How to Craft Your Brand's Story with Dave Gerhardt - Demand Gen LIVE!

It's definitely worth it. And it was fun. It was fun project to do. And there's also, like, a different connection that it created with people because it's a physical thing. For some reason, it's so strange. Like, like, old friends, college friends, random people are like, I bought your book. And I'm like, what? So, like, if I did, like, a. If I did, like, a course, like an online course on this, like, they wouldn't have bought that. But it's something about, like, a physical book that was. So. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. What'd you think on the. That's why I've never. Like, people are like, hey, Chris, why don't you write a book? And it's just like, the time. The. By the time the book even gets published, I feel like a lot of the things that you, like, talked about when you thought about writing it were not even relevant anymore.

Like, yeah, it's hard. It's hard. And, like, it's. Which is funny because, like, your book, like, if you wrote a book, it would be. It would. It would do well. Because I see so many people ask, like, in my community, for example, like, hey, does it. I need a book on B2B marketing? Or, like, you know, and it's hard because, like, if you're writing about, there's so much nuance, there's so much technology stuff. But I think, like, I think I wanted to try to write a book that was a little bit more evergreen. And so, yeah, like, the tools and stuff might change, but I think, who knows? To me, honestly, it's not like a novel. Right. Like, I didn't. I'm not going to look back on it in three years and be like, mad that I did it, and, like, it doesn't hold up. That's fine. It's okay.

Yeah. By the way, I had Sarah Kennedy Ellis on the podcast on Tuesday, and she of course, referenced you about how you think that she's a spreadsheet marketer.

Oh, my God. I mean, yeah, like, maybe I said that, like, three years ago, but, yeah, she's. She's awesome. And obviously she's.

Obviously, she was joking.

She's had way more success than I have. So, like, who should be the spreadsheet marketer? She's awesome, so.

Yeah. Yeah, of course she's awesome. All right, small talks over. Welcome, everyone. We gave a couple. A couple minutes for everyone to join in. Happy to have you here. This is our monthly expert series featuring Dave Gerhardt. We do this the first Thursday of every month at 12pm Eastern, 9am Pacific. And today we're going to be talking about something that, as I've continued to we have currently probably over the past three years have worked with more than 100 B2B SaaS and tech companies. And one of the things that seems to be really clear about like it's not just about running ads or making content or different things like that. Like a big part of it is whether or not you have a story that positions you to win. And so before we think about tactics and ads and different things like that, I think it's really important to take a step back and be like, who are we telling a story to? Are we telling the right story? Is it resonating? And why? And so what a, what a great topic to have Dave Gerhardt here with us. He just wrote a book on a similar topic. And so, yeah, Dave, welcome and looking forward to diving in on this topic with you.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Always appreciate our chats and the quality of people that seem to come in here and want to talk about marketing. So I'm happy, happy to do it.

Yeah, we almost got 100 people live, which is great. And we'll probably have some stragglers that roll through, but I love this time slot. We get great participation from all across the world. And so, yeah, let's get into it before we get into sort of like the process to how I just wanted to get it started from you as to like, like help people understand why that like they need to be thinking about this and prioritizing the company story.

I mean, to me, storytelling is, storytelling is everything. It's, it's, there's just so much, I think especially in the, in 2022, there's just so much noise and so much competition across every channel, across every category. You're rarely going to be the only game in town. And I've been using this Seth Godin quote that I love and I'll just kind of like roughly quote it, but please give credit to Seth, not me. And he talks about with B, it's especially important in B2B because when people are buying in B2B, they're not spending their own money, they're spending somebody else's money. And he says that in order to do that, well, when it comes to buying someone is either going to buy what they bought at their last job or what's cheaper. And so if you can't tell that, if you cannot tell them a story, then that's how the decision making framework is going to go down. I see this all the time. It's easier for me. I'm making a migration thing right now and I'm like, I've used HubSpot before. I'm like, I'm just going to use HubSpot because I know that it works. Or maybe you make the cheaper decision, but especially in B2B because of the noise, because of the competition, because of the complexity, because if there's 18 to 20 people involved in the decision making process, you got to give somebody a story to hang on to. And I also think it's not just the story, but you can't just throw a sexy story on a company and it's going to work. The ultimate combination is when the story becomes strategy. For example, HubSpot created this narrative of inbound marketing and they created this movement of inbound marketing and those two words basically shaped everything they did in marketing for about a decade. At Drift, we talked about conversational marketing or there's probably a bunch of other different examples that you could pull from right now. But it works as like the ultimate. Not only does it work as the great hook for your buyer and for your customer to give them a story, and we connect with stories on an emotional and personal level. It takes the logic out of buying. You could be the most spreadsheet driven person, but people buy with emotion and then justify with logic. And so I want to try to play into that and connect with the emotion. Mike Troiano, who's a VC now, he's a great cmo, he has a line that he talks about, if you want to change how people think, you first have to change what they feel. And the way to change what they feel is through storytelling. It plays out in the ultimate combination when the whole company is rallied around that. It's not just, oh, this is a great hook on the website or this is cool. It has to be played out in everything the company executes on from top to bottom. Now you can be the greatest marketer in the world, but this is not driven from the CEO and the rest of the executive team and company down. It's never going to work. It's going to mean you're going to have a great piece of marketing collateral, but it's not going to be a story that actually changes and makes waves with your company. It's got to come from the CEO and every CEO that I've worked with, I knew in the first meeting, this person gets the story and they want the whole company aligned around it and they believe in it. And that's when it really works, you.

Sort of talked a little bit more into the story and it started to for me blend into the idea of category. Do you see distinctions between story and category? And if so, what does that look like?

I think category creation, I think, look, I think category creation is important, but I also think that a lot of people have gotten kind of caught up in it a little bit in that if you, if you actually read the book, like play bigger for example, what, what, what they're talking about in that book is building multi billion dollar companies. And my opinion is you don't have to, you don't have to build a multi billion dollar company to be successful, right? My, my, my. The last company that I was at, they were 10, $12 million revenue company and they sold for nine figures. And the CEO is very successful exit and a great company. You don't have to build this multi billion dollar category. And granted my experience is much more biased towards like I typically have been working with early stage SaaS companies and so like less than 50 million, right? 0 to 50 million. But I think of it more as like what do you want to be known for? And what is the name of your thing that people can easily spit back at you? What do you, you know, what's the thing that you stand for? It's much more to me about like a movement and naming what you do than it is like creating a category. And category meaning that like Gartner is going to write some report on this and there's going to be some forester, whatever. I believe that stuff does work. I'm sure there's a strategy for that. I'm not poo pooing anybody who's done that. I'm just talking about my experience and what I've done. I think it's more about naming. For example, I don't know what your category is, but you all have done something around Demand Gen Demand. I think that your content, your podcast, your Demand gen Live, you've created a movement of demand gen B2B marketing people. To me that is just as effective as creating this formal category. I think people just get too caught up in that and it becomes a distraction.

It's so interesting too because from our experience that like, because of the way that we have the story and we craft the content, that the story actually gets iterated on in real time and will evolve as the company evolves because of the feedback and the constant iterations of doing it. Which leads me to the next question, which is what? When is the right time for A company to be thinking about this always now, always.

It was like, it was the only thing that I spent time with, with David, the CEO at Drift on in the early days. It's like, and it's not like we had like a standing meeting once a week to talk about the story. I mean, we were constantly texting, DMing, Twitter, DM, like, your brain just needs to be switched on. And like, even though we had a good story down, he was always sending me, look at what this company did. Look at this headline. Look at how they positioned this. This is genius. Look at how from, from B2B. Not just B2B. Like, yes, we, we were looking at companies like, wow, here. Look at this stroke of genius and how Mark Benioff acquired Slack. And they're talking about like the future of work now. We, we would look at stuff like that. But it's, it's an ongoing. It's gotta be like, I'm sure you do this as a CEO, like you're just always thinking of. It's. It's a not. It's a never ending thing. You might have what's on the website right now and your boilerplate and what the team is using. But like, I've always kind of had either Apple Notes or Evernote or Google Doc. I just keep a running list of like, I call it, like the messaging file. I keep headlines that I like, things customers have said. Maybe I'm on a thing like this today and I hear someone say something interesting, like I screenshot that. And so I always kind of have this like swipe file of things that people are talking about. So I think the story has got to be ongoing. And I also know that when it comes to marketing, most CEOs only care about two things, the story and pipeline. And so it's kind of like those are the only two things that we're already talking about. Always talking about at that level. And even at a Marc Benioff Salesforce type level, the story is never done in that. It's not done until everyone is spitting it back at you. And the whole company is sick about talking. It has to be years and years of telling that story. And so it's never done. It's like this constantly evolving thing based on what's happening in the market, what's happening with your customers, what new product stuff you're shipping. Because all of a sudden Drift was just a chatbot company, quote, unquote. And then we acquired this video company and now it's like, how do we figure out how video Plays into that story. Well, the story has to evolve. And so how do we tell a story around, like, video that starts conversations or whatever? It's constantly evolving based on all the different ingredients and inputs that you're getting.

I love that. If we go a little bit deeper on that specific point with the acquisition, let's use the Drift example. So you had the platform and then you acquired video. It's interesting to think whether the story drives the acquisition targets or the other way around. Would love for you to dive a little bit deeper into that.

Yeah, I mean, it's tough to give, like, perfect experience advice on because I think it's different. You know, some founders will wake up and just be like, I want to acquire this company and I have this vision. But, like, in the case of Drift, it was like, they had a vision, they had a vision. And I always talk about, like this. And I mentioned with HubSpot, like, we had two word positioning at Drift in its prime, which was like, the positioning was conversational marketing. And we're about. We're not about forms. We're about helping people start conversations. And look, you can debate whether that's right or wrong. Now this is. I'm talking about just from a inside. My marketing hat is on, and I'm the marketing guy at the company trying to figure out this stuff. Right. And so the conversational marketing was like, the framework was like, our mission is to help remove the friction in B2B buying and make it easier for people to buy. The way that we're doing that today is chatbots. Does that have to be the only way? No, there's lots of. Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, we're observing what's happening across companies. Everybody, sales reps at this time, 2017, 2018. One thing that was working really well was video, personalized video. And we're like, holy cow, this is a really good conversation starter. I wonder if there's an angle here. And so then you start to think about, like, it comes from a deep. I guess the short answer is, like, it comes from a deep understanding of your customer and your buyer. And I think it allowed us to, like, do other things that we made another acquisition an email company. Same hook. We kind of had, only had done chat. What's the hook for email? Well, it's about conversational email. Traditionally, B2B marketing companies just kind of blast out emails, but actually all the golden emails, when somebody actually responds, don't you want to get a response from an email? And so we're able to keep. Keep pulling out threads like that. But I also think it's, it can be hard to do over time. And I think one of the things that was really valuable in the early days of Drift is we didn't try to be everything to everyone. We started with a wed and we kept adding as opposed to like I see a lot of early stage companies, they try to be the all in one thing out of the gate and it's like, that's not interesting to anybody. And so at Drift, we started specifically with product marketers because our hypothesis was we needed to get this thing installed on somebody's website. Who has the keys to the website. At most companies it's product marketing. And so if we can go into product marketing and get, and get this thing installed, okay, then we're going to build, we're going to start to build a business, we're going to learn how to sell to product marketing, we're learning where the product falls down. Then once we prove out success with product marketing now maybe we can expand into demand gen and into sales and into, you know, wherever else things go down the road. I think that approach is very important to take also.

Yeah, I just want to also note you mentioned the messaging file. That's something that people that are in the audience can take away right now. Like whether it's a Google Doc or whatever you want to store it. I use the notes app on my phone and screenshots like being able to, as you have ideas, have a way to get them into a space that when you have time to revisit them, right. Every time you have an idea, you're not going to have a bunch, maybe an hour to go and think about it. But having a space to put stuff away as you keep working on it, because this, in my experience, this stuff doesn't come to you straight away. It happens over a long period of time. And so being able to let that stuff sit, simmer and continue to work through it, I think is really important.

I'll give you an example. I'm working with a company right now and we were stuck on this messaging thing for weeks and they haven't come out with this yet, so I can't share it. But like one day out of the blue on the call, what about blank? And everyone's like, oh my God, it's like, you know, sometimes this is why like look, I love, I think frameworks are very important. However, I think when it comes to positioning and messaging, they can be a crutch because if you're just so glued in this like this is my doc. This is my doc. But, like, what happens when you're like, you have lunch with somebody or you're out on a run and all of a sudden, like, you got it. You need to create space for that. But I also found that, like, creating this swipe file, just like there's so much messaging coming at you and it's not all like, you can't all like, you're not going to change everything that you're doing in that moment. But you see a competitor in your space puts out an interesting announcement. Screenshot, the headline. We could. I wonder if there's a way you could use that. CEO tweets something that kind of blows up. Interesting. I wonder why. Right? I saw this thing. I saw. I really like how this person talked about. It can come. It can come from literally anywhere. You're listening to a podcast. I'm listening to a podcast last week about companies. They're not talking about companies in the B2B SaaS market, SaaS space. There's talking about companies like Peloton who pulled forward demand because of COVID and actually now maybe did everybody who's going to buy a peloton already buy one. That's a really similar trend to a lot of SaaS companies. And so it just kind of becomes this exercise in pattern matching and just thinking about things creatively and getting outside of the B2B marketing bubble. But also you get a lot of things. Like at Privy, for example, there was gold that came from the customer success team, the customer support team. You can't just change the website messaging overnight. But all of a sudden now I got this Google Doc and so when I'm going to go write something or when we need to go do something, we have kind of lots of ideas to get the ball rolling as opposed to, like, I got a blank Google Doc and the CEO is on my ass to write the series C press release. Like, tonight. I feel good about that. I kind of have already been working on the messaging ongoing. We're not making this up from scratch right now.

And just so everyone knows, we're going to get into a more detailed way of actually how to get this done. But one more question just as set this up before we get into that with Dave, it's. You alluded to it a little bit and it's like, how does customer research and insights play into this? Is it an input? How does that work in your mind?

Definitely an input. I'm never the right person to ask on this because one of my strengths and weaknesses that I'm very creative and very impulsive, and so I might have an idea, and, like, the CEO likes it, and it's like, we're gonna go do this. This feels right. Where, like, a lot of people. Well, have. We haven't tested it with 50 customers yet. And there is huge value. Don't let me poo poo that approach. There's huge value in that.

But there's also huge value in having conviction and intuition and moving with an idea, because moving forward, you pick a direction and go. I think a lot of marketers are so stuck waiting to make everything perfect where they actually never make progress or put anything out. I'm sure that's where you're getting to. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but.

No, you're. You're 100% right. I do think that a lot of times, you know, like, one company that I. That I'm working with, on, like, on the category creation type of stuff or whatever, you know, we're in. We're in the messaging process, and it's like, all right, well, now we're gonna, like, we're gonna go do 10 customer interviews and survey them on this. And I'm like, look, we're trying to create. You also have to be, what are you trying to do? If you're trying to create demand, for example, in something new, Nothing. That you're going to go and sit down with customers, and they're not going to be like, yeah, this is genius. Go do it. They're most likely going to be like, I'm not sure I see how this fits. And so you have to be very aware of what do you want to get out of that. And so if you want to go and run the story by them and make sure that it holds up, and there's a possibility in their world that it could be great, but you're never gonna get, like, 10 customers from your customer advisory board. Being like, this is amazing. Do it. It's a great way to, like, check and get and get input. Like, I'm working on, like, a rebrand for DGMG right now. I'm gonna change the name and do a whole thing. And it's this weird exercise of, like, I'm asking people that I trust for feedback, and a lot of them are like, I don't love that, but I have strong conviction, and I know that it's gonna work because, like, I've been in this niche, I've been in this market, I've taken all these inputs. And so I think you also got to have, like, this is why the founder and the CEO has to be so involved in this process. Because they're the one, they're the crazy person who started this company. They're the ones who've been in this industry for a while. Usually you have to have some conviction of your own and some kind of gut. Now if you do have something like a customer advisory board, that's great. Use that as a, use that as an input, as a gut check and go and test that. But I'm also not talking about, like, doing large scale, like, messaging, message testing at a $500 million company. We're talking about early stage startups. And like, you also, you're gonna get lots of cracks at this. This is, it's never the, like, huge unveil. This is why I never like to do like the huge brand unveiling. Because you spend six months doing the whole brand, doing the whole messaging, and then it, and then it falls flat. Then you're like, we just wasted six figures on this verse. I'm like, let's change the headline now. Let's change the homepage now. Let's do a podcast episode on this topic now. Let's, you know, let's do a roundtable with five customers on this topic now. And so, like, what are the ways that you can almost, like, foolproof your way? This is Chris. This is also why, like, community is so important, because this is not even a book plug, but, like, I literally wrote my book through my community. I was like, I want to write a book. Here's a bunch of ideas. We tested titles, we tested concepts. I was like, when we went to actually launch the book, I was like, all right, it's not going to sell no copies, because I already had a good enough feeling that people had given me feedback through community that they might buy it. And so huge impact on us in the early days of drift was the fact that we had an audience and we had built an audience. And so when we went to go test things, we kind of already felt like we had a good feeling. And so one thing that, that we did really well, I think, was we would take a concept like messaging. And before we made the huge deck and before we made the huge website, we kind of always, it was always like a blog post first.