Chantel Soumis, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Franchise Empire, joins Brendon Dennewill on the RevOps Champions Podcast to share how she builds marketing ecosystems that are measurable, human-centered, and built to scale. With more than 20 years of experience in franchise marketing and brand strategy, Chantel brings a practitioner's lens to one of the most pressing questions in growth marketing today: how do you stay authentic and differentiated in an AI-saturated world?
In this episode, Chantel introduces her "listening tour" framework for understanding customer behavior, makes the case for a deliberate anti-AI policy, and explains why content strategy is the backbone of how brands get discovered through LLMs and agentic tools. She and Brendon also explore the EOS framework, Working Genius, and how franchise brands consistently underperform on marketing in the FBR survey because franchisees don't feel heard at the local level. This episode is essential listening for RevOps leaders, franchise executives, and marketing teams who want to build systems that actually close the loop between customer insight, content, and revenue.
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Chantel Soumis | Head of Marketing & Partnerships at Franchise Empire
Chantel Soumis is Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Franchise Empire, bringing over a decade of marketing leadership across franchising, SaaS, healthcare, and consumer brands. Previously a Fractional CMO and Head of Marketing at Steelhead Technologies, she specializes in building scalable, human-centered marketing systems for multi-location and franchise brands. An international speaker with 500+ events under her belt, Chantel is known for her practical take on consumer psychology, brand storytelling, and thoughtful AI adoption. |
Brendon Dennewill: Hello and welcome back. Today I'm joined by Chantel Soumis, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Franchise Empire. With more than 20 years of experience across marketing, branding, business development, and franchise growth, she brings a practical perspective on how organizations can create stronger customer engagement while building scalable and measurable growth systems. Her work has focused on helping businesses better understand customer behavior and strengthen brand positioning, using technology intentionally to improve both marketing performance and customer experience.
Chantel is an international speaker, mentor, and advocate for leadership development, personal branding, and thoughtful AI adoption. Chantel, welcome to the RevOps Champions Podcast.
Chantel Soumis: Thank you for having me, Brendon. I'm excited to be here. Six months.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, it's good to see you. It's been a few months since we saw you in Vegas. Chantel, it's June, we're halfway through the year, twenty twenty-six. You combine AI, customer psychology, user experience, and data into your approach. How do these elements work together to create stronger growth systems?
Aligning Data, KPIs, and the EOS Framework
Chantel Soumis: It's a whole ecosystem. If one thing falls off, everything falls apart. Data is the foundation for everything we do, because if we're not measuring anything, how do we know we're being successful? How are we tracking and measuring our successes? So having our KPIs matters. We operate on the EOS model. Are you familiar with the EOS framework?
Brendon Dennewill: Yes, we use it too.
Chantel Soumis: I thought so. I'm pretty sure we had that conversation at one point. In the EOS system, we have our quarterly rocks, and those rocks define our success. If we aren't hitting or exceeding them, something's wrong. Something's breaking on the back end, and we need to resolve it, fix it, or shift our KPI if need be. But ultimately, if we aren't reporting on those weekly and seeing how quickly and closely we're getting to our goals for marketing and sales, everything could be doomed for destruction.
Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely. And of course, to your point about rocks, for those who aren't familiar with the analogy, it's the mason jar concept from annual or quarterly planning. You want to make sure your highest priorities, your rocks, go into the jar before you add the gravel, sand, and water, because otherwise you won't fit it all in.
Rocks are prioritized every ninety days based on the goals of the organization, both from a long-term perspective and a one-year-at-a-time view. And you have to be able to measure that on a weekly basis, because otherwise you get to the end of the quarter and realize you haven't actually made any movement on your highest priorities. I like that perspective, and thanks for the reminder. So, Chantel, as brands scale, where do you most often see the disconnect between marketing activity and actual customer engagement?
Chantel Soumis: Not understanding your avatars or your ICPs, your ideal customer profiles. When I come into an entity, formerly as a fractional CMO for franchisors, my goal was not just to understand the franchisees but also to understand their customers as best as I possibly could, to better understand the brand. Nobody understands your brand better than your customers, because they're receiving the full experience.
A lot of times I see this done wrong at the leadership level: folks get too zoned in on their own KPIs, their own rocks and goals. They put blinders on and don't see outside their own picture. That means missing out on quality interviews, testimonials, and reviews that really capture the whole buyer experience, because that ultimately shapes your entire marketing infrastructure. If you're not speaking directly to customers in their words, what are you doing? You're going to reach the wrong people. You're going to waste resources, dollars, and time routing and mitigating leads that don't match your enterprise goals.
I call it a listening tour. It should happen quarterly, where you prioritize meeting with a handful of customers and users and ask them the hard questions: What made you decide to go with this brand? Why do you come back? What could we change to improve your experience? That's how you build a brand advocate for life.
One of my favorite brands is Culver's Frozen Custard. As a fellow Midwesterner, you get it. I'm one of their biggest fans. What they do is implement a consistency approach across the board: consistency with their promotions, consistency with their brand presence locally and at the corporate level. That's what makes a powerful business, especially a powerful franchise: creating systems where everything's memorable and unforgettable because they're listening to and staying in the weeds with their customers regularly.
Brendon Dennewill: Really good. One of the things I know about you is that you're passionate about getting content right. As part of any marketing strategy, having the right content is absolutely critical. What better way is there to come up with a content strategy than interviewing the actual customers or users of whatever it is you're trying to do, which then informs your content strategy, which attracts more of the same types of happy customers?
Chantel Soumis: Absolutely. If you're doing marketing right, the best marketers don't have to tell the brand narrative. Your customers are telling it for you. If you can get your audience singing your praises on your behalf, that's word-of-mouth marketing, and we all know that's the strongest form. They're creating the content for you, or you're giving them a platform to provide that feedback, which pays forward.
That's why I love working at Franchise Empire. Franchise Empire built its entire success on the shoulders of content strategy. What we've learned over the past three to four years, specifically with the widespread implementation and distribution of LLMs, is that content is the key source for a lot of these agentic tools. Feeding these agentic tools and LLMs content from the battlefield, from real-life lessons, is really how people and brands are going to continue to rise above the rest and be found organically.
Brendon Dennewill: Right. Coming back to connecting the whole content strategy to metrics and KPIs, once a business reaches a certain level of sophistication in understanding its metrics, one thing becomes clear: if your customer is essentially doing your marketing for you, that drives down your cost of customer acquisition, otherwise known as CAC. And if you're doing that right, the other metric so many companies should be tracking is the lifetime value of a customer. Those two typically work in tandem. If you're increasing lifetime value while decreasing the cost to acquire each customer, you've essentially reached the holy grail. I really like how those two things come together.
Chantel Soumis: That's the beauty of full life cycle marketing. A lot of folks get stuck on omnichannel or multichannel marketing and lose sight of the full life cycle, which is really about creating that whole feedback loop to feed the entire ecosystem so it starts running like a well-oiled machine.
Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely. So, Chantel, you started talking about LLMs, AI, and the whole agentic movement in general. We know a lot of companies are adopting AI right now, with greater or lesser degrees of success. From your perspective, since this is all still very fresh for most companies, what separates organizations that are creating real business value from those that are simply adding more noise?
Chantel Soumis: That's a good question, and it really makes me think. I've seen a lot of brands do it really well, and I've seen a lot of brands just tank.
What sets it apart, and what any consumer listening will be able to pinpoint, is when you're in your social media feed and you see an ad come through where the words don't match the lips. You immediately know this isn't a real human being, and that makes you less likely to engage with the brand. Where's the trust in that? It's almost like these brands are trying to fool you into thinking this is a real human, which can make or break your trust instantly. As they say, you only get one shot at a first impression, so don't screw it up. I've seen that happen time and time again in the franchise industry, mostly because people think they have to.
A lot of these brands think, "I need to start utilizing these tools because they're fresh and hot off the press, and if I don't use them now, I'll fall behind the competition." So they make these mistakes, and they're really risky. The best brands take calculated actions and prioritize people and the experience, which I know is a big focus for you, your team, and your company. That means making sure you have the right people in the right seats, because if the people making decisions about AI in front of your consumer base get it wrong, it can damage your brand quickly.
The other thing top-performing brands do is use brand listening tools and sentiment scoring. They monitor what people are saying about them in the digital ecosystem so they can get ahead of any lower-performing sentiment, whether that's someone bashing or critiquing the brand, versus when people uplift it. That's a train you want to get on, so you can keep the conversation going and encourage more voices to lift your brand narrative.
Brendon Dennewill: Which is interesting, because it comes back to the strength of leadership. Take that example of a brand putting out ads where the words don't match the video. Somewhere along the line in that decision-making process, someone likely told leadership, "We can now run ten times the ads at half the cost." They made the decision based on price without thinking about the cost consequence to the prospect's experience. What happens if they lose trust in that brand? Because once you've lost trust in a brand, it takes a really long time to earn it back.
Chantel Soumis: So true, Brendon. When you think about the cost of it going right, what happens when it goes wrong? What happens when you have to do damage control and hire a PR agency to clean it all up? That's a big risk, and a lot of folks don't think about that cost.
Brendon Dennewill: It really is interesting. On this show we talk a lot about brands coming to us to build the systems they've outgrown, typically their CRM. They build it at the corporate level and then make that same CRM available across all franchisees so data flows across the entire network. One of the things we often have to walk clients through is that we can't build the technology until we understand where leadership is, whether they have the right people in place, how their processes will change as they scale, and how their data and KPIs will change as they mature.
Only once we've figured out those three things can we start mapping and building the CRM that makes those processes and data real. It always comes back to leadership making a decision, and making a longer-term decision instead of a reactive, short-term one that might end up costing a lot more down the road. So let's touch on the psychology of getting things right and wrong in marketing and the customer journey. How does consumer psychology influence the way brands should think about messaging, positioning, and customer experience today?
Chantel Soumis: It's everything. At the end of the day, the brand experience is what makes or breaks the longevity of a brand's life cycle. One thing I like to talk about is having an anti-AI policy. Yes, come at me. Every avid AI user is probably thinking, "No, Chantel, you should be utilizing AI as much as possible." But I disagree.
I believe in having an anti-AI policy: defining when you absolutely should not leverage it. A lot of times, when you're truly trying to understand your audience, that's a human-to-human analysis. You break it down, form your own perspective, and then cross-analyze using AI tools to help you dig deeper. There are certain things you can do to maximize your marketing and sales approach, like asking AI to help you write an email or come up with a blog title based on what's performed best in the industry. But you know your audience better than your LLM does.
You can have your LLM perform deep research to understand the buyers coming through your website, or feed it information from your listening tours, and then use human intervention to make the best decision on headlines, scripts, and marketing collateral so it's best suited for your audience. If you put blind trust into any tool, that's a recipe for disaster. It could shoot yourself in the foot and cause a leak in your budget.
Brendon Dennewill: Right. And to your point, many brands and companies are realizing they need to shift their strategy. Take a home services brand or a wellness brand: if every marketing team in an industry is just using whatever the LLMs generate, how do you differentiate? If an HVAC company, a plumbing company, a gym, or a sauna business is competing with others in the same industry and they're all using content fed to them by LLMs, how is the customer supposed to tell the difference between brands? Once customers notice that every sauna franchise or every HVAC franchise is saying the same thing, they'll lose trust in all of them until they find one with a more unique message that resonates and makes them feel understood.
Chantel Soumis: A hundred percent. That's exactly where human intervention has to come in. If everybody's using LLMs and everything sounds the same, it's also defeating your own creativity. I read a study noting that school systems are starting to ban AI in classrooms, not in the United States but in other countries, because it's damaging students' IQs. It's literally sinking their IQ scores. It's important to keep in mind that the user is only as smart as what you feed it. If you put blind trust in automation, it can really be damaging.
Brendon Dennewill: Interesting times, that's for sure. Which is all what it's all about. Like we say around here at Denamico all the time, you're either winning or learning.
Chantel Soumis: We're definitely learning day to day, aren't we? I like that perspective.
Brendon Dennewill: So we've touched now on the authenticity of content and messaging. I know you've spoken about the importance of authenticity and personal branding, which are very connected. Why do those matter even more as AI becomes a larger part of how businesses communicate?
Chantel Soumis: You couldn't have set me up better for that question, and it's right along the lines of what we've been discussing. If we're heading into a world of automation, the human difference is what really captures attention. When you look at advertisements with models who have perfectly aligned teeth and perfectly symmetrical faces, you realize how boring that is becoming. You can smell AI-generated everything a mile away.
When you see flaws, or perceived flaws, in people, it ignites a form of connection that triggers dopamine and endorphins, because we're lacking that human-to-human connection. It's wild. When I try to create my own AI content while preaching authenticity and organic conversations, and I see the tools correct my face, I get really upset. Did that need to be fixed? I don't think it does.
It speaks to bigger conversations the world is having right now about the idea of perfection, and about us, as brands, professionals, and leaders, breaking through the noise instead of trying to fit that idea of perfection. We need to embrace the human experience, figure out where we fit, find our unique gifts and differentiators, and stand out to influence the world with positivity, inspiration, and hope, not clickbait or hot takes that grind people's gears the wrong way.
Brendon Dennewill: Which is interesting, because we live in a very competitive society. Looping back to what you were saying about EOS earlier, and thinking about perfection, I did some deeper work last year. Whenever I'm stuck on something, I'll often go back to Japanese culture and beliefs. Some people are familiar with things like Ikigai. But the one that really stuck out to me over the last year, exactly in line with what you're saying about AI lacking authenticity, is wabi-sabi: embracing imperfection.
That's stood the test of time, and what could be more authentic than that? It's the same idea in EOS. If you're working with an implementer, they'll tell you over and over, when planning your ninety-day rocks, that it's not about perfection, it's about progress. I like how those two concepts come together. And I think the more we lean into embracing imperfection and authenticity, the better, because how do you build a personal brand if you're trying to make everything look and sound perfect?
Chantel Soumis: I was referencing this book earlier, and I know your audience can't see it, but it's called The Six Types of Working Genius. Have you heard of Working Genius before?
Brendon Dennewill: Very familiar. We use it here.
Chantel Soumis: I love that, are you kidding? That's fantastic.
Brendon Dennewill: Yeah, I was fortunate enough to be part of one of the first communities Patrick Lencioni rolled it out to, I think about four years ago, through Vistage. I happened to be in Vistage, so I've been following it since it came out.
Chantel Soumis: It's seriously life-changing. It really helps you understand yourself. I believe the Zoracle framework has some similar elements, which is common in the franchising space, but the six types of Working Genius are absolutely game-changing. They're breakthroughs for leadership styles.
I worked twelve hours yesterday on workflows in HubSpot, and I kept kicking myself the whole time. Why can't I be smarter? Why am I so dumb? Why can't I figure out this workflow? Where's the hiccup I need to resolve? Then I realized: I am not a T on the Working Genius model. I am not built for anywhere near a workflow-building seat. I need to be the visionary, the wonder, the invention, maybe even the enablement to help push the workflows through.
But really understanding that you can learn if you're not winning, you're learning. I love that, because it's so brilliant. Hindsight's 2020. I wasted all that time. I know I'm not designed to be in that kind of seat, and I need to separate myself from it. A lot of leadership infrastructures completely dismiss the fact that they have people in seats who shouldn't be in those seats, which limits productivity. I could have just said, "Listen, let our IT person handle this. This isn't my wheelhouse, and I'm going to burn our own dollars wasting my time and resources here when I could be focusing on higher-dollar objectives." I should have done it sooner, but I learned, and these kinds of resources are everything for leadership and productivity in any department, not just marketing.
Brendon Dennewill: Absolutely. In fact, Working Genius pairs really well with one of my favorite books of the last couple of years, Who Not How by Dan Sullivan. For those unfamiliar with Working Genius, there are six types: wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, and tenacity. When you take the assessment, which takes less than ten minutes, it tells you your two working geniuses, the two areas where you should spend most of your time. It also tells you the two you're competent at but should spend limited time on, and the two that are your frustrations, where you should spend as little time as possible.
The idea is that when you're building a team, and any company is a team sport, you're looking to add people whose geniuses complement your own. It sounds like you and I might have similar geniuses. Mine is actually WI, wonder and invention, so when I'm building a team, I look for people with discernment, galvanizing, enablement, and tenacity.
So, as I'm building any team I'm part of, whether it's a leadership team or an operational team, I need to make sure I'm partnering with people who have those other four geniuses. You might find that in two other people, or you might need three to cover all six. But as Lencioni says, in a relationship with only two people, like a marriage, you have to accept that the best you'll ever do is cover four geniuses, which means two will still be frustrating for you. In our case, my wife and I actually share one genius, so we have three that are frustrations for us. Just knowing that helps us build systems, like relying on our executive assistant, to cover our weaknesses. It's about leaning into your strengths and then, coming back to Who Not How, finding people who love doing the things you don't like doing. Why would you keep doing the things you don't like doing?
Chantel Soumis: Absolutely. It's so interesting that you're a WI. You're high on top of the mountain, seeing things from way up there. I'm actually a discernment and enablement type of person, which is perfect for leading teams and coaching people, because I can discern information and enable them to make movement. That's a perfect managerial seat. If anyone listening is looking to hire for those spots, a D and an E is terrific, and so is a galvanizer, a G.
But where I was in the weeds for twelve hours yesterday, that was a T task, the lowest, most granular level of work. It was driving me nuts because it was one of my biggest frustrations. And to your point about working with your wife, I don't work with my husband, thank God for that, I don't think the business would last. He's an I, invention through and through, but he doesn't discern anything. It drives me crazy when we're doing a project, like installing a fireplace mantle, and he's not discerning that it's steel and we need steel screws for it. He'll try everything else, inventing ideas to reach a solution, before we actually think it through and discern the information, and then realize we need an enablement plan in place.
Brendon Dennewill: That's a good example. And the reason you spent twelve hours in HubSpot yesterday was your enablement, wanting to help toward the bigger goal. But the perfect person for that task on a regular basis would be an ET, someone with enablement and tenacity. That's the perfect person to do that kind of work for twelve hours straight.
Chantel Soumis: And Brendon, the worst part is, it probably would have taken them thirty minutes, not twelve hours.
Brendon Dennewill: Chances are, right? Because Lencioni built this tool based on decades of consulting with leadership teams, understanding why some teams were functional and others dysfunctional. That data is what allowed him to build this powerful tool. What most of us don't understand is that things that are naturally easy for us aren't necessarily easy for other people. That's one of the common trip-ups we run into. But your point stands: if you find the right person, they'd love cranking out twelve hours a day, at least for a few days a week. Whereas if you're the wrong person doing that, you'll be completely exhausted after just one day, never mind two.
Brendon Dennewill: Let's get back to leaning into your strengths and making smart leadership decisions. As we wrap up, from a franchise perspective, for any franchise or multi-location brand, how do you balance brand consistency with localized customer experiences?
Chantel Soumis: The ultimate challenge in franchising, isn't it? Marketing is always the lowest-scored item on the FBR survey every single year, without fail. You know marketing's going to need work. I think the most important thing is making sure your franchisees feel heard.
This is a huge area of opportunity for most franchisors. They have a marketing team in place, but they don't have someone sitting in with their FBC, their coach on staff, helping franchisees at the local level make sure they're engaged and have everything they need to thrive. Having someone from marketing, especially at the leadership level, who can build into that vision and optimize systems so everyone's on board, is really important. If franchisees don't feel heard, listened to, or respected, they'll disengage completely and go rogue, doing their own thing in marketing, which we don't want. We have a brand book and protocols for a reason.
That's important not just for setting your brand positioning and alignment strategy, but also for consistent coaching for franchisees on networking and engaging in the local marketplace, while making sure they have a feedback cycle so they can tell you what they need from your marketing systems. That way they're not going outside the alliance, which is every marketer's nightmare in franchising: seeing creative folks who love testing new things, then watching those things sink or reflect poorly on the brand, requiring mitigation.
I suggest having that feedback loop, making sure your marketing leadership team is engaged at both the local and corporate level, and building an ecosystem where everyone can communicate and information flows both ways. It turns this all back to our first conversation, getting feedback from your customers, because your customers ultimately shape the entire brand. They are the brand. You're not the brand, your customers are.
Brendon Dennewill: And I guess this is one of the solutions we like to build for brands. As we discussed before, a brand has to reach a point where the pain of not having a system in place to allow information to flow from franchisees back to corporate, and back down again, becomes too great. Until they have that system, it's really painful, because every piece of feedback has to be provided manually, meaning someone at corporate has to receive it and then put it somewhere, which typically means the data ends up scattered and inaccessible.
I agree that when it comes to marketing consistency and customer experience, decisions often aren't as strategic as they could be, because if they were more strategic, you'd think there would be fewer challenges when that FBR survey comes out every year.
Brendon Dennewill: So, Chantel, as we wrap up, looking ahead, how do you see AI changing customer expectations, marketing leadership, and growth strategy over the next couple of years?
Chantel Soumis: Every day we're learning more. Someone recently said that estimates of how many jobs AI will replace were overcalculated, because AI cannot replace the human experience. Plain and simple. Marketing is storytelling, in a nutshell, of the human experience. A lot of us marketers are shifting every day, losing sleep over algorithms that keep changing with our advertising dollars. The ultimate goal is to continue being a human-based brand while using tools that enable us to scale.
Where do I see us in three years? I see us continuing to embrace content strategies at the human level, because we're unique creatures who crave stories. That's in our DNA. We'll also lean further into content strategies because they feed these LLMs; it's what programs these agentic tools to thrive. Brands need to double down on organic strategies, even though it's a marathon disguised as a sprint. It's really challenging and frustrating to build KPIs around those and report on them regularly. You can measure it in volume and numbers, but unless you're generating those cold, hard dollars quickly from organic strategies, it can feel more like a pain than a blessing.
I also think people are going to start diving deeper into the criticality of leadership coaching. That's a really important cornerstone that's often left out of the mix, particularly in startups, because these emerging brands move so quickly, and their team members are expected to adapt on a dime and do things outside their zone of genius, outside their Working Genius. That's doomed for destruction too. If you want to operate on all cylinders and be as productive and organized as possible, Who Not How and that alignment strategy overall is everything. Having the right coach in your corner will get you exactly where you need to be over those three years.
Brendon Dennewill: That's really good advice. It comes down to, as a leader, how do you keep replacing yourself? How do you keep delegating so you can continue to elevate and be the best version of yourself, then hire people to do the things you're currently doing, things someone else might do better, more quickly, and actually enjoy doing.
Chantel Soumis: Isn't that the name of the game here? Loving our lives, being grateful.
Brendon Dennewill: Exactly. So, Chantel, any last words of advice before we wrap?
Chantel Soumis: Stay human. I know it's frustrating, and you can feel like you're competing against robots and can never win. But if you're not winning, you're learning. I suggest everybody go pick up The Six Types of Working Genius as soon as possible if they're not familiar with it, because it's a big stepping stone.
Brendon Dennewill: That's a really good tip. Working Genius also has a lot of online resources, but having the book handy to read, especially now in the middle of summer when people are hopefully taking some time off, is a good way to stay connected to being the best leader you can be. Chantel, thanks so much for joining me.
Chantel Soumis: Thanks so much, Brendon.
Brendon Dennewill: It was good to see you.