When "Too Expensive" Really Means "I Don't Understand Your Value"

Richard Byrd

Welcome to the program. Today we have a very special guest — Asit Goel, VP of Marketing for UniFirst. Welcome to the show.

Asit Goel

Thank you, Richard. I'm really happy to be here.

Richard Byrd

We're really happy to have you. And as you know, we have a tradition on this show where we ask our guests: if their company were a bird, what kind of bird would it be? What's your spirit bird for your company?

Asit Goel

My spirit bird is — surprise, surprise — a raven. A raven is not a sexy bird. It's not the center of attention. It's not something you're proud to show off to people, but it is an intelligent, adaptive bird. It's there in the background. I don't care whether you're running a palace, a bakery, or a manufacturing plant — ravens are going to be found everywhere. And that is what we do as a business.

We support the workers doing all the hard work — whether they're making bread, roasting coffee, fixing cars, making pharmaceutical medicines, making vaccines, or making the silicon wafer that goes into every single product we use today. Our uniforms and facility services are in the background. We constantly adapt to the needs of our customers. Take construction — as you're building new data centers, my company has to figure out how to service you in that location for the exact workforce you have, which goes up during construction and comes down when it completes. There's a lot of adaptability that goes in, which means I have to think differently and innovate.

Richard Byrd

I like it. I actually disagree — I think ravens are pretty sexy birds. Did you know they hold grudges? Apparently they're the only bird that holds a grudge. I learned that recently from watching Shrinking on Apple TV, so I'm not sure if it's actually true. But anyway — uniforms are a really interesting business. When I was in college, I worked my way through at a machine shop, and we had a uniform service. I was really proud to have my thing with a little patch with my name on it. And my mom didn't have to wash my clothes.

Asit Goel

That's the thing. Think about taking all the dirt, grease, and grime back to your home laundry machine — you'd have a machine that breaks down in about six months. And in your case, as a machine shop employee, the uniform is protecting you from the work environment. Could be sparks from grinding, sharp edges, tools, dirt, grease, oil. But then you also have work environments where the product needs to be protected from the employees. Nobody's going to be happy about finding hair in their food — think about food processing. Or vaccines, medicines, silicon wafers — you have to have uniforms protecting the product from any human contaminant.

Richard Byrd

When I worked for a big oil and gas services company, their research lab was in Cambridge. We had a clean room there, and I'm pretty sure you guys handled all the clean room uniforms. You can't walk in with cat hair or dog hair from home. Everything has to be so clean and precise. Well, for our audience who doesn't know about UniFirst — can you tell us a little about the company?

Asit Goel

Sure. What we do is called managed uniform services and facility services. Our product isn't just the uniform itself — it's the service that goes with it. Personalizing your uniform with a name patch, company logo, insignia. We provide every employee with a set of uniforms. Weekly we come by, pick up the dirties, and deliver a clean set for that week's work schedule — in the employee's locker or in the drop-off area — cleaned and laundered to the requirements of that industry.

My route service representative heads out to these locations on a weekly basis, checking in on everything from the locker room to the dirty hampers, any other concerns. And uniforms get ripped and damaged — we repair those. Our quality control process reviews garments before they go back out to service, and if something requires mending or replacement, that's all part of the program. Think of it like leasing a car where you're not responsible for maintenance. In this case, you don't even have to do the maintenance. As your workforce changes, we deliver the right size, right kinds, right numbers — all part of the service program.

Richard Byrd

When you're machining things, hot shavings come off and they'll burn a hole in your clothing. And we dealt with caustic materials that would just destroy your clothes.

Asit Goel

Exactly. And that's part of the expertise — we work with every sector of the economy, every conceivable industry type. We advise on the right clothing for employee safety and any OSHA compliance requirements. In mining, for example, your uniform isn't just coveralls — it has to have chemical resistance. If you're an electrician, a linesman, or an oil and gas field worker, your garment has to have FR — fire resistant — built in. There's an element of safety, and as a business you want reliability and consistency of service. We commit to long-term contracts with garments approved by industry associations.

Richard Byrd

How long have you guys been in business?

Asit Goel

We're coming up on nine decades — founded in 1936.

Richard Byrd

Amazing. Are you publicly held or privately held?

Asit Goel

Publicly held. The top three players in this industry are all publicly held — Cintas, Vestis, which used to be Aramark, and UniFirst. All have been in the business and publicly traded for a long time. Vestis was the most recent one — it spun off as a public company about two and a half, coming up on three years ago.

Richard Byrd

Tell me a little about your day-to-day role. How big is your team?

Asit Goel

I have six areas of responsibility. Classical brand communication — managing the brand. Sales enablement — as a B2B company, our primary sales channel is our sales reps, so we support them with the right collateral and qualified leads. Digital transformation from a customer perspective — as technology and customer expectations evolve, how are we leveraging technology to enhance the digital experience? Product management — I have a portfolio of 40,000-plus SKUs, managing product strategy with an eye on macroeconomic trends and product economics. Voice of the customer — we run a massive Net Promoter Score program, incorporated into the operating cadence of the organization. Every location manager is very much in tune with their NPS and how to improve it. And finally, pricing analytics — not just looking at pricing, but combining heavy analytics to optimize price by customer experience.

Richard Byrd

Wow, that is a lot.

Asit Goel

It is. Having said that, I have a pretty lean team — roughly in the mid-20s total. I supplement with agencies and external partners. My philosophy is simple: the pace of change is so rapid that rather than have deep specialists on the team, I prefer program and project managers supported by the most qualified agencies. That doesn't mean they don't have functional competence — they do — but the balance leans that way.

Richard Byrd

That is a fairly big in-house team. You're always looking for that balance of specialists and generalists, and it's hard to get right. Certain niche things are perfect for bringing in an agency.

Asit Goel

Absolutely. And I'll caveat this — this is not the team I inherited. The team has more than doubled in size in the last four years, and that has been a very strategic choice. We want to make sure that as a function, we're not seen as a cost center but as adding strategic value. Part of the pacing is ensuring that as we add team members and roles, we're constantly delivering quantifiable, verifiable value back to the organization.

On the branding side, I lean the other way — I believe brand keepers should be in-house. One concern I've had with agencies is churn. The senior level may be consistent, but the junior folks move around a lot. We've been very deliberate about building the team in-house, and now as I add new people, the quality and consistency of brand output is assured without having to start from scratch.

Richard Byrd

That is always a problem with agencies. Young talented people — designers, writers, digital marketers — as soon as they stop learning and growing, they're going to be looking. We've really tried at BlueByrd to make a conscious effort to make sure people feel like they're growing.

Asit Goel

That's why having people in-house puts me in a unique position to offer them exposure. When I came into this company, one of my first assignments was brand rejuvenation. This brand, strong in the '60s, '80s, and '90s, had gotten a little ignored in the last 15–20 years. We did a massive exercise on rejuvenation. It let me build out the team, and I was particular about a matrix approach — keeping junior people working on projects outside their primary work stream. If you're a campaign associate, you're interacting with creatives and seeing what the creative actually does for the business.

Historically, creatives were very busy creating collateral. It would go out and there was a black hole — nothing came back. Now we're very deliberate about sharing detailed results every six months with everyone on the team — whether you're a campaign associate, creative, or market researcher. You see how what you do rolls up to the larger objective. If you're an SEO writer, you can see organic traffic, but we also show how that translates into brand perception or pipeline impact.

We do internal lunch-and-learns where team members take 20 minutes presenting something they're proud of — not just 'here's a beautiful image,' but 'here's what it did for the business.' That forces them to talk to other people, track data, track business results. I remember the first time we did this — we had run a direct mail campaign with very strong results. Three or four months after the fact, the designers saw for the first time the hard numbers: how many people saw it, who saw it, what happened. You could see the excitement in their eyes that the work they did, beyond being beautiful, was impactful. Now next time I ask them to raise the bar, they understand why.

Richard Byrd

Yeah, I love that. Companies can get so siloed. When I was a young graphic designer, I'd make a brochure, meet the deadline, and never hear from the salesperson again.

Asit Goel

Exactly. The team's doubled in size in the last three and a half years — it's very important we don't let silos build up. People come from different organizations with different processes. When people don't interact, silos will build up.

Richard Byrd

Walk us through your career. How'd you wind up in your role today?

Asit Goel

After doing my engineering degree, I got an MBA and started working at Nestlé. Early on in my career, I had the opportunity to launch a brand called Nestlé Pure Life. I was working overseas in India — reporting into a Dutch boss working for a Swiss company, who was reporting into an American working for a French company called Perrier. That gave me wonderful exposure to different cultures and working on a global scale. I stayed in consumer products, moved to the US, worked at Kellogg's, worked at a few different places. Then I realized there was a huge opportunity in industrial marketing. I moved to industrial services about midway through my career, and after having worked at very large companies and PE-backed companies, I got a call from a recruiter about the opportunity at UniFirst. I was intrigued because I understood the market, and anytime I have the opportunity to paint on a blank canvas — that's phenomenal for me.

One thing I've learned through this unconventional trajectory: listen to the customer, pay attention to the data. That helps keep my biases in check.

Richard Byrd

Yeah, that is great advice. People forget to consult with these mythical creatures called customers. Especially in businesses that have been around a long time — people feel like they know their customers up one side and down the other. But every time we do voice of customer work, there are always surprises. Do you find that in your work as well?

Asit Goel

Absolutely. Customers are humans, and like all humans, they evolve with experience. The baseline expectation gets reset as they experience more. A lot of times, people inside a business think operationally — how do I keep delivering this product or service? But what was stable state five years ago may no longer be table stakes. What was exciting five years ago may have become table stakes because everyone is doing it now.

Let me give you an example. Back in 2015, I was working for a large industrial equipment rental company. We did a project to understand customer expectations. By that time Uber had started to explode, and one thing we heard was, 'If I can order my car on Uber, why can't you tell me when my product is being delivered to my job site?' I thought — great, I have GPS on my trucks, I can show them where the equipment is at any time. We actually mocked up some examples and went back to customers to validate, and the customer said, 'I don't have time to look at any app.'

Richard Byrd

[laughs]

Asit Goel

'I expect you to do your job, and I expect you to tell me when you're going to fail.' That's where I always coach people: listen to customers very carefully because their experience is evolving. They'll tell you what their pain is right now. But please do not take their literal pain as the solution. Understand what's underlying it, and you'll have a better win with the customer.

Richard Byrd

That's such good advice. How many people would have heard that from the client and said, 'Quick, somebody make me an app!' We have clients in the oil field who used to run customer advisory boards every year. One told me it's like walking into a room full of engineers asking who wants ice cream — all hands go up. Make this, make that. But ask those same kids who's willing to clean their room first, and the hands go down. It's the same with customers. 'Okay, great, if you want all these features, are you willing to pay a premium so we can recoup the R&D?'

Asit Goel

Right. There are two very important things in there. Number one — if Henry Ford had run a customer focus group and asked people what they wanted, the answer would have been a bigger horse. When you're doing customer research, be very careful what you're asking, because no one can tell you what will solve their problem. But they'll tell you their pain points. Think about Uber — we all grew up being told never get in the car with a stranger. Along comes Uber and we're all happily jumping in. Our behaviors changed because the pain point wasn't getting in the car with a stranger. The pain point was I couldn't waste time finding a cab.

Number two — there's often the desire to keep adding features and bells and whistles, but it has to match the willingness to pay. I'm fortunate that having done startup work, I can say startups are really good at this because you don't have the luxury of resources to keep adding on every feature. You have to come up with the minimum viable product that solves someone's problem. Once you get that hook in, then you have the option to expand. Larger organizations often get caught up in the 'if onlys' that never end.

That's why I think marketing has a very critical role to play. Marketing is the one function that by training knows how to listen to the customer, look at the macro environment, look at the competition, and plug into business objectives. When you find that link, marketing becomes a strategic function — and that's not very common. It's not something taught in MBA programs. Industrial companies and companies with newer marketing functions often don't have the maturity to think like that. So as a marketing leader, your job is not just looking externally — you're as much evangelizing internally.

Richard Byrd

And one of the things you mentioned — pricing falls under your marketing umbrella. I'm a strong believer that marketing should own the pricing conversation.

Asit Goel

Yes and no. Pricing is a very different skill set — more closely aligned with solving immediate business objectives. Pricing doesn't solve long-term problems. What I'm doing in pricing is solving for how I maximize the probability of this deal closing favorably, or how I maximize revenue or profit margin. That's taking into account very narrow constraints of the here and now.

Marketing works in a slightly longer-term cycle. You're a customer — you're either aware of me or you're not. You're not going to buy my product if you have no awareness of me. So I have to work on building that awareness before I can talk about selling.

Marketers are notoriously afraid of data. And financial data savviness is even further lacking. So you need the right leader. I've been here coming up on five years, and it's only the last two months that I inherited pricing — it had been a separate function. The four Ps of marketing — product, price, promotion, place — makes sense at a certain level. But the way marketing has fractured into all these specialist roles over the last 10–15 years — growth marketing, performance marketing, digital marketing, brand marketing — it's really scattered. And that's causing an issue where people don't understand the financial literacy they should have.

Richard Byrd

Yeah. And for a lot of our clients, we strongly encourage value-based pricing — they're all solving hundred-million-dollar problems, and you definitely don't want to do that on time and material.

Asit Goel

Correct. Pricing impact is visible in the next 6–12 months. Marketing impact can be seen within 3 months or up to 18 months, depending on your objective.

But here's the key thing on value and pricing. When a customer says your price is too high — my interpretation is: as a customer, they didn't understand your value. Think about it this way. You stop at a Circle K, grab a cup of coffee. You drive through McDonald's. You stop at Starbucks. It's the same coffee. You're paying 99 cents in one place, a couple bucks at another, and probably $10 at Starbucks soon. Why? Because in each case, the value proposition has been defined. Is it convenience? Speed? Ambiance? Customers end up defining price in abstract terms — features or price points. When communication is unable to explain value, the customer's simple crutch is: is it cheaper than what I'm paying? If not, I'll move on.

Richard Byrd

Man, that's spoken right out of our mouths here. And the other one we talk about is differentiation — if you're not talking about what makes you different, you're just competing on price.

Asit Goel

Exactly. Your value proposition has to be unique or differentiated, because if I can get the same value proposition somewhere else, it's parity — I'm in a commodity market, and price will carry the day. But if your product is not a commodity, you have to articulate value. That's where marketing's role in sales enablement comes into play. It's not just providing collateral for negotiations. It's how am I engaging the buyer even before my salesperson gets in the room?

Research shows 57–60% of the customer journey is happening online before they ever touch a prospective vendor. McKinsey had a study showing you have to reach a customer across more than seven channels to be effective, up to ten to truly stand out. What that's telling you is: customers need to be aware of you, familiar with you, and open to you. Otherwise it's not really a sales negotiation — it's just a price confirmation.

Richard Byrd

Yeah, and that was a bit of a rude awakening early in my career in business development — that people didn't want to talk to me until they were 80% of the way done with their research. But it makes sense.

Asit Goel

It's also a reflection of how we need to evolve our understanding of the customer in B2B. There are still people who think B2B stands for 'belly to belly' — and yes, relationships matter, nobody wants to do business with someone they don't like. But the information landscape is moving faster than ever. My job is to help customers be aware of their needs. I can't control their needs, but I can influence their wants. How does my communication steer them in the direction of the outcome we want?

Your biggest competitor isn't a rival company — it's the status quo. A business exists and is running without your solution. So your innovation is really competing against how things are already done. And that is a very different realm to operate in.

Richard Byrd

What would you say is the biggest obstacle you're facing in your industry?

Asit Goel

From a macro standpoint, automation and AI are transforming the jobs people do. Our business is really driven by the number of employees a company has. If automation reduces those numbers, that's a threat. But at the same time, what other jobs does it create? Think about all the data centers coming out of the ground — the electrical needs, the cooling needs. Those create different kinds of jobs.

As an industry, our biggest question is what changes will happen in the labor force over the next 5–10 years. Our products aren't planned for a season — they're designed to last 15–20 years. A lot of our capex is long-term. When I'm opening an industrial plant in a location, it's not based on the current market opportunity alone — it's based on how that market opportunity will sustain, because all the investment I make will take 10 years to recoup.

On top of that, tariffs affect supply chain capabilities, and demographic shifts are coming about. All of these create a set of questions the industry has to work through.

Richard Byrd

Yeah, I didn't think about how capex-intensive that business is. How does that affect your product development mindset — trying to predict what these new jobs are going to look like?

Asit Goel

Product development has to look at what we're doing today, where we're seeing immediate turns, and how we're evolving for the longer term. Take business wear — defined very differently 20 years ago than today. Athletic wear went from purely functional to a high fashion statement. Does that change what a machine shop employee expects their clothing to look and feel like? What was possible in fabric technology even 10 years ago is very different today. Delivery drivers, service industry workers — they need to move around and have comfort throughout the day.

We constantly look at the short and mid-term, because anything we introduce has to have staying power for the next 5–10–15 years. We work with a lot of partners — fabric manufacturers, vendors, other industry partners. Because we're a small part of a large industry, constantly sharing thoughts and ideas across the ecosystem helps us understand as an industry how to evolve to meet those challenges.

Richard Byrd

Wow, that is really thinking down the road. What tactics work best for you from a sales and marketing perspective?

Asit Goel

You have to be present in multiple places at the same time — you can't just pick one and run. Thinking about Blue Ocean/Red Ocean strategy: if everybody's bombarding people with digital ads, my job as a marketer is to cut through the clutter. We've seen tremendous success from old-school tactics like direct mail. And it doesn't mean email marketing or digital ads don't work — we've seen extremely high click-through rates on our email campaigns too.

Rather than answering from a tactics perspective, I look at it from a principles-of-design perspective. First: talk to customers. Don't be shy about it. That always works. Be present where customers are — digitally or physically. Don't sell. Understand.

When we've done direct mail, it's not about sending a bunch of postcards out. It's about the message and the context in which they receive it. One company I used to work for visited job site trailers regularly. We noticed they had planning calendars that were the heart of their operation. So providing a planning calendar became a very valuable tool. We started delivering those in September — not October or November, when three other vendors have already done it. It's the context, the message, the whole package that has to come together.

We use all the standard tools of the trade — trade publications, digital ads, videos, search ads. We're not big on social media right now, by design — every channel has certain expectations and I need to make sure I can deliver to that platform. But we produce a lot of content — blogs, case studies, articles — enabling that customer journey discovery that's happening without a salesperson ever entering the picture. And we maintain a regular cadence of engaging prospects through direct mail and existing customers through our portal.

Richard Byrd

Yeah, that's very well put. Everybody asks me what works in marketing. And I say all of it works and none of it works — it depends on whether you execute it properly and whether you're meeting customers where they are.

Asit Goel

Yes. And around sponsorships and partnerships — I often see these as very hard to define value for. But you have to have a clear objective. We do NFL sponsorships of three teams and a NASCAR sponsorship. Before we signed the contract paperwork, we were very clear about the objective and what the KPIs would be to understand if we're on track.

The mistake is when you don't know what you want. Marketing tactics are not pixie dust. 'I sprinkle some pixie dust, put up a billboard, and people should be beating down my door.' It doesn't work that way. Think about Chipotle when it came out — very successful billboard campaign. They were very clear about who they were reaching: people going out for lunch, not sure what they want, open to coming in. They made the messaging relevant, put up enough billboards that it was in your face, and there was a PR strategy behind it too. Marketing works when there is intent.

Richard Byrd

And we see clients who we suggest a full channel strategy to and they say, 'Do we need all that?' And when you start optimizing and turn things off, you find out that the awareness layer, when you shut it off, everything else is affected. It's hard to attribute that, especially for our very data-driven engineering and science clients who want to see direct correlations.

Asit Goel

Attribution is always going to be tough, because it assumes we consume information sequentially — we don't. And the decision maker is a human. You're selling into a company, but the person signing off on that contract is a human. Humans are more driven by emotions than rationality. Most business people forget that.

'I have the best product, why wouldn't they come? I have the best comparison chart, why aren't people signing on the dotted line?' What people forget is that the decision is being made by a human driven by emotions. I'm not saying people make bad choices just because they like you more — there's a baseline that has to happen. But emotions come into play.

That's why I think about a strategy with two layers. One that covers the high-intent user with a direct path to buy — and another that influences the thought process and evolution, through platforms like LinkedIn, articles that establish a community-level presence. Go back to recency, frequency, and relevancy. If I've heard of you, heard of you enough times, and what you're saying is relevant, I'm going to engage. Multi-channel attribution is possible if you have the right resources and technology infrastructure — but how many clients are willing to invest in that?

Richard Byrd

Yeah, that's a big investment. And it's just unclear. They saw your ad, drove past your billboard, went to your website, read some blogs, looked at a case study, eventually made first contact with a salesperson, saw a presentation, used an ROI calculator, and bought. Which one of those tactics was 'the one'? And I love what you're saying about people being irrational. I had an engineering client tell me, 'Our clients make decisions based on logic and reason.' And I said, 'That's interesting — what kind of car do you drive?'

Asit Goel

[laughs]

Richard Byrd

He says, 'I have a BMW.' And I said, 'Tell me why that was a rational choice, because a Camry does the exact same thing for half the price.' He goes, 'Oh. Touché.'

Asit Goel

And that's the part people don't realize. We don't leave our human emotions outside the door when we walk into the office. Our experience is also being shaped by what's happening outside of our industry. I know that at the press of a button I can order an Uber, order from Amazon for same-day delivery, deposit a check and wire money without ever setting foot in a bank, monitor my home, or talk to family overseas for free. All of this at the subconscious level is changing what we expect from vendors. That expectation is evolving whether you like it or not.

People have a navel-centric view of the world: 'This is how I do things in my business, so everyone must do it the same way.' They forget we're all different, in different environments and circumstances. Marketing is uniquely capable of removing those biases — if it can.

Whether it's industrial software or Fintech, it's the same thing. People tend to believe that if you build a better mousetrap, they will come. It just doesn't work like that.

Richard Byrd

Yeah, no — it really doesn't, and it's such a hard thing to explain. Are there any emerging marketing trends you're excited about?

Asit Goel

AI is an interesting one — I'm more curious than excited about it. What I am genuinely excited about is that the pace of evolution of marketing within B2B companies is now improving and getting faster. Concepts like growth marketing, performance marketing, customer insights, and NPS are becoming more discussed inside industrial companies, if not fully understood yet. Companies are reaching out for proper marketing help now when conventionally they would have just hired a junior marketing person to make a pretty webpage. We're catching up on the gap between industrial and consumer-oriented marketing.

Richard Byrd

And I think for a lot of people, marketing still just means LinkedIn. It's very tactic-based rather than strategic.

Asit Goel

Exactly. You can have LinkedIn Sales Navigator and send very informative outreach. But if you don't have the backend of the funnel to catch that inbound, all of that upstream work goes to waste. I've seen many folks who want to run ads but their website is still speaking circa 2010. There are expectations when you click on a Google or Facebook ad, and people don't understand that.

But as companies talk about this more, you're going to see more of them start to succeed. When the macroeconomic environment gets tough, the companies with better processes and capabilities — including around marketing — are the ones that come out stronger on the other side.

Richard Byrd

Jack Welch used to say he loved downturns because that's when market share moves. What advice would you give to a person just starting out in marketing?

Asit Goel

It's an interesting question. My son is a junior in college, and I was having a similar conversation with him a few months ago. I realized that if I'm being truly honest, there's not a specific career path I can map out — the market is evolving too fast. But one thing remains consistent: be curious. Don't shy away from jumping into anything and everything, not because you have to, but because you want to understand what it is and what it can teach you.

If you're in marketing, constantly ask why, how, what, when, where. Unlike finance and accounting — where the rules are set — marketing is about influencing human behavior, and human behavior evolves every day. The iPhone is barely 20 years old and it's central to almost everything we do. The internet has only been in mass usage for about 30 years. AI is a couple of years old and already the evolution has moved so fast.

Be curious. Don't form opinions — form hypotheses. Prove or disprove them through data and observation. And constantly think about one thing: the customer. It's not about what you do, it's how the customer perceives it. My only advice is: be curious. Ask the question why, how, what, when, where. Keep learning, because that's how your career is going to advance.

Richard Byrd

That is great advice, and I couldn't agree more. That's why I still love marketing — because I'm curious. And when we hire here at BlueByrd, we're always looking for lifelong learners.

Richard Byrd

Is there something we didn't talk about today that we should have talked about?

Asit Goel

I think we kept talking about marketing value without really getting into what it is. We talked about multi-channel, attribution modeling, all of that. But one thing marketers don't talk about enough is the value that marketing itself brings.

In the B2B space, this is especially important. As a marketer, you have an innate understanding of what marketing can do and how it does it — just like an engineer has a deep understanding of the laws of physics for whatever they need to design.

The one unique challenge B2B marketers face is defining value and helping people buy into it. It's one thing to say we delivered X ROI on this campaign, but do people actually believe it? That is the biggest challenge. There's no clear answer, but what I can tell you is: when we start something, we define what success looks like. Then we ensure we can measure it — qualitatively or quantitatively. And importantly, it's not just the measurement — are you evangelizing it up and across the organization? That is very, very challenging, and I see a lot of marketers struggle and feel frustrated.

As marketing leaders, we have to constantly keep an eye on that and work to refine the approach. One of the unspoken challenges in marketing is defining marketing value. There are days when you can define it down to dollars and cents. But when you're coming into an environment like mine — I'm the first head of marketing for a 90-year-old business that was extremely successful and built into a public company long before I arrived — the question is: what is the value that I bring? That's a very challenging exercise.

Richard Byrd

Yeah, I can imagine. There are certain campaigns where we can say, 'Here are our goals, and we hit them,' and there are high-fives all around. But other times it's really challenging — people always have the 'yeah, buts.' 'Well, if we'd just turned sales loose, maybe they could have come up with that too.'

Asit Goel

You can't control someone else. What you can control is how you communicate and present that information. I was at a marketers meeting once — small private group — and a marketer from a very large public company was presenting, very gleeful: 'We produced 30 high-quality leads!' My first question was, 'So what? Help me put this in context. You increased the sales pipeline by 30% — I can understand that. But what does 30 leads mean?' She was somehow expecting the CEO to hear '30 leads' and think, 'My next quarter numbers are set.' No.

This is where marketers get a black eye. We get so enamored by tools and metrics — clicks, engagements, redemptions, form fills. When you throw around non-value descriptors as value, it creates a credibility problem.

Richard Byrd

Yeah. For most of our clients, I just want to take impressions off the table. That is not a metric to bring to the C-suite. With marketers who understand leading versus lagging indicators — absolutely. But when you have FaceTime with a C-level executive, we're talking about business impact. That is what needs to be on the table.

Asit Goel

That's true. And that is the challenge — especially coming into an environment where marketing as a formal function hasn't previously existed. This is the third time I'm doing this, so I have some understanding of what the challenges are. But the playbook is always different. It's just an exciting journey.

Richard Byrd

Isn't that the case? We've never done the same playbook twice, because every organization is so different.

Asit Goel

That's what I love about marketing. Marketing is about influencing people to do things they probably don't yet have the desire or willingness to do. Whether it's executing a strategy inside the company or impacting customer behavior outside of it — I can come with the best collateral, but if the sales team doesn't use it, it's not effective. It's not just about creating the best collateral. It's about having the best influence that drives behavior change. Whether it's B2B or B2C, at the end of the day you're influencing a human to do something you want them to do. And that's the beauty of marketing: as long as humans can evolve, it will never be stale.

Richard Byrd

Well said, and an excellent point to end on. Thank you so much for being on the program, Asit — sharing your thoughts on marketing and the changing role of industrial companies and B2B marketing. I really appreciate your contribution.

Asit Goel

I appreciate it, Richard. It was wonderful talking to you. Thank you so much.

‍