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 Learn

• Competing 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 Topics

• GTM in both residential and business segments
• Creating “shock & awe” customer experiences
• Mapping Day 0 strategies with local event engagement
• Designing growth systems that work across sales channels
• Using CRM, digital behavior, and AI for smarter targeting
• Balancing automation with local, white-glove service
• Operationalizing culture in sales teams and hiring practices

Guest Spotlight: Steve Smith

Steve 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 & Mentions

• Book: Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Book: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• Inspiration: The Savannah Bananas
• Sales 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 have

KK 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. That's what they care about. They do not care about that, yes, it took all that that I described to get that experience, but they care about the experience and what the outcome was. So yeah, we're excited about that.

Mark Petruzzi (02:43)

you

Yeah.

KK Anderson (02:56)

Wow, your

numbers must have flown after that.

Steve Smith (02:59)

Yes, we always get a bump on the weather for sure.

KK Anderson (03:03)

That's

awesome. Okay. so we've sort of touched on the first couple of topics, but like I'd like the most, lot of our audience are B2B CROs and CEO. we know 80 % of your businesses in the residential sector, but talk to us about how you're growing the business segment. And then also like same thing, how do you decommoditize a commodity in

with your business customers what's working.

Steve Smith (03:25)

Well, I mean, at a high level, we want every type of customer that we pass to be able to experience our service. So the most passings we have are residential. So that's the foundation of our company. And it builds that brand awareness and scale. It gives us cash. We can build into neighborhoods. There's a lot of houses. We have pretty, we have a good machine, I would say, in assembly line on how we connect those folks. But.

We balance that with business customers and multi-dwelling unit because that gives us density. Those are other kinds of customers on the network. The message, the philosophy, the ethos is the same. So it's not an either or. Like I mentioned, they complement each other. People ⁓ own a business, they also own a home and live there. And so there's that kind of crossover there. The motions are different on how you engage with them. We always

work with chambers and local stakeholders because that's a great way, especially in the communities we're in, that's a great way to stay ahead of the message. If there are issues that the community is experiencing or they have questions, these are the people, these are the leaders that are active in the community. And so we're engaged in those discussions. Our folks attend chamber meetings and they participate in those committees and that helps drive that. So it all works together, it all stacks, but it goes back to that basic principle of

I would say every door, every floor. Anyone on the network, we want them to be able to experience live-o-fiber.

KK Anderson (04:41)

love that every door, every floor. That's really cool. Okay. let's go into some sort of classic sales skills, if you will, and let's talk prospecting. that's an attempt at business development. And well, I guess across the three channels, residential business and your multi-family dwellings, what's working for you from a prospecting perspective?

Steve Smith (05:02)

Well, we have a recipe. I think we've nicknamed it shock and awe. And what we do is we have warm-up period. So we measure, we call day zero the ability to schedule a customer to install. And we work backwards and forwards from day zero. And we have an idea of how much time we need and what we need to do to warm up the market up until that day zero.

And we want people to be aware of our brand, be aware of our offerings. And so when the time comes, we've had a couple of interactions with them, and then we can schedule. So we work that channel. I would call those pre-registrations or pre-registered leads, marketing qualified leads, depending on who you are listening. And our sales teams actively nurture those. They nurture them through outbound phone calls. So we'll use digital to drive in some demand. We will use direct mail.

which is kind of like the percussion section of a band. You've to keep beating the direct mail drum. We'll use door hangers. We'll use a lot of stuff to generate this awareness over that timeframe, which is roughly, 60 to 90 days because people get excited about, you want them to get excited about having the service. And then from there, it turns into more of a, active conversion campaign. We convert about 80 to 85 % of those marketing qualified leads.

The ones we don't convert typically have moved or they fall out. That's a pretty high ratio and we do that through these nurture programs. But how we prospect is very simple. Our business is address driven. So direct mail is one thing we do. We have a very great, great's not even the right word for it. Thomas Allen runs our marketing. We have a highly customer focused digital program.

and we're running different kinds of digital ads as we get closer to day zero. And that helps as well. Anyone that interacts on our website, we capture bits and pieces of information. Maybe we only get your address. Maybe we get a phone number or an email. And all of those get collected. I'm a huge fan of that show, Gold Rush, when it first came out. If you've ever watched that show, everybody builds their gold machine differently. But essentially what they do is they turn through yards and yards of dirt.

And they put it in those machine and it knocks out the big rocks and at the very end like it goes through all these different methodologies to get to the the pay dirt which is the dark dirt and the gold and it's like two guys and they're literally hand panning it out, you know in a tent. That's really what it is for us too. And you've got to go through that you got to go through and constantly fix that machine. Sometimes we do buy cold leads and at the residential level that's tough with Do Not Call.

regulations in place. The other thing, we do a lot of events, we do a lot of localized events. We have a great local campaign on that. people come in. A lot of times now at this point, they're customers. We have customers show up and then we have future customers show up. So we get all that interaction. But anyway, we can kind of drive that consumer, but we start with the consumers because they have the most events around that.

KK Anderson (07:25)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (07:45)

And then it just drives it into that machine that I talked about. And we just try to nurture them to that day zero and then we convert them. So today that's what we do. There might be some different things that we have to do going forward. It's continuous improvement. So I have to say this because it is funny, but when I worked at a company in Arkansas and we would go to a lot of events and you give out t-shirts.

KK Anderson (07:55)

Yeah.

Steve Smith (08:05)

And if you ever give it out t-shirts, people will show up to your booth and they'll say, I need two mediums and a large. And then the large isn't big enough, so they need the XL. it's not a very effective way to give out t-shirts. So one of our folks that worked there, her husband built things. And I mean like built things. And he said, I can build a t-shirt cannon. And I said, can you build it? So I gave him the specs off Amazon and I said, can you build one like this? And he built his t-shirt cannon.

Mark Petruzzi (08:14)

Thanks

Steve Smith (08:29)

Now, the difference was when we would go out with the t-shirt cannon, it didn't matter what size the t-shirt was. If we shot it out of the cannon, then people would knock each other over to get to the t-shirt. So I was like, we're going to need that at Live Oak. So in the original business plan, we had these really nice t-shirt cannons and we still have them. We have a blue one and we have a red one. Blue one stays in Florida, the red one's in Georgia for the Bulldogs. And yeah, we shoot them off.

I may or may not have shot one off in the office in the last couple months and shot a hole in the ceiling tile. So it works. It'll put a t-shirt on a rope at 100 yards, but it's just fun. So those are different ways that we kind of, know, people like that and it's fun. So that's some of the stuff we do.

KK Anderson (08:56)

you

Mark Petruzzi (09:08)

So Steve, have you shot at people that have not made their quota? Is that kind of how it works?

Steve Smith (09:13)

⁓ well, no, we haven't done that yet, But I have shot at new salespeople, testing, the trajectory in the parking lot. We have we have done that. And I think it's probably on video somewhere. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (09:16)

but

well, you see if their reflexes are quick enough to catch it. That's the, that's All right, well, let's go to topic four. This has been really, really enjoyable and let's keep it going. So I think we titled that leveraging AI and community engagement for growth. But I think I'd like to title it leveraging, technology and kind of anti-tech, before tech.

Steve Smith (09:28)

Yes, that's exactly right. Exactly right.

Sure.

You got it.

Mark Petruzzi (09:50)

because you're using a bit of old school here combined with all the power of GenAI. So what I love about your team does, and frankly even easier in the B2B space than it is in the B2C space, but your residential team uses a lot of creative local insights. They're analyzing Zillow all the time. It's all about maps.

You mentioned about the home square footage and figuring out what that is. I even read somewhere you're looking at clients pool size to tailor particular offers. How does that improve conversations and how does that improve your Salesforce effectiveness as well?

Steve Smith (10:21)

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it makes the conversation personal and not generic. We're not doing it to be, sneaky or anything. We're just trying to understand the customer. We've done our homework. So if we're calling someone, if someone's got a pool or, you know, a large backyard area, probably might have some, they might be spending some time outside. They might be inclined for like an outdoor wifi solution as an example. It just builds trust out of the gate that you know that

you're asking them about their, you've got their address, so that's public information. You're just trying to have a better conversation. We've all been in those sales situations where the pitch is completely off and you're like, you didn't do your homework. I want my teams do their homework. So they try to have a very, as much as possible, an intelligent conversation, a casual, informative conversation. we're not just.

banging through numbers to get to yes. We're having real conversations with people. So there's tools that have that. And then there are some AI tools. We do a lot of work around buyer personas in different areas. we look at words or messages that might ring true with some of those folks. For instance, in a lot of our markets, we have a real heavy DIY DNA.

and a lot of people like to do so. we focus a lot of things around that. Messaging around, creating a gaming room or with our app you can basically kind of customize your home network. You can have a network for the kids to stream, one for kids to game, and then one for mom or dad to do online work or online school. kind of little different things like that. We're using technology. We do...

AI is, I hear a lot about AI replacing people and maybe it will for certain jobs, but the way we use it a lot and we have kind of the standard kit that comes with your Microsoft license and then some folks will use different versions, Claude or ChatGPT. And I would say that it's an enhancement to the experience. It's never gonna replace the authenticity of a human and not yet. Well.

You said season at the beginning. I definitely feel old when you say that. mean, it's old. maybe not as long as I have a say in it, because I think there's a personalization part that you can't get yet. But you could definitely get far ahead in terms of understanding your customer and their needs with these different tools. And some are free. So why not use them? It was our sales manager, Katie Robeson, who

KK Anderson (12:22)

What are you doing?

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (12:41)

She came from Louis Vuitton. She was the one that came to me with this like hey, we're doing this and I was like, that's fantastic I didn't even it wasn't my idea. I just encouraged it. So yeah

KK Anderson (12:51)

I keep thinking as you're talking about all of this data that you have, there's so many ways you can use AI to really leverage that data to be even more customer obsessed and meet their needs even more directly based on different data triggers. Have you guys looked into doing that yet?

Steve Smith (13:07)

We have a little bit of that. We have some of that on our digital side. So we adjust our ads based on weather and that's what that's automated. then we also have, but in terms of like kind of a CRM and loading that we're in the continual phases of making that work. Like where does that information reside? We look a lot at our customer experiences. We have systems that kind of things that happen to users. We know when people probably need an upgrade.

and we proactively will text them and they're having, maybe they're hitting bandwidth limits.

KK Anderson (13:36)

And how do

know that? Because you're hitting bandwidth.

Steve Smith (13:38)

Yeah, we can see the user behavior. how much they're using, how many times they're kind of hitting peak, when they're hitting peak. Every ISP can pull this data, but we have a tool, a platform that we use through our CPE provider that allows us to get that visibility. So then we just action on it. So that's in play now. So the next step is kind of how you described is the more information we can.

gather about our customer and their experience, can store it. It's not just the storing it, it's being able to action off it. Is it insightful enough or are we having to boil the ocean to get some answer?

KK Anderson (14:11)

with agentic AI, you'll be able to piece agents together to make workflows to just, it could really be incredible. Yeah.

Steve Smith (14:13)

Yep.

It is. I've

it work too on the fiber design side. So there are softwares where we're designing networks and you can input all these different data sets, like where's the utilities, where's the streets, where's the public right away, and it will, generate a design, which might take a drafter, seven to 10 hours to do, and it can be done in 30 seconds or less. So there's tools like that that are helpful. Not that the designer isn't good, but where computers can crunch things.

looking for correlations and data and things like that. That's super helpful. So we're thinking about it and we're startups, so we're still, you know, the old analogy, we're definitely flying the plane and enhancing it at the same time. yeah. Part of the fun, thank you.

Mark Petruzzi (14:53)

Aren't we all Steve, right? Great, all right, let's jump to our rapid fire questions that our audience loves so much. And I'm really excited to see your perspectives on this. What was your first product or service you ever sold?

Steve Smith (14:54)

Yes, that's right.

Okay.

Okay.

I would say I was a paperboy for the Denver Post. I'm definitely dating myself. People literally bought subscriptions to the newspaper and the Sunday one was easy to sell because it had comics and it had the really cool sports section and of course it had the coupons. And as the paperboy though, you had to put all that stuff together in your garage. You got the Sunday paper delivered and you had to put it together.

Mark Petruzzi (15:32)

seven times heavier, maybe 10 times heavier.

Steve Smith (15:34)

⁓

yeah, was, gone are the days you couldn't deliver it from a bike and just wing it. I mean, I couldn't. I didn't have the arm strength. We did it out of the back of a country Squire station wagon. And it was, you my dad would drive and my brother and I would, you know, chuck the papers two hands because the Sunday paper Denver Post back in those days was something to behold. But the upsell was the daily. So if you could get them to take the daily, then,

that was the tough part. you try to say, oh, you know, again, this is pre-internet. So you're going to get the news every day. You're going to find out what the Broncos are or aren't doing in the off season or during the regular season. I think that was my pitch. So yeah.

KK Anderson (16:10)

I love it.

Even then you were thinking about customer outcomes. favorite CRO or CEO to follow.

Steve Smith (16:14)

I was. Yes. Yes.

I touched on him earlier, Jesse Cole of the Savannah Bananas. I follow that He's on LinkedIn. He has great content. He talks about the books he's read. He's fantastic. And it's enjoyable to watch. Yes.

KK Anderson (16:25)

That's right.

Can't wait for him to hear this one. And Jesse,

if you're listening, we want you to come on selling the cloud as well.

Mark Petruzzi (16:35)

Yeah.

Steve Smith (16:38)

You should come on Selling Cloud,

Mark Petruzzi (16:39)

There

Steve Smith (16:40)

Jesse. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (16:40)

you go. Okay, so a leadership or go-to-market practice that you believe every sales and marketing leader should adopt and you've shared a few great ones already. Is there one of those or another one that just goes to the top?

Steve Smith (16:55)

I'd say, I said it before, hire athletes. So hire people that can collaborate and thrive in adapting to change. You do this, you can fill a lot of roles early on. Even if you're an older legacy industry, you're gonna get really fresh perspectives if you hire people like this, because they can transfer their learning. So when I say athletes, I mean like a business athlete. Someone that's really good at, can be good at multiple positions within your company. Those are the people to get.

KK Anderson (17:20)

Love it. My favorite advice you would give your 21 year old self. Which was just yesterday. That was just yesterday, right?

Steve Smith (17:24)

there's a lot. yeah, it

was absolutely just yesterday. would, it's definitely not yesterday. I would tell my 21 year old self to bet on people sooner. Skills matter, but character and curiosity and grit, that's where you're gonna get the most out of life. Don't be afraid to take those big swings.

You mentioned it, Mark, you're betting on people, you bet on people you trust and share your values. And that's where the wins come from. So I've always bet on people, but I would bet on people more sooner if I could go back in time.

Mark Petruzzi (17:58)

So I have a typical question that we ask every week that I'm gonna change a little bit to you. The question is, what is your favorite sales or marketing book? But then I wanna add on, when are you writing your book?

Steve Smith (18:10)

⁓ well not gonna write a book, I'm gonna write a movie. So that's my... Yeah, I don't know if it'll get made, but it'll... I have a lot of business...

Mark Petruzzi (18:12)

Even better. You make a lot more money with the movie, selling a movie script than you would with any book nowadays.

KK Anderson (18:21)

Hey, you need to talk

to Mark. He's got a lot of movie experience actually.

Steve Smith (18:25)

Hey, we should do it. even have actors picked out for various characters. So we'll see. Hopefully I want it to be PG-13, but I'm worried it's going to be TVMA. Favorite business book is, I like a lot of them. I like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell because it talks about paralysis through analysis, trusting your instincts, which is hard. what I liked about the book was

Mark Petruzzi (18:29)

I love it.

KK Anderson (18:41)

and

Steve Smith (18:46)

People have natural, your human brain, AI is awesome, but the human brain can do so many things so fast that you don't even know that it's doing it and it picks up on all the subconscious behavior. Like I'm sure if the computer analyzed my facial expressions during this podcast, it would give you feedback on me. anyway, but it does this and people that can harness that, and it's hard, but that feeling you get like, have a good feeling about this or that, like why is that? And.

KK Anderson (18:53)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (19:11)

learning to harness that, it's great. And it's an easy read. He's got great perspective. It just kind of flows. So I would recommend that one. It's my favorite.

KK Anderson (19:19)

Okay Steve, well thank you so much. Tell us where people can find you.

Steve Smith (19:22)

Well, you can find me on live Oak fiber.com. If you go there, you can follow us and we're on LinkedIn. We're on the gram. We're on the Instagram. We're on the X or Twitter or whatever they're calling it these days and Facebook and LinkedIn. So yeah, you can find us at live Oak fiber.com. if you're, if you're, yeah, if you're in Florida, if you're in the panhandle between Pensacola and Panama city beach, or if you're over there in Georgia,

KK Anderson (19:36)

And if you're in Florida or Georgia, then they can switch to you.

Steve Smith (19:48)

outside of Savannah, Tybee Island, or if you're down in Glen County, St. Simons Island, Sea Island, Brunswick, you can find us. You'll see our trucks everywhere. So yeah, follow us. Even if you're not living in those areas, you should follow us. We have great content. We run our own podcast. have a kid named, he's not a kid, well, he is a kid, Garrett O'Leary. That's the one that came, Garrett came, used to do social media for a soccer team in California, but Garrett runs our podcast and it's called The Fiber.

and we have great local people on all the time. have some industry folks, so you guys should get on it one day. We'll have you on. Yeah, follow us there and watch our journey and cheer us on or throw tomatoes. ⁓ You can. There's a check availability button and just put your address.

KK Anderson (20:20)

would love to.

Mark Petruzzi (20:21)

We'd love to as well.

KK Anderson (20:25)

Well, please come to Texas. I'm ready to switch right now.

Mark Petruzzi (20:31)

Yeah,

that's the only problem with that. We can't get you in our markets for sure. We'd love to. Yeah, we'll get there. All right, Steve, well, thank you again. This was really informative, really enjoyable. And thanks to our wonderful audience out there for joining us each week and enjoy that we're right before it. Well, this is gonna be coming out after.

KK Anderson (20:33)

Okay, done.

Steve Smith (20:38)

we're not there yet.

Mark Petruzzi (20:54)

after the Labor Day weekend, but I know we're all working pretty late here before the Labor Day weekend. So thanks again for doing that with us, Steve.

Steve Smith (21:02)

We

Yeah, thanks for having me on to both of you and we should talk again.

Mark Petruzzi (21:07)

Sounds like a plan. Cheers.

Steve Smith (21:09)

All right,

thanks y'all.

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