The Art of Persuasion - Lori Zoss

So this is really all about the art of persuasion. Persuasion influences the topic of the day. Lord Exhaust is our guest. Well, I hate it when we go live and then I get alerts. All these alerts came up on our system. So some of the places didn't go live. We'll have to repost them after. Everybody, my name is Bill Gallagher. Scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast show comes to you every week with guests and topics. Our guest this week, Laurie Zkraska. You'll find all our 500 or so shows at scalp scalingcoach.com where you also find out about our coaching programs in scaling your business organization helping you grow. We've got a group starting right now as in the next couple weeks as this one goes live or write about it. And we have cohorts starting all the time. But there's a group to in particular to join right now if that's of interest to you. We help you take you through a year or two of things to get your company growing. Growing. Right. Making the whole process easier. Easier and faster and hopefully more fun. Right. I think business should be fun. So you'll find all that and more@scalingcoach.com There it is. If you're watching a video on the screen and of course it's in the show notes and it's not hard to remember at any rate, anyway, Lori Zos Kraska. Did I say it right?

You did. Thank you.

Welcome to the show. Are you in Ohio? Is that where you are?

I am. I'm in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cleveland wm.

Yes. Yes. Well done. Home of the buzzard. Yeah.

With a buzzard.

That's it.

Yeah. Well, anyway, so for our listeners, she's written a book on the subject and boardroom Playbook about corporate funding, particularly works with profit with purpose centered organizations and has done a lot of work in funding and that kind of thing where like, you know, it's one thing to sell people when you're solving a specific, like, really clear problem, but. But when you have to encourage people to do things that are there of their personal benefit, but it's indirect, that's where persuasion, influence gets even more important. So that's why I thought this was a great topic. Even though our listeners, viewers are not all necessarily people. We have some, but not that many in that world. So I'm glad to have you on the show. We'll also tell you more about our business and all that as we get through it. Yeah. So why don't we start off with a little bit of like your background, talk about that. And you've spent some time learning and honing. I mean first in school, we'll talk about that later. But as you went into and have helped people get better persuasion.

So I started growth owl in 2018. And specifically what Growth OWL does is we work with purpose driven organizations to help represent them with Fortune 1000 companies for funding and sponsorship dollars. And that involves a lot of persuasion. But before I started my company, I actually spent 10 years with PBS and NPR. A lot of people don't realize that member stations actually share resources many times. So I was heading up a group that shared resources of member organizations of PBS and npr. And we would go out and we would find funding specifically from corporations from our, from Fortune 1000 companies for our members, for our member stations. And I just really honed in on what it's like to be in a corporation. You know, before I worked in public media, I worked in for profit broadcasting. I worked in for profit education as well. So it's not as though I didn't know what was it was like on the corporate side, but I just had a really good appreciation for it. And I thought to myself, it would be great if I could take the principles that we utilize successfully in public media and utilize those for all different types of purpose driven companies. And that's really how, you know, Growth OWL started out. And in terms of other facets of my background, I actually have an undergraduate degree in English and communications and then decided to pursue my master's degree in business.

So it's pretty like a command of language, right, is pretty essential for influence and persuasion.

Yeah, absolutely.

Rhetoric and.

Yeah, absolutely. And my. I did a lot in high school and college of theater and my theater background as well gave me a lot of confidence and a lot of the improv that we did also kind of got me prepared for a lot of the situations that I was in throughout my career and continue to be in. Because you have to think on your feet, you have to think creatively, and you have to find a way to connect fast.

You know, it's. So this is unplanned kind of thing. But what comes to mind is you say all that and I wonder if you have a story or example to share with us. And is emotion like in business? We often think about making logical cases for things, except we are human beings, we make our decision with emotion, right? They're emotionally driven and using emotion and language and then we rationalize them with the business case. But the core thing. So I don't know if you have anything to share about using emotion and what you pick up in theater and in other realms that you work, you remember, notice you carried forward.

Yeah. So I have a take on emotion and an example for you, but it might not be exactly what you're looking for, but it's what came to my head. So I want to share that.

Trust it.

So I really spend a lot of time with my clients. I'm going to talk about one in specific to help them understand that when you are dealing with any type of decision maker within your organization, they're going to respond the best to, to facts based language, not feelings based language. So let me give you an example. So I worked with an executive director who on paper was extremely successful at what she did on behalf of her nonprofit. And she did a good job working with her team to bring in sponsorship dollars. But she never was able to exceed a certain ceiling of number that the board and the executives had, had wanted her to meet and exceed. So I started working with her and what I found was that she would get very emotional or what psychologists might call an amygdala attack. The amygdala being the area of your brain that focuses on that flight or fight response in even the basic of situations. So for instance, somebody might approach her from the board and say, well, it's been six weeks since you last heard from XYZ Corporation for funding. Where are you with that? She would internalize. That is kind of a threat. And then go into feelings based language. I feel this, I think this. And I needed to train her. And honestly I do a lot of training with all different types of executives. I'm changing the language to facts based on where you're saying. This is the information I have in front of me based on the behavior of the sponsor. Here's what we expect very different. And I think that's so important because part of the theater experience going back to that is feeling all of the emotions but siphoning out what's going to work for you in that moment. So when I'm working with executives like her, she has to siphon out where she's feeling threatened and focus really on the words that she's using. And since she started doing this, she has been more successful in getting more buy in from her board to assist her in these sponsorship meetings. So definitely a win win. But that is something that, that goes beyond just fundraising. That's just good practice. And working with anybody who is an executive, high level executive C suite within an organization, they will always respond to you best. With facts based language.

Yes. I think in particular like that I hear being aware, self aware of like, oh, I'm triggered. I'm defensive right now.

Correct.

And sometimes the defensiveness is not at all needed or intentional. Like I interpreted and attack and somebody else is just curious.

Correct.

But I'm feeling a little insecure about it and so I went right into that whole thing. So being aware of it, being able to move through the emotion and then focus on the facts. I was actually speaking more about like you know, about appealing to. Well, sometimes you're using a fear based thing in not in yourself but in the other person. So like I know right now you're worried about your company's position on the environment and here's an opportunity to get your message out about what you are doing. Right. I'm appealing to something there or I know we all are. Like we care so much about the safety in our community and about the situation with the unhoused and how we are working on that together. Like we can use appeals to emotion thing intentionally. It backed up with the facts and that kind of. I was thinking more about that. About.

I gotcha. Yeah. So I take everything back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you're familiar with that. So to me, you know, at the base of that pyramid are our basic needs as a human being. Food, are we hungry? Clothing, safety. And then it kind of goes up from there. But the reason I bring this up is because I find that from a feelings perspective you can connect with people best the further at the base of the pyramid you are. We can understand hunger, we can understand and empathize if somebody doesn't have a home or shelter or doesn't feel safe. So if, if you're a non profit and you're in a situation where you're trying to persuade a decision maker, you can fall back on kind of where they are, you know, where is your organization in terms of mission, vision and value on Maslow's needs. And most likely if you're kind of at the base of that pyramid, you have a really, really good chance of connecting with more people the further you get up. It's qualified people, just not as many because we don't always understand and interpret everything throughout the pyramid. So this, this wasn't meant to take you back to college 101 psychology or anything like that?

No, I think it's, it's interesting, it's relevant because I like, I think about early sales jobs that I had and in some companies that I work for at least One that comes to mind is the principal pitch was money savings and a lot of people just didn't care. Like the amount of money saved was kind of irrelevant. What they cared about was like security and reliability. So for those people, we would say, listen, we're a little cheaper than the other guys. But the deal is you want to have both of us in here because if one goes down, you want to be able to switch to the other company. Right. You were selling a tech service and that was compelling. In that case, it was about survivability, redundancy, resiliency, that kind of thing. In other cases where the company was looking for savings everywhere because there was financial concern, then saving money was not aspirational. Saving money was helping the company to survive and that addressed that. But in both cases, we were addressing a fear versus like, let's get the most modern, cutting edge, high quality, whatever. Yeah. People are like, it doesn't matter. Like this is, this is infrastructure, you know, and it didn't give them a competitive advantage to have better technology and they didn't care about the savings. Right. So those aspirational things are nice and sometimes we'll do them, but a lot of times it's, it's like to it to mitigate a fear or concern, right?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, we fear is one of the greatest motivators people have. It's just a matter of what is your fear. You know, and to your point, it's not always money's bay, but money based. You know, when I'm working with clients, you know, I work with a lot of clients where they initially have started engaging with marketing departments, which for a lot of nonprofits and purpose driven organizations, that's the worst place to be because their end goal for marketing is they need to sell product and they need to bring in more customers. You better align. So they don't understand, they don't have the same appreciation of the fear of your nonprofit not getting the money they need or not being able to serve, getting dog food to homeless pets. You know, they don't share that same connection as if you went to corporate social responsibility or corporate philanthropy whose decisions are made based on the things that you do fear. So a lot of it too is not only persuasion, but finding the right people that are kind of in your court.

Yes, that is a great principle even beyond nonprofit is don't go trying to sell something, partner, encourage with the people that don't actually care about what you care about out. Figure out the people who are the easiest, like who really are interested and responsive to that and then work on those people in, in their language, right?

That's exactly right. You know, I, I work with several organizations that one of their biggest issues was they didn't do the proper amount of research to find out who they best connect with. You know, a lot of boards of. It's very popular for boards of directors to say to these purpose driven organization executive directors, well, XYZ, Fortune 500s in our backyard, we should be getting money from them. Well, not necessarily. If there's not a connection there with their vision and values for philanthropy and corporate support, they're not going to give you money. And there's nothing that your executive director can do to change that. So you're absolutely correct.

Yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing to think about. Like, don't, I don't know what the word term is. Like, you know, chase lost causes or kill yourself or something. Like pick your paddles, find a place that's easy to get it.

Yeah. You know, I like to call it 5 not 50. So I think people with good intentions, they, when they want to start engaging corporations or not just in the work, I do think of any project you want to do and you have to, you have to bring in supporters in some way. Right. You get really excited about it and you put a list. I'm going to contact all these people, I'm going to contact all these corporations. The problem is you have good intentions and it doesn't get done because you have other things going on. It's not scalable. So with five not 50, if you just choose five really qualified companies and decision makers to reach out to learn a lot about those five, your chances once you reach out to get a response and persuade them to what you need are much better than if you were reaching out to 50 and only knew a little about each of those 50.

Well, in these days it's not 50, it's 5,000 or 50,000. And I'm gonna spam everybody and do that. And yeah, I just sent out a mail message yesterday and instead of sending it out to everybody on our list. Right. Instead I picked the people that had clicked, had opened.

Yeah.

Prior things around a similar topic. I'm like, okay, let's just send to these people because they seem curious, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. They're, they're, you've already seen them as qualified. You know, they've, they've engaged with you. So why do I care about those that haven't engaged with me? I want to really care about those that are already qualified and. And have a reason to want to work with me. Absolutely.

So we talked about. And. And you first learned Cialdini's work in. In school. Tell us about that experience and then maybe carry it forward to some examples with the companies you've worked with.

Yeah. So I was earning my master's degree and I had to take a class. I shouldn't say had, because I loved it. I took a class called Organizational Leadership with Professor Gates. I'll never forget him. I never forgot him because he was the only professor on campus who was allowed to bring his dog to work. And I'll get to that in a minute. So, Professor Gates, I'll never forget. I remember the class, it was an evening class, and he said, today I'm going to talk to you about Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion, which is the name of the book that Dr. Cialgini wrote that you can still buy. And the moment he started lecturing, you.

Know, we featured Cialdini a lot. We talk about his work regularly and scaling up. So.

Yeah, good. Yeah, awesome. I was hooked. I was hooked because I always felt as though I had a good sense of how persuasion works. But to actually had it categorized like he did was just fascinating to me. And I enjoyed the. I enjoyed the lecture so much. I remember that the bookstore. There was 10 minutes left over the bookstore being open that night, and I ran to our bookstore so I could buy the book and just read it. So you understand that, you know, Cialdini has six, well now seven concepts, you know, for. For persuasion. And they're some of the core that I start all of my clients with and to. To bring it back to my professor. I had asked Professor Gates at the end of the semester, how exactly were you able to get the school to allow you to bring your German shepherd every day? And he said, well, they like the dog better than me. And we discussed how that was liking, which is one of Cialdini's principles.

Yeah, being likable.

That's right, being likable. Which, you know, as you know, that's a huge part of a lot of standard sales training. You know, if they like you, if.

You'Re charming, if you're funny, if you're attractive, if you're tall. I mean, all of these things work in your favor. If you dress weird, if you smell bad, if you look funny, if you say weird things. Right. It's going to be a lot tougher to sell.

Absolutely. So in terms of utilizing his work. In my work.

Yeah.

When I was involved in Public media for those years, we used a lot of social proof. You know, social proof being we look to others and we in this instance we look to other organizations on how we should take the next step. Right?

Yeah.

So a great example, obviously education.

This is follow the crowd, right? This is do what other people do.

Absolutely, yeah. If you're wondering what line to be in, just look around and you'll find the line that you need to stand in. So with public media, education always resonated in terms of sponsors. It made a lot of sense because education is at the core of public media. Anytime we brought on schools, especially K through 12 schools for specific stations, we got calls from competing schools to want to be on. Perfect, perfect social proof working beautifully. When we started to open up who we can acknowledge on the air for underwriting and we started to do a lot more for our Fortune 500 underwriters, we just, we had our first major one in one of our major cities and again we got calls. Well, how are they able to get that? We would like to do that. So social proof has been a big part of success in my time in public media as well as in working with non profits and, and associations because a lot of, there are many corporations that look to purpose driven organizations on how to flow and where to go next when it comes to taking the temperature of the community when it comes to what types of initiatives they should be involved in. So nonprofits and associations, other purpose driven organizations, yes, they need corporations, but corporations also need them as kind of a guidepost for what's going on the community, which goes back to, you know, social proof as well. And authority, which is another one of my favorites. You know, just having authority in your area. A lot of corporations will partner with purpose driven organizations for things like, you know, research data or tell us what's going on in the industry. So we have a better sense. You know, whenever you see like a, an automotive trade organization that is partnered with General Motors or Toyota, a lot of that is because they see that third party nonpartisan association or nonprofit as a great authority for research and, and information. So those are just a couple that I like to use. But liking is a big one. There, there are times. Here's another great example for liking. There is somebody that I, I worked with a while ago that, you know, although things made sense on paper between her non profit and the companies that we were taking her to in for potential support. Yeah, the, the, the, they just didn't connect. The personalities were just too, there wasn't, there wasn't Likability on either side. And that can affect things. It definitely can. So either you wait for another decision maker or you move on. Right. So we moved on and we found where we could connect, and there was likability. But. But absolutely. Likability is a game changer. Definitely.

I noticed sometimes that I've been ready to hire, work with or somebody that seemed likable without stopping to go, wait a minute. Like, this is not a fit. Like, they're. They shouldn't be looking for this job, this opportunity, this whatever. But I do like them. Like, I'm just naturally drawn to them. And then. And then I have to remember, wait, I'm trying to find a vendor or an employee or, like, whatever. I'm not. I don't need a best friend. I don't need a running partner. What I need is to get this particular job done here. And so my liking them, I mean, there's some degree of it that as a, as the hiring person, the partnering person, you want to think about. But the flip side is also true. If you want to go out, make sure that you're finding ways to connect to people. So I naturally look for things we have in common and places where. But it's also useful to look and consider. I recently suggested to a potential client that they go with another coach, and I'm like, you know, I can. I like your. Your business fine. To me, you seem like nice people, but I think there's some things that are a little different about our culture. And I think you should consider this other coach, because I think he' more your vibe. Right? Like, what's your vibe like? And I think you'll. You'll vibe better with him. But that, but that's. Sometimes it's simplistic. Right. In this case, I thought they were more similar, similar values. But sometimes I've been chosen by people and I've wondered, like, why. And I realized the like was polarity. So there I'm kind of loose and fluid and playful, and they're a little, like, constrained and uptight and rigid, like, but they want to be with me because they want to get some of that, like, that looseness on them, on their organization. Right. So, yeah, sometimes the like is not a match necessarily as a compliment. Yeah.

And you also have to watch for. Just because you like someone doesn't necessarily mean that you're in the best position to help them, which I think you. You encapsulated already. But there are. I've had. I've had the same situations where I really like From a mission, vision and value. I liked it. But in terms of either something that I saw in what their process was, or just based on how I just thought this was going to go, or how I felt corporations would see them, I said no to moving forward, even though I really like them.

I don't notice it as much in our clients, but I certainly notice it in my own work. And I frequently say, let me give you some thoughts. I don't think you should work with me, but I'm going to give you just some free thoughts and you go do them, whatever, as if you were a client. But I don't want to charge you for anything because I'm not sure I can help you. And I think that's the thing. Sometimes people come back, but more than that, they say, I met this really good guy, Bill Gallagher, and he didn't just try to take my money. He was going to create value, even though I wasn't a fit bit. And that gives credibility, right?

Yeah. You're planting seeds. You know, you're planting seeds and you never know when they're going to harvest. That happens a lot.

So I encourage you to tell stories. I think stories are really critical. They capture our imagination, they help us get into it, but then sometimes the story is misplaced or too long or not effectively told. Tell us about Rhonda and who is Rhonda and that whole experience.

Sure. So I have been in positions in my career where I've managed sponsorship salespeople in various iterations for various properties. We'll just say that. And Rhonda was an amazing person to manage. She was extremely well connected in the community. Everybody knew her. She was kind of a pseudo celebrity in the community because of work that she had done when she was younger and just, again, just very networked. Really, really well.

She's.

She's dated rock stars. She's. I mean, she's. She had quite, quite a background. All right.

Yeah.

So I would hear these stories, and her stories, when she would tell stories were really compelling. You would hang on every word. But here was the problem with Rhonda. Her emails were awful. They would go on and on and on. I mean, they would be like five, six, seven paragraphs.

Yeah.

And this goes back to my point you mentioned earlier. I really preach the power of brevity when working with corporate executives. They don't have time for all of that. They need to know, what is it you want? What's our connection? What do you want next? That's it.

Yeah.

Rhonda, though, her philosophy Was I need to, I have to get this information out or I'm just going to explode. They need to know every detail or this is not going to go well. So that's an ego issue. If you feel as though you've, you've have to put a ton of stuff into an email and you have been coached that you shouldn't do that and you're getting into trouble for it internally, that's your own ego that's preventing you. That's your ego saying, I know better. But the problem is she didn't know better. She lost business because of it. She lost a buy in, in the building because of it. And never, and I don't want to say it ended her career, I think, but in terms of her time on our team there, there it was in jeopardy and it all kind of felt fell around this area. And what's just amazing though is here is somebody who had the gift of verbal communication. She could tell an amazing story and she knew when to stop. Like she knew to give you a little hang, like a little teaser so you'll come back for more.

Yeah.

But when it came to her writing style, she just, she kept people away and got people really upset. So I spend a chapter talking about this because decision makers of all kinds, when they receive information via email, they have the same response to them. If you are sending an email that's that long, you do not respect their time. You have no idea what they're going through and what their day is like. So the tip I like to give is, when you're doing an initial outreach to any company, keep it to 150 words. Who are you? How do you connect with the company in terms of their mission, vision, value or program? And what do you want next? If you're able to stick with that formula and really, really practice that, your response rates will definitely increase. And my clients have had much success with that. I've had success with that. And you know, my experience has, has really taught me that because the goal for that first email is just to keep them interested enough for a next conversation. We're not selling anything in that first email. Right.

We're, we're, that's a really key thing to remember.

Absolutely.

What is your objective for this? Are you selling them or are you just trying to get the interest started? A conversation begun?

You're just getting the conversation begun. Because when I'm, when I'm working with clients, we're talking about 5, 6, 7 figure s, all right? That doesn't happen over an email with an attachment. That is not how this works. So you have to be mindful about how you can, how you approach people like this. And recent study I read the average decision maker is getting north of 120 emails a day. So you need to really practice revenue in your emails.

You know, here's the thing that comes. So my emails would tend to be overly brief grief maybe, and, and not lacking a little like, politeness and connection. And text emails, all of them kind of the same. And I. Wanda's smiling in the background. My wife knows this. Other people know this about it. Like, I just tend to, like, take the relationship for granted and not add some social niceties. How are you today? Like, can I have a minute? You know, and I like, right into the point and, and so you can skew too far that way. I have to stop and remember, hey, I haven't talked to you in a while, but I got something I want to hit you with right now. Adding a little bit of social niceness on it is useful, but then there's the whole other end of it and there is a time and place for it. And to be honest, I don't know what it is. I see some people's posts, in particular social media, and also some of their emails that are so, so long. They're like an Atlantic article. And I'm like, where are you going with this? I know that you're trying to sell me something and it's like so hidden in here and I'm irritated with. And you've got more emojis and I'm still scrolling and I'm like, where are you going? And so for the most part, I tune them out. But there are some people, there are a lot of people that do this and there's a place where it works and an audience it works for. And I haven't figured it out, but I definitely. Maybe you know, what's. Where's the place where you suck people into these super long narratives?

Well, I'm. What do you mean, where's the place where you suck people into?

Where is that appropriate? Like, clearly that those social posts are working and those emails are working on somebody. They're not for me, but I don't.

Yeah, I think that's the thing. You've got to know who your audience is.

Yeah.

You know, everything I say is not going to resonate with everyone, and that's fine. No pick and choose what works. I'm not going to please everybody. That's impossible. But I do know, I do know how to, how to get Responses from corporate decision makers. I've got proof behind that. I've got my own social proof.

So I guess that's the distinction. It's. Is this a corporate decision maker trying to get something done or somebody pondering whatever like that kind of thing? Like there's a writer that I really is smart and all that accomplished, but I just don't like James Altucher, like oh my God, where are you going? Stop talking and wandering around and all your thoughts about whatever. But, but, and I would maybe be a little bit more typical corporate decision maker kind of a background. Like get to the point, tell me what I need to know.

I think you can have brevity, but you can also sound human with using words of appreciation.

Yes.

So it's about word choice. You don't have to have to be social. But you know, I like to end some of my emails with, you know, really appreciate your time in reviewing my information. That sounds better than thank you.

Yeah.

You know, so just fine tuning some of your words is very helpful. So I don't think it necessarily has to be when am I able to be a little more chummy? I think it's just more of showing sincere appreciation through few words. So the correct word choice for them taking the time to review what you said.

Well, it sounds like with Rhonda that you had a situation where in person there was a little more room for the long form story.

Yes.

And in email and another and in proposals it was like where are you going? Like why are you still telling me things? But even in person there are people who aren't telling a story efficiently or effectively. They're not going to the key moments and turning points and the setting the stage. They're just bombarding you with a linear narrative of something that you're like, oh my God, why do I remember that? For breakfast this morning, do you remember.

That movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles?

Yes.

So Steve Martin says to John Candy, your stories have none of that. And he goes to the structure of what a good story is. You have none of that.

Yeah.

Because it's all anecdotes. Right. So I, I appreciate what you're saying.

You know, very often we talk to people about like find the, the pivotal moment, the moment of crisis, the turning point in the story of the surprise and open there and then set the stage and then maybe step back and, and describe the situation then, then go through the resolution and kind of, you know, as a very simple way to tell even a business story, you know that moment where you were faced with a decision or where you suddenly realized it wasn't business as usual.

Yeah. You know, I think too we work in a very complex, not that business, business world has always been complex, but there's even newer levels of complexity for different reasons. So you've got a myriad of different types of people. You've got a lot of people talking about the differences between how Gen X and baby boomers communicate versus millennials, Gen Z and how that's causing a culture clash. So the question is it is your responsibility, I think, just as it is mine, to try to find and build the connection so you can communicate. You can't just always put it on the other person. You just have to figure out the way.

You mentioned something earlier, I'm going to have you talk to us about broadening your context within an organization. Before I do that, let me remind our folks that we have coaching programs for all aspects of scale and all stages from getting to your first million, from getting over from 2 to 20 million and, and then well beyond that. We've coached a number of companies through hundreds of millions and even a few through a billion dollar values at this point. So we've got something kind of at every level and we are filling group right now of companies trying to get that are like, you know, over a million and trying to get past 20 million or somewhere north of that. That program is called Growth Navigator. If you're interested in finding out about that, send us an email or go to scalingcoach.com look for the growth Navigator button on number of the pages there. Scalingcoach.com Growth Navigator is the website also you can drop us an email and, and if not that, if there's anything we can help you with around finding a coach in your region, in your or whatever your particular challenge is. We've got 269 coaches I think around the world today. So we've got plenty for you. So all that and more@scalingcoach.com so back to after a word from our sponsor me, back to your story. So you talked about a client who had a youth financial literacy program. They had to get beyond the normal channels and so tell that story because I think broadening and finding alternate paths we talked about earlier.

But yeah, so we hit this initially first that you know, marketing is not always the greatest place to go in the beginning and this was a great example. So I started working with a organization that they were doing a lot of the right things. Yeah, their messaging was good. I thought they had a really compelling program. Financial literacy at that time was really hot, for lack of a better term. It's still a strong feature right now for corporations, but at that point it was at its peak, like people wanted to get involved. Companies want to get involved.

Yes.

And so when I started working with them and really taking a look at the decision makers that they were talking to, they were all marketing related. And so we had discussions about that. And then I did some, I did some additional research into this company that they had been talking to in marketing and I was able to find that that marketing budget, it's like an, it's like a total umbrella budget. They don't even, you know, section it out. Digital, print, broadcast, it's just like a free for all. And, and this actually happens more than you would think in large companies. It's not always segregated. So I told him, I said, look, I think first of all you need to talk to somebody that truly understands mission driven decisions. Marketing, as I said earlier, is not driven by mission decisions. It's driven by sales and it's driven by finding new customers or whatever you want to call your customer. And their success metrics are based on that only for the most part. When you transition to corporate social responsibility. And that's what we did. I did some research, I did some networking and I found the correct content. Who oversaw a multi million dollar corporate social responsibility budget that my client had initially not even thought about engaging because they just figured everything goes through marketing. And again, that is a philosophy that I run into a lot of clients having. And the answer is no. There's actually a lot of different gateways in that have budgets. Corporate social responsibility, sustainability. If you're environmental organization, public affairs is probably one you wouldn't think of. Public affairs and community relations tend to have at least somewhat of a budget or they'll get you to the right place. I'm also proponent, if all else fails, go after the cfo. Because the cfo, they know the money and if they see you as value and they refer you to someone, they, the other people will respond to that because people always respond to the cfo.

So, so here's, here's, I think the translation for the wider audience, right. No matter what you're selling, it won't be the same as for a lot of our audience, but for whatever you're selling, there are probably multiple interested parties in that and we will naturally think of one department or one category of person and there are probably several that might be interested. And even if you end up with a different decision maker than you expected, you may also have different influencers. So thinking about the gatekeeper, the influencer, the decision maker, you know, these are principles that I'm blanking on the name now. Strategic selling is a platform program that's been used for decades around larger organizations selling into big organizations.

Let's even say you were a startup. Let's take it from that perspective. You're a startup and you've, you, your team, your marketing team has created their own sponsorship. All right, be, be aware that that startup might have money to invest in you as a company. There's a whole Ventures section of a lot of banks, financial institutions, larger Fortune 500s manufacturers that have a whole section called ventures. And they are looking to find opportunities to invest in companies. So if you don't know that you know, and if you just think about sponsorship, you're missing a whole other area of money you could be getting as a potential founder of a startup. So it just behooves you to, to think creatively and, and make contacts in other parts of the company.

And in our work with leading at scale, there's a kind of an overriding principle behind all of that. And what's the self interest of the other party? What are they interested in? Worried about aspiring to like all that, all of those kinds of things. Address that. Lori, it's been great to have you on the show. If you want more information about Lori, you will go to thegrowthowl.com there it is on the screen. We'll put it in the show notes as well. The Growth Owl.com is where you can find Lori and her company and her work and learn more about it. Thank you Lori, so much for joining us on the show today. I want to give a big shout to Wanda Mitchell producing our show in the background each and every day, getting it out, getting it ready. And then to Vern Harnish, my friend, mentor who created the whole scaling up platform book and the Rockefeller habits that came before it and the folks at Pop Flight Productions who get our show out every week. Thanks again to everybody for watching, for listening. Until next week. Keep scaling up. Talk to you next time. Bye bye.