SaaS founder Andrew Gazdecki explains how to tie your story to what your audience actually cares about. He points to Gong's emotional connection with salespeople and Drift's brand-as-moat strategy as examples, and argues that visuals are worth a thousand words. The framework: find a market shift, create a category, reinforce a theme, and build a movement around brutally honest customer feedback.
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Others is just how are you improving the lives of others? So this is just really just telling stories of how did you improve company XYZ? What was the outcome? And then also, what about your personal story is unique? And so this could be applied to you as a sales rep, you as a founder, Or even across your marketing. What about your story is different and unique? And what have you seen? What is your unique insights into the market that you believe to be true and you want your customers to believe that as well? And then the best stories that you could possibly tell is telling your customer stories. Because when you tell customer stories, those are real stories. Like, I can tell you my opinions about markets, but When you really, really nail it with a customer story, customers start creating their own stories for you, for you to tell to other customers. And that's kind of the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing is, will and always will be the most powerful form of marketing. Evoking emotion, you know, making people feel something like that's where you kind of think of, is there an opportunity to brand an enemy? And so this is a great way to make people feel something. Like, do they have an emotional connection? Like, one company that I think does this really well would be— like, the first company that comes to the top of my head is probably Gong. I mean, they have— they've done just such a great job creating this, like, emotional connection with salespeople and really helping them be better at their jobs. And I remember that. I remember the stats that they put out. I remember all the stuff that they do that really kind of creates an emotional connection to me. Probably not the best example, but that's off the top of my head. And then also super, super, super key is understanding your audience. So I have here written, have you ever told a story and found that No one's really listening, and that's probably because they're not interested, and that's probably because it wasn't a benefit to them. So this goes down to like really understanding like who you're selling to. So you could be selling to, you know, a VP of sales. Like, what's really important to them? It's probably hitting their quota. It's probably, you know, making sure they hire the best sales reps. It's, you know, a number of other things. So really understanding like what's important to your audience. should be tied into your story so they can really relate, and it just tells them that you understand their problems almost to a point where you more than they do. So servicing problems within a story can be even more powerful than just a story about the founding history of your company. MicroAcquire, as another example, People didn't really ever ask, why is 15% commission to sell a business so high? No one ever really asked that. And then I asked it, and then people started questioning it. They said, yeah, that's ridiculous. But it was the only option at the time. So there may be opportunities like that to really kind of bring out emotion, and then in your audience that really piques their interest. Using visuals as well. So as you're thinking about making marketing collateral or just updates to your website perhaps, this is one of my favorite quotes. Visuals and photography, if you get them right, they are really remarkable. Poor images won't get picked up on covers of big newsletters. And this is from Microsoft's chief storyteller. So, you know, a picture truly does tell 1,000 words. So being able to like visually also tell your story can be just as powerful, if not more powerful, than verbally telling your story as well. And this is just an easy example. Like, this is all this stuff that, you know, Hotjar Fixes. Instead of using all this other stuff, you just use Hotjar and that's it. So I instantly understand what Hotjar, the problem they solve and why they're doing it in just a simple image. So in summary, identify a shift, create a category, reinforces a theme, and then start a movement. And then what do you need to get started? Just brutally honest feedback from your customers, just testing and testing and testing and seeing what works and seeing what resonates. And sometimes just asking, like when you tell this story and if someone can repeat it back to you when you're on a sales call, that's kind of when, you know, it's really, you know, resonating with them. So I got 2 minutes left here, so I'm gonna stop sharing and I'd love to just answer any questions that any of you may have. So I already answered this one, when a SaaS company should look for brand I would say really at any point. David Cancel from Drift, I was talking to him one time and he told me, we've gone through 3 phases of SaaS. The first phase that created the winners was invention. The second phase was, this is like 2015, was the first SaaS company that could figure out the best go-to-market model, LTV to CAC, AED to SDR ratio. Everybody has the same sales playbook, every marketing playbook. And then today, the last defensible moat around SaaS companies or every business in general is brand. And so that's why Drift is such a good example of brand in terms of storytelling and really standing out from the crowd. And one thing I would just challenge everyone as you think about your stories is, Think outside the box. I don't have— like, when I think of, you know, go-to-market strategies, I'm always trying to think of stuff that doesn't feel like it's sales, it doesn't feel like it's marketing. Um, so it's just one tidbit. But this question here, so is individual brand business brand now? As an example, everyone knows you, the Andrew brand, and the micro brand due to you. I would say so. I mean, when you think about Tesla, you think about Elon Musk. I'm a huge proponent that every company needs a brand ambassador. You need someone that is kind of like the hype man. They're the person that's always just talking about the business. And you can have a brand story where you're not even really talking about your company. You're talking about how to make people better sales reps, how to make marketers better marketers, how to make finance people better at their jobs. Like, that stuff also can really build your brand. And I think that's where Gong has done such a great job is they've released a lot of data and told a lot of stories around how to become a better sales rep. And that's kind of what they do. And then when it's time to buy their product, You remember them. So we're out of time. I hope this was helpful. Hope you guys enjoyed this and really, really appreciate inviting me on.
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