What CEOs Want From CMOs: Challenging the Typical Perspective

Meet Denys Dubner, the visionary CEO leading two prominent international companies with an impressive marketing background, bringing a unique perspective on what CEOs expect from their CMOs.

CEOs often focus heavily on leads, but Denys challenges this perspective. He believes in focusing on the top of the funnel, proving your indispensable value that transcends the company’s solutions, and becoming a trusted part of your customer’s community. This is his POV for long-term success: building relationships with potential customers who don’t know you yet is the key to sustainable growth.

Denys Dubner, 2x CEO & Former CMO – Follow Denys on LinkedIn

To Denys, building trust and loyalty is a non-negotiable aspect of the job. He urges his CMOs to go the extra mile in making their brand indispensable and invaluable to customers. The key lies in establishing and nurturing strong relationships that withstand the test of time.

“One of our largest customers said that if one of your competitors calls us, we give them two names, your company and the largest company in the world in aesthetic medicine that patented every single thing that you know of. So they just say to the competitors, if you’re one of those two, we’ll talk to you. If you’re not one of those two, I’m sorry. And that’s the beauty of being valuable, and you can be valuable only if you know the customer.” – Denys Dubner

Denys doesn’t like to be in a position where he needs to reach out to someone who doesn’t know, trust, or like them.

Read on to learn how he has ensured being first valuable and then highly successful as both a CEO and CMO.

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube. To watch the 4-Minute summary video, CLICK HERE.

Introduction to Denys Dubner

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the B2B Marketing Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve McDonald, your host. And today, we have the privilege of having Denys Dubner on the call. And what makes Denys so incredible that we’re going to want to learn from him is that Denys is actually the CEO of two companies.

As if that wasn’t enough, Denys, to be the CEO of one company, let alone two. I know in the past, you’ve also been the CMO of a company and accomplished many great things. Both of your companies operate internationally, all throughout Europe, all throughout the United States, all throughout the world.

So maybe if you could tell us a little bit about the companies that you’re the CEO of and your background and we’ll get started that way.

Denys Dubner: Thanks, Steve. Thank you for having me. So the first company is a SaaS company called translate.com. That’s a company helping others to go international by localizing their content with enhanced technology, doing things very fast and accurately.

And the second company is called WOW24-7, that’s a customer support outsourcing company helping others to also internationalize their business. So a German company entering into the Italian market or a French market, or an American company willing to serve their customers within the US in the Spanish language.

So we help them communicate with their customers in more than 20 languages.

Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. I mean, there’s such a need for that. And I know that we talked a lot before and how easy you make that process. So we’ll find a way for anybody who wants to talk to you at the end of this to get in touch with you.

CEOs want CMOs to create value in the mind of the customers

Steve MacDonald: But I want to get into the meat of the subject matter here. And this series is all about what CEOs want from their CMOs. Could you shed some light on that? What are the priorities in your mind as a two-time CEO, CEOs of both companies at the same time right now? What do you want from your CMOs?

Denys Dubner: Steve, I think we are all different as CEOs. Everyone is unique. I’m coming from a marketing background. I used to be a CMO, so I’m probably not a typical CEO. Often CFOs become CEOs, right? CMOs, not that often, but it happens. So I think many CEOs want leads. They want sales. They address a small percentage of their customer base and audience, potential customers, through paid ads and stuff like that.

While a CEO with a marketing background and someone who understands the importance of the content and addressing the rest of their audience as somebody who doesn’t know you yet. So I think the magic is right there. For me as a CEO, I want brand awareness. I want people to trust us, like us, and know us before they reach out to us, and I do not like to be in a position where we need to reach out to someone who doesn’t know us, doesn’t trust us, doesn’t like us. I don’t like to be faceless company approaching someone in the cold.

Steve MacDonald: So you said a number of really important things there.

Maybe break that down just a little bit. So I know that when we were talking before we were recording here, one of the very first things that you said was that I want my CMOs to know the customers and what happens when they know the customers versus when they don’t know the company’s customers and what the impact that makes. Can you explain that a little bit?

Denys Dubner: So when I was a CMO, that was, for me, the biggest achievement in terms of growth within a very short period of time. So I was working for a company in aesthetic medicine in cosmetics and cosmetology. And basically, within one and a half years from the top 20 companies in the country, we became the top two by really understanding the customer.

But I was lucky when I joined the company, people within the company knew their customers so well, so they just needed a little bit of structure. So we started to do webinars, offline events. We became the best educator for them. We attracted the best coaches, the best doctors, everybody, the best, so they can learn.

And that locks them in. There was an interesting comment from one of our largest customers. He said that if one of your competitors calls us, we give them two names, your company and the largest company in the world in aesthetic medicine that patented every single thing that you know of.

So they just say to the competitors, if you’re one of those two, we’ll talk to you. If you’re not one of those two, I’m sorry. And that’s the beauty of being valuable, and you can be valuable only if you know the customer. You don’t even talk about your product. You just talk about something that worries them, that helps them do their job better, entertain them, cry with them, smile with them, everything with them, but you’ve got to understand them.

Value is defined by the customer

Steve MacDonald: You’re talking about B2B buyers, right? And you’re talking about educating, you’re talking about building trust and building respect, and how you do that. The last time that we spoke, you had just been on the phone all day with customers. When you came in as a CMO to that company, you said all I did was talk to customers.

It was interesting because I was just introduced to a gentleman who is in a private equity firm, does deals with all B2B, all SaaS, and they take over these companies. And he said the number one thing he does is he said, I get on the phone and I’ll call 20 customers. And I only do that because I have to know how valuable this company is, right?

And what you’re doing is you’re saying the same things. He’s trying to understand the customers to understand the company’s overall value. You’re trying to understand the customers in order to be able to market and project the value of the company, right? And so it makes sense from every angle.

But one of the things that you said in there was that it was the kind of content that you were providing that defined value. One thing you didn’t mention in there didn’t seem to be in the world of feature benefits, right? You were educated, right? You even said entertaining. It sounds to me like you’re building a relationship as a consultant in the industry, as somebody that should be trusted, that what you say matters, that you understand them, you understand their business, and you understand the dynamics of the industry.

So, therefore, you’re highly valuable to them beyond what the actual company itself does.

Denys Dubner: And therefore, you build your brand equity.

Marketing is a much more important part of sales than ever before

Steve MacDonald: Yes. I’ve been in brand strategy for a long time. I worked with the guy who was McDonald’s CMO, who taught me how to do branding. And that’s not usually a part when you think about brand equity, right, is your expert status.

But in the B2B world these days, especially where before they ever talked to somebody inside of a company, they’ve already done up to 70% of their research. They’ve usually determined in their own mind who they’re going to talk to. So that content and brand equity that you’re talking about, would you agree that marketing is a much more important part of the sales process than ever before?

Denys Dubner: Absolutely. You know, we are living in the world of the Internet. Everybody sees things. The place is noisy right now. It’s much noisier than ever before. And one touch doesn’t work anymore. So, I’ve seen the stats. Before, you needed probably three to five touches with your customer before you can sell to them.

Right now, the stats are getting closer to 20, right?

Steve MacDonald: Closer to 20 and across that omnichannel world, right? So many different places, so many different levels. Everywhere.

Denys Dubner: And you’ve got to be consistent. And if you, again, coming back to knowing your customer, if you don’t know your customer, there is no way you can be consistent for 20, 50, or 100 touches before they’ll like you and trust you and know you.

Why CEOs want more than leads

Steve MacDonald: Right. Yeah. Something else that you had said a little bit earlier that I just put into a mental check to say, we have to come back to this, is you said that traditionally CEOs want more leads. They still do. But you have a different perspective on that.

Tell us that perspective, please. It sounds a bit odd, right?

Denys Dubner: Yeah, absolutely. Of course, we still look at the number of MQLs and SQLs and everything, right? But I think the focus right now should be on the top of the funnel. You’ve got to build a relationship with those who don’t know you.

And you do this through content. You do this in many different ways, but if you can only address the bottom of the funnel, nothing is going to work. At least you are limiting yourself to very slow growth.

Steve MacDonald: So you talk about focusing on the top of the funnel, you’re talking about 97, 98% of the people don’t even know who you are.

And one line of thought would say, I’m going to wait. I’m going to do some content. I’m going to see who fills out a form, and they’re going to raise their hand in some way. And then I’m going to spend the vast majority of my time on that. Give us a little bit of the balance in terms of your marketing resources and how you direct them in your companies to get introduced and establish relationships versus working on the MQL to an SQL to convert, if you wouldn’t mind.

Denys Dubner: Yeah, sure. So at translate.com, I just joined the company two months ago. So all I do right now is talk to customers because I do need to understand because we have different ICPs, so many different profiles and that’s an issue too. So we are serving too many customers right now, and I need to understand every single one to take the company strategically in the right direction.

I’m just being honest. And that takes time to understand. In general, my personal opinion is that I can see that a lot in the past. And I talk to my friends, CEOs all the time too. And they make their social media manager, who is very young, and not that experienced, create content that seems great for them, but if your customer is a C-level B2B, then it may seem naive and not that helpful, right? So you’ve got to have senior people on your team to become interesting.

So therefore, whether you outsource the content marketing or you build an in-house team, just take your time. Really understand, build long funnels, allocate money to it, and become your audience’s best friend. In this way, you can become very successful. You can grow really fast. Otherwise, again, coming back to the bottom-of-the-funnel things, I think Google ads didn’t work well for many companies recently.

Something happened. Don’t know what happened for many companies. It just didn’t work. So I speak to my friends, and a couple of agencies as well in the UK, and they said our ads don’t work. So we are not going to hit the quota for sure. And then I go, why are you so dependent on only the bottom of the funnel?

Steve MacDonald: Right. So it makes sense. We want to think that if we talk about our products or services, everybody will say, wow, I need that. And that’s all I need to do. Right? That’s a very old-school way of thinking about it. Because in this day and age, and studies have proven this, what a buyer, a B2B buyer, thinks about you in terms of your expertise and the trust and confidence in you is more important than what the company does itself.

It’s all about balance

Steve MacDonald: Without trust and confidence, you’re not going to get this to the stage to talk about, Oh, hey, here’s specifically what we can do for you. So what you’re talking about seems like there’s a shift of the 80/20 of most CEOs want their CMO spending 80% of the time talking to customers about what they do, 20%, I’m making that number up, but it’s a good illustration at the top of the funnel. And focus more on the hot leads and the ones that we can talk to them about what we do.

And am I hearing correctly that you want a much greater emphasis on the top of the funnel than the lower funnel?

Denys Dubner: That’s exactly what I mean. But also, I would like to add that when you address the top of the funnel to the right audience, you can go strategically in the direction that you like. And if you depend purely on the bottom of the funnel, you just get the hot leads that need your services right now, but it doesn’t mean they are ideal customer profiles.

So you’ve got to be within your ICP, within the industry that you like, within the company size that you like to sell to. You don’t even have to talk about what you do. Just talk about what they need.

Steve MacDonald: And so what I’m hearing there is if you do that, you’re going to attract an MQL that’s much more qualified versus MQLs where you’re trying to qualify. They’re not in your right ICP, so therefore, you’re spending your BDR team or sales team spending way too much time with leads that they should never have. And the whole focus on the top of the funnel and adding value in the way you’re talking about it helps ensure that you’ll get better quality MQLs.

Denys Dubner: Don’t forget about the middle of the funnel. You’ve got to be strategic with it as well. And don’t forget about customer retention as well. So it’s not just the top of the funnel. Everything is important. But what I’m saying is that if you don’t focus, because many companies don’t focus on the top of the funnel, they just think about the bottom of the funnel and then hopefully retaining their customers.

But I’m saying that you should spend money on the top of the funnel. And effort as well, but don’t forget about the middle of the funnel. And so you have to be strategic about the whole journey.

Steve MacDonald: And one thing that is going back a little bit to, you just said you’ve been spending the last two months, because you’ve just joined this company, talking to customers. The first company, when you joined, you were talking to customers, is this something that should be in your recommendation? Something that definitely is if you’re coming in new, and you’re educating yourself, but is this an ongoing thing?

Do you ever stop talking to customers? I’m sure you wouldn’t do it as much, right? It seems like that’s the number one thing you’re doing right now, but do you ever stop talking to customers?

Customer conversations that go beyond sales

Denys Dubner: I do it as much, Steve, at any point of time, not as much, but still, I do this a lot. It’s not only me, but I also bring other people to the meetings with customers and potential customers as well.

I know that one specific segment of your audience is SaaS companies. And I see that often when they are product-driven companies where the development team says, hey, we have this beautiful feature. Everybody’s going to like that. And they have not even talked to one customer.

They just don’t know. They think it’s cool because they are nice techy guys. But I always bring R&D guys to meetings with actual customers, potential customers, and just people from the industry, and that way, your product becomes so much more valuable so fast. I’ve seen this over and over and over again.

Steve MacDonald: Let’s talk about that a little bit more. When you say you bring others from the industry, R&D, you’re talking about people that are outside of your company?

Denys Dubner: No, I’m talking about inside. I’m talking about the inside because typically, the senior developer is never meeting anybody, but they still initiate new ideas for the new feature, for new this and that.

And it’s important. So they meet the customers too so they understand the way their customers think about what they need. And sometimes they realize that what they’ve developed, and they’ve been developing for a while, nobody needs that. People need something else.

Steve MacDonald: So you’re helping them get that firsthand customer knowledge because you could translate for them, right?

You’re a translation company, one of them. You could translate what you’ve been hearing from the customers, but hearing it directly from the customers is so important, and it just seems to carry a lot of weight, right? Then you feel an affinity. You have a relationship with the customer versus a persona on a piece of paper or somebody that gets talked about. They’re real, right? I love that.

Denys Dubner: Yeah. And that inspires people within the company too. Marketing people, salespeople, and C-level we all speak to the external world of customers, right? The other divisions within the company, they don’t do that much, right? And it’s such a joy to be in the meeting and speak to the real person, to the real customer who uses what you do. And that’s beautiful.

We have this Zendesk application for customer support managers. We started bringing developers into those meetings with the actual users and potential buyers to hear their feedback. You do this, you do that. And if you do that, that would be beautiful.

So, of course, they get this information from marketing all the time, but when they get to meet the person that uses this daily and compares it to the competitors and so on and so forth, they become so much more motivated.

Customer-led content creation

Steve MacDonald: 100%. I’m sure they feel empowered. They feel like they actually have a connection. I imagine it impacts everything they do in their jobs. Let me ask something. Earlier, when you were talking about building brand equity, building value, building trust, building respect, and that you do that through content I always ask everybody the same question on our podcast, to rate the importance of content on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not important to the success of the company at all, 10, it’s vitally important to the success of the company. How would you rate it and why?

Denys Dubner: It’s a definite 10 for me, but don’t create content too early. Think about it. Make sure that you know your customer first. If you don’t know the customer, don’t do it.

You could invite the potential customer, you can speak about other things. Don’t even talk about your own product. So learn from them. You could record it. But many people don’t want to do that. They want to learn first without showing this whole process to the external world. And I think it’s okay to do it that way as well. Just interview your customers and record it, and then put it out as well. That’s also valuable.

Steve MacDonald: I remember from our previous conversation that you had talked about how it almost took a year in one of the companies that you were involved with to really understand. the customer to the point where you felt like marketing was then starting to hit its stride.

Denys Dubner: That’s correct, Steve. So, I graduated from the Swiss executive business school with 90% planning and 10% execution. So I like the Swiss precision in the sense that I’m more conservative. I would like to be prepared first. And then go out into the market and then make it a success.

Advice for CEOs and CMOs

Steve MacDonald: Well, from all of your background and the conversation that we’ve just had here, if there was a takeaway that you wanted the audience to remember above all else, what would that be?

Denys Dubner: Just as a CEO, understand your customer yourself. Don’t rely on anybody else in the company. Just also speak to customers all the time, and spend money on the top of the funnel.

Do it well, be organic, and be someone people can like, know, trust, and respect because you’re valuable to their life, not because of your solution but because you’re part of their community.

Steve MacDonald: Now, the second part to that is, since this is a series on what CEOs want from their CMOs, what’s the one word of advice or soundbite of advice that you want to give CMOs?

Denys Dubner: B2B CMOs, don’t burn out.

It’s a stressful job. You’ve got to juggle so many balls at the same time. So it’s one of the most difficult jobs, I think, on the C level. There are so many things going on at the same time, so many things don’t go right at the same time. So you’ve got to have a thick skin on the one hand, and on the other hand, you’ve got to be empathic and help the team to be even more valuable to your target audience.

And make sure your CFO understands the importance of the top of the funnel. That’s my advice.

Steve MacDonald: Well, I believe 100% when you say that CMOs have a really tough job, and they don’t last very long. We did a whole series on why the B2B CMOs fail so quickly. It’s actually proven there.

They last half as long as CEOs. They have the shortest tenure of all the C-suites. So, agree 100%. Well, Denys, thank you so much for coming in and sharing this. If anybody wanted to get ahold of you and ask a follow-up question, what would be the best way? Is it LinkedIn?

Denys Dubner: Yeah, just hit me on LinkedIn.

Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. We’ll do that. We’ll put a link to all of this as it goes up online. And thank you very much. Words of wisdom that we all needed to hear. Thank you, Steve.

Denys Dubner: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Next Steps

Denys talks about ways to create value that transcends your company’s solutions, delivered first and foremost through highly valuable content. To elevate your content’s ROI and revenue impact, don’t miss the opportunity to CLICK HERE and schedule a 20-minute strategy session with Steve MacDonald, founder of ConstentStrategies.io.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.