How B2B Marketers Can Build Greater Trust

In many B2B organizations, the C-suite inherently distrusts the marketing department. There is this ideological disconnect between marketing, the C-suite, and the rest of the organization. One side is thought and process-driven and then there’s marketing which requires unconventional thinking, experimentation, and a deep understanding of human behavior. How can B2B marketers bridge the trust gap and build credibility inside and outside their organizations? How can they effectively get “buy-in” from the C-suite?

That’s why we’re talking to B2B marketing expert Gee Ranasinha (Founder & CEO, KEXINO) about how marketers can build trust with senior management and other business units. During our conversation, Gee discussed the pitfalls marketers should avoid, the importance of understanding your audience, and why it’s imperative to find those internal champions within the organization.

https://youtu.be/gKjLMRiWKCc

Topics discussed in episode

Gee explains why the C-suite and senior management distrust the marketing department [1:52]
An example of how marketers can improve their communication with the C-suite and other departments like finance [15:13]
Gee elaborates on the role of research and strategy in building trust [19:59]
How marketers can find their internal champion(s) and collaborate effectively with them [29:42]

Companies and links mentioned

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Gee Ranasinha, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt the industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. Welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question that conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to deliver better B2B marketing solutions for startups and small businesses. So coming to us from Strasbourg, France, Gee Ranasinha, welcome to the show.

Gee Ranasinha 01:06

Delighted to be here, Christian, thanks for inviting me.

Christian Klepp 01:10

Glad to be connected Gee. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Because ma’am, have we got a lot of ground to cover. So let’s dive in. So Gee, you’ve got quite a distinguished background in the world of B2B marketing, but for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that has become part of your professional mission, right. And we spoke at length about this in the previous conversation, how marketers can build trust with the C-suite and the rest of your organization. So I’m going to kick this interview off with something we talked about previously, the C-suite inherently distrust the marketing department. And shocker, it’s marketing’s fault. So why do you believe that?

Gee Ranasinha 01:52

I think there are a number of reasons Christian and I think it’s primarily due to the nature of work that happens within the C-suite, business departments compared with marketing. So I think there is a ideological disconnect between the C-suite senior management and marketing for a number of reasons, one of those reasons being that pretty much every other business silo within the organization operates in a very cause and effect. Let’s call it mathematical, almost Newtonian, in its approach, you know, two plus two is always four, everything follows logic, process and rigor. You think of it like engineering, or mathematics or something, okay. And just by happenstance, the vast majority of people in the C-suite, or certainly senior managers seem to have reached that position within the organization, through a route which takes them through economics, finance, engineering, science type métier, subjects, were like I say, Everything’s very Newtonian in its approach even economics, you know, the basis of economics assumes perfect information, perfect utility, perfect trust, right. And to be able to make the decisions and assumptions within the categories. And all of that is great. As an example, within manufacturing, for instance, supposing you’re making widgets. Now, the object of the exercise is to make those widgets as efficiently and as cost effective as possible. Right. And if you can save money on automation, or raw materials, or, you know, more streamlined processes, or you know, whatever it may be, there is a direct correlation to the efforts that you’ve put in and the resulting output, obviously, up until the point where, you know, you’ve reduced the cost of the materials to the point where it’s no longer fit for purpose, right. But if we excuse that, it’s all very, two plus two is four. Great. And then you get marketing, where the object of the exercise within marketing is to affect change, change in circumstance, change in environment, but usually, in terms of a change in memory structures or thought behaviors within an individual or individuals. Okay? So, this whole economics, finance, sequential logic process breaks down when the target of our efforts are anything but logical in their outlook. People are not logical, people do not behave in a certain way consistently, constantly devoid of context. Right. And so because of that, effective marketing requires certainly out of the box thinking, but it requires experimentation. And it also requires an understanding of human behavior, and how that human behavior changes within context. And we do not in marketing operate under the economics fallacy of perfect information, perfect trust, or perfect utility. Because the units of measurement that govern the output or influence the process of creating a marketing output, do not always have a defined value outside of our own little bubble, for example, there is no such thing as an SI unit of trust, of fear, of regret, of frustration, of anger, yet, these are all variables that can have a positive or negative effect on the likelihood of purchase. So, this is why I say there’s a fundamental disconnect, where you’ve got a bunch of engineers or engineering thought processes individuals on one side of the table, and then you got us on the other side of the table. Right. So that’s number one.

Gee Ranasinha 07:23

Number two, all that what I’ve just said, is made even worse, exponentially worse. Because as marketers, we don’t do ourselves any favors. Okay, firstly, how often do you actually have someone in marketing at a C-suite level within, having a boardroom seat, it’s very rare. And the tenure for CMOs is getting shorter and shorter. I think the last time I read it was about 14 months. Right. So why is this? I think, you know, the example I just listed is certainly one of those reasons. But the other reason is, like I said, we don’t do ourselves any favors. And what I mean by that is, let’s go back to let’s go back to marketing 101, right, marketing 101, know your audience. Yeah. Which means adapt your message and articulate it using verbiage and language and meaning that resonates to the cohort that you’re looking to attract. Basic marketing right now, there’s nothing, no surprises there. And yet, marketers will go into a board meeting, and wax lyrical, using all of these marketing terms that they know and love and enjoy between themselves. And they’ll be talking about salience and resonance and excess Share of Voice and all of this stuff, which scares economists, or finance people to death. Right? It’s like Oh, my goodness, what’s all this woowoo West Coast tie dyed stuff, we might as well go off and, you know, believe in the power of the crystal. So that’s what I mean, by we don’t do ourselves any favors. Marketers need to adopt the language of the boardroom, which is the language of finance. We don’t do that.

Christian Klepp 09:43

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you really hit the nail on the head there with… it’s something so basic, but yet I see we see marketers violate that all the time of not knowing their audience, and we’re talking about internally as well as externally. And that’s such a great segue into the next question about, you’ve brought up some of them already. But talk to us about some other pitfalls that marketers should avoid if they’re trying to build trust.

Gee Ranasinha 10:09

What… as a marketing professional, whether you’re a manager or a CMO or VP of marketing, it doesn’t matter, what you don’t realize is that your best friend needs to be the CFO, needs to be the accounts person. Because much of what you’re saying to them, and using finance terms, like ROI, which is a totally wrong word to use, term to use when you’re talking to a finance person, because that does not mean… ROI does not mean ROI when you’re talking to a finance person, right. And the thing is, it comes back to, you know, marketers are from Venus and finance peoples are from Mars, maybe, you know, on the one hand, marketing brings insights based upon our understanding of what customers perceive as the value the business brings to them, right, of which they’re prepared to pay for, while finance brings efficiency in the operations of the business with ways to deliver the customer value at the lowest possible cost. Right. So obviously, we’ve got two major contradictory approaches to business. Right. And this is where the, the source methodology, if you like, and the certainly the processes of finance and by marketing sufficiently and significantly diverge, okay. If from a marketing standpoint, I don’t think many people who have been in marketing for any length of time would, who would disagree that typically we over promise and under deliver, right? Putting up business costs against a return that doesn’t sufficiently justify its position, right. Which obviously, you’ve taken to extremes, cost ends up being too high. And, you know, in the worst case, you could do damage the business. Unfortunately, finance goes too far the other direction, okay. They’re looking to engineer business cost structure from an assumption that all costs are bad, right, and all costs should be avoided. So ultimately, they under deliver on the customer value component, right. So the result for reducing costs by too much as the value added element of the deal is eroded, the customer no longer sees the product or service that you’re sending as being worth the purchase price, so the business no longer becomes sustainable. Okay. So it’s a different approach. But at the end of the day, you get to the same point, as I said, what was lacking is marketers’ adoption of the language of the boardroom, which is the language of finance, is the language of the business in general, you know, based upon underlying strategic goals and measurements, usually set up by the CEO, the numbers person, the CFO, the accounts person, their job is to communicate information in those business terms. And that’s where, you know, we hear all these wonderful finance terms like balance sheets, profit and loss, ROI, cash flow, you know, EBITDA, EBITDA, I mean, marketers can’t spell EBITDA. They don’t know what EBITDA is, right. Now, clearly marketing’s message to the C suite should be seen as equally important. But since we use a different set of language terms, must have it go straight over the head of the average C… CFO. Okay. Maybe finance sees itself as being driven from the head, while the classical view of marketing is that is primarily driven from the heart. Right. But, you know, the fact is that there’s no one size fits all and endlessly repeatable model for delivering marketing results. And because of that, because you’re having to reinvent the wheel each time almost. It puts finance people on edge, they get very uncomfortable. Okay, it’s a bit like placebos in the medical profession. Okay. So some people in the medical profession have issues with the placebo effect. Okay. It’s not that, that doctors don’t believe the placebo effect exists. Because obviously, there’s plenty of all you know, empirical evidence that shows it it does. What they don’t like is they have no idea how and why it works. But it does. Okay. And in the same way, I think finance has an ingrained discomfort with marketing, not because they don’t think it brings results but because they can’t make an Excel pivot table out of it.

Christian Klepp 14:56

It’s you hit the nail on the head there, I can I can just Imagine or just, I’m just trying to enter the mind of a finance person where this type of talk is driving them insane because they can’t, they can’t quantify it somehow. They can’t put that on a spreadsheet somehow, you know?

Gee Ranasinha 15:13

That’s how they think. But more importantly, that’s how they work. Let me give an example. Okay, so suppose it marketing puts together a successful content marketing campaign. Okay. So they, they put together a range of communications, collateral, they’ve got some articles, some ebooks, some videos, some podcasts, maybe, okay. And it’s all supported by a targeted social media campaign and some emails and sent out to a handful of carefully selected audience segments, okay. The result is a success as far as marketing is concerned, okay, page view metrics for the articles are through the roof. You know, there’s ebook downloads going out the wazoo. There’s millions of video views, you know, as gazillions of likes and shares on social media, everybody’s going around patting themselves on the back. Right. Okay. And as a result of all of this work is translated into increased site visits, reduced bounce rates, you know, maybe your SEO goes up a bit, you know, we’re all super happy. Except the CFO hasn’t got a clue what all this actually means, in real terms. OK, what finance is looking for, is how all of this translates into what rocks their world, which is cashflow. Right, that’s what we’re looking for, revenue. Okay, sure, they’re happy with the extra traffic and visibility, and you know, all that’s great. But there doesn’t seem to be anything in their mind anything tangible to justify us, you know, opening a bottle of bubbly or something. Okay. So what, what the CMO forgot to factor into the equation was something that we all need to consider and know your audience, to get the CFO more enthusiastic to report those results in, in, in finance terms. So, for example, the CEO maybe wants to hear something along the lines of… based on our experience with similar campaigns that we’ve run in the past, we conclude that if the business spends X amount of dollars on this marketing initiative, we will increase revenue by Y percent over the course of the timeframe. Okay, so now we’ve changed things around and presented things in a way which finance people can get excited about. And we’ve got something that the CFO could work with. Of course, there’s more details like that, you know, in his process, and metrics and implementation and so on. But we have all of that, okay, we just need to show it in a different way, you know, show how we, how we decided on customer segmentation, from the research that we do from the interviews, qual and quant, you know, work data mining, buying lists, so whatever. And then we show how the segmentation work leads us to design, the value proposition and how we define channels and how we do the targeting, the positioning and all the rest of it. So we educate the finance team on how we see these decisions, and actions influencing customer buying decisions, okay? Now, that’s at the highest level, sure. And we need to sort of drill down into you know, time spent per visit, time bounce rates, click throughs, all that sort of stuff. But once a purchase changes and measured were pretty close from calculating the true cost of those purchases, acquiring those customers, most importantly, comparing that to the status quo. Too often, we go into a an efficiency frame of mind, and we say cost per click, cost per view, cost per whatever. But we don’t compare it to anything. We don’t compare it to not doing anything. So attribution goes straight out the window. finance people know this stuff, because they’re clever. Right? So we can’t do things like that. Right. So it’s ultimately what we’re talking about is pivoting this marketing centric data view into something easy to digest for the finest of Bob.

Christian Klepp 19:44

Absolutely, absolutely. And that kind of like, is a nice lead into the next question about research and strategy and how you can use I mean, essentially like data, right to build that trust. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more?

Gee Ranasinha 19:59

It’s not very fashionable at the moment or the last few years, to be honest. Too many people who call themselves marketing is a term I use for the people I’m talking about. Because I don’t consider them marketers. They jump straight into the tactical execution and don’t do their homework. They don’t do marketing with an uppercase M. And from a process driven perspective, you know, there are sort of basic tenets that need to be achieved and gone through at various levels, depending on the particular you know, the business that you’re offering, that you set the product, the business, the audience, the environment, the category, the complex competitors, all the rest of it. But at the most basic, it starts off with looking at the business problem, not the marketing problem, but the business problem, diagnose, call it diagnosis stage, working out what the hell is going on. Okay, what’s working, what’s not working, find out where the pain points are. And it’s not just within sales, we’re not just within what management say it’s going to be. It may be further afield, it may be pre sales may be product management, it may be R&D, it may be support, it may be at a reseller stage, we don’t know. But diagnosis is key. Because often what happens, from my perspective, is I’ll get a business owner or senior manager come to us and say, I just need you to do X. And they’re self diagnosing. Right? And it’s like, oh, okay, so you’ve got no education in marketing, no experience in marketing, your only exposure to marketing is seeing somebody create a, a branded stress ball of tote bag or, you know, print some brochures, but all of a sudden, you know, what the marketing problem is, that needs to be addressed? Is, is that what you’re saying? And this is a common problem, self diagnosis, okay. You know, if, if I, if I go to my mechanic and say, I need a new transmission? And after looking at my car, the mechanic says, Well, no, all you need an oil change. What am I gonna do, I’m not going to believe me, I’m gonna believe him or her. Right? You, if you’re paying an expert, you know, it generally makes sense to go with what their conclusion is. You’re free to go to his go see another expert. But the idea that you know more than these guys, does seem to be a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it? So diagnosis is crucial, absolutely crucial. Because if you don’t know the problem, you can’t come up with a solution, right? You have to have insights, to drive your approach, because otherwise, you know, you’re not in marketing, you’re running around waving a finger in the air, you know. So diagnosis is a practical thing. And to be honest, it’s not hard, it’s not rocket science. I have a bit of an issue with people who are a bit precious about data and try to raise it in something, you know, almost biblical in its veracity, when it’s not. It’s low down dirty. Hands in the mud kind of work, you know, there’s a standard way of generating insights and data, you know, generally speaking to a greater or lesser degree, we start off by doing qual, right. So there’s initial qualitative research, which takes the form of it can take the form of interviews or focus groups, so ethnography or you know, whatever makes most sense for your particular business. So that you can, you know, truly understand the market, get the market orientation side of things, you know, being humble about what you think you know, right? Yeah. Understanding the market and the businesses placed within that market. Yeah. Then once we’ve done that, we channel those insights, the qual into quant data, quantitative data, which takes the form tangibly, usually is some kind of survey with a list of questions in or NPR is, you know, one of the most popular quant exercises is a list of questions that you ask to a representative sample of the market. And he asked him, you know, what do you think of this on a scale of 1 to 10 or whatever else. And can you explain, you know, it’s about as standard as it gets in the industry, really. And it doesn’t have to be expensive this stuff, you know, especially with things like social nowadays, email, you know, you could you can get that stuff done pretty cheaply. It’s not like you have to spend 10 have 1000s with a market research company like we used to have to do. These things can be done, affordably. Now, obviously, it makes… the trick here is to actually get the insights from the data. And it’s not… because it’s not about the data. Okay? It’s about the insights from the data. Data is done. Okay. Too many people, I think there’s a, there’s a famous quote by a famous person whose name eludes me at the moment is, and the quote was something like, people use data, the way a drunken man uses a lamppost for support rather than illumination.

Christian Klepp 25:42

Pretty much, right?

Gee Ranasinha 25:46

So after that, the traditional next steps after the research and diagnosis are ST&P, segmentation, targeting and positioning. So you do the market orientation stuff, you know, identifying the needs and desires of consumers, and the related products and services that satisfy them. Which is something 99% of businesses all already think they know, but they don’t know anywhere near to the level they need to do. Because they’re biased in their assumptions, because they are not their customer, I don’t care who you are, what you sell, the very fact that you sell it, you are no longer your customer. And you need to be okay with that. Right? The drivers, the behaviors, the commonalities, you know, all of that sort of stuff are skewed, because you’re on the other side of the counter. So once we’ve done all of the ST&P, that segmentation targeting positioning, and we get to strategy, we evaluate the targeting choices we have, you know, we need to make some decision on what we’re doing, but and then position ourselves to those targets. What are the objectives. And the hard thing about strategy. And the reason why so many business owners, especially founder business owners, push back hard on strategy is because strategy is as much about what you say no to as what you say yes to. And entrepreneurial business founder owners don’t like saying no to anything. But you have to say no, in order to actually make sense and being able to create some differentiation, that new buyers will be able to understand. And the messaging can resonate with them. Once you’ve done all that, then we get to that icky, dirty, horrible, tactical nonsense, which is what most civilians think of when they think of marketing. Right? So that is social media and advertising and websites and videos and…, whatever else it may be. But regardless of industry or business, even size of business. That’s pretty much it, you know, yet, what I’ve just outlined is not the reality of at least 90% of the businesses that I speak with pretty much every week. This just three stages, diagnosis, strategy, and tactics. And they’re always in that order. And even more importantly, each stage to take up equal amounts of your time. And they’re also multiplicative. So if you get the diagnosis wrong, you’ve screwed up your strategy, and you screwed up your tactics. If you get your diagnosis, right, and you screw up your strategy, then your tactics are screwed. So each one is as important as the other. And tactics, you know, generally speaking, they’re split into four execution elements. And some people call these the four P’s. But you know, some people call it 5Ps, 6Ps, 10Ps. It’s like, it’s, you know, it’s like somebody’s got cystitis or something, they made a Ps out of everything. Right. But you know, which, regardless of how many Ps there are, it doesn’t really matter. But the point is that what most people see as being marketing is actually just Promotion. It’s one of those P’s. And it’s a fraction of a fraction of what marketing is all about.

Christian Klepp 29:31

Talk to us about the importance of finding that champion to build trust, so people within the organization that can be your advocate, so how can marketers collaborate effectively with that person?

Gee Ranasinha 29:42

I think it depends about how deeply ingrained marketing is within the organization today, okay. If it’s a marketing-led organization, then the work is I don’t say a relatively easy but certainly easier than if it is something that you have to sort of bow in new to greenfield site. And there’s two ways of looking at this, you know, that internal champion, the most important advocate that needs to be persuaded and be actively demonstrating their support or what’s going on, has to be the person at the top of the tree, it has to be the CEO, or however, the company is structured. If it’s a company, where it’s a founder/CEO, you know, so it’s a person who actually founded the company and is now running the company, it becomes even more important, because just like pretty much any leadership role, you are, as you know, as much leading by example, as anything else. And so if subordinates look over and see the actions not being adopted by you, that they are being asked to adopt, it’s not gonna stick. It is never going to happen. And so, it’s vitally important that we convey the reasons why the CEOs in a senior manager, founder, whatever needs to review their place within the organization and their priorities within the organization to include a marketing centric Data View. And communicate that to the rest of the organization. Because if they don’t buy into it, it just not, it’s not going to stick the other person at a senior level that needs to be an advocate, which is probably as hard if you’re coming from a position of weakness, which most marketers are, is, as I outlined before, is the finance guy, or lady. The the CFO needs to be your best buddy. And it’s about, you know, as I explained on that example, you know, pivoting the marketing centric view into something that is easily digestible into the finance department, okay? So, it may be something simple, like, you know, the number of newly acquired customers this quarter, against the cost of acquiring those customers this quarter, versus the status quo, versus not spending the money, and what the customer numbers would have been otherwise, okay. Or it may be breaking down the customer lifetime value of newly on boarded customers versus existing ones. It all depends on the particular business concerned, right. As obviously, also with the stated commercial priorities of the organization, okay. But it’s important to connect marketing efforts to financial results, because not only are we then presenting the marketing plan, as a business use case, but we’re presenting the work in the report in ways that the finance can understand and all of a sudden, the CFO gets what’s going on. They have a newfound appreciation, I was going to use the word respect, maybe that’s too early to strong, but certainly an appreciation to the work that marketing team is doing. And if they understand the logic behind the illogic irrational approach, then the finance people are more likely to fight for the marketing department when budgets are being set, since they have a clearer a working understanding of what goes on over the other side of the wall. Because at the end of the day, I don’t need to say to you, you know, marketing is everyone’s job, right? It’s not the job of the marketing department is the job the entire business. And it becomes even more crucial today as businesses seek to adapt to a new engagement model, okay. So the better that finance and marketing can work together, adapting their local datasets and verbiage and expectations to each other’s world, then the easier it becomes for the organization as a whole to make valid business decisions. So those are the things, the two main champions advocates that we need to work with. And if we have the those things in place, by being able to express the marketing requirements in words, and terms that the business understands. The finance can disseminate that, the sales can disseminate that support. You know R&D, all of that it filters down into their own interpretation versions of that basic ethos.

Christian Klepp 35:11

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I cannot stress that enough that the CFO has to be your friend. And I think there’s, there’s an art and science to that, or how the marketers approach these people and forge that necessary alliance, the very necessary allies. Right. Okay.

Gee Ranasinha 35:26

I mean, marketing gonna get a look into these sorts of things. Supposing they are having a conversation about pricing. Right. And somebody around the room says, Well, maybe we should get marketing involved. They get laughed out of the room.

Christian Klepp 35:42

You know, it’s an unfortunate truth. But yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, we’re gonna move on to the bonus question. So, Gee, rumour has that. Rumor has it. Aside from running a successful marketing agency, you’re also an adjunct professor. I’m gonna repeat that I just completely tripped over my sentences. Here comes the bonus question. So Rumour has it. Rumour has it that aside from running a successful marketing agency, you’re also an adjunct professor at business schools, in France. So here’s the question. Let’s just say that somebody after this interview, perhaps it was even that person that called you just now, let’s just say somebody calls you after this interview and says, Hey, listen, I’ve heard a lot about you. And I would be very honored to pay for your plane ticket to fly you to any business school in the world, where you can teach marketing. So if that if that ever happens, where would you go to? And why?

Gee Ranasinha 36:47

Wow, Christian you’ve totally floored me with that one. Totally floored me with that one. I couldn’t name a school. But I could I could tell you, it wouldn’t be one of those exclusive highfalutin Ivy League type August institutions. Okay. It would not. It would be, it would be someone somewhere, which is a lot more accessible. It will be like a community college type environment. Because the problem is this the sort of stuff that I think should be spread far and wide, that is not being spread far and wide, is being restricted because of accessibility. You know? Yeah. And you know what I’m saying, and it’s not just me, there are plenty of other people who… coming from a similar position. These things need to be said, Because. And the answer is two things. Number one, it’s never been as easy as it is today to start a business. And that is exactly the problem. We’re having far too many people, starting businesses, adopting an attitude of, you know, if we build it, they will come. You know, remember that movie from a few years ago? Quite a few years ago, 30 years ago, I think it was right. People who are starting businesses who haven’t got a friggin clue about business, zero, they don’t know the difference between revenue and profit. And I’m serious about this. They don’t know the difference between revenue and profit. And yet, they think they can run a business. And this is why I strongly insist and maintain that marketing should be about solving business problems, primarily. And, because that’s, that’s what we’re talking about. And everything needs to be framed, as in relation to the business because what’s marketing about? Marketing is about generating revenue, marketing sells, marketing is selling stuff. That’s the reason why businesses spend money on marketing. Otherwise, you wouldn’t bother with it, we won’t need it. You just you just opened, you know, turn the open sign on your door, you know, physically or virtually. And all the orders would come in at 5:29, at the end of the evening, you turn everything off and start counting your cash. And everybody would live happily ever after. You know, the sun is shining, the birds are singing in your kids will marry millionaires. Wonderful.

Christian Klepp 39:40

Right? And then you wake up (laugh)

Gee Ranasinha 39:42

And then you wake up and smell the coffee. Yes. And that’s why I think that’s the sort of institution that I would want to, to go to, to be able to spread these ideas and these basic precept, precepts even far and wide.

Christian Klepp 40:04

Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s fair enough.

Gee Ranasinha 40:07

I know it sounds like a little bit of… like a Miss Universe type answer, you know? I don’t mean it to you know, you know, wishing peace on the world and all the rest of it. I don’t quite mean like that.

Christian Klepp 40:16

Oh, I get it. I got it. No, but that’s a, that’s a good answer. Good answer. But you don’t, you don’t have it nailed down to a specific institution of higher learning. That’s fair enough. Fair enough.

Gee Ranasinha 40:27

To be honest, I mean, up until I was sort of shanghaied into this other part of my life, I was very much against formal educational structure, because I just felt it was, it was the whole ivory tower thing. And it was devoid of any practical application, because 99% of people who are teaching, haven’t done anything at the coalface in the real world, since the days of black and white TV, right? And we’re trying to churn out students fit for purpose in an environment that these state teachers have absolutely no experience of. And that’s why I do it. Because I’ve got, I’ve still got a foot in both camps. So I don’t, you know, relay my experience as real world experience. And something that is practical, it’s not come out some book written in like 1983 or something.

Christian Klepp 41:27

Yeah, yeah. You have the privilege of traversing both worlds as such.

Gee Ranasinha 41:32

And I think if I lose that I don’t think I’d be doing as… I’ll be doing a disservice to my students. Because all of a sudden, you’re in the academia bubble again, which nobody wants. You end up with, the machinery is churning out educated fools. We’ve got enough of those in Congress.

Christian Klepp 41:54

That’s another podcast interview. But yes, absolutely. Probably not this podcast, but somebody else’s (laugh).

Gee Ranasinha 42:00

Probably something else. Yes. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 42:01

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Gee. This has been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much for your time for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. And quick Introduce yourself on how people out there can get in touch with you.

Gee Ranasinha 42:15

Sure, yeah. My name is as you know, is Gee Ranasinha. I’m CEO / founder of KEXINO, a small business marketing agency. We’re based in Europe, but 90% of our clients are in North America. Apparently this internet thing really works. Who knew? Anyway, you want to get ahold of me. You can get it get me at kexino.com. The best and fastest way to get ahold of me is to find me on LinkedIn. Put my name in LinkedIn, there is only one Gee Ranasinha on LinkedIn.

Christian Klepp 42:46

Yes, last time I checked.

Gee Ranasinha 42:48

Absolutely. Doppelgangers wanted to be me, which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, that’s for sure. But finally, let’s have a chat.

Christian Klepp 42:58

Fantastic once again, Gee. Thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Gee Ranasinha 43:02

Thank you. Delighted to be invited.

Christian Klepp 43:04

Bye for now.

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