It is late February 2026. You made it through the January board meeting. The deck looked great, the pipeline chart pointed up and to the right, and someone—probably more than one someone—said some version of: “We just need to hit Q1. We can reinvest in the long game later.” Later almost never comes. I …
Why Boards Choose Short-Term Revenue Over LTV—and What CEOs Can Do About It Read More »
Your customer satisfaction scores look solid. Your Net Promoter Score is respectable. Yet your referral engine sputters along at half the rate you need. Sound familiar? Here’s what most leadership teams miss: customers don’t remember experiences the way accountants measure them—by averaging everything. They remember like humans, which means your carefully tracked “average experience” …
The Peak-End Rule in Customer Experience: Designing Moments That Drive Referrals Read More »
As we kick off 2026, CEOs, Marketing and Sales leaders across B2B companies of all sizes are finalizing growth plans, setting aggressive pipeline targets, and aligning their go-to-market strategies. Yet one of the most consequential drivers of profitable scale rarely makes it into board presentations: how marketing and sales stages are actually defined—and when …
The Hidden Tax of Broken Stages: How Vague Pipeline Definitions Quietly Kill B2B Growth Read More »
If you’ve read my earlier post on The Half-Life of Cross-Sell, you know the uncomfortable truth: your window to sell more to an existing customer decays rapidly—often in days, not weeks. But here’s what I didn’t fully explore: the psychology behind why that window closes so fast, and more importantly, how both B2B and …
Do You Want Fries With That? Revisiting the Half-Life of Cross-Sell Read More »
Award winning Chief Marketing Officer, Founder, and Investor with a history of building profitable companies and top-tier brands for the financial services, fintech, data, martech, health care, insurance, and consumer financial products industries.
Copyrights 2023 Rich Smith’s All Rights Reserved
