Episode #342:
Jan Willem Doornbos, Chief Marketing Officer at Nomentia, explains why sustainable B2B growth starts with strong foundations. He shares how customer outcomes can align sales and marketing around a common direction. Jan Willem also outlines why companies must build trust with future buyers and create distinctive marketing before demand becomes visible.
“Our job as marketers is to earn a place on that shortlist before a buyer even raises their hand. We are not just capturing demand; we are creating future demand. It’s tempting to focus only on the 5% who are buying today, but ignoring the 95% is one of the fastest ways to limit your long-term growth.” – Jan Willem Doornbos
Jan Willem explains why B2B leaders must build the foundations for growth before attempting to accelerate. He shares practical perspectives on defining the ICP, connecting sales and marketing around customer outcomes, identifying patterns in customer feedback, and building relevance with future buyers. The conversation also explores why bold ideas and a clear point of view help companies stand out before buyers begin evaluating solutions.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:10] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Prospectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. And today, we’ve got a really interesting guest, Jan Willem Doornbos. Now, Jan, there are a lot of things that make you interesting. You’re a chief marketing officer right now at Nomentia, and you can talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
[00:00:28] Steve MacDonald: But what was interesting is that you studied marketing, but you started out in sales. And you spent the first four years in sales. In fact, you’ve grown in your career to a point where you were actually even heading up sales and marketing. And so, it gives you a really interesting perspective. Because the relationship between sales and marketing is so important for growing and scaling our businesses. And so, I just thought that was an interesting part of your background that gives you really interesting insights. It’s kind of like, until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, you don’t really understand, and you have been on both sides of the fence.
[00:01:06] Steve MacDonald: So, we’re going to be talking today about why long-term growth requires more than just demand. A lot more goes into it. And we all know that obviously there is a lot more that goes into it, but the depth that we are going to cover today, I think, is really refreshing. But before we start, I would love to give you a chance just to expand a little bit more on your background before we get started.
[00:01:29] Jan Willem Doornbos: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me here today, Steve. It’s a pleasure, and I am looking forward to this conversation. My name is Jan Willem. I’m based in the Netherlands. These days, I work for Nomentia, a company formed by a merger between a Finnish company and an Austrian company. In terms of my background, I spent the last 16-17 years in B2B SaaS businesses, mostly from startups to scale-ups to enterprise companies.
[00:02:00] Jan Willem Doornbos: Like I said, the first four years when I started my career, I started as a BDR. Eventually, I moved up in this company and eventually led the marketing and sales operation. When I moved to the next company, I was focusing on the marketing side. So yeah, and actually from that moment onwards, I started my career mostly in marketing, always with the focus on basically one thing: helping marketing become a growth driver rather than sort of like a cost center.
[00:02:26] Jan Willem Doornbos: Now, since a year and a half or so at Nomentia, we started last year in April. Hopefully, I can give some insights from Nomentia today as well. And yeah, outside of work, I’m a husband, father of two daughters, owner of two sheep. I think I have an interesting background. During my studies, I played field hockey at a professional level, first in the Netherlands and then for a few years in Italy. So, still very competitive.
[00:02:55] Steve MacDonald: Well, fascinating. I love that competition in terms of a team sport. This is a team sport. B2B is a team sport. There is no doubt about it. And so, I’m sure there is plenty from your professional experiences there that you bring in. I’m going to talk about something you just said there.
[00:03:10] Steve MacDonald: You said marketing is perceived as one of the largest cost centers in the business, which it typically is. But I talk to a lot of CMOs who feel like they’ve got imposter syndrome. They don’t have a seat at the table. They’re looked upon as a cost center. They’re looked upon as good as their last lead.
[00:03:29] Steve MacDonald: And the role of marketing has so dramatically changed. And so, we’re going to talk a lot about that here today, but I just wanted to accentuate that there are still a lot of perceptions. I did a whole series with CEOs on what B2B CEOs want from their CMOs, and it was pretty scattered. What CEOs want from their CMO, the evolving role of the modern CMO, and what we need to play can be three wildly different things.
[00:03:56] Steve MacDonald: CMOs, a lot of the time, are left to define on their own really what my role is. How do I fit in? How do I earn a seat at the table? How do I drive revenue? How do we make that happen? So, I love that you’re balanced on sales and marketing, and so I just wanted to start out and ask: you had a really interesting perspective that scaling the business started before acceleration. We can kind of look at those as two of the same things, but you’ve got a very different perspective on it. I’d love to have you just kind of start there.
[00:04:31] Jan Willem Doornbos: The single biggest lesson I’ve learned throughout my career is that probably early in my career, I probably made the same many mistakes, let’s say, many marketers make. So, you get excited about, let’s say, campaigns or activities or quick wins. And over time, I’ve learned that growth isn’t created by, let’s say, doing more things. It’s created by doing the right things in the right order. When I joined Nomentia, I also spent my first months listening, learning, and assessing the business before making, let’s say, changes. So, what became clear was that we had many good, let’s say, ingredients, but some of the fundamentals weren’t fully connected. So, for instance, our ideal customer profile wasn’t consistently defined. Messaging was also, let’s say, too focused on the product side rather than more on the customer-focused side.
[00:05:27] Jan Willem Doornbos: Teams were sometimes operating with different assumptions. So, in my experience, scaling a business without a strong foundation is a light metaphor. So, let’s say building a second floor on the house before you’ve checked the foundations. You can grow for a while, but eventually you will hit limitations.
[00:05:45] Jan Willem Doornbos: So, that’s why last year was really about, let’s say, building that foundation. I think that is really important and crucial when you start as a CMO at a new company. So, really understanding and defining ICP, clarifying the value proposition, aligning marketing and sales. Sounds easy, but it’s not always like that. Building specialist expertise in the marketing team, because it’s not, let’s say, the CMO who will be managing and driving the growth engine. It’s basically the team that is working on the operational side. You know, last year was really about building that foundation, and this year, ’26, is more about accelerating because the groundwork has already been done last year.
[00:06:26] Steve MacDonald: Can I tell you that you are completely not alone when it comes to focus on the foundation. So, every C-suite executive that comes onto this podcast, and we’ve been very fortunate to have 340 so far, but about 125 guests ago, I started asking the question: what are your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth. The number one by far was internal alignment. By far, internal alignment.
[00:06:54] Steve MacDonald: Second was a lack of deep understanding of the voice of the customer, which then leads to things like we don’t really have a good definition of our ICP from their buyer point of view, and then everybody operating with a different perspective and a different lens. What that means is our messaging is mixed. Our ability to build trust is limited when we know we have to be known and trusted before the day one shortlist closes. We hamper ourselves from the beginning. There are such fundamental foundational things that we kind of think that we’ve got covered. They can be looked upon as so fundamental, but when they’re not, and they’re overlooked, there is usually no internal alignment plan.
[00:07:44] Steve MacDonald: Forrester talked about how it’s the number one thing, building trust. There is no trust-building plan inside of an organization. Less than 3 percent of companies, according to Forrester, are customer-obsessed. There’s no plan to have them as our North Star. And so, I just wanted to say that I love that you’re shining a spotlight on the foundation because the foundation, if we don’t get it right, a good end is dependent on a good beginning. That’s what I’m taking away from what you’re saying. Is that a good takeaway?
[00:08:16] Jan Willem Doornbos: No, you’re absolutely right. I can echo your words.
[00:08:21] Steve MacDonald: So, let’s get into your insights on if alignment is the number one challenge. Sales and marketing alignment is probably the poster child. Tell us a little bit about it, because you’ve been on both sides, and you’ve worked on both sides. You’ve overseen both sides. What keeps that misalignment from happening, and how do we address it? What kind of a plan should we have?
[00:08:50] Jan Willem Doornbos: I wish I had a more original answer, but I honestly think that this is one of the oldest challenges in businesses. So, because the sort of like, let’s call it, misalignment between marketing and sales isn’t really a process problem; it’s more like a human problem. Marketing wants to build future demand, more like long-term thinking strategies, and sales needs opportunities today. And both perspectives are completely valid. They naturally create, let’s say, tension. So, I’ve worked in several organizations, and every time people say, ” Don’t worry, sales and marketing are perfectly aligned here.
[00:09:28] Jan Willem Doornbos: And then, a few weeks later, you discover the same debates again. It’s the same challenge most companies face, and it gets even bigger when companies grow through acquisitions, operate in different regions, or bring together teams with different cultures, backgrounds, and experiences. What I have learned is that alignment isn’t a project you complete once. It’s something you continuously work on. I think the breakthrough happens when both teams stop asking what marketing needs or what sales needs, and start asking what the customer needs.
[00:10:02] Jan Willem Doornbos: Once everyone rallies around customer outcomes, alignment becomes much easier. When I was doing my first week at Nomentia, we did the assessment based on observations. I came to the same conclusion, and that’s why we started working. You know, it still probably will never be 100 percent fixed, but as long as you focus on what the customer needs, that makes the conversations, let’s say, much easier internally.
[00:10:30] Steve MacDonald: You know, to back up what you’re saying, I had a woman on, she’s a three-time B2B CMO. She’s now a partner at a go-to-market, business-to-business go-to-market agency. They deal specifically with go-to-market strategies for mid-market B2B companies. And she said the power of the voice of the customer is the number one change agent inside of the company. If you were trying to align, like you’re talking about, you’re trying to bring teams together, everybody can have their own individual voice, and we’re all smart people. We didn’t get to be C-level executives because we didn’t have an opinion, and we didn’t have our priorities and how we’re being judged.
[00:11:08] Steve MacDonald: And the system’s set up against us. Truthfully, it really is. So, instead of relying on all of our own points of view of what we need to do, there’s one highest authority voice in the business, and it’s the customer, like you’re saying. So, she said, if marketing can bring the voice of the customer in properly, not only does the CMO have a seat at the table they never had, but you’re representing the highest authority voice in the business.
[00:11:33] Steve MacDonald: It’s the only way to truly align as a company, is behind the customer. That’s not a small thing, because most companies don’t have a good voice of customer program to begin with. Here’s a question for you. You were in sales, and sales conversations are so important with prospects that become customers, and customer success conversations are so important. But my question is, do we rely too much on that for voice of customer. Here’s the question specifically.
[00:12:05] Steve MacDonald: Today’s B2B buyer waits longer and longer and longer to want to talk to us. They’re 80-plus percent of the way through the buying journey. They’ve usually set the day one shortlist, and they are, according to Gartner, in a validation mode. They have made the consequential decisions, and now they are selecting the partner. They’ve defined their problem, they’ve defined the severity, they’ve defined that they need an outside source, they’ve defined their budgets, they’ve defined everything. So, what we learn is incredible, but we’re not learning upfront.
[00:12:39] Steve MacDonald: We’re not learning as much about how they formulated the problem, how they’re thinking about it, how they prioritized it, how they’re resourcing it. That’s all the good place where we come together, and we help. And customer success, their key mantras are cross-sell, upsell. We’ve got two sales organizations that we’re typically getting all of our feedback from.
[00:13:01] Steve MacDonald: Therefore, my question isn’t to discount it, but do we need additional proactive voice of customer that we’re bringing into the mix to really learn, or should we just be reliant on our two internal commercial go-to-market sales processes that we have in place.
[00:13:22] Jan Willem Doornbos: I would say that when customers are using your solution differently, which is the case at Nomentia, how do you turn their voices into a shared direction? I think this is probably one of the hardest parts of building and scaling a sales company. In our case at Nomentia, we serve treasury teams across multiple regions in Europe, and also outside Europe, across different industries and maturity levels. So, customers use our solution in different ways and have different priorities.
[00:13:55] Jan Willem Doornbos: If you only listen to one customer segment, you risk building a solution that does not scale. On the other side, if you ignore customers altogether, you build something nobody wants. So, the balance is finding patterns. Instead of listening to individual requests, we look for common challenges underlying those requests. Customers may describe platforms differently, but ultimately, they are trying to solve similar issues around visibility, automation, control, and efficiency. That is where a scalable platform strategy emerges. You listen broadly, but you prioritize around problems that appear constantly across customer groups.
[00:14:36] Jan Willem Doornbos: So, in our case, when I joined Nomentia, I think that previously, at least in order to resonate within the business and within the markets, our way of marketing and positioning was really static and feature driven. So, we do have solution X. Okay, cool. But what does it actually do for me?
[00:14:57] Jan Willem Doornbos: How does it help me solve my challenges in the day-to-day business? That is really what we are trying to do as well within Nomentia. Really trying to understand, okay, these are our features, yes, for sure. But what does each feature actually do for the customer? How does it solve customer challenges? That is what we try to lay out, and it is also how we would like to differentiate ourselves within the business, where we see a lot of companies do this product feature static selling. So, that is why we try to differentiate ourselves from the work.
[00:15:35] Steve MacDonald: So, really important, what you are just saying there is looking for the commonalities of the challenges across disparate groups, because we all have different verticals, minimally different geographies, and different cultures. There are differences in our ICP. But how do you collect that information? How do you proactively understand the voice of the customer to understand and be able to discern what challenges are similar?
[00:16:05] Steve MacDonald: Where is that voice coming from, and how are you proactively going out and trying to get that voice?
[00:16:13] Jan Willem Doornbos: You mean how we are gathering the feedback from our customers?
[00:16:18] Steve MacDonald: Customers, prospects, the buyer, whether it is the prospect or the customer. In getting that information that you are assimilating and then looking for the challenges, where do you see that coming from, and how do you get that?
[00:16:32] Jan Willem Doornbos: So, yeah, I think it is twofold. On one hand, it is internal. We do have very strong expertise in our business. Some employees in our business, as I’ve mentioned already, have been with the same company, in the same industry and segment, for 15-plus years. So, they have a lot to say, but sometimes those colleagues aren’t exposed or asked to speak up and share their voice. So, that is on one hand. Obviously, internally is always a strong place to mirror what we think from a messaging or language perspective, and what we believe from a marketing side will resonate within the business. So, you can sound-check that with your people internally.
[00:17:17] Jan Willem Doornbos: On the other hand, it is customers. What we are doing as well is having those discussions. We have multiple formats internally with our customer base to gather feedback and understand their preferences at the feature level and on the roadmap. But really digging deeper, like, what are your real challenges? What is waking you up at night? And how can we help you solve those challenges? How can we take that away from your desk so that you can run your business a bit more efficiently as well? We have multiple formats for gathering feedback, and each is based on different groups. So, it could be by industry, by segment, or by revenue share. So, we have multiple formats.
[00:17:58] Steve MacDonald: Well, what I love is that you have a dedicated avenue, program, whatever you want to call it, or plan for going out and soliciting that voice of the customer. A McKinsey study found that less than 15 percent of companies actually use the voice of the customer to make strategic decisions about the business.
[00:18:20] Steve MacDonald: I think, hold on a second, that is supposed to be our North Star. And so, I love the fact that you are very proactively going out and soliciting that. You talked about the complexity across the customers, and you talked about a lack of an ICP. So, I was talking to a woman the other day, and she buys and sells companies. One of the things that she does, when she comes in and buys and sells companies, is when she is selling a company, she decides, are we going to sell the company as a whole, or are we going to split it up? Are we going to sell it individually? And she said, so we look at foundational things. ICP definitions are one.
[00:18:56] Steve MacDonald: She said, you would not believe how many times we are handed something like a three-year-old ICP definition. It was done once because it was almost required, so we did it, and here it is. Then nobody ever even thought about it again for three years. She said, ” You would not believe how common that is. How do we keep up to speed? We have a market. We are ripping up playbooks, reiterating, and rethinking things at a more advanced pace than we ever have before. So, how do we now take that, not only innovate and scale, but do it in a way where we are keeping pace with the market? That is another huge issue that we have.
[00:19:44] Steve MacDonald: Not only do we have to understand our ICP, but also the market, the changes, the effects of AI, and our own product roadmap. There is far more complexity than just the buyers themselves, right? How do you, as the CMO, stay on top of all of that? What I’m taking away is that you were talking about a future buyer focus. When you were talking about it, you cannot just be looking at today’s buyer. You have to be looking ahead in the market and at the buyer of tomorrow.
[00:20:04] Jan Willem Doornbos: I think this is actually one of my favorite topics because it fundamentally changed how I think about marketing in general. But one of the hardest things for me as a marketing leader has been staying committed to this philosophy when quarterly pressure starts building. Every leader feels that pressure. When you look at targets, we naturally want to focus on opportunities that can be closed today or tomorrow. Basically, this quarter. So, one of the biggest shifts we have made was recognizing that only around 5 percent of the market is actively buying at any given moment, and the other 95 percent are future buyers. This is just a common principle in marketing. The temptation is to focus all your resources on that group because it feels measurable and immediate.
[00:20:51] Jan Willem Doornbos: But if you only focus on today’s buyers, you are constantly competing for the same small audience. I think that the real opportunity is the other 95 percent, people who are not buying today but will buy at some point in the future, and our job is to educate them, build trust, and create awareness long before they enter the buying process. Again, as a metaphor, you can compare it to planting trees. You do not plant the tree because you need shade tomorrow. You plant it because you know you will need shade years from now. And building future demand works exactly the same way.
[00:21:32] Jan Willem Doornbos: When buyers eventually enter the market, most do not start from scratch. They buy from a shortlist that is already in their heads. And our job as marketers is not simply to generate leads. Our job is to earn a place on that shortlist before a buyer even raises their hand. If you are not on that shortlist, you are not in the game.
[00:21:59] Jan Willem Doornbos: So, that is why we invest heavily in thought leadership, education, webinars, research, industry content, and everything that resonates. Again, focusing on the pain points and the challenges. So, we are not just capturing demand; we are creating future demand. It is tempting to focus only on the 5 percent who are buying today. Ignoring the 95 percent is one of the fastest ways to limit your long-term growth. That is my statement.
[00:22:22] Steve MacDonald: You know, the way that I have heard it put is, today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand, right? If companies that are putting their shortlists together do not know you and trust you, you are gone, right? We said it at the beginning. So the brand has a huge role to play. We have covered so much, and our poor brains, as humans, can only remember about two or three things at a time. So, I want to ask you: if there was one thing that you wanted the C-suite executives who will be consuming this podcast to take away from our entire conversation, if there was one thing that you really wanted them to take away, what would that one thing be?
[00:23:01] Jan Willem Doornbos: Actually, there is one thing I would love to leave people with, and that is the importance of courage in marketing. Today, it is becoming incredibly data driven, which is great, so we have better insights than ever before. But sometimes I worry that we are becoming too similar, right? We are all following the same work, so everyone is talking about the same topics. Everyone is following the same playbooks. Everyone is running the same campaigns. Yet many companies are struggling to stand out. So, how can you be a differentiator? I think the industry needs more big ideas again, more creativity, more personalities, and more boldness. Because before someone becomes a customer, they first need to remember you, and people rarely remember the safe option, right?
[00:23:48] Jan Willem Doornbos: They remember the company that had a point of view, that had a clear statement, or a bold statement. But you should not run away from the value that you are offering. Courage in marketing is something that I take very seriously, and I try to challenge my team. How can we be different? What can be the game changers? Challenge the status quo. I think that probably the most expensive words in business are, ” We have always done it this way. Again, we have always done it this way, is probably the most expensive words in business.
[00:24:20] Steve MacDonald: To back that up, I talk to a lot of folks here, and because we are all buyers too, right? We are not just sellers. We are not just in a selling organization. You buy your tech stack all the time. You buy research. You are a buyer, right? I talked to a CSO literally three weeks ago, I think it was, and he said, ” We put out an RFP; 14 different companies responded. They all checked every box and said they could do absolutely everything.
[00:24:42] Steve MacDonald: He said it was a complete sea of sameness across 14 different companies. That is exactly what you are talking about. If we all have the same LLMs with the same market intelligence, and we all have the same market studies, the majority of the insights we have in our business, if we do not go looking for more and ideate and innovate, then we are just part of that sea of sameness, and we are not going to stand out.
[00:25:05] Steve MacDonald: We are not going to get differentiated. We are just going to be part of the group. I love that as a takeaway. I love that.
[00:25:14] Jan Willem Doornbos: I think that also, in the role of the CMO, you should rely on the people in your team. I think the important role of the CMO is also to ask the questions and not always have the answers, but ask questions like, can we do it differently? What if we do it this way? What is your take on this? How can we be slightly different than the others? Is there a way that we can even make it better? I think those simple questions will help you become a better team and eventually build the courage to market differently.
[00:25:49] Steve MacDonald: Well, I have to tell you, the mission of this podcast is to bring different, unique perspectives like this to light from C-suite executives from all over the world. And if we can all share our insights, perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences with others, then it is the rising tide that lifts all boats. You were a phenomenal part of that rising tide today, and I just wanted to say thanks for coming onto the podcast.
[00:26:12] Jan Willem Doornbos: You are welcome. Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed the conversation as well. Thanks.