Episode #259: 

Steve MacDonald, CEO and Founder at Content Strategies, explains why B2B growth often breaks down inside the company, not in the market. He explains why internal alignment is the most common issue and why most teams claim to be customer-first but fail to execute. He breaks down what the voice of the customer really means, why typical sales and success motions limit honesty, and also shows how to turn customer insight into usable, trust-building enablement.

“Trust was going to be the currency to close deals, and if you don’t have it, you don’t get onto that list upfront. When we bring in the voice of the customer and the voice of the market, we are giving our voice a chance to be trusted.” – Steve MacDonald

In this episode, Steve MacDonald explains how ABM performance improves when leaders stop guessing and start aligning teams around real customer truth. He shares why trust is earned before the first sales call, why voice-of-customer must sit outside sales pressure, and how AI makes insights usable in daily sales and marketing execution.

Follow Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn 

Follow host Ken Rutsky on LinkedIn 

[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Ken Rutsky: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m your guest host today, Ken Rutsky. Now, if you’re a regular listener, you’re well acquainted with our guest and normally your host, a man who needs no introduction here, Steve MacDonald. Hey, Steve. Welcome to your own show.

[00:00:23] Steve MacDonald: Thank you. It’s interesting to have the tables turned. I like it, though. I like it.

[00:00:28] Ken Rutsky: Now, of course, Steve has spent years interviewing hundreds of C-suite executives about growth, alignment, and go-to-market execution. You know what? I’m also proud to call Steve both a colleague and a friend. Uh, so it’s great to be here. Now, over that time, Steve’s chats with go-to-market execs like myself reveal some really interesting patterns. And what, to me, is the most striking is that growth challenges aren’t always caused by markets, competitors, or buyers. In fact, they rarely are, but they’re caused by internal alignment gaps and really weak operational use of the voice of the customer. Amazing. So we’re gonna flip the script.

[00:01:07] Ken Rutsky: Instead of Steve asking the questions, I’ll be putting them to him, unpacking everything he’s learned about things like why ABM breaks down and how AI can actually surmount the challenge of operationalizing the voice of the customer. Steve, you’ve asked these questions hundreds of times, and today you get to answer ’em, so welcome back to your own show again, Steve. Let’s get started.

[00:01:34] Steve MacDonald: Welcome back. I like it. I like it.

[00:01:37] Ken Rutsky: Alright, uh, so Steve, maybe we start by just simply asking you, and, you know, kind of open-ended. You’ve done hundreds of these calls, and what surprised you the most about where growth actually breaks down for B2B organizations?

[00:01:52] Steve MacDonald: What’s interesting, yeah, we’ve racked up over 250 interviews now with B2B C-suite executives, but we also work with clients and we run podcasts for them, and we’re interviewing their ideal customer profile, their lost deals, their deals in the pipeline, cold prospects, and then helping them in their go-to-market strategy. We’re really heavily involved in execution as well as just having these deep conversations with, well, you see kind of both that. The, um, we got it. Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. And the execution of it. Yeah.

[00:02:25] Steve MacDonald: And then I’m the Chief Sales Officer of my company as well, so we’re, you know, I’m in an ABM model, so we’re kind of deep in this from all angles here. I guess what was the biggest surprise for me is because we always arrive at a topic for the podcasts that we do by asking a very simple question of the guests, like, what do you see as your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?

[00:02:46] Steve MacDonald: I’m used to doing SWOT analysis and different things, and the biggest threats are outside of our walls or virtual walls of our company, right? We point elsewhere at the market and the trends and our competition and where our technology is and all that kind of stuff. But when I asked this question hundreds of times now, the answer almost always is internal. And the number one challenge that over like 70% of those C-suite executives said was internal alignment, like the biggest challenge.

[00:03:21] Steve MacDonald: Here’s the good news out of this. We spend a lot of time thinking about how do we persuade the relationships, the partners, the customers that we have, the core prospects in our business. How do we persuade them to come to our point of view and what we should be thinking about first and foremost is what that point of view is? But how do we align? It’s very typical that even sales and marketing aren’t aligned, and buyers complain all the time. What we read online and what it says on your website and then what the sales people are talking about and then what customer success is actually delivering to us feels like three different things.

[00:03:59] Steve MacDonald: That should be the easiest thing to take care of. We’re all on the same team. We all get our paychecks written from the same company. So why is it so hard? That’s, to me, the biggest question. Once you get these big challenges, it’s like, well, okay, but now what do we do about it? What’s the root cause of it? I think that’s what’s important.

[00:04:23] Ken Rutsky: So much to unpack there. You know, to me, two things strike me. One is how do we get alignment? But I think even before I ask how, what do we align around? And I think you have a lot of thoughts on that. I know you have a lot of thoughts on that. Oh, so do you align around what?

[00:04:40] Steve MacDonald: Well, so there’s not one of those companies I’ve ever talked to or an executive that wouldn’t agree with this statement. Yes, as an organization, we are very customer-focused. We’re customer-first. Everybody says that. Almost nobody really executes well on that.

[00:04:59] Steve MacDonald: It’s not just me saying that from my conversations. McKinsey did a big study, and they found out that less than 15% of companies are actually customer-focused. They don’t execute on the voice of the customer, but we all know that’s the highest voice of authority. That’s the North Star. So when we don’t have a real deep relationship and understanding and constant conversations with our customers, then what ends up happening is all of us that have risen up in our careers and are very smart people and are very capable of making decisions, we all do. As Chief Marketing Officer, we make decisions. As a Chief Revenue Officer, as the CEO, as the CFO, as Chief Product Officer, we’re all making our own decisions based on our own bias. Where what we should do is all align around the voice of the customer.

[00:05:42] Steve MacDonald: If we did that, then all of a sudden that’s the natural alignment factor. So just by actually saying we want to be truly customer-focused, which means we truly want to listen to our customers and not only listen but then act on that, it’s an internal alignment factor that nobody can argue with. It all

[00:06:13] Ken Rutsky: What is the voice of the customer?

[00:06:15] Steve MacDonald: That’s the voice

[00:06:16] Ken Rutsky: of the customer. And you, in fact, before we say that, get to the how, because I know we have a lot to talk about the how. What do you actually mean when you say voice of the customer, Steve? That’s a word, term that gets thrown around left and right, and I don’t think anyone really says, what do I mean when I say voice of the customer?

[00:06:32] Steve MacDonald: When I hear that, what I think of is I wanna be inside the head of the customer. The more that I can be inside of the head of the customer and truly understanding what they’re thinking, what they think their challenges are, what they think their risks are, what they think is important to create success, and what they don’t know. What they don’t know is where they’re open to having somebody come in that’s really smart, that they think is a peer, that they think is a colleague, that they don’t think is a vendor, they don’t think is a seller. Somebody that comes in that’s like, hey, I’ve been there. I get it. And hey, we’ve tried this and that and brings new ideas to the party. They’re open to that because not everybody has every answer.

[00:07:13] Steve MacDonald: So to do that, here’s the key. You can’t have voice of the customer conversations that are run through existing business processes and departments that were set up to do something totally different. I’ll give you an example here. You can’t get your best voice of the customer information by talking to prospects through the sales department, and this is CROs saying this too.

[00:07:42] Ken Rutsky: Too much context, right? Too much pressure, too much transaction focus, all that.

[00:07:48] Steve MacDonald: The whole idea of that is it’s a sales pitch. The prospect has their cards against their chest. They’re not revealing. They’re there to see what they can glean. Maybe there’s something that is important that these guys can say, but they’re not opening up.

[00:08:02] Ken Rutsky: It’s the damn.

[00:08:03] Steve MacDonald: It’s absolutely, and customer success conversations are the same way. Every CEO and CFO, at the end of the day, the KPI for customer success is how much did you cross-sell and how much did you upsell? They are a sales organization, an internal sales organization as well. So the idea here is, and lots of CMOs and lots of CROs that I talk to, they say, hey, when I come onto a new role, the very first thing I do is I just start having conversations with customers.

[00:08:38] Ken Rutsky: Right.

[00:08:38] Steve MacDonald: Right. I’m not

[00:08:39] Ken Rutsky: selling

[00:08:39] Steve MacDonald: anything,

[00:08:40] Ken Rutsky: though, because you said something very interesting to me that I want to throw out a framework for you. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about this framework, but I think it was right up what you were saying. You said, if I could paraphrase you, when you get into the head of the customer about what their challenges are and then what they don’t know, meaning I know what they know, so I know what I know that they don’t know. There’s a framework that I’ve used in building sales and marketing messages, which is you have known spoken problems. So those are the ones that are easy to get to. I say, Steve, what’s your problem? Oh, you know what? I’m outta gas. I gotta go to the gas station. You have known unspoken problems.

[00:09:22] Ken Rutsky: For that stupid metaphor, it might be, hey, yeah, you know, Ken, my real problem is my mileage stinks. But you’re not gonna admit that to me because then you’re admitting you bought the wrong car. But it is one of your problems that you have. And then the third one is the unknown unspoken problem. Those can be very powerful customer motivators. Think Challenger Sale.

[00:09:47] Ken Rutsky: The problem is if you don’t start on the framework of the known spoken and the known unspoken and you just skip right to those unknown problems, people tune out. They don’t wanna listen. You haven’t gotten permission. What struck me about what you said is it’s right in line with that framework. What do you need to know? You also need to know what they don’t know.

[00:10:09] Steve MacDonald: And we don’t always know what we don’t know or what we need to know, right? So when we come in and we’re having, so a big study that Gong did, thousands of sales conversations that were recorded, and they analyzed it, and the sales rep talked two thirds to three quarters of the time.

[00:10:26] Steve MacDonald: We have lots and lots of meetings internally about what are the problems of our ideal customer profile and how do we solve those problems. We come in and we sell in a lane of the challenges and the problems that we solve. They don’t want us, buyers don’t want us coming in our lane. They want us coming in and saying, hey, this is the world of problems and challenges that I have, and I need you to think at this level.

[00:10:54] Steve MacDonald: But we don’t even try to start out at that level, and we assume that we know what the problems are. We just come in with our solutions. Vendors talk like this. Partners, colleagues, peers talk out here, and that’s where, as B2B selling organizations, we don’t do a good job out here. We don’t understand here.

[00:11:16] Ken Rutsky: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. There’s a whole nother podcast we could do about narrative and messaging, and this is how I’ve lived my life for the last 15 years, thinking about this. And your obsession, in a good way, with the voice of the customer really adds another layer of thinking for me.

[00:11:32] Ken Rutsky: I’ve appreciated that learning from you in the short time we’ve been working together. We have to capture the voice of the customer before we can operationalize that. Maybe let’s talk about what are the effective ways that you’ve heard from these executives about how they try to do it. What’s effective and what isn’t? What are your ideas about how to get more effective in capturing that voice of the customer?

[00:11:54] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, and I think part of that, too, is answering the question of what do we want in order to capture that voice of the customer? What do we want out of that? We don’t just want a deck. We don’t just want a report that we can share with everybody.

[00:12:09] Steve MacDonald: What we want is a relationship. Everybody agrees the world of B2B is a relationship-based business. And 6sense put out that on day one, when an organization decides they need to acquire new technology or they need to bring in a new partner, they start their buying motion. That first day they decide four out of five of the companies that they want to talk to, and 95% of the time one of those companies is who they buy from. The voice of the customer has to do two things. It has to get in early. It has to help us establish relationships that are built on trust, as well as learn. A voice of the customer program has to have two very, very distinct goals.

[00:12:58] Steve MacDonald: Build relationships early and learn, and learn outside of our lane. Now that you know, okay, there’s two different major objectives that I’ve gotta accomplish here, now how do I do that? That’s the long way around to get to your question, is how do we have long-form, meaningful conversations that aren’t a pitch but are more of a conversation between colleagues, between peers? And if we can do that, that’s where we open up. That’s where we uncover. That’s where we build relationships.

[00:13:32] Steve MacDonald: The first thing that I did when I started this company, the inspiration behind what we’re getting to is you can do this through podcasting. You can get people onto a podcast and have a long-form, meaningful, deep conversation about any topic. We as podcast hosts drive what that conversation is about, which is why we like that question, what’s your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?

[00:14:00] Steve MacDonald: It starts the conversation up here at the most important things. If there was a better way to get access to the absolutely right people that we want to create relationships with and have those deep, meaningful conversations, I’d be up for it. I just haven’t found it. It’s not webinars. It’s not picking up the phone. It’s not emailing and asking for a meeting. I haven’t found anywhere close to it that’s a better way just to get into those long-form conversations to understand the voice of the customer and build the relationship at the same time.

[00:14:35] Ken Rutsky: So now that’s the capture. That’s the capture.

[00:14:37] Steve MacDonald: That’s the capture.

[00:14:38] Ken Rutsky: And you talked about the learning. Then there’s that, what I call the activation, as you know, right? So let’s go through that. So I’ve gotta capture the information, but then I’m gonna learn from it. So maybe you can talk about that and what are the challenges organizations, even if they could capture, let’s say they’ve got all the Gong, and you take out the issue that they’re sales presentations and say there’s valuable customer information in there. What do I do with it after I capture it?

[00:15:03] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. So there’s a ton of issues to unpack on that one. I’ll start with something really basic. Everything that we’re talking about here is basic. We’re talking about how do we fundamentally internally align, how do we do what we know we want to do, which is talk to our customers more.

[00:15:20] Steve MacDonald: We come out of conversations with customers, and anytime that that happens, we’re always like, oh my gosh, we learned so much. We gotta do more of that. But we’re all spread too thin. We all have a list of proactive things that we could never get to. So that comes back to answering your question, which is what do we do?

[00:15:38] Steve MacDonald: Because what happens with most learning is it stays in the minds of the people that have the conversation and it never leaves their mind, or it becomes a transcript or a report that then is on the server. And as much as we have AI technologies and everything to access stuff on the server, Forrester put out a report. They’re like files on the server don’t get accessed on average more than 10 times. So

[00:16:04] Ken Rutsky: You know what, Steve? If I had a dollar for every time I said to a salesperson, it’s on our sales enablement portal.

[00:16:11] Steve MacDonald: Yep.

[00:16:11] Ken Rutsky: Yeah. Not gonna happen. I mean, it wasn’t gonna happen, player, 10 years ago.

[00:16:14] Steve MacDonald: Not gonna happen. It’s not gonna happen. So the death of really great learning, and because if this voice of the customer learning, if it’s not spread out to the teams, like high-performance teams and individuals, is how companies win. Back to, again, internal, we control who we hire as high-performance individuals and teams.

[00:16:35] Steve MacDonald: That’s why VCs and private equity companies, they focus on the team first, the idea second, because they know the best idea, you gotta have a good team that has a decent product or decent technology. But if you don’t have the team to take it to market, it doesn’t matter.

[00:16:48] Ken Rutsky: Right?

[00:16:48] Steve MacDonald: So how do we enable teams, right? How do we enable anybody at any given time, at any given day, to have understanding of this knowledge and be able to activate it? And so this is where you get into every single person who’s watching this podcast right now, I am sure, has had the question asked to them, what’s your AI strategy?

[00:17:10] Steve MacDonald: You go into the board meetings as a C-suite executive, your CEO looks at you as the COO or the CMO, like, hey, you know, Ken, what’s your AI strategy? Right? You know, by

[00:17:18] Ken Rutsky: the way, Steve, we made it 18 minutes without using the AI word, which might be a world record for a podcast taped in 2026. Here we are. So let’s go. So what’s your AI strategy?

[00:17:31] Steve MacDonald: Well, so here’s the AI strategy. It’s not the long-form conversation. If I handed a bunch of people a half an hour video or a big transcript or a report or even an article that came out of it or something like that, it’s not usable content for teams.

[00:17:55] Steve MacDonald: What you do first is you go into these podcasts and you’ve gotta have, again, goals. What’s your goal with getting voice of the customer? What kind of information do I want out of this? What kind of information for my sales enablement for the sales team do they really, really need?

[00:18:12] Steve MacDonald: We figure out how do we make it really accessible to them. Even before AI, just what do they need? So our recommendation always to our clients is, first off, there’s three top five lists that we’ve gotta nail and we’ve gotta totally understand. We all gotta come into an agreement because they are our North Star for when we’re talking to your customers and your prospects and lost deals.

[00:18:42] Steve MacDonald: So here’s the first top five list, is what are the objections that kill deals in our pipeline?

[00:18:49] Steve MacDonald: Those are some of the most important things that the sales team is dealing with absolutely every single day, are the things that really inhibit our demand gen campaigns because there are objections that aren’t voiced, because those are people that we’re just trying to influence. We take those and we put a framework around them. We reframe them in a way that allows the voice of the customer to answer that question because this is like the truth that nobody really wants to know, is sales conversations are becoming less important until the very end of the cycle.

[00:19:20] Ken Rutsky: Oh, no doubt. Yeah.

[00:19:21] Steve MacDonald: Right? Because they don’t wanna talk to us, and we are not trusted. Anybody inside of a selling organization, we are the lowest form of life in terms of trust. And that’s not me saying it. I’ve had it reverberated to me many times in these conversations. But plenty of studies, like via McKinsey, the Trust Barometer, right? It comes out every year. The most recent one, 68% of respondents said business leaders were literally purposely misleading and exaggerating and grossly exaggerating.

[00:19:56] Steve MacDonald: You could have the best set of values and morals, but you’re lumped into the world of B2B selling organizations, and we just are not believed. That lack of trust, Forrester put it out, their predictions for this year was that trust was gonna be the currency to close deals. And if you don’t have it, you don’t get onto that list upfront. If you don’t get onto that list upfront, you’re out in the cold. You’re left behind. But we need to develop trust by using the voice of the customer behind our voice to support it. So I always say this.

[00:20:36] Ken Rutsky: So the first list, top five objections.

[00:20:39] Steve MacDonald: Okay, top five objections. The other one is what are the top five unique go-to-market elements? The selling statements that we make in meetings where we can raise eyebrows. Everybody goes, oh, I didn’t quite think about it that way. If it’s tantalizing enough, we can raise eyebrows.

[00:21:00] Steve MacDonald: But if we take those statements and we have them validated by the voice of the customer, the peer community, their peer community, who they trust implicitly, all of a sudden our unique go-to-market statements that sell our company, now we are bringing to the party the research that they’re doing before they want to talk to us and serving it up to them on a silver platter and saying this isn’t just us. This is the same people that have your job, the same companies, are saying these are the smartest things to do.

[00:21:32] Steve MacDonald: As many times as we can bring in, like I have in this conversation, to validate what Steve says, because if Steve says something important but nobody else is validating that, then how much do we trust Steve? But when we say, well, McKinsey said and Forrester said, we bring in voice of the market. We bring in voice of the customer as support systems, literally support structures underneath the voice of the business. So when we say the things that are provocative, the things that raise eyebrows, the things that buyers then wanna have the second, the third, and fourth conversation about, they’re gonna close business. We are giving our voice as much of a chance to be heard, to be trusted, so that we can stay in deals and close deals. 

[00:22:18] Ken Rutsky: Okay, so, and

[00:22:19] Steve MacDonald: we,

[00:22:19] Ken Rutsky: two things. Two things. Voice of the customer. So, a hundred percent. I’ve done a lot of work in cybersecurity, and boy, you go ask a hundred CISOs their opinion on marketers, and you might as well have asked them about their opinion on Haiti. It’s just so bad. But if one of their peers says, vendor X, Y, Z delivered this and solved this problem for me, you cannot put a value on that. That is beyond gold. The second thing is the value. What are the top five things we can do for the customer? What are the top five objections they have? We wanna get the voice of the customer integrated into how we answer those questions or talk about that value. Third list.

[00:23:04] Steve MacDonald: Third list is what are truly the top five challenges that they have, and not the ones that are in our lane. Their top five challenges. Because if we come in talking about their top five challenges, then they see us as more of a holistic partner and not a point solution, not a vendor. None of us want to be vendors. We want to be partners. Well, we better start acting like partners. We better start acting like we get this, not this.

[00:23:33] Ken Rutsky: Yeah. And I think in my experience, two of the most credible things you can do as a vendor is, one, say, no, I don’t help you with that problem, but here’s how my other customers have done it. Or the second one is, here’s how we would work together to make that other thing even better. You have that access to the problems that you don’t solve. You can turn those into powerful sales and marketing motivators also.

[00:23:59] Steve MacDonald: Yep. Here’s the thing. We don’t typically know their list of their top five challenges, because if we come in talking two thirds to three quarters of the time in our prospecting conversations or sales conversations about our lane, about here’s the things that we do to help you, and then 25% of the time they reply back, they’re replying to what we said. We don’t really have a system in place to understand truly what they think their challenges are, but we need to. Why do you ask that question, what are your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth? It’s not leading. It’s open-ended intentionally, on purpose. The whole idea, if you talk to anybody about how do you define your ideal customer profile, is truly deep understanding of their problems, their challenges, yet we don’t have a mechanism to really understand them.

[00:24:57] Ken Rutsky: Awesome. Okay, so we got these three things that we’re trying to learn. We learn ’em all through our conversations.

[00:25:03] Steve MacDonald: Yep.

[00:25:03] Ken Rutsky: And we use podcasts as one of the data sources for that, and you talked about using AI in order to get it operationalized, but we kind of didn’t get there. Let’s talk about that, because this is where AI can change the dynamic within the organization for alignment and learning. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

[00:25:23] Steve MacDonald: Yep. So, uh, you gotta first design what you want, and then can AI help? Instead of the world right now being like AI is gonna change this world, we believe that’s gonna help. And what ends up happening is a lot of times it makes us more efficient, which

[00:25:39] Ken Rutsky: or it just tells us what we wanna hear.

[00:25:41] Steve MacDonald: Right, right. Exactly. Um, and by the way, the stats are still all the same. Like 85, 90% of AI installations don’t work. The promise is there, and we all still believe it, but we don’t know how to implement it. And one of the big reasons is we don’t define the use cases for what we want.

[00:25:59] Steve MacDonald: It’s help. What do we want? Oh, can AI help us? Instead of AI is gonna be a huge help. How do we insert it into what we’re already doing? First, what is the use case that we want it to do? Here’s what I want it to do. And so I think about the big issues, like over two thirds of content marketing creates sales doesn’t even care about. They don’t think it has any value. We’ve created this entire marketing department, and we have a lot of people working really hard, doing stuff to help them. I want to create, as a marketer, content that sales has to have. They can’t live without it. It’s so good, right?

[00:26:38] Steve MacDonald: Those lists of objections, if it helps them address objections that are killing deals in their pipeline, they’re gonna be raising their hand for more. Right? More.

[00:26:47] Ken Rutsky: More.

[00:26:48] Steve MacDonald: Right. Yeah. So we identified those lists. Those top five lists get us in at least the right direction of the kind of content that they need. That’s the first thing. Second thing, they don’t need long-form content. They don’t want another blog post, another ebook. I’m not bagging on that. There’s definitely roles for that. There’s roles for that. What they want is, hey, I just got out of a meeting with this company. Oh, they brought up objection number three, and now I gotta bridge that objection. I gotta really address it and try to get the next meeting. What I need is I need to be able to very simply, in a very tight, small email follow-up, say, hey, thanks for the call yesterday. You brought up a really good point. Here’s two or three things to think about. I’d like to set up another call.

[00:27:37] Ken Rutsky: Oh, and by the way, here’s what one of my customers said about it. Boom. Video.

[00:27:41] Steve MacDonald: So that’s it. So now you’re bringing in what I call the triad. How do I bring into that email our point of view, the voice of the business, but support it by a single quote from the voice of the customer or maybe a single quote, a statement of fact that’s this long from the voice of the market, that leaves that prospect thinking, oh, I can’t ignore this. What Ken is saying as a sales guy is supported by my peers and some of the biggest consulting firms in the world. Okay, maybe I need to think about this.

[00:28:15] Steve MacDonald: I think about this as how do we take the voice of the customer and the voice of the market and the voice of the business? How do we bring them down to single statements that can be assembled together in the smallest forms of communication to make them really powerful?

[00:28:31] Ken Rutsky: And not to make the commercial for content strategies, but that’s essentially what we’re building with the AI infrastructure that you’ve invented, that you’ve developed and rolled out to your customers. I can go in and say, here’s an objection. Help me fight it. Help me solve it in real time by using the voice of the customer or the voice of the market and in alignment with the value we can deliver. Boom. There’s your two-paragraph email with a quote from a customer and a link to a video clip. 

[00:29:03] Steve MacDonald: Yep. So think about it this way. Marketing and sales sat down originally and we co-decided what those top five lists are. Like, guys, what are your top five objections? What are the ones that are really painful? And they agree, and then we’re like, okay, those are the ones we’re gonna help you support. Think about going into an AI tool. Ours is the AI Navigator. Going in and going into the main navigation under buyer intelligence, and then you got objections, challenges, validations. You’re that salesperson that had objection number three. You go into the tool main navigation, buyer intelligence, objections number three, and each one of those, we’ve created a framework.

[00:29:47] Steve MacDonald: The voice of the business reframes the objection. We’ll have it said in a number of different ways, but what’s the most important way that we can eloquently frame that so that it has deep meaning, provocative that you say that to any one of our buyers, they’re gonna be like, yep, that’s it. How do we reframe it as the voice of the business? When we talk about it, we’re talking about it, then how do we affirm it by the voice of the customer, and how do we prove or validate it by the voice of the market?

[00:30:18] Steve MacDonald: Now, when you go into buyer intelligence objections, objection number three, you land on a page that has individual single quotes. Single sentences of voice of customer, voice of business, voice of market. Scan through them and go, oh, click checkbox. That one, that one, that one, that one, that one. Start prompt, and it’s taken those, and now those are the ones. Maybe you have six or seven.

[00:30:46] Steve MacDonald: You say, okay, now I need to write an email, right? And then there’s an email prompt in there that you can put in your key takeaway. But what you’ve done is you’ve boiled this world of voice of the customer, your voice, the voice of the business, the voice of the market, the people that are most trusted, and you’ve allowed it to boil it down to where it can just be click, click, click. Write me the email, and now I’m on my way.

[00:31:12] Steve MacDonald: Very powerful communication. If we just break it down into its component parts, little statements, quotes, and facts, and make them easily accessible, and use AI to then use our sales email prompts. You can do the same thing for articles or eBooks and things like that too.

[00:31:30] Steve MacDonald: Right.

[00:31:31] Ken Rutsky: Very cool. Okay, so we’re getting along here. It’s been an awesome chat. I have a few. I’m gonna really make you the guest now, right? Okay. From the spot, this is the rapid fire section. I’m gonna give you three last questions, right?

[00:31:46] Steve MacDonald: Okay.

[00:31:46] Ken Rutsky: First one is, what’s the most important topic in the context of this conversation today that you don’t think we’ve mentioned yet?

[00:31:55] Steve MacDonald: Hmm.

[00:31:55] Ken Rutsky: I told you I was gonna put you on the spot.

[00:31:57] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, absolutely. What we haven’t done, I think we lightly touched on it, but one of the things that this process, like going through those top five lists, it helps companies align internally ’cause we agree on things that we didn’t even ask ourselves to agree on.

[00:32:19] Steve MacDonald: Things as important as what are the top five objections where we lose deals. If you go into a company and you ask five salespeople, five marketers, and the executive team, you’re gonna get wildly different answers. Just by thinking what we want the targets of this kind of a program to be, it forces us to align. It forces us to say those are the most important things we agree on. Using this program to create more internal alignment is one of the biggest benefits that is most undervalued or undersold.

[00:32:56] Ken Rutsky: Awesome. Okay. Second, rapid fire. What are you the most proud of in the context of either your career or in what you’ve built at Content Strategies or anything else you wanna say?

[00:33:10] Steve MacDonald: I would say raising my kids, but, um.

[00:33:12] Ken Rutsky: Well, me too, but yeah, we have that in common. We both have gaggles of kids, but anyways, outside of that.

[00:33:21] Steve MacDonald: About two months ago, one of my clients, and we were talking about the next year’s budgets, she said one thing to me that, like, I just so proud of. She said, Steve, this program, this ABM podcasting program is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my career.

[00:33:40] Ken Rutsky: Wow. Wow. I filed that away in the, uh, attaboy file that I look at when I’m having a bad day.

[00:33:47] Steve MacDonald: Oh my gosh. Absolutely. It’s like your kids coming and saying, Dad, I really appreciate you for this reason. You’re like, nobody ever says that as a kid. Lemme.

[00:33:54] Ken Rutsky: Write that down. That’s awesome. Okay, last rapid fire question, Steve. I’m a big podcast listener, as you know, mostly about cycling and politics, but let’s do it in this context. One minute. Biggest key takeaway for sales and marketing leaders from this podcast.

[00:34:12] Steve MacDonald: Put aside every preconceived notion that you have about podcasting right now. This isn’t about reach and downloads and creating great blog posts. This is all about taking any relationship that is important to building your business and initiating that relationship or enhancing that relationship, whether it’s a customer that is your biggest revenue expansion opportunity and bringing them onto the pipeline. The audience for this podcast is the guest. Everything else is icing on the cake.

[00:34:55] Ken Rutsky: Awesome.

[00:34:55] Steve MacDonald: So that’s what my big takeaway would be, is how do you work on the relationships that are most important to your business? We’ve even brought cantankerous board members onto the podcast.

[00:35:09] Ken Rutsky: Yeah, I know a few of them.

[00:35:10] Steve MacDonald: Yes. So if you think about it that way, it’s about building relationships and building reciprocity in that relationship and trust in that relationship. That’s what this is all about.

[00:35:24] Ken Rutsky: And I would say my number one biggest takeaway from this is that the voice of the customer is the true north, and I think throughout my career and through most sales and marketing executives I know, they’ve said that, but they’ve never been able to operationalize it. Now with the tools we have and the inventions that, frankly, Content Strategies has made, you can capture, learn, and operationalize the voice of the customer in a way that you’ve never been able to do before.

[00:35:56] Ken Rutsky: If that’s not a goal of yours, that’s cool, and the way we met is I was in an operating role and you pitched this service to me, and I was ready to go, but then I left that job. So, uh, you know, I.

[00:36:09] Steve MacDonald: So we decided to partner together.

[00:36:11] Ken Rutsky: I’m really a true believer because what I realized is I’ve been kidding myself that I could really capture the voice of the customer in the way I operated before. So to me, if you do it this way, if you do it another way, you’ve gotta figure out how to capture, learn, and operationalize the voice of the customer if you wanna win in the marketplace. That’s my biggest takeaway.

[00:36:36] Steve MacDonald: And by the way, Ken, how did we meet?

[00:36:39] Ken Rutsky: You invited me onto this podcast.

[00:36:42] Steve MacDonald: We started a relationship, right? Episode.

[00:36:44] Ken Rutsky: I don’t know what the number is, but I’m there somewhere. He looked. Alright, Steve, thank you, and loyal listeners, I hope you enjoyed me putting Steve on the hot seat, and we’ll see you at the next podcast.