Crafting a Compelling Narrative for a Business w/ Refresh Connect Summit #scottsthoughts

Welcome to Success Story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host Scott and today you're going to hear me at the Refresh Connect Summit where I spoke about crafting a compelling narrative for your business and your brand. Hope you enjoy. Today we have with us, Scott Douglas Clary, who is the head of Advanced Strategy and Grow at Grass Valley. Scott also member of the Forbes Business Development Council and he's a founder of ROI overload and I keep using Scott for more than five minutes but let me stop here. Welcome to Refresh Connect Scott. How's it going? Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's a pleasure. It's wonderful. Today we're going to be discussing about a very interesting topic. How do you craft a compelling narrative for your business? Scott, let us start with the why your things. What companies have a compelling narrative? That's a great point. I think this is something that a lot of companies struggle with, especially earlier stage companies and also some later stage companies. The narrative is going to be an extension of what the founder of the company believes in and what they want to bring to the world. Normally when you're an early stage company and you're selling your first product to the founder CEO, you're the one who is selling the actual product. You're the one who's the evangelist for the product. Now to get other people to believe and feel the trust and emotion and enthusiasm that you have for a product, you have to create a narrative and that narrative has to guide the messaging that your companies bring to the world across all aspects of the company. It can be the messaging and the tone of your sales reps, your content that you're putting on on social media. Literally everything that's going to drive how your company acts toward those customers as well as internally with the company culture and whatnot. So to craft that narrative and to build a brand around that narrative is very important and that can even go as far as the tone or the words that your company likes to use when they go out into the world and when they speak with customers. So having that narrative and that origin story that really drives emotion in both your potential customer and clients, as well as turning people within your own company into evangelists for your company all rests on everybody having that goal congruence and shared purpose and that's why the narrative is so important. So it can evolve over time. I don't think a narrative is something that's set in stone, but if you don't have a vision and you don't have a narrative as to why you're doing what you're doing as a founder CEO as your company grows, you have to realize that nobody else is inside your head. So you have this vision about why you want to take your company to market, why you want to take your product to market and it's an incredible idea, but you have to find a way to codify that so that it sort of basically is across your entire organization. Does that sort of make sense? It's a why you need the narrative? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So Scott, just a follow up question to this, how can companies find which narratives fit them? Yeah, so that's a really good point as well. And this sort of speaks to why support to have a narrative and why a narrative is never set in stone. So the narrative that speaks to your company, it's something that has to evolve through first, when you take your product to market, you're selling to your first 50 customers and you're finding product market fit. That's always my suggestion. So to sort of provide some contacts whenever somebody's, and we're starting very early stage, but this is sort of like the evolution. So when you first launch a product, I always suggest that the founder CEO goes sells the first 50 of that widget to their market. They find some sort of product market fit and then you're going to start crafting a narrative that's going to generate more demand based on the ideal customer profile target customer profile that you found in that first 50 set of customers. So that would be your initial narrative. So the narrative, it's including your buyer personas, the messaging, the channels and the ideal customer profile. It could also include industry size of company, amount of employees depending on how deep into the weeds and how much you want to really define it. That's how you build out your narrative. So the narrative, it's never going to be for companies. This should be the way they build their narrative in terms of the messaging. The messaging depends on what product, what industry, how you want to bring it to your customers. But the point is not so much to have like a, it's not important to sort of go online and Google what's a great narrative for a company. It's more important to make sure that you know you have to build one and then look internally within your own organization to build that narrative. So it's, again, it's not like a blanket, a blanket narrative that can be used for any company, but you do have to know that to build it, you have to define all aspects of your initial customer set and then use that to go forward. Now as a company grows, it also is still important to sort of iterate and build on that narrative. And what that looks like is obviously, you know, as your product and your portfolio expands, you are going out and you're speaking to your customers and you're understanding why your customers are buying. You can be conducting surveys, you can have somebody who's in charge of customer success and you're actually going out and you're interviewing customers and customers are going to be telling you why they're buying. It's a very strong sales technique and marketing technique, but it sort of doubles down on narrative. So as customers tell you why they're buying and they're telling you, I bought the product because of this feature and I bought the product because of that feature, now you know what's important to customers. Even the ones that buy, you may have thrown a whole bunch of feature sets at them, but they're telling you exactly why they chose to buy it and then you're using that verbiage, the verbatim and you can use that to build out your own messaging and your own narrative and keep iterating. And as you continue to grow, you're always keeping that line of communication open with your customers to make sure that the narrative of the company and the narrative that you put into the world and the marketing and the messaging is directly in line with why your customers are buying. And I, you know, it seems so simple, like it makes so much sense, like, you know, we have to make sure we're selling the way our customers are buying, but I don't see a ton of companies making concerted effort at doing that and doing it effectively. I don't think, you know, if you even, even how customers buy, for example, to show you why this process of customer feedback, this customer feedback loop is so broken. The traditional sales cycle is, you know, you're doing your prospecting, your discovery, your qualification, and then you're going to do, you present a proposal, you negotiate, you take it to close. There's no customers in the world that want to be prospected, that want to be discovered, that want to be qualified. So even the traditional sales cycle shows how broken that line of communication with customers. So sales cycle is broken and it doesn't fall in line with how customers want to buy the branding and the messaging is broken and it doesn't fall in line with how the customers interpret the benefits of your product. So all these things rely on speaking with the customers and making sure that as you grow as a company, you don't grow too large that you never want to or don't see the value in communicating with your customers and using your customer's decisions to drive your business forward because ultimately that will make you successful. So that is why narrative is so important because it leads into so many other aspects of the business. So Scott, how do you get this narrative to the market? So we do build up on the first narrative with the help of customers, but from then on, how do you take this to the market? Would you suggest something like building a campaign around it or how do you go about doing it? So when you're taking a narrative to the market, this sort of falls into the marketing spectrum to start and then eventually it'll bleed over into sales. But when I take a narrative to market through a marketing team, that means that all, like right, if you want to talk granular, like all the social posts that are going out on like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, all the white papers that you're creating, all the email campaigns, all the explainer videos, like very, very tactical things. These are all tying back to the narrative that your company has decided on. So for example, the company has decided that our software is solving this problem with the customer. And this is why we're solving it. And this is what led us to decide this was a problem that we wanted to tackle. So literally everything that you're putting out into the world is falling back onto that narrative. So all the actual tangible marketing items and then to take it a step further. So that's how you would initially push the messaging out. Take it a step further when we talk about marketing and sales alignment. So now we have all the marketing messaging, all the marketing collateral that is being broadcast out into the world in every single aspect of what marketing is. So you know, in some industries it could even be like printmailers. It doesn't, you know, there's so many different ways. But we always think of marketing and digital marketing just because we work in software, we work in tech. But there's a lot of other industries that still rely on on actual physical marketing trade shows, that kind of thing. And you know, now we're doing more remote, but still that whole that all the whole gamut of marketing activities that that has to sort of come from your narrative. Now how do incorporate sales into that? Well, when your sales reps are selling, the PDFs that they're sending customers, the videos are sending customers, the conversations that they're having with customers. All of these, all of these items are in line with the narrative that marketing already put out. So when you are, of course, if you're jumping on a discovery call and you're asking all these questions, you're trying to learn about your customers as a sales rep. But you're also keeping in the back of your mind because you're confident in the narrative and the pain point that you're solving that this is something that's going to come up in that conversation and you're going to position the product in a certain way that you're the subject matter expert and you're solving for the problem that all the marketing collateral is preaching about across all the other channels, right? So you want to make sure that your sales, your sales pitch, you know, I don't like the term elevator pitch, but your elevator pitch per se when your sales reps are speaking with customers is in line with that narrative and the marketing collateral and the copy on the website so that across the entire commercial organization, outward facing to the customer, everybody has the same message. And that's a very strong, a very strong play for a company because how often have you seen or experience when a company is advertising one thing on their website or on their social media and a sales rep is positioning it a different way or talking about different features. That kind of misalignment, it definitely kills the trust. So that's how you take it to market. You make sure that it's going out across all your channels, but the missing piece is definitely to have that sales alignment when you take it to your customer because that just is important. And I think I don't want to spend too long on this and I have a whole bunch of questions you want to get through, but what's very important is the sales process is no longer linear. So how the sales process used to function is you would have you would have an inbound lead that would turn into a marketing qualified lead that would be passed over to sales and sales would walk it through the sales cycle eventually through to close. Customers don't function that way anymore because they have access to internet and you can pull you can look at a variety of stats like anywhere as low as you know like 30, 40% upwards of 60, 70%. That number is the amount of energy or the time that the buyer has already gotten into the buying cycle or done the discovery or done the research of the amount of information that the buyer has actually accumulated which will influence their purchasing decision before they even get on the phone with a sales rep. So say they've done 70% of the research, they have 70% of the knowledge when they're getting on the phone that sales rep, they kind of already have a really good idea. So the sales process is now no longer linear in the sense that the customer is consuming marketing material. They're speaking to sales after they get off the phone with sales, they're going back on the website, they're going to take a look at the company's Twitter, they're going to take a look at the emails, they're going to get back on the phone with sales and and it's like this like circular almost this it's like this back and forth between all the sales and marketing and commercial properties that a customer has and that's how customers buy in 2020 and and if you have a marketing process that is very linear and you feel like after you pass off a lead to sales, it doesn't really matter what sales says because that customer is farther down and they're no longer in the marketing sphere, you're incorrect because the customer has accessed the internet. So you always have to make sure that the entire commercial organization lines up. Yeah, let's understand about the marketing and sales aren't very different now, they left the buck together very connected, yeah, 100% yeah, yeah. So Scott you're also telling about how sales and marketing could take our narrative to the market. Now reversing roles, how do you think a great narrative should be leveraged by sales and marketing teams? How can it be leverage? Well, I think this takes us back to why people like buying from a CEO or a founder and it's this is a great point. So let's talk about evangelism. So a big proponent of evangelism is Guy Kawasaki. Now Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist for Canva and I've had to fortunately have the chance to speak to him and I asked him what does that mean because evangelism he educated me he said evangelism comes from it's it's I can't remember the the the culture but it's a term that means to bear of good news to bring good news and it's very easy for a CEO to be an evangelist because they believe so much in their company but how do you turn the entire organization into evangelists for a product because we know that in most companies you speak to the SDR or you know the the accountant and finance is not evangelizing a company they're just doing their job day in day out and for them it may they may not be passionate about where they work so I think what a narrative allows us to do is it allows us to take the CEOs enthusiasm and and the ability to evangelize a company and it allows us to take that passion across the entire organization and I mentioned I mentioned Guy Kawasaki and Canva because that's something that he has worked on with Canva to make sure that if you speak to anybody in Canva they will be an evangelist for Canva they won't just be somebody doing a job and obviously that takes a lot of effort it takes a lot of work on the culture of the company to make sure but it also take it also to get that it's more than just culture because you can have a great culture and you have a fun culture of a starter culture you can have a culture full of people that want to grow professionally that are committed that are intelligent that are you know putting in all this effort and work but if they don't understand the narrative of why they're doing what they're doing and it's not defined and it's not meaningful to them how do you expect them to bring a meaningful narrative to their customer so that narrative can basically mobilize your internal organization and turn everybody from just an employee into an evangelist who's actually promoting your company even if for example they're not in the office nine to five so the the way I see an evangelist is somebody that on their social media they choose to speak about their company because they love the mission that their company is aligned with they're going to be speaking about it after hours with their friends or family just because they're so into what their company is and that's how I think that a strong narrative can drive that kind of evangelism for a company and obviously imagine if you can mobilize your entire team to always be speaking about what you're doing that's incredibly powerful as a as a basically as the commercialization technique right I'm just speaking about all those voices going out and speaking about the good thing your company is doing that's going to get a lot of people interested drive a lot of eyeballs and obviously that's going to turn into like actual revenue and business growth so yeah so yeah that was an excellent example of fascinating narratives and how you use them or how you have the employees evangelized for it and it's great yeah yeah I think it's very important I think it's hard to do it's very hard to do because like just from personal experience I've worked in companies almost almost all companies that worked in don't do a great job at it right I think there's still a true lack of transparency and narrative that is and the narrative is more like when we speak of narrative it's more than just like the the points that are listed on a website I think that companies have to put a more considered effort into being transparent making sure that the employees understand the goals of the company because you can have a strong narrative but if the employees don't trust the CEO and the executive team they're not going to evangelize but if they feel like you're all on the same level and there is that strong narrative in play that's when they're going to go to back to your company that's when you're going to get employees that want to stay with the company even though we know in this job market in recent history they could easily go get a job somewhere else right so you want to provide that you want to provide more than just a salary you want to provide a purpose for companies and other things you want to provide like you want to provide growth opportunities and all these other things that are very good to have to to maintain really great quality talent but on top of on top of the you know all the extracurriculars and whatnot you want to make sure that they are lying with your with your company's mission so Scott let us slightly move it towards sales so this is one question that I've always wanted to ask a lot of sales and marketing leaders and a lot of leaders have been speaking about that as well so technology has been changing things it's been sweeping transformations but how do you think technology is going to create new things in sales or what do you see coming new in sales because of changes in technology yeah sure there's a lot so let's let's speak high level and then if you want to go into anything deeper so technologies that are going to impact sales so first let's speak with social speak about social selling so the access to social media and the ability for anyone to truly create content at scale can turn anyone into a hey like I don't get me wrong I hate the term influencer but an influencer within their industry so I think that to to be competitive in today's environment you obviously are going to have the company that is doing inbound initiatives and helping facilitate their sales reps to do outbound initiatives but if you want to take a step further I'm a big fan of sales reps building out their online presence to social sell to give you an example of this that I've done myself like I brand all of my social right now as business oriented and it's not always specific to my company like my day job is focused on SaaS for broadcast and media but a lot of the content I put out is just I would say I would say about 80% of the content I put it is just really great best practice and sales and marketing and something that I know and I love if you are an accountant if you are an SDR if you're an AE if you are a content marketer if you write website copy there is a group of individuals that are going to align with what you love and what you do also simultaneously you should be putting out content that is going to help build your audience at a sort of useful for for your for your business unit at large but you should also be putting out content that helps promote what you're doing so again evangelizing but I think that anybody can be a social seller can build an online community and to ignore the free access to like thousands and millions of impressions that we have available is really just naive and I think kind of lazy I think if you aren't learning how to build some sort of online social presence for your professional brand I think that you're really hurting because that can help with for example how you found me for this conference I run a podcast on the side and that's helped me attract incredible guests if I you know right now if I wanted to I'm not I don't I love what I do now but if I wanted to find some new work I have opportunities coming to me all the time because I built out and and the thing is how do you get what is sales sales is trust right so your customer has to trust always remember that in sales customers always buy with emotion and justify with logic so if they don't trust you it doesn't matter if you're the lowest cost or the or the best features they're not going to buy from you but what a customer will do if they trust you is they'll find logical ways to rationalize the purchase so how do you build trust well traditionally and this is actually going to go into something the next point that I want to bring up how do you build trust so traditionally you know you meet the person you build a relationship well we're increasingly doing business on a global scale we're we're required to make more money make more connections do more activities and like it's very hard to keep up with the requirements of growing business that are trying to you know 10x 100x their investors money in some cases it depends on the industry but we need to be we need to be able to build relationships without always stepping into somebody's office and shaking their hand especially now with like for that the health concerns that we're sort of living through everyone so our most how do you do that well you can do that you can do the conferences and whatnot but that still is difficult to get that from the door to the point where you're allowed to ask somebody to jump on a Zoom call or whatever so if you are constantly putting out content that's great content that shows your knowledge and shows your expertise and it really basically puts things out there that people are always consuming they're building levels of trust with you before they even interact with you so they're consuming your content they're understanding that what you're putting out now they're understanding with what you know like you're putting some of those sales you're putting them about marketing you're putting stuff about whatever industry you're in now you're becoming a trusted advisor in that space before they even have ever had a chance to speak with you in person so by the time you you jump on that Zoom call they've consumed hours of your content and I you know there's there's psychological drivers that actually dictate how many hours of content or a customer has consumed from a company or an individual before they buy it it averages out of about seven hours of content before they feel comfortable trust the company and buy so imagine the ability we have with social media as individuals as individual sellers not just companies the companies like are for sure they should be doing this but even some companies aren't but as as individual sellers the ability to fast track that relationship without even having to jump on a call so by the time you jump on a call they already know and they trust who you are and then you can take that and you can increase the sales velocity of the deal or whatever outcome you'd like to have happened from that conversation so that's one way that I really think sales is changing the ability to build a presence online and connect and build trust online the second thing that we're also seeing is what we're doing now so that ability to properly do remote remote interactions and build that level of trust remotely so Zoom is incredibly popular you know there's a whole bunch of them there's like there's Skype there's global meet there's WebEx there's Google hangouts it doesn't matter what you use you have to be able to know the technology and you have to be able to work remote and especially now with the health insurance that's big everyone's working from home but not just that people are always connected always on you have a younger workforce that wants to and they're still effective but they don't always want to have to go to the office they want to be a little bit more free and how they work and how they collaborate with their team so the ability to work remotely and use those remote work tools video being a very important one because if you're not seeing the person it's very hard to build a connection remotely obviously the epitome of building relationships is seeing the person face to face but if you can't I'd say that video is still very very important for that if you never have any like you know in person interaction but they have to be comfortable companies have to be comfortable using all these tools individuals have to be comfortable using all these tools and because again like I said like this workforce is evolving and also for companies it lowers all these hard costs associated with having physical locations it opens up hiring opportunities to global regions that if you were just a regional office now you can hire talent diverse talent across the globe because now you've enabled your workforce to work remote and I think the direction we're going in in all honesty if you want to pick it a step further beyond just you know remote remote work tools as there's so many we talk about video but there's so many remote work tools like you know Slack different messengers like like basically anything to collaborate a team like Monday a JIRA Confluence like Trello like all these different tools to allow people to collaborate in office or remote doesn't really matter but now I think the future of work will be like all these augmented reality interactions as well and that's where I see sales going so I don't see I don't see many offices or many companies really requiring physical offices except for maybe social interaction in the future I really do see augmented reality to be something that is very prevalent in sales and just business in general so the ability to have authentic interactions without all of the costs associated the time associated with smoothly we're going to we're going to end up and we're not obviously there yet like but I think that to adopt all these new technologies that's how we sort of start positioning ourselves for where the future of work future of business future of sales is going yeah and it is very clear that social selling is more relevant than ever before of course yeah yeah definitely you have to we have to be you have to be knowledgeable at least so maybe you aren't comfortable a lot of people get very hesitant about putting out content I understand that but trust that if you know what you if you know what you do and you put out content about an item or a passion that you have and it's professional in nature that will be well received and if you do that at scale continuously then you will build a following that gravitates towards whatever you know and whatever you're putting out so I think that you have to get over the technology inhibitor like we can all learn there's no reason not to learn get over I guess the the mental inhibition of putting out content and you don't have to be putting a video every day if you don't feel comfortable you can just be writing really great text posts for example and that would be something that would elevate you and even in 2020 it would separate you from quite a few people like if we look at the largest professional network LinkedIn which I think is that like I don't know 600 million people like correct me from wrong we can do a fact check later but it's something like 1% of people on LinkedIn are actually publishing content that's incredible because LinkedIn you literally have access to I'm sure if I look at that like over 50% of the decision makers within organizations like why are not people leveraging that and I think that right now if you're listening to this or if you're getting started in your career and and you're aware of these opportunities of these massive social networks that can be focused on professional like LinkedIn or not you can still start now and you can be massively successful by you know like if you if you've put out content for the past 10 years you're going to have a very healthy user-based following that trust what you do and the opportunities that come from that are truly exponential it was a lot of insights within a short span of time Scott it is great hosting you and thanks for being a part of refresh connect thank you very much for inviting me I really really appreciate the opportunity to it's a great initiative and and hopefully this grows and grows and sure will in the future