Episode #235:

Mark Humphreys, Chief Marketing Officer at Trasna, examines how trust has become the defining currency of growth in B2B relationships. He explains that every partnership, purchase, and brand reputation depends on credibility built through consistent, authentic communication. He also shares how deep customer understanding and one-to-one relationships drive loyalty and long-term success. 

“Trust is paramount. Everything is built on trust. If there’s no trust, then there’s no relationship. In the B2B world, people want to be able to trust you more than anything.” – Mark Humphreys

In this episode, Mark outlines why companies must elevate the “voice of the customer” from a one-off activity to a continuous, embedded practice. Drawing on his global experience integrating multiple brands and leading enterprise transformations, he reveals how listening systems, disciplined strategy, and saying “no” to distractions enable brands to bridge the trust gap and turn credibility into sustainable growth.

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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 have a very special guest on, Mark Humphreys. Now, Mark, by trade, you are a CMO. You’re a multiple-time B2B CMO, and what’s interesting is that you’ve spent the last 20 years in Dubai. Here in the States, what we know about Dubai is massive, explosive growth, right? And the companies that you’ve been involved with, you’ve been managing that growth right alongside Dubai and that growth accelerator behind it. One of the biggest issues that keeps us from that launchpad and just exponential growth is the lack of trust that we have in the business-to-business industry.

[00:00:53] Steve MacDonald: And I’m not talking about like Transnet, you know, where you work today. I’m talking about in general. And what I want to do today is we’re gonna lay a foundation for how we discuss trust and how we take the trust gap—what it is—and how we make major growth within our companies. Because this is a strategy that the majority of companies aren’t using today.

[00:01:18] Steve MacDonald: And I’ll get a little bit more into that, but before, I wanna dig into a little bit more of your background because it’s exciting times you’ve been in Dubai. Exciting times to be in the B2B business, to be a Chief Marketing Officer. And if you wouldn’t mind, just maybe explain a little bit more about your background before we get started.

[00:01:36] Mark Humphreys: Yeah, sure. Firstly, thanks for having me, Steve. Yeah, I’m a marketing guy, as you say, with over 20 years of experience. A big part of that has been in the wonderful world of B2B. I studied marketing at university before doing a diploma in PR, which probably shaped me a bit into being a bit of an idealist in terms of how to achieve trust and credibility.

[00:01:58] Mark Humphreys: I started my career in various PR agencies in London, working on the B2B side for brands such as the BBC, the Discovery Channel, and FHM Magazine. Then, one cold, dark, wet November, I got offered an opportunity to come to sunny Dubai to join the region’s biggest real estate company. They had an ambitious growth plan, like many companies in Dubai, and that plan was to basically expand and diversify into other sectors and disrupt some very established industries. So that’s what took me to Dubai. I was working there for a good few years. After the global recession hit, I took refuge at Dubai Silicon Oasis, which is a government technology park with the rather bold vision of becoming the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.

[00:02:49] Mark Humphreys: Easier said than done, right? And then following that, I’ve spent a key part of my career at Works, in telecoms, where I’ve been involved in the company’s transformation from a regional player into a global leader. And finally, at the beginning of last year, Works was acquired by Trana, which is where I am now and where I’ve helped integrate six companies under one brand—one IoT brand—which just this year was recognized as one of the top four players in the world in that space.

[00:03:19] Steve MacDonald: You’ve certainly got a tremendous amount of experience, and I love the idea of taking from regional to global, integrating companies, making a global standard. So everything that you say here today is interesting, because you and I—we had a conversation before—and, you know, I asked you the question about what are the greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth in our B2B businesses. And we started talking about trust among a number of other things.

[00:03:47] Steve MacDonald: I just wanna set the stage here a little bit because there are some pretty alarming things that are going on. We all know that our brands are trust marks, right? We kind of learned that early on in our careers. But listen to this—if you go no farther than the LinkedIn Edelman Trust Barometer, all over North America, all over Europe, and the Middle East, trust is on a decline. To the point where, in their last barometer of 32,000 business leaders that were respondents in that survey, 61% said they don’t believe what we tell them. In fact, they feel like we are creating gross representations of the truth. And that hit me like a ton of bricks.

[00:04:34] Steve MacDonald: I’m like, hang on a second. You know, we all put ourselves in the best light, but literally, they don’t believe what we’re saying. They don’t believe what we’re telling them. And a whole other study said the same exact thing. They said 74% of B2B buyers don’t even believe the customer evidence we’re presenting to them—like how we package up what we do and say, “Hey, we could do this for you.”

[00:04:56] Steve MacDonald: And the only group that they put, in terms of the totem pole of trust, up at the top are the leading consulting advisory firms and their peers in the industry. At the bottom are salespeople. And we wonder why we’re in this kind of delayed B2B self-service buyer journey, where they’re waiting longer and longer and longer to want to talk to us.

[00:05:23] Steve MacDonald: You put all this together, and you kind of come to the conclusion—we can’t just do things the same way, right? What was working five years ago, ten years ago, it’s just not gonna work today. But this is the opportunity, right? This is where we say, okay, if we really embrace this, how do we embrace this to create explosive growth and keep doing that to succeed in today’s marketplace? So I’d love to ask your point of view—in today’s world where you’re competing right on the world stage, how important is trust in the brands that you represent?

[00:06:00] Mark Humphreys: It’s paramount. I mean, everything is built on trust, right? If there’s no trust, then there’s no relationship. In the B2B world, people want to be able to trust you more than anything. You may have heard the old saying, “No one got fired for buying IBM.”

[00:06:16] Mark Humphreys: But the principle remains that in the B2B world, you’re not there to take a risk. You’re generally not there to save a quick buck. You want reliability because if you bring on a partner and they fail—and you know, if they fail in something particularly mission-critical—then you don’t want to be the person to explain that to the CEO. And that’s why trust—being able to basically prove your capabilities, your credentials—is the bottom line. It’s what everything else is built on.

[00:06:49] Steve MacDonald: And, you know, in the world of B2B, it’s even more important. Like, we’re asking our buyers to make decisions that could impact their careers, right? I mean, these are big decisions. These aren’t like, do I buy purse A or purse B, right? And if I make the wrong decision, you know, I’m out a couple hundred bucks or whatever it is. But these are decisions that we’re gonna make over a long period of time. And, you know, if you take the, like the Gartner or Forrester trusted advisor status that we’re supposed to be, we kind of gloss over. We’ve heard that term so often, we gloss over the trusted advisor part of that and how we achieve that. And it’s like the difference between being a vendor that sells what we do and a partner with them in their success. And I think that’s the problem. Like, if you look at—I think it was Gong that did a huge study—thousands, like thousands and thousands of transcripts from sales conversations where the salespeople talked two-thirds to three-quarters of the time.

[00:07:52] Steve MacDonald: Vendors are aware of what we’re doing, right, whereas trusted advisors do a lot of listening. And then within that landscape, we talk about, well, how can we work together and can we work together? And you had mentioned that it’s actually easier to build trust in the world of B2B.

[00:08:13] Steve MacDonald: Right, because of this—it’s not like we’re talking to millions. We have a defined TAM, and then within that, a target list, and we have certain accounts that we’re going after. Explain to me a little bit more about what you were thinking about when you said it’s easier to build trust. Not that it’s easy, but it’s easier than the world of B2C.

[00:08:36] Mark Humphreys: Yeah, I think what we were talking about, if I recall correctly, is particularly, um, you know, in some B2B sectors where you have a small, niche group of buyers—maybe just a few hundred or whatever companies—then you can actually build strong relations with them and build regular dialogue with them.

[00:08:58] Mark Humphreys: You know, you can get to know their challenges, their goals, everything about them. And you can basically, on a one-to-one level, build that relationship. And I think that’s something that, you know, if I’m selling chocolate bars or something to millions of people, then it probably becomes a lot harder.

[00:09:17] Mark Humphreys: But, you know, that’s what I think I meant by the whole B2B thing—it’s because of that close one-on-one relationship. And B2B is something that—it’s not a kind of—you rarely get impulsive buying in B2B. It’s not like you’re there at the checkout and you just buy something off the shelf.

[00:09:35] Mark Humphreys: Look, these are considered decisions. They involve multiple decision-makers. And all of this takes time. And it’s something, you know, with that time there’s an investment there, and there’s an investment that, as a business, you’re hoping to get a return on someday soon.

[00:09:54] Mark Humphreys: But, you know, you do have that longer cycle, and you do have—sometimes you have—the opportunity to have that deeper relationship.

[00:10:05] Steve MacDonald: You know, going back to our original conversation that you and I had, we were kind of talking about what do we want to talk about on the podcast here. And, you know, we were talking about the fact that it used to be a lot easier, though, to build that relationship. And B2B is a relationship-based business, right? So it used to be we could literally go visit a client. We could pick up the phone and call the client, right? We could send an email. And now, I’m not saying they’re pushing back, but they’re resisting having a relationship with us.

[00:10:36] Steve MacDonald: They’re physically waiting until they’re 80–85% of the way to make a decision. By the time they want to talk to us, they’ve already got the top two or three in mind, right? So our goal here is to create a relationship in a way that the traditional ways of creating a relationship don’t work. And you talked about a key—and one of the keys that you talked about was truly listening and understanding them.

[00:11:09] Steve MacDonald: Right, like having a true Voice of the Customer program that allowed you to have the kind of insights that, through the touchpoints that we can put out there, build that relationship. Trying to get a call where they say, “Wow, okay, these guys really get it, right? They truly have spent the time to understand what’s going on in my world, what’s important to me, what my challenges are.”

[00:11:33] Steve MacDonald: They can act as that advisor—that trusted advisor—and not just a vendor trying to sell. Now, here’s the key. This was out of a McKinsey study, and they said that the vast majority of business leaders know that a Voice of the Customer program is important. It’s a source of ideas and innovations. But less than 15% of companies actually act on it.

[00:11:56] Steve MacDonald: They actually put together and specifically have a Voice of the Customer program that they execute on—less than 15% of companies.

[00:12:05] Steve MacDonald: Here’s my personal opinion, and I think this is kind of what we were talking about, is that it’s hard, right? Like, it’s easier to stand behind our data these days, right? We get more data coming in. We’ve got sales—they’re talking to prospects. We’ve got customer success—they’re talking to customers.

[00:12:21] Steve MacDonald: It’s not like we’re not talking to them, right? But in a world where just internal alignment is the biggest challenge—just to be all going in the same direction, to be taking cues from all these different places and departments and putting them together—what’s missing is the actual conversation.

[00:12:44] Steve MacDonald: Right. The one-on-one conversation. A three-time B2B CMO that came on the podcast, she said, “Steve, those one-on-one conversations are so golden. You’ll never learn that same information from a survey.” Right? Like, we all go into client advisory board meetings and things like that, where we get to talk to customers.

[00:13:02] Steve MacDonald: Without a sales initiative, right? We’re just talking. We always come away saying, “We gotta do that more often.” Right? That was incredible. We learned so much. We built relationships. We understand at a different level. It’s a lack of time, I think, in coordinating to do that. So the question becomes, where is the priority?

[00:13:25] Steve MacDonald: Like, in your mind, if you could—if trust was something we absolutely had to build, and really, truly understanding the customer was the fuel to light that trust on fire—where do you see, kind of, in the priorities of what we all need to do as B2B organizations, dedicating ourselves to truly understanding the Voice of the Customer?

[00:13:49] Steve MacDonald: I’ll put you on the spot, if you don’t mind. On a scale of one to ten—one, it’s not important at all, Steve; ten, it’s vital to the long-term growth of our business—truly understanding that customer and implementing and acting on it.

[00:14:03] Mark Humphreys: It has got to be near a ten, hasn’t it? I mean, to be a successful business—which, you know, the studies show that the successful businesses prioritize listening to the customer—it has got to be near a ten. I mean, I do take your point as to, you know, kind of maybe the normal everyday gets in the way sometimes. I think you talked about the one-on-one conversations that one of your previous guests talked about. I think they are very helpful. You know, a lot of great feedback we get is when we’re on the road and we’re able to visit customers.

[00:14:34] Mark Humphreys: You know, our business—we have customers in all four corners of the world. So, we can’t do it with the same customer every week. But when we do, you know, you take them out for a drink, it’s amazing what you learn. It really is. And that’s the kind of gold dust that you can pick up.

[00:14:48] Mark Humphreys: There are a lot of other tools you can use—qualitative, quantitative sorts of stuff—to gather that information, but you have to work, I guess, to figure out what’s best for your business, for your industry, and for your setup and resources as well. I mean, I remember relatively early on in my career, I was working for a company with multiple distinct entities, and they were all operating under one brand. And we could see it was getting to that point where they just, you know, it wasn’t optimal.

[00:15:08] Mark Humphreys: And rather than kind of stick my finger up in the air and make a decision, you know, I thought, I wouldn’t do this properly. I don’t want to make a decision for a business with an annual turnover of, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. I wanted to get the input from the customer. I wanted to listen to the Voice of the Customer. So we conducted a brand audit—about four or five months later.

[00:15:40] Mark Humphreys: Many focus groups, many one-to-one interviews, surveys of thousands and thousands of customers. We had a lot of information, did a lot of analysis. I managed to create a report mapping how we needed to take the business forward and the changes we needed to make. I went and took that to the owner of the business.

[00:16:03] Mark Humphreys: He read it. I’m there outside his office. He calls me back in after an hour. He says, “This is the most important document we’ve ever had.” It is gold dust. It was simply just listening to the Voice of the Customer.

[00:16:18] Mark Humphreys: There was no real magic in it, but it was the Voice of the Customer which, you know, we were able to take their input and basically translate that into a strategy, a recommendation of how to take the business forward. So that was great.

[00:16:31] Mark Humphreys: In that respect, the business went on to grow exponentially. So what’s the problem? I can’t help but look back on that time, on the whole exercise, with mixed feelings. Yes, we got a good result, but the time and effort taken to get there just seemed a little excessive. Many of the findings in my report—they were the same as my initial gut feelings.

[00:16:54] Mark Humphreys: I consumed time—an excessive amount of time and resources—to prove them. And I reflect now thinking, you know, could there be a faster way, a more efficient way to get that information and not take myself and my team to breaking point? Nowadays, I try to be a lot more focused.

[00:17:14] Mark Humphreys: And what I mean by that is I try and be a bit more proactive. It’s not about, “Oh, it’s that time again. Let’s go out and hear what the customer’s saying.” I try and build systems—put systems in place for all the touchpoints through all our teams—where we can capture that feedback, the key feedback, what the customer’s saying, and have that strong and continuous flow of that information.

[00:17:38] Mark Humphreys: Coming back on a regular basis. So that will allow us to have a clear picture. And then, when something comes up that we’re not too sure about, when there is a major unknown, that’s when we can go out and do a deep dive. But focus around that—the major unknowns. You know, I think I can understand, having made my mistakes or done it the hard way early on in my career, why people perhaps are hesitant to conduct or throw everything at this Voice of the Customer. But the stats are there. The research shows that without it, you’re not helping yourself.

[00:18:17] Mark Humphreys: So it is critical advice to the customer. However, I would say there is something for the old, you know, Henry Ford approach or Steve Jobs approach, and trusting your gut. Yes, get those unknowns, those key unknowns verified. But trust your gut. And I guess also don’t be blinded by one or two noisy voices. You always get one or two noisy customers who will shout and be very vocal about what’s wrong. But if they’re not representative of your entire customer base or even a subset segment of your customer base, then you know, how far are you gonna go to satisfy them.

[00:18:55] Steve MacDonald: I gotta tell you what my takeaway from all this is. The story about the owner of the company taking your document and coming out and saying, this is the most important document for the company he’s ever seen because it put the company on a trajectory. We don’t adhere to the basics sometimes, and the basics are the most important. The highest voice of authority over the owner, over the board, over investors, over anyone, is the voice of the customer.

[00:19:22] Steve MacDonald: You may have spent a lot of time putting that together, but what if you hadn’t? What if you hadn’t put it together in a way that it was believable, we could trust in, that it validated your gut instincts, right? If you hadn’t gone through that validation process, you probably wouldn’t have had the same reaction from that CEO, from that owner of the business.

[00:19:41] Steve MacDonald: What I love that you said is now you’ve got the systems in place. We should never stop listening to the customer. You say continuous, ongoing, right? The one thing we know is our customers are complex and always changing. The traditions and the trends and things around them are always changing, so we can never sit back and just say, we got it. We know it.

[00:20:05] Steve MacDonald: But to balance that with our gut intuition, here’s what happens without the voice of the customer as the rudder. We all have gut, we all have risen to C-suite roles in our various departments, but without one unifying voice, we have the ability to make our own decisions, and we do all the time. And if we’re all making our own decisions as C-suite, on top of sales, on top of marketing, on top of product, on top of customer success, on top of operations, on top of finance, all of those decisions and all those departments ultimately affect the experience that the customer is gonna get from us.

[00:20:43] Steve MacDonald: The same McKinsey’s, Deloitte have said, CX is the number one differentiator these days. It’s really important to have one voice that the company can follow, and that one voice aligns everyone behind it, and that’s what you did in that story. That was my big takeaway, and it has to come from the top down.

[00:21:03] Steve MacDonald: It has to come from leadership down. And what you did is you aligned everyone, starting with the owner of the company, behind that voice. That’s my takeaway. Why it’s a 10 out of 10. You had talked about there’s just too many shiny objects and distractions around us. We can have one unifying voice. We can have a strategic focus, but part of the plan is executing on it. That could be one of the hardest things as well.

[00:21:31] Steve MacDonald: I have a podcast coming up with a woman. She was a three-time B2B CMO with Cisco, IBM—you mentioned IBM earlier—GE. She said, Steve, the only thing I want to talk about is execution, ’cause that’s where it all falls apart. Tell me about your experiences with the shiny object distractions, but keeping the whole company on course.

[00:21:51] Mark Humphreys: This question reminds me, I dunno if you follow this, there’s a marketing cartoonist, I think Tom Fishburne, and there’s kind of like a group of animals in the boardroom, and they’re all being basically distracted by this shiny thing outside the window—the shiny new thing.

[00:22:06] Mark Humphreys: How do we not get distracted by that? Personally, I’m a bit of a stickler for kind of structure and strategy. Without it, you are just gonna be zigzagging all over the place and not knowing where to go. One of the things I’ve always done in the companies I’ve gone into is try to establish a kind of atmosphere and a culture that is, this is the big prize. This is where we’re heading. Keep our eyes on the big prize. This is the bigger picture, that’s what we’re trying to achieve and have a strategy to achieve that. Be focused on those long-term goals. Have a strategy to achieve that, be consistent with that strategy. Don’t go chopping and changing. Jekyll and Hyde Marketing—not something I’m aware of being a successful approach. Consistency is key. Having said all of that, I do recognize that you have to be fluid in terms of execution.

[00:23:02] Mark Humphreys: You can’t bury your head in the sand when there’s a major development that sends shockwaves through your entire industry. You can’t carry on, fingers in your ears, and act like nothing’s happened. You have to react, and when the game changes, you have to adapt. You have to stay relevant. But you have to be true to your principles. If it’s not achieving the end goal, and if it’s not true to your strategy, then you have to be able to say no.

[00:23:32] Steve MacDonald: No is one of the most powerful words in any language. I’ve talked to so many CROs about the word no because the shiny object for most companies is, well, that may not be the perfect fit to our ideal customer profile, but I can bring some pretty good revenue in.

[00:23:52] Steve MacDonald: Then all of a sudden, you bring it in, but the company’s not really set up to address their needs. We spend a lot of time, a lot of resources in that company terms. All of a sudden, you lose them, and in any of our businesses, NRR should be one of the biggest KPIs. We should be looking at net recurring revenue.

[00:24:13] Steve MacDonald: There’s been a number of different studies from Deloitte and Forrester that talk about the vast majority of new annual revenue, like 73 to 80% of new annual revenue, should be coming from our existing clients. We better bring in the right clients because if we don’t, a) they’re gonna churn, they’re not gonna turn into expansion opportunities for upsells and cross-sells, which is one of the biggest sources of new revenue growth. So that saying “no” is so powerful in so many ways, from the biggest growth levers in the business down to how do I serve them on a regular basis, on a daily basis?

[00:24:54] Steve MacDonald: It’s funny because we’ve been talking about what you could classify as some of the very, very basics in business. Know your customer. Know them well. Focus on them. Don’t get distracted. Make sure that we have alignment internally. Make sure that it’s coming from the top down, that everybody’s bought in on it. These are the kinds of things that we all learned in Marketing 101, but here we are a quarter of the way through the new millennium. We’ve got AI tools, we’ve got more data, we’ve got more access to it, we’ve got big companies with whole departments focused on the customer and on sales and on marketing, but we’re still talking about getting the basics right. That’s interesting.

[00:25:42] Steve MacDonald: Here’s my last question for you, and it’s the most important because we’ve talked about so much here, but our poor human brains can only take in two or three things at a time. If somebody was tuning into this conversation, what would be the one single most important thing that you’d want them to take away from our call?

[00:26:03] Mark Humphreys: I think the obvious one is the voice of the customer, isn’t it? The voice of the customer is king. You find that you have that and you’ve got your mojo. All the rest of the magic just happens. Marketing is a creative industry, and there’s a lot of value that can be added by being creative, but if you haven’t got the voice of the customer right first, then it’s all for nothing.

[00:26:26] Mark Humphreys: The voice of the customer is really important, and as I was saying, just to give an example earlier on in my career, don’t do what I did early on in my career. Try and build a system where you are getting that, receiving that information proactively, not reactively, but proactively build the systems—and there’s delegation there.

[00:26:46] Mark Humphreys: Make your touch points work for you. You alluded to the fact we’ve all got data growing out of our ears these days, with all sorts of dashboards. We do have. If we can go through those, find out what really matters—those KPIs—look at those things and use those touch points, those interactions, as a chance to engage with a customer.

[00:27:09] Mark Humphreys: When they’ve got a delivery, just ask them to give a simple rating or just give a short bit of feedback. All of that can help contribute to the bigger picture. Your sales team as well. These guys, they’re out on the road. I dunno how they go somehow from flight to flight.

[00:27:27] Mark Humphreys: Places we travel as well, Steve. It’s a long way from Denver. They have that one-to-one time with the customer, and that is gold dust. It’s about extracting that information, not just the one conversation, but each and every conversation from every sales individual. If you can build a system that pulls all that information together, essentially without you having to do too much, you’ve got a really good start and you’re on your way to understanding what makes the customer tick. If you do that, everything else comes easy.

[00:28:03] Steve MacDonald: I love the advice, and here’s what I know—people are gonna have questions. Is it okay if I give out a link to your LinkedIn profile so people could reach out and ask you questions?

[00:28:13] Mark Humphreys: Of course, yeah.

[00:28:15] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Well, Mark, the goal of this podcast is to bring leaders from all over the world—C-suite executives from all over the world—that have different perspectives, different insights, different experiences, all in B2B. All with an ABM go-to-market motion. And if we can all learn from each other and the wisdom of what we’ve learned over all the gray hairs and things that we’ve earned over the years, then that’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats. I just wanna say thank you because I thought you were an amazing part of that rising tide today.

[00:28:52] Mark Humphreys: Thank you very much, Steve. It’s been a pleasure to be on the show.