“Act like a shepherd”: The importance of messaging buy-in with Steve Earl

Mikey: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Presentation Thinking, aka the Storyteller Study Club, a podcast that is on a mission to make us all better presenters and business communicators. I'm your cohost, Mikey Mioduski, founder of Ghost Ranch Communications, a presentation design agency. And I'm joined by my co host, your favorite, Molly Geoghegan, straight out of Englewood, Colorado.

What's up?

Molly: What's up, Mikey? Hello, Presentation Thinking, Presentation Nation. Mikey, it's kind of like the beginning of the year type of episodes for us, so we've been like Reflecting on our journey towards what we call, like to call presentation excellence a lot, right? [00:01:00]

Music: Yeah.

Molly: And, I, you know, I'm writing a newsletter about that, that people might receive soon.

And, um, how would you, like, what is presentation excellence to you?

Mikey: Okay, yeah. So, we've established through observation, working with probably thousands of, of teams over the years, there are four kind of categories or, or cultures around presentations at an organization. Some just kind of go. Yolo, everyone does their own thing.

It gets a little bit crazy. We call it PowerPoint Wild West. Others might try to reign things in a tiny bit and put a little bit of resourcing toward it. And they fall into a camp of make it pretty where every once in a while, they'll launch a new template and hope that that makes things a little more cohesive, but it doesn't last very long.

Then of course, some people really ramp up for that one big keynote every year. Steve Jobs style, they'll actually invest in a really big splashy keynote. And that's great. The rare air, the 5 percent club attain presentation excellence, where from the top, all the way down, people [00:02:00] live and breathe and really strive for better presentations.

And we've defined these four pillars that, that encompass presentation excellence. You have to have a strategic message. You have to have visual storytelling. You have to tailor the presentation to eat, to the moment, to the audience. And you have to be able to do that all at scale. So you have to take a systems approach.

And over the year, we're going to talk about all, all of these pillars and talk about maybe some of the things that are getting in the way of more organizations achieving presentation excellence, but. We're going to start with strategic messaging. And today we have our resident expert, the head of product marketing at Ghost Ranch Communications, Mr.

Steve Earl, because he's lived and breathed strategic messaging and scaling messages at pretty big organizations. And I think Steve, you've seen, uh, maybe the one thing that could probably stop any and all good messaging from getting out there starts at the very top. And um, that's what we want to talk about today is, is [00:03:00] messaging buy in and what role that might have in better presentations across the board.

So Steve, thanks for joining us.

Steve: Uh, happy new year, Mikey, Molly, it's good to be back and looking forward to what I think is a really important part of message rollout. And so, yeah, yeah. Lots of good, good things to talk about here.

Molly: Yeah, and if you're just tuning in, you might recognize Steve's voice from previous episodes, which we'll link, but Steve, you've also helped us with.

Creating you're such a good presenter among many things and you helped create the framework called slide zero, which was really setting up a strategic message before creating a presentation like understanding your what your why and how you're going to go about it. So it's interesting that we're coming back to this topic of messaging buy in.

Where it's like, how important is it to get that, like the buy in from stakeholders and other people and putting that into practice. It's kind of like a different side of slide zero, but it also involves this like pre step before getting to the adoption stage.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, I think as we talked about probably a [00:04:00] year ago now, the hardest work in getting messaging out into the wild happens really before you get to the start line, before you really Really start releasing it to sales or marketing and, and, and that upfront work is just so critical as every product marketer knows it is, it is often work that isn't seen happens behind the scenes by the product marketing teams, but it's so important if, if, if ultimately the messaging is going to hit the mark, um, when it's released.

Yep.

Mikey: Steve, I know this may sound obvious and people listening here are already advocates of better presentations, but like, from your perspective, having been in product marketing. At all levels, like what role do presentations play in a B2B organization, you know, kind of winning and getting to market more successfully?

Steve: Well, I think the reality and you all know that is B2B selling is all done through the presentation medium, whether that's PowerPoint or Google Slides or some other form, you know, [00:05:00] presenting. Your idea, your product, your message in a way that, you know, engages the audience, you know, is the B2B selling approach by default.

So presentation medium is the default way as we all know of B2B selling. And, and it's evolved over the years, but most of these are done through PowerPoint, as you all know very well, and, or Google slides or, you know, some sort of slide way. And so. Captioning your message through that medium, or at least delivering your message to that medium couldn't be more important for, I think, successful B2B selling now, you know, there are definitely parts of the selling process that should be done without a slide deck.

Um, and that's, you know, um, a really important part of selling, obviously the discovery and the conversation and the consultative approach, but there's always a, a presentation element to it. And, and this way is that. All teams, all sellers, all marketers, um, can be better at presentations. And so that's, that's what this whole topic of presentation excellence is about, is help helping [00:06:00] the organizations work through, you know, some of the areas that can improve how they present the ideas and messages to the ultimately customers.

Mikey: I think as I was trying to better understand, like a definition of strategic messaging for myself, I kind of asked you one day, like, so what's the opposite of strategic messaging? Like, if there is a lack of it at an organization, what do you see in, you know, in place of it or in lieu of it? What, what kind of happens?

Steve: If you start with the, with the result or the outcome and work backwards, it's, I think it's easier to talk about what's the implication of not having a more structured messaging or a, you know, disciplined messaging approach. And it really is in sales cycles. I think the sales teams struggle with articulating value properly.

I think the market gets confused because your marketing teams are saying one thing and your sales teams are selling, I tell her, saying something different. So there's both buyer confusion and [00:07:00] market confusion, and then ultimately brand confusion, right? Understanding what your brand represents in the market and offerings and value it provides to, you know, to, to the customers that you target.

So I, I think ultimately it's across many different areas. That's what messaging strives or consistent messaging strives to reign in is, is removing that confusion, bringing consistency to your message, making sure that whether you're, you know, pushing your, you know, your value proposition over social media or on your website or through email campaigns, it all looks and feels and smells the same.

Each of those mediums requires slightly different treatments, obviously different types of copy, but the underlying message needs to be consistent. And, you know, without that. You know, the outcomes are pretty, pretty disastrous, so it's, it's, uh, it's a ruined part of the process.

Molly: For anyone out there that's, like, beginning of the year, kind of finishing up the messaging framework documents and the presentation, and [00:08:00] they have to go and talk to them about their teams, but, like, the team, they have to convey why this is so important and to, you know, buy into exactly that importance and emphasis you just described.

What kind of advice would you be giving that person? What happens for them?

Steve: Yeah, I mean, it's probably the biggest challenge or the things that product marketers can do early on that will lead to ultimate success is buy in. And so with this whole topic today is about message buy in or getting that early buy in because ultimately, without that buy in up front of your stakeholders and your, even your subject matter experts, Primarily your stakeholders, uh, downstream adoption just won't be possible.

So I think there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about today about what PMN should be thinking about early on in that message development or message creation process, particularly around how to get buy in. And that's a really. Really critical part of the process that can make or [00:09:00] break the alternate, uh, success of the message.

Mikey: Awesome. So we're going to crack them open, Molly. Three imperatives for messaging buy in. Tip number one, Steve Earle. I love this one. Do you want to let us

Steve: know what it is? Yeah, so I think every Every product marketer needs to think like a sales person and, you know, think about your messaging as your product and your internal teams or stakeholders as your customers.

Now, as product marketers, we, we support the sales organizations all year, right? We were really good at value based messaging and helping sellers deliver The right messages or help them position the product in a way that, that ultimately the, the, um, prospect is going to buy. So product marketers, when they're thinking about getting buy in for their messaging and their messaging is.

is their product. They need to think like a salesperson. You may think that your messaging is amazing and all the stakeholders can't wait [00:10:00] to get in the room with you and step through every line of it, but they've got day jobs. And frankly, they don't, they don't really understand what messaging is, to be honest with you.

They know you're doing something and really get it. And, and what they don't get is, The downstream impacts of consistent messaging we just talked about. So, so you've got to think about yourself as a salesperson and that messaging doesn't sell itself. It'll flop if you don't sell it. Um, so internal selling is a critical part of this buy in process before you've even deployed it to the sales team or to the marketing team.

Getting that buy in up front is a selling exercise. So treat your messaging as the product and consider your, your internal teams as, as your customers.

Molly: Kind of a good way to try it out too, because if you're doing that kind of before you're doing it externally, and especially if people are excited, get excited about it and can easily feel like, yeah, I could, I can work that into my, my basic sales spiel or whatever, then that's a good sign, right?

[00:11:00] Like, And it's a green flag for your messaging.

Steve: Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the, you know, as product marketers, when we put a product deck together for our sales teams,

Music: yeah,

Steve: we all know it should be W driven, right? What's, you know, products bright and the features are wonderful, but, but what is the What's the value that my product is going to deliver custom selling to.

So when you think about messaging, think about the same way, right? Think, think like a salesperson, always map when you're in front of these, you know, stakeholders, always map what you're doing. The impact of your messaging or how it aligns with business strategy and business priorities. And that, that is the people in the room have to know what's in it for them, right?

What, why are they sitting in the room listening to your messaging, um, review? So be really clear on the value to them and the outcomes you're trying to achieve. You know, one example at Enterprise Tech Company, we were really good getting. Top of pipeline leads, top, top of [00:12:00] funnel leads, lots of conversations happening with our sales teams.

But then the sales deals didn't progress very far down the pipe. They got stuck early stage for whatever reason dropped off. And so we were really good at, at capturing the audience's attention, identifying a problem, setting a vision, but then the sales team struggle with progressing those leads. So, so that became this deal progression.

Became a priority for the business. And, and so product marketing had to help with the sales, um, not just getting new conversations, but progressing those through the sales, sales cycle. So we worked on some messaging and some approaches that really was around maturity models. You know, it was really around.

Yeah, here's the vision, but, but let's, let's help you, Mrs. customer get from where you are today to this ultimate vision. And there's a set of steps along the way. So it was, it was through a maturity model conversation to help. Progress those deals through the sales, sales process. [00:13:00] Every time we, before we rolled it out, each time we were in front of the stakeholders that we wanted to get approval or buy in for the messaging.

I always came back to the ultimate goal was connected to this priority. What we're trying to do is. Help deal progression and this is an approach that's going to help address that ultimate business priority and that got their attention So it was it was then they were open to listening to kind of the messaging and our approach and how we were going to do That but but I think be clear on the outcomes for the people in the room And attach that to a business priority and if there isn't a business priority, I think I think you've got to question why you're doing what you're doing, but that's going to get the attention of what it says you want buy in from.

Oh,

Mikey: that's so good.

Molly: That brings up the thing of like messaging is for. Your business values and your business outcomes like you should be building it to achieve help achieve and establish something right so it's not [00:14:00] like you're just whipping up a random story sometimes people like oh we don't need all that fluff but like that that can help as it's not fluff you know if it's strategically done it can really help establish and reach the right people so there's so many ways like messaging is a form of storytelling Mikey and I have talked about those nuances and like what umbrella fits where but That is part of your brand story, and your brand story helps with business.

Steve: Yeah, and Molly, each time, I'm thinking back now, we had lots of these buy in reviews.

Music: Yeah.

Steve: And often it's the same group of people, or subsets of the same group, but I still, that first slide, I still, Reinforce the mapping, right? The first slide was always, I know you've heard this 10 times before, let me go back and tell you why we're doing this.

Restate the business priority. Even though they got sick of hearing that it was, it was reinforcing the fact that this wasn't, this isn't being done in a vacuum. It's actually to solve a real [00:15:00] problem in the week. So it could be as simple as starting the first slide before you get into the messaging With restating why we're doing it and, and the value that it's going to deliver that, you know, the stakeholders and business as a whole.

Mikey: Steve, I'm glad you mentioned slide because, you know, when we think of a, maybe a messaging framework, a lot of times it's the deliverable might be like a doc, here's our new messaging doc. And we're all, the three of us are reading Emma Stratton's new book, Make It Punchy. And she has this really good quote, it's like, There's zillions of messaging docs collecting dust on drives across organizations, you know, around the world because they were just chucked over a fence and they weren't actually given any real influential push or like, you know, maybe presentation of the why you should care about this.

Steve, your next one, I think is a really compelling point, which is to actually communicate the messaging. Like it's a high stakes presentation. And you say, because that's what it is. So can you, [00:16:00] can you tell us about that? The second point?

Steve: Yeah, it's a, it's a really important one, I think, because as much as us product marketers get into the details, we understand what messaging has to be a certain way and a level of detail, level of nuance.

The, the audience doesn't always, most times don't always think the way private marketers do. It doesn't mean. They're wrong. That's just the difference. So when we're presenting messaging, messaging can be dense and complex. So presenting the information is often tricky. Got this audience, you're, you want to get by them, but presenting it is, is as important.

Um, long to think about. What's file you're going to look like if you don't get buy in the messaging, isn't going to be rolling, right? They're not going to buy your product rather than the product being the messaging. So, so this is a high stakes situation. And you need to be thinking about how you present this to [00:17:00] the audience.

Um, if we think about, we did a spiky recently about the inter private marketers, how many internal presentations do you do compared to external presentations? And, and not surprising, you know, the, the number of internal presentations was far greater in the multiples compared to external presentations.

But. But we, we know that not a lot of effort, time, planning, preparation is done in these internal sessions. But this particular example is really important. You should take the time, communicate your messaging like it's a high stakes presentation because, because frankly it is.

Mikey: I remember an amazing presentation from your days at Oracle where you, you put a lot of sweat into this one messaging framework and you know, I, I think only now is this really becoming clear to me as to like why you cared so much and because other clients, you know, they, they weren't putting a quarter of as much time or investment [00:18:00] into An internal messaging presentation.

And so, yeah, I know you've walked the walk and I'm curious, like, whether it was that one or another, is this a one and done kind of presentation or, you know, like what's the life cycle of something like this? Yeah, that particular

Steve: example, it was, uh, it was at Oracle, you know, Oracle, you know, Oracle Marketing Cloud, I ran product marketing for that and then Oracle, Oracle CX marketing.

But both of those scenarios, the portfolio there at Oracle was built through acquisitions, right? They had portfolio of products that were leading products in their respective category, whether that be in marketing or broader CX. So it was a very, um, very different products from everything from marketing automation through service to personalization and data, but each of them had their own unique value proposition.

And so positioning or creating messaging portfolio wide was pretty complex, complicated and prone to opinions and errors. [00:19:00] And so, yeah, that, that example specifically to the marketing cloud piece was to take this idea of, of it's important to present this messaging to these stakeholders. And so we went through a process of just like we do with the sales deck.

We did, you know, this internal deck working with ghost ranch at the time, um, to help bring the messaging to life a little bit, because what we didn't want to do was sort of throw the messaging over the wall and say, Hey, read it and provide comments, right? Here's a Five page, 10 page document, because some will, most won't, and you really won't get the feedback.

And that's not buy in, that's just hoping to get through the process and tick the box. And so, putting it into slides. Using animations to build and tell the story, right? The story element's important and it's hard to, to, to do it, to build a story around messaging, but at least not within messaging, but about your messaging.

Um, it can be challenging, but, but think about it in terms of building and presenting what the messaging is. And, [00:20:00] and it isn't about getting into the features, right? You know, it's, you know, we don't, we don't want our sales teams to talk about the features of their product. So we're talking about the messaging.

It isn't necessarily getting into all the line level details, but say at a level that they understand and best articulates the value. So we did that and it wasn't just a one time presentation. You know, we had to sell this to different audiences in different regions. And, and, and so we developed, you know, a presentation.

That I thought at the time, you know, would maybe get a handful of uses, but really was used throughout the whole financial year because there's always new people to, once the buy in is done, right now you're getting adoption, that whole, you know, the whole work body of work you did about how to present it helped with sales enablement and helped with downstream education and things like that.

So, so yeah, so treat when you're getting buy in, treat that buy in [00:21:00] set set of sessions, like you would a high stakes presentation and use the time and as was PowerPoint, it could be any sort of slide kind of presentation. But the point is, is presented, don't just throw it over the wall.

Molly: Yeah, definitely.

Was there, how many times would you say presented was single messaging

Steve: framework to get buy in was the most amount of times? Oh, Molly, I, I don't, I lost count. I don't, I don't know. It's impossible

Molly: to know the exact numbers, there's so many.

Steve: I think the point is, it was, it was greater than one, probably, you know, in, in the tens of times, but, but, but what was good was it wasn't, once that was created, my team then could use those.

Same slides, the regional leaders could use those same slides to train their regional sales team. So, I don't know where it went from that point, but because it was much easier to educate people on and give them, [00:22:00] you know, kind of the big picture, you know, I have no doubt it was used beyond just me personally, but, um.

Molly: And do you feel like it was helpful to have that iteration so that by the time It was passed to people you were like, well, okay, we've nailed it. We needed to emphasize this a little bit less of this. Did you kind of tweak along the way? Did you find?

Steve: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's like, would any, any dead quite any salesperson, you'd want to get feedback from sales and adjust it so it works.

So this is no different from that. And, and it was always an iterative process because often the buyer, you know, You're going to get feedback from, from key stakeholders. That's, that's guaranteed. So, but it was a good way to get out of the weeds as well. Just, you know, what, at least at the higher executive levels, if it's presented, right.

It was comprehensive. It cascaded top to bottom from the strategic down to the right down to the product level without getting into the nuances. So it was, you had to strike that balance between not getting stuck in some, you know, [00:23:00] Yeah. And it was, it's a tricky balance, but definitely if, if, you know, if you, if we zoom out from this topic, it's, it's think about it like a presentation.

You are presenting this, you know,

Molly: totally

Steve: to, to, to these, these teams.

Molly: And the audience is like, yeah, the live, you need to listen to the feedback too, not to make fear enterprise sale experience super trying to make, I'm trying to like make it super cool. Cause it is cool. But I'm just reminded, Mikey, we've talked about, uh, the surf documentary filmmaker, Bruce Brown, here on the podcast, and Mikey's a big surf fan, and he famously, when he released The Endless Summer, his, like, iconic film, he took it on the road, and so he showed it in these small, like, scale premieres, or just shampoos and stuff, and Based on where audience would, like, react, or maybe he could tell they were tuning out.

He'd get, like, feedback from the audience members after the fact. He didn't do a wide release until, I think, a year of doing that, Mikey. He did, like, 60 something show weeks or something. Live narration, and then

Mikey: decided, [00:24:00] and then before laying down that final film cut. Yeah. So

Molly: talk about getting buy in.

Mikey: Get those reps.

Gets better each time, exactly. And then, and then you're in the CEO's office, and that, by that point, you're, you've got it locked. Yeah.

Molly: Same thing with Enterprise Tech.

Mikey: Yeah, so we've got the three imperatives for messaging buy in. We've got two down. Think like a salesperson. Present it like it's an actual high stakes presentation.

The third one, I think, Steve, like, marketers are often accused of living in their ivory tower, you know, like being in this echo chamber. Maybe not being as collaborative as maybe sellers would want them to be. I think that maybe influences your, your third and final point about better buy in. Uh, can you talk about this?

Steve: Yeah, number three is about acting like a shepherd, right? I think what that means is marketers as they go through this message development journey is bringing stakeholders along with them. And I, you mentioned Emma Stratton's book. I, I kind of, and maybe it was a quote that you have in the blog, I don't recall, but, but [00:25:00] what I saw was.

She said, I might call my, this is her quote, I might call myself a message strategist, but I'm really more of an alignment strategist when I consult with teams and I re I read that. And it kind of, it kind of fitted into this, this sort of topic about as a product marketer, your role is often to facilitate the process.

Is to work with the subject matter experts, the executives as well, because even if they have a lot of the answers in their head, you, your role is as a product marketer is to. Is to work with them to kind of bring that out and to facilitate a process as opposed to being in a room and coming up and revealing the messaging shouldn't be a big reveal, right?

It should be something that's a process. And if you're bringing the stakeholders along that process with you, when you get to the buy in phase. It's going to be so easy, you know what I mean? And I think these three imperatives kind of connect together and this is, this is, you know, act like a shepherd.

Don't, it's not a big reveal, [00:26:00] you know, bring the stakeholder, the one with you, partner early and often and, and give, give them a voice. I think that's really an important part of this because, because, you know, at Ghost Range Frank, you know, one of my roles is to work with our clients on On messaging, right, on, you know, messaging and narrative development.

And we, we work with all sorts of clients from, you know, you know, people in biotech, AI, you know, companies to even, you know, um, you know, carbon removal from the atmosphere. We work lots of, and we're not experts. I'm not an expert in any of those industries. So my role isn't to come in and tell them what their messaging is, but it's to kind of facilitate work with the key stakeholders and the experts in their, you know, in their respective businesses and work the journey with them and facilitate, you know, what that message might like.

So I think that's a very important role that product marketers to, to take on as they're thinking about building messaging. You know, and making sure it's going to [00:27:00] be successful.

Music: Mm hmm.

Mikey: Yeah. I loved it. You, you actually guided us through our own messaging journey last year. You know, I think at Ghost Ranch we're so used to really fast turnarounds and, you know, this for working in the presentation space.

And I actually really kind of relished the time that we took on our messaging. It was, it wasn't like, we're going to sprint through this in a week. It was a quarter, maybe a little longer than that. And we kept revisiting. All right, here's where we're at. And by the time we finished, like you said, I'd seen this stuff so many times and we were just by the end finessing it, but it was like instilled in us, we were all bought in like our, you know, three, four execs.

And then we started to kind of like socialize it with certain people. Hey, is this going to work? And I think you even tapped clients. You tapped our employees and, and it was a really cool process. So I, I really enjoyed it. And I would recommend it to anybody is, and as well, like not to try to speed through it, because I think that would have kept me personally a little jittery that like, we're, [00:28:00] we're trying to force something.

And so I really appreciated the time. That we took to make it, make sure it was done, right.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. And if you follow, you know, if you follow that approach, it really isn't a one time buy in event. You know what I mean? It isn't like now we're going to do buy in. It's sort of, it happens as you go. And I think that takes the pressure off as well.

That point in time where it's like, this is the make or break meeting. If it doesn't happen, you know, everything's blown up. So I think kind of that, taking that, that kind of ongoing. Kind of Shepherd approach, really working with and giving, giving your stakeholders the voice and, and getting back in the room with them, right.

Get, you know, giving them updates along the way. You know, one, one example back at, you know, that Oracle example I just gave, I remember by following that process, when I kind of got into one of the bigger buy in meetings, A couple of the folks that were in that room had, had, I worked with them, they were key stakeholders on that journey and they'd already bought in and advised [00:29:00] and corrected and helped me with the messaging.

So they were in the room in that next buy in session, you know, talking on my behalf. I mean, they could jump in and it really took the pressure off me and I wasn't the only person in the room. That was talking. And so, so it had lots of benefits, you know, if you think about yourself more as a facilitator and bring the stakeholders along that journey with you.

Mikey: So you don't have to win over everyone all at once in one big room, but it's okay to have these side conversations and be like, what do you think about this? And like, as you said, kind of win them over one by one so that when they're all in the room, you've already done it with 90 percent of them. Right.

Yeah.

Molly: Build some allies.

Mikey: Yeah.

Molly: You know, I love the metaphor, Mikey, of The hero's journey, there's usually like some typical magical wizard or mentor that brings a gift and helps, you know, bring the hero along the way, and we often say when you're building for an audience, like, they're the hero, you have to be the one giving them the gifts, and I think this applies here too, where Acting [00:30:00] like a shepherd for your stakeholders here.

You want your work your your your story is not disjointed You know, you're both working towards the same Business goals and overall like values for the company So you might as well be the one bringing them the magical gifts of messaging

Mikey: Yes, and Steve how often should this stuff be revisited?

Molly: Yeah, I'm sure

Mikey: the answer is it depends

Steve: Yeah, I mean messaging is Messaging is never done.

However You What you do find is within the organization, you're in, you know, think about the big tech companies, you can't change the messaging overnight and then call the sales on Sunday night and they're ready to go Monday morning. So it depends, right? Depends on the size of the company. The market dynamics, often you're in early stage market, that's changing all the time.

So the competitive positioning changes a lot because there's vendors coming up. But you know, when you've got a fairly large sales organization, you can't be changing the message every week or every month. [00:31:00] So it's, it's definitely an ongoing process, but because of the overhead of sales and all this auto consumption.

You kind of, what we typically did, we kind of created the messaging for the year, reassessed every quarter, but the competitive intelligence side was really important because that's the piece, you know, we're winning for different reasons because of the different market dynamic that can really impact the messaging and you should respond to that pretty quickly.

But, but I would just say it's, it's. It's an ongoing process. And one thing that's, you know, it'd be interesting to, to ask product marketers, how often they refresh their messaging. You know, there's the evolution of it throughout the year, but a refresh to me is like a, a reset almost. And some people do it every.

Financial year, right? Every year they reset and, you know, in large organizations, sometimes it's hard because you have to retrain all your sales people, you know, as opposed to just evolve the message a little bit. And, you know, messaging over time [00:32:00] should evolve unless there's some pretty significant market changes.

But it is an interesting question, Mikey. And the answer is it depends, but I don't, I think the, the one thing that private market is shouldn't take away is. It isn't a one and

Music: done because

Steve: our job is to make sure it continues to resonate, tweak it along the way, augment it, refine it, you know, what you don't want to do is make wholesale changes every quarter because it just, it's really hard to re enable a sales team, but

Mikey: yeah,

Steve: but we also don't want to just do it once and forget about it because, you know, that's not the best approach.

Molly: Yeah.

Steve: Balancing act.

Molly: Mikey, I think it's time for the Spice Cabinet of messaging. And I'm curious, Steve, were there any frameworks or lists of questions to dial in messaging? Or people you followed that helped you kind of shape your view of messaging. How did you, how did you learn about it?

Steve: Boy, there's so many smart people out there.

I think I got [00:33:00] most of, most of my refinement from working with salespeople. It's not working with marketers. It's funny because, you know, ultimately, it's the sales folks who have to stand in front of that client, right? And, and the words, you know, come out of their mouth. And that's the point, that's the point of reality, right?

It's not the, yeah, you can put marketing words on a website and yeah, you know, you get some, but you can measure visitors and all that. And that's great. It's hard to, to bid to sales, but you know, it's the salesperson that at the end of the day, that's where the rubber meets the road. You know, there's a handful.

When I think about the people I've learned from, it's even, I'm not a salesperson, I'm a marketer, but I felt that where I really advanced my, I guess the way I did messaging was. By talking to these, the best salespeople and the way and what was important to them, and that helped get rid of the fluff, right?

It, it helped dial into the differentiation. It helped focus on the value side of messaging, right? Or [00:34:00] so I think there's no one person, Molly, but I, I think there's a type of person that I think I, I clearly I'm the most from in that, that, that senior sales executive that has just been doing this, I know what.

They might not know the essence of the message, but they know what's garland, right? And what works and what doesn't work. So anyway, so that, that's probably my, you know, you know, that's the way I've answered the question.

Molly: I love that. Yeah. Well, and it's reinforcing. I went through that product marketing core certified course in London last month.

And a big thing for every module that we went through was about keeping that open communication between marketing and sales because they, they have to, you have to be clued in with what's important to them so that you can both be moving things forward and succeeding siloing stuff doesn't really help anybody.

So keep talking to your sales people. Befriend, make allies of them, it's, it's worth it for sure.

Mikey: They might give it to you straight too.

Molly: Yeah.

Mikey: They, uh, [00:35:00] I would never say that. Yeah, I think they'll let you

Steve: know. And they should. You know, yeah. Yeah. Totally. You want to be authentic. The salesperson is your customer.

Yeah. You need to listen to what they need and what works and what doesn't. And if you don't, then you're going to be, you're going to be successful, isn't it?

Molly: Yeah. Yeah. I like

Steve: that.

Molly: And as far as, we've mentioned this a couple of times, as far as some books or resources about messaging that you've found really useful, we've already quoted Emma Stratton's recent book, Make It Punchy.

We'll go ahead and link. Link that as well. I've been listening to that one and I know she offers a few cool frameworks of list of questions to ask yourself and ask your teams as you go through these messaging exercises. So, and those are, I think freebies are some of them on her site, so I'll link that.

Anything, any other books or podcasts you've listened to that have helped with messaging. Or that you've been inspired by, Steve?

Steve: You know, I, I, I guess I'm a student of the way the brain works a little bit. Really, I'm a science type of person from old and I really [00:36:00] enjoy as we understand more about the brain and how the brain responds to stimuli and, and, you know, there's a corporate visions is a company of art for a long time, they kind of link.

Selling techniques or what works in selling to how the brain responds. And I really, you know, really enjoy some of the work they put together and they're coming from a selling perspective. It's all about selling. And that's, again, ultimately, I think a product market issue is around, but, but I do like the way they think about it and a lot of the related content about how the brain.

Responds to stimuli and what works and what sticks and what doesn't, you know, is really fascinating and I try and keep up on some.

Molly: Yeah, I love the blend of behavioral science and selling. Yeah. This makes so much sense.

Mikey: Steve, we know your walkout song has been and always will be You Too Beautiful Day, right?

Absolutely. Any, any changes to that? Let's do it.[00:37:00]

Molly: Thank you for joining us, Steve. We will continue this journey towards presentation excellence and discussing the key components necessary for them as we go throughout 2025. And it starts with buy

Mikey: in, Molly. Yeah, it starts

Molly: with buy in.

Mikey: Yeah. Don't, uh, don't build your messaging in a vacuum. Don't assume it's going to be adopted or bought into without you presenting it.

Present it. All right, Steve, thank you so much for being here. Presentation Nation, thank you for listening. Molly, until we meet again, keep on pitching.