C-Suite Sales & Marketing Perspectives – Details, episodes & analysis

💡 Thomas McCarthy-Howe, Chief Technology Officer at STROLID, Inc., delves into the transformative power of AI in business communication. He explores how AI-driven conversations, referred to as "liquid gold," can revolutionize customer interaction by mining insights from thousands of daily exchanges. He also shares his experiences and insights into the creation and application of the vCon Standard, a unique framework for capturing and utilizing these rich data sources.💡

"Once you start truly listening to your customers' conversations, you realize they reveal things about your business that you didn’t know." - Thomas McCarthy-Howe

Thomas explores the challenges businesses encounter in using conversational data, from defining conversations to deriving insights. He highlights how AI can scale customer understanding and strategic thinking, while also stressing ethical needs like privacy frameworks. Through his extensive experience, Thomas shows how data transparency and sentiment analysis enable businesses to create hyper-personalized customer interactions. 

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💡 Mike Vannoy, CMO at Asure Software, talks about the contentious topic of B2B cold calling, weaving through concepts of customer experience, content strategy, and the integration of marketing efforts with sales to foster long-term business growth. Mike also sets the stage for an in-depth exploration of how traditional and modern sales tactics coexist and complement each other.💡

“I don't like the binary nature of never making a cold call because it assumes there's something magical on the other side of that coin that works. However, the other side of that coin is a massive continuum of countless possibilities, some of which work better than others.”- Mike Vannoy

Mike Vannoy challenges the conventional wisdom surrounding cold calls, suggesting a nuanced approach that defies its binary categorization. He underscores the importance of a comprehensive content strategy, advocating for its role as a pivotal element in the B2B sales process. The conversation delves into the ever-evolving buyer's journey and the critical need for sales and marketing alignment. Mike's insights are geared towards creating a powerful customer experience, bridging the gap between the company's brand aspirations and the customer's real-world interactions.

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💡 Peter Lloyd, a globally experienced CMO and marketing expert, explores the critical role of customer-centric strategies in global marketing and sales. He shares his vast experience from his tenure at Digicel, highlighting the importance of elevating the customer’s role to the highest authority in any business decision process. He also discusses building a customer-obsessed culture within organizations and how this approach influences success both in the B2C and B2B sectors.💡

"Ultimately, the customer has the final say. The numbers are critical, but if the customer is saying something contrary to what you're saying, that will eventually show in the numbers." - Peter Lloyd

Peter discusses Digicel's transformation, highlighting the importance of understanding customer pain points to fuel innovation and growth. With declining traditional revenues and rising competition, he stresses collaboration between sales and marketing. He emphasizes using customer data to refine ideal customer profiles, aligning strategies and KPIs, and positioning customer experience as a critical competitive advantage in dynamic markets.

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Jamie Gier, a three-time B2B CMO, discusses the challenges faced by B2B CMOs and why they often fail quickly. She emphasizes the difficulty of creating a brand and generating high-quality content in a B2B environment with elongated sales cycles and multiple decision-makers. 

"Today's brand is tomorrow's demand, and CMOs must balance immediate results with a strategic focus on brand building and content creation. Content plays a key role in building trust and influencing purchasing decisions." - Jamie Gier

Jamie also explains the need for a content strategy to remove friction points in the sales process and provide valuable educational content. Jamie stresses the significance of customer voices in content creation and the role of relationships in building trust. She concludes by emphasizing the importance of setting expectations, getting early wins, and building a long-term marketing engine.

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Brandon Rhoten, the current CMO of GroundTruth, leverages his rich B2C experience acquired during his time at Wendy's and as the CMO at Papa Johns and Potbelly Sandwiches. In this exclusive interview, discover his unique method of merging B2C and B2B marketing that includes but goes much deeper than grabbing more attention and connecting with the emotional needs of B2B buyers. Explore Brandon's unique fusion of B2C and B2B tactics to fuel innovation at GroundTruth.

After listening for years to the likes of Forbes, Gartner, and Oracle about making B2B more like B2C, it is more than just an interesting notion.

"You're advertising to people in B2B, and they have the same attention issues and fundamental desires as in B2C." - Brandon Rhoten

According to Brandon, the key to grabbing attention in B2B marketing is finding the "hook" - the one thing that solves the problem and gets the target audience interested. It's all about addressing their fundamental needs quickly. This is the opposite of leading with function and features. 

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In this interview, Jon Ewing, a three-time B2B CMO, discusses the role of marketing attribution in B2B marketing. While acknowledging the importance of data-driven marketing, he cautions against overreliance on attribution models, particularly in the complex B2B sales process. Ewing emphasizes the need for experimentation and proxy measures to gauge the effectiveness of marketing efforts, especially in areas that are difficult to measure, such as events. 

Jon discusses the concept of the McNamara fallacy, which highlights the dangers of focusing exclusively on measurable data and ignoring the unmeasurable aspects of marketing. He warns against prioritizing metrics that can be easily measured, leading to a narrow view of marketing effectiveness.

"We can be over-reliant on [attribution] in a B2B context. B2B sales is a much more complicated process with a lot more layers and a lot more people involved, and therefore, trying to pin success or trying to model backwards to understand which of our marketing materials have been the most influential can be very, very difficult." - Jon Ewing

Jon recommends and suggests examples for finding the right balance between data and intuition, experimentation and attribution, brand-building, and thought leadership. 

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CMO Fran Wilson has a wealth of experience in B2B software and was involved in the growth of Red Hat from its early stages to its acquisition by IBM for over $4 billion. Fran highlights the importance of focusing on a limited number of growth bets when developing a go-to-market strategy. She advises against spreading resources too thin by simultaneously chasing too many growth opportunities. Fran suggests focusing on three to five growth priorities that align with the organization's goals and capabilities. This approach ensures alignment across the organization and enables effective resource allocation.

"If you try to chase 10 or 8 growth bets, you're going to peanut butter everything, and you're not going to be able to execute in big, meaningful, impactful ways. You really need to enumerate no more than five... growth bets that you're going to execute in your fiscal planning." - Fran Wilson

Fran's insights provide valuable guidance for B2B CMOs looking to deliver successful go-to-market strategies. Her five best practices offer a framework for alignment, efficiency, and growth. 

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Vincent Guérin, VP and Head of Marketing at Trolley, joins Steve MacDonald on the B2B Marketing Perspectives podcast to discuss the importance of content and thought leadership in B2B marketing. 

Vincent highlights the challenge of creating content for industries where marketers are not the persona or ideal customer profile (ICP). It's important to create content that addresses the pain points and challenges of the target audience, even if you don't personally experience them.

Vincent stresses the need to build trust with potential clients through thought leadership content that showcases expertise and positions the company as a trusted advisor. He suggests a content strategy that focuses 85% on the audience's pain points, challenges, and industry trends and only 15% on self-promotion. 

"If you create highly promotional content that only speaks about your product, you really talk to maybe 20% of the market. You need to find ways to educate your market and educate and entertain them to attract a much broader audience." - Vincent Guérin

Vincent tackles the tough problem of building expertise through content and thought leadership in this interview.

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Introducing Elizabeth Irvine, VP of Marketing and Customer Success at MarketMuse. Elizabeth has a wealth of experience in the marketing industry, having worked at Gartner and led BDR teams. In this interview, we will delve into the importance of content planning and uncover the untapped resources that CMOs can leverage to create thought-provoking and engaging content.

Elizabeth highlights the need for marketers to think beyond traditional content planning processes. By prioritizing customer conversations and leveraging customer data, marketers can create content that truly resonates with their audience. This approach not only enhances the effectiveness of content marketing but also strengthens customer relationships and establishes the company as a trusted advisor.

"The day is full of conversations, and your brain can only process that for a certain amount of time, and when someone's asking you what customers and prospects in these meetings are saying or want, it's hard to recall, let alone how to capture and use it as insights for marketing." - Elizabeth Irvine

Elizabeth shares her secrets to tapping into untapped resources for content planning.

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Steffen Hedebrandt, founder and CMO of Dream Data, discusses the importance of revenue attribution in B2B marketing. He emphasizes the need for marketers to think long-term and connect their activities to revenue outcomes. Steffen shares insights from a benchmark study of 400 customer journeys. 

Steffen discusses the average length of a B2B customer journey (192 days), the number of touches required (31 sessions), and the implications to B2B marketers for driving revenue. 

"You need to constantly be curious about how your company wins revenue. So, every time you win a deal, start thinking about what actually led to this deal and what your customer journeys look like. Second, if you want to stand out in this day and age, you need to be relentless when it comes to producing high-quality content and thought leadership." - Steffen Hedebrandt

He also emphasizes the role of high-quality content in driving B2B growth and explains how content can serve as an investment in the sales team. Steffen concludes by discussing the challenges faced by B2B marketers in proving the value of their activities and the importance of experimentation. 

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