B2B Inspired

Customer Empathy; Unleashing The Marketer's Superpower

• BlueOcean | The B2B Agency • Season 1 • Episode 19

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How do we apply our 💥superpower of empathy💥 in the marketing mix?

Pull up a chair and get comfortable for *Storytelling Time* as we join Korey Rubenstein, a 'pracademic' bridging academic theory with real-world B2B marketing practices. 

In this discussion, Korey, a University of Waikato lecturer and KiwiSaaS community director, emphasises the powerful mix of creativity and strategy that emerging marketers can offer. 

Discover how storytelling, from ancient times to the silent film era, shapes marketing narratives that captivate audiences, enhance memory retention, and influence decisions. Korey highlights the enduring power of storytelling in connecting with B2B customers, demonstrating that it's not just about the product but the compelling story behind it. 

The conversation wraps up by revealing how empathy and personal connections create sustainable competitive advantages, debunking the stereotype of stoic decision-makers and showcasing the transformative impact of customer-driven thinking.

Connect with Korey on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/korey-rubenstein/

Connect with Dale on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalekoerner/

For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz

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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.

Dale Koerner:

Kia Ora, and welcome back to We Do B2B, the podcast by Blue Ocean, where we unpick the ins outs, ups and downs of B2B marketing here in Aotearoa, new Zealand. I'm your host Dale Koerner, and I'm a B2B marketer like you. From emerging trends and thinking to inspiring real world stories from smart, good people here in New Zealand, we are here to help the New Zealand B2B marketing community to become one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world. If, like me, you're a B2B marketer looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place. Kia Ora, and welcome back to We Do B2B. I'm joined today by somebody who titles himself a pracademic, which is an interesting kind of description that we'll get into. So joining us today is Korey Rubenstein. He's an adjunct lecturer of marketing at the University of Waikato and the community director at KiwiSass Community. So, Corey welcome.

Korey Rubenstein:

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Dale Koerner:

So we are filming this straight off the back of the KiwiSaaS Southern SaaS conference up in Auckland. Big, big event. How was it?

Korey Rubenstein:

Oh my gosh. Yeah, a big event filled to the rafters on the day, which was great. We oversubscribed for a physical event, which felt really good. The day was full of an amazing amount of energy and enthusiasm for the software as a service sector, and people came away with practical knowledge and know-how put into their businesses the very next day and also a sense of energy going into what could be a really challenging year ahead.

Dale Koerner:

Nicely put, good summary. So a lot of the focus there is obviously on knowledge sharing and that, I suppose, plays to a little bit of your space as a pracademic. So, first and foremost, what the hell is a pracademic?

Korey Rubenstein:

Yeah, it's a contrived word that people who aren't very good at research have come up with for rationalizing their existence. In a university setting, a pracademic. They focus on the more practical aspects of an industry or a sector or some way of doing business and bring that into a university environment. So I really think of my role within the business school, within the School of Management at Waikato, as a conduit for what's happening in industry and how can we bring that to our students.

Korey Rubenstein:

Other true academics who focus on research and they're pushing their own frontiers by exploring theory and producing theory. They are really responsible for kind of building the frameworks and the foundations that the rest of us practical folks stand on every day. My job is to kind of bring the market-facing side of that equation back into the university, in particular for the know-how and knowledge of students, because ultimately our goal at a management school within the university is to prepare these students for entry into the workforce. They need to have some skills, knowledge and capabilities. That gives them credence to be taking those seats when they get that job.

Dale Koerner:

Now, it's an interesting area because within the B2B space I think even within the professional group of marketers B2B is kind of the I don't want to call it the poor cousin, but it's certainly the misinterpreted one a lot of the time. So you represent a pretty interesting space in being connected with academia and the up and coming marketers of tomorrow, but then also deeply involved across the QSS community within a lot of businesses and a marketers of tomorrow, but then also deeply involved across the QBSAS community within a lot of businesses and a lot of marketing teams. So one of the things that in conversation with B2B marketers across the country that comes up time and again is what can we do as an industry, or even as a, as the higher education sector, to actually prep students better for the world of B2B marketing? What are the gaps?

Korey Rubenstein:

Sure, I think first is awareness. Students are so familiar with the world that they live in and occupy and the massive amount of consumption around them, and that's not really through a business lens. They aren't necessarily entrepreneurs or business owners, and even if their families have a family business and that really helps what they're most immersed in is B2C or direct to consumer, many of them and social media. So the first piece to me is exposure and awareness that, hey, this actually fundamental side of the economy exists. Things are a little bit different here. There's some nuance that you may not understand just wearing your consumer hat as a typically 18, 19, 20-year-old, and it's really important critical work that's being done here. And also, by the way, there's a huge amount of opportunity here for you to bring your own sense of creativity and individuality and shape this in your image. So it's that awareness piece. First, exposure to what does this side of the economy look like and then from there you can deepen their knowledge and relationship.

Dale Koerner:

I mean, I look back on my degree, so I studied international business and German, of all things, at the University of Bath and I remember taking one module in a four-year degree on business-to-business marketing and it was basically on key account management. That's the whole structure, like how to work out how much this business can spend with you and then get them to spend it, yeah, so so when you talk about that, that, that awareness piece, are there any? Are there any tools that that you use in the classroom to actually, um, I suppose, shine a bit of a light on the fact that you know, when you buy the bottle of coke, well, guess what, there's a whole business to business side of that that produced the bottle and the bottled it, and that produced the product and that distributed it. How do you? How?

Korey Rubenstein:

do you? I'm gonna get a little nerdy here, we're gonna go into the weeds for a minute. But there's this really lovely framework and it's marketing principles. First, marketing principles one through four. Okay, and I weave it into every course that I teach marketing principles one through four.

Korey Rubenstein:

The first one is all customers are different. Okay, so stick with me. You have marketers listening. So all customers are different. We know that's true. Yeah, right, we're all unique individuals and from a B2 C perspective, that's really quite easy to understand. But also also all organisations, all businesses are different. They might buy similarly, just like we buy similarly using the same channels, preferring the same promotional messages or targeting things like that, positioning even. But actually, okay, it's not that much of a leap to say, well, actually, all organizations are different. Then you bring that down to the local level. Like, why is the corner car yard different from the other corner car yard in a corner of the street car yard, and how are they different? Why do you buy from one versus the other? Well, okay, let's look inside that organization. So that's marketing principle number one. Marketing principle number two is all customers change.

Dale Koerner:

Okay.

Korey Rubenstein:

All right. So not only are they all different, they're all changing all the time. So it's about managing those dynamics, right. So it's heterogeneity and then dynamics.

Dale Koerner:

Yeah.

Korey Rubenstein:

Yeah. The third one is all competitors react, okay, all right, so that's pretty easy. That's already at the organizational level, yeah. So if all competitors react, we have to have a level of empathy with our customer. If they're an organization, how can we help that organization to react to some competitive threat or dynamic at play? And lastly, all resources are limited. So our own internal resources are limited as an organization, but our customers, if they're businesses, their resources are limited as well. So there's some storytelling that can occur with weaving in that perspective and that context into what is otherwise a very heavily consumer-centric and consumer-dominated perspective, even in the classroom.

Dale Koerner:

I'd really like that flow, so I probably should know that sort of thing. You know, sitting this far into my career in marketing, I feel like you know that's.

Korey Rubenstein:

I have a book I can lend you. It's really good. Also, it's for the quantitative nerd in anybody. It goes into the detail about how to apply these what is a very, very simple framework in some actually complex statistical analysis.

Dale Koerner:

What I see in that is you start with principle number one and everything really kind of flows on through there. So what you're talking about there, you know that customer piece. How does that then play out in terms of what students know or what students need to know of the B2B space? Because what you're talking about there is you've gone from. People are unique, businesses are unique. What do they need to absorb, what do they need to be taking on and how do they get?

Korey Rubenstein:

there. The number one thing that I try to instill in students and it's really agnostic as to how they apply, whether that's B2B or B2C or direct-to-consumer, any of those things is this sense of empathy, and everyone has it. We all have it as humans. I mean, my partner is a psychologist and she has worked with actual psychopaths and there's even a tinge of empathy that they have usually for themselves. But it's honing this ability to deeply empathize with your customer and that customer may look like anything, it might be an organization, it might be an organization, it might be, you know, an individual that ability to empathize with them and their needs and then to use the tools at your disposal as a marketer, which essentially is the marketing mix.

Korey Rubenstein:

Right, we have these four to seven Ps that we teach to all of our students and it's the bread and butter of what we do in marketing, academia and in practice. However it manifests. How do we apply our superpower of empathy in the marketing mix? And honing that skill in students and getting them to realize that there are more what we would call target market segments out there other than just teenagers aged 18 to you know, whatever, as university students, having them hone that over time is actually my goal, so that when they get out into the marketplace they're able to say you know what? I can look beyond my own needs, beyond my own preferences and really walk a mile in the shoes of our ideal customer profile.

Dale Koerner:

Yep, yep, and one of the things that I think that I see as a bit of a crossover here between academia and the world of business, looking specifically business to business, I mean, one of the things that we as B2B marketers are always trying to do is prove that we've got that empathy and we understand those problems and that we can demonstrate that we've been able to do something about them. Invariably, that comes down to proof, which in our world translates often to case studies, white papers and the like. And then, on the flip side of that, back in the world of academia, you use a lot of I suppose, a lot of case study-based learning, true?

Dale Koerner:

So what I'd be interested to know because I consider everyone who's listening to be a student of marketing, hopefully hopefully we all are still is when it comes to producing proof in the real world, when it comes to producing case studies. What can the actual B2B practitioner learn from the academic world?

Korey Rubenstein:

I in the past have taught case study analysis to master's level students. So these are executive MBAs through to what we call an MBM, which are mostly students that are coming from other industries or other business sectors, and they need a management lens. So in that case study analysis paper know, we have read and analyzed literally hundreds of cases and what I can say cuts across all of those. What makes a good one is what makes a good marketing strategy, what makes a good marketing campaign, and that's just a really good story. And so marketing campaign, and that's just a really good story. And so what I would say is if you could take a lesson from the academic playbook in how we help students to learn principles and context.

Korey Rubenstein:

That storytelling component is completely universal. It's at our core as humans that want to associate with one another. If you can apply that to demonstrate value to a prospective customer or prove the worth of some investment that you're asking for your senior leaders to make in your marketing program, apply that to whatever you're doing and structure it. It's just as simple as any other initiative you want to create within your organization or profession. It has to have a structure, and we're really fortunate that storytelling is not this newfangled thing. People like a very clear beginning, middle and end. They want to know the cast of characters, they want to know the setting and the plot, and as long as those things unfold in a sensible manner, I think you're already on the path to success.

Dale Koerner:

One of the things that we touched on just before we switched the cameras and the mics on, one of the things that we touched on just before we switched the cameras and the mics on. You were talking about this in the academic sense of building a case study in a way that lets the student find the answer without necessarily telling it to them, and I think that's a really interesting observation that I think plays out often in our space in terms of creative. Plays out often, I mean in our space, in terms of creative. You know, some of the best and most compelling, most memorable work is not the thing where the answer is obvious. You have to deduce, you have to interpret. So tell us a little bit about that, because you had a fantastic phrase for it before, which is it's completely slipped my mind and I can't remember what it was, but you were talking about that structure of basically getting to a point where the audience or the reader concludes and finds the answer.

Korey Rubenstein:

Yeah, I tend to think of this. You know, probably no one on earth is still alive that remembers the silent movie era, right, I mean, that was quite a long time ago, but we all somehow have a reference point for that genre ago. But we all somehow have a reference point for that genre. And when you have a lack of some medium like you didn't have audio in the silent era film they had to kind of reduce their creative to this totally visual format and still tell a story. Yep, right. Well, how did they do that? They followed what the Greeks did in all of their works.

Korey Rubenstein:

It was basically a three-act play where in the first act you had all this introduction of the cast, the characters, the setting and some little kernel of the plot. But there's a lot of subjectivity there. It could go in lots of different directions. In the second act you have what we call rising action. So, okay, now we're familiar with all the scene and the setting and we're familiar with some undercurrent of something that's happening here and it might be funny, it could be incredibly dramatic, it could be scary. In the third act, that's kind of where all is revealed and just structurally, between the second act and the third act, you have this French term, the dénouement. That's where the rising action climaxes and then turns to falling action. It's all this unraveling of the tension that's been built up in the first two-thirds of this play, that format.

Korey Rubenstein:

It's been around a long time, it works and we, as B2B marketers, can use it in everything that we do, and myself, as a pracademic, I use it in the cases that exemplify the learnings from theory and application to business. Essentially, what we're doing is the student gets to write the rest of that three-act play from the denouement, from the moment where the action climaxes. That's where they get to write the rest of that script. So what happens? They get to use all of their creative powers. They get to apply all that inference and deduction and any kind of theory that might be required. That's their chance to actually put it into practice and to flex those muscles and skills that you hope they're developing throughout the course of your paper.

Dale Koerner:

Do you find then that when you take that approach, that because you're kind of passing that I suppose, the cognitive load of forming the conclusion over onto the student, that the principles then stick better?

Korey Rubenstein:

Oh yeah, without a doubt. I mean, how does memory if you look into some of the work around memory and how we actually learn, um, I'll go to a little aside here. Um, you know, when books first came out, right, you had the gutenberg printing press. Everyone was all up in arms about books will destroy our kids' ability to remember things, right, because it was all oral tradition. Yes, things were written, but it was only the powerful and the elite that had written word. We know that that's not the case, right? And then fast forward to today and iPads will ruin our kids' ability to learn.

Korey Rubenstein:

It's all on computers. That's still not the case. But there is an interesting thing where there's this relationship between writing something down actually, with using your hand writing something down and its transference into long-term and working memory. There is seemingly a causal link between the two, which is really interesting.

Korey Rubenstein:

Now, if we zoom out and we try to think, maybe it's not so much about the writing itself, it's about the reinforcement of the concepts through writing. But if we take out the writing component and say, well, if it's about reinforcement, conceptual reinforcement, and that's what actually links it to long-term memory and the ability to use it in a practical sense, then we can apply that in any way. And so my thing is get it out of the working memory, get it out of that cloud that we all have in our brains that competes with things like what's for dinner and oh, I forgot to walk the dog and I have all these other obligations and narrow in on how to apply it in a real-world context, and you're setting yourself up for success. If what the goal is is like salience, right, we want this to be salient.

Dale Koerner:

I'm glad you used that exact word, because I asked that question as a loaded question, because I read another batch of research yesterday, the day before, straight out of Harper Business Review, and again the whole thing is it's talking about in the B2B context how 90% of sales go to people who are in the day one shortlist, right? So like 90% of sales go to the one of the contenders who that B2B buyer knew about as soon as they entered the category. Yeah, so when we talk about salience, I think it's really interesting to actually look at how can you use things like case studies and proof or even creative I mean even good ad creative to not actually spell everything out completely blatantly, because that what you're saying there has an impact on memorability totally.

Korey Rubenstein:

Uh, then that was your original question, which I completely went on a tangent, but your original question was really insightful in that, yeah, anytime you get to invoke um engagement, you get to invoke involvement and that's a loaded term in marketing, right. So we have levels of involvement. We have product and brand involvement. If you get buy-in, then you're carving out some proportion of mind space, right. And if we remember back to the acronym of mind space, those are all specific little nodes within our actual brain, own individual understanding and you know, lens on that stimuli is a very good way to move that from the noise that is that cloud above all of us in our, in our working memory, into long-term memory so the world of b2c has done a really good job of leveraging emotion to build memory right.

Dale Koerner:

You look at all of the I say all of the the good B2B brands and the ones that stand the test of time somewhere on the line. They are using emotion to drive a memory trigger. They're using that to then associate with a category, category entry points, and the whole thing kind of comes together. They're front of mind at point of need. In the B2B context, though, there's an assumption that people are rational beings, and that they are, I don't know. As soon as you cross the threshold of the office, all of a sudden this switch flicks off behind your ear and you are thinking purely objectively how can we, how can we collectively overcome that? Because for me, that's completely flawed.

Korey Rubenstein:

There's a pretty simple way of thinking about this as far as I'm concerned, and what I tell students is what I advise clients out in the real world is at the end of the day, it's people that buy products and services, not companies. It's people that buy products and services, not companies. All of the decisions that are being made to date are being made by people, and people are susceptible to all of the same influences when they work in an organization as when they're deciding on consumption for themselves. So the same type of appeals, with some modification, will work, the same type of positioning will work, and, ultimately, what we're looking to do is connect. How do we connect with someone? How do we achieve some degree of relationship with them? Either actual relationships or virtual relationships, or really relationships created through our advertising as it reaches the marketplace.

Dale Koerner:

Who do you see in the software as a service space doing that really well, because you're close to that community, right, you're very much part of that space. And I find SaaS a really interesting kind of area because for me, a lot of the time, what you see is it's a lot of features, it's a lot of this does this, this does that, this does this. But I don't see a focus often on creating that sense of empathy.

Korey Rubenstein:

You know I subscribe to this line of thinking around sustainable competitive advantage and so there are really only three market-facing sources of sustainable competitive advantage and we think about them in terms of the bore brands, offerings and relationships. And this is really valuable for B2B because I think that there are some areas here where we're probably not punching in the same way as B2C. So let's explore that. If you subscribe to this idea that there are really only three sources of sustainable competitive advantage that are market-facing, it's brands, offerings and relationship. The organizations that I see doing really well are those that are investing in brand brand.

Korey Rubenstein:

Historically in B2B, we've invested in offerings ie our technology, our product, our features and we've invested in relationships. That's typically through sales. Sure is Right, there are risks there, the risk in investing a disproportionate invest in those things. I would say it's also dependent on the category or on the sector whether that's a sustainable approach. And remember we're not talking about some term to term competitive advantage. This is sustainable competitive advantage. We're talking like several years to decades type strategy. The third is those relationships. Now, more and more, we're seeing relationships at the front lines in sales. It's coming back into being quite valuable. So I'm not saying neglect or negate any of these sources of market-facing, sustainable competitive advantage, but what I'm saying is be aware of the proportion of spend that you're applying to each and what your organizational goals really are. So in relationships, they're risky because people leave Yep.

Dale Koerner:

Right and they take their clients with them.

Korey Rubenstein:

That's a real threat to the business, and as much as you want to create tight contracts, we know that at the end of the day, the principle is these are people buying from people, people like people or they dislike people, and those relationships are potentially transferable. There's an interesting thread here, and what we're seeing a lot of technologically savvy organizations do is they're moving those relationships onto a channel that they entirely control, and we'll see how that plays out. That could be effective. Certainly, in the short run it's effective and there's some cost savings to be had there.

Dale Koerner:

So by that you mean sort of managing a community in a one-to-many kind of structure. How do you?

Korey Rubenstein:

Yeah, the punchline here is autonomously. I mean you have artificial intelligence that is able to manage relationships with more empathy, with more consistency, with greater speed than an individual or even a group of individuals could do so I and that's entirely owned by the organization and that cannot be transferred when someone leaves or dies or retires or whatever.

Dale Koerner:

But from a sustainable, from the sustainable competitive advantage perspective. That relies, I suppose, on having an AI that's better trained. Correct, because again that's coming back to your offering piece.

Korey Rubenstein:

Correct. So that does blend, that does blur the line between the two, and it's this thing of well. It requires constant innovation and spend but so do brands.

Korey Rubenstein:

So do brands. But, to answer your question, I have this deep relationship with the SaaS sector in New Zealand. Where do I see those who are differentiating, not necessarily on features or on their offering or even on their sales team or competencies. It is in brand and it's about creating a really easily identified and differentiated brand. The personality says something not just about the organization and their product but also about their customers and there's that resonance there and I think that's a big green space in terms of B2B and every marketer out there, I think, will be going yeah duh, that's nothing new to us, but it's. How do we rationalize that within the architecture of the organization and get spend or resources or whatever is required to activate that on a strategic level?

Dale Koerner:

You've studied, you spent time in the space of brand management right, and understanding how that whole piece works. How do you convince someone who doesn't have that same outlook that actually doubling down and investing on brand I mean the sustainable competitive advantage argument is a great one, but how can our audience, for example, the B2B marketers of New Zealand, how can we fight that fire?

Korey Rubenstein:

Yeah, I think the answer is it depends. So, within the framework of your individual organization, what are the types of appeals that work? You know, a criticism of marketers is they're great at marketing something on behalf of the organization, but terrible at marketing the competency within the organization, but terrible at marketing the competency within the organization. Right and like carving out our own position within the organization. Everyone should just bow down to what we do and realize how genius we are.

Dale Koerner:

Why don't you understand what I understand?

Korey Rubenstein:

Yeah, exactly. So I would say first, kind of be empathetic to how does your organization make decisions? Is it based on data? Is it based on actually, you know what? We have some heuristics that we use and it's a sniff test. If that's the case, then that's a very different appeal. So take the first step to go well, how do we make decisions, and then be flexible enough to reconfigure that pitch, because you're asking for something to fall in line with however those requisitions are made. I had the very, very good fortune of doing my master's with who was at the time, the world leading expert in brand management. He was the editor in chief of the Journal of Marketing for many, many years a guy by the name of VK and here's a little interesting aside, vk. You know, academics are all about their lineage.

Dale Koerner:

Okay.

Korey Rubenstein:

VK was the premier student of Frank Bass. Frank Bass created the diffusion of innovation model, the S-curve.

Korey Rubenstein:

Oh okay, yep, so this is the type of like of pedigree we're talking about Now. Interestingly, these folks were responsible for taking the study of marketing out of this purely creative and sort of subjective, sense-making stuff, which is still completely necessary and relevant and valuable, but then quantifying it, and where they found the most success were in really large organizations that have, and even at the time, massive data sets revolving around their customers, using that and applying some statistical rigor to derive insight, and it was that quantitative proof right that led to the marketing function exploding in the Fortune 500 literally overnight.

Dale Koerner:

Yep. Now let's appropriate that to New Zealand businesses in B2B, because, let's face it, there aren't that many in our camp here that have Fortune 500 budgets to spend on brand. And let's bring it back to the topic of brand. I actually would be interested to understand what your own definition of brand would be. Oh, ok, on the spot, no pressure. Your own definition of brand would be oh, okay, I'm on the spot, no pressure.

Korey Rubenstein:

Yeah, no pressure, look to me. Brand. It is the living, breathing embodiment of the organization. We personify it, we contextualize it. We use words like love, hate, sexy, romantic, all of these things that are very much associated with individuals and essentially, at the end of the day, it's the promise that is made with the customer and it's about trust. So what does that trust look like? And trust is this big term that has a range of degrees over it, like it's a spectrum. For some, the trust we're looking for is an overnight romance right. For some, we're looking for life partners forever. So to me, it's about that promise that's made with the customer. But it's the living, breathing embodiment of the organization and we want to contextualize that using personification.

Dale Koerner:

Interesting. I like the fact that you talk about the living and breathing piece as well, because I think so often people see a brand as a one and done, and so long as we keep showing it to people, it will do what it needs to do, and there's a whole school of thought there around building memory structures and everything else like that. But I think within the B2B context because you've got things like relationship still playing quite a strong part it's not just what you say, it's what you do as well, it's the actions that you take. Totally, it's the way you respond.

Korey Rubenstein:

Yeah, all those things. Well look, the truth is is that I remember lots and lots of people that I've come across, and many of them are involved in my daily life. That doesn't mean I like them. Just because they're there and present and show up doesn't mean they're valuable, doesn't mean I think of them fondly or want to interact with them unless I'm forced to. The same is true of brands Just because you're there and you're showing up doesn't mean that it actually moves the needle in terms of the desirability to consume your products or services.

Dale Koerner:

Dialing back then to the beginning of the conversation. What I think really ties this all together, then, is still that sense of and you used the phrase, I think, earlier on customer obsession, because, ultimately, whether we're dealing with proving what a business can do, whether we're dealing with a brand, whether we're dealing with selling into the C-suite to get the sign-off, we're still fundamentally talking here about just understanding people, right? Everything stems back to that empathy, even the storytelling piece that you talk through. Yeah, it does.

Korey Rubenstein:

I think that's a really good way of summarizing what can be such a nebulous and subjective discipline.

Korey Rubenstein:

At the end of the day, it's about deeply empathizing with the problems, the challenges that your customers have and really adopting this philosophy that customers are problem solvers and if you show them the path and if you remove all of the tension in helping them to solve their problem, well then the chances are much greater that they're going to utilize your products and services to resolve it, and that's where we that's where we target our empathy superpowers is okay, I can really understand the position that you're in. I totally get it. I'm going to actually use that as the center of my innovation engine. We put it at the center of our organization, whatever it is that we do well and that informs all of the other decisions, not the other way around. When we have a product-centric decision-making process within our organization, we have all these funky things that start to happen. Right, it's a monkey walking around with a hammer. We're looking for nails, right? I'd much rather the case where the customer is the one that's driving our decision-making, because ultimately, we're responsible to the market.

Dale Koerner:

Mic drop. I think that's a fantastic place to wrap that up. Producer Louie's giving me the wave that says we are there on time. I think we're probably going to have to come back and have another one of these at some point, because there's so much more to unpick here. But, corey, thank you so much and really enjoyed the conversation. It's my pleasure, thank you. That's that. Thanks for listening to. We Do B2B by Blue Ocean. Now brace for CTAs. If you want to join and grow the community, make sure to subscribe. Wherever your eyes and ears absorb information, don't forget to switch on notifications so you know when the latest episodes drop. And for more B2B goodness, be sure to follow Blue Ocean, the B2B agency, on LinkedIn. Now look, you know how this next piece works. The more reviews we get, the faster this thing grows. So please do for us what you hope your customers would do for you Leave a review and share your thoughts. Let's stay connected and keep the B2B marketing conversation going.

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Dale Koerner

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