DeAnna Ransom explains why more reps, more tools, and more activity aren’t fixing pipeline, and why modern GTM teams need more precision, stronger retention, and deeper customer understanding.

Most B2B growth teams are doing more than ever.

More reps. More tools. More signals. More outbound. More dashboards.

And yet, for many teams, the pipeline still doesn’t follow.

That’s the tension at the center of this conversation with DeAnna Ransom, Chief Growth Officer at Betterbot.

DeAnna is rebuilding a GTM motion in real time from the inside. She’s not talking about this from the sidelines. She’s in the seat, doing the work, and seeing firsthand where the old growth math is breaking.

Her argument is clear: growth in 2026 is not a headcount problem. It’s a precision problem.

When teams add people to a motion that isn’t precise, they don’t fix the problem. They scale imprecision.

We get into why AI didn’t break outbound but held it up to a mirror, why teams often have data about people without actually knowing them, why visibility has to come before scale, and why retention is no longer just a customer success issue. It’s a growth strategy.

We also talk about the CMO tax, what it takes for marketing leaders to be seen as business leaders, and why the modern growth leader has to build a system precise enough to scale and human enough to trust.

If your team is doing more but getting less back, this conversation is worth sitting with.

DeAnna Ransom is the Chief Growth Officer at Betterbot, an AI platform serving the multifamily industry.

She has more than 20 years of growth and leadership experience across B2B and nonprofit sectors. Her background spans sales, marketing, and customer experience, which gives her a different view of the revenue motion.

Instead of treating marketing, sales, and customer experience as separate functions, DeAnna looks at them as one growth system designed around the customer.

00:00 Introduction: Growth Is a Precision Problem

Growth teams don’t have an activity shortage. They have a precision problem.

Adding people to a motion that isn’t working can make the problem worse because it scales imprecision.

AI is not the core problem. It exposes whether your outbound motion is relevant or just louder.

Having data about a buyer is not the same as knowing the buyer.

Before you scale, you need visibility: attribution, forecasting, lead to cash, handoffs, leaks, stalls, and where relationships are weak.

Retention is not just a customer success metric. It’s one of the most capital-efficient growth levers a company has.

The best customers should teach you who to pursue next.

A quiet customer is not always a happy customer.

Marketing leaders need to come in as business leaders, not just campaign leaders.

The modern growth leader has to be both systems architect and translator.

“When you add people to a motion that isn’t precise, it isn’t working. You’re scaling imprecision.” — DeAnna Ransom

“AI didn’t break outbound. It held it up to a mirror.” — DeAnna Ransom

“You can’t scale what you can’t see.” — DeAnna Ransom

“A quiet customer does not automatically equate a happy customer.” — DeAnna Ransom

“Your customers are your business.” — DeAnna Ransom

“The modern growth leader’s job is to build a system that is precise enough to scale, yet human enough to trust.” — DeAnna Ransom

Betterbot

DeAnna Ransom on LinkedIn

Brian Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to The B2B Roundtable. I’m Brian Carroll. Excited to be with all of you today.

What I keep hearing from leaders right now is this: they hired the SDR team, added the signals, added the technology, and their budget went up, but the pipeline doesn’t follow.

And so they hired more and they switched tools and they started a new initiative and the results still didn’t move. I’ve come to believe that this problem isn’t capacity, it’s precision. And most teams have more activity than ever, but they have less signal from real buyers.

My guest today said AI didn’t break outbound, it held it up to a mirror. And DeAnna Ransom is the Chief Growth Officer at Betterbot. She’s rebuilding the GTM motion in real time from the inside.

Now, if you’re a CMO, growth leader, or GTM operator who’s felt the squeeze between AI noise and being able to connect with your buyers, this conversation’s for you.

So, DeAnna, you said that growth in 2026 isn’t a headcount problem. It’s a precision problem. What are you seeing that makes you say that?

DeAnna Ransom: Yeah, thank you, Brian. First of all, thank you for having me today. Here’s what I’ve been seeing over the course of time. So there’s pre-pandemic, pandemic, and where we are today.

Over the course of time, what typically happened has been more reps, more spend, more activity. But that math in 2026 is completely broken. Capital has gotten super expensive.

Reaching people has gotten tremendously difficult. And when you add people to a motion that isn’t precise, it isn’t working, you’re scaling imprecision.

And so as you start hiring more and more people, people are a very expensive resource to bring in. And when you do that and you have not gotten precise, you have not done the fundamentals underneath it so that you can accurately target, understand, and connect, not just engage, connect.

The moment you see it and you’re adding these bodies, you’re going to stop because there’s no precision in it.

So I’m watching folks acquire more tools and do more outbound than ever before. They’re hiring more and more folks.

And you’re doing more, but what you’re actually getting back in the door is significantly less. I’m watching cold reply rates drop. They’ve dropped by almost half, I would say, in recent years. I think it’s gone from something like 6.8% in 2023 to something today around 3.4%.

So you have AI flooding inboxes, and you have outreach that is getting completely ignored. And it’s not ignored because the volume isn’t there or maybe the timing isn’t right. It’s because it’s not relevant. It is truly, truly noise.

And because of that, of course, if you are being ignored and you’re not relevant, you’re not going to get the result.

And that’s what I’m seeing. I am seeing the scale of noise versus the precision that creates relationship and relevance.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, I was just thinking about something you said: that teams have data about people without actually knowing them. So I wanted to hear from you, what’s the difference?

DeAnna Ransom: So the difference is when folks have a tendency to build an ICP. They start with an industry, they start with a title, and they go, great, this is what this person does, and they talk at that person.

Not with. They’re not starting a dialogue. They’re not understanding the human being.

People used to buy lists. Now you can do data append. People are using Clay. They’re enriching the data. You’re doing all the things to know about the person, but not knowing the person.

And I think that has become a major disconnect, especially in the rise of the pandemic when everyone went remote, one-to-one and real-life events went down.

So I really am seeing now that relationship building, really wanting to know the person, their pain, what they need, and understanding them on a human level before you even try to sell them, has just gone down.

We’ve got to fix that. There is the business piece, which is how we can use tools to connect, but it will never replace the human connection, which is the trust factor.

Brian Carroll: As you’re building this GTM motion in real time, and you’re building really from the studs up, what did you look at first?

DeAnna Ransom: Yeah, and I will be honest, before I think at all about a campaign or a hire, I look at what we can see. So the first thing that I wanted to fix was because you can’t fix what you can’t measure.

You can’t scale what you can’t see.

So what I did in very deliberate order was trying to get us to visibility first and a single source of truth. Attribution, forecasting, lead to cash. If leadership and the dashboard disagree, what are we doing?

I also wanted to dig in and do some ICP precision. Again, I’m not talking about what’s their title, what company do they work for from an industry, but who are our best-fit, highest-retaining customers?

Really from data and evidence and not from anecdote and aspiration. This is real work that, as an operator, you have to do before you start trying to send anything out the door.

And then the other thing is to look at where the motion itself leaks. Where does it stall? Where do the handoffs break off? Where are we single-threaded? Which means that it’s a weak relationship to begin with.

And for me, retention became where I focused a little more than acquisition. It was really plugging that back door.

Before we’re trying to go in and bring in more, because if you bring in more on the top of the funnel or in the front door, but you haven’t fixed and really understood and built a moat and a grounding and a relationship with your existing customers, all that’s going to happen is you’re going to churn out the backside.

And to me, that’s how you scale precision. That’s how you find who you really serve. And then you bring in AI as a layer, and then potentially only headcount if the system proves that it’s needed. That’s operational efficiency.

Brian Carroll: I really liked how you were talking about first focusing on visibility. And also I liked how you were focusing on who exactly is your ICP, not just total addressable market.

Not just focusing on acquisition. So much of marketing is spent on acquiring customers, but I like that you go beyond that and focus on the full funnel of retention and improving retention, potentially expansion.

So you’re using that as the template to understand who are your best customers and feeding that back into the system moving forward. Is that what I’m understanding correctly?

DeAnna Ransom: You are understanding that correctly, because then we know how to go and find more of those customers because we’re going to serve them well and they’re going to serve us well.

I believe that there has to be a mutually beneficial relationship to it.

And if you think about it, existing customers in this new dynamic, they are generating about 40% of your new ARR. That is a huge portion of your money.

And then if you think about what it costs to get a net new logo. Now, net new logos are celebrated. They’re the ones that get the confetti. But retention’s quiet. It’s also stable.

It’s also grounding.

And so I believe that when we expand, for me, I took over marketing, sales, and customer experience and created it as one motion, because that’s where you’re truly going to have growth.

So to me, my growth levers focus very strongly on how we are taking care of the customers we have, who are those best customers, and how can we continue to serve and expand within them.

And that is one type of growth lever. But then and only then are we looking at the net new, because that tells us who to go after and where to go to find them.

Brian Carroll: Really unique how you were able to tie all the pieces together from marketing, sales, customer success as part of your responsibility. How did you earn that credibility?

And maybe just as part of this, talk about quickly what Betterbot does. And then how do we overcome this tax as marketers, which is having to justify why do marketing in the first place?

No other function seems to have to do this. Finance doesn’t need to justify its existence. Sales doesn’t. I’d love to hear your perspective on this.

DeAnna Ransom: Yeah, I want to make sure I get all of the parts of what you asked.

So number one, over the course of my career I started off selling. Moved into marketing. I was in customer experience and led teams there. And so I probably have a very different perspective of how that works together as one unified revenue team motion.

I look at it that way because if you look at the dynamics of even the amount of time that a prospect spends with marketing now, it has shifted significantly.

At one point, they were spending about 60% of their time on the marketing side before they ever even wanted to speak with a sales rep. So as people were doing their own research and digging more deeply, marketing was owning more and more of a motion that they were always a part of, and that’s the sales motion.

And then you realize that there’s only one motion, and that is acquire and sell. It’s one motion with one team. So that’s kind of how I came to be in this as a leader and why I probably think about it as a unified, take-care-of-the-customer and create-this-virtuous-motion approach.

What does Betterbot do? Betterbot is an AI platform that serves in the multifamily industry. We literally power everything from the first touch of a resident’s journey all the way through to the retention side within the multifamily industry.

So again, we’re thinking end-to-end. Think of someone who is looking for their home and where they’re going to live, how they are taken care of as a resident, from booking the tour to signing the lease to living in the property, so maintenance and all those things, and all the way through to the other side, which is retention, or unfortunately, if they should move out.

If you’re with us, we’re hoping we’re getting some more retention. But we do that with an agentic AI platform. So we’re on the cutting edge of using agentic AI, and I have been able to take that and build that into our workflows for our revenue team.

And then you’re mentioning a little bit about how companies are taxing marketing.

Brian Carroll: How have you addressed it? Or, if you were coming into an organization as a new marketing leader, what might you do differently?

DeAnna Ransom: Well, when I come in as a marketing leader, I’ll start there, but I’m going to go back to the tax.

When I come in as a marketing leader, number one, I don’t come in looking only at my function. As an executive leader, in order for us to work together cohesively and solve the real business challenges and truly move a business forward, it’s not just about a function.

At that point, we are looking at it as a business leader, understanding the fundamentals of the business, the unit economics, the marketplace.

I don’t come in and look at campaigns and tactics and branding strategy. I can do that and it will get to that at some point. And I can have teams that can run that. But I come in as a business leader.

And it’s important that as marketers we come in remembering what our contribution to the business is, not just the function of marketing.

We come in behind the eight ball when we allow ourselves to be pigeonholed into a functional element. And so it becomes very important to have honest conversations about what the business really wants to achieve overall and to not speak in terms of just the function.

The function becomes how you can serve the business, but it is your business expertise and understanding of it that will allow you to craft the marketing elements.

That is hugely important. That is a distinguishing factor that I think we have to come in as marketing leaders with, understanding beyond a promotion or a campaign.

I want to sit down and understand what’s our three-, five-, ten-year plan. I want to talk about what are the levers we want to pull to truly drive growth in the business. Are we considering not just new verticals, but are we also looking at partnership economics? Are we thinking about ways that we can use our technologies to serve other industries? Do we have a force-for-good multiplier?

There are things that we can really start to do from a business perspective.

The tax piece is a challenge that’s been around for an extremely long time. When I was Chief Marketing Officer at Televerde, we talked about this constantly.

And there is not another function of the business that tends to have to prove itself again and again and again. And many times we talk with folks who everyone tends to think they’re a marketer. I feel like I found my tribe, so I’m hoping this is resonating.

Brian Carroll: Right.

DeAnna Ransom: A campaign is not marketing. It is a marketing tactic.

And so it is incumbent on us, whether we like it or not, to step back and go, hey, if you’re looking for someone that’s just going to run campaigns, that’s probably more of a marketing manager function that you can hire for.

I’m here to serve the greater good of the business and to look at how we are going to interlock and evolve the business overall and be able to drive growth.

And that’s a business conversation. That’s a P&L conversation. It’s very different than a marketing budget conversation. So we have to up-level that.

Brian Carroll: I like it. What you’re saying is we cannot be pigeonholed into thinking marketing is a demand generation function. If that’s all you think of as marketing, then you’re getting pigeonholed, because when you’re a strategic marketing leader, you’re looking at the long term of the business, as you talked about, the five-, ten-year plan.

Looking at the growth, looking at how the business is going to evolve, looking at new markets. And these all require a long-term point of view.

I wanted to ask you: you’ve been writing about this back door of retention, and I think it’s really a different point of view because so much emphasis is put on acquisition. And you’re talking about retention, expansion of your customer base.

So why do you think growth teams overfocus on new logos when durable growth often lives with the customers you’ve already won?

DeAnna Ransom: I can answer it very simply, which is it isn’t sexy. I believe I said it before, but new logos are visible. And they’re celebrated.

Retention is super quiet. Teams pour resources at the front door, building SDR teams, outbound motions, and the revenue is leaking out of the back door. The math has flipped.

In 2026, the most durable and capital-efficient growth lives with the customers that you have already won. And retention is the same discipline as good acquisition. It’s a continuation of getting to know the customer continuously and not just billing them.

Net revenue retention is the defining metric for me for 2026. A business at 120% NRR grows a $10 million base to $25 million in five years just on expansion. Let’s just sit with that.

Brian Carroll: So NRR, this is net revenue retention. Am I understanding that correctly?

DeAnna Ransom: You are correct. And it’s an important metric because if you’re thinking about budgets going down, you need to do things in the most operationally efficient way possible.

And we know that you talked about folks wanting a dollar for a dollar. That’s not how the math works in net new. It just does not. It’s about two dollars or more for a net new logo acquisition.

When you’re thinking about expansion, you are roughly at that dollar for dollar. So why would you not, when you’re thinking business and true efficient growth and not on a functional tactic, why would you not focus on your back door and take the best care of your customers and continue to grow and expand with them?

Brian Carroll: What you’re saying is, if we increase our net revenue retention, you’re reducing your customer acquisition cost because it is more spend a dollar, get a dollar versus whatever the ratio is, a two-to-one CAC or whatever that turns out to be. What you’re saying is, it just makes economic sense.

DeAnna Ransom: Yes. It is like I keep saying it, I’m going to hammer that. It’s capital efficient.

You don’t have to go and start from the beginning. You have them as a customer. And so you’re having your cost there. Your cost of sale actually goes down tremendously because you’re just expanding within them.

You’re continuing a conversation and you’re not using the same resource.

I’m going to say this again because if you’re looking at it from a P&L perspective, when you are having your customer experience team and they understand from an account management perspective how to care for the customer and continue to expand within the customer, that’s a different line than having a costly sales executive going out and hunting and bringing in a net new customer.

So you’re actually multiplying the savings in who’s taking care of that customer and being able to expand within it. It’s twofold.

Brian Carroll: Well, I’m thinking about it from the point of view of a listener today who maybe hasn’t explored looking at net revenue retention, looking at this as a growth driver. What would you suggest to someone to get started to explore this? What would be that next best step?

DeAnna Ransom: One of the things that I did as a first step, just to make sure before we could even get to any type of ICP, was an audit of our customers.

And I’m not talking about just who are our customers, what are the logos, but I dug in a little deeper to understand who they are, segmenting them, how many of them are reporting tickets versus how many of them are excited, how many of them have participated in our NPS and what scores they have given us.

Really wanting to understand how we’ve been serving them, what feedback have they been giving us, what are the things that they’ve been coming with.

I highly recommend starting with an audit of your customers so that you really understand who they are, which ones are at risk.

Because a quiet customer does not automatically equate to a happy customer.

You need to understand, we’re talking signals, Brian. You need to dig in and understand what are the signals. What are the trend lines of, hey, I’ve had about three customers get quiet and then six months later they dropped. You might want to pay attention to that.

Dig in and understand who you already have. How do I care for them? Who’s at risk? Who’s truly happy? How do I amplify the happy? Expand within the happy? Understand the unit economics.

Are these good customers in the sense that they are profitable? And here’s what I mean by that. Some customers, are you continuing to have to pour so many resources into it that they’re actually not a profitable customer?

How many folks are taking the time to really understand the business and the shape of the business from that perspective? That can tell you a lot about where to go forward.

So I highly suggest that deeper audit and understanding of your existing customer base so that you can, A, work with at-risk customers, B, work through the expansion economics of being able to grow without more capital, and then C, know where to point your outbound resources.

Brian Carroll: This is something I know a lot of marketing teams aren’t doing enough, which is going in and really investigating who our customers are.

For whatever reason, after the sale happens, that’s the responsibility of customer success, or that’s the responsibility of sales, or that’s the responsibility of the account manager. But what I love you’re saying is, no, start by understanding your customer first.

Is there anything else you’d add to that?

DeAnna Ransom: Well, the only piece I’d add is that you want to understand it because your customers are your business. As a business leader, they are your business.

And so understanding them will then help you to understand more about your business, where it’s weak, where it’s performing well, so you know where to pour gas and what to fix.

Brian Carroll: I’d love to talk about what the modern CMO or chief revenue officer or growth leader needs to become now, especially as AI is changing our work and buyer behavior is changing as well.

What do you think a CMO or revenue leader needs to become today to meet these challenges?

DeAnna Ransom: Yeah. I think about it all the time. If you go back to the tax that we are hit with that we’ve been chatting about, and the systems and where we are in the marketplace, the modern growth leader’s job to me is to build a system that is precise enough to scale, yet human enough to trust.

I think that is where we have to come from.

It’s two things at once. It’s a systems architect and a translator.

The architect piece, because marketing, sales, and customer experience, I don’t believe, this is my personal perspective, I don’t think that we can any longer operate as these three separate functions. We have to have shared metrics. We have to operate as one growth system that’s really designed around the buyer.

The translator piece for today’s marketing leader is because now you have to be fluent in AI operations, in revenue operations. I mentioned unit economics, but you still have to be the most empathetic person in the room.

You still have to be the one that is championing and advocating for the customers and the business.

And so I think in this world, in this moment, the title matters a little bit less than the scope. Owning the whole motion as one system and wanting to own it from a business perspective is what I think today’s modern leader is going to need to do.

Brian Carroll: Do we know these people or do we just have their data?

And I think that’s the question every growth team needs to be asking or sitting with right now.

It’s going to put you in place for something that actually works.

And you’ve heard DeAnna Ransom today. She is the Chief Growth Officer at Betterbot. And you can find DeAnna on LinkedIn. I recommend you follow her.

And if you found this episode helpful, you can subscribe. We’ll also be providing the links and resources and transcript in the show notes.

DeAnna, once again, thanks for joining us.

DeAnna Ransom: Thank you so much for having me.