In this episode of Stop the Noise, Susan Tatum speaks with Norman Guadagno, an experienced marketing executive, about effective strategies for independent consultants looking to connect with CMOs and other high-level executives. Norman shares actionable advice on avoiding common outreach pitfalls, building authentic relationships, and demonstrating real value to prospective clients.
Notes from the Show
Avoid Overused Templates: Generic or overly familiar outreach emails (e.g., “quick question”) often backfire. Instead, craft messages that show genuine understanding and curiosity.
Reframe Problem Statements: Share insights from real conversations with peers (e.g., “20 CMOs identified X as a common challenge. Is this relevant for you?”) rather than making unverified assumptions about their business.
Focus on Relationships: Building long-term trust and authentic connections will always outweigh transactional approaches in consulting.
Understand Their Core Concerns: For CMOs, pipeline generation is a top priority. Connect your services to their ability to achieve measurable outcomes, like higher-quality leads.
Research and Empathy Matter: Conversations with your target audience provide valuable insights and demonstrate respect for their expertise and challenges.
What’s Inside:
Fatal errors in outreach techniques.
The critical piece to building relationships.
Why authenticity matters.
How to solve a CMO's biggest worry.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Transcribed by AI Susan Tatum 0:36
Hi everybody. Welcome back to stop the noise, and today, my guest is Norman Guadagno, who is a high level marketing expert. He's had multiple roles as CMO, Vice President of Marketing, all kinds of titles like that. And he I think Norman, you were also the managing director of a marketing firm at some point
Norman Guadagno 1:01
that is correct. I've worked on both agency side and client side, so I've sat across for myself virtually.
Susan Tatum 1:08
Thank you for being here. It's wonderful to have you and welcome.
Norman Guadagno 1:12
Yeah, thank you, Susan. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and dig deep into anything we can do to stop the noise.
Susan Tatum 1:18
Wonderful, wonderful. Well, I think the topics that I would like to focus on today are effective outreach. From the standpoint of, you know, how do we get through to CMOS without being we don't want to be annoying. We don't want to be pests. I know that's not going to work, so I guess to just say, how do we get through and then how do we build valuable relationships with them? So we've got our listeners are independent consultants, a number of whom would have CMOs and other marketing execs as their clients and the people that they that they want to develop relationships with. So just to, just to pick it off out there. What are we doing wrong?
Norman Guadagno 2:02
So first off great topic, because I think it's it's critical, no matter what role you're in, and certainly if you're a consultant, wants to speak to C suite executives, and moon today will focus on the CMO. There are approaches that work and there are approaches that don't. I think a lot of what is done wrong, and then I don't even like that word honestly, Susan, I think a lot of what is done because maybe it's easy, or because people have seen others doing it, but it's not effective. Is things that are either a very much templated and it's amazing to me, actually, from the most junior BDR to the most senior consultant. I see inbound things that are templates that I've seen before, and if I've seen it before, I know it's a template, and I'm probably not going to pay attention to it. So that's one sort of clue, right? Is that it might be easy, but it's not particularly effective. And then the exact other extreme of that is presupposing too much familiarity. And I often get inbound, particularly from senior, but I've even gotten it from more junior inbound, where they assume a level of familiarity with either me as an individual or with my business. That's unwarranted, and it's off putting. To be honest, if you are reaching out to me, particularly if you're offering a strategic service, something of strategic value to me, or even if it's just purely tactical, you want to help me with function x or function Y, unless you've been in my business, you don't know my business and tell me as as honestly, I've gotten many, many emails. Quote, and this is, this is more generic, but we've looked carefully at your website, and you're letting leads slip away. That is a full of assumptions that a, you know what my strategy is for the website? B, you understand my lead generation model overall. See, you know my numbers, and I'm going to assume all of those things are not true. And so there's, there's subtleties in it that oftentimes get lost when you're thinking about the person on the receiving end. And I'm sure we'll talk some more about that.
Susan Tatum 4:17
Yeah. So you know, when we talked the first time, you had a great analogy that had to do with water running out of your house. Please repeat it now, because I think it, first of all, it stuck with me, but it's also, I think it's just a great job of some summing up what we're what we're inadvertently doing.
Norman Guadagno 4:38
Yeah, and I own the fact that anybody who's known me for any period of time, period of time knows that I make up lots of analogies and metaphors all the time. I do it just as a way for me to view the universe. But I think what I was trying to convey was, if someone sends me an email and says, I see water pouring out of the back of your house let me help you with your plumbing problem right now. That's making a bunch of assumptions that there's actually something wrong and not that I'm draining my indoor pool because I happen to have one, or I'm draining my 10,000 gallons saltwater aquarium. There's you're seeing effects, and you're not really knowing the cause. And so much of as a marketer, so much of modern marketing is actually cause and effect. We invest incredibly heavily in building digital infrastructure and creating campaigns and bringing things to market, and that's the effect. But you can't always know the cause unless you're on the inside, and yet, the inbound solicitations I often get are focused more on the cause rather than the the effect that I created.
Susan Tatum 5:48
Right. Well, you know, a lot of the information that we get says, Know Your know your market, understand your prospect and what their biggest problems are and what they're going through. But in talking to you, I realize how easy it can be to inadvertently make assumptions that we really should not be making. I mean, just because we have a list of the top problems that CMO states does not mean that
Norman Guadagno 6:14
they are my problems right, but, but there's a way to recast that. So I don't want to, I don't want to say, don't do that. Because I want to be super clear, if you send me an email, because most of the time it's an email, but if you send me an email and said, I've spoken to 15 marketing leaders in the past three months, and these are the top two problems I keep hearing, is this something that you're seeing as well? Now that's a twist on the approach. It's not the you have this or, God forbid, I get an email, as I've gotten many times, Norman as the CMO of company X, you must really be concerned with leads. That's like saying to me, Norman, as a fish, you must be concerned with water. Of course, I'm concerned with leads. So what that? But if you talk to me about the fact I've spoken to 20 marketing leaders and they're seeing that leads are taking longer to convert, is that something you're seeing? Can we talk about some of the things we've seen to help accelerate conversion on leads? Now you haven't made any assumptions. Now you've actually started to dig into something real.
Susan Tatum 7:21
So that's brilliant, and it makes a lot of sense. I want to put one thing in support of that is that talk to the do actually talk to 20 marketers, or whatever it is, and not because people you know, they'll do that, and I always advocate talking to your marketplace anyway, and listening and understanding what they're saying and testing what you what your assumptions are, which is what you are suggesting?
Norman Guadagno 7:46
Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I think your point is a good one. Talk to the 20 marketers, if your target audience is CMOS, SVPs of marketing, VPs of marketing, anyone who's leading a marketing function at any scale, and you haven't talked to 20 of them? Well, you're in the wrong business probably like you should be talking to them. And if you have a point of view, I'm, let's imagine I'm a consultant, and we've developed a way. We'll stick with this analogy. We've developed a way to help drive faster lead conversion. Just leave it at that high level, right? I'm going to talk to some of the folks that I've been working with and I'm going to say to them, Hey, can I quote you? And then I'll put that quote in there, and I can be anonymous. A CMO at a, you know, major B to B. Software company like yours, said, X, Y, Z, or it could be attributed if, if the person wants to allow attribution. The other thing you can do, particularly for senior consultants, and I've seen some great ones do this, talk to me, tell me, Hey, we're trying to figure out if this is a real problem. I would like to have a conversation with you. I am not going to try to sell you anything during that conversation, I would like to gather from you, as I've talked to 20 other CMOS, to see if this is a real problem, because we think that we could help businesses. End of story, I'm much more likely to say yes,
Susan Tatum 9:05
well, and I, I appreciate you saying that, not only because it's true, but you also validated the that's an approach that I use myself and advise all of my clients to use is, is research, basically, and you find that I found, across the board, at different levels, in different markets, that people are willing to help, they're willing to have that conversation.
Norman Guadagno 9:30
Absolutely, we're we're all starved to knowledge, because we're all overfed with knowledge, right? It's like the world we live in right now, there's so much information out there, there's so much data. There are so many opinions, right? All of us are being stuffed filled with them, but it's hard to process them sometimes. And having a conversation with someone who says, Hey, I just want to focus in on this X, Y, Z, whatever it may be, allows me to say, oh, okay, well, tell me what you're hearing. Here's what I'm hearing. Oh, that's interesting. You're sort of making some sense out of something I hadn't seen before. Or I want to introduce you to a tool you may not have seen I was just into them. Here's an example. I was just introduced by someone to a tool I had not seen before. Very cool AI driven tool, and if you're not familiar with AI, it's supposedly what everyone's talking about. That was a joke, but, but I'm like all in on AI personally, I'm spending a lot of time looking at various AI tools, thinking about how marketing organizations can leverage them, how they should be structured, to take advantage of them, and someone pointed me to a tool I hadn't seen before that did something very interesting. What I didn't have and what I did immediately after, I didn't have someone to talk to it about. They weren't an expert on it. They just sort of said, Hey, I heard about this thing. Take a look at it. So what I immediately did was sent messages to three other people I know, saying, have you seen this tool? I'd love to get your opinion on it, or I'd love to talk to you about it after you take a look at it, because I didn't know what I didn't know. Now, a consultant who comes to me and says, Hey, I just saw this great tool, XYZ, you may not have seen it, I'd love to talk to you about it and see if it's something you're thinking about. You're considering, is this relevant in your business, before I as a consultant, go ahead and invest my time to become a partner with them, or become an expert at this bringing tool or bring it to my clients.
Susan Tatum 11:29
Hey, that's a good one.
Norman Guadagno 11:31
The fact is that we're all selling something. It's let's just acknowledge that that's our job in business, at some point, we're all selling something. So put that aside and say, Can we learn something in the process too? And if we can learn something in the process also, it makes the selling that much better.
Susan Tatum 11:49
Well, I like to say it's we're not selling, you know, we're helping to solve problems. And I think with, you know, with consultants, if we, if we don't get out of consultant mode, or expert expertise in trying to help mode and try to be a salesperson, then we'll be much better off.
Norman Guadagno 12:07
and I think that's a fair, fair way to characterize it like. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with selling like, eventually somebody has to pay for something, because that's how we all live and do the things that we want to do. But there's consultative selling is, is like, how much weight is there on the consultative and how much is there on the selling, right? And, yeah, and to build relationships and, and I think that that is, was the second thing you brought up. And I want to just touch on that, because you bring up something that I think is critical. Relationships are long term investments. You don't build a relationship on a Monday, so you can call them back on Friday and say, Okay, let's do a deal. It's relationships are long term investments. Relationships are a way to really drive value. And I will give you a real example. I two companies ago. I was working with a large, well known consulting firm who will remain unnamed on this conversation, but who's large, well known and highly respected. And I got to know some of the consultants, really nice people. Skip forward two companies. I joined another company, and there's that large consulting firm again, in place when I get there, not the same exact people, but overlap so it's the same larger team, and I get to know some more of the people, nice people, valuable. Continue to have relationships. I have them in my mental file. Then I move to a place where I'm looking for a new role. I decided now it's time for a new role, and the offer I get from one of the most senior consultants at this large consulting firm who had gotten to know was, hey, as you're going down this path, if you see a company and you want us to give you a point of view on them, where you want to have practice interviews with us, just let me know that is a relationship, so that when I land at my next company, guess who I'm going to call, right? And they're really and they create value. They create valuable outcomes. But they also know that it's the periods in between, sometimes where the relationships are going to pay off. In fact, relationships are more valuable, I believe, when I'm not actively paying you money, than what I am.
Susan Tatum 14:19
True. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, we do, I do see a lot of, there's a lot of push to make things happen fast. I mean, you know, we're, we want instant gratification. We want to check something off the list and move on. And also, I do think that, and I don't have anything against sales. I agree. I don't like icky sales. And I agree that, you know, it's, it's a, it's a very important thing that somebody buys. But I think a lot of the approaches and methodology that sales folks are taught to use and that management requires that they, you know, measures the things that force them into using this are based on a tactical. Well, I mean, excuse me, a transactional sale, so it's something that's just turning over and there. And that relationship isn't really necessary, nor is it a big risk, nor does it have to be a lot of trust built. Consulting is the absolute opposite of that, right?
Norman Guadagno 15:14
Absolutely. And it's certainly in pure transactional sales, like, if I think about software business that I've been in, and I had large groups of BDRs that have worked for me at various companies. They're young, fresh out of school, and they're held to numbers, and they have to be, that's just the reality of what we do at that level of volume of transactions. They have to generate pipeline, and that's critical for the business. But I always try to make sure that they're being coached into just because you have to drive high volume and just because you have a lot of prospects to reach out to, does not mean that you have to get caught in the trap of following all the trends in outbound email or phone call. And you and I had spoken about this previously, and then, as a recipient of this, I see this, and I know it happens both at senior consulting levels and as well as at junior BDR levels, that they they're all on the same Reddit or other forums or in different groups, and they somebody says, I tried x and it worked, and then everyone tries X, the one that I like to pick on because it made me laugh that I had happened so frequently and so in such a volume. This is probably, although I still see a couple of them nowadays, but it was more than probably a year, year and a half ago, every inbound from a BDR somewhere, usually software vendors, sometimes consulting, but was
Susan Tatum 16:39
Norman, let me break in here for just a second and say that BDR is business development rep. for those that are not
Norman Guadagno 16:46
yeah, thank you for clarifying, right? Sometimes called SDR or sales development rep, So they're, they're basically the the young ones who are making the outbound calls to try to get
Susan Tatum 16:55
doing the cold. They're doing the cold, right?
Norman Guadagno 16:56
Cold grunt work. Uh, terrific work. But, you know, it's hard work at this particular trend, although there are many of them. Was emails that went out, and the subject line was quick question, and as if somehow that's going to trick me into opening it, and then it was always the Have you ever did XYZ related to whatever it is they're selling now, here's here's the insight. And I'm not suggesting that many people don't have this insight, but oftentimes PDRs and other sales people don't, and it applies across the spectrum. You think, gosh, I just got to get in front of Susan. I'm going to pop this quick question. What you don't think is Susan as a senior executive, or Norman as a senior executive gets 10 to 20 of those a week. And so after I've seen the first two inbound that say quick question in the subject line, I will never open another one again, right. And so you may think that, okay, you're like gonna get but the reality is, all people are highly sensitive to patterns and and very, very good intuitively at filtering like when your phone rings. And I don't know about you, Susan, but I very rarely answer my mobile phone right? I answer it either it's a a caller that I know, where b My internal pattern recognition and a bunch of other stuff says I should answer the phone. And I'll give you a perfect example. We all get, I don't know how many you get. I you get. I get lots of spam calls every day, even with spam filters and robot call filters, I get a lot of them all the time, and we all know not to answer the ones from foreign countries, et cetera, et cetera, right? But today I picked up the phone. Why did I pick up the phone? It was from a name and a number I didn't recognize, but I was expecting a delivery, and I knew it was one of the local area codes. I live here in New England, there's a lot of area codes, and I was expecting a delivery, and I'm right about that time, I expected the driver to pre call and say, we'll be arriving soon, and I answered the phone, and it, in fact, was the driver saying, now on any other day, I would not have answered that call. So that's not unlike email, right? Or other things, like, people are really good at filtering out the things they don't want,
Susan Tatum 19:10
and people are really good at picking up on what's, what's inauthentic as well. I mean, I shouldn't be now, what a what a computer or a robot or whatever sending it's, it's, it's just blatantly obvious,
Norman Guadagno 19:24
yes, and even the best of AI today, still, you can see I just actually had a had a colleague that I had dinner with recently who was telling me that there are AI candidates, completely generated candidates, going through and attempting to go through interview processes at companies, and they're fairly compelling, until you sort of look carefully at the candidate and realize that it's not actually a person, it's an AI and so so it's going to get better and better. It's going to be harder and harder. What does that actually push us back to relationships, right? Yeah. And if you want to cold call me because you have my number in your database, let me tell you what you should try. Try sending me a text and saying, Hi, It's Susan Tatum. I represent company XYZ. I'm wondering if I could schedule a call with you. Don't just call me because I won't answer.
Susan Tatum 20:17
Yeah, you're at least nice enough to have the call. Let it the call through. I have it where if you're not my contacts, it's not even going to ring, it's going to go to voicemail.
Norman Guadagno 20:25
yeah. And now I can look at the voicemail in real time when they're leaving it on my iPhone. Yeah. And so it does. It does give us those, those capabilities and and I don't want to suggest by any of this Susan that I'm not as many executives open and eager to have new relationships, consultants, services. There are so many people out there that have amazing insights to help me in my business, but they have to break through a lot of noise, and it is a signal and noise problem. There's a lot of noise, and they really have to break through, and they have to try to show up in a way that's different and unique. I just had someone, and this is a fair model. I just had someone introduced to me, offering us service, because they were introduced by someone I know that's classic, like, Oh, here's, you know, Norman, I'd like you to meet so and so, that's how you and I met you and I met to someone that is someone who I trust. If that person hadn't introduced you to me, you may not have gotten through
Susan Tatum 21:25
Yeah, probably wouldn't, but I wouldn't have sent you an email that said quick question.
Norman Guadagno 21:31
But you could send me one now, because I know who you are, right and which is the funny thing about it, if I get an email from you tomorrow that says Susan Tatum and it says Quick question, I'll open it and read it. It's all about the context that I delete 20 quick questions, but I'll open and read one because I have the right context.
Susan Tatum 21:50
So unfortunately, we're gonna we're coming up against time, and I wanna
Norman Guadagno 21:55
you told me we had three hours. Susan, I got myself strapped in for three hours
Susan Tatum 22:01
we've had, it's been so good you didn't realize it. I just feel the need to ask you this, like, what are the high level issues that CMOS tend to worry about?
Norman Guadagno 22:13
That's That's one that CMOS talk a lot about, certainly in the space that I operate in, which is B2B software, B2B technology, but many other spaces in my space, I have to be able to generate sufficient pipeline every quarter to drive revenue. Nothing else that we end up doing actually matters if we're not making our commitment to the numbers and in most businesses, they're only the type I operate in, we are held to generating a certain percentage of the pipeline from marketing. And no matter what else we do, if we're failing to make those numbers, we are going to be under a tremendous amount of scrutiny and pressure. So first and foremost is, is my demand generation engine doing what it's supposed to be doing?
Susan Tatum 23:01
And is that, when you say, Make pipeline, is that that you're putting marketing qualified leads, passing them on to sales?
Norman Guadagno 23:07
Yes.
Susan Tatum 23:08
Do you get. Do you have responsibility for whether that actually turns into a client? Are they going to come back and say, from my days in corporate and marketing, it was, there was a lot of, well, the leads are crap.
Norman Guadagno 23:18
That's the part of it, that in most organizations, every organization is structured differently. Marketing hands off lead sales has to close them, and marketing is trying to generate the highest quality sales. Is looking for the highest quality and the highest volume. And that is where we talked earlier about the quality of leads, or, you know, the ability to convert Emphasizing Quality over quantity, which I've done, is a dangerous thing to do if you can't quickly enough generate the quality, because if I told you, look, you're going to have to go a couple of days without eating, but I'm going to serve you the most amazing meal two days from now, versus I'm just going to give you some rice and beans. And I love rice and beans, but I'm just going to give you some rice and beans today. And today and tomorrow, but you're not going to get that amazing steak or lobster or whatever your food of choice may be. And this is the conundrum, right? Because, as a marketer, we want to emphasize quality so that we're handing something that's likely to close. As sellers, they often want to make sure they're getting sufficient quality and operating as they should, under the belief that they can close them and therein lies the Do you want a bowl of oat meal for the next five days, or do you want a beautiful breakfast buffet and nothing for them at the end of those five days and nothing between now and then? It's a complex situation. And to your original question, what do CMOS worry about? We worry about that all the time. We worry about lots of other stuff. But if that's not done right, we're not going to be successful.
Susan Tatum 24:50
Would it be fair to say that the best chance of getting a conversation with you is that no matter where my focus is, let's say brand marketing. I'm going to tie that to how that affects your ability to create these goodly high enough quality, really good leads.
Norman Guadagno 25:07
You just won my business right by but that's it like, what is brand? Brand is creating awareness amongst future buyers. It's very, very top of the funnel. And if you can say, look, I can accelerate quality down funnel, or I can accelerate velocity down funnel, because I have a magic potion at the top around brand, I'll listen Absolutely, because that's what we try to do. We and marketers are creating future buyers, and we're satisfying buyers in market, and we're keeping customers aligned and engaged post sale as well.
Susan Tatum 25:41
No, okay, well, I could sit here and ask and talk with you for three hours, but
Norman Guadagno 25:48
I will run out of things to say. I'm sure
Susan Tatum 25:49
I won't run out of things to ask you.
Norman Guadagno 25:52
All right., good, good.
Susan Tatum 25:53
So for people who you know? I know you don't want a whole bunch of people calling you or but are you're on LinkedIn, or is there? Can they follow you?
Norman Guadagno 26:02
You can follow me on LinkedIn, and I welcome people following or wanting to connect. You can check out my sub stack, where I write about various things. It's thinktone.substack.com, you'll have that information. You can publish it with your fabulous podcast, and just don't call my mobile number. Yes, you can get my mobile number. It's out there, but don't call it. And the honest truth is, like many executives, I have a I have a second mobile phone that has a number nobody except my family and closest colleagues know because everyone's mobile number is out there, and so you have to maintain a little bit of a privacy and so check me on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I post frequently, and I love getting connected to people
Susan Tatum 26:50
Awesome. Spell your last name for us, please.
Norman Guadagno 26:52
Certainly it's spelled G as in George U A as in Apple D as in dog A as an apple G as in George N as in Nancy o as an Oscar,
Susan Tatum 27:04
right? Well, thank you again for being here this this has been fantastic, and I really appreciate it.
Norman Guadagno 27:08
Great questions, and thank you for having the opportunity to discuss it. And as always, I am welcome people who are going to reach out and say I have a different approach, and I love learning about new things. We're all lifelong learners I hope.
Susan Tatum 27:22
All right, have a great day. Norman,
Norman Guadagno 27:24
thank you. Susan Bye
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