How to Take Charge with a Champion Growth Model

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a really interesting topic and my guest, Mark Bernardo, who is here with us today. Our topic, Mark, is how to take charge with a Champion Growth Model, and it has many tentacles and legs that extend throughout the entire organization.

[00:00:21] Steve MacDonald: But that’s your passion, right? You say that because you have experience in everything from engineering to data science to customer success, yet you always return to supporting the customer—that is where your passion lies. So this Champion Growth Model will cover a lot in that area. You also have experiences in your personal life that play into empathy, which will be a key part of our discussion today. You liken it to the 25 years you have spent in martial arts, and I want to hear more about that. You also have a four-year-old son—congratulations; he is almost four.

[00:01:02] Steve MacDonald: It is an exciting time in life, but here is what I’d love to do. You are the VP of Customer Success at IP Fabric, but that only begins to define who Mark is. If you wouldn’t mind, take a minute and give us a bit more about your background before we begin.

[00:01:17] Mark Bernardo: I love it. Thank you very much, Steve. It is a pleasure and a privilege to be on this podcast, and I look forward to a robust conversation. My background has been in industry and corporate roles my entire career, right out of college. I have been in some form of leadership capacity for about the past 25 years.

[00:01:35] Mark Bernardo: That experience is relevant because it has allowed me to see the business from many angles, both internally and externally, and to appreciate the different lenses we have. When we sit in an engineering seat, we focus on building products and delivering features.

[00:01:52] Mark Bernardo: When we sit in a marketing seat, we focus on promoting the vision. When we sit in a customer-facing seat, we focus on solving pain and delivering outcomes, and ultimately creating champions. I have been in all those realms, and that is the role I occupy today.

[00:02:16] Mark Bernardo: On a personal note, a four-year-old certainly keeps me active and energized every day. My wife and I also run a nonprofit called The Courage Campaign, where we primarily work with K–12 students. We give them tools through movement, breath work, journaling, introspection, and challenging questions to foster resilience, self-awareness, and a sense of belonging—qualities that, we believe, translate well into corporate environments.

[00:03:01] Mark Bernardo: I also have 25 years of martial arts experience. I have long valued empathy as a high-quality trait, but it truly became clear to me when I transitioned from student to teacher in martial arts, where people rely on you to help them achieve their outcomes.

[00:03:20] Mark Bernardo: We often box martial arts as purely self-defense. For some, that is true. Others come to learn the art itself—the history, the forms, the many variations—or to overcome something within themselves, such as fear. It is less about the physical and more about the mental journey.

[00:03:40] Mark Bernardo: I initially taught in a formulaic way, but my students soon highlighted gaps in their experience, which was transformative for me. Later, I saw the same patterns emerge when I worked with customers early in my career, and that is where many dots began to connect.

[00:04:05] Steve MacDonald: What a great story. In business and with our customers, we must be committed students of our customers, and we cannot assume we know why they have these challenges or why they come to us in the first place.

[00:04:21] Steve MacDonald: You just gave three distinct reasons why people would want to join martial arts, and you are right—I always thought it was just for safety and self-defense, but it may not be that at all. The customer truly is the highest authority in our businesses.

[00:04:38] Steve MacDonald: If we don’t understand why they come to us, why they engage in dialogue with us, why they stay with us, or why they renew, then we miss significant opportunities. You have mentioned empathy several times, and I want to understand how empathy works in this growth model and how to take charge of the Champion Growth Model.

[00:05:01] Steve MacDonald: I’ll turn it over to you—just to give us an understanding from a foundational level, what is the Champion Growth Model?

[00:05:09] Mark Bernardo: It starts with outcomes, ensuring we can clearly name what they are. Features don’t move markets.

[00:05:15] Mark Bernardo: Since customers are the de facto source of truth, we need to understand not just what they desire but also what has stood in the way of those desires.

[00:05:40] Mark Bernardo: Take Peloton, for example. They were on fire because they created a community and accountability around a tightly integrated system of hardware and software. The outcomes were about transforming people’s lives and making them feel they belonged, which people craved—especially those who couldn’t make it to the gym during COVID.

[00:06:02] Mark Bernardo: Peloton was deeply empathetic to where people’s pain points were. It wasn’t just about a need to work out; it was a need to be seen, to belong, and to celebrate together. That is where the Champion Growth Model begins.

[00:06:20] Mark Bernardo: It is about synthesizing outcomes first: naming what we aim to achieve, and then using empathy as the navigation tool to find our way. We ask: What has stood in the way until now? How do you feel in your role day to day? What is holding you back?

[00:06:39] Mark Bernardo: Often it starts with technology or data we can’t access, or insights that are difficult to derive. But once you establish a relationship and trust, ongoing conversations begin to connect dots.

[00:06:58] Mark Bernardo: A throwaway comment may reveal internal friction—like hearing from leadership that they are frustrated by obstacles X, Y, and Z. That’s when you help them become heroes in their own story.

[00:07:13] Mark Bernardo: Let’s work together to look beyond the technology and focus on connecting the dots for your leadership in a more compelling way. It starts with trust, and it starts with outcomes. From there, we use empathy to navigate through the process. Once I see you and understand you, it becomes about—

[00:07:33] Mark Bernardo: Really creating trust. That is driven by consistency. The root of a lot of pain for customers is variability. I talk to you today, you deliver on point—you said what you were going to do and you delivered.

[00:07:47] Mark Bernardo: Then tomorrow you forget about me, you don’t follow up, or you break the mold by being inconsistent. That breaks down trust. That is the next piece of the model.

[00:08:12] Mark Bernardo: The final piece is more difficult because it requires a specific condition—an emotionally charged moment. When customers feel most against the wall—frustrated, fearful, when their plan has failed or there is a critical outage—how you show up in those moments is what they remember.

[00:08:36] Mark Bernardo: That is how you create a champion. Once you have a champion, they can introduce you to others and help you make new champions. It all starts with an absolutely, deeply trusted relationship with your key stakeholder.

[00:08:56] Mark Bernardo: That stakeholder could be a user or a buyer—or both. You often start with the buyer, then navigate through the user community, and the user community introduces you to other stakeholders.

[00:09:11] Steve MacDonald: What’s really interesting is when you said it starts with outcomes. You can work backward from the outcome in many ways, but you still need to pass through empathy, then trust, then emotionally charged moments. All three levels are emotional.

[00:09:31] Steve MacDonald: Am I correct in concluding that, even in the hardest core B2B environments, the Champion Growth Model is fundamentally about an emotional connection with the customer?

[00:10:07] Mark Bernardo: Absolutely. Anyone who has worked with me knows I say this a lot: data matters, but emotions matter more. You always need objective data to satisfy core KPIs—the checkbox components. But once you compensate people fairly and treat them well, what matters next is how you help them grow and what community they have.

[00:10:38] Mark Bernardo: Data is table stakes. The differentiation, the way to reach champions, is through emotion and connection. I welcome any debate, but that is my view.

[00:11:08] Steve MacDonald: Our lives are driven by emotion, whether we admit it or not. We use facts and figures, but our decisions are emotional—how things help us or our families. My question is: how do you structure a team, a framework, or a process to deliver outcomes through such emotional paths? In business, we usually think more rationally than emotionally. How do you flip that model?

[00:11:54] Mark Bernardo: You have to open the aperture first. A common failure mode is trying to answer the question within the confines of a single team—Customer Success, CX, or UX. Instead, you must influence the entire organizational culture.

[00:12:26] Mark Bernardo: You could have the best Customer Success Manager, but if customer support brushes the customer off, or a salesperson is overly aggressive on renewal or upsell, that disconnects the experience. You must map all touchpoints: who talks to the customer, how they talk, and then equip each team with tools and insights to enable constructive dialogue.

[00:12:56] Mark Bernardo: You can’t change everything overnight, but you can start simple. Once an issue moves to Customer Success, arm your CSM with the same philosophy and show them how to show up. For high-priority issues, have a pre-call between support and success to demonstrate your commitment.

[00:13:34] Mark Bernardo: Beyond native processes for driving adoption, education, and usage, it’s key to ask the right questions, identify critical data points, and pull on the right strings. Sometimes history is your guide. If a customer who always attended calls suddenly misses three in a row, that’s a clear signal to reach out and investigate.

 

[00:14:31] Steve MacDonald: You keep making really interesting points. I want to return to your comment about internal company culture. At the beginning of your answer you said we have to create a company culture that focuses on these emotional paths to achieve these outcomes.

[00:14:50] Steve MacDonald: You said we need the right company culture. To deliver the outcomes you described requires significant training and investment in internal teams. We want low turnover and all the traditional things, but retaining good people is hard. Attracting and retaining the right people is especially challenging if we need them to deliver a Champion Growth Model. If employees feel engaged—if they feel cared for from an empathetic, emotional perspective, that they are safe and important—does that help drive the Champion Growth Model? Does their engagement create a halo effect?

[00:15:47] Mark Bernardo: Absolutely. Think about any relationship: if you’re speaking passionately to a group of twenty people and they’re looking away or down, you immediately feel your passion wane. People who show up well need to feel that their effort matters. Without that, they can’t embrace a growth mindset or show up authentically for the customer.

[00:16:24] Mark Bernardo: There’s interesting research by Francis Frei, a Harvard professor, and her coauthor Anne Morriss. They describe the “trust triangle,” which has three vectors: logic—do people understand what you’re doing and why; authenticity—are you genuine; and empathy—do you care. If any of those three are missing, you won’t earn trust.

[00:16:44] Mark Bernardo: So, if people feel their work goes unnoticed, they won’t show up authentically, and that breaks the connection and trust.

[00:17:22] Steve MacDonald: Do you have a story where empathy—either internally with your team or with a customer—made a significant difference? We remember stories far better than facts or figures. Is there a story that brings this to life?

[00:17:43] Mark Bernardo: There’s one story early in my career when I led a support team. We had a customer—a plant manager in Australia—who was notoriously angry. Our support team gave rote answers with zero empathy, the product team brushed him off, and executives got tired of his complaints. He was a large customer running his plant on our software.

[00:18:21] Mark Bernardo: One evening, his plant shut down and he lost production. He was furious, so I asked to meet him that night at 11:00 PM my time. I let him vent, then said, “I can’t promise an overnight fix, but I promise I will be here with you and we’ll work through this together.” For six weeks, we held twice-weekly calls—sometimes past midnight—with critical engineers on the line. Gradually, issues got resolved and he felt heard and seen.

[00:19:38] Mark Bernardo: By the end, he was a different person—one of our biggest promoters, even speaking on keynotes about our product and outcomes. The only change was someone willing to meet him where he was, listen to his pain, empathize, and then show up consistently.

[00:20:20] Steve MacDonald: Showing up at 11:00 or midnight showed you cared.

[00:20:28] Mark Bernardo: Exactly—that was all he wanted.

[00:20:30] Steve MacDonald: How dare a company force me to call at their time, right?

[00:20:34] Mark Bernardo: At the time, we also had a center in Japan that just took calls without engineering support. He felt, “You are not meeting me where I am.” That was the first domino.

[00:20:49] Steve MacDonald: Those seminal moments matter, but you also showed up consistently over time. Actions speak louder than words. How does consistency of experience across customer touchpoints fit into the Champion Growth Model?

[00:21:19] Mark Bernardo: Consistency addresses variability. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to influence the brand. Consistency means being predictably reliable. Early in my career at GE, we focused on Six Sigma and measurability, practicing “say, do, to the nth degree.”

[00:21:46] Mark Bernardo: For example, most of us think delivering early is good. But some customers wait for inventory: early delivery means unexpected storage costs, while late delivery disrupts production. That level of precision—doing exactly what you say, when you say it—is critical to trust.

[00:22:26] Mark Bernardo: If you say it’s going to be here on this day, then deliver it on that day and be reliable about it. That was an interesting moment for me because it challenged our normal narrative. Early isn’t always better—doing what you say you’re going to do is what’s best.

[00:22:44] Mark Bernardo: Being consistent and reliable is what matters. Even think about children: they develop trust through consistency. It’s about saying the same thing over and over and not veering from how you show up.

[00:23:05] Steve MacDonald: You speak so passionately about this. Across your career, what are you most proud of? I know you always come back to customer support—what accomplishment stands out to you?

[00:23:23] Mark Bernardo: Honestly, I’m most proud of the people. Throughout my career, it’s been about how I’ve impacted individuals. The leaders I’ve helped develop still reach out today, sharing lessons they learned from me—and I learn from them too. I’m proud of those trusted relationships where we’re both vulnerable and growing together.

[00:23:59] Mark Bernardo: I remember an executive training event where, at the end, someone said, “Mark always created space where I felt safe—not only in presence, but safe to speak.” That is the thing I’m most proud of, because it impacts both business and community at a human level.

[00:24:46] Steve MacDonald: That’s amazing. When someone tells you you created a safe space, it’s a profound compliment. I have one last question: if there’s one key takeaway you want listeners to remember, what would it be?

[00:25:13] Mark Bernardo: Every decision and every touchpoint is both a moment to influence and a moment to learn. Every interaction contains friction to be understood and opportunities for elation—wins that reveal blind spots.

[00:25:39] Steve MacDonald: Mark, one more thing: would it be okay to share a link to your LinkedIn profile so people can reach out?

[00:25:47] Mark Bernardo: Absolutely, I’d love that.

[00:25:48] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. The mission of this podcast is to share diverse leaders’ perspectives—our successes and failures—to lift all boats. You’ve given us so much to think about today. Thank you.

[00:26:12] Mark Bernardo: Thank you, Steve. Few podcasts take this “outer rim” approach of connecting dots. Most stick to formulaic ten-step processes for Customer Success. But at the end of the day, it’s about people and emotions. There’s nuance in every interaction, and understanding that nuance is essential to building real momentum.