Get Your Sales To Soar By Accelerating The Buying Process with Dave Hubbard
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
For every company to able to raise revenue, there is a need for the sales process and marketing methods to be aligned. Accelerating sales to 30% annually is an easing thing to do for Marketing Outfield CEO Dave Hubbard because he has an engineering background combined with a sales personality. This allows him to get into the gritty parts of sales and marketing. Instead of focusing on the sales process, what’s important is getting the customers into the buying process quickly. By aligning to what customers are trying to do, the sales process becomes dynamic, effective and gets on the same page with the marketing. Learn more on how to turn a suspect to a qualified lead, into a forecast, into and opportunity and then close deals.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Dave Hubbard who is the CEO and Founder of Marketing Outfield. Dave is both someone who’s an engineer as well as a sales expert, which is very rare to find one person being able to do both. He wrote an article called CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth. Regardless if the company is a startup or a big company, there are five symptoms that help the CEO identify that their product team, their marketing team and sales team are not in-sync with the target customer. When the revenue generation team is not working well enough to work across different functions, then the CEO must get involved. They don’t have to be sales rock stars or even marketing gurus to make a massive impact. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Get Your Sales To Soar By Accelerating The Buying Process with Dave Hubbard
Our guest is David Hubbard who’s the CEO of Marketing Outfield which is a revenue acceleration expert. He has helped small and medium business sized companies accelerate their revenues by 25% to 50% annually. The way that Dave does this is by collaborating with business to business companies in the design and execution of their successful product launches. Also, he knows how to get you lead gens and how to execute on those leads. What I really love about Dave is his expertise in getting sales up and running. Dave, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. Pleasure to be here.
Before we get into all your expertise, can you share with us how did you get all these expertise? Did you always know you’re going to be a CEO or a marketing sales guru when you were right out of school? What gave you the experience to get this expertise?
Actually, I became a professional engineer in computer design and systems. I was responsible for a number of computer systems for power utility. I decided I wanted to get in the general management, so I jumped into sales. I was very fortunate to jump into a $16 billion company. They gave me some training to actually sell. It enabled me to become one of their top sales reps in the corporation. A few years later, I decided to go into field marketing. They came along to train me with classical marketing: the product, price, place, promotion. That enabled me to create some and new significant businesses for the company. I went from there being at the field and I moved up to the chain from the field to country level to division, corporate. I did it in a very unique way. I went from sales to marketing all the way along. Sales and marketing field, sales and marketing division, sales marketing corporate and ultimately becoming chief marketing officer at some companies, chief sales officer at others and at a couple of cases, chief revenue officer responsible for all the sales, marketing and product management. I feel strongly that that uniquely qualifies me to help companies better align their sales, marketing and product management to the opportunity and actually accelerate sales.
I’ll say it’s very unique. Back in the day, I sold mainframe computers, Control Data, Amdahl which Fujitsu owned, competing with IBM. It’s a rare bird. It’s like a unicorn in the startup world that has an engineering background and a sales personality. Usually, they’re two very different skill sets and you’ve been able to combine them both. Is that an accurate description of what you do and who you are?
It is. If it wasn’t for the training and support I received early on, that transition wouldn’t happen. You’re right. An engineer that sells is a little bit unique but with all the training and skills, it becomes possible.
Also, sometimes engineers just don’t want to do it. It’s a left brain thing. They want to be in their left brain analyzing, solving problems with design or engineering, whatever it is. Sales people for the most part are not really interested in the tech stuff, “Just tell me enough that I can sell the product but I don’t really want to understand all the nitty-gritty stuff.” The fact that you can go into the nitty-gritty if need be, really gives you a stronger level of confidence and then you’re able to show other people how to get there. Let’s talk about one of the things that is really so important here which is the CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth that you’ve written about. There are really five barriers to getting your sales up. What’s the first one?
The first barrier has to do with what’s called the sales process. A sales process is nothing more than the things that a salesperson must do to move a suspect into a qualified lead, from a qualified lead into a forecast opportunity, from an opportunity into an actual closed deal. The fortunate part is that a lot of companies don’t have a sales process. That is a big problem because a sales organization without a sales process is just a bunch of independent sellers. It’s not a sales force. They may have the sales process but then it’s rigid. In other words, a competitor does something with a compelling offer and it never gets in the sales process so the rest of the sales team doesn’t know about it. They all get surprised when it happens. The sales process has to be dynamic. If the sales process is not dynamic, it becomes outdated, ineffective and unused. Finally, the worst offender is the sales process should be about the salesperson trying to move the buyer through their purchasing process. It’s not about our sales process. It’s about the customer’s buying process. We want to move them through quickly and end up the winner. If we can do that correctly, and most companies do not, then having a right sales process can accelerate sales by 30% annually just that point alone.
[Tweet “How to go from suspect to customer?”]
The big takeaway here is, A) You need to have a sales process so the information gets shared across the entire team and not just scattered. B) Without this, then there’s no structure of moving someone on having a sense of what the next step is to move them as you called them suspects instead of prospects. I think that’s interesting all the way to them saying yes and really making sure that it’s on their timeframe and their criteria, not yours. Is that a pretty good summary?
Yes. It’s absolutely critical. Something like that wasn’t needed twenty years ago. Now that the buyers are self-educating online doing their own research, they’re making decisions without involving us. Therefore, we really have to make the extra effort to align to what they’re trying to do. If we do that, then we’ll become much more buyer-centric and miracles happen. We all of a sudden start talking about what the customer wants us to talk about. We, all of a sudden, start finding who is impacting that decision process and how we’re going to talk to him. We figure out how to get away from no decisions in half the sales because we’re gauged in the buyer’s process not, “An hour every day I did the sales presentation, I did the download, blah, blah, blah.”
It’s really finding out what’s important to them as opposed to just giving the standard presentation every time, right?
They don’t care about the product. They can find that online. What they want is a solution to their business problem.
Exactly. They will ignore us. They will avoid us. They will go through the whole process up to 70% all the way through their decision process without reaching out to us because we’re product pitching. They don’t care about the product. They can find that online. What they want is a solution to their business problem.
What’s the second barrier here as it relates to lead gens? I’m going to guess it has something to do with qualification and following up. Please tell us.
Lousy marketing leads. That’s always been the complaint between sales and marketing, “Lousy leads or they don’t follow up.” Now that you’ve got a self-educating buyer, the rules have changed. You’re going out looking for leads let’s say. 79% according to research of the leads that come from marketing will never buy. The 21% that will will do so eventually; maybe not this quarter, maybe not this week, eventually. The biggest problem is you can’t have a salesperson running around trying to qualify all these stuff instead of closing deals. When you look at the reasons for this, it’s not because marketing wants to do this. It’s because their strategy is outdated. Twenty years ago, in the old days, you didn’t have to worry about it. The customer would only find out what we told them. Now, they’re online. Marketing is still focused on just creating leads. They’re not focused on helping the sales organization convert and turn those suspects into customers. That’s what they have to do because the buyer is online all the time and they’re reading the competitor information, they’re making decisions so that both of them have to understand what’s going on. The key takeaway on that one is if you align the marketing and sales strategy so it’s throughout the entire buyer purchasing process, you’re going to deliver 38% more deals annually. It’s simple as that.
One of the things that I find really useful when we’re working with the marketing department or if you’re doing your own marketing is to really be clear on who you help and what problem you solve and in the marketing messaging and say, “Who this is for and here’s who this is not for,” so that that can really weed out some leads that aren’t qualified to buy or don’t need what you’re saying or don’t meet your minimum requirement. What are your thoughts on that?
That’s absolutely true. I’m going to talk about the impact of product to this whole process and the impact that marketing also has to be aligned to the entire buyer process to be educated to that. If they’re just doing leads, they have no visibility to what happens to the leads. It becomes magic. They have no possibility of knowing. I think that leads us straight into the third thing. It’s one of the reasons that marketing cannot demonstrate ROI. They cannot demonstrate the contribution to the business. The CEO is not interested in how many clicks and views and eyeballs they got. That didn’t wash it. Marketing can say what the cost to lead is but they can’t say what the cost of customer acquisition is. The reason for that is they can’t tell that a Twitter campaign drives more sales opportunities than an email campaign or a webinar or anything else. It comes back that they’re just doing branding lead generation. If they don’t engage with the whole buyer process, they can’t tell the impact of what they’re doing.
That’s so important what you just said there because if you’re pitching to an investor at any stage whether it’s the entry level or further down the road, one of the questions you’re going to get asked is, “What’s your projected cost to acquire a new customer?” If you’re further along and you’ve got revenue coming in, “What does it cost to acquire a customer and how can you reduce that?” Having that thought through in a way that makes a lot of sense because if they’re going to give you money to spend on marketing, they’re going to want to know how you do it. One of the mistakes people make when they pitch is saying, “If we only get 1% of all the people in China to buy this, we will be rich.”
They don’t go for that.
Do you have a story of how someone you’ve worked with has used your expertise to go from not really having an ROI to marketing to figuring out how to do it better?
I can give you the process. I can’t think of one right off the top of my head. Really it comes down to you have to take the marketing expense and tie it to not leads but how many sales opportunities did you increase? How many of those became sales forecast? How many of those became closed deals? How many of those became upsells? How many of those became cross-sells? How many customers do we retain? All of those points marketing can impact. They can impact with all the technology and approaches they have today. It’s all related to revenue. What’s exciting about that and where I have helped is sales and marketing are getting on the same page. You can get sales and marketing and say, “How do we move opportunities to forecast? Sales, what are you doing? Marketing, what are you doing? What can we do together?”
When the salespeople are talking to leads for marketing, do they ask them, “How did you hear about us? Where did you come from?” Sometimes the answers might be, “First, I saw a Twitter and then I opted in for something and then I got an email.” Then you start to realize, “It’s not just one thing that gets a good lead. It’s an accumulation of marketing efforts,” right?
It is. It’s technology that is available to marketers now that wasn’t twenty years ago. For what your example is called, it’s called attribution software. What it does is track a customer who could be anonymous when they go to the website. Track them and know exactly what they downloaded, what social campaigns they reacted to, what telephone campaigns. You can see the whole reaction. If you’re collaborating with sales, you share that. They’d say, “My customer has done A, B and C. I know they add up to a great qualified lead. I’m going to try to cold-call in there.” Let me give you some examples where this ROI comes in. The studies basically say if you go through this approach I’m talking about and execute it properly, you can deliver 27% faster profit growth. What caught my eye was this study. There was an interesting study of an industry. It showed that if you use the right mix of marketing programs, they increase revenue by 30% a year but get this, they decrease marketing expense by 50%. It comes back to marketing. If they don’t understand what’s working or why, they can’t fix it. Now, they have the technology to do that. They didn’t have before.
[Tweet “Getting the deal is never enough to keep a customer.”]
This whole concept of technology being used to retarget someone, they go to the website and they’re cookied and they’re tagged and they follow them when they go to other websites and they see an ad. That I know has shown great ROI for people who need some frequency. If you’re looking for a trip for example and you’re not ready to book yet but you keep seeing ads, so that when you are ready, you then book that hotel or what have you. Do you have any thoughts on the value marketing provides after someone is a customer? I think that other studies have shown that people tend to keep looking at ads of brands and products that they’re using to reinforce their buying decision so there’s no buyer’s remorse.
You’re absolutely in the right point. If you’re gauging online throughout the complete life cycle of the buyer, you know they’re going to go through that buyer remorse. You want to keep on feeding them messages whether it’s email, because you know who they are now, or online advertising to some degree. You want to actually be productive and try to upsell, cross-sell or get them into becoming an advocate for the company. In other words, it never stops. Just getting the deal is not enough. Sales can’t easily make that happen because sales is off to the next customer trying to bring him onboard. But marketing can because they have the technology. They just put it in there and keep the constant messaging going to those customers afterwards related to the product they bought. That’s powerful. It’s really important for startups particularly in the SaaS environment. Retention is critical. There’s so much more energy trying to get a new customer versus retaining what you have; so much better upselling a customer than trying to get a new one. Sales has not been equipped to do that very well because they’re always going after quota. Marketing can do a lot of fill in for that. All of the things that they used to get customers, all the technologies, all the campaigns are the same tools they can use to keep customers.
There’s so much more energy trying to get a new customer versus retaining what you have.
Barrier number four: Dealing with the product, go-to-market. Explain what that is please.
That one there is part of the biggest problem in companies and particularly in startups. If you have a product launch and sales don’t accelerate or every time you do new features and versions to release but you don’t see a balance in sales, it’s possibly and probably because they don’t have a good product market fit. They didn’t find out who the ideal customer profile is. That work is so critical when you develop a product to absolutely know who you’re targeting, who’s making the decision, what are their business issues and it goes on and on. If you do not do that work correctly, what happens is sales particularly in the startup, they’ll go out and they’ll find the early adopters. For them to accelerate sales, they’re going to find the sweet spot.
You can’t make all your predictions on the early adopters and think that there’s an unlimited number of them because there isn’t, right?
Right. If I was to talk to a CEO, I’d probably shake him and say, “You’ve got to get an experienced product manager involved earlier not later.” Doing this stuff, understanding product market fit, understanding the ICP, understanding product launch cross functionally, understanding go-to-market.
What’s ICP for those people who may not know?
That’s the Ideal Customer Profile. These things are not something you can think about in the weekend and go do. You’re betting the whole company as a startup that the product works. I’ll tell you from experience, it is much harder to find a market for an existing product than it is to design the product for the market correctly in the first place. I’ve seen companies go bust because they have this product but they don’t know where to sell anymore. The market they wanted to is not the right market.
Any example that comes to mind?
Not really except some of the startups I worked that was a problem. They had a product that worked well at the mid-sized side of companies, but it didn’t work well at the enterprise. The features were there. The problem is they didn’t have the robustness and reliability. At the enterprise level, for them that’s important. They don’t want to lose the job. For middle companies, they want to get the job done and they’re willing to take more risk. If you’re in the wrong market and you say, “I’m going to have a sales organization go after enterprise, and this is my product that was really made for the middle market,” you’re going to have a problem.
Keeping up with demand I think is also a big thing I see happening sometimes. If you don’t have the funding to make enough product or you don’t have the staffing to handle the results from a successful ad campaign, that can really be detrimental, right?
[Tweet “How to get you better leads?”]
It is. That comes back to really the four barriers we’ve talked about so far. If you look at moving the buyer through their process, that means you have a much more reliable forecast of what can happen. Marketing can tell you if they generate more leads from social how much revenue that could come out. They’ve tracked it by using attribution software and everything else. They know how many more opportunities could happen, with the right sales closes opportunities and actually have a reasonable forecast of what could happen. Right now, without that, you’re basically guessing.
That brings us to the fifth barrier, which is dealing with leveraging technology.
This one here, this is where the CEOs really got to jump up and get involved. Today, there is over 5,000 marketing technology vendors. That’s not counting the 600 or so advertising technology and the hundreds of sales technology. We have so much technology available to automate everything and anything. The investments on CRM, Customer Relationship Management, marketing automation, the C-level is not seeing the revenue they had hoped to see. There are two basic problems there. One is we’re still automating the outdated broken process that we used to use twenty years ago. That’s not a good thing because what you do is you just get lousy leads at scale because you’ve got outdated process. The second thing is these systems aren’t well-integrated. They suffer. When a salesperson goes to CRM, they see one thing. When the marketing person goes to their platform, they see something else. They’re not looking at the same thing. That makes it hard to align their efforts.
It’s like looking at the elephant, someone is looking at the tail and someone is looking at the trunk and saying, “We’re looking at completely different things.”
Aligning cross-functional processes is very difficult to do. It’s worth 13% faster growth. It’s a lot easier in a smaller company to fix all those stuff than a bigger company that’s got a lot of established bureaucracy per se. The CEO has to get on top of it. He cannot delegate technology, strategy. What he or she should be saying is, “I want a single revenue generation system. I want you to build me a single revenue system so that if we change strategies, I can see what the output is.” Sales looks at it and sees the same thing. Marketing looks at, sees the same thing as product management looks at and the same thing with the C-level.
If the staff doesn’t know how to do that, they can engage you to help them do that. Is that right?
Yeah. It really is straightforward. You really just have to make the commitment that says the CRM becomes a base unit. Everything revolves around it, every tool and you have one view. The marketing people look at the same window with the sales people. They may be looking at different things but they sustain information so that everybody is still on the same page. When it comes to trying to align sales and marketing and product management, it really comes down to give them the same page. Give them the same problem that everybody can work on. You’re looking to have collaboration. All of these people are smart. Sales understand sales they’ve been trained. Very few of them have ever been a marketing specialist especially in the data driven side. Marketers, very few have been in professional sales. They don’t understand. You get two of them in a room, you say, “Let’s communicate.” It’s like having two groups with different languages. They all agreed they want revenue. They all agreed they want customers. Now what?
If I get them focusing on a customer and moving the customer from where we found them to where we want to be, amazing things happen.
You really have to focus them on a common thing. What I found in my experience and in the last twenty years, if I get them focusing on a customer and moving the customer from where we found them to where we want to be, amazing things happen. They really do. You can get them to collaborate. It’s not marketing blaming sales or vice versa. They both have skill sets and they’re both trying to do the same job. I’ve seen it happen where sales and marketing just feel like one team. I see that as a future that has to be done. If we don’t get there, you can’t accelerate sales. You can’t accelerate revenue when you’ve got marketing going one direction, sales going in another. They’re doing their best but they’re not growing in the same direction.
What do you think is the most important thing a CEO can do to accelerate sales? Is it what you just described or is it something more with alignment?
It’s all about alignment. I don’t try to do alignment for enterprises. It’s just too difficult. Alignment is really taking departments, channels and trying to get them aligned. In an enterprise, there are hundreds of channels and departments to align. In a startup, you start out the right way. You get sales marketing and product management on the same page on the get-go. You give them your expectations of what you want to see. You allow them to take the tools and make it happen. The key thing for a CEO is make sure your revenue team is a team from the get-go. Don’t assume just because they get-together in a room, they’re on the same page. You have to make sure that every single person in the company, in the startup understands the buyer journey; what problems they have, how they make decisions, including customer service or customer success as it’s called these days, including financial. Everybody should understand how they’re interacting with a customer. Who else in the company may be interacting at the same point? It helps them understand better.
Dave, how can people work with you and your company Marketing Outfield to help them do all these things or even the services you offer include helping them as a chief financial or revenue officer? What’s the best way for people to decide whether they need you or not?
There are two primary ways. One way is if they’re not getting accelerated sales, I’ll come in and identify the two or three things that can make an impact over the next year that we should fix and collaborate with the existing organization, develop the right strategies and execute them. We take it from soup to nuts to make sure it works. That’s a typical consulting engagement. The one I prefer, the one I recommend and I’m moving more towards is what’s called a fractional chief revenue officer. In other words, you’re getting somebody with the experience that I have in sales, marketing, product management and you bring them in five or ten days a month, not for the full twenty days so you’re paying less, to guide the existing staff with the right strategies or right techniques to deliver acceleration. What it does is when I’d leave whether it’s a year or two years or six months, those people are better equipped and that leadership is better enabled to understand how the revenue engine is working.
You remind me of what a Sherpa does when people are climbing Mount Everest or any of the other big mountains. If you want to get up there faster, bring Dave in.
When I drive consultants in, when I was running companies and a CEO, etc. I wanted them to leave my staff smarter. I wanted them to leave me smarter. They’re bringing an outside perspective, something that when you’re trying to get your company going, you get blinders on unfortunately, and we all do. We’re just trying to execute the plan. Somebody coming in can add so much value. You really want them leaving the company better off, not like the traditional Big League management consultants who come in as a team and leave a PowerPoint behind and say, “Go ahead, do this and you’ll be fine.” It doesn’t execute in, the organization doesn’t get smarter. You’re not really doing the most value you can by getting involved.
I highly encourage people to follow you on Twitter. There are 30,000 people doing it already. You really are constantly giving great information and best practices for getting your sales to take off. It’s @MOutfield. Dave Hubbard on LinkedIn, you can follow him there. Go to the website, MarketingOutfield.com to see how to become more profitable and get those sales up. Dave, thank you so much for being on the show.
It was a pleasure. I hope those listening pick up just one idea that moves them forward in sales acceleration. I think we did a great job if they can just do that.
You did more than one. Thanks again, Dave.
Thank you, John.
Links Mentioned
- Marketing Outfield
- CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth
- @MOutfield Twitter
- Dave Hubbard LinkedIn
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Friction: Passion Brands In The Age Of Disruption with Jeff Rosenblum
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Clients want content that inspire them to push themselves and do things that are irrational. This irrational behavior according to author of Friction: Passion Brands In The Age Of Disruption, Jeff Rosenblum, will create loyalty from your customers. If loyalty becomes the core of a big company where people trust each other, then disruption happens and an emotional connection between the customers take place. Jeff shares his stories of being a disruptor in the business world from the get go and his belief why brands are built and not bought.
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Our guest is Jeff Rosenblum, the author of Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption. Jeff has such great insights as to what it is to help a brand get through all the static electricity that’s out there. He said, “Brands need tools that don’t create scars.” He’s got a great story around Patagonia that brings that to life. His whole point is that advertising should be emotional not transactional, and that sometimes we ask advertising to do too much. There are so many things that need to happen to get a new customer and to keep them. He said, “At the heart of every great brand is trust.” You’re going to really enjoy hearing the insights from Jeff’s book, Friction.
Listen To The Episode Here
Friction: Passion Brands In The Age Of Disruption with Jeff Rosenblum
I’m really excited and thrilled to have Jeff Rosenblum, the author of Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption as our guest. He has so many things that I want to talk to him about. Jeff is a documentary filmmaker, an industry disruptor in the advertising world and the founder of a marketing agency called Questus, which has counseled influential brands like American Express, Apple, Disney, Marriott, the NFL, it goes on and on. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it a lot.
Jeff, I always like my guests to tell me their story of origin. That can be, “When I was a kid, when I was in college, I knew I wanted to go into advertising.” Take us to that place where you said, “This is the career for me.”
I can take this thing all the way back before I was born. I was speaking about this when I was drinking a bourbon and that whole cliché advertising experience. In a lot of ways, I was actually bred for this job. My father is a salesman. My mother is a shrink. My grandfather was a Rome-runner. When you think about those three pieces of genetic code, I was almost inevitably going to become an advertising man. I’m not saying I’m great at it but I think I was certainly bred for it.
Sales meet shrink. I had a big career in advertising selling advertising for Condé Nast. I was completely fascinated by psychology of what motivates people. How do you persuade people? Then if you take the showbiz factor of it with jingles and everything and catchy headlines that pull people in, I already knew I wanted to do it so I find that fascinating. Before you started your agency, what did you first start doing and what did you love about it?
The interesting part of that DNA is I’m not a creative guy. I have virtually no design skills. My background is more on the research side of things and hence, the power of that genetic code from a shrink. It’s all about listening to consumers and what they really want. It all had actually started in the early ‘90s. I was fresh out of school, I was working at a research company, and I had a motorcycle not because I was cool. I had it because I was really flat broke, it’s all that I can afford. When you put on a motorcycle helmet, it’s actually a lot like taking a hot shower. I’ve learned subsequently, what happens is you’re getting alpha waves in your brain. It’s your highest form of neurological creative thinking.
What I realized is everybody is soon going to be connected to the internet then all of the conversations that we’re having and all the data that we’re collecting is going to shift from the offline world to the online world. Lo and behold, it turns out I was correct. I’m still a 24-year old zit-faced kid. I barely graduated college. The next thing I know, I had Microsoft, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Walt Disney, Discovery Channel, Levi Strauss all as my clients because I was one of the first guys in the country to figure it out. There are still a couple of other young kids on each coast, but this was the domain of young folks. It was really cool and really exciting gathering all that data for these huge companies. What always happens to me is I started getting bored. Once the adrenaline wore off, I realize that all I was doing was market research. I was moving around a lot of numbers, I was making a lot of PowerPoint, nobody really cared. They have wind up collecting a lot of dust.
I went down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and I was having this incredibly psychedelic experience. I had this incredibly non-psychedelic thought which was, “Why not start an advertising agency?” It turns out that all these brands that had hired me wanted to understand not just how to collect data through the internet, but they wanted me to help them understand what should they do with the internet? How do you build a brand leveraging digital? I figured, “All the agencies out there don’t seem to get it, I’m going to start an agency.” I called my best friend from college. He was an incredible artist. He had private gallery openings, famous people like Johnny Depp were buying his paintings. I was like, “Let’s start an agency.” He was like, “Have you ever been in one?” I’m like, “No. Have you?” He said, “Absolutely not.” “Fuck it man, let’s do it.” We showed up. We had two desks, one chair, a stolen laptop and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and we had one client. It was three months’ worth of work and we realized that we had three months to go find another client. Fast forward about ten years later, we won Agency of the Year. Then the next year, we won it again. Then after that, we created the documentary and now we created the book. In a lot of ways, we’ve been disrupting things from the get-go.
What an impressive hero’s journey and a great story. I just love the visuals of one chair between the two of you. I doubt that you were so cutting edge that one of you were saying, “I’ll have a standing desk. I don’t need a chair.” The book Friction, I’ve read it. It’s not only got great insights, great visuals, but it really gives people a huge way of thinking about that advertising could eventually evolve to a place where it’s useful and not interrupting. Can you talk about that, Jeff?
Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption
The name of the book is Friction. Friction is anything that gets in the way of people doing what they want to do in life. It’s anything that gets in the way of their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations and even their day-to-day goals. What it’s about is brand solving people’s problems. People don’t wake up in the morning wanting brands to interrupt them with clever advertising anymore. They want brands to do a lot more. They want brands to fight friction. They want brands to help improve their lives one small step at a time. What this means is creating content and experiences that empower people rather than just advertisements, which interrupt people.
Can you give us an example of one of your clients you’ve done that for?
We’ve done it with a lot of cool clients. Universal Orlando is a client where we follow the entire consumer journey. To be clear, a lot of what we do is we create ads and what we’d like to think are good ads. This really isn’t about the depth of advertising. That false eulogy has been written before. It’s about recognizing that we’re asking advertising to do too much. It’s just as important to have a great website, and more important than the website is the content that sits in the website, and to recognize that not everybody is the same. Very frequently a brand will have about six different personas and each persona has different needs. As they go through the sales funnel, they’re going to have different needs across those personas. Ultimately, you might be looking at a full content matrix as you go from aware to interested to converted to evangelist. It’s about having a video in the right place. It’s about having user-generated content in the right place. It’s about having an app in the right place. It’s about making sure that the app has the right features and that it’s technologically connected to the experience, geo-targeted in that example. With every client, it’s sometimes less about the activation and the big idea and it’s very frequently more about following the journey and putting the right information at the right place at the right time.
One of the things I don’t like to do is talk too much about my clients because it sounds like I’m tooting my horn. What I want to do is toot the horn of a brand I don’t actually work with, which is YETI Coolers. I just saw an article. The guys that invested in this company, they invested $57 million and it’s about to go IPO for $3.3 billion. It is not some fly-by-night crazy technology company. These guys make coolers. Literally, the same product that’s been around for over 100 years. Coolers would keep your beer cold, your soda cold, your bologna sandwiches cold. There’s nothing cool or exciting about this. They have turned YETI into a full-blown lifestyle brand. At the core of the friction that they fight is the product is fundamentally better than the competitions. It’s literally certified grizzly bear proof. Nobody needs a grizzly-proof cooler. When is that going to happen? It’s really nice to know that your product can go further than you could possibly go in your wildest adventure. What I really love about these guys is on their website, they’ve got commerce. You can buy these things like any other website, but they’ve got a full-blown storytelling platform. They’ve got a series of videos. Each of these videos are about eight minutes long. They have this protagonist like “The world’s most intense fly fisherman,” “The world’s greatest ski guide,” “The world’s greatest barbecue pit master,” and she happens to be this 89-year old woman; these crazy stories.
It’s funny that I misfocus. I could go and said, “These ads,” because they’re not ads. You literally never see the YETI brand except for maybe one second, the product will flash in the background. In one of these videos, you’ll see a competitor in this overnight kayaking race. This death-defying race that people are in. At one point, you see one of the competitors past out cold with a YETI hat on. The point is these videos are amazing. You watch these things and you’ll email me and be like, “These things are incredible.” They’re eight minutes long. I’ve watched dozens of them. I’ve shared them with my friends who have watched dozens of them. We post them to each other when we text. We put them on Facebook. We’re here talking about it in front of all your listeners. We can’t get enough of proselytizing for the YETI brand. The friction that they fight not only in the product is that people in that category who are going outdoors to go on their adventures, they want inspiration. They want to see content. It inspires them to push themselves further to do things that are more exciting. It’s not just the macro perspective of how much money they’re making, but it’s the fact that this brand has become a full-blown lifestyle brand. It’s no longer just coolers. Ad Age ran this article and it said, “If you can’t afford a YETI cooler, you’ll buy a YETI hat.” People always buy the t-shirts, the hats and they tell all their friends, “These coolers? They cost $700.” You can get a perfectly good one from Coleman for $150, the same size. That’s the power of fighting friction. That’s the power of telling a great story.
[Tweet “Are we asking too much of advertising?”]
The big takeaway for me from what you said, Jeff, is when you provide content that’s emotionally engaging without a lot of advertising in it and take people on a journey, a story, then they become your brand ambassadors and share it, and then that elevates your brand much like what I’ve seen Nike do and Harley-Davidson. That if you can afford the most expensive Nikes, you can buy a t-shirt and the same thing with the hat with the Harley’s. It’s really a great, great example and a story and a strategy on what we do. One of the things in your book that really stood out for me both from image standpoint and word standpoint is you talk about, “Brands need tools that don’t create scars.” We’ve talked about a great brand obviously not doing that. Let’s talk about brands that are creating scars and first start with, what’s an example of a brand creating a scar?
What we’ve referred to in that example is how to go in where we open the book and the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, realizing that some of his products scarred the rocks that he loved to climb so much. That’s how he launched Patagonia. The point is that brands also need new tools the way that Patagonia did when they restarted their company and do scars or anything that hurt what people love the most in this world, which is their own brand reputation and their customers. Sometimes brands learn the hard way. United Airlines, that example is so profound because it doesn’t matter what United Airlines tells me. They could have the most charismatic person, a flight attendant on the phone, on the microphone at the flight, telling me to have a great flight. They can develop the most absolutely beautiful TV ad or print ad or banner ad or pre-roll. They could do the greatest thing ever done. There’s nothing they can say that’s going to get me to believe that they care about me, in any way, shape or form. I saw them standby while one of their passengers got dragged off the plane with blood coming out of his face. I saw it, you saw it, everybody saw it. The amazing thing is when you watch those videos, it’s not just what was going on. Here’s what I thought was really interesting is, how many cellphones are actually in the foreground of those videos? Type into Google, “United Airlines, passenger getting dragged out,” and it’s not just the fact that one person was filming. Everybody was filming, everybody has a super computer in their pocket. Everybody has an incredible video camera in their pocket. If you do terrible things like United Airlines, you’re going to scar your brand reputation and you’re going to scar your customers. It’s really hard to heal a scar.
That leads right into another thing that’s in Friction, which is talking about transactional versus emotional relationships. If you treat people like a commodity, like a transaction, there’s no culture that would stop that behavior because it’s just a transaction, “These are the rules.” If you come from a place that’s an emotional, “We care about our customers,” whether for me, Starbucks always pops up in my head. I am a big fan of Howard Schultz. I read his book, giving his employees or even part time health benefits when he didn’t have to. All that culture shows the employees that you care about them as people and then they in turn can care about their clients and customers, and then take that effort to remember your drink order. To me, that’s the difference. I’d love to have you explain what you see what brands can do or anyone who’s starting their own company, whether a big brand, existing or new to make people feel emotionally connected versus transactionally connected.
We can continue on that example, United Airlines makes a ton of money. In a lot of ways, I don’t know the numbers, but people might argue what’s the best airline company. At the end of the day though, it’s still a transactional company. I would never tell my friends that United Airlines is great. I will never spend $29 on a hat. I would never sit there and tell you that United Airlines is great, but they still get a ton of money from my travel expenses. There’s no shame in being a transactional brand. Transactional brands make sense. They have a good product. They’ve got good marketing and they charge a fair price. There’s no shame in that. It’s just not what my book is about. My book is about breaking through to what we call a passion brand. These are the brands that have an emotional connection. There’s nothing rational about buying a YETI cooler for $700 when you can get one from Coleman for $150. There’s nothing rational about buying a YETI hat and promoting that brand like a walking billboard. There’s nothing rational about telling all your friends on social media to watch these videos. What happens is when brands create that emotional connection, they elicit irrational behavior. It’s irrational in the most positive of ways. Ultimately, the best way to get irrational behavior out of your customers is to act irrationally yourself. That’s a crazy concept. Brands have to act irrational.
[Tweet “Advertising should be emotional, not transactional.”]
Irrational video for YETI is, “We’re Yeti and this is what makes our coolers so great. It’s grizzly-bear proof. It keeps your stuff cold.” You talk about features, you talk about the benefits, all that stuff. An irrational behavior is, “I’m going to create an eight-minute video. I’m going to invest in this video. I’m never going to put my logo in there. I’m never going to tell you anything about it and I’m never going to ask you to buy this product. I’m just going to do something to inspire you and entertain you.” That’s totally irrational. Going back to the Patagonia example, if you look at the homepage of their website, which probably has about six horizontal panels, the vast majority of them don’t talk about Patagonia products. They talk about all of their initiatives defending the environment. They literally had a panel on their homepage of their website that said, “Don’t buy this jacket,” with a picture of a jacket they sell. They were engaging people in a conversation about the damage that has done to the environment when you throw out your old jacket and when you buy a new jacket. They created a documentary called Worn Wear, which celebrates and extols the virtues of people who literally hold on to their Patagonia products for 50 years. That’s totally rational. They’re creating content, talking people out of buying their products. What did they get out of that? Unwavering loyalty and an absolute army of evangelists.
That’s the whole core. If you can get people to trust you as a person, as a brand, they stay loyal. The same thing is true in your company. If you can create a place where employees feel that you trust them and they trust you, that you’ve got each other’s back and you’re never going to do anything to hurt them, they will stay loyal because you’re not just in it for the money.
Passion Brands: Winners act like winners before they’re winners.
Before we wrote the book, we created this documentary called The Naked Brand. We sat down with Kevin Plank, the CEO of Under Armour, who in my opinion is literally one of the most impressive and successful executives on the planet. He started the company from his grandmother’s basement and he grew it into something that competes with Nike. He’s as nice a person as you’ll ever meet. He’s cool, he’s nice, he’s competitive, and he’s everything you could ever ask for. We’re filming and he says, “At the heart of every great brand is trust.” I remember watching this and I’m like, “You’ve got something more for me? That sounds a little thin and pedantic. I could use a little bit more depth.” Then what I realized over the coming days, weeks, months and years that I’ve thought about it, that’s what makes him so smart. He doesn’t cloud everything with a bunch of silly thoughts. He gets right to the heart of the matter, trust. At the heart of every great brand is trust. When you create content that inspires, educates, removes friction, it shows empathy and it creates trust.
As a Pitch Whisperer, I’m all about helping people be clear and concise and compelling. It’s not about trying to impress people with your vocabulary and how smart you are or telling them everything you do. It’s like, “Here’s the takeaway,” and that’s what helps you create good advertising. Back to what you were saying about this irrational behavior causes people to really engage with your brand, I think the Dollar Shave Club is another example of breaking through the clutter with that crazy comedies and going up against the big guys at Gillette that have been doing it for years. That really seems to me to be your sweet spot both in the book and what you do for your clients.
That’s hilarious that you bring up that example because my father sent me an email. Obviously, he’s a fan of the movie, fan of the book. He’s my dad, he’s very supportive and he loves to talk about these things. He’s talking about friction. He’s like, “I signed up for Dollar Shave Club. I felt this was a friction fighting brand, but I could not sign up. I couldn’t work my way through the sign up process.” It’s interesting because what we talk about is macro friction and micro friction. Macro friction is what we’ve been talking about. It’s these things that go on the entirety of a category. It’s YETI creating these great stories about the outdoors. It’s Patagonia defending the environment. The flipside of it is micro friction. These are the things that happen at that relationship level with prospects and with customers. It’s really as simple as help people make purchases easily, which seems really easy. How hard is it to take somebody’s credit card number? Every bit of technology that makes buying products easier, makes selling products harder. When we figured out desktops, mobile came along. When we figured out mobile, social came along. Then wearables came along and virtual realities coming along. Everybody I think should go buy an Alexa for $40 because it’s incredible for shadowing the fact that pretty soon, we’re not going to need screens at all. We’re just going to have little speaker phones following us wherever we go. This is a super computer that sits in your house and talks to you for $40. That makes it easier to purchase. “Alexa, go buy this new XYZ for me. Go buy Friction, the book.” It makes it harder and harder for brands to sell in particular if their products are not available on Amazon.
Amazon is the master at that user experience of one-click buy. In Friction, your book, you have chronological steps for removing friction and one of them is number seven, this user optimization. That’s exactly what we were talking about with Dollar Shave Club, right?
Yeah. It’s optimize, optimize, optimize. Consumers have no empathy for your brand anymore. They just have heightened expectations. One of the things we talked about is it doesn’t matter what category you’re in, Uber is your competition. In a world where you can just in three clicks, get a car, it shows up, it takes you wherever you want to go. One click, plays the music you want. You never have to breakout your wallet to pay for a five-star rating system. It keeps everybody civilized. There’s virtually no friction in the Uber product. There’s friction in the Uber brand, but let’s talk about the product. There’s no friction in it. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to buy a shaving equipment or any other product, people are used doing Uber world. They’re just not sympathetic or empathetic when it comes to friction in the relationship that people have with brands.
Amazon is taking it to the next level. You and I don’t have to wait a day. We’re going to have a drone deliver your package. Talk about instant gratification. The friction of going to a shopping mall and parking, no wonder malls are dying.
What I saw on the news is that they were talking about manufacturing is going to come back and it was going to fix retail. All I could think when watching this is like, “You’re out of touch. We all want manufacturing to come back in America. That would be awesome, but retail? Retail is screwed.” Unless you’ve got a very unique product, people are going to go to Amazon. I think they have bigger problem to that, and maybe we’re a little off topic with this. I think a lot of impulses that people have right now, a lot of that brain candy is just happening in their digital environment: the selfies, the Instagram, the Facebook, the Snapchat. People are entrenched in that behavior that I don’t think they wake up in the morning thinking, “I really need to touch that part of my brain by going shopping.” When was the last time you heard someone say, “What are you doing today?” “I’m going shopping.” You don’t hear that anymore. We used to hear that all the time. The economy is pretty strong right now for a lot of people. I don’t think it’s the economy that’s holding back retail. It’s the fact that our brains are physiologically changing.
Teenage girls just love to go and hang out at the mall. That became a social thing, not that they were necessarily buying a lot of things. Now, the retail therapy that so many women love to use is they get the same fix from online clicking and stuff shows up. They buy it in three different sizes and all that good stuff. You have this great quote in here about, “Winners act like winners before they are winners.” Can you talk about that?
The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership
That’s not my quote. That’s Bill Walsh’s quote. The name of the book that Bill Walsh wrote is actually an autobiography. It was written after he passed away through some ghostwriter. It’s an autobiography. The name of the book is The Score Takes Care of Itself. “Winners act like winners before they’re winners.” The point is this, Bill Walsh walks in to the San Francisco 49ers headquarters in approximately 1979. He didn’t look like a football coach. He’s got the neatly combed hair. He’s got a sweater, he’s got khakis. He looked like a professor. The only thing that was missing was a Bent Billiard pipe. He didn’t yell. He didn’t scream. He didn’t give rah-rah speeches. He totally, completely and fundamentally revolutionized the way that football was played. He had this one simple idea, “Put the ball where the other team isn’t.” The Super Bowl trophy is called the Lombardi Trophy named after Vince Lombardi because he really created the strategic underpinnings of football before Bill Walsh. It was based upon strength and willpower. Big strong men blocking other big strong men, big strong linemen and running backs. Bill’s idea was make it look like that. At the last second before handing off to the big strong running back behind the big, strong alignment, pull it back out and throw it to an area of the field called the flats, which was about six yards from the line of scrimmage but really wide. Nobody was playing with a 53 yards of width, the whole football field.
This is what brands need to also do. Put the ball where the other team isn’t. You’re not going to win on strength and willpower by investing in huge advertising budgets, by trying to find a more creative agency than anybody possible. It’s undifferentiated. You have to find a place to put the ball where the other team isn’t. “The winners act like winners” quote, as if for me at least, that story was just perfect. He wrote this business book and I basically poached it and retold the story. The other thing that he really did is he focused in on culture and he was, “All winners have to act like winners before they’re winners.” He was focused on, “Receptionist, when you answer the phone, you’re going to answer it this way, with class, sophistication and intelligence.” He was going to take care of all these little things. He never had these goals like, “We’re going to win theSuper Bowl. We’re going to make the playoffs.” He literally had players that almost were revolting. When he told the owner on him, “This dude is not focused.” Meanwhile, he won five Super Bowls and almost every Super Bowl that has been won since has all been based upon Bill Walsh’s principles. The key is, “Put the ball where the other team isn’t,” and that includes culture and behavior before your bottom line goal.
We’re going to close with one of your quotes which is, “Great brands are built, not bought.” What does that mean from your lips? To me, that’s just as strong a quote and I want to hear what people should take away from that quote.
I’m glad you like it and I appreciate the compliment. It’s about creating experiences for people. It’s not about buying paid media interruptions. Paid media in advertising still works well, just asking it to do too much. Build you brand, don’t buy your brand. Build great content, build great experiences. Then you can spend money on paid advertising. “Great brands are built, not bought.”
[Tweet “At the heart of every great brand is trust”]
Jeff, I can’t thank you enough. The book is Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption. It’s a fantastic book. I highly recommend everyone get it. It’s one of my new favorite books. It’s a coffee table book. It’s just so clever, even the cover looks like matches that you can literally strike it on the side. People could follow you on social media, @JRQuestus. Thanks again, Jeff. This has been a big treat on how to eliminate friction and how to go from transactional to emotional connections to get brand ambassadors.
I love the podcast. Thank you so much for having me on.
Links Mentioned
- Jeff Rosenblum
- Questus
- Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption
- Ad Age
- Dollar Shave Club
- The Score Takes Care of Itself
- @JRQuestus
- Questus
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Brandscaping – Unleashing The Power Of Partnerships with Andrew Davis
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Clients will always say yes to pitchers who tell a great story, and a great story invites listeners to keep wondering what happens next. If your audience can predict the end of your story before you even get there, then their interest level goes down. Stories that chase answers pique the interest of clients, and to do this your pitch needs to be molded into a story where the ideas are simplified and the focus is not on you, your product or service, but on what you can do to help solve the problem of your potential investors. Author of Brandscaping Andrew Davis learned the secrets to telling a compelling story that was fueled by his dream of working in The Muppets Show. Learn more about the rules of Brandscaping and how partnering with like-minded people can get you your audience.
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Our guest is Andrew Davis, who has some great takeaways on how to make your pitch and your story so compelling. He said, “Start with assuming that the audience already knows what you want them to know. Don’t teach people when you pitch.” He has a whole strategy on how to turn browsers into buyers. You’ll want to be sure and see how he does that. He tells us all about working with Charles Kuralt and how telling stories is really all about chasing answers. If you want to be a good storyteller, and I highly suggest you learn how to do it, raise the stakes and get the audience to say, “What’s going to happen next?” Because the more you can do that, the more compelling and concise your pitch will be. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Brandscaping – Unleashing The Power Of Partnerships with Andrew Davis
I have a guest named Andrew Davis who’s an author of two books and he is a keynote speaker. He tells me marketing has never been more complicated, and I couldn’t agree more. People are bombarded with over 500 branded messages every day. He helps people cut through the clutter and get people to take action, which is what we love to do here at The Successful Pitch. He really is an expert on how to rethink marketing for the digital age. He’s written for Charles Kuralt and produced for NBC. He worked for The Muppets and MTV. He co-founded, built and sold a successful marketing agency. If that’s not enough, he’s produced documentary films and campaigns for big brands as well as tiny startups. He has this great title of one of the most influential marketers in the world. He’s appeared in The Today Show and in The New York Times. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. This is fun. This is a new show for me to talk about pitching. I enjoy it.
Your whole focus is getting business leaders how to grow their business and even impact their cities and leave a legacy. It’s a three-tiered step there, which I love. Let’s go back to your own little story of origin. You can choose how far back you want to go. You can take us to when you were ten. You can take us back to high school, college, whatever you want to do where you started to go, “I think I want to be an author or speaker or I want to work for MTV,” or saw The Muppets and said, “One day, I’m going to work there.”
If I go that far back, I wanted to be an actor. When I was a kid, my mom got me into some acting classes and I started out doing television commercials for Cadbury’s chocolate and Chevrolet and all sorts of other brands. In fact, I auditioned for ET, the movie. That’s how long ago we’re talking. I realized in high school that I wasn’t actually a really good actor but I really enjoyed the entertainment business and I wanted to be involved in television and film somehow. I went to college at Boston University. I studied television and film there. Right when I came out of college, I got my first job at a television station, producing two live shows. One was a call-in show. I was living in Boston at the time so it was a right wing Republican host in this Liberal state who would scream at the TV for an hour and try to get people to light up the phone lines. My job was basically to pick the least drunk person to put them on the air.
That sounds like a stand-up comedian.
It was awful. That was my foray into television. After that, I started working for The Today Show. I was a producer on Weekend Today and then The Today Show, The Daily Show version of it. I wrote for Charles Kuralt on his last television show. If you’re not old enough to know who Charles Kuralt is, you should look him up on YouTube. He’s an amazing storyteller. If you want to learn how to tell stories like a pro, just by watching him, you’ll learn a lot.
Let’s stop there then we can go back into your story of origin. Let’s double-click on Charles Kuralt and storytelling because that is what the whole concept of The Successful Pitch is. I’m always telling everybody whoever has the best story gets the sale. Whether you’re selling yourself to get hired, selling yourself to get your startup funded or selling to get new clients, run a pitch. What would you say are some of the secrets to Charles Kuralt being such a good storyteller? Tell us a story of working with him.
Brandscaping: Emotions are what lead to action while reason leads to conclusions.
I think the key for Charles Kuralt was always that it had to be a human story. I think that works everywhere. It doesn’t matter what you’re pitching or to whom you’re pitching. Understanding the human element, how the emotions actually play is what’s really important because emotions are what lead to action while reason leads to conclusions. What you’re really trying to do is inspire people to act. Charles Kuralt was an unbelievably powerful human interest storyteller. He wanted to ensure that you were telling a person’s story that was relatable on a broader scale. He wanted you to find the themes within the story no matter what story you were telling. He was relentless with this. Even when you were pitching Charles Kuralt a story, if you were in the pitch meeting, you essentially were tasked within just a few sentences, telling me something amazing about a person that inspired me to ask a few questions immediately. If you could do that and get Charles Kuralt interested in hearing more of the story, he would approve the story and say, “Go tell the story.”
The other key I think for him was telling stories was all about chasing answers. That’s what he used to believe. If you’re telling a story where the end is predictable or I know what you’re driving to and I’m getting there faster than you’re getting me there, that’s a pretty boring story. Charles Kuralt always ensured that if your story was two minutes long or twenty minutes long, it didn’t matter how long it was, as long as the viewer was constantly chasing an answer in the story like, “What happened to the person? Does he ever finish fixing the car?” They could be very basic questions but as long as you were chasing the answer, you could have people riveted and emotionally invested in the story.
[Tweet “Telling stories is all about chasing answers”]
Listeners, your takeaway here is when you’re telling a story, clip an open loop in the story. In other words, don’t give all the answers away in the first 90 seconds. Intrigue people to want to know more.
I think most people’s mistakes, especially telling a story or definitely in a pitch is believing that, “I’ve got to give all the information in containers that are clean and simple.” Stories don’t work that way. In fact, I think the best stories invite the viewer or the consumer or the listener to constantly wonder what’s next. Just like you did in this story, if you’re wondering about my origin story still, maybe you don’t even care about telling stories, you want to know what happened after that Charles Kuralt job I had. That’s leaving people hanging and wondering what’s next.
How did you get from Charles Kuralt to The Muppets and MTV?
This is really a quick story of persistence. My dream job after I left college was actually to work at The Muppets. That’s what I really wanted to do. Even as a child, I had a magic and marionette show. It was called M&M Puppet Theater. I used to tour around doing birthday parties for $50. I was a terrible magician and not a very good puppeteer, but it was the genesis of this idea.
From $50 a pop as a semi-good magician to now where you are as this high-paid, famous, in-demand keynote speaker. That’s quite the hero’s journey there.
The Muppets was a job I really wanted. I actually started writing one handwritten letter every single month to someone at The Jim Henson Company and I would have it FedExed. I realized it was the only way at the time to get through the assistants because the assistants open so much mail. They would find these letters from me and just throw them away or throw them on a stack of stuff that the executives wouldn’t read. If I FedExed it, they would read it. I wrote 36 letters, just over a three years’ worth of letters before I finally got a phone call from a guy named Peter van Roden who was the executive in charge of production for The Jim Henson Company. He essentially said, “Andrew, thanks so much for all these letters over the last few years. We don’t have an opening for you. I don’t want you to waste money on FedEx anymore. You’re in our system and we’ll call you.” I said, “Peter, I totally appreciate that. If you would just give me a half hour to meet with you, you will no longer get any more FedEx letters, I guarantee it from me.” He agreed surprisingly enough. He said, “Come down tomorrow. I’ll give you a half hour.” I sat down with him for a half hour which turned into about an hour. By the end of the hour, he offered me a job as the production manager for the workshop, which is where they made the puppets. That’s how I got my job there.
First of all, the big takeaway for me is you’re investing in your belief in yourself to stand out from the crowd. That’s always a big a-ha moment. I’m sure if you’re making $50 a pop, FedEx even back then was expensive. Clearly you believed in yourself enough to invest in yourself to stand out from the clutter. That’s the first takeaway of that story. The second takeaway for me is you got the first no but you didn’t let them off the hook. You still said, “If you want these packages to stop, you still have to see me.” A lot of people would have just said, “You don’t have an opening? Okay, thanks, bye.” There’s the difference. Persistence but in a creative way. Secondly, giving them one out.
I’ll even add one more because I think what was weird about that, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I was writing these letters, they weren’t just like, “Hire me.” What I was trying to do was research the industry as much as possible and even show them how thoughtful I was being about how they could maybe fix their business because this was actually in the 1990s. The Jim Henson Company was falling apart. Jim Henson had died in the early 1990s and they were really struggling to reinvent themselves. I had a format for each letter. It would start with a, “Congratulations,” or ”I heard,” and “What a big win.” Then it would say, “Have you thought about this?” Or, “I also saw this and maybe this would help build the business.” What I learned from actually writing the letters, even though I wasn’t getting a response, they became more and more a vehicle for me to learn about the industry. By the time he called, I didn’t really think I was going out on a limb and not taking no for an answer. I actually believed I could really help the company at that point.
I actually did this one more time. I wrote letters to Warren Buffett. In 2012, I sold a digital marketing agency that I had founded, called Tippingpoint Labs. I had founded it actually with a journalist friend of mine who I met at that first television station we talked about. When I sold the company, I was wondering what to do next, then I thought I would buy a newspaper. I don’t know if you’re aware, but Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, owns 60 newspapers and I thought, “I’ll write letters every week.” I wrote him a handwritten note about how he could save the newspaper industry. It took me less than the three years. It ended up taking about a year and a half but I ended up having a meeting with him in New York as a result of the letters I had written. Again, it was the same outcome. I think I learned a ton about the business as a result of writing the letters to him. I also published them on Tumblr which actually generated a huge amount of interest from some of the world’s largest publishers.
Haven’t you turned some of that strategy that you learned owning this digital agency into part of your keynotes now?
Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships
Yeah. The first book I wrote was called Brandscaping. After I worked at The Muppets, I worked at a couple of startups because everybody was leaving the television world in the late 1990s to work at the first dot-com boom. I got really into that as well, so I started working into marketing. I felt like I was working for really not smart marketers. My friend, Jim Cosco, and I founded Tippingpoint Labs in 2000 and we sold it in 2012. In 2012, I essentially said, “Let’s take all the knowledge that we learned at running an agency and turn it into a book.” I published the book when I left the agency in 2012. It’s a summation of what we learned, which is essentially partnering with other people to access your audience is a much better way to invest your money today than buying traditional media. That’s the short summary. A lot of that agency thinking has really propelled my speaking career but also helped me rethink marketing in general.
One of the things that we haven’t even touched on that is quite fascinating especially with what’s going on in the political landscape right now is you were a presidential advisor on the Russia relations from 2010 to 2012. Any insights on what that was like? There’s got to be a story there.
I can sum up that experience as a real clue into how the political system works but also how multinational negotiations work. I’ve been successful in the business world. I’ve been invited by the State Department and President Obama to be on a council. I do know a lot about the media. I had a lot of experience in the newspaper business as well and publishing. I was invited as well as six other people to be on this media relations and Russian relations team. I left really disillusioned not at any administration or people specifically, but on how slow and antiquated relationships work in the political sphere. It’s just not like I’m used to doing business, getting things done, and really having meaningful and substantive conversations with people. There was a lot of, “You just don’t do that. We don’t talk about the tougher issues early. We’ve got to build rapport and slowly bring in issues that they want to talk about.” Over two years, we did not get much done and that really disappointed me but it was a really interesting experience. There were people from the film industry. There were people from digital media. There were people from traditional newspapers, all six amazing people on the panel on the US side and on the Russian side. I learned a ton about the business in general.
Let’s jump ahead a little bit to what you’re talking about for 2018, which is your keynote about Raise the Stakes. Who’s that for and what are some of these simple secrets?
Chasing answers is one of the ways that storytellers help raise the stakes in telling a story. Raise the Stakes, the keynote that I’ve been giving since September is actually a fairly new one for me. It’s all about how people craft stories that actually get people to the end of the story, which in a digital age is very, very difficult. Especially if you’re thinking about watching on YouTube or even you’re listening to this podcast, there are lots of other opportunities for you to drop off and leave the consumption of the content. I spent about two years working through all the kinds of elements that I have even learned in television and in marketing that really do help tell a story that keeps people captivated and gets them all the way to the end, which is where you’re making your ask, where that call to action really is. Whether you’re pitching someone an idea or a business or just trying to make a sale or if you’re actually just trying to get across your core values for your company, all of these things are important. If they don’t make it to the end, you didn’t accomplish your goal of getting them to consume the entire length of the content. I didn’t tell you any of the secrets. I was getting you to chase the answer.
Tell us the story of a brand that uses the secret.
Let’s just use videos in general because they’re very easy for us to understand. How-to videos are really good example of videos that people get all the way through and that they cannot skip around. There’s a series of steps in a how-to video and you know you’ve got to get from point A to point B, so you’ve got to watch the whole thing if you want to get from point A to point B. Videos that are how-to videos keep people asking a question. The simple question there is, “What’s next?” If you’re giving a presentation or pitching something, if you keep them on the edge of their seats always asking, “What’s next?” that’s the most basic presentation or pitch or story you can tell. If you take it up a notch, raising the stakes is basically showing something that people really want, which could be your audience, it could be your customers, it could be the people that are sitting in the boardroom that you’re trying to pitch something to. Then threaten it as much as you can for as long as possible. That gets the tension really high and that’s when they’re interested in hearing how to solve this problem. The key to this is not solving the problem before you make the ask. At the height of their tension you’ve got to say, “Before I tell you how I solved all these problems or how these problems are going to be solved, I need $3 million from you. That is why I’m here.” Then you tell them how you’re going to solve the problem and then they’re interested in really answering that question because they were paying the most attention right before the release, the catharsis of that answer.
[Tweet “Raise the stakes by telling great stories”]
I’m always telling everybody that people buy emotionally and then back it up with logic. You’re talking about getting them at this emotional state where their brain is so alive and paying full attention that then you slip in what your ask is as opposed to them not associating that ask with any kind of emotional state.
You want them essentially at the height of their enthusiasm, anticipation, and interest for whatever is coming next. When it’s your ask, that’s the best time to get them to fully comprehend what you’re asking for and still want to know the answers to the question.
You also have this great thing called Momentum and how you turn people from browsers into buyers. Let me tell you, I talk about how to take people from invisible to irresistible, so nobody appreciates an alliteration as well as much as I do. The full alliteration is How Brilliant Businesses Turn Browsers into Buyers. That’s a brilliant piece of copy. Let’s double click on that and just open that up a little bit because everyone has that problem. Going from just browsing to your site and not clicking to buy, browsing from, “I’m looking at a bunch of resumes,” browsing from, “We’re looking at a lot of other speakers,” whatever it is.
I think the biggest issue actually is the approach in general. I think most of us, when we’re thinking about trying something new from a marketing or a sales perspective, we want to try the new stuff on a new prospect or customer immediately. I think that used to be the case. The smartest marketers and businesses today actually do the inverse. They experiment with their latest ideas, innovations, products, pitches, even marketing messages with their most loyal customers. I call them their loyalty loop. Instead of trying out your next big pitch on five investors in a big boardroom that you’ve never met before, the best thing to do is actually call someone you pitched two years ago that has heard you before and was maybe mildly interested and try the new pitch again. That way, you’re much more likely to get actual really good feedback.
Brandscaping: If you really want to build momentum, the first thing you should do is email it to your loyalty loop.
This applies even for email. A lot of people spend a lot of time writing great content to put on their blog and the first thing they do is tweet it out. I think if you really want to build momentum, the first thing you should do is email it to your loyalty loop. You should think about it in two phases. One is just a few people that are very close to you that you really do respect the opinion of and this content would be relevant to them. You want very specific feedback. Instead of going right then to tweeting it out, wait for that feedback. Wait for them to consume the content and return to you with some feedback. Then take it to your wider loyalty loop. That might be everybody in your company or it might be everybody that subscribed to your email newsletter. What you’re waiting for is actually the half-life of the consumption of your content, which means you’re actually waiting for the most people possible to consume it, then as it start to wane in interest, then you want to take it to the next level.
I broke out down-building Momentum into four phases. Start with your loyalty loop. Then it’s essentially move on to your social networks one by one. Instead of tweeting it out first on Twitter and then two seconds later putting it on Facebook and three seconds later doing a YouTube video on a SlideShare. You’re vomiting it on everybody. Stop vomiting your content on everybody. We don’t want your puked content. The more strategic about when you distribute your content instead of where you distribute it, the better off you’re going to be in building momentum for it.
The third phase is actually buy ads. I know this is counterintuitive in an age where everybody says just social media will do the trick. If your content has been successful in those first two phases, investing in a new audience, attracting new people to your content is really important to your stuff, to your pitch, to whatever it is you’re working on. The final thing is PR. Most people do the inverse. They start with a big product launch or a big announcement or hoping to get in The New York Times with their new big idea at the very beginning. Today, you’ve got to think of it in reverse. It ends up looking like building a mountain instead of building a series of spikes.
You’ve been on television multiple times. I’ve had the privilege of being on television and I know that when you’re pitching to get on television, the better your segment idea is structured in four minutes or less, that they can have a sound bite that grabs people and it’s backed up by the fact that you’ve already got some traction is what you’re saying with this.
You need to show them some social proof that it’s actually already got momentum. They need to think that they’re going to propel it to the next level.
You and I have talked briefly that you have some tips that you’ve learned from pitching from television that people can apply to their business. Let’s begin with that.
In the late 1990s, I was also pitching a lot of reality TV shows. When I first started our agency, Tippingpoint Labs with Jim Cosco, he and I were going out to LA from Boston almost every month, pitching shows to everyone from the networks to agents. We spent a ton of time out there. First of all, learning how to pitch TV shows but then second of all, failing a ton. We must have pitched 500 or 600 shows. We got a few option shows and we got one produced, which was actually a really bad show. It was called Knock First and it was on ABC Family for a season. It was a good idea executed poorly, I think. The art of pitching especially in television, what I learned very quickly was just simplifying the idea very, very quickly to the core of what you’re actually doing. I think too many people pitch very complicated ideas in very complicated ways. It doesn’t mean that your idea is simple. It means the art of the pitch is simplifying it so that it can be understood quickly, consumed quickly, and they can make a decision very quickly if they want to hear more. That’s really important. When I said we’re chasing answers, you want to simplify it so fast so that they can make a decision. When you pitch a TV show and I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, John. Have you?
[Tweet “How to turn browsers into buyers”]
I have pitched a couple of reality show ideas in front of the people that know what they’re doing. You have to go like, “It’s ‘Liar Liar meets Oh, God!’ or it’s ‘Big Brother meets the Survivor.’” They need points of references really fast.
It’s called an analogy line. When you go into a pitch, you pitch the idea and you would pitch it just like you just did. Or you might say, “Fear Factor is ordinary people facing their fears by competing against each other in outrageously devised stunts.” They make a split second decision. They say, “No, I don’t like it,” or they say, “Tell me a little more.” That’s exactly what you’re trying to do, get people to chase those answers. You’re trying to simplify the ideas you present. The other thing was I realized there was a giant difference between crafting a pitch and just creating a presentation. I think people in the last ten years or twenty years have essentially believed the two are the same. Creating a presentation is just putting a deck together and then going in and reading the deck or telling a bunch of stories that are on your presentation slides or just presenting ideas. Crafting a pitch is all about building that story in the right way where you’re really simplifying the idea and you’re focusing not on who you are or what you do because they don’t care at that point. You’re actually pitching the idea first and waiting for them to ask a question.
You said something that I really want to underline for everyone listening which is, just because you simplify your pitch doesn’t mean you’re simplifying your product, your concept, your idea, whatever the value is of what you’re doing. Most people go, “I don’t want to dumb down what I’m doing.” I’m like, “You need to make it so simple and intriguing that people want to know more and not tell everything at once.” In fact, one of my favorite quotes from an investor was, “Don’t boil the ocean.” That’s what you’re saying here is simplify the pitch so you’re not trying to explain everything.
There’s a real art to that. It’s actually really, really hard. The most successful pitching people in the world are really good at simplifying big ideas. At Tippingpoint, we actually had five really simple pitching rules. The first one was, “Assume your audience knows everything you wish they knew.” That was rule number one. I think we spend too much time just in general teaching people and thinking they don’t know what we need them to know. In fact, if you just make the assumption they know everything you wish they knew, they either will ask or they won’t ask. They’ll look it up and all of that stuff keeps them interested in whatever it is you’re doing. When you over-teach, you’ll lose the audience. That was number one.
Two, “The audience doesn’t care what we know.” That’s a really important one. A lot of people pitch and they try to sound smart and look smart, and most people don’t care what you know really. If they do, they’ll ask. The goal is to keep them asking questions when we’re pitching. Number three I think was, “Pitch with unbridled enthusiasm.” Number four I think was, “Make no excuses,” which is a very controversial one because we even get really upset if somebody was late for a meeting. If you show up late for a meeting, which does happen, but the first thing you do is walk in and say, “I’m so sorry I’m late. The traffic was really bad.” You’re already off to a really bad start. Making no excuses for a pitch is really important. It doesn’t mean you don’t apologize, but we prefer that you apologize at the end instead of starting off that way. Number five is my favorite, “Pitch and stop.”
That includes an elevator pitch. If someone says to you, “What do you do?” that’s not an invitation for a ten-minute monologue.
Pitch and stop was the key. Actually full disclosure, I am the worst rule infraction person for that rule. In fact, Jim Cosco, my business partner, was the opposite and he would kick me under the table. It was clear I just needed to shut up and let it go. I really do think there’s an art to pitching. The last one is, “Go big or go home.” I think there are too many people pitching great ideas but not pitching them as if this is their big pitch. This is something I learned in acting in the very early days.
Brandscaping: There are too many people pitching great ideas but not pitching them as if this is their big pitch.
Every audition is like the Super Bowl, right?
That’s right. A casting director told me once that I needed to ham it up, which is surprising for someone like me. If you’ve ever seen me speak, you’d be surprised. What her point was, she even said to me after I did the next take she said, “I need you to go even further.” She had to say this four or five times and I could still keep going further. I kept pushing it. She said, “I want you to go as outlandishly big and crazy as possible on this take.” I did and she was like, “That’s what I wanted.” When I asked why, she said, “Unless I know what you’re capable of, I don’t know how to pull you back. That’s a lot easier than pushing you forward.” I think that goes the same for a pitch. You’ve got to really bring all the enthusiasm and fun that you have. Bring it to the pitch, really deliver it in a way that really does excite the people that you’re presenting to in the manner you’re presenting. Forget about the idea. I’m talking about the way you actually pitch.
At the end of the day, people are going to hire people that they like being with. I was working with a big architectural firm, pitching to do a big airline renovation for five or six years. They were told, “We’re going to hire the people we like and not who has the best design because we’re going to work with you for five or six years.”
“It’s going to be a six-year endeavor. I don’t want to hire people I hate.”
That pitch, you better come across to someone that they want to work with, that’s fun, and all that stuff. People so often leave out that characteristic and they think, “I just have to show my stuff.” I loved everything, and especially with assuming that the audience already knows what you wish they knew so you’re not teaching them. That’s really great stuff.
I made all the mistakes that led to these rules.
That’s what audience relate to. When you’ve been in their shoes, that’s everything. You have a book called Brandscaping and another wonderful book called Town INC. Let us know the best way to follow you on social media because we know you’re not going to vomit on us. Give us your Twitter handle or your website, all that good stuff.
My Twitter handle is @DrewDavisHere. You can find me there. My website is AkaDrewDavis.com. It’s mostly speaking because that’s all I really do these days, which is lots and lots of fun. I’d love to hear from you. If you’re listening to the show and have pitching questions, pitching is something I’m passionate about but don’t talk about very often so this has been really fun, John. My email address is [email protected].
Andrew, thanks so much for being on the show. You’ve jazzed us up like you do your keynote audiences. I’m sure anyone who’s ever lucky to hear you speak out there, event planners that might be listening to this that you walk your talk. That’s for sure.
Thanks a lot, John. This has been awesome.
Links Mentioned
- Andrew Davis
- The Jim Henson Company
- Tippingpoint Labs
- Brandscaping
- Raise the Stakes
- Momentum
- Town INC.
- Andrew’s Twitter
- [email protected]
- Charles Kuralt
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The Successful Pitch – Book Trailer
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