Part Three: The Revenue Logic of Customer Obsession

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome, everyone, to the C Suite Sales and Marketing Prospectus podcast. I'm Steve McDonald, your host, and today we've got a very special guest on Lauren Goldstein. Now, Lauren, you are a very special person. You have a fantastic background. I don't wanted to say you're defined by your profession, but you're a chief growth officer at Winning by Design, which is a B2B go to market consultancy, which gives you an incredible purview in what's going on in the marketplace where companies are struggling, where they're having successes. You were a, uh, former chief revenue officer, you co founded Women in Revenue, and so you get feedback from the peers in your community, your colleagues, all the time, on, um, what does it take to be successful today? And on top of that, you've got a whole personal life outside of that adventure, Queen, boy, mom, all kinds of good stuff. But what I would love to do is have you expand on that a little bit before we get into the topic today, which is the revenue logic behind customer obsession. But if you wouldn't mind expanding on your background first.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, you definitely did a great highlight, Steve. And I would say my mom and dad would be proud, so thank you. But, um, you know, there is something in what you shared in terms of that connective tissue between customer obsession and revenue. And, uh, I love the phrase revenue logic, but it really comes down to knowing who your target audience is and having that through line between understanding what motivates them and the revenue for the organization. And I'd say some of that correlates into my personal life, too, and whether it is raising boys and really understanding how to motivate and incentivize them. And I actually got a very rewarding call from my son this morning that proves that those nuggets that you plant and understanding them will pay off later. Um, but it also came through, I'd say, about eight or so years ago when there was an opportunity to start Women in Revenue. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later, when we realized that not everyone understands how to really connect some of your skills, some of your network, and some of what you're really good at, your highest best to something that will really be valued by an organization. So much of what Women in Revenue is built on is this concept of mentorship. So I think there's a lot of through lines between revenue and creating value for organizations. But whether it's raising boys, whether it's helping create a mentorship platform for 10,000 women with women in revenue, or whether it's bringing it together to add value to the customers that I work with day in and day out. That's something that really gets me excited to engage every day in the world that we live in.

Speaker B: I want to set the tone here, the context a little bit, because there's some stats out from very recent reports that were done like Forrester. They did, uh, in 2024, a customer obsession study, and they found that only 3% of businesses are actually customer obsessed. Yet ask any one of us, are you customer first? Are you customer obsessed? Absolutely.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, you know, we all are. Nobody would ever say that they're not. This is the exact opposite. Right. And customer obsessed organizations have 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth. They retain clients 51% better than their competitors. There's real revenue logic in being customer obsessed. But when we go into the boardroom, very few people are asking about, hey, how are you all doing in terms of understanding the customer? How are you doing on aligning behind your icp? How are you doing in terms of making sure that information, those insights are leading to how you're making strategic decisions to grow the business. And the last one I'll say is that I think with 2023, McKinsey had a study that said less than 15% of companies use the voice of the customer to make strategic decisions. Now, I know you have a ton of opinions, so I'm just going to leave it at that.

Speaker A: The news with these stats is that it leaves a lot of opportunity for organizations like Winning by Design or some of the places that I've come from, like Annuitus, to really lean in and help companies. Because there are so many challenges with companies looking at those obvious either gaps in what they're doing today or opportunities that they have to do it better. Before I answer your question, I do want to share two stories. Very early in my career. This is when I was at Babcock Jenkins very early in my career, and we were working with some of the top 100 technology companies in the world. And I remember at the time I was doing demand marketing and we would generate all these really good leads. That's back when demand gen and lead gen were so important. And we would then pass them over to the sales organization to follow up on. And we'd circle back and see a week later, a month later, six months later, how those leads were doing in terms of being followed up on. And I, uh, will not name names, Steve, but this is someone who, I think you have been nearby in your past as well, none of the leads had been followed up on. And when we started to dig in and understand why sales and marketing weren't aligned. Classic problem, right? Case in point. Fast forward to even, you know, in the last weeks and months. One of the things that we get a lot of at winning by design is a lot of pattern recognition. Simple things like looking to see what customers churn and understanding why can help really unlock, um, where those opportunities are for the customers who are getting value from what you offer to them. So I'll just pause there for a second and see if you want to lean in. But I thought the antithesis is really an opportunity for companies to pause and really understand where the value comes from.

Speaker B: Well, you said something in there. You said when demand generation, lead generation used to be more important. And I talk to CMOs every day, and I talk to CMOs that are. They feel like they have an imposter syndrome. They feel like they don't have a seat at the table. They feel like they're as good as their last lead. They feel like they represent one of the biggest cost centers in the company. And so when you said that, the flip side of that is there are other things that have become more important. And that's what I'd love to start out with. Right? The buying journey. How we influence buyers, how early we're out there, how we build trust. Like, so much has changed. How would you start us down that path? Right. You start us out by saying, when lead generation and demand generation used to be more important. So I'll let you take it from there.

Speaker A: Yeah, I will qualify that and say that was definitely an early concept of how to engage buyers, yet we're so much more sophisticated today. Just a quick story, and then I'll go back to answering your question, but I actually ran into my former CEO from Babcock Jenkins, who taught me a lot about this back in the late 1990s. Like think 1998. And I met him when he was at a Portland, uh, Ad association event. And he was talking about this new technology that he had created to help profile and create personalized experiences for people on a website and then also create very targeted and personalized experiences in email. Now, this predates Marketo, it predates Eloqua. And trust me, I think he would have rather been the inventor of those solutions than on the services side. But what it really taught me is that there is a currency, and I love to call it the through line between brands and buyers, when the brands really start to understand what that ongoing need is so it's when I think about lead generation, that's like flipping a name over the fence. When I think about buyer engagement and really understanding what buyers needs are, understanding what makes them successful, both from a rational perspective, you know, in terms of what helps their business as well as from an emotional perspective, what helps them personally. When brands start to do that and really have this kind of two way dancer engagement, that's where there is this true through line between insights and revenue for an organization.

Speaker B: So let me pick up on that. Insights and revenue, really, when we say customer obsession, that can mean a lot of things. It could mean the experience, the service. But the driver at the very beginning is insights and what they truly need and what we offer. Right. In the end they're our North Star. That's who we serve. If we don't serve them well, head uh, to our peril. Right. So everybody believes in insights. Yeah. Here's something that's interesting that I had a conversation with the other day is that we have a tech stack component for almost everything. Where's our tech stack component? Where's the operational level for insights? Insights that align with maybe how, uh, we address the objections that kill deals in our pipeline. Insights that align with challenges, pain points. Insights that align with how we better sell and close deals. There are so many different layers of insights and where are they? We come out of like example cab meetings and we're doing high fives and belly bumps because we learned so much. We had to do this again and again. But what ends up happening is the next day, maybe it's told to somebody else in the company within a week. Yeah, it's in a sales meeting a month later, maybe it made it into a PowerPoint deck two months later it's almost hard to be found. Yet those insights are what drive the entire company. Why do we not have an operational layer to bring insights together? We have AI now. We can do it. Right. Why don't we.

Speaker A: I think that there's two parts to it. Uh, it's not a matter of can we. As you've just stated, of course we can. And for instance, inside of our organization, as we've been redefining some of our product offering, we've taken dozens of call recordings from first meetings and really done primary research in a very short order used our conversational intelligence tool plus CLAUDE to really understand what those insights are. And I think organizations are hopefully starting to get better and better at that. That's one kind of component to it. But the other piece of it is that you need to then really socialize those across the whole organization. Because if just the person who sat in the cab meeting is the only one that knows, how about the rest of the organization? How about your sellers that are on the front lines? How about your product marketing team? How about really every single person in the organization needs to be privy to to those insights because as we know, alignment is one of the killers of success in an organization. So I think those two have to really work in concert with one another. I'm going to throw another old school anecdote, Steve, but when I've seen it done really well, I've seen things like posters. This is perhaps not as relevant if teens aren't in the office, but life size posters of who the ICP is and not just getting at what their demographic or psychographic information is, but really what is success for them and their team. What's the impact that makes them successful? I do think that socialization and alignment is often a key missing component.

Speaker B: And just to make the point, internal alignment is the number one challenge inside of B2B companies. My own studies across over 100 different C suite executives. By far the number one. You said number one. Throughout the hundreds of companies you've worked with. I've had other go to market partners on work with Fortune 500 mid. Absolutely. And internal alignment. Get hold of this. Executive teams that are internally aligned have 2.4 times the revenue growth of non aligned and they have two times greater profitability. What you're bringing it up, what you're talking about isn't a throwaway line. This is the number one challenge. And we were talking back and forth. We can either look at it one of two ways, either we are our own greatest blockers, our own greatest challenges for sustained growth, or we have the greatest opportunity ourselves. It's not dependent on anyone else. It's not dependent on the technology or the products that we're delivering. It's dependent on how we come together as a company. And the old adage that VC firms and PE firms, they invest first in the team. High performance teams the company, the products separately. It goes right to what you're saying here is we have to be high performance, we have to be aligned. What's so difficult about it? Why aren't we?

Speaker A: It's a really good question. If I had totally cracked the code, I think that perhaps I would set up my own consulting shop to help teams to have better alignment. But I think that thinking about the yin and yang of um, understanding icp, what I will say is that Teams that are really obsessed with their customers and are aligned around who their ICP is are the teams that does act as a really important forcing function. Right. When everyone in an organization understands what impact is for those customers. And not just in the pre sales process, by the way, I'd say more important or at least equally as important after they become a customer, making sure that impact is delivered, especially in a SaaS or recurring revenue business where so much of your ability to generate revenue from that organization happens after that initial sale. So when teams are really aligned around this concept of impact, which does correlate directly to who their buyers are and what that buyer values, those are the teams that will naturally become more aligned. Again, I think there's a lot of other ways to drive alignment, but I think that if I had to pick one thing that people really spend some time thinking about, that would be the one thing.

Speaker B: So aligning around the customer and to be customer obsessed, have a deep understanding. Like to me, obsession means a never ending drive. I'm never done learning. Right. And I'm never done being curious. I have it on my to do list every single day. It's a top priority. Right. What does customer obsession mean to you from a chief Growth officer, a Chief Revenue officer perspective in terms of one thing you could say is optimizing for customer obsession is optimizing for revenue growth. And I love to just hear your perspective on customer obsession and how you tie it directly to revenue growth.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a great author whose book I actually have on my shelf to reread over the summer from a gentleman named Will Guidera from, um, Unreasonable Hospitality. And if I mispronounced his name, I apologize, but he really is this amazing expert. He's a restaurateur who was able to get his restaurant, eleven Madison, to be in literally the top restaurant in the world. And it was not because the food was the best. It's because they really listened to to exactly what their customer wanted. They found certain moments in the experience with their customer to surprise and delight. And at the end of the day it's having insights. But it's also, I think, especially in our world of recurring revenue. I've said it earlier in this conversation and I will say it again. It's understanding what that emotional and rational impact is for your buyer and for your customer. And by emotional, again, really understanding what success or failure means to them personally. And understanding the rational side, which is there's definitely some sort of efficiency or productivity or cost savings or time savings gains that that organization gleans from the service or product that you offer. I think that's, I hate to say it like it's not hard. It's pretty straightforward and simple, but yet it's often overlooked.

Speaker B: The idea of not overlooking. There's a term that gets thrown around a lot called customer proximity. Staying close to the customer. And I had a gentleman on, he's a 4 uh time B2B CRO and he talked a lot about customer proximity. And he said, steve, but when I say you've got to have a lot of conversations with the customer, he said those that are outside of the sales environment. He said tremendous learning from the sales environment. But I think his point was that today buyers are waiting longer and longer to want to talk to us. They've already put the short list together. They're in a validation mode, they're in a confirmation mode of decisions they've already made. And can you fulfill those decisions? Yes. Is there more to learn? Absolutely. And we can play that role. But he was talking about the conversations that happen earlier as they're forming their opinions, as they're designing. How high of a priority is this pain point to me the emotional risks involved? Right. What do you think about his idea of customer proximity but being proactive at getting conversations that are outside of the sales conversation that are designed to be earlier stage?

Speaker A: If I understand the outside of the sales conversation on one hand, if we're talking about being provocative and thought leadership oriented, helping for solutions where there may not necessarily be be a known need or they may be breaking into new a category, I definitely think there are ways to be provocatively engaging with a customer to help like unlock that, that mindset. So absolutely I'm not going to be able to think of a great example off the top of my head, but there are many, many brands that have been very successful of uh, bringing to light a problem that exists in the market that they're purpose built to solve for and really showcasing the value of that to their customer base and being out in a thought leadership environment and really setting the conversation versus competing at the end. When a buyer is 70% of the way through their journey, for sure.

Speaker B: So if a buyer is almost completely through their journey, I think it was sixth sense. Bain did some studies on this as well, McKinsey, that on average the short list, when it gets formed on day one, four out of five, four or five vendors are put on it 95% of the time. One of the winners is from that short list. We got to get on the short list. Right. Getting on the short list in your mind, how does trust play in the brand? You being seen as a legitimate player in the marketplace. What are the things that help us get on the short list? That maybe when you were talking about lead gen, demand gen before, what are the things that help us that we've got to do in advance to get on that short list to have the opportunity to close deals.

Speaker A: Yeah, I always think proof that you can deliver what you promise. You know, I think that's always a ah, winning approach. For instance, I've always believed do references early in the sales cycle introduce someone to a customer and let them hear it directly from a customer. I'm not a believer in let the reference check be the last thing that happens because I think they're super high value. So that may be a tactical answer to your really thoughtful question, but I really think that so much of the value that sellers can offer in the buying process is to let that buyer explore answers to the questions that they have and really understand what those questions are from pattern recognition and be able to serve up solutions to that early on, not wait to be asked, but to be proactive in knowing what are likely challenges.

Speaker B: One of the words gets thrown around about getting on that short list and doing work in advance is building trust. Forrester came out at uh, the end of last year and said their big prediction this year was that trust is the currency to get in and close deals and retain clients. On top of that, they literally said to C suite executives, the number one thing that you need to do, you have demand gen programs, brand building programs, we have programs to develop all kinds of things in our go to market strategy strategy. Where is your trust development program? And they actually recommended for CMOs that it's the number one thing that they should do. Where does trust play into all of this in your mind?

Speaker A: You brought it up in the last question as well. And again I think about just the um, thousands of B2B buyers that we've worked with on behalf of our customers over time. I do think that trust that impact will be delivered is really critical. And again I think that it's simple. Understand what success, understand what impact looks like for that customer and make sure that you are deeply focused on showing them what that looks like in their scenario though, showing them what that looks like for other customers that you've worked with. I think at first trust is built by understanding what success looks like and then making sure there's a plan to deliver that in SaaS or recurring revenue. That's not just one time, but that's every day, every month, every year. It's over a very long period of time. And I think that trust is still a really important ingredient, but it's linked. Trust and customer obsession, uh, are linked concepts from my perspective. They're not separate.

Speaker B: So you said something earlier that I made a mental note that I wanted to come back to. You made sure to say that we need to understand both the emotional and rational reasons why buyers make decisions. And there's lots of studies that talk about actually how in B2B, big deals, enterprise deals even, that the majority of the decision making is based on emotion, the risk. These are big decisions, these can be career kind of making decisions. Right. And what's interesting, we never really think about it this way because we've all been buyers. As a cgo, you're a buyer, right? I'm sure you added to your tech stack, you did all kinds of things as the cgo, but that was not your defined role. You're not a full time buyer. Just thinking about our, uh, buyers in different ways. They have full time jobs. Being a buyer is not one of them. They're not professional buyers. How do you think about just the thinking about the buyer and knowing that the emotion is at least 50% of this decision making criteria, what do we do differently? Knowing that?

Speaker A: I think that in an enterprise sales environment, which tends to be a lot of where I've spent more time than not, it's not just an individual buyer, it's many. You've got multiple people in a sale. And so I think that's really where I see some of the best sellers shine, is that they're able to really map out and get underneath what those emotional and rational impacts are for our champion. For the economic decision maker, I'd say to a lesser degree to the individual user, but there are still, uh, multiple people that are involved and that that is where you see your bestsellers shine. They understand what success looks like and they're able to again, paint the picture, confirm that the solution will deliver upon that, offer proactive references that will get beyond, build confidence and trust in what's being purchased.

Speaker B: So I want to make sure that I'm allowing you to answer all the questions, even the ones I haven't even asked. Right. Previously in our last conversation, you talked a lot about the use of technology and that technology is not a strategy itself. What did you mean by that?

Speaker A: Um, it's something that I have felt deeply for a very long time, which is it's very easy to get caught up in Bright Shiny object syndrome. And oh my gosh, if we just buy this CRM or this automation platform or this AI platform that is going to help us propel our success. I don't know if I'm the only one who said it, but it is one of my favorite sayings, and that is technology is not a strategy. And that organizations really need to make sure they're back to basics. In some cases, there needs to be process, well defined, people need to be trained. And even in the age of AI today, I think there are some really interesting experiments happening, but those experiments are not necessarily yielding results or productivity, they're just interesting. But the organizations that are really utilizing AI are having an orchestrated set of tasks that are being completed that are actually adding value to the business, either in terms of insights or productivity, and they're yielding roi. So I would say to anyone listening or the executive suite, just make sure that if you are looking to purchase technology or if you have technology that you've purchased, really make sure you're clear on what the strategy is, how you'll utilize it, how it interacts with other systems, who it's adding value to. I think that's a really important piece that that hasn't been touched on yet.

Speaker B: So now I'm going to ask the most difficult question, which is that we've talked just about so much here, right? If there was just one thing that you wanted, the C suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast to remember, what's the single most important thing you want them to take away?

Speaker A: You're asking hard questions, Steve. I mean, we've talked a lot about the fundamentals of people process technology. We've talked about the importance of alignment and customer obsession. So, so let's assume that we've hit on all of those and that in fact, those are really important. I'm going to take a moment, since you asked, and share something that is very near and dear, and that is about the importance of mentorship in an organization. And I think that whether there is a formalized way to find mentorship within the organization or you seek outside resources, like for instance, we do have a nonprofit, um, called Women in Revenue. If you want to check it out, it's womeninrevenue.org it is a 501c3 nonprofit that is actually funded by many of the technology companies that are household names to all of us. I look at what we do as team sport. There are no heroes in this business. And I think that mentorship and really finding a community and A network for your teams and yourselves to collaborate with is so important. It's how we grow. It's how we have a growth mindset. I know personally, I've mentored dozens and dozens of women, but even recently, I said to someone on my team who is much more an AI native than I am, I'd love your help. There's so much I have to learn, and I want to understand how you're thinking about solving this type of a problem or that type of a problem. And I think that mentorship goes two ways, and I think it's something that everybody in an organization should have access to.

Speaker B: I have to say I agree 100%. I think we've come at it in different angles. I think staying tied to a community, learning from the community and what they know, uh, and what they've done and what's failed and what hasn't and what they've tried, and that's the same thing. I think behind customer obsession is an obsession in our own profession. Right. And the mission of this podcast is to bring different voices together. So a very different way than you're doing it with women in revenue, in your community. But I applaud you for that. I just wanted to say thank you for being a part of this community and bringing your expertise and your insights to the entire world of C Suite executives. We interview C Suites from all over the world, from Europe, us, India, Australia, name it. And I call it the Rising Tide that lifts all bows. And I thought you were just an amazing part of that Rising tide today. So, Lauren, thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Steve. It's been fun.