Brand Demand: Creating Clarity and Driving Growth Amidst Uncertainty with Microsoft for Startups

All right, it looks like we are at 3 o'clock on East Coast time. For those of you on the West Coast, it's noon. So we've got a little bit of a chat here on brand demand, how to create clarity and drive growth amidst the uncertainty that's happening in the world right now. And we're just going to dive in. So I hope you're all well and safe and excited for some, some insights and some ideas on how to work through the circumstances that we're working through right now. So this is a brand new presentation. It's stripped down. It's super simple slides meant for these very complex times. And I'm here to talk to you about brand demand and why it's so important and one of those tools that you may not have in your toolbox yet. So just a teensy bit about me. I'm a serial entrepreneur myself. I've spent more than the last 10 years as a startup CMO in a number of different businesses, including SaaS. I'm the author of The Community Manager's Playbook, which is all about how to build brand awareness, customer engagement in the digital world. And let's be honest, I'm also no stranger to managing a crisis. I started as an investigative journalist before getting into marketing in the startup world. And I think a lot of that sort of desire for the chase and the competition came from all of my experience as a triathlete and a swimmer growing up. So I'm here to give you a little bit of energy as well as we go through this. OK, so brand, it's a startup secret weapon. And I'll tell you that almost every single founder that I've worked with, whether it was when I was at General Assembly building their brand curriculum or whether it's in the coaching work that I've done or just friends that I'm trying to help, every single one of them is like, oh my God, I wish I knew how to use brand earlier in my startup journey. I could have used it to raise capital, to win customers, to bring on employees and a number of other things. And I'm sure all of you are working through right now. So let's just talk a little bit about the specifics behind this. As a veteran interim CMO— and this is one of the things that I've spent really the majority of the last 12 years doing outside of a couple ventures of my own that I've founded along the journey— is I've really stepped in as an interim CMO. And oftentimes this started with a friend of mine coming to me or an SOS text message Oh my God, marketing's failing or running out of runway. And they're like, it's marketing's fault. Like, marketing's falling down on the job. I need you to come in and fix it. And what I do find when I dig in is that the problem often lies and almost always lies across the company, not just specifically with marketing. And this is not to say and not to like punt the blame to anybody else. Marketing absolutely has a role. Almost always in helping to fix moving a company's growth forward. However, it's normally not the source of problem that founders often think that it is, that they're having a hard time acquiring customers or moving through the funnel. Often what I find in the dozens and dozens of startups where I've been the interim CMO, or I've worked with them through, you know, the key fundraising phases to get to the next growth point, is that it's only 10% of the time where marketing actually completely has failed. And oftentimes that is because there is a disconnect between the marketing person or outsourcing it to an agency or some junior marketer who's been sort of tasked with the company's entire growth and just doesn't know what success looks like. So I'm here to give you some of those tools about what happens the rest of the time, the outside of that 10% of the time, and maybe also just the acknowledgment of the fact that 10% of the time it's decisions around who's leading marketing and making sure there's integration across multiple people to ensure that you're set up for success. Okay, so let's look at this. How do you move from a brand and having a brand to a brand that creates demand? And one of the things that I would say in terms of a lot of the work that I've done in creating a brand, when somebody comes to me and says, hey Lauren, can you help us with our brand? Or building a brand or the brand messaging. What they're actually asking me for is I want customers to come to me in the middle of the night without having to do anything. I want our customers to bring all of their friends along for the ride. I want the referral marketing to be a no-brainer. I want this to be so super easy. I want the brand to do the work for me. And we do have some amazing examples in the startup community, especially in the last decade of startup growth. Where the brand has driven demand by being super clear and by being very straightforward. But so a lot of you are probably saying, well, great, Lauren, in theory, like, yeah, having a brand that creates demand is for a few instead of the many. How do you go about doing this? And it's a fantastic question. We only have a few minutes, so I want to take us through the key elements of creating a brand that drives demand so that you can have that really sharp tool to help you through these critical times and how you're communicating to your customers, your prospects, and your employees, your investors, and anybody else that's in your stakeholder mix. So there's 4 keys that I find are the most important when it comes to brand demand and brand creation. The first is clarity. The second is connection. The third is momentum. And the last is all about alignment. So these 4 elements together, if you do them really well and define them as part of your brand strategy, you will be able to create so much clarity for all of your stakeholders. And this includes who you are, where you're going, who should join you for the ride and how to do that, but also very clearly who shouldn't be coming on the ride so that you can save your ti— time, your team's time, and everybody else's energy by attracting the people that are right for what you're working on and making really clear for everybody else that you're not the right fit for them, just so that they can find the solution they're looking for and free you guys up to focus on what matters most. Okay, so clarity. So clarity, we have purpose, promise, and value. I put these sort of super simple 3 elements of brand clarity here so that we can just look very specifically at how you can create each of these regardless of whether you have any messaging background, any brand background or marketing background. And almost all of you are going to say, well, yeah, yeah, of course we know what our purpose in the world is. We know what we're promising our customers and we know the value that we're creating. And I can tell you from coming in from that interim sort of fixer perspective, most of the time I fix these three things and they don't even need me anymore. And I think a lot of you are probably going to have some questions at the end and say, no way, how do you do that? But if you look at your home page, or the emails that you write, or whatever assets you're using, these 3 things need to jump out there. And not just for your, for your prospects in order to convert them to customers. Also, when you're trying to bring in talent, or both employees, advisors, especially when you're talking to investors, they want to know these things. They want that purpose, promise, and value to be explicitly clear from the beginning so that they know what you can do now, because that's part of your promise. They know the value that you're creating now. They also know that greater purpose. And this is actually one of the biggest problems that I see with startups, especially when they're trying to go after solving some big audacious problem, is they have this huge vision, but they don't ground it in what they're doing today. And especially in times like this, you really got to simplify it down. You have to make it very easy for people to say yes and to be able to respond to you because everyone is just so overwhelmed. So as we look at that, you then have connection. That's about identity and community. So your sense of identity, a brand that really draws you, and I'm a Nike alum myself from the beginning of my career, and one of the things that Nike has done so well and continues to do well is they make their marketing so clear on who Nike is that it attracts people who are, who are like them. And so you can use that sense of connection and identity in your messaging and your visuals. In the way that you interact on your products. And these types of things create that sense of identity where you have them nodding with you on a regular basis. And it's easy for them to say yes because it's already happening. And it creates a sense of community, both together with identity and separately. That sense of community for a lot of SaaS products is the difference between you getting a customer that then brings 5 or 10 people like them who then bring 5 or 10 people like them, et cetera, et cetera, to something where you're having to do things on a much more manual one-on-one basis. So building a cult-like community around the problem that you're solving, again, with clarity as that first element, will just pay dividends in spades. Momentum. So I think a lot of us as founders know this, and anyone who's been in the startup world, for those of you who are employees of a startup and trying to look for some tools right now, is we all know that once you get your stride with a startup, you feel unstoppable. And so many of you might be saying, well, you're either in the camp of you've got so much momentum that you're drinking from a fire hose or you don't have enough momentum and you're feeling that you're like at this halt or at a pivot, repivot kind of moment with what you're doing. And I think once you get those first two elements of clarity and connection in place, then it's about that momentum, about setting a cadence for growth. And being in the conversation to be able to be top of mind and then be able to engage that conversation is the first element. Then from there, it really becomes about making sure that the customer perception of you is what you want that perception to be. And I know that probably sounds like a little bit vague, but the customer perception is the thing that can create so much momentum. How many of you have seen Or let's take Dropbox, which, you know, at its early stages used the idea of momentum as its way of using referral marketing to create momentum, to build traction and help them really scale up. So often, if for those of you who are in the earlier or in the early growth stages, it's helpful to look at some of the companies that were like you that are at sort of that further step in their, in their journeys and much in a stable place where they're sort of a fully adopted product and then reverse engineer how did they get their momentum, because eventually you want the momentum to carry itself. You don't want to have to continually use that startup hustle in order to sort of force the momentum uphill. That's not what you're looking for. You want to find— use those first couple elements in order to then move that momentum consistently forward. So here's one of the things that people often forget about, and you've heard me mention all of your stakeholders and your employees multiple times already in our chat today. Internal alignment is the, is the additional sort of element here. And the reason that I share it is because when you have clear goals, a clear vision, and clear milestones, it really helps to create an autonomous team. And I think a lot of us are attracted to the startup world because there is a sense of togetherness, but also a sense of autonomy, that there's moments where you just need to put your head down and focus. And really be able to build that momentum that we just talked about. But when you don't have clarity, it's really hard to hit short-term milestones, to hit bigger goals, or to go after that big vision and make decisions autonomously on your own, or to propose solutions on your own. And as a founder, those solutions could be that you're proposing them to your investors, to your customers. This internal alignment applies regardless of whether you're a team of a couple people or a team of hundreds of people. And being able to create the alignment really, it's one of the biggest things that I find in trying to create teams that are high performance. And that athletic side of me always is sort of looking for this as like, what is that tipping point in terms of how you set the foundations up that regardless of what's changing, that the team knows how to move forward. So how do you enable this brand demand? When we look at sort of the visions and values, right? Like we're trying to sort of, lock this in, in terms of pulling the pieces together. The vision and values, always clear. So these are the things that you need to do to make sure that you're going to be able to create the kind of demand that is pulling customers towards you. Um, and starts with that vision and values. Again, you need to have that big picture view, but then you need to be able to pull it down to the day-to-day, which is then about the communicating effectively. And that The biggest advice that I can give is you have to cut the muddy messages. If you have an email that's, you know, 2 pages long, you need to figure out what is the 10% of that message that is absolutely essential to communicate and then put the rest into an asset or something else. But really trying to remove any muddy messages to effectively communicate when you're in these times is super, super important. And this goes for all stakeholders— customers, employees, vendors, investors, etc., etc. Strengthening the value proposition. So strengthening the value proposition is something that I've been doing a lot of work with, with founders in the last couple months. And so this is really, you know, what is that thin edge of the sword that really cuts in and people are like, I can't live without that part of what you do, because that's your, your way in the door with new customers. But it's also the thing that you want to dig in on with customers that you already have that either you haven't been delivering enough value to, or now is your moment to ensure that you keep those customers and get more like them by having their back right now. The last element is all about differentiation. So differentiation— founders always understand the hustle and the teams they attract the same thing. But if we can put that hustle behind a real clear differentiation with an eye towards what makes a difference for the customers day to day, it's a huge support to a strong value proposition. 'Cause a strong value proposition without differentiation is really opening itself up to competition. When you do all of these elements together from the first several elements that we walked through, really enables you to unleash the power of brand demand. So here's a really simple exercise. I've actually been using this one quite a bit with founders as well. When you've got a ton of messages going on or you're trying to validate a pivot, I try to simplify down what you are doing into what are the 3 things that people absolutely, positively have to know about what you're doing. And so you can use this to prep to get on your virtual stages. You can use this for what are the 3 things that I have to get across in an email outreach, the 3 things that I have to communicate when somebody does actually pick up the phone and then give me some of their time. So the reason I say simplify it down to your 3 most essential points is it's really easy with everything going on to be— to let the train go off the tracks. And clarity is the first element that I bring up because it is so, so important. And this exercise is one that every single one of you can do. And so the easiest thing is to try and take the messaging triangle, the 3 points, and then look at the— this sort of graphic that I've just gone back to around enabling demand. One of your points is likely around visions or value, depending on what your product is. One should absolutely be about your value prop, and your third should be what makes you unique and different. So that's a really easy framework. So if you're trying to test a pivot, come up with that messaging triangle, come up with a couple of them, and know what it is that you're trying to communicate. So there's 3 simple points, and I don't mean 3 paragraphs, I mean 3 bullet points that if somebody literally only gave you a minute, that you can make sure that you can weave that into conversation. Okay, so let's just wrap this up. I wanted to make sure that we gave ourselves enough time for a few questions here at the end, and so this is a recap of how do you how do you get results leveraging brand to drive demand so that customers want to come to you? And so clarity creates confidence, especially during these times. If you're trying to get people to part with their money, you need to give them confidence that spending that money is going to really serve them. So you need to— they need to know what that promise is, what that value is baked into that clarity. Connection builds trust. We all know that things are about relationships. And right now, who are people turning to? The people that they know and that they trust and that they're really excited to do business with, but also they know that you're going to deliver. And I know that all of you on this phone know how to deliver. So creating that clarity, building that connection so that they know that you're going to deliver. Then we have sort of this alignment element. Again, you want to enable your teams, especially when things are super crazy. You need to be able to divide and conquer and not have to have that fearfulness that somebody might make a decision that you don't agree with, or that you're all beating to different, you know, drums as you're moving forward. So this is really enabling momentum and decision-making within your organization. Last thing about momentum is we all know that momentum can drive outcomes because once you get it going, it's like a freight train. It just keeps going and going and going. So we really want to make sure that you've done those first 3 elements so that as you're getting it out there, you're building momentum and traction even if you are pivoting or if you're changing your messaging right now and changing some of your product or your focus, is you want to build a reputation that is going to attract the kind of virality that is gonna have customers doing the work for you. With that, um, that is the super quick version of brand demand for these crazy digital times that we're working through with work from home. Um, I would love to take some questions both here, and then if you don't get your question answered feel free to use Twitter or LinkedIn, and I'm happy to answer more questions to help you guys out. Yeah, thanks, Lauren.

We've got some really great questions from the SaaStr audience. The number one that people have been uploading this question, so they really want to know, what are your tips for measuring the ROI of brand when brand and revenue sometimes don't go in the same sentence together?

Absolutely. So, I mean, there's a couple different ways. What I try to use is use brand for a tool for something that we're already doing. So whether that's email outreach, whether that's sales pitches, when I started to really apply brand to things that are already happening and showing the difference between creating that clarity and the connection and focusing in on these couple key elements and showing the difference between close times for, for a BD deal, for example, like if you have to kind of use business development as part of your sort of close cycle from a SaaS product. If it's not all being done online. That's a great way of measuring it. I— one of the other things I would say is in terms of measuring some of the specifics around brand, and I'm happy to also share some additional resources after this with the SaaS community, is one of the biggest things that you're looking for in measuring brand is that brand and doing the work with customers will give you insights that you can apply to both your marketing as well as your product. And so being able to measure the outcomes on new product features or new marketing campaigns that came from insights and being able to benchmark something existing versus something new. That's a, that's a really easy way because you already have a place to start.

Yep. Yeah, that's super helpful. And I know one that people have been asking a lot about today is hiring. So people want to know specifically from with your insights and your background, how do you leverage brand for hiring, especially now?

Absolutely. So one of the stories that I didn't think I had enough time to share in today's chat was during the last market crash, a founder. I got one of those SOS text messages saying, we're— we've got 3 months of runway. I've had to fire almost all of our people, but I need to recruit either our customers or people that are really passionate about what we're doing into the fold, or some of our employees that we can't afford, that we want to find a way to incentivize them so that when we weather this storm, they're sort of a part of it for the next journey. And so I'd say the biggest way that we actually used it in that example was for all of the stakeholders, but it worked really well with employees, was having that brand clarity of like, what's the purpose and what are we collectively trying to do together? And then how they can contribute. So it was really simple. Once we validated from the community, from a customer standpoint, like, what is the problem we need to solve now in the new circumstance? Was then what about that could really attract talent? And so from a community-building standpoint, I think that that's really a powerful way of trying to attract talent, is to take the consumer insights that are part of your purpose and then the promises that you're making to your customers and use very similar ones with your customers because you want— you want your employees to be your first customers. And I do often find is that when that's the case, that you end up having people that are super, super dedicated. And for the founders on the line, that's— that's the kinds of employees that are going to act as you would, right? Like we all want— we all want employees or contractors or people that are helping us that will work as hard and be as dedicated to the mission as a founder is. And so I think a lot of it in terms of that employee side is to figure out how the alignment between customer and employee. And then I do this with everyone when I recruit and I've recruited, you know, hundreds of people, especially building communities. You're building, you know, recruiting ambassadors and, you know, sometimes dozens of people at a time is to figure out what it is that are the top 3 things that you absolutely need in that hire. And then as you're interviewing, asking what it is that makes that person a high performer and seeing where that alignment is, because then you can say, you know what, the 3 things that are most important to us in response to the 3 things that like really make you succeed, here's how we can fit that up. Right? So it's almost like you're doing a value prop, um, with a really strong messaging clarity for that new hire or for that Sometimes, you know, volunteer. I totally think that this is something that people in the startup community should be considering right now is, you know, there's a lot of people that are out of work who would be willing to, and in our past crashes have said, you know what, I'd rather have something on my resume and be adding value and contributing to something that I believe in, knowing that if we do, there's going to be an opportunity for there. You'll write me an amazing recommendation and help me make connections to get a gig. So a lot of creative things on the HR side to think about.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for those insights, Lauren.

So helpful.

I wish we had more time, but—

I know. If you guys need anything, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn. I'll answer more questions.