Ep. 94 – Reinventing Growth in a Commoditized Market with Steve Smith Part 2

In Part 2 of our conversation with Steve Smith, Chief Revenue Officer at Live Oak Fiber, we go deeper into how his team is scaling with both agility and authenticity—blending AI, community engagement, and a customer-first mindset to win in a highly commoditized telecom market.Steve unpacks what it really means to lead with transparency, build a culture that thrives across residential and B2B markets, and design a sales engine that delivers personalized value at scale. From t-shirt cannons to AI-assisted prospecting, it’s clear: growth happens when you meet your customers where they are—and actually understand who they are.What You’ll LearnCompeting Beyond the Product: Why the best way to differentiate is not what you sell—but how you serve.Human + AI Prospecting: Steve shares how Live Oak’s team blends digital ads, field outreach, and AI signals to achieve 80%+ MQL conversion.Leveraging Customer Context: How insights like home square footage and pool size help personalize campaigns—and why trust starts before the first call.Net Promoter as a North Star: The cultural and operational moves that helped Live Oak achieve a 76 NPS score—higher than Apple.Culture-Driven Growth: Why hiring “athletes,” not just resumes, is key to building high-performance sales teams in uncertain markets.AI Without the Hype: How Steve’s team uses AI practically—from outage alerts to upgrade prompts—without losing the human connection.Key TopicsGTM in both residential and business segmentsCreating “shock & awe” customer experiencesMapping Day 0 strategies with local event engagementDesigning growth systems that work across sales channelsUsing CRM, digital behavior, and AI for smarter targetingBalancing automation with local, white-glove serviceOperationalizing culture in sales teams and hiring practicesGuest Spotlight: Steve SmithSteve Smith is the Chief Revenue Officer at Live Oak Fiber, where he leads a people-first, tech-enabled go-to-market strategy across residential, MDU, and commercial segments. With more than 25 years of experience in telecom, Steve is known for his bold talent bets, operational creativity, and unwavering customer obsession.Resources & MentionsBook: Good to Great by Jim CollinsBook: Blink by Malcolm GladwellInspiration: The Savannah BananasSales Concept: “People don’t buy drill bits. They buy holes.”🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts.Mark Petruzzi (00:31)So Steve, we have a lot of audience members that are in the ISV market or SAS, Software as a Service. And really what you do is kind of telecom as a service, even though you guys were before all these acronyms like SAS. And it's interesting. We can all debate what a commoditized market really is.Steve Smith (00:37)Right?Mark Petruzzi (00:52)but some of them feel like their markets are moving into a commoditized market. So what advice would you give those CROs that trying to stand out as their market matures and does get more commoditized?Steve Smith (01:07)Well, will say it's a continual battle. there's no magic, there's no silver bullet, it's consistency, it's having the organization focus on it. But I would say don't compete on the product alone, compete on the experience. So focus on trust, transparency, and outcomes. If you do that, for instance, we have an outage, we post it online.And we'll say we're having an outage, sorry for the inconvenience and call us here if you need assistance. And sometimes we'll have outages or issues in an area because we're still under construction and we'll proactively give people credits and say, hey, we're sorry. We're sorry this happened and we'll reach out. If you focus on those things, then you'll stop being more of a commodity and you'll be more indispensable, so to speak.But people respond with that. It depends. it's a continual battle. In today's climate, everybody wants the best for the lowest price. if you focus on those things, trust, transparency, and outcomes. I have a friend that would say, people don't buy drill bits, they buy holes. So you talk about what they get out of it, not so much how you're doing it for them. Yes, we have fiber optic. Yes, it's in conduit, and it's buried, and we haveKK Anderson (02:04)Mm-hmm.Steve Smith (02:12)phenomenal connectivity and nodes and we have all this telemetry around our network, but they don't care about that. I mean, they care about is it going to be up. Last year in September, Hurricane Helene was one of the late storms in the season and it went to, we have a lot of storms, but this one went across Glen County. 80 % of the county was without power. And however, if you had live Oak fiber,Mark Petruzzi (02:27)Yes.Steve Smith (02:35)and you had service, lot of people had generators, you were able to watch the Alabama-Georgia football game and there was watch parties online and people were like, I've got live oak fiber, you come to the house and we're watching the football game. ...