Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 148: How to use strategic narrative to engage with prospects with Andy Raskin

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148: How to use strategic narrative to engage with prospects with Andy Raskin · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

0:32
SPEAKER_00: The cybersecurity market is crowded, and each of us is trying to rise above the noise, be noticed, and be remembered.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: Today's guest is the go-to person in the world for the idea of using strategic narrative to center a company and differentiate in the market.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: Done well, a strategic narrative will mean you will be perceived as the leader and go-to company in a space.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: It'll inspire prospects to want to work with you, which is why I'm pleased to have as our guest today, Andy Raskin.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Blue Board Podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity companies it's hard to get repeatability and scale the business.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird provides you with tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or 10 about building great cybersecurity companies.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: Our guest today is Andy Raskin, one of the absolute go-to persons in the world for a concept called strategic narrative.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Andy, welcome to Sales Blue Bird.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: Great to be with you, Andrew.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: I'm looking forward to this discussion, Andy.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh let me tell you why.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: A few years back, I don't know how, but I came across a post on Medium and the title you were recognized, which is the best sales deck I ever saw.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: And for those that haven't come across this before, Andy did a breakdown of Zora's from it right in about 2016 or so.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: And for me, it really hit home, right?
2:08
SPEAKER_00: I loved the way you broke it down.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: It gave me a different approach to thinking about in sales what I was doing.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: And it led me on a journey, frankly, into this world of using story, using narrative in sales situations and how we can be more effective as sellers doing that.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: And actually a couple of years ago, I joined the story brand group.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: I became a guide in their world just to get even better as much as I could around this whole area.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: So I'm looking forward to this discussion today because I think in the world that I live in and cybersecurity, this is a much needed idea and much needed thing that people should be latching onto.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: However, Andy, before we get into that, let's talk about you.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Let's learn a bit more about you and what you're into.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: I've got a list here of 35 questions.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: The good news is I'm not going to ask you 35 questions.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to ask you to pick randomly numbers between one and 35, and I'll read out the question that corresponds to.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: Does that sound like a plan?
3:04
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
3:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm game.
3:05
SPEAKER_01: Okay, how about 18?
3:07
SPEAKER_00: 18.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: What's one thing you own that you should really throw out?
3:16
SPEAKER_01: One thing I own that I should really throw out is uh first thing that's coming to mind is I recently replaced my garage door opener with a new one that's much quieter.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: But the old one, like, you know, how do you dispose of a like a garage door engine and like the big bar that, you know.
3:35
SPEAKER_01: So anyway, I own this old garage door opener and I should probably get rid of it.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: The irony is it's probably sitting in your garage, right?
3:42
SPEAKER_01: It is sitting in the garage, taking up space, getting in people's way.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Another number between one and thirty-five.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: How about uh four?
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Beach or mountains?
3:52
SPEAKER_01: Mountains.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because you can't ski on a beach.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: Well, you can ski in the water, I guess, but you can't really ski on the beach.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: I've done a lot of mountain sort of hiking, light mountain hiking in uh used to live in Japan, and I did a lot of hiking and mountains there.
4:09
SPEAKER_01: Got to learn how to snowboard in Japan, and so yeah, I just like the cold mountain air being up there.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: So I funnily enough lived in Japan as well, but I was three years old, so I don't remember it.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, where were you?
4:23
SPEAKER_00: In Tokyo.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah?
4:24
SPEAKER_01: Well, why were you living there?
4:26
SPEAKER_00: My dad was in international banking, and he used to get posted to different places every couple of years, and we spent, I think, a year and a half or two years in Tokyo.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Oh, cool.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember it?
4:35
SPEAKER_00: No, I I really don't.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: I see pictures, but I don't remember at all, unfortunately.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: I'll have to go back though.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: One more number to you, more than 35.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: 16.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: 16.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: What is one song you could listen to for the rest of your life?
4:49
SPEAKER_01: I really love, and this is gonna sound so out of character for me, but I really love Toxic by Brittany Spears.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: I think I could listen to that song, maybe not in the whole life, but for a pretty long time.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: Because of what?
5:03
SPEAKER_01: The uh uh the first time I heard it was I was doing uh spinning class on stationary bikes, and I was like, whoa, like I just got super pumped, so it just gives me a lot of energy.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: That's the first time I've heard Britney Spears answer that question, Andy.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: So already you're standing out from the crowd with that answer.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: All right, well, let's get down to the business side.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: Let me frame up the conversation like this.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: I and the listeners work in the world of cybersecurity, and Momentum Group, which is one of the, I guess, investment banks in the space, they track 6,500 cybersecurity vendors in their market scape, and it is a notoriously technical area, right?
5:44
SPEAKER_00: They're solving problems with technical solutions that are very in-depth, and you know, they're innovating around technical boundaries and pushing the boundaries, things like that.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: What we end up with is highly technical products and highly technical founders.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: And the obvious thing is how on earth does someone, as a company coming to market really stand out from the crowd, somehow sound different, be remembered for the right reasons by the prospects out there and actually get some business going.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: So it's an interesting kind of framing challenge for that we're all facing right now in cybersecurity.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: I guess how I'd like to start off though, Andy, is for those of us that kind of heard the phrase but don't really understand it, what exactly is strategic narrative?
6:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, I'm still trying to figure it out myself, even though I'm probably, I don't know if I invented the phrase, but I'm probably responsible for kind of a big contribution to popularizing it in, I don't know, the last five or six years.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: The way I think about it is, yeah, you mentioned that there's the cybersecurity space incredibly crowded.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: In the marketing technology land, there's this guy in Boston, uh, Scott Brinker, every year he puts out this slide called the Marketing Technology Landscape.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: I he used to call it the Martech 5000, but eventually there were like 8,000.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: There's so many companies in all these spaces, you know, it almost doesn't matter what landscape we're talking about, it's going to look like that.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, the traditional way we're taught to stand out is essentially by making claims.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: Here's why we are different or better.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: And let me tell you about our thing and why it is different.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: And this goes back to a lot of the early like positioning books and stuff.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: And I think you know, that was fine in a time when you're talking about positioning against maybe a few other choices on a supermarket shelf, which was when most of this doctrine was put together and it became kind of the way people do things.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: But it's, I think starts to break down in these kind of hyper competitive spaces that you're talking about, like cybersecurity, like pretty much any any SaaS space or other space, uh software space now.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: Uh, because first of all, you have everybody screaming.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: Everybody's basically screaming their claims.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: We're different because of this.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: And you know, maybe on a supermarket shelf, like you can kind of get the sense, okay, maybe they're fruity or whatever.
8:09
SPEAKER_01: But now it gets so complex, I think the buyer has a really hard time understanding even whose claims hold water.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: Like it's almost impossible to judge those claims.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: Also, the speed at which innovation happens has become so fast that, and that's partly why these spaces, of course, are so crowded.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: But I think the this idea that, oh, our product is better because it does X, Y, and Z.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: Well, the next competitor, well, they could probably build X, Y, and Z in a few days.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's not exactly true, but I think as a buyer, we kind of tend to start to think this.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: So, this whole idea about how we stand out is, I think, starts to starts to break down if you're following the traditional way.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: And so I started to think about how that could work differently.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: And I started to see a lot of companies doing this different thing, which is what I call this strategic narrative, which is they're not talking directly about their stuff initially.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: You know, they get to it, they get to the, but they're starting by talking about this shift in the world.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: So the strategic narrative is a way of differentiating that is not first and foremost based on talking about how our stuff is different, but talking about what we believe has happened in the world and how that point of view or that narrative about the world is different.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: The example you mentioned, Zora is this company, people may know this now, but they were in a very crowded space of companies selling subscription billing solutions, you know, SaaS solutions.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: And most of the companies were essentially saying, hey, here's our feature list, and you know, here's why we're better, and we help you repeat the bill and all kinds of.
9:50
SPEAKER_01: And Zora started in a completely different place.
9:53
SPEAKER_01: They said, hey, we now live in a subscription economy.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: Used to be you sold things to people, now they want the benefits of those things without the hassle of owning those things, and there's this major shift in the world.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: And here's what it means for you.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: And oh, by the way, of course, you know, we've built our software that's all based on helping people win in this new world.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: And that structure is the structure that I use with all the teams that I work with when we're building the strategic narrative.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: So switching from what I call descriptive positioning, which is here's why our thing is better, to this narrative positioning, which is here's what's happening, here's this major shift in the world, and here's why the old tools weren't built for this, and why we are.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna pick up on that.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: So one of the things that I read you wrote was category narratives evangelize a new discipline for winning, while positioning the old one as obsolete.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: So there's like two sides to that.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: The old way doesn't work anymore, and there has to be a new way.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: Did I get that right?
10:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: And you know, even you mentioned this word category.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a lot of talk about category and it's and great.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: The way I think about it is less about like category.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm building a taxonomy, a new taxonomy of stuff, which is kind of what category is.
11:10
SPEAKER_01: As much as like we're building a movement, you know.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: So if you look at Zwora, they really acted as if they're fomenting a movement among their buyers that's going to say, hey, you know, we're now against pure selling, we're now for subscription.
11:24
SPEAKER_01: And that was very controversial at the time, less maybe still somewhat in some industries, but less so now as it's you know been embraced.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, this whole idea of there's there's something we're against, there's an enemy.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: And the enemy is either not a you know a problem necessarily that the buyer is dealing with, but it's an old way of thinking that we are trying to rid them of.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: And when I hear the words movement, that to me is an emotional word, right?
11:55
SPEAKER_00: People join a movement to make big changes.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: This is not a well, our little feature is a little bit different, right?
12:00
SPEAKER_00: How do you work with teams so that they think more around emotion as opposed to just logic all the time?
12:06
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that this approach to selling, this, you know, we're gonna create a movement, you know, you have to sort of be bought into that or not.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: And I think there's so many teams now that have done this.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: A really great one is Gong in um, you know, sales software.
12:24
SPEAKER_01: Another team I worked with where the story that came out of that work really boils down to, hey, used to be we you'd run sales on opinions, and now we're gonna run it based on reality.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: The whole shift is it's that whole shift, and oh, we have some software to help you basically see reality.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: That I think people see enough examples of companies sort of having breakout success that way, and they start to want to emulate it.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: So I don't usually try to convince anybody of that.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: Usually when I'm working with a team, they're pretty much on board with that idea.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, let me dig into that a little bit.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I it strikes me in working with a bunch of exec teams as well, that I can see some characters that I've worked with that might be a little bit resistant to this idea of narrative versus listen, we built this great product.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: It does amazing things.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: Why aren't we focusing on that?
13:12
SPEAKER_00: Do you get a sense of that sometimes?
13:15
SPEAKER_01: Well, the key thing is, I mean, there's this idea that, hey, if we're telling a narrative and doing a story, that we're somehow not getting to those key, you know, technical details, which of course, those are really important.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: What we're trying to do here is create a frame for those technical details so that the buyer understands in an emotional way why they matter.
13:39
SPEAKER_01: And so, and then I think this isn't only for non-technical buyers, where even technical buyers, I hear over and over again when we go in with just the features, because they hear this from everybody.
13:54
SPEAKER_01: So it's just they're just processing you as like one in a million.
13:58
SPEAKER_01: But when you say, Oh, hold on, let me tell this story about the world, like, is this happening to you?
14:04
SPEAKER_01: And they say, Yes, let me tell you how it's happening.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: This kind of creates a connection and a frame for talking about the technical details that I think makes them hit home a lot harder.
14:17
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I think there are certainly going to be people who are, that's not something I want to do.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: And great, if that's the way it works for them, do what works for sure.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: Let's make this a little bit more real.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: I've got in my mind two different scenarios.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: One is the the earlier stage company, they're bringing a uh some sort of innovation to market.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: They've still got maybe a technical founder, and they're obviously working their ass off to just bring an amazing thing to market.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: How would a technical founder or technical CEO think about this?
14:47
SPEAKER_00: And at what stage of their development should it really be coming to the fore in terms of things they should be working on?
14:51
SPEAKER_00: Because they're not short of things to do either.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've seen companies embrace this at different stages of their life cycle, but there definitely have been companies that have come to me exactly at the point you're talking about.
15:04
SPEAKER_01: A good example is a company called Elicity.
15:06
SPEAKER_01: The CEO is named James Weinbrenner.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: And James joined Elicity, I think a few years after the company was already up and running.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: But the the founders, very technical founders, had built this really great solution.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: And they're, if I were to summarize what the story they were telling, they would sort of say, hey, it's this meets this meets this.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: So it's like all these, they would say it's like all these combinations of stuff together.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: And so essentially they're describing it and saying, hey, it has the advantage of this, the advantage of this, the unit.
15:37
SPEAKER_01: But I think that even for technical prospects, it was hard for them to get their head around it.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: And so when James came in, he really wanted to create this kind of simplified narrative around what's changing in the world such that we need this combination of stuff.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: And where they landed was a very simple story about how security is shifting from what James and his team call like moat-based, which is basically, where are you?
16:08
SPEAKER_01: is the main question.
16:09
SPEAKER_01: Like, are you in the, you know, are you in the building?
16:11
SPEAKER_01: Are you, you know, where are you located basically, to a different question, which is like, what do we know about you?
16:17
SPEAKER_01: Meaning, what do we know about your behavior and your identity and all these other kind of things over time?
16:23
SPEAKER_01: And this shift they call, I think it was cognitive security, or I may be getting it a little bit wrong, but and they use this phrase as the kind of starting point and this story as the starting point for, okay, well, and here's the frame about why we're bringing all these technologies together.
16:42
SPEAKER_01: And from what I've heard from them, like it just makes it a lot easier in sales for people to understand, like, okay, well, why do these things matter?
16:49
SPEAKER_01: Why are these people different?
16:50
SPEAKER_01: All those kinds of things.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: So, in that world, and Andy, you know, what they're saying, I'm just paraphrasing what I heard you say just now.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: So their talk track with a prospect man might be around the idea that you know the shift has happened or is happening away from the castle and moat concept to people in data is everywhere.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: And then that puts a different, it probably asks a whole different set of questions of the security and about how they deliver that.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: And Elicit T probably has the answers for those questions or the way to help people on it understand those questions.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: So you're shifting to a world of basically trust that's moat-based trust to this trust that's and they actually call it cognitive trust.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: So to trust that's based on our knowledge about you, not just, you know, are you in the building or are you in the network?
17:33
SPEAKER_01: And yes, like you said, that's a whole different set of questions.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: And you can see almost when you start to tell that story how a prospect might almost you almost imagine like what the features would be and what the solution would offer.
17:46
SPEAKER_01: And that's what we're looking for in the strategic narrative, is that it's not necessarily just sort of this simplifying story, but it's painting a picture in the buyer's mind.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: So they're kind of rolling them in the movement.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, hey, isn't this the way it's going?
18:02
SPEAKER_01: And it's not, maybe it's it, you know what, we just believe in it should just be based on where you are.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: And okay, you've just disqualified that person as a prospect and great, move on.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: One thing I've heard you say around this is it's not a case of dumbing things down, right?
18:18
SPEAKER_00: And I think maybe that's a false narrative that people kind of you know think about when they think about salespeople or marketing people putting some sort of story around it, right?
18:26
SPEAKER_00: It's not about dumbing it down.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, if it were dumbing it down, I think you know you would just lose respect.
18:32
SPEAKER_01: You wouldn't get the respect of people in the industry that you need.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: What we're really doing is seeing if we can sum it up why all this matters.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: And that's really hard to do, you know, to name it.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: You know, these things sound very obvious in hindsight.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: Like I work with a lot of teams that say, like, yeah, we want something like subscription economy, where it's just like so quickly and like it's so obvious.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: And if you talk to the CEO of Zora, which I have on my own podcast, and ask, you know, well, when you came up with this subscription economy thing, it was wow, it must have been obvious that was right.
19:07
SPEAKER_01: He was like, no, we hated it.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we thought it sounded really like everyone's gonna think subscription is just like late night infomercial, cheap stuff.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: And you know, can we really use that word if we're going to talk to like, I don't know, Ford and selling our solution to these big companies?
19:23
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, there's there's a lot of hindsight, sort of envy that comes in.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, if we can really commit to it and narrow it down to some very sort of just a few words in the language, then we can use that to build the movement and it starts to create some equity around the story that works not just in sales, but in recruiting, fundraising, everything really.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: It seems like to me there's a fine line between naming a movement and creating yet another buzzword.
19:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: And and I think that we often see, you know, category creation, like, oh, we created a new category, and it's, I don't know, profit maximization platform.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: And it's just these words that don't have a lot of meaning.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: That's why I think the narrative is so important because you know, a great example is Gong.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: I remember the CEO of Gong was talking about what should we call this category?
20:19
SPEAKER_01: And eventually they came to this idea of revenue intelligence.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting, revenue intelligence had already actually been used by other competitors of theirs and other people, but nobody actually like it didn't really take off.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: It only took off when there was this story behind it.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: Goodbye opinions, hello reality.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: And so the story, I think, which is in very simple terms, you know, is kind of what really is the beating heart of the narrative, not just these like couple words, but the couple words and naming it is useful because, you know, even like in your industry, you know, zero trust.
20:51
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's a huge movement.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: And if you're the one who gets associated with that, then there's big advantages there.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: I love that characterization.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: The words without the narrative, the story, the movement, the meaning become meaningless, but it's that meat that gives the words the real power.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: I love that kind of framing you just did there.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: Let me give you a different scenario then.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: We talked about the startup.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: Let's go the other end of the spectrum.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: I spent, I can't remember exactly, eight, nine years of my career at McAfee.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: Big well-known name in the industry.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: Depending on when you were there and what you called a product, they had 35 to 55 different products to sell.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: You can't, well, but you can, but I don't think you can do a strategic narrative around every single product.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: So, how does a company with more products think about using narrative?
21:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and this is I see more and more companies are coming to me around this later stage.
21:41
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, for instance, I just worked with a company where I mean they've raised over a billion, like just raised, but you know, they started out in one very, very well-defined product area.
21:52
SPEAKER_01: And then through building and through acquisition, they now have lots.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it's 30, like you had, but it's much more.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: And what they're finding is so so the big question is like, how do we get everybody uh kind of pushing in the same direction?
22:07
SPEAKER_01: Which is a lot of things like in sales, how do we start selling this portfolio of things rather than just the individual things?
22:16
SPEAKER_01: And even internally in the company, how do we get people to start feeling like they're part of this bigger thing versus just sort of you know pushing their own little area?
22:27
SPEAKER_01: And what I found is that CEOs at this stage get really interested in the strategy.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: Strategic narrative because it's a way in for sales, for recruiting.
22:38
SPEAKER_01: That again, we're not going to start with the products, we're going to start with the shift in the world.
22:43
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, the great example of this is Benioff.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: So Benioff, in this case, he really did have a great strategic narrative from the beginning.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure how many listeners were around or active in tech industry back when he started around 2000.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: He's telling this story of, hey, software is over, and we're now in this new era of the cloud.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: Very simple narrative, very controversial at the time.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: Even if you understood he's talking about software as you know, something you own and maintain, that's what everyone did.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: But he, you know, creates this movement.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: But of course, over the years, Salesforce becomes very big.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: They start acquiring lots of companies, building new product, and they need a bigger story.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: And what I think he's done really well is every year at Dreamforce, which is their big conference, he gets up as the CEO and basically tells the narrative for that year and usually for a few years after.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: So every few years it changes a little bit.
23:47
SPEAKER_01: The last this last year, by the way, very relevant to your industry, is in 2021, which was the last one he did, the whole story was about the rise of the trusted enterprise.
23:58
SPEAKER_01: And that story about the truth, you know, used to be, I don't know, the enterprise we had to be, you know, deliver value and deliver all this stuff, whatever, but now it's really about trust.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: This is the big thing.
24:10
SPEAKER_01: This becomes the umbrella that he uses to position pretty much all the products that Salesforce sells in all of its divisions and subsidiaries and everything.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: And I think that that's a way to think about it, you know, at this later stage, where yes, we want to, we're gonna have to eventually talk about these products, but can we build this story such that it's clear why this assemblage of products is so valuable and why you need this versus just saying, hey, look, we got everything.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I remember when I was at McAfee, we had, I think we called it a security connected story.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: So we built up to it, we explained what it was, and then we named it.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: You know, we call this security connected.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, I still remember it, that was 12 years ago, right?
24:54
SPEAKER_00: And the reason why I remember it is because it actually resonated with prospects and therefore I used a lot.
24:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: It was a very compelling way to do it.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: When I think about other companies, let's say bigger cybersecurity companies, I've seen them do the naming of a catchery, but then there's no substance to it.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: And it just sounds, to me, it sounds stupid.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, they name something and then it's like, I I've got no idea what this is all about.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: I've got no idea what they do.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing there except a couple of words together.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: It seems like it's uh they went halfway down the path and then either gave up or didn't know what to do.
25:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
25:26
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a that's a huge miss.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: And you know, I think when that happens, it's pretty clear.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: People that, you know, it's like, well, what is the story we're telling?
25:34
SPEAKER_01: We don't know.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: Uh, if we don't know, then the story is not there.
25:37
SPEAKER_01: You know, if we have these three words or whatever, and it's not really clear how to tell the story, then we haven't done the work.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: So let's go down a level here, Andy.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna I saw you wrote something and you said that you decided to abandon positioning assets when you're working with teams and working with uh companies and make the sales deck the primary instrument of any strategic narrative engagement.
25:59
SPEAKER_00: Now, as a sales guy, I like to be the center of everything.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: So the fact that my sales deck is the primary instrument, there's music to my ears.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: But tell me more about how you came to that realization and what role the sales deck plays inside a company.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there is this question, you know, we want this story, as we you and I have talked about already, to really power everything, you know, to set up the conversation in sales, but also for recruiting, for you know, the investor conversation.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, so there's this question like, in what form should we capture this thing such that it will, you know, work that way?
26:36
SPEAKER_01: And the traditional answer to that question is let's put it in a place the world never sees.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: Some kind of internal, like you said, sometimes called a positioning map, or some marketers call it like a messaging house, or often it's in marketing and it's it's kind of like this outline of the messages you're supposed to use.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, and the idea is the thinking behind this is everybody's gonna come back to this thing and pull messages from it when we want to build like a sales tech or a website or things like that.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: And I found that that would break down in my career, not only doing this, but in working in companies too, because you know, first of all, a lot of people wouldn't go back to it, especially outside of marketing.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: They'd kind of do their own thing.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: And even if they did, I think it's hard for most people to take like fragment messages or you know, like like sort of insights about who our customer is, and then turn that into a compelling narrative and have it be concise and work and everything like that.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: And so when I started this work, I really thought about what would work better.
27:39
SPEAKER_01: And as you said, I came to the sales deck because I think the sales narrative is the core narrative.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, for investors, you know, who's the first person an investor is going to call for due diligence?
27:51
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna call the customer and they're gonna ask, why did you buy this thing?
27:55
SPEAKER_01: So they want to know the sales story.
27:57
SPEAKER_01: The you know, recruit for job candidates who want to join the company, they kind of want to understand the same thing.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: Like, well, what are we making and why do people want it?
28:05
SPEAKER_01: And you know, what's going on there?
28:07
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it was a controversial move because a lot of people like traditionally see the sales deck as an output of some supposedly more fundamental strategic definition thing.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: But I found that it could actually work.
28:19
SPEAKER_01: And you know, when I work with teams, I'm not working with the sales team directly, I'm working with the CEO always.
28:26
SPEAKER_01: So, what I'm asking the CEO to do with the help of sales leader and other leaders is build the sales deck as the kind of core thing.
28:35
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's been great because then you know when the CEO is out talking, that's the story the CEO is telling everywhere.
28:43
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be the same story that is in sales.
28:46
SPEAKER_01: Of course, you know, we don't want it to be dictated from the CEO down to the sales team.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: We want the sales team to have some say in how this thing works.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: And so, of course, part of the work is always, okay, here's what the CEO wants it to be.
29:00
SPEAKER_01: Let's take it out in some sales calls and see like how does this thing play?
29:03
SPEAKER_01: Like, and get back from the sales team, like, yeah, no, that thing you thought was great, we got to get rid of that or whatever.
29:08
SPEAKER_01: You know, maybe it works in a CEO keynote, but it doesn't work in a, you know, this piece doesn't work in that.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: But if we can align on the sales deck at all levels, I found that that can be really, really powerful.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: One thing that you wrote that really home with me, because I think we're absolutely aligned on this, which is to make sure the new sales deck facilitates discovery.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the things that I've seen people do is equate a deck with a lecture.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: Or me talking at you for 15 minutes and 20 minutes and convincing you that our way is the way and we're awesome, right?
29:41
SPEAKER_00: But to me, you know, a deck used well facilitates a discussion and a conversation.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: And it seems like that's what you were saying, where you're saying it facilitates discovery.
29:50
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that we even have, you know, Gong, I think, puts out this article every once in a while where they they correlate, you know, better results with not showing slides during discovery.
30:01
SPEAKER_01: But I think that hides the fact that it is sort of, you know, uh other thing, which is that most slides are what you said.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: Their most slides are us talking about ourselves.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, that's gonna not be good for discovery.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: But I found if the slides are like what we're talking about here, which is not about us, not even about our partner, but if they're about primarily this shift in the world.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: So, hey, we're seeing, you know, if you imagine Zwar going in, hey, we're seeing the world shift from you know selling things to subscription.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: And how is that playing out in your world?
30:33
SPEAKER_01: You can imagine this is a way for the seller to get the prospect to open up.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: And this really is, you know I hear this from CEOs and salespeople all the time.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: This is how we know that the narrative is working.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: If in sales, the sales team you know starts saying, hey, we're seeing this shift from blah, blah, blah, and the person just says, Hey, hold on a second.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: Yes, let me tell you how that's playing out here.
30:56
SPEAKER_01: That's when we know it's working.
30:57
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, I really believe that.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: One of the things I learned the hard way along the way was that uh it's a lot easier selling to someone who's already aligned and thinking about the world the same way you are, rather than trying to convince them that their whole philosophy of how they do their job is all wrong.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: It is good to know that early.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: And that's something I think is hard to get to when you're just starting out with, hey, what's your pain?
31:21
SPEAKER_01: What's your pain?
31:21
SPEAKER_01: What's your pain?
31:22
SPEAKER_01: Here's our solution, here's our solution, here's the solution, right?
31:25
SPEAKER_01: You're not getting to that bigger picture that you know is underlying all that stuff.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the prospect who's being experienced the death by discovery way to start the conversation is not gonna be joining a movement too easily, right?
31:40
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be harder to get them to get out of that and think bigger.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: Let me wrap up, Andy, with a different scenario for you.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: What you've talked about is you work with CEOs, you work at the board level, exec teams, you know, shaping, helping them shape how they're going to market and making a difference, right?
31:54
SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking of, you know, the per seller who's working for a company, they're they're B round or C round, he's in his basement office based in Ohio.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: You can't get the CEO or the head of sales to think about strategic narrative, right?
32:08
SPEAKER_00: They're they're thinking about we need more leads or something like that.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: How does an individual in a company embrace some of the concepts of strategic narrative and how they do their day-to-day jobs without the company kind of embracing this whole concept full bore?
32:23
SPEAKER_01: This is a really tough question, Andrew, because I used to do like sales trainings, you know, where the sales lead, someone in sales, kind of almost like the scenario you're saying, someone in sales really like is gravitating to what I'm talking about, but their CEO somehow they're they're not reachable or something like that.
32:42
SPEAKER_01: And so I'd come in and do the sales stuff.
32:45
SPEAKER_01: And what I found was, yeah, there was some interest, and some salespeople would take it and sort of you know take the concepts and build a deck along the lines that I was describing.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: But I didn't see the long-term impact.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: And so I actually stopped doing those because I really believe this has to come from the CEO.
33:05
SPEAKER_01: And that's not to say that a salesperson couldn't, you know, take some of these principles, but you know, this war thing, it only worked because the CEO is saying it, the marketing team is saying it, the engineering team is building to it, but everything is there.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: And so what I would say is if the leadership is not providing this story, ask them what it is.
33:28
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's there and you don't, you know, you just came in and you don't know it.
33:32
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they just haven't done it.
33:34
SPEAKER_01: But I literally had people say to me, you know, I left the company because this wasn't made clear to me.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: And I think that is the CEO's job.
33:43
SPEAKER_01: And so I don't put this on the individual salesperson.
33:47
SPEAKER_01: I think no individual salesperson can align the whole company around the story.
33:53
SPEAKER_01: Only the CEO can do that.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, Andy, as I said, in cybersecurity, there's so many companies out there doing their thing.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I really implore people I talk to about is, you know, at the very least, think bigger and more different, if that's even the correct English, uh, than you're doing right now, right?
34:10
SPEAKER_00: You're not going to differentiate with more white papers and another data sheet or something like that, right?
34:13
SPEAKER_00: You've got to really think about how you're approaching the whole market and inspiring people to make a change.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: And to me, if I was uh an exec at uh an earlier stage company, this is the thing I'd be latching on to.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: If they do want to get in touch with you, Andy, and and have a conversation about how this might work for their organizations, what's the best way to do that?
34:31
SPEAKER_01: You can connect with me on LinkedIn.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: On LinkedIn, I'm I'm always writing about companies that I work with or I don't know, insights that I got from doing this work with more and more teams.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that's usually the best place.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: And then my website is andreaskin.com.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
34:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, I appreciate joining the the Sales Blueboard community today and telling us all about the strategic narrative and uh all the best for the rest of the year.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: Same team, Andrew.
34:54
SPEAKER_01: Great talking with you.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: This was a conversation that I really did enjoy.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: I found myself nodding my head along to a whole bunch of things that Andy was saying, and I found his perspective to be very powerful.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm already bought into the idea of using story, strategic narrative, things like that in what we do in sales and in the company in general.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: I've already bought the idea.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: So for me, it was a case of understanding more about it and trying to draw the right learnings from Andy's experience.
35:25
SPEAKER_00: But for those of you new to the area, it really is a powerful way to think about how to drive the company and differentiate in the marketplace.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: I had a lot of takeaways, I gotta tell you, but let me try and narrow it down to three that were important to me.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: The first one was the idea that the words that we use to describe ourselves, they need the meaning and the story behind them.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, they will just be empty buzzwords.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: Right?
35:51
SPEAKER_00: So, as I said in one of my questions, there's a fine line between what ends up becoming meaningless a buzzword and also something that has meaning behind it and inspires people to join a movement to go and do something different.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: And when I work with my clients, what I encourage them to do is you lead towards the name, right?
36:11
SPEAKER_00: You start with the narrative first and then you name it at the end.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: You don't start with the name.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: You don't start with what might perceive by a prospect to be the buzzword and then try and justify it, right?
36:22
SPEAKER_00: So to me, that's a very powerful way to do that.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: So that was one takeaway.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: The second one is you know what Andy was saying about this needs to be done at the company level with the full support, the backing, the political capital, the drive from the CEO and maybe even the board.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, it can become very diluted and ends up not working as well as it should.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, inside a company, there's lots of forces going on.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: There's lots of different things that are wrapping our headspace, right?
36:54
SPEAKER_00: And unless this something as big as this has the drive from the top, then it's very likely to be something that's going to be tried for a while.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: It might even be called a failure without the necessary support and guidance behind it.
37:07
SPEAKER_00: So I really like what he said about that.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: It needs to be driven from the CEO down.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: And lastly, you know, as a salesperson, I always like it when people orient around the sales deck, right?
37:18
SPEAKER_00: And that's what he was saying.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: You know, at the end of the day, something like that is used a lot, it's used in front of prospects a lot, and therefore it's a great thing to be the core of what we do or describing ourselves as opposed to just another output from a consulting engagement.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: But also the thing that hit home with me, and some of you may have heard me go on about this before, is that we do ourselves a disservice when we view any deck, never mind the sales deck, as an excuse to lecture and talk to someone for 15 minutes and just talk at them.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: Right.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: And I do see this from time to time.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: People equate a deck to me talking all the time.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a false narrative.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a false assumption to make.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: And as Andy said, you know, if you're gonna use the sales deck, use it, but use it to facilitate discovery, use it to drive the conversation or continue the conversation.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: Use it as just a way to present visuals, which then you've got very smart and thoughtful questions around, which encourages the prospect to take part in a meaningful conversation.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: So those were my three takeaways.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: I'd be interested to know what yours are, if there's any different ones that you have.
38:25
SPEAKER_00: As always, hit me up at andrew at unstuffable.do or text me on my cell phone number 303-956-0024.