Episode #336:
Liz Emmott, Chief Revenue Officer at CIBT, explores how commercial leaders can rebuild revenue organizations amid changing technology and buyer expectations. She explains why customer understanding, internal trust, and expert collaboration create meaningful differentiation. Her perspective shows how aligned teams can build credibility, improve the customer experience, and drive sustainable revenue growth.
“Being able to articulate, understand, and speak the language of our customers and prospects is actually the only way we are going to win. We have to demonstrate that we know their industry better than they do, and this is why they need to trust us.” – Liz Emmott
Liz Emmott shares a practical view of revenue leadership when automation accelerates outreach but makes differentiation harder. Drawing on experience across enterprises, startups, and CIBT’s global mobility businesses, she explains how leaders can turn specialist knowledge into buyer relevance, align commercial and service teams, and make internal trust visible to customers. The conversation connects customer obsession to stronger credibility, better decisions, and durable revenue growth.
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[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 super interesting guest, Liz Emmott. Liz, you’re a CRO at CIBT, and I’m gonna let you explain a bit about the company and who you are. You’ve been CRO multiple times. You’ve been a Chief Commercial Officer. Right now, you run commercial operations for CIBT. That means marketing and sales, and all kinds of different departments. You’re talking to people about data and how we’re organizing data around deploying agents and AI, and so you’ve got a lot of responsibility.
[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: What I love about our last conversation is you’re brought in most often to rebuild revenue organizations, and you’re doing it at a time where we’re all rebuilding already. With the role of technology and the change in the industry, we’re always in kind of a rethinking, rebuilding mode now. But you’re really doing it from the ground up.
[00:01:08] Steve MacDonald: And so I love the perspectives that you’re gonna be sharing here. And if we rolled it all together, you and I were just talking, there’s kind of an overarching theme here, and we call it the Revenue Logic of Customer Obsession. What that truly means, when you’re rebuilding revenue organizations in today’s environment, is the importance of customer obsession and its direct connection to revenue. So what I’d love to do is have you share a little more about your background before we dig in.
[00:01:41] Liz Emmott: Sure, absolutely. Thanks so much for inviting me to come along today. Very excited to chat with you. My background: I started my career at American Express. I like to say I grew up there. I learned all of my good and quite a few bad habits and have been gradually downsizing since. That said, my last three companies were all blue-chip listed companies, and most recently I’ve been working with a number of startups. So I have that full spectrum: working for a massive blue-chip, where everything has to flow through a very specific process, to working with a startup with less than 100 employees and trying to implement some of the structure and discipline I learned at the larger organizations.
[00:02:36] Liz Emmott: So most recently, I’ve been with CIBT for the last eight months, so I’m still pretty new to the role. CIBT basically works with moving people around the world, whether that be short-term movements, people just going on holiday or on a business trip who need a visa, right up to people like myself who’ve actually immigrated from my homeland of the UK to the US a couple of years ago, managing that full immigration process. So we’re made up of three separate businesses: visas, immigration, and notary services. And I run sales, account management, partnerships, and marketing across those three businesses.
[00:03:23] Steve MacDonald: I’m gonna say right away, you look pretty calm for all the responsibility that you have.
[00:03:31] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I want.
[00:03:31] Liz Emmott: Must be that gin and tonic I had before I joined.
[00:03:34] Steve MacDonald: There you go. So here’s what I wanna, I wanna talk about and start us out with: it’s a given, right? There’s this, and I think you and I called it relentless market change that’s going on right now for a number of different reasons. But we don’t always talk about what that means for revenue leadership. What does that mean for how we are approaching our go-to-market strategy and carving out success within this relentless market change? So I’d love to get your perspective on that to get us started here.
[00:04:06] Liz Emmott: Yeah. Look, for sure. I’ve been around for a few years now, and the tools available at a salesperson’s fingertips today. It’s both fantastic and slightly terrifying. And the speed at which it changes. You make a choice to bring in a new tech tool to help with your go-to-market motion, and you’re worried that within a couple of months it’s gonna be obsolete and that somebody will be bringing in the next tool and you’re gonna miss out. Also, it has an impact as well on the quality of the salespeople that we’re seeing now, because it does make sales, in a way, much easier, because you can get things out there much more quickly. But it also means you’re saturating the market, because everybody is doing the same thing.
[00:05:00] Liz Emmott: So I think the real trick and the real thing that we need to overcome now, number one, how do we differentiate when the market is so flooded? Number two is: how do we use and zoom in on the salespeople’s skill sets to make sure they’re still actually selling, rather than relying on technology to do everything for them?
[00:05:25] Liz Emmott: It’s a conundrum. In some ways, it really helps us, and I think it’s certainly in what I’m doing today; it helps me quickly identify who I should be going after. I can send out multiple emails that nobody ever needs to touch. I can follow those up with calls. But am I still getting that quality? Do I still have the quality of the salesperson to differentiate? What’s happening in their sort of whole marketplace is driving some of that quality down.
[00:05:54] Steve MacDonald: That quality being driven down is one reason why this is happening. I’ve run this by a whole bunch of CROs ’cause a gentleman said this to me about two months ago on the podcast. He said, “Steve, in this market, what’s happening is it’s harder and harder to get access to the executives that we’ve always tried to get ahold of. The time it takes to get access to those executives is longer and longer. And when we do get a meeting with them, it’s shorter and shorter.”
[00:06:24] Steve MacDonald: He said, basically, the entire process is being squeezed, and so the quality is an issue there, the availability for them to be doing so much more of their research before they even wanna talk to us, and that’s, the self-buying journey is well documented. How do you train, how do you set up a revenue organization where access to the executives is harder than ever, fewer and farther between, and shorter when it comes?
[00:06:53] Liz Emmott: Well, I have to say, within our business, a lot of our decision-makers are not at the executive level. So I do think that helps us. One benefit we have as a business is that it’s not something you can buy. You have to have what we offer, and if you don’t take what we offer, the implications can be quite severe. Now, a lot of businesses don’t have that luxury, and I think that is a luxury. But certainly what I’m thinking about in our business is that we don’t have a huge number of competitors. There are obviously a number out there, but as I said, this is something that you have to do. This has to be managed in a certain way. Our challenge is thinking more about how we tailor that message to individual buyers in individual ICP opportunities, so we get their attention above our competitors.
[00:08:01] Liz Emmott: If you think about moving people from one place to another, our big industry is pharmaceuticals and oil and gas. A pharmaceutical company has far different implications than an oil and gas company if immigration goes wrong, or if they don’t get people to market quickly. Our challenge is around getting in front of- sometimes the fact that our people are not senior enough, our decision-makers are not senior enough, actually makes it difficult rather than the other way around. If that makes sense. Does that make sense?
[00:08:35] Steve MacDonald: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We all wanna be able to move up to the true decision-makers and the ones that actually say yes or no. That’s an issue in so many different companies. But you just started down a trail there, and you said our big verticals, they’re very different, and the implications of not having a service like yours are very different and very unique.
[00:08:56] Steve MacDonald: The title here is The Revenue Logic of Customer Obsession, and you just opened up the door. How do you see, in terms of understanding the voice of your customer, their true challenges, how they operate, how your services allow them to operate? How important is that to differentiate your company over and above the actual services that you provide?
[00:09:18] Liz Emmott: It’s absolutely critical, and this is, I think, one of the hardest things to build. Now, we have a number of people in our organization, and I’m not one of them, by the way, who are true experts around everything. I’m in the middle of a firm of lawyers. This is what they do and how I’m challenging the organization, because I can’t do this myself. I don’t know the first thing apart from having been through immigration myself. I remember being very confused by the whole thing. I don’t even know where to start with this, personally. I have to leverage the expertise in my organization to educate my people, but also help my prospects understand that we understand their business better than they do.
[00:10:14] Liz Emmott: The way in which we’re doing that at the moment, and I’ve set up a whole new marketing organization within CIBT. It’s been in place only for a couple of months. But one of the sort of pillars that they’re working on is about getting this sort of ambassadorial voice out into the marketplace and helping us to gain credibility in a marketplace where, frankly, we’re quite a small player competing against the Big Four consulting firms.
[00:10:48] Liz Emmott: So, being able to really articulate and understand and speak the language of our customers and our prospects is actually the only way that we’re gonna win. Because nobody got fired for hiring EY, right? We’re up against that. So, we have to be able to demonstrate that we know our customers or our prospects or your industry or this part of your industry better than you do, and this is why you need to trust us. So, you know, on the one hand, I’m building a machine. It’s a numbers game, it’s a numbers game, it’s a numbers game. But on the other half, the other side, I’m having to really go into a lot of detail about, yeah, but why? Yeah, but why? So what? Why us? Why does it matter? Why do we understand more than somebody else?
[00:11:41] Liz Emmott: If we don’t get that right, and I’ve got the right people to do it in terms of the expertise, and from a marketing perspective, I have the right person to orchestrate it, but I want to be able to replicate it across the organization in different markets, have different spokespeople. That’s gonna really help us to build that credibility and grow revenue.
[00:12:05] Steve MacDonald: You just made me think of something because another CEO on the podcast said, “Steve, we’re not in enough of the right rooms at the right time, talking to the right people, asking the right questions.” It’s very profound, actually, when you kind of dissect that and being proactive about being in the right room with the right people at the right time and asking the right questions. But what it begs, and where that conversation went, ’cause you said, “And how do I scale it?” Insights, learning, things that we understand about our customers and their verticals and their business uniquely. One pharmaceutical company isn’t like another.
[00:12:41] Steve MacDonald: How do those insights live in the mind of the go-to-market team, not in the mind of a few people? The biggest problem, I think, is extending what we know into every aspect of what team members are doing, because high-performance companies have high-performance people. How do you think about going about solving that?
[00:13:09] Liz Emmott: Yeah, and that is a challenge for us because we have a small number of spokespeople that go out into the industry. The way I was thinking about it, actually, is that when we were speaking earlier, we talked about the fact that my product is actually my service delivery team. That is what I have to package up and sell. But my service delivery team are fee-earning individuals, so I can’t afford to have them spending too much time. They have their own book of business, and it flows up into revenue. They don’t report directly to me, but that is another source of revenue for the business.
[00:13:55] Liz Emmott: The marketing pillar that I mentioned earlier will do a lot of that, I think, to amplify that voice. But we also need to ensure the knowledge these guys have is communicated effectively to the sales team. It’s not without conflict because lawyers, immigration lawyers in particular, are very, quite rightly, very proud of what they do, and they’ve studied a long time to do it. The feeling can be a little bit, “Who’s this jumped-up salesperson who thinks they can go and talk about things that only I know?”
[00:14:32] Liz Emmott: So, again, you have a bit of a conflict there. But I think this is where what I’ve done about this within CIBT is that the COO and I are joined at the hip. We’re like the extension of the same person. We have very complementary but different skill sets.
[00:14:44] Liz Emmott: And I think what we’re doing together is driving our organizations together and getting them to really understand that you’re really good at this, this person is really good at that. And actually, there is no conflict. If we do this together, then we, the royal we, will be successful. And it’s a culture change.
[00:14:45] Liz Emmott: It’s not like that now. But that is one of the biggest challenges we have: driving toward an organization where we, as salespeople, become an extension of our lawyer colleagues.
[00:15:39] Steve MacDonald: You even gave the physical kind of visual of coming together. I don’t know if you remember, but when we first met and were talking about what we wanted to cover on this podcast, right? And I asked you a question. I said, “What do you think are the two greatest challenges you have for creating long-term sustainable growth?” I didn’t ask that at the very beginning. But I’ve asked it about 125 times now, and the number one answer by far, number one challenge, is internal alignment. And you just said it needs to be cultural. It’s not right now. It needs to come from the leadership.
[00:16:14] Steve MacDonald: But bringing the different go-to-market teams together, so that we’re all heading in the same direction. It’s classic: marketing promises one thing, sales talks about something else, and then we actually deliver a third thing. Unfortunately, that’s still very alive today. It seems like a very basic thing.
[00:16:33] Steve MacDonald: The question I want to ask you is, I had another woman who was at a go-to-market agency, has worked with hundreds of companies, and she said, “In order to get that alignment, the voice of the customer is the number one change agent in a business.” ‘Cause it is the voice that nobody can argue with. It is the highest voice of authority in the business, higher than the board, higher than the CEO, higher than a founder, right? We’re talking about customer obsession here. How does the role of customer obsession help that alignment and help bring teams together? Do you see it the same way I’ve just framed it? And you don’t have to, but I’m just asking the question.
[00:17:13] Liz Emmott: What I see in a lot of organizations, and I think this has been consistent across my entire career, is that there’s often a lot of conflict about who actually owns the customer. Who is doing what for the customer? This is probably amplified even more in a business where your service delivery team is your product because they’re dealing with the customer. It’s not actually the first time I’ve worked in that sort of service environment. But you get to the point where operations is like, “It’s my customer,” and sales is like, “It’s my customer.” And the challenge for me is, I think we all intrinsically want what’s best for the customer.
[00:17:59] Liz Emmott: We absolutely do. Particularly when you’re working in the service industry. I think people don’t work in the industry unless they believe that. But where I think companies in general could improve around that is just seeing beyond yourself and your function in this, breaking down some of the barriers that we, as human beings, put up ourselves just because we want to retain control of something.
[00:18:31] Liz Emmott: Right? And again, we talk a lot about attribution, and that’s always a big word. There’s no attribution. We don’t know where we’re being successful; we don’t know where we’re not. But a lot of attribution in a lot of people’s minds is, “I did that. That was me. I got that customer. I found them; therefore, I should be rewarded for that.” This is behavior that I have seen over and over again in every company I’ve ever worked in. And if people, I think, just got over themselves and genuinely thought about what the customer wants, then they would make different decisions.
[00:19:13] Liz Emmott: I’m grappling with this personally now because, as I mentioned to you, I own client management globally across the three businesses. But I’m starting to wonder whether that’s the right thing, and whether it should actually sit with me. All of it, some of it. And it’s quite hard because when you’re trying to do a transformation like the one that I’m doing, and I’ve used this argument so many times when the CEO or the board try and take me off on a different tangent or try and get me to think differently.
[00:19:47] Liz Emmott: I’m like, “No, I have to have all this. I have to have visibility of every single piece of this. Because if I don’t, then we’re not gonna grow the revenue, we’re not gonna get bigger, and it just won’t happen.” But I’m actually starting to question that in this organization as I really start to [00:20:05] think about not what’s best for me, or my people and their need to continue to own these customers, but what is the model that is actually going to be the ultimate and the best way of looking after that customer, both commercially and from a service perspective? Where does that sit?
[00:20:25] Steve MacDonald: Instead of saying we’re focusing on revenue, then what happens is we focus on a lot of internal processes. We focus on our compensation systems. We focus on all kinds of things. We can spend a lot of time doing that, and we really do. We have to spend time on that. But if we first and foremost focus on the customer- you said it, focus on the customer- that leads you to make different decisions.
[00:20:48] Steve MacDonald: And we have to believe that those decisions are the right decisions. If they’re right for the customer, they’re right for our company. If they’re right for the customer, it may mean moving some responsibility outside your group. But if that’s right for the customer, that’s right for the business ultimately, and it’s right for all of us. It’s the ultimate in a team sport. We’re not a team of superstars. We’re a team, and that team has to show up every single day.
[00:21:16] Steve MacDonald: It goes back to our first conversation. You were focused on the team. You were so focused on people, and you started our conversation before I hit the record button today talking so proudly about the team that you’ve put in place in the different departments that roll up to you, and that you’re so proud of who’s there and what they’re doing. A leader needs to know they don’t have all the answers, that they need a team that makes them better, and that they need to make decisions independently of the team itself. That’s a very selfless perspective. I just want to, like, raise my hand and say I love that you said that.
[00:21:51] Liz Emmott: It’s tough.
[00:21:52] Steve MacDonald: Oh, it’s very tough. It’s very tough. And I guess the biggest question I have left for you is: we’ve covered so much territory here that our human brains are proven to remember only two or three things at a time. So when we’re in a sales meeting and talk for 45 straight minutes, only two or three things are gonna be remembered. What would be the single most important thing that you want the other C-suite executives that are gonna be consuming this podcast to take away from our conversation?
[00:22:24] Liz Emmott: I think it’s about, and we touched on this, it’s about not believing you can do everything yourself. As a revenue leader, you have to look at the organization as a whole, and you have to make decisions based on things outside your control. And I think the most important thing is around the collaboration with the other people in the organization that can help you to be successful. That is the single biggest thing for me.
[00:22:58] Steve MacDonald: So I love how brief that is, and to focus on the people internally and culturally building that, I want to ask if this is tied to this. Because remember when I said that the number one answer to the “what are your two greatest challenges” is internal alignment. The second one was a lack of focus on the voice of the customer. The third one was the lack of trust internally and externally. My question to you is: the focus on people really is to build trust. We all know those trust exercises we used to do, like decades ago. “Fall back, I’ll get you.”
[00:23:31] Steve MacDonald: But, like, yes, if we don’t trust each other from one team to the next within our team, to our leaders that they have our backs, is building trust internally one of the greatest challenges to growing a business? Am I taking what you’re saying away properly?
[00:23:48] Liz Emmott: No, well, I think it is because the customer sees it. We had an interesting conversation at one of our exec meetings a few weeks ago, where a colleague of mine said, “In my former company, they used to say, ‘When you go to the board meeting, you all have to pretend like you get on really well, and see if you can make a few jokes and all this sort of thing, and make it look like you’re a really cohesive group.'”
[00:24:15] Liz Emmott: And he then said, “Now I work with this group, I know exactly what that leader was looking for, because this group of people, they sort of exude this trust in each other. We almost finish each other’s sentences. We’re a true team who are driving towards a single goal.” So the fact that we’ve got that at the executive level, I think, really helps us to now drive that culturally within our organization. Because what then happens, so I’m gonna flip to another. You said I was brief. I’m gonna expand now. But I, I sort of think about other successes in my career: if you show up as a team that is obviously a group of people who like and trust each other, that resonates outwardly to your clients as well.
[00:25:07] Liz Emmott: Whether you’re in a client review or whether you’re at a new customer meeting, your customer or your prospects think, “I wanna work with this group of people ’cause they’re a really cool group of people who obviously enjoy what they do, and I wanna be part of that.”
[00:25:24] Liz Emmott: The other example I was gonna say was in the days when I was back at Amex, I had a stint as an elephant hunter, where we used to go after the big billion-dollar deals. I mean, as the sort of lead salesperson in that particular role, I’d only ever open and close. In fact, sometimes I didn’t open because I’d get an exec to do it. But it was always such a team effort, getting each person to talk about their area of expertise. And the biggest account I ever signed, when I sent out my sort of thank-you note after we won the deal- there were 63 people who had been involved in that deal, either behind the scenes or in the presentations or doing the pricing, all these different areas. 63 people. Wow. Took two years as well. I think what you have inside reflects outside to your customer, and that helps you win.
[00:26:23] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, I wish we had another hour and a half, because I know there’s another hour and a half of content inside of you, but the mission of this podcast, when we started it out about two and a half years ago, was to bring the C-suite voice together across the world. So we interview C-suite executives from all over the world, all over Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada, the US. The goal is that if we bring our different perspectives, insights, and experiences together, we can help one another.
[00:26:59] Steve MacDonald: It’s like that collaboration that you’re talking about internally, and I call it the rising tide that lifts all boats, and you were an amazing part of that rising tide today, Liz, and I just wanna say thank you for coming on the podcast.
[00:27:11] Liz Emmott: Thank you for having me.