Where Strategy Meets Reality - Christopher Wallace

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Christopher Wallace. Christopher spends his days helping companies close one of the biggest gaps in business, the space between what gets set in the boardroom and what actually happens in front of the customer.

0:39He's the president of Interview, where he works closely with sales organizations to make sure their go-to-market strategies don't just live in slide decks, but actually show up in the moments that matter most, aka when customers are making buying decisions. Under his leadership, interviewers help companies drive meaningful improvements in revenue performance and customer satisfaction across millions of frontline interactions. Christopher is also an adjunct marketing professor at Villanova University, and his insights have been featured in the following. Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and AdAge, to name just a few.

1:20He's a frequent keynote speaker, panel moderator, and podcast guest, appearing on more than 70 business shows. And finally, he lives just outside Philly, like yours truly, with his family where you'll likely find him hiking, kayaking, attempting to prove his golf game. I love the use of the word attempting. Or talking about what might be his most unique passion, drumroll, backpacks. Yes, you heard that right, backpacks. Christopher, welcome to the CMO Whisperer podcast.

1:52Christopher Wallace:Steve, thank you so much for having me. This is a long time coming. I've wanted to be on this show for a long time, so I appreciate you having me on. Listen, I'm a big fan of your work. I'm so glad we got connected. And as they say, any Philly guy, right, I'm in. Right, right, exactly. Got to stick together, us Philly people. I kind of want to talk about backpacks, and we'll get to that later if we have time, because I'm sure it's quite a great story. but I'm sure the customers, listen to me saying customers, the listeners, I want to hear about what your thoughts on other topics. So let's start with translating marketing strategy for sales execution.

2:28Okay. One of the biggest disconnects inside companies is the gap between what gets set in those boardrooms and actually happens in front of the customer. First question is why does that gap exist in the first place?

2:39Christopher Wallace:There's a lot of reasons why. I think that the silos that exist inside a lot of organizations, We'll talk about companies of various sizes, but in a lot of organizations, what marketing is tasked with doing and what sales is tasked with doing, really, it's just too far apart. They're not connected in terms of how they're gold. The left hand is not talking to the right hand, so to speak. And I think what happens is you have one group that is really geared toward building the brand and or driving demand, being the marketing organization. and then the sales team's execution looks very different from what the marketing organization is trying to do.

3:17Christopher Wallace:So I would say the biggest reason the gap exists is those two groups operate independently from each other. They're siloed. They're trying to accomplish different things. And for whatever reason, there's just not a great, most organizations aren't great at just driving cohesion between them, making sure that they're talking and really linking them. And the age old question is, should sales and marketing live under one organization inside companies? And my answer to that would be yes. Oh, I can hear the collective, oh, no, amongst some of my listeners. And I'm sure you face that literally in face-to-face conversations with people in sales or marketing.

3:52No, no, no, no. No, they need to be separate. Yeah. It depends if you talk to them. Why? Let me pay double the advocate. Why? Why should they be together?

4:00Christopher Wallace:You're talking about the strategy and the execution. One's a strategy arm. One's an execution arm, right? You really are. and I think a lot of what I'm going to talk about really focuses on, call it the B2C or the B2B2C world. That's really where my team and I have our expertise. But I think that the, and I'll give you a story about a CMO that's a friend of mine, actually also lives here locally, probably had him on the show. He told me a story, he was in the gaming business, in the casino business. And he told me a story about when he took over marketing, he demanded that all of the, at the time, they were called these guest advocates or guest concierges, sort of the people that cater to the high rollers and things like that.

4:40Christopher Wallace:And he demanded that that team be moved under him. And he had a separate training team that sat inside the marketing organization that really was working to make sure that anything they developed in terms of, he was developing loyalty strategies, but anything they were doing from a loyalty perspective was really turned into a new playbook, kind of an evolving playbook for these guest concierges. And by doing so, he was able to really control, you know, what I'm telling the customer on one hand and what they're hearing when they stand in front of one of my people, because that's the disconnect that we see all the time.

5:11Christopher Wallace:So I think that, you know, when we look at, you know, whether or not you have sales and marketing under one organization, the person setting the strategy, having an understanding of how it's going to get executed at that point of transaction, I think you can make a strong case that having those as closely connected as possible is going to drive better results. It's going to drive better ROI on your marketing spend. Okay. I'm still playing devil's advocate, or maybe not with this next question, but clearly there's egos involved. Yeah. Talk about that. Well, I think that there are egos involved.

5:40Christopher Wallace:And I'm not saying that every organization needs to change their structure today, right? I do think that over time, I think that sales and marketing leaders have recognized more and more that they need to work more closely together. But when you go back to the ego piece, I think that the means, it comes down to dollars and cents, right? How can the company operate as efficiently as possible, right? And if you have the expenditures is coming from the market. And again, depending on the organization, but if the money being spent on the marketing side of the house is really what's driving the demand, if that's driving the phone calls to put traffic, you know, whatever, however your demand is coming in, I really think that there's a big efficiency play.

6:16Christopher Wallace:And listen, if I'm a sales leader and I've got an ego, at the end of the day, don't I want to capture as much of that demand as I possibly can? Now, where I really think it gets tricky, Steve, I think the equation gets really tricky if the company's investment in sales is substantially greater than their investment in marketing. That's where I think it gets really, really tricky. That's where I think some of your listeners would say, well, we're a sales led organization. Marketing sort of supports what sales is doing. And I think in that instance, it can be tricky because I don't know that salespeople, you know, salespeople providing direction to marketers is necessarily the best thing.

6:48Christopher Wallace:I think that the strategy piece really has to be on lockdown. So I do think that that's where it really gets tricky is if you flip that coin over and marketing is really kind of the smaller and call it less resourced part of the organization, then it gets really tricky. Is it too simplistic? And you tell me if it is. Is it too simplistic to think that alignment would go a lot smoother if there is a better understanding or coming together of the whole attribution part of this? Meaning, well, no sales wants credit. No, marketing wants credit. But if we just roll it together, would that help? So I think it goes back to when I talked about the goals, right, the goals and years gone by, it was, you know, when social media really started to explode, it was clicks and likes and reshares and things like that.

7:30Christopher Wallace:Now, I think over the last, you know, six, eight years, I think that the marketing side of the house has really gotten tighter in terms of making sure that they're measured in actual tangible business results, right? Real business impact. I don't think it's as simple as saying, yes, we're all going to be under one roof and we're going to be focused on, you know, focused on kind of one set of metrics. But I do think the attribution piece is key. I think that the attribution shouldn't be hard. Marketing should have one set. It should flow all the way through. Marketing is guiding one portion of the journey and sales is picking up another portion of the journey.

8:01Christopher Wallace:The metrics that drive the first end of the funnel versus the metrics that you're going to track on the back end of the funnel, the bottom part of the funnel, really should be different. And it should be clear how if you're doing well with these, if you're not delivering the results that you want, you should be able to look at the bottom of the funnel. If marketing is doing their job, it should be clear to look at the bottom of the funnel and say, hey, listen, we're not converting it where we need to convert. Why? What's going wrong? And a lot of times that comes down to things like messaging and just pure execution and following processes and good customer experience habits and things like that.

8:33Christopher Wallace:But I think the metric should be on a continuum and really look at the funnel and look at the buyer journey as opposed to trying to be sort of collapsed together. I don't know that that would necessarily help. I know. And I simplified it, of course, for brevity's sake here. But I can just see people going who are not in sales and marketing going, look, just roll it all together. But it's not that simple. But we'll table that. Maybe if we do a part two, we can dive deeper into that whole dynamic. I want to move to consumer buying habit. Now, this is not breaking news, but consumers today have more information and more choices than ever before.

9:04And we'll be saying that a year from now. And, you know, that'll never end. But right now, from what you're seeing, looking backwards, how have buying behaviors really changed in the last, say, five to ten years?

9:13Christopher Wallace:If we look at the rise of digital information for the consumer, I think what, you know, we all know what happened was it went from the salesperson had the information. right? Think about buying a car 25 years ago, okay, 20 years ago. The salesperson had the information. They were protecting the information and the customer was trying to gather as they went. They went there because that was kind of the single source of truth, whether it was product info or pricing and financing and things like that. So the internet obviously made it a lot easier for people to access that. It gave them all the information that they needed, but they got to the point where they had a lot of information they felt empowered.

9:46Christopher Wallace:And then the information kept growing and growing and growing, and the choices kept growing and growing and growing. And what we've seen is it went from empowered customer to overwhelmed customer. So over the last, you say, five to seven years, six or eight years or whatever, what we've seen is that the average consumer, and we have research to back this up, and we've got lots of anecdotes from clients to back this up. But the average consumer starts their typical buying process overwhelmed. I read a slide deck from one of our clients one time. The first page of the slide deck said, our customer starts their buying journey confused, frustrated, and overwhelmed.

10:20Christopher Wallace:Confused, frustrated, and overwhelmed. And I think that what you find is consumers, the information reaches a point of saturation where they say, okay, I've got more than I need. And now I don't know what to select. I've got so much info, so many choices. Sorting it out is a real challenge for me. Yeah. And that then becomes, it just snowballs, right? Well, it's yes, because, I mean, what happens? So think about, you know, I love conversation or an anecdote from a book I read last year called Sales Pitch by a woman, an author named April Dunford. And in the book, she talks about buying a toilet.

10:56Christopher Wallace:OK, now April Dunford's her expertise is really in software and like positioning software tools and things like that. So she's not really a focused on like home improvement purchases. That's our world. Right. Those are the things we know. But I heard her describe her experience of buying a toilet. And it's one of those things where if you don't get the right help, she's got all the information she needs. Like how many, you know, how many gallons per minute flushes and so on and so forth. Like she can access all that, but really understanding how all that information boils down to what toilet she actually should put in her home is a very nuanced, is a very nuanced thing.

11:32Christopher Wallace:And if you don't get the guidance you need early on in the process, when you say it snowballs, you get one little piece of wrong information or somebody guides you in the wrong direction. Well, you could get stuck down that rabbit hole for a long time, and you're not necessarily getting closer to what you need to make a purchase. So what we see is the information is leading to a lack of confidence on the buyer side. And that's a challenge, right? That organizations need to meet that challenge and say, okay, we've got to empower confident purchases. And I don't think more information is the answer.

12:03Christopher Wallace:I think better organized information is the answer. That's part of the answer. I was going to say, it's part of it. It's a big part, but it's just a part of it. Yeah, there's no shortage. I'm laughing because if I see one more company say this term, but so many companies say they're customer centric air quotes. In reality, what are what are most organizations still getting wrong about that and how people make this actually sorry, actually make buying decisions. Okay. So I'm going to tell you my favorite stat. So on my first day, whenever I teach my class at Villanova, MBA level class, the first thing I teach the students on day one is I have them read a Wall Street Journal articles from 2024.

12:38Christopher Wallace:And the article talks about how I think, if I'm going to get the stat right, 91%, okay, 91 % of CEOs say they are a customer-led organization. They're a customer-first organization, okay? Okay. 58 % of the CMOs say that their company is customer first. Okay. So think about that. You've got a 33 % and I think I'm within a couple of percentage points on those stats, but you're talking about 33 % gap between what the CEO says and what the CMO says in terms of the perception of whether or not they're customer led organizations or if they're customer first organizations. So my personal belief is customer centric has just become a buzz phrase when in reality, there are systems and tools and entire operating models designed around being a customer first organization.

13:28Christopher Wallace:And that doesn't always mean they're going to be the most efficient organization. It doesn't mean they're always going to be the fastest organization, but they're typically going to be the highest margin organizations. They're going to be the most beloved organizations. But it's not easy. You can't just say it and put it on your website and be customer centric. You really have to put all the mechanisms in place to empower your people and empower the right decision-making. Everything from pricing to product design to service offerings, all those things really need to be thought through with the right mechanisms in place to make sure it's all pointing toward value to the customer.

14:00By the way, put that on a plaque somewhere, please, what Christopher just said, because it's really that straightforward and that simple. And talk about for part two, I could have my own discussion on that with so many people about how this is just so overblown. That's why I preface this by saying, if I see one more company say they're customer-centric, You know, I'm going to blank because it just it drives you crazy. And to me, it falls under the overarching belief that I have that so many companies underestimate, literally underestimate the knowledge and the savviness that consumers have.

14:32Christopher Wallace:They all know. We're all consumers. We know you're trying to sell us something. We get that. Well, so so and this is a piece I'm really passionate about, Steve. And this is going to be, you know, from a from a thought leadership perspective, you know, my writing, my you know, my my videos and things like that. The key theme that I'm on right now is I really think that organizations, the way they approach a sales conversation, the way they approach that buying journey is really outdated. I think it's 10 to 15 years, if not more, outdated where they still think it's some sort of a game, some sort of a sparring exercise with a customer.

15:05Christopher Wallace:And the reality is the average consumer does not have the time to waste. I've often said that I want to retire the phrase tire kickers. You still hear retail owners or sales managers use the phrase, oh, well, if a tire kicker comes in, it's like tire kicker, right? This idea that people have this spare time to come in and price shop you against five other retail stores is it's a complete it's completely misguided. And I think it misguides your salespeople and your front line. It's archaic. But there's still so many people that are entrenched in this in this way of thinking. And the way we, you know, in the programs that we do with our clients, we say they are here to buy.

15:44Christopher Wallace:You should assume every single customer is here to buy and you should assume your close rate is going to be 100 percent. Not because it is going to be 100 percent, but you need to treat every single customer in every single lead as a qualified buyer. If you don't go after, if you don't approach every single conversation, every single customer as if they are there to make a purchase during that interaction. right or at least in a subsequent interaction then you're going to turn customers away because if they don't feel like you're serious about doing business with them they will begrudgingly go do business with somebody else they do not want to go store to store to store or call around or the data all supports that if they don't have to they don't want to so this idea that you know people are price shopping they have all they can just pull it up in their phone and have it instantaneously be willing to defend the value of what you charge against your competition as opposed to like being afraid that they're going to price shop you.

16:39Christopher Wallace:So this idea that the customer's in it for some sort of a game is completely outdated thinking. They are all there to buy. And if you assume otherwise, you're making a mistake. Does everything you just say apply to B2B as well? I'm going to be honest and say, I don't know. I know my limitations, Steve. I'm self-aware enough to know my limitations. Now, my organization, we're a B2B organization ourselves. It just so happens that the services that we provide are primarily for a B2B2C or a B2C audience. I think that given the number of buyers involved in a buying decision or a number of people involved in the buying committee on the B2B side is so much greater that you may have somebody who's more on a fact-finding mission.

17:22Christopher Wallace:You may have, and that's why I think we talk about people can get the information they need. I think on the B2B side, more and better organized information for the B2B buyer, I think is the trend that I'm seeing, right? Transparency, more information up front. They're going to get it at some point, holding things behind a walled garden or dragging people through long discovery processes before they can find out what your services, your tools cost, that type of thing. I think that that is going out of fashion very, very quickly. I agree. And I happen to think it does apply to a lot of B2B, having spent a lot of time in that world myself.

17:56But it's another part two. This part two list is growing better. We're going to have a really good part two. I was going to say, yeah. Right. That's a good sign.

18:02Christopher Wallace:Exactly. So I want to kind of move to driving frontline behavior change. So companies, we all know, spend enormous amounts of time and money building strategy. But the frontline is where it either lives or dies. So why is changing frontline behavior so hard for organizations? The first reason is because they're giving them too many things to focus on and too many things to do. I would say they're overloaded and underprioritized is probably a better way to say it. That's the primary reason. These folks are kind of the tip of the spear from an execution standpoint, and they're asked to sell everything, talk about everything, position everything as frequently as they possibly can.

18:44Christopher Wallace:And at some point, it just becomes noise and they start to tune it out. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, I talked to a friend of mine who's been in the, he's more of a B2B, a sales consulting guy. But he and I really, you know, we bonded last year over this idea of clarity for salespeople. And I think when we think about behavior change, we think about driving execution at the front lines. The number of organizations that have failed to give their salespeople, customer service reps, technicians, whomever shows up in that customer conversation, who's ever at that point of customer interaction, the number of companies that fail to give them explicit direction on what they want to do and clear expectations is staggering.

19:23Christopher Wallace:It's staggering. One of the first things we asked them is, well, what were they told to do? Well, they were put through a training and they were told about the product and they're, okay, but what were they told to do? Organizations leave their frontline teams to figure out how to take goals and product information and somehow turn it into great conversations and great messaging with their customers. And that's the point of execution that we're failing to see. So lack of clarity, I mean, overprioritization is the biggest issue in terms of why frontlines struggle. But to make, to remedy that radical clarity for your frontlines, clear direction on things is the first step in driving that behavior change.

20:00When you get called into a company that says, hey, Christopher, we want to change how our people sell or interact with customers. Where do you start?

20:08Christopher Wallace:The first place we start is what processes they have in place. Again, what is the fundamental or foundational process or journey you want them to follow? What do you want them to walk the customer through? So what we try to understand is what is in place, Kurt. And we take a look at that. And typically what we find in an organization is what they have is fine. It's a five-step model. It's all the key. It's the greeting. It's the discovery. It's the presenting, presentation of value, all those types of things. But what we often find is they're generic. They're relatively generic and they're kind of outdated.

20:51Christopher Wallace:A lot of them still have, I'll give you a great example. A lot of them still have things like top-down selling. When you go to present the offer, it's top-down. And we're like, no, no, no, no, no. Top-down, that's like 12, 15 years ago. Customers don't buy that way. That's not how they want to be sold to, that type of thing. So we're looking to see, do they have something in place? Is it still relevant? And are they doing it? I mean, those are really the three things we look at. And if an organization says, listen, we have something now. If we take a look at it and it's good, we will tell them, don't scrap it.

21:19Christopher Wallace:The less change you drive to your people, the better off you are. If you're just not executing on it, we have programming that we can run for your sales leaders to re-energize them, get the defibrillator out, put the paddles on it and shock it back to life. But that's the place that we start. What is the fundamental process you want your people to follow? What's the repeatable thing you want them to do time and time again. And if it's, if it needs to be overhauled, we'll recommend an overhaul. If it's in good shape, we'll recommend kind of that, that refresh. Okay. That makes sense. I'm going to use a word that gets you overused a lot across the, across the world, but that's culture, right?