Story is Strategy

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Hey, what's up? This is Dave Gerhart and you're listening to DGMG Radio. Hey, DGMG Radio, what's up? Today I want to talk about company positioning and storytelling. I see something that comes up a lot and it's a very common thing. And it is so often at companies as they evolve or even in the early stages, you can have a product that can be sold to different customer segments for many different use cases. And I often talk to marketers or you know, the marketing team has one opinion, the sales team has another opinion, the customer success team has another opinion about who the right fit customer is and all the use cases. And even if the product's really good and the use case fit is really strong, there's always this like we, there's a hundred different ways people could use our product and we need to tell them all And I, I totally disagree with that because what I see happen over and over is companies, startups fall in love with all of the different ways their product can do something and they try to mash that all together in some, like, meaningless value prop. Like we help build relationships. I can't give an example without context, but. And I think that's just such a mistake because when it comes to positioning your company, being direct and being clear is so much more powerful than having this muddy. Like, we serve five different customer segments because you have to remember that you can always land and expand. And so there always needs to be some angle, there needs to be some wedge, and oftentimes 80% of the customers are going to buy for that reason. And so this is one of the things that's so frustrating about doing positioning inside of a company is that everybody's got opinions. And I don't mean this in a, in a disrespectful way, but you have to limit the number of inputs and people who are making these positioning and messaging decisions. It's great to get their input and get their feedback, but like, you can just totally tell when it, when a startup has just like kind of mashed all the things that they think are important from different teams and put them together and then slapped them on the website. And I see a lot of times, like, I feel like I'm very direct and I give very specific advice and I'm like, man, this company just like, is overthinking. They're overthinking their positioning because when I'm able to look at it from the outside, I'm like, oh, it's so obvious. This is what your company does. And they're like, yes, that's what we do. And I'm like, well, great. Why haven't you said that? And it's like, well, because, you know, this segment and this team and we also have this, you know, partnership with this company and you know, we have this legacy customer set that we got to appeal to. Like, no, no. Clarity is always going to be the best thing. And there's nothing more important than the story because the story is your strategy. And so if you can't get aligned on the story, then you can't go build an effective strategy. And so I see so often anytime the story is muddy, the strategy is muddy. We're selling to all these different customer segments. And I'm not talking about a hundred million, $500 Million company with, you know, multiple business units and most of the people in the DGMG world or that I'm either working with directly or, you know, talking to through the community or day to day podcast. Listen, like most of you are less than $50 million. I would say most people are probably even less than $20 million in revenue, maybe even 10. Like, I think, I think there's a lot of like single digit ARR companies that follow this stuff. And like your advantage right now is to just be clear and be direct and don't try to be everything to everyone and don't overthink what you're doing. Yes, you got to make it sizzle, you got to add some stuff to it. But the opportunity is to take a step back and say, like, what's the reason 80% of the people come to our website and buy. It's usually going to be one, one or two very clear and direct things. And that's what you want to build your positioning around. On top of that. That is also why story is so important, because then you can have an effective strategy moving forward anytime. Your positioning is rock solid, then the strategy, it answers so many questions for the strategy piece moving forward. And, and it's oftentimes the CEO is usually at the center of this because they have all these different ideas and visions and things they want to do. And you got to push to focus and say, like, what is our wedge? What is our hook going to be? What is this very clear story? And this is why I keep going back to this thought that like so much of marketing is ruined by what happens internally. Like, you have to make a team. I think April Dunford talks about this. But like maybe the CEO, the marketing leader, and maybe, maybe one other person should be involved in owning the creation of the company story and narrative. Now that doesn't mean you don't get feedback and you don't make other people feel like they're involved and bring them in and put in ideas from them. But you got to have a strong conviction and it's never going to be 10 people in a room raise their hand and say, yes, this is a story. I agree with it. No, you have to pick one, you have to pick a lane and you have to go out and execute. That's one observation that I was going to share today. Okay, the other thing I want to talk about is your marketing strategy. So first we talked a little bit about positioning strategy.

Okay.

One thing that I don't see enough people understand is that your marketing strategy has to be based on the ingredients that you have to work with. Right? Marketing. You're the chef, right and you get a bunch of different ingredients. But the problem is as the marketer, especially at a startup, you are not often involved in shopping for the groceries. And to any sports fans out there, especially if you're in the Patriots world, you remember there's a classic Bill Parcells quote about if they want you to cook the meal, they should at least let you shop for the groceries. Well, in marketing, you're not shopping for the groceries, right? You are, you are joining the company after the founders started at some point. You are not the one fundraising, you are not the one hiring everybody across the company. You are not developing the product and figuring out, you know, there's so much nuance. And so I'm ranting on this because I saw a question come up in the DGMG community the other day about, hey, we can't pay San Francisco top of the market salaries. So like, how do we compete for talent? And that was such a great question because it really prompted this thinking in my head which is like, you have to have context of all that. And so like as a marketing leader, your job is not just to blindly execute on the orders that you're given from the CEO, you have to be real. And so if the CEO, if you have a plan, it's like, hey, we're going to grow from 0 to 10 million in the next year and we raised 100 million from Sequoia and we have well known investors and well known founders and great, you know what, I bet that's an insane goal still. But you're going to be able to go and attract top talent because the how you're going to, how you're going to build a team is you have a great story around, you know, equity and potential unicorn and potential upside and you have all this cash and so you can go and pay 150k for early head of marketing when you haven't like built anything yet or sold anything yet, but a lot of companies aren't in that position or let's say you're coming into a, into a market and you know, five of your other competitors are super well funded near and you're not and funding is just one piece of this. But like when you're building your marketing strategy for the year, you have to take in all these different things into account. So like can we compete in this area? Like same thing I think about like when I'm building a marketing strategy and picking channels, like if we've never done a podcast before and this is like, it's a bad example but just to give you some context. Like, if we've never done a podcast before, nobody in our company has done a podcast. Nobody likes to hear their own voices, they don't like to talk. We don't have any writing expertise. Then, like, I wouldn't recommend going and do that. First, you have to stack the deck for the things that. For the areas that you can be uniquely successful. And so when you go and build a marketing strategy, you need to take the ingredient. You need to look inside of your company and say, well, what factors do we have? Like, okay, well, we can't pay top of the market. And so we're going to have to hire more junior people. And so as a result, that's going to change the marketing strategy that we're going to build. Right? Or maybe you can and that will go the other way. That will change a different type of strategy. Right? Or we, we, you know, we're bootstrapping this. We haven't raised a bunch of venture dol. So we're not going to spend, you know, five grand once a month on a dinner with CEOs to try to sell to them. You have to use all those ingredients. You also have to use the context of what's happening in the market with your competitors. If five of your competitors are really heavy with events, then I might not go play that game. And I'm trying to find other channels that I can win and compete on. And so whether it's hiring or picking channels or figuring out where you're going to place bets, like, you have to take in all that context. And so, like, before you get into the spreadsheet and before you get into the Google Doc and doing whatever your planning is, like, sit down and say, like, what is our place in the market? How do we think we can win? What are the things that we need to go and do there? And so, hey, I don't have the biggest budget in the world, and so I'm going to have to build this team with three or four junior people. Okay, that's going to take a lot of my time and coaching and training. Okay, but, like, what channels can we go and compete on? Or maybe, maybe we can hire an agency to help scale some of this thing. You got to think about all the ingredients. You can't just go and say, yep, here's the funnel math. Here's the goal that we got from the CEO and CFO for the year. Okay, we're gonna go execute on. You have to work all those factors into your plan, and you gotta be constantly adjusting and even on the hiring side, you might adjust the strategy based on who you're hiring. Like, I've done this in the past where you, you might be hiring, like, hey, I think we need to hire for product marketing. Well, I'm gonna post two product marketing roles. I'm post head of product marketing. I'm gonna post product marketing associate. I'm gonna see who comes in because maybe we'll get a badass head of product marketing. Ah, but damn it, we can't afford her right now. She's making a 150 at this other company. We can't pay her that right now. We got a more junior person who looks really hungry. And this person, you know, maybe we do have actually a nice like 80k salary in the budget. Okay. So we're going to go with that path. Like, you have to give yourself optionality. And somebody had asked us before, but the way that I put that in the hiring plan for the year, and this is a separate tangent on hiring now is this like you put in a range and have that conversation with the CEO, like, hey, we're. We have budget to hire five people this year, right? I can't tell you all the five roles that I'm going to hire throughout the year. I have no idea. We got to go do things. Maybe we'll hire two of them now and three of them later. And so I've always kind of had like TBH to be hired in the plan. And I give a range of salary, right? And so like, usually it's like, hey, you know, the range for this role is going to be between 100 and 150k. And if I get the 150k person, then maybe the next person that I hire on the different part of the team, I can't. Like, I just use that. It's almost like if you're building like a DraftKings lineup and you have a, you have a budget and you're going to go spend a big portion of your budget on one person, then you got to go and re. Re. Readjust the formula for the rest of the people that you're going to hire. And this is not just specific to hiring, this is spending on any channel. So just continue to think about marketing strategy as like a portfolio and, or a recipe. And you got to work with the ingredients that you get from the company and from the market. And your job is to put all those things together. It's like, you know, you could hire an amazing chef. Like, if you give me all the like crappy ingredients I have in my fridge right now and ask me to make you something. You're gonna get a grilled cheese, right? But if you hire an amazing chef, they might make you that same grilled cheese. But it's gonna be amazing. That's what separates the great marketing leaders at least from the others. Okay, this is just what I want to do with this podcast. I have guests. I'm gonna do some of that stuff later. But right now it's a little bit before the holidays and I'm not up for calling people over zoom and talking for an hour. And I'm going to be hanging out more with my family over the next couple weeks. So I'm just ranting and I hope it's helpful for you. If it is, drop me a note on Twitter or hit me up on my website davecarehart.com and if you're not already a member of DGMG and everything else, you can go check it out. It's all up on my site, davecarhart.com Shout out to the crew at Hatch UseHatch FM. They do all the audio editing and production for the show and they give startups like unlimited editing and it's amazing. I've used Fiverr in the past. I've used Upwork in the past. This is way better. We have a system where basically I record an episode, I throw it up on a trello board, I've picked the music and we've done the intro and everything later and they stitch it all together. Hey, I'm even on their website. Look at that. Look at that ball, man. Okay, all right, I'm out of here. Enjoy the rest of your day, week morning, whatever you're doing and hit me up. Davegarhart.com.

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