Using Meaning In Your Marketing with Pete Steege

Foreign. So there's power in meaning. What is it? Why is it important for growth? That's the subject of our conversation today, the power of meaning, bringing meaning into your marketing and how it can actually help you grow. Maybe you would like to be growing faster than you are. Hang on to the growth you've already got. That's what our conversation is all about today.

Foreign.

My name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you once a week. A couple times a week we do an interview show like this and then we also do a little tip show with some insight, story, whatever, about some of our tools and things to help companies grow and survive, even enjoy the process of growth, that journey. You'll find all our back catalog, over 500 shows and more@scalingcoach.com also information about our coaching programs, our tool downloads, our workshops, things like that. ScalingCoach.com is where you'll find all that. So I'm joined now by Pete Stagge near, in and around Minneapolis, Minnesota. I was going to talk to us about meaning in marketing and anyway he's got some cred in this category. He wrote a book on purpose. It's a guide to marketing with meaning. And he has a company called B2B Clarity where they do exactly that kind of thing. He's got a great background in marketing and particularly in technology, Silicon Valley, Fortune 100 firms, and he's helped people grow in the world of marketing. So he's going to share some stories and that kind of thing with us today about meaning and marketing.

Pete's welcome to show Bill Great to be here. Thanks for allowing me to be here.

Yeah, thanks so much. So using meaning and marketing, why don't you talk about first? Why'd you write this book?

Well, you know, as you said, I've been a marketer my, my whole career. I started as an engineer, but pretty quickly figured out that, that that was where I wanted to be. And through the, through the decades, one, one common finding or thread that I, that I saw was that especially in technology companies, marketing tended to be facts and information and focused on, on sharing intellectual things. And what was missing was the, the, the importance of the, the why for the, for the client. Right. And I, I guess I came to a conclusion that marketing is really about relationships and relationships are built on meaning. So I started my business to, and wrote my book to kind of explore this idea of how do you activate a business to grow by making the clients see why you can help them versus try to you know, intellectually understand what you do, which we're obviously, we're all way too busy to take the time to do that. It starts with why. Right. So that's why I wrote the book. I also found that in my work with a lot of CEOs that don't have a marketing background or a marketing leader, they were lost when it came to this marketing thing. Right. And back to the meaning. I found that a marketing engine that really drove growth had to start with this, this purpose. And if you do that first, then all the activity, which is so tempting to start with, all the activity flows out of that, driven by that purpose and meaning. And that's how you break through. That's how you create a standout story and how you make the connections and win the commitments that help you grow.

Well, you've referenced it a whole bunch here indirectly. But start with why Simon Sinek maybe the most watched or certainly up there in the very top 10 of TEDx videos. What is it that you're saying or adding to that work? Because you, you're adding to that idea and that thing that he's so well known for.

Right.

Certainly Simon didn't invent meaning. But then you talk about meaning in human relationships and marketing is. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, I would say the difference is absolutely. There's some. There's. There's a common truth here. Right. The difference that I see is I've really oriented what I do and how I help around this idea of relationships and that marketing's role is creating and strengthening these relationships. And what I found is there are three factors in creating the meaning behind these relationships. It's more than just that branding exercise. The why and the how and the what. It's what I like to call the superpowers of marketing for CEOs, not for marketing organizations, but for a CEO. And the first one is authenticity. It's telling the truth. And I find that that's an awesome place to start with CEOs is why are you here? But it's the truth of it that you can share with your internal team and drive your mission as well as all along the way. The key is it's not just. It's not just about the why. It's your transparency. Being authentic means you make it clear who you are. And it's not this, you know, why, but you make why part of your whole story, inside and outside the company.

That's the first example of this, of authenticity, telling the truth about a company. I feel like everybody Feels like they're telling the truth or they would like to be telling the truth. What. So what are you really speaking about here in authenticity for a business.

So I'll give you an example where I had a company that I was working with, a CEO who had a great 30 million dollar business, 20 year founder, you know, he, he had this great culture. It was in low voltage technology for commercial construction. So is this incredible leader with all these bells and whistles and capabilities and.

Video and everything in this arm, wiring, right.

All that stuff. Really good at what they did. They had, they just knew everything. Their problem was they were just throwing up all these things they could do. And so again, back to the truth thing. Not only were their customers confused because they had. Well, sit down. I got a long story to tell you about all the ways we can help you. Their team was confused because they weren't grounded in the truth of why. Why are we so driven and so good at what we do? What's behind that? Right. And so when we worked together on that, we went through a process I have called the truth Chain. And the goal is to get to what I call the true story about their company. And what we found was it wasn't about the technology, it was about empowering businesses to be together. Right? So it was this idea of creating a place for them to make their business happen. So in other words, rather than talk about the speeds and feeds of the technology that get plugged into the walls and how good that is, that's the proof points of the truth. The truth is we can help your business be better, get, you know, be exist together in this building. Bring it. We can make your building come to life. Right. And that is the interconnecting the people.

In a structure is what they. And did they care about that they.

Did when, when we got there, they had been through exercises before where, oh, we just don't, we can't say what we do. When we got to that aha. It just, the, the, the resistance melted away. That the excitement grew. Everybody, yes, that's us. We are, we are helping the universe. Right. In this way that was very specific to what they did. Right. And then the, the obvious response to that when they asked, well, what do you mean? Now you can tell them about the technology or the expertise or the capability or you know, success stories. That's all in, in support of the why. Right. The meaning. So that was an example. And I find that most of the people I work with, it starts with that, that aha. Of oh, I get it. That's why we're here.

I think the hang up here is, is if we think about truth, then we also think about lie. If we think about authentic, we also think about inauthentic. And I, are they lying ever or withholding the truth? Is there something missing in their true story? It seems like they weren't saying that they, they, they weren't hiding or there's nothing inauthentic or lacking authenticity about that is there.

For me, it's that when I talk about truth, I'm leaning on the transparency side of it. So it's, it's getting to the truth more than being dishonest, you know, or lack of dishonesty. So what I found is it's, it's partly a self knowledge. They know their own truth. Right. So it's not that they're being deceptive, it's that they, they haven't embraced the truth. And to help them, once they know that, it helps guide them and how they talk about. Because it's not just what they do, it's what they don't do. Right. It's so helpful with targeting too to say here's how we help. Here's exactly. And by the way, here's how we don't help. I can introduce you to somebody that does that.

Yeah, okay, so I get that. So I think focusing on what they care about versus what they don't care about is what I'm hearing in this that's useful and being clear about that with people. And I suppose that also then the kinds of work we don't care about or we're not going to do then starts to get easier, clearer there.

Speaking of that, so another example, you talked about the dishonesty. There's a passive dishonesty. I'll give you the example. There's a company that doesn't have that clarity and their team doesn't know the why and they're engaging with a client or a prospect. There's this split second hesitation where they're thinking, now what am I supposed to say? What's the script? And it's that level of inauthenticity that or I'm not sure what to say. I'll get back to you, let me go find out. Versus the company where they've, they've figured out why we're here and they've shared with everybody, so everybody's on the same page of who we are, what we do, how we help. Then every engagement, the things that the CEO can't be in the room for, every Engagement, sales, product support. It can be authentic because they can. They don't have to look up the script or memorize the story. They just live it right. Because that they know why they're there. It also allows them to be more autonomous and just do a better job, a faster job, a more responsive, creative job, because they're not doing what they should do, they're doing what they're there to do.

You know what comes to mind as you're speaking about this? I was thinking about a company we worked with a few years ago, but it's representative. Many companies that we worked with and they went through a huge period of growth and there was a great deal of focusing around this. So they did restoration work. You know, so they, you have fire, flood, damage that like, they're the kinds of people that come in, you probably see trucks and brands and things all around. And there's very much a focus on like, we'll fix that water, we'll get it out. And. And the simple shift that they did is they started first with, no, we're about restoring like it's in the word. We're about restoring lives and businesses like, boom. Like, you had a life and then a flood came through a fire. There was a damage, there was something like that, and you're wrecked in your whole business or life is turned upside down and they're like, it's, yes, you're getting the water out, but you're getting the water out so that family can move back in again and so they can resume their life. Like. And that focus on, like that big picture of like you're restoring a life of business, that was a, it's a subtle shift in many. But it's really powerful because you remember the people and the connection that you're actually, you know, like, hey. And I could see it with that, with that company, the Low Voltage Wiring company. Like, yeah, we're about interconnecting everything so that you can actually talk, connect, work with each other. Like, so that you're your, your computers connect and your lights are on and your cameras are working and you're building secure and that kind of thing.

Their line was bringing workplaces to life.

Yeah.

So picture in a live building, right?

Yeah, yeah. I think in, in some ways with a business, like with human beings, I think there's authenticity and vulnerability and that's a different domain or dimension than a business where it'. It's more like pull out. Why do you even do this kind of work? Like, what's the. Why do they need this that anybody cares about.

Back to my view that at its core, marketing is about relationships.

Yeah.

And relationships are between people, they're not between companies. And yes, there's a business and if we were talking about finance or operations or product development, there'd be other things. But in my view, the more marketing can focus on the people to people, interactions between people in businesses, the more powerful it's going to be. Because that's, you know, different topic. But there's statistics about people, business people as well as consumers. They make decisions emotionally and unconsciously first and then they rationalize them with their minds. Right. And Right. So you can't say, oh, this is a million dollar deal. We have to share them the facts. It starts with do I trust you? Right. And that's what I believe is why the power of this even in business. To business. Maybe even more in business. To business. Because we stand out with this approach too.

Yeah, yeah. I often left with that. What are we even talking about? What do you actually do? Why do I care? Like right. People are yammering out about this service they have and that's, I'm like, wow, give me some big picture here first. I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds. You shared about a engineering test company in preparation. Tell us about that company.

Yeah. So this is again from the technical side. This is a career engineering test engineering executive who was really good at engineering and had the opportunity to create his own business. He had a couple partners and they jumped out of their business and started this practice and landed really well to start. And just the three of them, they had a million plus revenue the first couple of years. Big clients that had thorny engineering test problems. That was a great start. They came to me because that they had exhausted their personal network and they saw the potential they could help so many of these big companies. But who are they? These three and they, they didn't know they were engineers and they, they knew marketing was important from their previous careers, but they had no idea what to do. So as, as you'd expect, we started with this true story for them. And the, the magic with them was as they described their special sauce. Why are they so good at what they do? They talked about this paradigm in the test engineering world called Shift Left. It's kind of like Agile methodology for product development. It's just out there, right. People talking about it for 20 years. And as we explored it further and they followed that and they said, you know what, everybody talks about that as an ideal. We actually do it. And as we look closer, we realized nobody else was talking about that. So they could stake a claim to be the Shift Left team. And while we didn't rebrand the company, we basically reoriented them around this Shift Left concept. And the magic of that was, a, it was authentic. It's absolutely. They came. They started with that, right? That is who they are. But B, they could go to these Fortune 100 companies and go to their test organization, their engine software organizations, and say, we're the Shift Left people. And all of a sudden, their credibility was supported by 20 years of best practices in the industry that everybody agreed was almost impossible to realize. So they were able to, you know, leverage industry lore almost as their differentiation. And that led them very quickly to within. Within that year, they landed a $4 million client, this $1 million business.

So help me understand, isn't I. Because it's a little bit technical and industry specific, but Shift Left. Is that not something everybody was saying they were?

No, it turns out that they weren't. That it was. It was a fluke. It seemed like they should have been. Somebody should have grabbed onto that.

What they were talking about, that people know.

They know it as a truth but unachievable ideal state.

Huh, huh, huh.

And nobody was. Nobody had created a practice of shift left.

Huh.

And so that was there for them to. To own. And it was them. It was who they were.

There's something that people want. Shift left means something in that world. And. And they're like, we actually do that? Yeah. Okay. Got it, got it, got it.

Shift Left done. Right. That's what we said.

That was a little bit. Shift Left and right was their thing. That's pretty clever. I think one of the things that's really useful is catchiness. Catchiness in something. The zippiness, the zinginess of some thing. I had. I taught a leadership class for years, and I remember one guy came through it, and he was a passionate vegetarian or vegan or something, and he wanted to promote more vegetarianism. And, like, great. And so he was creating a marketing campaign around that, a whole communication campaign around that. And I forget for what organization or whatever, but because it's been some years, but I do remember this because it was catchy.

And.

And he named his campaign Eat Like Einstein. And already I'm like, oh, how did Einstein eat right? Like, and now I don't know if it's true or not, but I will never forget, and I'm intrigued by that. His thing was like, eat like Einstein's. Like, oh, maybe that there's something in the diet of the. One of the smartest people, you know, that we know of and who did something really enormous in. In the world of physics anyway, like, oh, eat like Einstein. That. That's the thing that's novel and that's catchy. And that like, okay, boom. And now I'm interested in vegetarianism. Where before, I'm definitely not particular. I like vegetables, but I. To the exclusion of the other. No. So anyway, that I like. I'm intrigued by it. I'm interested. Right. So the campaign is already working with the name and I think that shift left on, right, like, boom, I've got something catchy. I'm like, oh, wait, what's that?

Like, you want to know more, right?

Yeah, tell me more. Wait, what do you mean?

I think that's so important that the magic there is not trying to put it all in. Right. It's allowing the mystery. It's constructing the beginning of a conversation rather than an answer.

Yeah.

Important.

Yeah. It's interesting, I think about applying to me, like, what do I. Like what do I care about? Well, I care about growth, right? But I want it to be with less suffering and all my programs, all my coaching around, like, look, you will suffer. You could suffer, but you don't have to. Like, it's going to be hard work. There are places. But we could actually do this growth with. With less suffering, with more play and like community. So how do we do that? Right. And that's the design of our programs and things like that. But. But that's like the thing that I care most about. It's like, let's make this journey fun because life is hard and then you die. Right?

And that's what that. What I love about that, Bill, is that is. That is their need, not you telling them what you do. You're talking about how you can help them, which is, yeah, if you want.

To grow your business, I'm here for you.

But let's do it with less pain.

Let's. Let's have some fun in the process, you know? Yeah. And it's. It's funny, like, not everybody's committed to that. Some people really enjoy their suffering. They wear it like.

Yeah, it's true, Cross.

Right. So there's a certain thing that people identify with the suffering of it. And look, there's times for it. I remember finding motivation in it once when I was trying to accomplish a fitness goal and I was out to do my first open water swim in the San Francisco Bay, but I'd arrived late. It was now sun was set, it was beginning to get darker. It was a bit drizzly and foggy out. It was later in the year, it was cold. So it's cold, late, lonely. I'm in the bay where there's animals, things swimming around and stuff like that. And I have to go and I'm like, I just wanted. Everything in my body wanted to quit. And then I thought about, well, if I quit, I tell one story and then what's the story I tell if I go? And then I realized, oh, talking about how hard it was gives me bragging rights. And I love that.

Nice self motivation.

It's a much better story to come in tomorrow and say how I swam and it was cold and dark. And in fact, I, I've been telling that story for years.

That's.

So there's power in figuring out your motivation, the meaning for you in anything, like makeup. Meaning. Talk about meaning in relationships. What is that all about? What do you say? Like, okay, relationships matter. I need to work with people, I need to sell to people, buy from people, interact with human beings. So I get relationship. Right. But what about relationship and meaning? What's the role there? What are you, what are you asserting?

If you think of B2B, which is my world, you have, you have very busy people and they're just trying to get their job done. They have long, you know, we all live that life right, where there's priorities and you just got crazy stuff going on and there's people pinging you all the time, email, phone, whatever, whatever. Different way.

Yeah.

The idea of meaning is that relationships have to have a reason because they take effort.

Yeah.

So even if even the simplest consumer example, I'm in the grocery store and I'm on that, walking down and there's an end aisle and my favorite cereal is on sale. That's my reason. I pick it up and I buy it. And that same diet dynamic translates to the $150,000 contract in a B2B. If, if I don't believe in a value, if I don't have meaning for why I would talk to that person, meaning I have this problem, they have a solution. I want to learn more. I'm going to invest the time, my precious time that I'm choosing to do that rather than other things, I have to have a reason. I'm not going to do it just because I like the way your voice sounds or, you know, you have a really cool logo. I'm going to do it more predictably. I'm going to do it because that Story that maybe the logo helps, but it's about, oh, they can help me with this thing that kept me up last night. That's why meaning is so important. And if I can share Bill, there's.

The meaning is the, the relevance.

Yeah. The reason. I like to say it's the reason for the relationship or the investment in the relationship.

Okay.

I have to have a reason for spending the time.

Okay.

Right. And. And meaning is, is creating a reason. Yeah, there's meaning for me in doing this.

Before we talk about the, the semiconductor company way back when talk to tell us a little bit about your, your process. What do you go through when helping people focus in on what their meaning is, meaning for their business?

Well, first of all, I like to talk about marketing as an engine. So that's the first thing I'll say just for context, that the marketing as one tactic or one campaign just doesn't work. And people I help that maybe don't have the marketing experience or leader, they can get drawn into those really easy activ. That may be easy to do, but they're just spinning plates. Right. So the first thing is to realize we need to create an ecosystem and that ecosystem needs to be driven around this. This meaning for your business. So we'll start with what I call a truth chain exercise. And that is where we, we first make sure we're crystal clear on who our target client is. You know, we all. All the different ways you say that.

Yeah.

I'm a big believer in the sharper it can be, the better.

The as specific as a really, really good thing. Like do we cater to business or business and consumer. Is it what kind of consumer, what problems, what world are they living in? What's what, how are they different from anybody else? Are you going after the same ones that everybody else or do you want a certain type like that, that, like narrow, focused. We want people like this, that clarity.

As clear as possible.

Not just demographics. It's not company size, it's not age and income. It might include that, but it's got to go much broader than that to lifestyle, to value set, to things like that. Right.

I like to say rather than a target market, we're looking for a bullseye market. So that's one end of the chain.

Okay.

And now we can picture them and we know them, right? Because they're probably the people we're serving. Right.

But that's our very first show back episode number one Some years ago, Robert Bloom, Inside Advantage Robert Boom, former chairman now passed away a year or two ago, wrote A book called Inside Advantage. He was the past chairman of Publicis Worldwide, so very accomplished in this. And he talks a bit about that process. You know, apologies for the production qualities and stuff of show number one. But it's worth a listen to go back on this very topic.

Cool. So that's one end of the chain. Then we go to the other end of the chain, which is you, your business. And we make sure we're crystal clear about why we all get up every day and why we do all the effort and the hard work to get in the cold bay. Right. What is it that's driving that effort? Get us all aligned on it. That's that true story I talked about before. Right. Well, that's the beginning of the true story. What, what, who are we? Who do we help? We identified that and, and now we build the chains systematically closer and closer to the, to the center between those two. So starting from the customer side, we know who they are. Okay. Now what are the problem, the burning problems they have that we can help them with? Right. And think about. And these are the things I like to say. They keep them up at night, not just how might we help them. What are the problem? The burning problems. Right. So we come up with those and then from our, our side, the next step is we know who we are, what are our capabilities that we bring to this, our skills, our, you know, whatever it might be, our people, our.

Technology, what are we good at? Yeah, Right.

And then now you're ready for the magic middle, which is how we can help them with their problems. It's not, let me tell you about who I am. That's skipping from the bottom to the top. It's not let me tell you how I help companies like X. That's skipping to the top. It's I, you know, we can help you solve problem X, Y or Z. And again, that's the, that's the first part and that's all you need to say. And then if they care, they're going to say, well, tell me how. And then you have the opportunity to tell the capability story or whatever else. But that magic middle piece is, is often it's just skipped over. It's not used. I like to think of the, what's it called? Commercial. There's a sales process with the commercial insight that is that same idea. There's a story in the middle. It's not about you, it's about the industry. It's about what you're target is trying to solve. And you have a new insight into how to solve that. And that's what they're looking for, is solutions. They're not looking for a vendor. They want help with their pain, right? And then that, that's the reason, now you've got the meaning, the reason for them to spend their precious time with you. So you can explain, you know, give them the details of what they need and how you can help them. That is what I call the story that, that.

So the first part is who you're, who you care about and the, the particular person you're interested in or the type, the Persona, whatever it is. And the second part is the thing, the problem they're dealing with that you actually care about. Right?

Yep.

And then the third thing is what and how you do what you do. And, and well the third thing is what you do. And then the last piece is what pulls it together is how what you do fits their problem. You're connecting the dots between you and their pain point. Right?

We can solve X for you. Tell me how. Now you can talk about how.

Uh huh. So we solve this thing for you and this is how we do it. That's unique, right?

And if you found the, your true target market and it's reflecting your true value, you're in home field advantage at that point, right? Because you've identified a problem that you know you have a unique solution for and it's you finding the people that can benefit from what you're so good at. So now you're in this market of where you're the leader in this micro market because you found the people that really value what you alone can do the way you do.

So in that first part of figuring out who you're after, it's as useful to figure out who you don't want to work with, right? We build buildings, but we only build them for this kind of company, this kind of person, developer company, whatever. Or we do custom homes and we only work with the end user or we only work with community developers, like whatever it is. And then the second part is, and we know that those people have this problem and we are interested in how to make it easier or predictable or be on time or whatever it is like that. And then there's what you do. And I think with what you do. When I think about our clients on the regular, they struggle with knowing themselves, right? So they, it's, it's hard to see yourself, right? Like you see a certain angle and everybody else sees the whole you from many angles and probably focus on one or more at some point, but they can see aspects of you that you don't see and they notice things like things that are obvious that you should do, you don't do, and then you focus on other things that probably are stretch or that you should leave out. That self awareness is really, really hard. It's hard to see yourself. You know, we spent a lifetime sort of lying to ourselves.

It's true. What else happens, Bill, is without that clarity, self knowledge, which is a required, you know, an exercise you need to do, you end up with your organization appearing in the world in a variety of different ways that are not coherent. So again, in this busy world, if I see one thing that makes you seem like you're this and another thing that makes you think you do that, those cancel out and I, I've now my eyes glaze over and I go somewhere else, right? So having that simple clear truth and, and making sure that's what's being communicated allows it to resonate and, and you know, build and, and be, be stand again, you stand out because so many companies don't do that.

You know, it's funny, there's a saying, right? You can't read the label from inside the jar. And we all live in a particular jar. And yet if you walk into the supermarket and you look at 27 different kinds of pickles, right, you can tell easily which ones are the spicy, which ones are crispy, which ones are dill, which ones are like whatever they are, the garlic ones, you could spot them all really easily. But inside the jar, the pickle just is a pickle and it doesn't know what kind of thing it is. And I think it's very hard to see it. But your friends, your family, your loyal customers, they're like, yeah, no, Bill, you're like that. Like, and they say, and some of the things they're like, yeah, of course that's obvious. Like, but you're not saying it and, or you're avoiding other things that they all say and see. And I think it's, it's really useful to get some of that external feedback. Most often we say you can go to work on your brand promises. Yeah, but you probably want to think about and talk to your competition. I mean, look at your competition to see how you're different. And you probably really want to hear from your customers who've worked with you, both the good ones and the bad ones who liked you and didn't like you. Like, who are we that you can't see, right? And put it in their language, it seems far more credible. Like Getting outside of your head, the leadership team's collective wisdom. There's a little bit of delusion, good or bad.

Absolutely. It's so important. And that exercise we do when we're figuring out the truth chain, we have people in the room that are customer facing and we're asking about our clients. Right. And what do they need, what do they want, what do they like, what don't they like? Right. Has to be voice of customer. It has to come from that for sure.

We've done recent shows about the voice of customer, and getting this perspective in is really useful. There's another one in there that I think a pretty good hack. And if you want to figure out how you are different, talk to your new hires, especially new hires who work for any competitors or any other parts of an industry. They will tell you things about you that you just don't notice, things that you take for granted, things that you have stopped paying any attention to. Oh, no, you guys are really different. Like this, right? Yeah.

That's good.

Valuable. I hired a buyer once, a former customer from a major, major company of another company. And after I heard this, this leading person was. Had left their employer and was in between things, going to do something else. And I said, listen, could I hire you to do some consulting with us? Come spend a day with us and look at some projects we've been working on. And I had them in and we talked about a bunch of different things because I wanted some outside perspective on it. Just really their opinion and feedback. But along the way, one of the things that I really learned was who we were in the industry, things that we were great at, things that we were not so great at, how we compared. And it was really, really insightful because there were a lot of things that I just didn't fully get. Places where we were good and places where we were bad. But like, everybody's like that, you know, things that I worried about so much that, like, I didn't need to worry about.

You know, I think, Bill, that you're making a case for what you and I both do is our business model really is. You know, we add value by being from the outside with our clients. And yeah, there is something, yes, you need to talk to your, to your market. But, you know, we bring. That's one part of the value of having somebody outside your company help you with this conversation is. Yeah, it is hard to do that yourself from inside the pickle jar.

You shared another story about a semiconductor equipment company. Tell us that story.

Yeah, so this one's A little different because it's, it's a bigger company and more, more of a strategic positioning. Meaning story. So this was a semiconductor equipment maker and we made a machine called a photolithography device.

Yeah.

And that was a long time ago and it was still hundreds of thousands of dollars for each. Right. Really expensive. And so the chip making factories, think intel or Nvidia, they're the ones that would buy it.

Right.

Our competitors.

Maybe to say it, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but to say it for people who are not familia, the industry in the world. Right. This is equipment. You know, you see a, you zoom in on a chip and you see there's lines and things going every which way. This actually prints those lines, describes them. So the equipment can lay down the atoms where they need to be at the appropriate thickness and like that.

Yes. And this is important. There's even a little more detail. Our machine was just the dark room part of that. Developing the image.

Yeah.

So the chemistry and all that. Attached to that was the camera, which the manufacturers of these machines were Nikon and Canon and the company called ASML. They were actually, you know, 10 times as much as our machine. So the, the story here is we were small and we were competing with these other lithography dark room maker companies that were 5, 10 times as big as us. And we were trying to win customers overseas. And it was a real challenge. How do we compete? Well, we figured out, back to the meeting. We figured out that they don't care so much about the darkroom part of this. They care about that big expensive camera device that cost them $10 million.

Yeah.

And so we created a, a forum, a breakfast forum at the annual event, this, you know, the semiconductor conference where everybody flies in. And we hosted it. It was about photolithography, which was our process. And who did we invite as all the speakers, all the stepper makers. So. And we did not bite any other photolithography companies. So we had this breakfast with this, all these friends of ours who were the ones that our customers really cared about, talking about how these two products work together. Right. So we, we kind of leapfrogged or went around the, the competitive. Rather than fighting the fight and getting in the trenches, we said what's really the truth? What, what do they care about? And it's the Stepper, which is the name of that camera. And that was very successful for us. We ended up over three years tripling our market share because we didn't just get in the trenches, we we looked for the meaning and we talked about. And the other thing I would mention is we did have a unique advantage in that relationship between that those two machines and that we were the fastest machine. So we were able to tell a story now that we set the frame, that we help those cameras work faster. And that is much more important than how the chemistry works inside the machine. Right. So that was an example. You know, it applies at so many different levels. It's. It's really about does. Do they care? What do they care about? And how do you help them solve that problem?

So you're about connecting the stepper better.

Yeah. The stepper worked in tandem with the photo, the darkroom, the photolithography system. And there was robotic arms going between them. Right. So the stepper, the camera would expose the patterns. Well, I mean, would print, you know, expose the patterns with a light source. And then they'd ship it over to our machine and we would develop it like a dark room. And we were able to make a case to say we're helping that stepper work faster.

You know, the. The old DJ in me is just dying to go license the any Kamozi song hot stepper for this. Here it comes.

You know, I have to say that was the most fascinating industry to work in. This was a long time ago, but I don't know if you've read chip war, but it is now this geopolitical. One of the most important industries in the world right now. And it's just amazing how that has. Has grown to be just an amazing thing. Those. Those stepper machines, they cost hundreds of millions of dollars now for one machine. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's a lot, right? But they go into plants that are churning out lots of chips, and it's really critical to.

That AI is built on those chips, man. That's. It's powered by those chips.

Yeah, well, the book is. The book is B2B clarity. A company is B2B clarity. The book is On Purpose. We'll throw those titles and links up on purpose. CEOs guide to marketing with Meaning is the book. You can find it wherever. Get your fine books. And then B2B clarity is the company. And we'll put that link in the show notes. And there's a CEO guide in there that you might find useful for your company as well. Pete Steggy, thanks for joining us on the show today and sharing some of your process and some of your stories about the companies that you've helped and grown in that whole B2B world. Big Shout out. And thanks also to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish for creating the whole scaling up framework that we use with all of our clients to help get growing and do it in our way of making it a little less painless, a little more fun every day, even when there's hard work to be done. Shout out to Cameron and the team at storyon Productions who get our show prepared, ready, promoted, all of that kind of thing each and every week, the folks at Podfly who edit our audio and show notes, and to everyone for watching, for listening. Thanks again for watching. For listening. Turn on your notifications like subscribe do all that kind of thing that's good for us. Share it with somebody else is probably the most useful thing you could do for your friends to add meaning to your relationships. If this show is useful, share it with somebody else who would love it now if you could use help with anything like that. Of course we've got all our shows coaching programs for every stage of company now, from sub million million to 20 million, 20 million beyond to a billion. We've got something to help you grow and grow in a way that's a little bit more fun. So keep scaling until then. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.