Episode #335:

Stephanie Crockett, President and CEO at Eric Mower + Associates, explains why customer obsession should influence decisions across the entire organization. She explores how customer intelligence can align teams, reduce risk, strengthen trust, and support bolder decisions. Stephanie also shows how CMOs can turn the voice of the customer into greater strategic influence and sustainable growth.

“That’s where the revenue comes. It’s about creating products and services, front of the house and back of the house, where all of the things that a customer experiences demonstrate that obsession with their needs.” – Stephanie Crockett

Customer obsession becomes a revenue strategy when insight shapes more than marketing. Stephanie explains how continuous customer intelligence can reveal operational issues, align leaders around shared evidence, reduce the risk behind major investments, and give teams confidence to make bolder choices. She also explores why brand, demand, trust, and emotional connection must work together before B2B buyers create their shortlists.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] 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 conversation with Stephanie Crockett. Now, Stephanie, you are the CEO of a large agency, Mower, and you started out in the agency years ago in account management. You’ve worked your way up to CEO, and what I love about our conversation is that the topic is the revenue logic of customer obsession, and you guys are customer-obsessed about CMOs. That’s who your customer is, and helping them serve their customers. As the CEO of the company, you have to be revenue-focused, and if there’s anything that’s happened over the last decade with CMOs, it’s that we’ve been beaten over the head in terms of: you’ve got to be focused on revenue. You can’t just be, “We’re in lead generation, and we’re all about positioning and the brand and long-term,” and those are incredibly important things.

[00:01:06] Steve MacDonald: But you have to be connected to pipeline. You have to be connected to revenue, and the board’s going to hold you accountable to that. That’s what you help your CMOs live in, that world where I talk to CMOs all day long and on this podcast, and it’s amazing how many are feeling like they’re an imposter. They’re feeling like they are not having a seat at the table, that they’re looked upon as just one of the largest cost centers in the business, and they’re just as good as their last lead, and it’s so different these days. So the emerging role of the CMO, and how they play within the executive suite to set the stage for the company so that customer obsession drives revenue. I would love to hear a bit more about your background before we dig into the customer obsession conversation.

[00:02:01] Stephanie Crockett: Sure. Not as exciting to talk about me as it is about the company, but as you said, Steve, I really grew up here at Mower. I started my career in account management, and I’ve been with the company for over 22 years. Throughout that time, my job was to be obsessed with understanding our clients’ customers and how to generate leads and the revenue they need. Over time, wow, has that shifted, right? It really has created such an intense obligation and accountability to those CMOs for revenue and that return on investment. And the way we approach that as an agency is that you have to start with a thorough understanding of the customer from every angle of the organization, not just marketing, to make sure everything you’re doing is driven by customer demand.

[00:02:55] Stephanie Crockett: That’s where the revenue comes. It’s about creating products and services and front of the house and back of the house, and all of the things that a customer experiences need to demonstrate that obsession with their needs, and the marketing lead, the CMO, is often responsible for that customer experience and really being held, again, accountable for the investments that they’re making in all of the ways in which we’re communicating with customers and how that generates revenue.

[00:03:26] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting you said that they’re really in charge of the customer. In a B2B organization, we don’t have titles like chief customer officer or chief experience officer. And there’s really nobody. Nobody is tasked with it; nobody, at the end of the year, is held accountable or has their compensation tied to understanding the voice of the customer.

[00:03:48] Steve MacDonald: But just to put an emphasis on this, and then I have a question on that, because there’s a big void in the world of B2B on the voice of the customer. But Forrester did a study two years ago on customer obsession, and they found that customer-obsessed companies had 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% better retention. So customer obsession has revenue logic. Customer obsession is tied to the bottom line. Yet in a B2B organization, nobody’s in charge of it. Like.

[00:04:19] Stephanie Crockett: You’re right. You’re right. It’s interesting. I think something you said is so interesting, though, Steve, because the CMO isn’t rewarded for it. They aren’t necessarily held accountable for it, but they are responsible for it, because to produce marketing that delivers results, you have to be obsessed with the customer. You have to understand their voice to be successful, and the statistics from Gartner are 100% supported by so many other studies out there, including a study we did. Our philosophy around relationships with customers and between brands is what we call making fierce friends, and that’s based on the notion that a relationship has to be a fierce friendship built on trust, relevance, perfection, and all the things.

[00:05:03] Stephanie Crockett: Our studies demonstrate two to three times more likely to buy more, to recommend more, to have a longer relationship. So it’s all in support of that sort of connection with that customer and how critically important it is. The CMO, while again, they aren’t necessarily being recognized for it, they are being held responsible for it, as well as so many other things. Their job has just, they keep, like, kind of throwing things into the job description and making it even more fun to have the role of a CMO today.

[00:05:35] Steve MacDonald: So one of the things, too, is that everything, every application for them as marketers has a foundation on the customer. But one of the superpowers of the CMO role is how they support all the different departments internally.

[00:05:53] Steve MacDonald: Sales enablement is all about understanding the voice of the customer. Customer success is all about understanding the voice of the customer. The legs of the go-to-market strategy that are responsible for revenue production in the company are all founded on that. So here’s a question: most CMOs that I talk to are so busy they don’t have the time to even get the proactive things on their list. A lot of them will start out when they take on the CMO role, they’ll start, and they’ll call customers, and they’ll say, “This isn’t a sales conversation, but I’m just here to learn,” and then the calls stop because they’ve got their CMO role to do. And what happens is the voice of the customer stops, and it just comes through sales transcripts and customer success conversations, but those are sales motions.

[00:06:45] Stephanie Crockett: Absolutely. Like, absolutely.

[00:06:46] Steve MacDonald: How does a company stay customer obsessed?

[00:06:51] Stephanie Crockett: It’s such a great question, Steve. You know, the one thing that I think is so critical for the CMO, and you talked, of course, about the sales organization and that part of their engagement with customers. And you made a good point that often, when those customers’ conversations come in, it’s at the point of sale. It’s not necessarily at the point of retention. It’s not necessarily at the point of renewal. Those things are so critical that marketing absolutely plays a role. But how you’re staying fresh with that voice of the customer, very often, because the CMO is so busy, they hire people like us. They hire agencies. We have an in-house research team. We do that work all day long, and we know how critical it is.

[00:07:31] Stephanie Crockett: We have one particular client that we’ve been working with, that we’ve been their agency for several years. We began the relationship doing customer research. They’re always talking to customers. But what we were learning was that we were having such great results: extraordinary sales figures, 149% year-over-year increases in revenue and sales. Monster numbers. Then things started to fall off a little bit, and we’re like, “We’re still staying fresh on understanding the customer,” but we started to learn so much about the importance of talking to the customer on everything that wasn’t just the sale, that wasn’t just marketing. This was about the customer experience. This became information that has now been delivered to every other aspect of the organization because they realized it wasn’t a sales problem. This wasn’t a pricing problem. This was an inventory issue, and it became an aha moment that the whole organization needs to pay attention to the voice of the customer.

[00:08:31] Stephanie Crockett: It’s not just marketing’s responsibility. It shouldn’t be, and now it should be informing these other aspects of the organization. This was an operational thing that they needed to solve. This wasn’t a marketing solution. This was an operational solution. So now you have the entire organization being like, “What’s that? Oh my gosh, we need to be doing this all the time.” The challenge is that, again, the CMO has so much to do, but only so much to do it with, and is being asked all the time to do more with less. And while the CFO is arguing for return on investment, they’re never picking up the phone and talking to a customer. They don’t understand how important that is in uncovering not only sales solutions, but retention, et cetera.

[00:09:17] Steve MacDonald: So the importance, and I love that you have an entire research, like, voice of the customer department internally, because your clients don’t, and we’re not set up that way. What you just said there is that CMOs are being asked to do more with less. Everybody, especially in the day of AI, everybody’s expecting you to be able to do a lot more, a lot faster, with fewer people. The board and C-suite perspective is to save costs, and we’re still going to be able to produce a lot of value and quality. It’s getting harder and harder to do the kind of things that you’re talking about, even if we know that they’re foundational.

[00:09:54] Steve MacDonald: The other thing that I wanted to bring up that you started out on, like how customer research became a solution that went through a different department that has nothing to do with marketing. Usually you don’t think it does. But all marketing and all different departments are interconnected. The number one challenge in every B2B organization is internal alignment. I want to get your opinion on this: how it connects back to the voice of the customer. So I’m talking to this woman, and she’s a CMO, a three-time B2B CMO, and now a partner at a go-to-market, a B2B go-to-market consultancy firm. She said, “We work with hundreds of companies. Absolutely, the number one issue is that the different departments are not aligned.” So they do an alignment study when they first come out, and we found this out, too. We ask all C-suite executives, “What are your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?” Alignment.

[00:10:45] Steve MacDonald: Internal alignment was the number one challenge by far. So here’s where it comes back to what you were just talking about: this woman said the number one change agent inside of an organization is the voice of the customer. Everybody will listen to the voice of the customer versus the opinion of the CEO or CRO or CFO or the one loud board member. Everybody has an opinion, but only one counts. Have you seen how the voice of the customer can align across departments, mm-hmm, and bring alignment inside of a company?

[00:11:23] Stephanie Crockett: No question. No question. And I think the example I was giving you, Steve, is such a perfect example of that, because so often when clients are talking about, or they’re trying to identify the importance of that alignment, they’re often just thinking about that, about sales and marketing. But it really needs to be in those two departments. But it needs to be across the board, in part because of what you said about how marketers are being asked to do more with less. Part of our role is to help them prioritize what that more-with-less is, especially with AI and all of these tools at our disposal.

[00:11:55] Stephanie Crockett: We are all in on spend your dollar, spend your agency time focused on voice of customer, focusing on those insights. We can get robots to do some of the execution work, like some of those things. So if we’re trying to prioritize your limited budget and your limited resources, let’s really hone in on the things that make the most sense. When you see the impact of that voice of the customer, you’re 100% right. The number of times we’ve been in a room and you’re presenting and everybody’s like, “Ooh,” like they’re reading these quotes, they’re seeing the verbatims coming out of the studies, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this was such an eye-opener,” that a CFO will, or CEO will, quote it in an earnings call.

[00:12:35] Stephanie Crockett: It becomes so powerful, and so that’s where CMOs need to be focused on really, again, aligning not only the people in the room, but their resources and their dollars towards those efforts, because it’s the answer to that alignment. They can all align around that voice of the customer as long as they’re not just focusing on sales, but they’re focusing across the entire organization, from product development to inventory control and everything in between.

[00:13:04] Stephanie Crockett: The number of times clients have said to us, “We built a faster widget.” And we’re like, “Great. Did the customers want it to be faster? Were they asking for faster?” “No, just some engineer figured out how to make it faster.” Okay. Then that engineer isn’t customer-obsessed, right? They’re creating things that they don’t necessarily need, and then marketing has to figure out how to sell it. If the entire organization is aligned around that idea of really being customer-obsessed, that’s where you’re all kind of singing from the same hymnal, and that’s where the magic happens.

[00:13:36] Steve MacDonald: So I’m curious about how you convince CMOs, and I know when you have conversations with CMOs about the importance of the voice of the customer, they’re going to immediately say yes. But no one else in the organization is asking them to focus on the voice of the customer. They’re not being held accountable, like everything we said before. You have to sell CMOs on focusing time and effort to have you do that for them. Is that a hard sales strategy? How are you convincing CMOs to spend, sure, more time on the voice of the customer to connect that revenue logic? How difficult is that, and how do you do it?

[00:14:16] Stephanie Crockett: Yeah, it’s a fair question. I think one of the challenges that happens is when we talk about voice of customer, there’s always that immediate, especially if you’re a new CMO coming into a role, there’s that immediate concern about how much is this going to cost, how long is it going to take, I need to get some, some things moving. I’m eager and ready to go. I don’t think it’s a tough sell as long as we can address those issues, and again, we have so many tools at our disposal now that enable us to get to insights faster and quicker, and produce results and things they can rely on. But the other part of it is that the dynamic has changed a bit.

[00:14:52] Stephanie Crockett: Everybody understands the importance of trust in a relationship between a brand and a customer. So to have a trusting relationship, you have to demonstrate that you understand your audience. They’re never going to trust you if they think that you don’t get them, and so that trust is always at the foundation. But what I’m seeing now, Steve, over the last couple of years in particular, is the importance of eliminating risk, because there’s so much to be afraid of now, because every dollar is accounted for, every single investment that’s made, they’re being held to such standards that I think the risk elimination, and partly because of the macro environment that we’re in, both economically and otherwise, that there are so many things that are pressure points.

[00:15:42] Stephanie Crockett: When you can eliminate risk, either with an agency partner that you know has your back and is going to be there and bring a team forward that knows their stuff, that you can rely on, to understand the customer, and knowing that having that voice helps you eliminate that risk. It’s that old adage of “Measure twice, cut once.” We’re like, “You need to measure like 18 times,” because we don’t have any more cuts left if we can; there is no wood left in the pile if we get rid of it now, because the budgets are so tight. So that, I think, is a powerful argument that a lot of CMOs can really relate to.

[00:16:16] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting, in the world of B2B, we forget that more than 50% of the decision-making is emotional, mm. And a significant portion of that is tied to risk. The purchase process can take a year or more because it’s a seminal decision. And there’s risk involved in that, and so if I’m hearing correctly, what you’re saying is to reduce the risk because we’re going to understand the voice of the customer. That’s going to help us make the decisions that aren’t as risky.

[00:16:46] Steve MacDonald: We’re going to feel more confident. Absolutely. We’re going to make better decisions. If I’m reading that right, is that the good interpretation of what you’re saying?

[00:16:53] Stephanie Crockett: 100%, right. Because I think people feel more confident when I’m not just throwing something at the wall and seeing what sticks when it comes to campaign concepts or even tactical solutions and strategies. If I know that it’s really baked in this solid customer research that I’ve done, and I’ve got that voice of customer, I’ve talked to them, I feel confident that I know what they need and what’s going to resonate with them, then I can feel good about putting something in front of our audiences and in front of my CEO, in front of my CFO.

[00:17:26] Stephanie Crockett: I feel good about making these smart choices because they are backed by this research, and so that becomes a bit of a, not a safety net, but almost a security blanket. I’ve got this research next to me that I feel really comfortable with, and hopefully that’s coming in conjunction with a partner that you feel really solid with, that brings that same feeling of kind of safety to you as well.

[00:17:49] Steve MacDonald: It was interesting. McKinsey did a study two years ago, and they found that only 15% of companies use the voice of the customer to make strategic decisions. 15%. What you’re talking about is that it gives you confidence, reduces risk, and provides the security to make the right decision. You could look at it the other way. You’re creating risk if you’re making decisions without the voice of the customer. You are, I completely agree, increasing your risk factor.

[00:18:18] Stephanie Crockett: Yeah, absolutely. I think the one thing I want to make clear is that reducing that risk and feeling more comfortable and confident doesn’t mean you’re taking an easy, safe route. Because so much in B2B, we know how important it is to break through the proverbial clutter, right? You have to take some chances. You have to be risky in how you bring creativity to light. You need to be creative and push the envelope. We are the type of agency a client comes to all the time: “We wanna do this,” and we’re like, “That’s not the right strategy, and here’s why.”

[00:18:53] Stephanie Crockett: The reason why we wanna go this route is that we have that voice of the customer in mind as well. It enables us to be a little bolder. It enables the client to take some chances because, again, they feel so confident about it being foundational in that voice of customer. They can push the envelope a little bit and not just do the same old thing that they’ve always done, because they have the backup to really enable those, those bolder moves.

[00:19:21] Steve MacDonald: You had talked earlier about how we have so much more technology and tools to measure. How is the technology helping you create the measures and the right KPIs around voice of customer, where before it was this big, ethereal thing that was hard to wrangle? How are you helping to wrangle and make it more measurable and concrete?

[00:19:45] Stephanie Crockett: I think there are so many amazing tools out there to the point of it being a little overwhelming. The tech stack, if you will, it’s gotten so big and can be a little cumbersome. But I think one of the most important things is to establish upfront for a CMO to really, truly understand, for them to have buy-in with their agency partner, with their own team, with their CFO, with their CEO, with all of those folks, of exactly what they’re being held accountable to, then insisting that in order to do that and deliver a solid campaign, they have to have the tools at their disposal to measure exactly that.

[00:20:20] Stephanie Crockett: In B2B, a sales cycle is so complex because of the distribution. There could be channel partners. It’s not easy to get attribution from one thing to the next, and that is the holy grail. I put a banner ad on this website. How many widgets did it sell for me? Right? Like, ta-da, that’s what everybody wants. But that’s not easy when you don’t have the budget, the resources, or the right tech stack to make it happen.

[00:20:47] Stephanie Crockett: Right now, the other important piece where technology is really coming into play, and I mentioned this earlier, is some of the work that we’re enabling to just get some of the things done faster and easier that don’t need to be so laborious, so that we can allocate resources in the right places. We, of course, like any organization, we’re human first, but we are enabled by AI in the areas where we can help to automate some processes and things, and some of the work to provide that scale and resources available to marketing, so that they’re really able to, again, prioritize in the places where they can measure the things that really are going to result in that information that they need and data around what’s going to drive the greatest revenue.

[00:21:36] Steve MacDonald: I keep hearkening back, so I’m remembering things that I had as my questions on things you had said earlier. You had talked about, like, when you’re selling into a CMO, into this environment you’re describing, and they’re like, “I got a lot of ideas. How much is this going to cost? How long is it going to take?” The voice of the customer isn’t a project. No. It doesn’t have an end date. It’s ongoing. It’s never-ending.

[00:21:57] Steve MacDonald: But is that a mentality that you have to make sure that you convince your clients of, or are they right on board? “Nope, absolutely. We gotta keep this up. This is a constant drumbeat.” Where is the thinking as you’re starting to work with your clients or in your new business in terms of voice of the customer as a project, voice of the customer as ongoing lifeblood of the organization?

[00:22:19] Stephanie Crockett: I think it’s a bit of a mixed bag at the moment, Steve, honestly. Looking at it, I’m just sort of like Rolodexing through all of our top B2B clients right now. I’d say probably 50 to 60% are continuously always on, thinking about voice of customer, obsessed at every angle, right? And then probably the remaining percentage is like, “We did a brand study, and we’ve done this voice of customer, and we did it a few years ago, and let’s think about the time that we wanna renew that, and we’re going to do a new study,” and they’re not thinking about all the ways.

[00:22:50] Stephanie Crockett: Now, with that said, there are so many ways to get voice of customer through just ongoing work, right? It doesn’t have to be a big brand study. It doesn’t have to be quant. There are a lot of opportunities to do that through AI tools. We are doing a lot of work in this synthetic space right now, and also through the platforms that you’re working on. They can provide a lot of data and information to you, and certainly your own customer data, that I think we just have to weave in, in some cases, trying to push that when the client isn’t thinking about it. I think there are a few different ways to skin the cat on how we approach the voice of the customer for those who might not have that philosophy. We weave it in as much as we can into the day-to-day work we’re doing and pull out as much information as possible.

[00:23:38] Steve MacDonald: It’s almost like a mentality shift inside of the organization. In the B2B world, buyers are waiting longer and longer to talk to us, and they’re making more and more of their decisions. I’m talking to more and more CROs about how we’ve got to be out earlier. If we’re not known and we’re not trusted, when the day one shortlist closes and we’re not on it, we’re out.

[00:24:02] Stephanie Crockett: Right. We’re out.

[00:24:03] Steve MacDonald: We’re out. Spending time and energy understanding customers builds trust. You get me. You understand me. You’re not a vendor just pitching. You’re actually helping me understand, and you’re consulting. Building trust is a huge part of the B2B success equation, and you have to make time for it; the voice of the customer is a huge part of how you build trust. Are you seeing a shift as the market shifts and buyers are waiting longer to even talk to you? Are you seeing a shift in the mentality of your clients in how they have to approach the market differently?

[00:24:45] Stephanie Crockett: For sure. For sure. I think that there is, without question, an understanding of the importance of trust. That seems to be pretty ubiquitous, which is really comforting. I think there also has been a shift over the last few years in that understanding of the importance of the emotional connection, that it isn’t just a rational buy, that people are making those decisions with both sides of their brain, so to speak.

[00:25:09] Stephanie Crockett: That’s the part that is exciting to see, the dynamics and the way that they’re communicating with customers change because they do understand the importance of trust, and that’s just so critical for them to get on that short list, to understand them. That also has really helped brands understand the importance of brand. That has to be foundational. You have to be out there in the ether and known and thought of, so that when it comes time to buy, you are in the consideration set, and it can’t just be always going to one end of the funnel; you have to think about it through the entire funnel.

[00:25:49] Stephanie Crockett: And so we are definitely seeing that shift. I think that’s the piece where there’s so much conversation about trying to get CMOs to be in lockstep on that front with CFOs, because the resources have to be there to support that. That’s not to say you have to triple budgets immediately, because we know that’s not feasible, especially with the economy the way it is right now. But more importantly, it’s a shared understanding of how you have to find that harmony between brand and demand, how those all connect, and how trust is foundational to all of them. I don’t think there’s anybody that thinks, “We don’t really need that. We just got to hammer sales. We just have to hammer leads.”

[00:26:34] Stephanie Crockett: I hear all the time, I hear it from our competitors, you’ve got a lot of agencies that are going low cost, AI, doing everything. That’s it. But the number one thing they talk about is synthetic. The number one thing they talk about is speed to get insight. So even in that environment, when they’re going for a low-cost agency solution, they’re still bringing the importance of customer insight to the forefront, because synthetic is changing the game for us when it comes to that voice of customer or robot customer, and how we bring that to the table.

[00:27:07] Steve MacDonald: We’ve covered a ton of territory here. But I want to give you an opportunity for the B2B C-suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast. Mm-hmm. If there was one thing that you wanted to make sure that they took away from our entire conversation, what’s the one most important thing you’d want them to know?

[00:27:26] Stephanie Crockett: I think the important thing is that the role of the CMO has certainly gotten very complicated, and they know it. They’re feeling it. But the importance of that role isn’t just to think about what you’re learning about customers and view it only through the lens of what marketing is delivering. There is so much rich information in what you’re pulling in about customers that can and should inform so many other strategic decisions within the organization. I think I’m of the philosophy that if you’re not invited to the table, but you’ve got the tastiest dish to bring, they’re going to let you in the door.

[00:28:05] Stephanie Crockett: If you’ve got the heaping yummy bowl of macaroni and cheese that everybody wants, and that’s coming in that voice of customer, they’re going to pull up a chair. So I think for CMOs that aren’t being given the opportunity to be at that strategic table, when you have that voice of customer that everybody can get around, that’s your entrée. That’s your, literally and figuratively, that’s your entrance piece, and so leverage it, because it will only benefit the organization and ultimately the marketing outcomes, which you’re being held accountable to.

[00:28:39] Steve MacDonald: You’ll never go wrong representing the single most important voice in the entire business.

[00:28:45] Stephanie Crockett: Right. Absolutely. Right? Absolutely.

[00:28:47] Steve MacDonald: So I got to tell you, the mission of this podcast is to bring different perspectives from different C-suite executives all over the world, and how we’re tackling the same challenges and the same problems, the same opportunities, the same AI, everything we all have. How are we carving out success? If we can bring the insights and education and perspectives together, then it’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were, absolutely, an amazing part of that rising tide today. Thank you so much. I just wanted to say thank you.

[00:29:18] Stephanie Crockett: Absolute pleasure.