Episode 22 Edited
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Richard Ellis: [00:00:00] According to Gartner, only 14% of companies say they have a 360 degree view of their customer. Yet companies that effectively capture and act on the voice of the customer are 60% more profitable than those that don't Today consider some goodness around how to scale and operationalize the voice of the customer across sales and marketing teams.
Welcome to some goodness where we engage seasoned business leaders and experts to share practical guidance and tips to help new and future C-level leaders maximize their impact. My guest today is Stacy Leidinger, a longtime B2B software leader with deep expertise in product marketing, demand generation, and strategic alignment between marketing and sales.
She's helped guide multiple organizations through growth. And successful exits by putting the customer at the center of the strategy. Stacy, welcome.
Stacy Leidwinger: [00:01:00] Thanks, Richard. I'm really excited to connect today.
Richard Ellis: I just always love collaborating with you, and I'm excited to dig into a couple of topics here. As you've worked in lots of organizations of big and small sizes, from high growth startups to large global companies, one thing that you've highlighted to me is that it's often hard to truly scale the voice of the customer.
And so I thought for this episode we could dive into that and I'd love to start with just when you hear the voice of the customer, what does that mean to you and why is that so important?
Stacy Leidwinger: Richard, great question. I think voice of the customer, you could spend hours just dissecting the different definitions.
So I think for me, coming, as you said, my background's very much in product management, product marketing, marketing overall. So I'm gonna come from it as a go to market. Right? There's a whole discipline on voice of the customer. Mm-hmm. But when you're thinking about marketing and sales and product management, what does voice of the customer truly mean?
It really means [00:02:00] understanding fundamentally what pain the customer has, what solutions that they are looking for or potentially never even thought of, but they know they have those pain points. And then understanding when you're driving real value. So something that gets almost put on repeat often when I'm talking within an organization is it's all about the value and the outcomes.
Richard Ellis: I like that value and outcomes, which is an extension from just capabilities and needs, right? It's the whole broader spectrum of that, and you've seen a lot. So let's start off with, I love storytelling, and you don't have to pick on anybody, but let's start with a negative a little bit. Where do companies fall short in trying to really gather the voice of the customer?
Stacy Leidwinger: I think there's kind of three areas that I see organizations fall short and quite honestly, it depends on their evolution. So these are not things that you'd see at every company, but where they are in their evolution definitely impacts where they are maybe falling short, capturing that voice. But one of the tried and true that I see, especially [00:03:00] organizations that are sometimes already established, they assume they know the voice of the customer.
They don't have to do this work anymore, right? I've been here, I'm out there on sales calls. We have thousands of customers. Of course, we know the voice of our customers, and that's when the competition comes, eats those organizations alive because customer pains are always shifting. Business dynamics are always changing.
And also the technology, the services, the solutions that are out there to solve those pains are evolving. So often we see markets consolidate. The reason they consolidate it is more solutions are solving those pain points. Mm-hmm. And so when organizations don't stay close to the customer, they assume they know who it is.
That's one of those fundamental challenges that I often see organizations fall victim to.
Richard Ellis: Great. You may have a couple of more, but if you don't mind us digging into that one a little bit. So how do you solve that? Right. Because every marketing department that I work with, it's not like their, you know, resources are walking around looking for more to do.
They always feel like their head's on [00:04:00] fire. They're overwhelmed. So how do you solve that? So
Stacy Leidwinger: sometimes you have the luxury of having a voice of the customer department that's actually doing these things.
Richard Ellis: Oh, that's novel,
Stacy Leidwinger: but you don't always have, so let's assume that no one is tasked to go do this. Now you need to infuse it, especially in marketing and the things that you're doing on a day-to-day basis.
So customer advocacy is absolutely critical. You're doing customer case studies, you're doing interviews. I always recommend at least two customer or marketing individuals are on those customer calls. One that's asking the questions, they're driving the dynamic. Have someone else take the notes and shift those roles so that more and more people are hearing the customer words.
The other thing is events are alive and well. I know a few years ago it was far and few before finding live events, but now they're out there. A lot of organizations are doing road shows. They're doing these individual sessions. Make sure that anytime you're doing an event, someone's there not just running the event.
So my rule is if you're at the event, you're working the booth, [00:05:00] you're going to sessions, you're talking to customers, you're listening. You're not just putting up the booth 'cause you're on booth duty. You're actively engaging. 'cause that's the best way, again, to hear, go visit competitive booths, go visit partner booths, listen to those conversations.
And so that's another way, that's just day to day. The other thing is staying really close to sales, and I say that everyone, if they're in marketing, product management. You should not only have your favorite salesperson, you should have the most highly productive salesperson on auto dial or high up on your teams list and engage with them on a regular basis.
Ask them, what are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are some of the challenges? Have the competitive landscape changed? If you build those relationships, they'll start bringing it back to you and infusing it, but you have to stay close and you almost need to hit pause once a quarter or at least twice a year and go, what shifted?
What has changed in the world since we last talked about our customers, since we last talked about that voice? What differences are we [00:06:00] seeing? And if you build in that behavior, you'll never lose sight of the voice of the customer.
Richard Ellis: Got it. So there's really two dimensions to think about. One is being in front of the customer on a consistent basis, and the other is being in front of sales and a part of sales cycles and sales conversations on a consistent basis.
I was just talking to another client last week that was kind of lamenting that marketing wasn't serving the sales team very well, and they weren't getting what they needed. We were kind of digging into that and they said they're never on our calls. They don't meet with us. They just throw stuff at us.
And they're just assuming this is what we need or our customers want to read or whatever. Do you have any recommendations on like how much is enough, but not too much in terms of getting involved with sales or participating on sales calls?
Stacy Leidwinger: Yeah, and I think even across marketing, not everyone's created equal, and I don't mean that in a negative way, right?
The person that is doing marketing operations and managing the budget and the back end of the website, they may not need all of this all the time. Those that [00:07:00] are creating messaging, those that are determining the demand plans, where you're placing dollars, how you're doing your social media, your pr, your brand and awareness, which probably is about 75 to 80%.
I think they should be actively engaged in the same path sales are on. So I'm a deep believer that if you're doing sales enablement, which is most often remote, have marketing, join those calls, make sure they're engaging, they're talking, they're already there. Product marketing should be a huge liaison between the.
Sales team and the marketing team bringing those things back intentionally. But if marketing's getting the same enablement, they're hearing the same stories, they're hearing win stories, success stories, sometimes even creating them. I've had marketers where their job was to go get. Three or four win-loss analysis every quarter in their regions, which forces those relationships, and you publish and you share and you learn.
Then you're all starting to work from the same songbook, the same playbook. You're hearing those live stories, and so I'm a big believer that it's not [00:08:00] sales and marketing as two separate organizations. When you think about enablement, when you think about who needs to know what, it should always be a sales and marketing organization together.
Again, high is exceptions to that, right? But for the most part. Think of it as one work. Forget org structures and everything like that. The same information sales is learning about the customer. Marketing needs to learn about the customer.
Richard Ellis: I like that a lot. And what comes to mind is I see a lot of marketing departments be very project focused.
You know, whether it's campaign or we gotta get our M qls up, or e everything's kind of a project versus what's a consistent operating rhythm of just interacting with the sales org, or maybe even customer service, et cetera. You know, one common interaction point comes to mind is QBR and, and the work we do, I have.
The opportunity sit in a lot of client qbr, and I'll tell you that probably more than 50% didn't have marketing represented in that. But what's your point of view on marketing representation or product marketing in [00:09:00] sales? Qbr?
Stacy Leidwinger: So I think marketing should always be there and actually presenting. So at the end of the day, and I strongly believe this.
There is one number that the board stakeholders and everyone cares about, and that's the revenue you're producing, right? And you can break that down. They're gonna wanna know how much is acquisition, how much is expansion, how much is retention, but those are the numbers that people care about. Every other number.
And I deeply care about metrics and marketing metrics of MQ LS and conversion rates and website visitors. Are leading indicators to what gets you to the final number? So I'll tell you actually a story about A QBR once where sales and marketing were both present and I was pretty young in my career.
Really liked our CEO. We sat there and it was one of those quarters where marketing had hit all their objectives. It was like we killed our lead numbers. The MQL were off. Website was doing great. We had a great product launch, great pr, and so we're like, wow. But sales, unfortunately that quarter didn't hit their numbers and we're like, it's gonna be a tough quarter for sale.
[00:10:00] So. In this QBR marketing went first and we're like, look, we did so great. And then sales went and it was like, yeah, it was top here's some of the things that we found out. Here's where we're struggling. And I remember being, you know, fairly young going, Ugh, I can't wait. You like, we kind of got ripped apart last time.
I think sales is gonna get ripped apart this time. Not my fault. And our CEO looked over at marketing and said. How dare you. How dare you show up and claim success this quarter when we didn't hit our numbers? I can't believe you just came and said all this great things you did, and then your sales counterpart said, we struggled.
Why weren't you talking? Why weren't you helping them? 'cause if sales isn't successful, we're not successful. And I remember that moment and I've taken that to heart and I have said as an organization. Our number one objective is to drive sales numbers. Yes. We're gonna talk about how we get there. We're gonna talk about those leading indicators.
But when you change the QBR format, where you have a shared goal across sales and marketing and sales, talks [00:11:00] about how they contributed and marketing talks about how they contributed, and you have people interacting, that's when you now make a change. I had recently. We were working with a sales organization when I first started.
They're like, Stacy, I'm glad you came in 'cause it's not working. This is not successful. I think you're gonna have to get a new marketer here. They're not doing what they need. Fast forward a year and a half later, once we had shared metrics, shared objectives. I was getting emails. Are you giving her a bonus this year?
Are you supporting her enough? Like she's part of the team? And when you see that shift, you know you've made a change in dynamics.
Richard Ellis: Oh, that is so good. And such a reminder that we're all here to drive revenues collectively and shared metrics. Such a great way to just kind of break down those silos and those walls between sales and marketing that you can often see kind of creep into the organization sometimes.
Well, let's pull on that thread of. Creating more alignment between sales and marketing. 'cause I know one thing that you and I have talked about in the past is that we're both a believer that marketing should be a part of [00:12:00] SCOs. Not just sit in the back of the room, but tell me a little bit about your perspective on involvement in SKO or general sales trainings and things like that.
Stacy Leidwinger: No, so I'm sure if any marketing leaders listening to this, they're laughing. Like that would be great if we had budget, right? Because that's the first thing we're trying to get as much as we can. We've been fighting to get sales kickoffs back. I will say the best organizations I've worked with haven't had sales kickoffs.
They've had go to market kickoffs and that brought in everyone that was focused on driving go to market. So that was a lot of sales marketing. It might not have been the whole organization, unfortunately. Again, some of the web developers and things like that, they weren't per se on that go to market frontline.
It also brought CSMs in 'cause they're often left behind. But it brought everyone that was engaged in that go-to-market responsible for revenue together and it wasn't sitting in the back of the room. So I'm a strong believer and Richard, I think you've helped teach me this over the years, get people out of their seats, moving at these kickoffs, doing exercise, [00:13:00] role playing.
If someone can learn something remotely by listening, get it off the kickoff agenda, it should be active engagement. It should be opportunity to learn from peers. And if you're driving it that way, then it's such a huge miss to not have your field marketers, your product marketing team, your brand team, their engaging.
I've seen some of the best work come when the marketers are trying to learn the sales pitch or vice versa. You've got someone in the CSM org trying to go ahead and do discovery. They're like, oh, I actually do discovery every day with our existing customers. Right? But they are trained differently, and so I think there's so much value when you unify.
Yes, we all live in a world of budget. It's one of everything's a trade off. So do you do one less event, but if you can be more effective and get more out of every dollar you spend, isn't that also a high level of productivity?
Richard Ellis: Absolutely. Yeah. And so that should go to the business case for the kickoff event, right?
And I love go to market kickoff versus just sales kickoff. I know a couple of our [00:14:00] clients are now starting to call them revenue kickoffs rather than just sales. And if everybody has a shared goal of driving revenue and they can see a line of sight to improving revenues, they should be there. Right? I totally get the budget constraints, the real constraints that we have to deal with.
One of the things that you and I have done recently together is really kind of balance just the messaging and enablement work for not only sales, but positioning and marketing materials and website materials from just being self-focused features and capabilities to more customer focused, market focused, to really drive an awareness that they need to do something different.
Right, and they need to do it now, versus it's all about us and just expecting the customers to connect the dots and say, oh yeah, I need some of that stuff. When you think about voice of customer, you know, one of the things that you mentioned at the top of the call was sometimes it's helping them understand what they need, that they're maybe not appreciating.
How does that come about from either product marketing [00:15:00] and marketing perspective and sales to really be more insightful to the customer and help lead the way?
Stacy Leidwinger: And I think what you just said is the key. It's being insightful and so I think this is really important, especially if you're going a little bit up level.
So I've always been in B2B software. If you're going kind of mid-enterprise up, the first thing that a customer wants to know is that you understand them. They want to be learning from you because you should have seen this problem before. You should understand industry trends. You should be able to help them articulate why that is the next pain point they should solve.
And so it's providing some of those insights that you're not alone. This is kind of the negative outcomes that might happen. These are the challenges that could fall on the business. To me, it's all about helping someone build that business case early on and they should be nodding their heads of like, yes, this is me.
They know me. And then yes, I haven't been able to articulate to my management team. How big of a problem this is, or what is the business impact if I don't solve this problem? [00:16:00] Because those have to go hand in hand. We have lots of pain in our everyday lives, but is it worth solving those pain points? Is it going to make incrementally your life or business better?
And so the more insights that you can provide that industry knowledge, be that subject matter expert, that's when you drive engagement. So coming from a marketing perspective, one of the top metrics I do look at is engagement on the website. If I get a hundred visitors, but. 80% are highly engaged. I'd rather that than a thousand visitors that come to a page and leave, because those are never gonna turn into customers.
And so thinking about once you capture their attention, how do you keep them engaged? How do you keep sharing new insights, new tidbits? It's great. I was working with a security company recently and there's a lot of breaking security news, so we started LinkedIn lives. Anytime there was a hot new topic, we'd get in, we'd interview the researcher, and you know what?
That wasn't selling anything. We never really mentioned a product, but it was providing insights about a new threat. What are [00:17:00] some tactics they could take to improve that threat? We were giving them insights that said, I've learned something now. I might be willing to give you my time to learn more about.
What do you do with all this knowledge you have? Like how are you really helping people?
Richard Ellis: Right, right now, what, you know, how do we solve this? Or just being positioned as the expert, right in the industry can kind of pull demand and pull customers towards you. I love that. Well, are you seeing any other trends these days in terms of engaging customers, you know, whether it's LinkedIn lives or YouTube shorts, or what other ways are you finding to be successful?
Yeah.
Stacy Leidwinger: Oh, there's so much. I feel like Richard, we could spend another whole hour on how marketing and how to get that engagement is changing. I know AI is a heavy, heavy word, but it's a key one. And the reality is, one of the things that's out there that didn't exist a decade ago is understanding a buyer's intent signals.
And to me, this is game changing. So before you never [00:18:00] knew of what anyone wanted till they picked up the phone and said, I'm ready to talk to you. Now, there's technology out there that will go ahead and understand. Here's somebody that has engaged in your website. They came to a webinar. We build trends, and now we say, out of everyone that you're engaged with throughout your, let's say Salesforce or your CRM database, these are the 20 accounts that are most likely ready to buy.
And one of the things that really shocked me is we did some historical looking back and we said, out of all the customers that bought and were new that we acquired this quarter, how many showed buying signals six months ago? And it was 80%.
Richard Ellis: Really? Wow.
Stacy Leidwinger: 80%. Why spend your time mining all these accounts that might have a pain that might be looking to switch vendors and all of that?
When with the technology and the capabilities we have now? You can really identify and now you can start personalizing and your messaging and micro personalization and all of these things. So the amount of technology and scale to [00:19:00] make things feel personal and bring those insights to the people that matter most.
It's truly amazing. It takes time, it takes effort. It's all there and it's no longer kind of this pie in the sky dream. It's there, and you can be very scientific about how you go to market lining. Then that's why that voice of customer is so important now that we know these are the people buying, how do we let them know?
We know their pain point. We know how to deliver value and outcomes to them because we've done it again and again.
Richard Ellis: That's such a strong one-two punch, right? You have a good handle on the voice of the customer and what they need, and then you get a good handle on buying intent and what to look for to give you a heads up to where you can then target boom.
Right. Should see some real efficiencies in your go to market. That's awesome.
Stacy Leidwinger: Requires sales and marketing, be talking constantly and make sure that we're aligned around this is what we're seeing. But yeah,
Richard Ellis: now
Stacy Leidwinger: the data helped drive that a lot more than anything else. Mm-hmm.
Richard Ellis: That's so good. Time flies.
While we're having just such great discussion. So we're almost out of time, but is there anything else [00:20:00] that we haven't talked about that you think the the listeners might appreciate? Any practical tips or any obstacles to watch out for or anything?
Stacy Leidwinger: Yeah, so especially if you're a leader of any kind, any size.
One of the things I would challenge leaders is when you're in any meeting, you're discussing anything about the company. If you haven't heard someone say the word customer. Ask why. I can't think of anything that really shouldn't center around the customer that you're doing. And so as a leader, it's one of those things I do that gut check after someone's presented to me.
They've asked for feedback. I read a press release, I read a PowerPoint, whatever it might be. Did someone really think about the customer and is the customer voice in whatever we're talking about? And if it's not, it's the first thing I bring up and it's so simple to do and that will ensure that that customer voice isn't everything that you achieve.
I.
Richard Ellis: So smart. That's a great way to end. I think that's something really practical that everybody listening can go do, starting their next call right after they [00:21:00] finish listening to this episode. So that's great. Well, thanks for diving into the voice of the customer. As you mentioned, we could go on and on, but unfortunately we have to cut it off there.
You've listened to a few of our episodes at least, and I know you know that at the end we like to kind of. Deviate from our current topic and just say, Hey, outside of maybe even the professional world, what is some other goodness that's come into your life that you would want to share in the spirit of spreading goodness?
You have anything for us?
Stacy Leidwinger: I do. And the minute, you know, I was thinking about joining and I have seen, I actually thought about this book and I leave it at my desk. So every morning I read one small passage. It's. Called The Pivot Year by Brianna Weist, and so my company recently was acquired. That brings big change, and so I love this book because it's taking, you know, change can be challenging, but change can be such opportunity, it can be time of reflection, and so every day is just one paragraph and it's talking about how you handle change, how you really think about what do you want next.
In life and [00:22:00] sometimes it's just really short passages that can make you think throughout your day. And to me, when you're going through some of this and it's amazing whether it's professionally, personally, with your family, I feel like everyone's in a constant shift of change. It's been a really grounding, easy to do daily, and it's been great.
I've shared it with others back and forth.
Richard Ellis: That's so good. And I love books, so I'm gonna have to go pick that one up. Thanks for that recommendation. But you're right, I mean, change is a constant, right? So you can't stop the change, but you can help how you react to it or what you do or how you pivot. And so I look forward to digging into that and maybe getting some new ideas and insights.
Well, thank you for, uh, spending your time with us today. It's always a pleasure to meet with you.
Stacy Leidwinger: Yeah, Richard. Well, thank you very much. It's been great being back and have brought back some great memories over the years. Collaborating
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