Episode #319: 

Rebecca Welsher Kaplan, Chief Marketing Officer at Slice Merchant Services, explains why trust, customer obsession, and empowered employees have become the real competitive advantage in modern B2B growth. She explores how AI, personalization, and strong relationships work together to build lasting customer loyalty. The companies that consistently prioritize people alongside technology will earn stronger brands and sustainable growth.

“There is never one solution, there is never one channel, and there is no one right way to build a successful marketing campaign or branding practice. It comes down to who you are as a business, who your customers are, and the value proposition you provide at a human level.” — Rebecca Welsher Kaplan

In this episode, Rebecca shares why sustainable B2B growth depends on balancing technology with human connection. She explains how customer obsession, empowered employees, thoughtful AI adoption, and trusted relationships influence buying decisions long before a prospect evaluates vendors. The discussion offers practical leadership insights for executives focused on long-term brand strength, customer loyalty, and measurable business 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 we have a very special guest with us today, Rebecca Welsher Kaplan. And Rebecca, you are the Chief Marketing Officer at Slice Merchant Services, a credit card services company, and we’ll have you explain a little bit more about that in a minute.

[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: But today we’re talking about the soft advantages of B2B and how they’re reshaping B2B growth. For a long time, as chief marketing officers, we’ve had to think about the long term and the short term. We’re part of the C-suite, so we’ve got to really understand how we help the entire organization be a growth engine, right?

[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: And there have been parts of the business that, over the decades, have felt like, “Eh, that’s the softer side. Let’s talk about the core aspects of building a pipeline.” The changes today have brought back what a lot of people are calling the rise of the brand, and we’re going to get in and dissect that in a big way.

[00:01:04] Steve MacDonald: But you have a very interesting background. You spent 15 years in an ultra luxury five star global resort in marketing, and now you’re in hardcore B2B. And part of what we’re going to talk about today is what we need to learn from B2C and bring into B2B, because it’s a relationship based business. It’s still people that we’re talking to here. What I’d love to do is hear a little bit more from you about your background before we get started.

[00:01:36] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Sure. Coming out of university, I spent a handful of years at investment banks working there, which was quite interesting. As the fall of Bear Stearns and JPMorgan happened, I took my talents elsewhere, and that led me to Google, really looking at how the math of it all can impact different parts of a business rather than just finance. I found myself loving marketing and how, as much as we want to look at it as a people and sales and growth engine, a lot of it really is math. And so I spent some time there and then found myself working at a corporate level at a global five star luxury hotel and resort firm. What I learned there was invaluable and unbelievably eye opening, to really take the mechanics of it and look at the application in a real life scenario. And what we can glean from really focusing and honing our attention and our efforts on experience and personalization seems counterintuitive when we’re looking at a B2B, or a B2B within the financial technology industry.

[00:02:52] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: But the truth of the matter is that if we look at the growth of a business that’s so reliant on technology and apply the importance of soft skills, we are setting ourselves and our customers up for long term future growth.

[00:03:13] Steve MacDonald: Well, that sounded so good, I think it should have been in the front of a Marketing 101 book.

[00:03:18] Steve MacDonald: I want to dig into it more. So I’m going to term it a little bit more loosely. Today, more than ever, we actually have to win awareness and trust before buyers decide what they want to do. Because the shortlist locks on day one, and all the research says about four or five vendors get on that shortlist.

[00:03:43] Steve MacDonald: And if you’re not on the shortlist, you’re out. Ninety five percent of the time, the deal is won by somebody on that shortlist. You win by getting on that shortlist because you’re known and trusted in advance, right? Right. So the idea of the soft side, the experience, and building trust, can you tell us a little bit about that in terms of why this is on the rise, and how you think about it?

[00:04:06] Steve MacDonald: Spending so much time, I love it, from investment banks all the way through five star global resorts, and now into credit card processing and B2B, you’re pulling it all together and seeing it. Yeah. From every different angle.

[00:04:20] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Right. And I think there’s a lot that makes complete sense when you’re afforded the opportunity like this to say it out loud.

[00:04:32] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: To say the technology is vital, and the systems are important, and the history of where things have been means so much. But we can’t discredit likability. We can’t discredit being trusted. It is not enough anymore to be the cheapest and the fastest because, with technology on the rise and needs changing every day, what cheap looks like and what speed to market means changes dramatically from quarter to quarter, not just for the business, but for the people, for your customers.

[00:05:17] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Companies are going to get it right, and they’re going to get it wrong all the time. But relationship building with your current clients, and the ability, to your point, for every department within an organization to really understand the motivation and the importance of being customer focused, and understanding what is important beyond the business, is very difficult. It is very hard to make this type of thing seem simple. But when you reach out to any company you’ve purchased a shirt from, you’ve bought an airline ticket from, or you’ve bought some cheese for your pizzeria from, and the cheese comes in green, and it’s never come in green before.

[00:06:03] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Everything has always been great. You don’t even know who your cheese vendor is. You don’t know who to call. It came in green. Now you have to figure out a lot of things, and you are in a bad mood. You just need it solved. You don’t want there to be static. It’s already static. And these are just things that are going to happen.

[00:06:23] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: But it’s how you react to the problem and how you solve that problem for your customer that’s going to make them a brand ambassador for you. When someone asks who their vendor should be, they’re going to say, “Look, I’ve used this guy. Give him a call.” It’s because you were their partner. Everyone was aligned to solve the same problem at the same time. And empowering your teams, whether large or small, to be able to make those decisions quickly on behalf of your merchants or your customers is what separates someone good from someone who’s great.

[00:06:59] Steve MacDonald: I want to accentuate a couple of things that you just said there, because you weren’t downplaying the role of the product. But what you were basically saying is, in the world of AI, a technology or a product feature, where in the past product and price reigned, today that’s just not the case. Product features can literally be, you and I were talking about vibe coding before we got on here, anybody can replicate a feature.

[00:07:28] Steve MacDonald: You can’t replicate a partnership, and that’s one of the main things that I’m taking away from what you’re saying. And you said that to do that, you have to be customer focused. And there was a study that came out a couple of years ago from Forrester on customer obsession, and we all say, “Yeah,” that we’re customers first. The Forrester Wave.

[00:07:47] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Yes. The Forrester Wave. Yeah.

[00:07:49] Steve MacDonald: Yep. I was there. And they said that, literally, between B2C and B2B, 3 to 5 percent of companies are truly customer obsessed. Yeah. So this isn’t an easy thing to do. What you’re talking about here isn’t, “Oh, yeah, sure, we’ve got to be customer focused. Thanks for reminding me, Rebecca.” We need to take it to heart, right? We need to say, “This isn’t something that’s just one of the many to do’s on our list. This is one of the highest priorities.” Because customer obsessed organizations align better, and they produce revenue at dramatically higher rates. So.

[00:08:24] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: The technology that gets discussed in back offices, when you are really allowed to listen to your customers and hear what the problem is, and for those people who are listening to that conversation to lean in, as you would, and try to solve the problem, if you see a significant thematic issue, solve that issue, and then communicate to your whole customer base, “Hey, we have this new thing.”

[00:08:49] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: We don’t have to say, “There was a problem before, and we fixed it.” It would be great if you did, but very few people are willing to say there was a problem before. Just say, “Hey, there’s this new feature, and this is what it’s going to do.” That is predicting need. Even though it’s reactive, it’s predicting that the need is going to be multiplied, and solving that problem before it becomes an actual issue that makes you less competitive on that shortlist. Technology is vital, and without the technology, in a company like this, there is no company and there is no growth.

[00:09:20] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: We are technology focused. We are light years ahead of our competitors when it comes to personalization, when it comes to value add, and when it comes to product. At the forefront of it, we have the latest technology in hardware and software, and are able to scale to a personalization level for small and medium sized businesses that is unheard of in the industry.

[00:09:48] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: But how do you hear that, and how does that become important to you if you don’t have brand ambassadors, if you don’t have the guy working down the street from you saying, “You know what? Put Slice on your list.” You miss it. By the time they’re sitting on ChatGPT or sitting on Google researching the best POS system for a small or medium sized business, you’re too late.

[00:10:09] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: It’s too late. To your point, that shortlist is cultivated in rooms we’re not in. And so it is really important not only that we predict that need, and that we are customer focused and customer obsessed, but that we are communicating in a responsible way and a clear way to our current customers what it is we’re doing and why, and allowing them to have the floor to come back and say, “Hey, what about this idea?”

[00:10:36] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: And to be heard. And empowering an organization, and kind of shifting focus from the technology. Technology is number one. But number two has to be how we feel and how our customers feel about the product we’re putting out in a meaningful way.

[00:10:53] Steve MacDonald: And you said something in there. You said predicting customer needs. A lot of times, I think that, as CMOs, we’re almost like archaeologists, going out and trying to dig and find the customer’s needs, and, “Aha, there it is.” Yeah. But predicting customer needs, there’s a process to predict. Well, right?

[00:11:13] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Yes.

[00:11:13] Steve MacDonald: And so tell me what you mean by instead it’s being customer focused. Like I talk to a lot of customers, I do surveys, and I understand my customers. Sure. That’s different than, or maybe a predecessor to, predicting customer needs. How do you see that working?

[00:11:31] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Well, I think it’s an easy sentence and really hard in application. I think when we’re talking about an industry like merchant services, unless you are specific to one industry, the needs are varied and really disparate. But that doesn’t mean, at the core of it, that there aren’t four or five themes that any business owner would need. As a restaurant, do you need to integrate into all of the delivery apps? For a convenience store, do you want to have your inventory tied into your POS system and automatically let you know it is time to purchase more toilet paper?

[00:12:12] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: That is specific, but if you step back, it is a need for any store, any thing. It’s a need that can be scaled. Do you need a website? Do you need revenue management? What is it that is needed? Where can we take disparate thoughts and disparate technology and put it all into one place? It is the same idea as we used to have a cellphone, a camera, and a calculator, and now we have one thing. It wasn’t that we didn’t have a calculator or we didn’t have a phone. It was the prediction that we can just get this all in one spot. And it sounds crazy when you say it the first time, and now it is. You couldn’t imagine walking around with all of these things all over the place.

[00:13:05] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: It just makes sense now. Because this technology moves so quickly, the capabilities change every single day. It really comes down to what do we see the need being at a top level for everyone, and how then can we segment and personalize for different size companies, different companies all around the country who might have different tax laws or different privacy concerns and privacy codes and laws tied in, and how do we just make it seamless for everyone and make a top line thought seem highly personal and highly important at an individual level.

[00:13:46] Steve MacDonald: There’s so many, you called them patterns, right? There’s so many variations and different things, and it’s one of the things that AI today is helping us understand and recognize and make sense out of. You had a hypothesis that a lot of companies are misunderstanding AI’s role in creating sustainable competitive advantage today, and I wanted to ask your question on that because if we’re looking at AI in so many ways as the answer to so much. But it’s so powerful, we do have to understand exactly where it does help and where we need to use it. So I’d love to hear your understanding of AI’s role in creating competitive advantage.

[00:14:27] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Sure. So I think that AI is the conversation of the day. We’ve seen these things before. The world gets obsessed with new technologies, new capabilities, and really digs in.

[00:14:39] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: And I believe, personally and as an organization, that AI is vital to scale and speed, to get our customers what it is they need. What is now emerging, and what we knew we were going to hear from organizations once this became more widely adopted, is the unbelievable expense of standing up AI. It is not a technology right now that is without cost. So upfront, you’re going to see a lot of companies putting a lot of time and investment into AI that are going to make amazing changes for the world. But you’re also going to see AI have negative implications when it comes to the costs of things.

[00:15:24] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: In the immediate future, things are going to be really expensive to manage AI, to run it, to test it, to implement it, and to hand it off to our customers. As time moves on, AI is going to become a cheaper tool and also, and we’ve already seen, kind of displace headcounts, really allow organizations to reorganize their firms and put more money into different spots.

[00:15:50] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: What we don’t want to see, and we all need to be mindful about, is the impact that these expenses and costs have on small and medium sized businesses, and the socialization that ultimately the costs for these goods should come down because the headcount and the cost to manage and produce these technologies are cheaper. Now, that is, again, we’re going back to predicting the problem. Right now, these are still very expensive technologies. Standing them up is expensive. Learning them is expensive. But how you communicate the use of these technologies to your customers, and to the world, really is going to help people understand that when these costs ultimately do come down, what is the role of your business partner in sharing that cost savings with their customer?

[00:16:49] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Are the costs going to come down, or are the costs going to remain stable and the profits at these companies are just going to grow? And I think that ultimately, that conversation is going to be a really interesting one. The sentiment around corporations’ profit margins changing because of the AI landscape is going to be something that’s going to be really interesting to watch and really interesting to see how businesses manage it.

[00:17:16] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because what you’re talking about is that AI isn’t just a tool we use to become more efficient. Our clients have expectations about our use of AI so that they get things quicker, higher quality, and maybe lower cost. But that’s that value equation, right? Like time, cost, and quality. But they expect that AI is going to impact all three of those dimensions of the value that they get from us as partners, and we need to think about AI that way.

[00:17:54] Steve MacDonald: One of the things that you had mentioned in our previous conversation is that, yes, AI has expectations of maybe lowering employee counts and everything, but you talked about how every employee shapes growth. And I would love to, because there’s the human component of AI that an employee can do to shape growth that AI just can’t.

[00:18:18] Steve MacDonald: And what’s the role, when you say every employee shapes growth, I love that, right? That’s creating a culture that’s bringing, that’s standing everybody up and proud of what they’re doing. Their role in the company matters. How do you see that? How would you articulate that?

[00:18:33] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: I think that empowering all of your employees to make the decision to do the right thing is really impactful. I know for, even for myself in my varied professional career, you don’t always feel as though you’re empowered to do the right thing. You always know there’s rules. You have a boss. When this happens, you do this. We just are all trying to get through the day. If we can empower every person who has the opportunity to speak to a customer, the ability to make the right decision.

[00:19:08] Steve MacDonald: Yeah.

[00:19:09] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: You have to trust the right decision will be made because people want to do the right thing. If you socialize internally the golden rule, treat others how you want to be treated, it goes so far, and it allows internal employees to be advocates for your customers, and explain what happened, what should happen, and how the problem can be remedied. No one wants there to be a problem. Nobody wanted to have to take that phone call. Nobody wanted this to even happen. But these things happen to everyone all the time, and who you interact with at a company can shape your impression of that company as a whole.

[00:19:50] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: By handcuffing employees, you may inadvertently be creating bad sentiment and bad feelings about your company, and we all want to be seen, and we all, as customers, want to feel valued and feel as though the business is important, the issue is important, solving it is important, and that it mattered as much to the person who’s helping us as it matters to us.

[00:20:15] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: I think we’ve all been on the phone with customer service in any kind of capacity and felt friction, whether it was a wait time or a technology issue, or you just couldn’t get what you wanted. Whatever it is, the friction was the phone call. Adding more friction and making that person feel unimportant and unvalued is a detriment to your company because we only remember how people made us feel, and with all of the options in the world, you choose what makes you happy. So I really do believe that the culture of support and the golden rule is really what can set any company apart in the long run.

[00:20:56] Steve MacDonald: So there was this Chief Information Security Officer, a CISO, and he had just gone through a big review on his tech stack. In addition to it, there were 14 different vendors, put out a big RFP. Every single one said, “Yep, we checked every single box,” and he said, “All I wanted to know was what it was going to be like to work with you after I hired you.” Everything that you’re talking about, it takes a village. The company is a village. It takes all of us. It’s not just customer service. It’s not just customer support. It’s not just marketing or sales. How we take care of our clients is part of the sales process. What that experience is like when we’re thinking about hiring, and we’re going through the contract process, every bit of that is a promise of what it’s going to be like to work with us in the end. We want to work with people that we like, we know, and we trust.

[00:21:53] Steve MacDonald: It comes back to what you said at the beginning, how this is such a relationship based business, and that’s that softer side, right? Relationships just matter, and you were talking about how marketing is the invisible driver of growth. There’s no one else in the company that thinks this way.

[00:22:17] Steve MacDonald: In most B2B companies, like I’m sure at your five star global resort, there was somebody in charge of customer experience. There was somebody in charge of the customer. In most B2B companies, we don’t have that, and so it just kind of happens a lot of the time. We have a customer service ethic, and we think customer first.

[00:22:36] Steve MacDonald: So it’s not like we’re not thinking about this, but what I’m taking away from what you’re saying is we have to think really hard about this, and we have to bring the entire company in on the plan. Because it’s not about one isolated incident. It’s about the entire set of experiences that they’re getting from us.

[00:22:54] Steve MacDonald: What I want to do is I want to give you an opportunity to say, if there was one thing, because we’ve, we just, we’ve talked about a lot. We’ve covered a lot of territory here. But if there was one thing that you wanted other C suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast to take away from our conversation today, what would be the one most important thing you’d want them to know and remember?

[00:23:19] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: The key takeaway for any industry, when you’re sitting within marketing, is that there is never one solution, there is never one channel, and there is no one right way to go about a successful marketing campaign, initiative, or branding practice.

[00:23:40] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: It really is going to come down to who you are as a business, who are your customers, and what is the value proposition at a human level that your business provides. We’re all, at the end of the day, people at a job. And to your point, what is it going to be like working with you? I think it really comes down to the golden rule, and operating in a way that you can be proud of, and your customers can be proud of. The long term benefit of that is going to be higher brand equity and brand sentiment from your clients.

[00:24:18] Steve MacDonald: In the end, if there’s one thing to take away, it is we’re a company that can do what we say we can do, and we’re easy to work with. We’re going to come back to a company like that time and time again.

[00:24:29] Steve MacDonald: The whole mission of this podcast is to bring together different C suite perspectives from across the C suite, from across the globe, for B2B companies, different backgrounds, different experiences, and different insights. If we can all share together, then I call it the rising tide that lifts all boats, and you were an amazing part of the rising tide today, Rebecca, and I just wanted to say thank you very much for coming on to the podcast.

[00:24:55] Rebecca Welsher Kaplan: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.