Craft Stories That Focus on Relevancy - Jorge Soto, Ed Jaffe, Joe Caprio, and Tyson Goeltz - Revenue Today - Episode # 058

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.

Hello, hello everyone, and thank you so much for joining us for this incredible session today. Shout out, of course, to Rev Genius for putting this on. We all know that a demo without a story, or even just any presentation or sales conversation without a story that resonates, is not ideal. Today we're gonna be covering how to craft a compelling story around, of course, your demo. And we're gonna give it a couple minutes here for folks to log in, but I'm really excited to be joined by this amazing panel. We will dig into the details here in a quick second. However, we're gonna be talking from a revenue leader perspective, but also from the perspective of a pre-sales leader as well, because as we know, in the enterprise, it's really, really important to have these organizations aligned. So again, we'll give it a quick second just to get, or give folks a quick second to log in and access the link. A couple housekeeping items. You'll see that there is a Q&A function in your, in the interface here on your screen. So go ahead and, you know, if you have any questions, go ahead and submit your question there and we'll get to that a little later. This is of course being streamed as well on LinkedIn. So go ahead and engage with as many folks as possible, post your comments on the feed, and we'll have a lot of fun here today. Ed, I am just having to shout out the Nirvana shirt. Thank you so much for doing that. Really appreciate it. Plus the guitars in the back. I got my 6 or so guitars that I haven't played in a while, which I should. Tyson, we gotta do a jam session here at some point. Maybe we can do like a revenue jam session.

If by jamming you mean you're playing and I'm listening, I think that's the best way to jam.

Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Awesome. Well, we'll go ahead and give it another minute or so and then kick it off with some introductions and then get ready to bestow your wisdom. And of course, Joe, I'm really excited to have you on this here today.

I'm pumped to be here, George. You know that.

I know. I love you, man. All right, awesome. Well, let's go ahead and get started here. Um, hello, my name is George Soto. I head up community here at Reprise. Been here for, uh, almost 2 years now, which is, uh, crazy to, to think about just given the, the age of the business. Uh, I will be the host here, moderator. Just kind of guiding us through the conversation here today. Again, just as a reminder, go ahead and click on the Q&A function and submit your questions. Awesome, I see we got some comments. Oh, Joe, there you go. Awesome, testing the comment feed. Joe, why don't you go ahead and kick us off? Give us a quick intro.

Hey everybody, I'm Joe Caprio. I'm a partner at Glasswing Ventures. In a prior life, I've built sales teams. I've gone 0 to 20, 0 to 10, 0 to 1, and I've found myself consistently selling into the revenue stack, um, in zero to whatever journeys. And then at my last, um, career crossroads, I chose to switch over to the dark side and join a VC fund, um, where now I coach really, really technical founders on getting their first set of customers. And so we invest in seed stage AI enterprise technology, and then I've help former CTO, chief data officer, data scientist types figure out how to become a salesperson and figure out what their story is.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And of course, Glasswing is involved in Reprise, so we very much appreciate that. Tyson, how are you?

I'm fantastic, George. Thanks. And hi, everyone. I'm Tyson Geltz. I'm the CRO. At Reprise here live in Austin, Texas. Before becoming CRO at Reprise, I spent nearly a decade at LinkedIn in various continents and then an Austin tech success story with a company called A Cloud Guru in the e-learning space. And now I'm extremely passionate and pumped about helping go-to-market leaders create winning demos with Reprise.

Awesome. And Tyson, really, really super excited about you leading our revenue effort here at Reprise, and we really love you a lot. So thank Thank you so much. Ed, how are you?

Good, good to see you, George.

Likewise. Yeah, why don't you tell folks a little bit about your background and, uh, those— what— why those cool guitars are behind you?

Well, the cool guitars are behind me mostly so people like you ask about it when we're having that, you know, the beginning of Zoom meetings where you're sitting there like waiting. Well, how's the weather there? It's terrible. How's the weather there? It's fine. And then you sit there for 5 minutes with nothing to talk about. It always gives us something to talk about, or people ask about the records. But as by way of background, so I am the Director of Research and Customer Experience at 2Win. We run various workshops for sales and pre-sales and leaders who are trying to make a stronger impact with their audiences. So I spend my time working with various types of sales teams on how to give better demos, how to run more impactful discovery, how to win better with executives, and how to tell better stories in meetings.

Awesome. Thank you so much for that. Let's go ahead and dive into the first topic, which is really around leveraging closed won opportunities. opportunities, customer stories, and discovery, right, to craft your story. It just boggles my mind that so many sales folks sort of come up short with leveraging the data that we have already in our hands to be able to craft that story. Joe, how do you use closed won deal data to start to craft that story?

Well, George, what you just said there, surprising how many people don't do this well. I'll just volunteer a time that I did it really poorly. kind of explain why and maybe how I learned to do it right. So I spent 10 years in manufacturing before I went into startups and maybe I had some bad training or a lack of training, but when I went to my first startup, I was told about using case studies on Zoom calls. And I said, what do you mean? Like, just read this slide about this other company to the stranger and say that, you know, they got 300% ROI and then they're supposed to just like buy this product because I read this slide to them. And that's what I did. And I got on Zoom calls and I would just read slides at people and it would go really, really poorly. And I wasn't actually telling a story. I was just bragging about deals we had done. And it took a while for a good mentor to grab me and say, hey man, you're doing it wrong. You know, like you are telling a story to make it easier for the other person to imagine themselves benefiting from your product. You're telling a story so the other person doesn't have to show up and immediately admit all these weaknesses. They can just react and empathize with this other customer who had those problems. And so the story is actually like a bidirectional conversation. It's just a jumping off point to help encourage the person to have that conversation. But the idea of telling a customer story, the irony is like, it's not a one-on-one, you know what I mean? You're not just narrating a story. It's an interaction. The story is guiding the interaction. So that was my epiphany that I had when I finally got my head on straight and started leveraging customer stories.

Tyson, what's your experience and advice around this?

I think a key part of stories landing is relevancy, which is like what Joe was saying, is, is the story I'm being told feel like it fits me or not? Easy way to check in or check out. I think what's interesting is we tend to agonize over losses. You know, we ask, why did we lose? Why did we lose all the time? We celebrate wins, but it's more the outcome versus the journey. And kind of the underutilized space is, well, asking, why did we win? And it's that why did we win story that we should really use to go to anchor our stories. People, people follow leadership, and a great way to show leadership is to show that you've been there before. And that you can help them get to the place that they ultimately want to go. And I think demonstrating that you have a grasp of why people purchase your software and/or your hardware and where they ultimately can get to is a great way to show leadership.

Awesome. Ed, what's your take?

So I think Joe's story really resonated. I think I see that so often where people just go in and they do exactly that. They throw up a case study slide, they just read it, and then Expect the audience to read and listen at the same time, which never ever works. And so then people, yeah, they're 300% ROI thing. It's so common. And then there's no context for that. Like, what does that actually mean? Is it because you went from like 1 to 3? Like, or is it actually a real number here? And so I think that what we, you have to really think about when you're telling a story is it's, Tyson says, being relevant to the audience. And I think that comes in a few different flavors. It's You wanna make sure that the benefits that you're talking about are relevant to the people in the room. Are you— have to prioritize for what are the things in your software? Your software can do 100 things. What are the 3 things they really care about? And are you really hitting those points?

Hmm.

And then I think where, where I've had stories fall down is if they just don't land with the audience for not always business reasons. I used to tell a story for marketing technology. I was talking about the ideal customer experience and I would for some audiences, talk about Norm, the character Norm in Cheers, and how that's the ideal customer experience. That worked for, you know, I grew up in Boston in the '80s and '90s, and so for an audience who had seen the show, that would land. Joe totally gets it. Right. In an international audience or an audience that was, you know, had not seen the show, it wouldn't land. And so you have to think about, you know, if it's an international audience, if you're being, you know, coming from a place— Americans love to use idioms and sports references and all these things. So if You're, you know, an American speaking to somebody in Europe and you say, move the goalposts, something out of football, they're gonna look at you like, what are you talking about? So you have to really think, how is it gonna land from a number of different factors?

I love that. I love that. I feel like we can speak to this forever here, but Joe, you know, if you think about kind of the story and how it evolves when going outbound versus inbound and within that context, anything that comes to mind there?

I had, I had an experience with this too, on a sales team when I was, I was leading a sales team. And, you know, like a lot of startups, early days, we grew up on inbound deals. We didn't really spend a ton in marketing until maybe you get like into your Series A or later. Or sorry, you didn't spend a ton of money on BDR teams. We were just kind of like taking inbound meetings and closing deals. And then we raised another round. The growth goal got really aggressive. We hired a bunch of BDRs. We hired somebody into channel. And we started taking in meetings from sources that we weren't comfortable with or experienced with. And our old approach wasn't working anymore. Our win rate on outbound-generated meetings was, you know, like really, really bad compared to our extraordinarily high win rate on inbound meetings. And, um, so I started listening to the calls, you know, and trying to identify where the meeting was breaking. And the weirdest part about an inbound meeting is you kind of have the right to say, why'd you ring my doorbell? You know, like, why did you ask for this meeting? And then the idea is to pattern match what they're saying to you to the relevant stories and say, wow, that's amazing. I just had this last week. I helped somebody, you know, they said it was even worse. And you're telling the story as a reaction to the reason this person wants your help. You got on an outbound-generated meeting and you're like, hey, why'd you take the call? And they're like, because you asked me to. And you're like, yeah, but surely there must be a problem over there. And they're like, dude, you asked me 5 times, you know? And at a certain point they're gonna be like, homie, you said you had like the newest thing you had to explain to me. I had to see this. Fricking show it to me. And so the idea on an outbound generated meeting is you should be doing pattern matching to segments of your, to your customer. Find a segment that looks like that customer and then say, hey, you look like this customer. I would love to tell you this story. Now they come into the meeting and you're like, hey, why'd you take the call? And they're like, cuz you promised me a story. So tell 'em the story. And so the story on an inbound meeting is reacting to what they tell you in the beginning of the call. And the story on the outbound meeting is 1 or 2 or 3 stories that you think this person looks like. That's again, meant to entice them to have a dialogue and mutually discover they actually do look like that customer and they have the same problems that customer had.

Awesome. Ed, you know, speaking of segmentation, how do you use persona segmentation maybe just to add or Or take what Joe said to the next level to craft that relevant story, as Tyson mentioned?

Yeah, I mean, it's— I think Joe's got a really good point about kind of that. When you think about those meetings, when, yeah, why'd you take the meeting? I don't know, because you asked me. Like, I love that. And that's so common. And you have to think about what does the person in the room ultimately care about? And, you know, every— you have different roles and different people care about different things, but you know, if you're meeting with a person who's really security-focused, here's probably the things that they're gonna wanna talk about. If they're in a different role, here's the things they're gonna talk about. Part of, I think I was just running a discovery workshop and some of you were talking about is go to a 10-K, look at what is the company saying, these are our problems, and think about what strategic things can you tie to? 'Cause I think where people really get stuck and where I see a lot of deals fall down is they go in, hey, I got these really cool features to show you. Okay. Versus, I know that this is the thing that, you know, your boss is caring about, or the board really cares about this. So for your role, how does this impact you? You know, how does this trend impact you? You'll get a much better conversation than, hey, can I sell you some software? Like, okay.

You know, it's just, again, I scratch my head going, are we still doing this? Like sales folks are still coming up short. They're not implementing these these like just fundamentals, you know, in my— at least in my mind, you know. Tyson, if you think about how to use discovery, and of course discovery is sort of like a wide or a big, big term, right? Big— there's a lot there. But, uh, you know, what would you say are some, some tips or your feedback on using discovery to solidify that story?

Yeah, I mean, you talk about fundamentals, you know, how often have we heard we We need to get better at discovery. We, you hear it at every company, at every stage. I mean, I've heard it my entire, my entire life. So it's, it's still an opportunity for us cuz the discovery should light the demo on fire in a good way. In a good way. You, you heard Ed talk about like, what does my prospect care about? Discovery should help paint the picture of what I care about, and then I can use my product and my demo to put that front and center so Ed can feel you know, evoking emotion through your product, how what I'm showing him, whether it's a feature or a part of your software that helps him, right? It should really kind of create that emotional connection. Ed, you told me in our call you're trying to do this because of this. I wanna really isolate, this is how you can do that. And then it carries it forward versus just, Ed, here's a bunch of stuff. In doing my research, I believe that companies in your space care about this stuff. And the reality is Ed's sitting there like, Yeah, I kind of actually don't. So if you had asked me, I would have told you that. So ask them, they'll tell you, because people want to spend time on things that they feel like can actually help them.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.