number one answer across over 100 C-suite executives I’ve asked that question of is internal alignment is the number one challenge. One of the things you brought up very clearly was that when you’re not in tune with where the market’s going, and you’re internally driven by your own product, your own reporting, and the proposals you’re putting out, it’s very easy to get very internally focused. But if you’re not focused on the customer and their customer, ’cause that’s what they’re worried about really is ultimately impacting their customers.

[00:06:23] Steve MacDonald: So I love the focus on not only the customer of the customer, but internal alignment. By the time you get to the place where you’re like, “Geez, we’re really not aligned,” that’s the status quo of most organizations. It’s why it’s the number one challenge.

[00:06:39] Steve MacDonald: If that’s one of the symptoms of being out of step with the customer, how do you talk to your sales team about staying in step with the customer? We talked about that as customer obsession, right? It raises the bar. It’s not just having some conversations; make sure you’re in touch with the customer. Being obsessed with the customer is a different level, like you said, and why is that so important?

[00:07:06] Matthias Holder: It’s very easy. If you’re approaching your customers just to fulfill your numbers, just to fill your funnel, to get your revenues, your order intakes, it’s something that they realize: you do not get their trust. You don’t earn customers’ trust, and they’ll treat you as what you are in that moment. You’re just a sales guy. But if you understand your customer’s market and the customer’s customer, you can consult your customer. You can help him get the right solution. You can guide him to a business solution, build a business case for his business, and become the partner.

[00:07:46] Matthias Holder: You will become a trusted partner of your customer, and he will be listening. And if you live that, you will never reach that point where you say, “Oh, I’m so obsessed with my internal structures, procedures, and so on.” You will always think in the world of the customer: what are his issues, what are his demands, what are his problems, and I can help him solve them. For me personally, this is always a transition also from understanding my customers and their markets. What does that mean for my business? What does that mean for my products, for my services, and how do I adapt this into my own production, into my own portfolio, and into my own solutions so that on the front end, again, I can be successful?

[00:08:27] Steve MacDonald: So you brought up trust, and I want to make sure that we don’t just gloss over that. It was really interesting. I had a conversation with a CEO, and her company works with all kinds of industries in a go-to-market capacity, and she said, “We’re talking to C-suite executives and our customers and our prospects, and because of the market dynamic and the changes in AI, and just everybody’s rethinking everything, they’re becoming much more risk-averse.”

[00:08:55] Steve MacDonald: What I’m putting together with what you’re saying there, in building that trust, they’re looking for more than just a point solution. They’re looking for a provider that’s going to be there and help them wade through this market uncertainty and this change. They need a partner to help them through that, and that’s beyond product, service, and pricing; that’s trust.

[00:09:21] Steve MacDonald: How important is that? All the studies show that, when the RFP comes out, or a company decides they need to hire or reevaluate a contract, they put a shortlist together on day one, and that’s who they buy from 95% of the time. So if you’re not in a trusted position beforehand, you’re not on that shortlist; you’re out.

[00:09:46] Matthias Holder: Right? Yep, and absolutely. Absolutely. We always say people buy from people, so you need to gain their trust. So you need to gain the trust as a brand. You need to be a trusted brand. You need to be a trusted person. You need to be there for your customer. And never underestimate, especially when talking about capital investment, global machinery business.

[00:10:05] Matthias Holder: As a vendor, we have that global overview. We know the markets globally. We know trends globally. We know trends locally, regionally. So we typically have much deeper insight into the overall business situation than the customer does, who is occupied with day-to-day operations, troubleshooting, and all of that. We can tell him, “Hey, hold on. This is happening in one range, and that is happening in the other range. What’s your positioning? Where do you want to go? What do you want to achieve with the investment you’re going for so that you can be successful in your business again?” And then we can start a conversation and say, “Okay, maybe this or maybe that or the other one, but this is what I would recommend for your business, for your solution.”

[00:10:52] Steve MacDonald: We can come in as vendors and try to sell. We can come in as consultants and try to lead them through the market, and you’re right, you have a perspective on the market that they don’t have. Most of us, as companies, don’t talk to as many of our peers as we do. They don’t have a handle on the market as we do, and are you seeing that in this time of rapid change in technology and innovation, that they’re needing a trusted advisor more than ever, and that role of building trust is more important? We all know it’s been important. You can go back 20 years, 30 years, that’s always been important, but why is it more important today than ever?

[00:11:33] Matthias Holder: Markets are changing much faster, much faster than they used to. And you said, okay, let’s go 25 years back or 20 years back. That was exactly the time when I started as a young engineer after university, and I started in the consulting branch of a big capital investment company, one of the biggest producers in that field, printing machines, and we had just one goal and one target, understand your customer, help him develop his strategy, help him derive the proper solution, the proper technical solution, fully independently, whether it’s our own solution or something else, or no solution at all.

[00:12:12] Matthias Holder: This took me to places where I said, “Okay, don’t do it. Do not invest because this is not what you need.” And this creates a base, a trust base. Those guys will always come back to you and ask. Ask for advice, ask for support. This is something they really remember, and it gives you a customer relationship you don’t get if you’re just the salesperson bringing quote by quote. Yeah.

[00:12:38] Steve MacDonald: So how do you translate this? This is obviously a way you have to instill in your sales team. You’re not out there on the front line having every single conversation. And this isn’t necessarily a natural tendency to have customer obsession at the level that you and I are talking about right now. How do you train the sales team to be customer obsessed and connect the dots for them? You put the time and the effort to understand, you’re going to get more contracts, you’re going to get a bigger book of business. What does that kind of conversation and that training look like, just at a top level?

[00:13:17] Matthias Holder: It’s very easy. It’s very easy. It’s making them understand that they need to sit down with the customer and understand his needs and his requirements before, before walking out the door with a quote under their arm, or even several quotes, which they then throw on the table and say, “Select one.” This is not sales. This is just understanding your customer, sitting down, talking to him, understanding his demands, his requirements, and then, even if you leave the door without putting something on the table, tell him, “Okay, customer, I understood. I got your ideas, I got your demands. Let me think about it. I will come back to you tomorrow, the day after, with a suggestion on how we can tackle that, on how we can work on that together so that you get forward with your request and your business because now I really understand what you’re looking for.”

[00:14:13] Matthias Holder: Customers don’t buy equipment, they buy business solutions, and in a very quickly changing world as we have today, they are happy about each support they can get to secure that decision and to get advice on that decision, to be a bit more on the safer side, and that’s what we can bring in as specialists in our products, in our markets, and actually what happens there.

[00:14:38] Steve MacDonald: I was talking to another CRO last week, and I asked him, I said, “What’s the competitive advantage of your sales team if it isn’t the product or the service?” And he says, “We’ve got a really good product. We’ve got a really good service, and we’ve got really good pricing. But with rapid innovation in our technology and our services, everybody’s catching up. Everybody responds in RFP. Everybody says they check all the boxes. It’s really hard to compete on product, service, pricing alone.” And he started talking about what you’re talking about, and he said, “The competitive advantage of our sales team is the insights they have into the market and their customers.”

[00:15:19] Matthias Holder: Correct. Correct. And you always have to ask yourself: will my solution increase the customer’s productivity, quality, cost base, and give him a competitive advantage? Make sure the capital invested is invested right, and it’s not just, “Okay, I have a sale, I walk out the door and never will come back again.”

[00:15:40] Steve MacDonald: So do you, as part of your training, we strive really hard to be in the right room with the right people at the right time, asking the right questions. We can be in the right room at the right time with the right people, but if we’re not asking the right questions, then we’re going to miss that opportunity.

[00:15:54] Steve MacDonald: Do you help your sales team in terms of asking the right questions in order to get to the true insights that we’re looking for? Independently across the team, across the world, nobody’s coming up with all the right answers. Do you, as part of the training, help them with the kinds of questions they need to ask to get the right answers and have the right conversations?

[00:16:17] Matthias Holder: Absolutely. The basic underlying idea is not to talk technology, but to sit down with the customer and talk about his business needs. Which, of course, requires my sales guys to understand a little bit about the business itself and what the target is there the customer’s customer again- and then talk to your sales guy, to your customer: “What are your current problems in your market? You’re selling, you’re not selling, you have quality issues. What’s your feedback from your market, from your customers?”

[00:16:48] Matthias Holder: These are the questions we need to understand; we need to ask them so that we can, in the office, put together a suitable offer for the customer and say, “Hey, okay, I understand you’re facing these problems in your market. We know from our understanding of the market that this and this are required. So, dear customer, I would suppose that we look for that and look for this because this helps you in this aspect, and this helps you in the other aspect.” And so we get to a point where we really talk business much more before we basically talk solution and technology, and this is what customers today expect.

[00:17:24] Matthias Holder: Quite simply, think back to the automotive industry, like 20 years, 30 years maybe. Everybody was talking horsepower and speed, and how strong the car, the machine was, the engine was. Today, we talk consumption, we talk safety, we talk sustainability and all of that. It completely changed. We talk solutions. We don’t talk technology anymore, and solution always means addressing a certain business need.

[00:17:52] Steve MacDonald: So I’ve always found that the more that you can talk about the market, the trends, where it’s going, then they’re much more open to talking about their challenges and what they’re seeing. Because it’s a two-way exchange. If you come in and say, “I’ve got two or three options on a proposal here, but tell me a little bit about your industry, your market, what’s going on.” They don’t want to educate you, right? Their job is not to. In fact, they get very frustrated if they feel like they’re educating the salesperson on a call. So it’s a very interesting balance of, if you come in talking like a professional, talking like a consultant, a knowledgeable person that is worthy of being listened to, then they’re much more open, and now you’re going to get those insights.

[00:18:43] Steve MacDonald: So it’s almost like the process to unlock them to truly start talking about what’s really bothering them and what they’re really dealing with and what they don’t really know how to solve is you position yourself as an expert to begin with, because then they’re willing to open up, and you get to open up.

[00:19:00] Steve MacDonald: But here’s the problem, they’re waiting longer and longer to want to talk to us. Another CRO, he said, “Look, Steve,” he says, “We’re, we’re having fewer conversations that are farther apart and that are shorter than we used to be.” They’re farther apart, shorter, and so our opportunity, when we’re in front of the prospect, the buyer, is more limited than it is before, and so we have to make the most, absolute most, out of that moment. Is that a trend you’re seeing as well? The contact with the customer and how infrequent and how long you have with them to accomplish what you’re talking about. Is that a trend that you’re seeing as well?

[00:19:39] Matthias Holder: Yes. Yes. It is. It is, and I think you have to differentiate whether we’re talking to a new account, to a new customer, which we just approached for the first time. We have to come through the door and say, basically, convince him, gain the trust that he accepts us as an expert in the field. For sure, everything else is just wasted time. And then I think we, as a sales organization, need to make sure we see our existing customers often enough to keep that bond and that trust. Stop by even if there’s nothing to really discuss on a business level at the moment; just stop by, see how he’s doing, ask him questions about, “Hey, how is your business running?” Because then again, this is knowledge you collect for yourself to understand your markets and then the customers of your customers.

[00:20:32] Matthias Holder: Then keep in touch, not just sales, but keep in touch with your customers. And also, whenever possible, try to be at or visit trade fairs or something where your customers exhibit, because this again is where you can start talking to their customers and understand what’s going on there, getting that market insight, fairs, conferences, whatsoever. Even maybe visit them directly, if you have the contact.

[00:20:56] Steve MacDonald: How do you tie, going back to the title of our conversation here, The Revenue Logic of Customer Obsession? Because there are always so many variables that impact revenue. It’s not one thing, but how do you tie customer obsession into growing revenue? In your mind, when you’re in front of the board, when you’re in front of investors, that’s all they care about: revenue, right? So they’re not asking how you’re doing it as much as whether you’re growing revenue, and if you’re not, then I’m going to really start asking a lot of questions, right? So how do you connect customer obsession with growing revenue?

[00:21:41] Matthias Holder: Very easy. I mentioned earlier, if the first thing you bring to your customer’s meeting is a quote already, you haven’t asked the right question, and you haven’t spent enough time on that. You haven’t taken the chance to build that trust situation. If you gain that trust, if you’re with the customer on eye level as an advisor, as a supporter, as a partner, all price discussion becomes second, and this itself already is a big benefit in all sales.

[00:22:13] Matthias Holder: Now again, sales discussions, sales situations. Once you have the trust, he might not even look at the second or third vendor because he says, “Hey, this guy told me exactly what to do, whereas all the other ones just throw their quotes on my table and say, ‘Here, this is what I can offer you,’ without understanding what I’m doing.” This is what really makes sustainable growth, and this is why customers stick to a brand, stick to even a salesperson. So it’s also very critical: if a salesperson is switching companies or leaving companies, retiring, whatsoever, you need to make sure that the next one is stepping into this trust situation because this will keep your relationship with the customer and actually keep your revenue stream.

[00:22:56] Matthias Holder: Technology changes, market changes, product changes, all very regular. But what’s really constant is that your customer’s business is changing even faster, and you need to understand that and be there, talk to them, and understand the challenges they have. That’s really the big point.

[00:23:14] Steve MacDonald: So, a couple of things I’m putting together, connecting the dots from what you’re saying here, and whether it’s having those calls where you’re asking the right questions, talking to them about their customers, going to the right conventions, going to their booths, talking to their customers there. You have laid out a number of different ways you’re gaining insights they don’t have time to get. They don’t talk to their peer community as much as you do. You’re selling to their peer community every single day.

[00:23:47] Steve MacDonald: I read a study recently that scientists are looked upon as experts at a 76% level. The peers to us in our own industry are at that exact same level, 76%. So, if you can represent their peer community, who they look to, that’s who they look to for validation, right? What are my peers doing? What are people doing the same thing here? If you can be a true reflection of your peer community, and you’re seen as somebody who’s constantly active, talking to your peer community, and bringing those insights in, your credibility goes up significantly. Is that a good takeaway? Because that’s what I was taking away from our conversation here.

[00:24:32] Matthias Holder: It is. It is. And even further, I would take it a step further. As a representation of the peer group, you can give him advice completely separate from the peer group, or different advice from the peer group, because that is what everybody does. Do that, because this will differentiate you. That’s a bonus, I think, you can bring in, stepping out of this or not being part of the peer group, but representing or reflecting the peer group. You can consult him completely differently, and internally, talking about the revenue stream again, talking to your customer, understanding their markets, the customer’s customer, it gives you the right base to decide on your sales strategy.

[00:25:13] Matthias Holder: It gives you the right base to decide on your products and develop your products and all the value stream within your own company because this is then completely focused on the customer solution on the front side again. So, this gives you the products that will sell.

[00:25:27] Steve MacDonald: I love this. It’s the market perspective. We started out by talking about how you stay ahead of market changes and dynamics, and I think we spent the entire time here talking about how you stay in tune with that and how that’s the core of your consulting. And as a reflection through the peer community of who you’re selling to, you’re talking to more people in the markets than they ever will.

[00:25:50] Steve MacDonald: I would love to have you give, because we’ve covered so much territory, and I wish we had another hour of conversation here. For all the C-suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast, if there was one thing that you wanted them to take away from our conversation, if nothing else, take this away, what would that be?

[00:26:11] Matthias Holder: Let’s be a bit provocative there. Never fall in love with your products. Fall in love with your customers, your customers’ success. Products change, technology changes, markets change, customer expectations and challenges change even faster. So, stay in touch with your customers. I think that’s the absolute key takeaway we have to really focus on.

[00:26:35] Steve MacDonald: I love that. I think you just bottled up the entire episode and what we all should be doing more and more in two sentences there. I just have to say, the mission of this podcast is to talk to different C-suite executives from all over the world, and we all have incredible insights, perspectives, and experiences that we can bring to the table. And if we do, just like you have today, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats, and you did a phenomenal job on that today. Thank you very much for being a part of that rising tide. Yeah, thank you, Matt, for coming on. I really appreciate it.

[00:27:09] Matthias Holder: My pleasure. Really, my pleasure, and thank you very much.