How To Build Trust (and Crush Sales Cycles) with Empathy-Led Marketing
with Beth Wilkerson, Senior Marketing Manager, Barnes Aerospace
Audio Only
Episode Description
Shorten your sales cycle and create marketing that truly resonates! This episode reveals how empathy-led strategies and customer journey mapping can supercharge trust, influence buyer decisions mid-funnel, and turn complex challenges into your competitive edge.
Listen & Learn
- Empathy-led marketing shortens sales cycles in technical industries.
- Customer journey mapping uncovers real buyer questions and pain points.
- Direct customer feedback validates or challenges internal marketing assumptions.
- Consistent messaging increases trust and buyer willingness to pay more.
- Cross-functional input aligns messaging with buyer needs.
- Fragmented teams and silos undermine marketing effectiveness.
- Adapting strategy to rapid market changes demands organizational flexibility.
- Empathy turns “soft skills” into measurable business advantages.
Guest Bio
Beth Wilkerson is a purpose-driven marketing and communications leader who is driven by a mission: to leave the world better than she found it. That purpose shapes her daily leadership, guided by three core principles: explore, engage, and empower, whether building global marketing strategies or contributing to the success of her community.
With 20 years of experience, she has built and led marketing functions for global industrial brands. She specializes in using empathy as a competitive advantage in engineering-first cultures, helping technically-driven organizations understand their customers deeply enough to shorten the trust cycle, influence purchase decisions, and build relationships that transcend individual transactions.
Her disciplined approach includes a customer journey mapping framework that translates customer insights into messaging strategies that meet buyers where they are. That approach has delivered a 5x higher click-through rate, a 4x higher engagement rate, 200% growth in web leads, and an all-time company record in web sales growth. In industries where lead times can span years, she works collaboratively to create unified narratives that resonate with commercial, operational, and executive audiences.
She has built marketing functions during private equity transitions, collaborated with executive leaders to align strategy across global teams, and navigated 13 managers in six years – all of which honed her adaptability skills that she considers essential for successful marketers. Her work contributed to the Barnes’ landmark $3.6 billion acquisition.
Her expertise also includes account-based marketing, demand generation, content strategy, SEO/SEM, and responsible AI, which serves a core belief: companies that build trust faster, win.
Outside of work, she volunteers as a kayak instructor at the YMCA, is active in her community, and serve as a guest lecturer at universities to invest in the next generation of business leaders.
Her opinions are her own and do not reflect that of her employer.
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