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Your go-to digital marketing toolkit: Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders Podcast.
In-depth discussions with leading voices in tech marketing, uncovering the challenges they face and the innovative solutions they're implementing.
Our goal is to provide you with sincere value, perspectives, learnings, and transparent advice you can apply directly to your digital marketing strategy.
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MARGIE: You start getting a lot of friction between those two groups about what a qualified lead actually looks like. It's just that you got a mismatch of what the expectation was, the message that you were sending.
Kerry: Hello and welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. I'm so grateful you all are here. I'm your host, Keri Gard. And today we're stirring up something special with Margie Agen, award-winning marketer, author of Brand Breakthrough and founder of Centerboard Marketing. We're talking about why your message isn't just a marketing problem. It's a sales, product, and leadership conversation. From narrative building to brand voice, Margie helps B2B companies find their secret sauce. And today she's sharing the recipe.
Time to spill the secret sauce recipe, Margie. Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm hungry.
Yes. Let's do it. Here's what we're cooking up today, folks.
We'll explore how to spot misalignment early, why your brand story might be falling flat, and how to build a message that doesn't get lost between pitch decks and sales calls. Plus, we'll close with my favorite, favorite, favorite question of all, which is outside of marketing, what is currently bringing Margie joy. Let's go for it.
Let's do it. I know you love experimenting in the kitchen. So let's do a little brand recipe for dissociation. So tell me what would be best paired with each of these. One thing. You can't have a sentence. Okay. Free. Yes. What a phrase. Brand voice. Personality.
MARGIE: Go to market. Sales, marketing, product, customer success.
: All the teams. Ooh, I like it. That is all the ingredients for GTM right there. Sales slide decks. Rallying point.
MARGIE: I'll get into that. Yeah.
: Yeah. Pack that, folks. Strategic narrative. Storytelling. And for kicks, audience persona soup. Drama. Oh, I love it. You are in for a treat today, folks. If that hasn't gotten you leaning in, I don't know what will. I love hearing the messy side of marketing and cooking. I make such a mess in the kitchen. My poor husband, whenever we're done dinner, he's got to cook. Sorry, husband. Cooking where it can be a messy endeavor. What's one kitchen worthy marketing fail or hot mess you've seen that made you laugh or learn something?
MARGIE: Well, I like cooking more than baking because cooking, you can be a lot messier. But you also experiment. Baking, it's science. You have to be extremely precise. Right? Or you get, you really get a mess with cooking. You can usually clean up your mess and still find something salvageable out of it.
Right? So, so you're looking for like a marketing fail. You're going to start there. Yeah. I think, I mean, the biggest lesson that I have learned along the way, and we can, we can unpack a lot of this is don't cook alone.
Cook with friends. Right? So is really doing something in isolation. You know, you're so in love with your work. And I have definitely had moments when I, you know, because I like to think and go away and cook things up and then present it as like, here is the finished dish.
Ta-da. And I have learned the hard way that if I don't bring people along with me for the ride and show them a little bit of, you know, how the sausage is made to extend the metaphor a little bit, right? Then they, I get nodding heads, but then they don't actually use it.
They don't feel connected to it. And so I've delivered this beautiful, you know, playbook and it never actually gets used, which is, you know, I feel smart, but there's no purpose in the end. So that's, that's my big learning and where I think over the years of having done this and worked with clients, I've, I've had to really change my methodology to, to kind of bring them along earlier.
: Bring them into the process, bring them into the cooking process.
MARGIE: Bring them into the process. Yes. Proof to be. Yeah. Get the, get the, get the, get the process. And that's where some of this is going to be messy, right? This is not a straightforward process, especially when you're talking about messaging and positioning. If it was, you know, if it was straightforward, we, we, it would take a week and you'd be done, but it doesn't work like that. Not take a week. Actually requires the, the mess to come out with something in the end that is usable and that people feel connected to.
: There's, in the mess of it, there's big feelings. And one of the feelings I find is frustration of, can we just go do the thing? Like there's this, like, they want to move faster than, like, I want to do the thing too.
But I don't, I got to be able to tell people what it is that the thing is to do the thing. Are you, are you finding that friction as well? And what are you doing about it?
MARGIE: There is a reason that causes a company to say, we need to deal with our messaging. Almost nobody does it unless they have some kind of a compelling event that drives emergency. And that could be external, right? Like, oh, a new competitor, you know, entered the market and they're saying the same thing we're saying. And so there's this urgency, hurry up, we got to get it out there because we have to combat this competitor, right? And sometimes it's like a big trade show that everyone's going to be at. Again, we need to stand out. But there's a hard deadline, right?
We need to be at this thing. Right. Or we're, you know, the biggest is we're relaunching our website. Beautiful, technical, gorgeous website, no content, right? So we need, we need to do it because the website and then the website is delayed. So everyone is frustrated.
And you're already behind before you even have begun, right? So I understand that there is that pressure that we cannot drag out this process forever because we have promised our investors that on X, Y and Z date, we're going to do this, right? Or we've told the company that we're doing this so it has to be done. So in those kind of situations, you have to go with honestly, in all situations, you have to go with V1, right? And you have to set the expectation that this process is not done. We're going to do V2 and then we're going to do V3 and then we're going to, you know, just have learned from it. So it is better to iterate, ship something, right?
Just give people something and respond to yes. And then actually that helps move the process along in some ways because otherwise you could just navel gaze forever. But I think that's where that urgency comes from is that there has, there's some kind of external facing event that requires this messaging work.
: We gotta go. We gotta go. I love that. We'll come back to this because I have follow up questions. But I want to know, you said many companies think they have a lead gen problem, but really they have a messaging problem. You sort of alluded to it here. Can you walk us through what misalignment really looks like across a GTM team?
MARGIE: Gosh, so I have a company that I'm working with now that was, it was the merger slash acquisition of seven different companies. This is like to the extreme. Many companies go through some sort of an acquisition or, you know, revision of branding. But here you have seven different companies that each had their own sales team. Each had their own, essentially they were competitors to each other and they all merged. Each had their own sales team. Each had their own kind of process and way of the systems integrator.
So process and way of talking about how what they did was successful to the client, right? Each had their own slightly different ICP, right? So ones in South Africa, they're really into the mining industry, right? One's in, one of them is in Canada. They're really into oil and gas. So everybody is slightly different.
And that is the extreme. That can also happen even within one organization that isn't the merger of multiple companies because organically as an organization grows, each sort of department, or sometimes there's a champion within that department. And these people are very smart and they, you know, they've got tons of skills. And so they're building their own thing.
And everyone is kind of building their own thing because they see an opportunity in their own area of business, right? So what this alignment looks like is if from a customer perspective, you're talking to this company in one type of scenario and you're hearing a certain type of a story, you know, they're, you're hearing how they describe their company, you're hearing how they describe their products and services, you're getting a certain feeling about this company. And that looks, but your experience, if you were talking to a different person within the exact same company, maybe even in the next meeting that you have might as well be a totally different company, right? And so that can be extremely disjointing when you think about the customer experience, extremely disjointing to hear, see one story on the website, one story in your sales conversation, then you get passed to like a sales engineer or a customer, a success person, right?
That's a totally different story. And now you have a technical problem and you call in and you get like, it's as if you're talking to a different company, right? So that's the impact of all of that is really erosion of trust, right? Erosion of trust because the customer doesn't feel secure that they know who this company is. And it's also a lost opportunity because that customer is going to talk about you while you're not in the room, right? They're going to go to an event or they're going to talk to their colleague who has a similar role at a different company. And the colleague is going to say, Hey, who do you know that does X, right? And you don't know what they're going to say. Right?
You don't, you don't know how they're going to describe you. Exactly. And you're not there to help control that conversation. You haven't armed them with your elevator pitch. So it's up to their interpretation.
And that's a huge lost opportunity for somebody to then refer you or talk you up when you're not in the room, because you, you have appeared to them as, you know, kind of disjointed.
: Right. You need to plant the seeds along the way of who you are so they can pick it up and be able to then present that back for sure. In terms of that trigger you sort of mentioned earlier where there's like a trigger of where they need the thing, right? Where they need to bring, they need to readdress their messaging and the alignment issue.
Is there, is there first signs that something's off even before the numbers dip? Like what is that they, they got to go to this event. And now they realize that their messaging isn't working. What, how did they realize it? What was that trigger? Right.
MARGIE: So where the marketing team often where it trickles to the marketing team, right? Who may not be at that event, right? You're, you're back at headquarters doing your thing is that the sales person often comes to you and says, I need a solution sheet for this event.
Right. Like that, that fire drill moment when they're like, I don't have any, you know, I need something. I need a sheet. Why do they need, did they really need a sheet?
Right? Do they really need a solution sheet? I think what they're telling you is, I don't know what to say.
Right. I, I'm not prepared to have a conversation that, that where I feel confident that, you know, that's going to resonate with the customer. So I need a piece of paper with essentially to give them to do that work. So that tells you a couple of things. One, you might have already created that paper and they're not using it, which means basically it's not reaching your audience. And, or also that you may not know what to say either. So it's sort of an indicator that, oh, wow, I'm sending people out there into the world to have these conversations and they're not prepared. So that's, I think how it usually hits marketing is through sales, because sales is the one that, that has to actually go out into the field and have those conversations.
You know, other ways that you may know that your messaging is not landing is you are also going to see it on your website, right? You're going to see high bounce rates. You're going to see very low conversion rates. You're going to see that even if you're sending traffic to your website and your ad sounds really interesting and it's, you know, visually compelling and all the way, you might also be in the wrong people, right? So you may be speaking like at a certain level or a certain level of technical knowledge or sending a message that you're a great fit for a certain type of customer. And maybe that's not the type of customer that your sales team really wants to engage with. So again, like between the marketing and sales side, that that's when you may start seeing that disconnect is that you're sending what you think are qualified leads over to the sales team because you've got 500 people that attended a webinar, right? They spent the time to go to a webinar. But in fact, perhaps those people are not really the best fit customers and sales doesn't actually even want to talk to them.
So things slow down. You start getting a lot of friction between those two groups about what a qualified lead actually looks like. And, and that is telling people that this wasn't, you know, an event or webinar for hands on practitioners or something like that, right?
And sales actually wants to talk to three levels above that. That doesn't mean that you can't do both. It's just, it's just that you've got a mismatch of what the expectation was the message that you were sending.
Kerry: It sounds like the trigger is really marketing realizing that there's a miss one marketing doesn't even know what to say. And then that misalignment between, you know, sales sort of showing up and saying they need to, they don't know what to say. That's, yeah, I mean, it's really hard to simplify what it is you do in a way that lands with an audience, right? So I, I think bringing in experts, we were even struggling this with ourselves. We just redid our messaging.
I'm very lucky enough to have a good friend who's product marketer. And I was like, can you just peek at this and let me know? And he literally changed three words. And it was like, just those three words that have now completely changed how we talk about what it is that we do. And so I, what are the words?
I really want to know what the words are. So my internet, my internet keeps cutting out. Sorry, folks. Okay. We were talking about, so the thing that makes us different from other agencies, which there's, you know, a gazillion SEO digital ads agencies out there. And we, we do specifically work in a niche of B2B, you know, tech and cyber, but we're still not, but, but still like, so what?
Right. The thing that really makes us different is we have what I call an Asana brainchild of yes. So, so when I talked about this Asana brainchild of the project management system that we have behind the scenes that makes all of this stuff work, he was like, oh, radical transparency. And I was like, because I was calling it like demand acceleration. And I was like, coming up with all these things.
He's like, no, it's radical transparency. Just go do that. And I was like, okay, that is what we provide through Asana. You can actually see when we're going to deliver, what we're going to deliver at what time we're going to deliver it.
MARGIE: So yeah, that would be, which is, you know, why that's, why that's really powerful is because it hits a pain point that many people have with agencies, right? Which is that it's kind of relates to what I was saying before too, which is I went away and I cooked up some stuff and then I served it up, right? Didn't didn't go so great because you don't know what the heck they're doing, right? And you and sometimes then people aren't the best at communicating what their process is. And so to be able to actually track along and follow along is is empowering for a client and comforting for a client. So I think why that works is because it hits on the exact pain that is very specific to the whoever is buying your services. So, so I will say like, I am, I flipped the conversation on you because it is so much easier for me to do this for other people than to do this for myself. So, but I got to tell you, like, I could do this all day long and love it for other people. Because I'm not as emotionally involved.
: I think that's the thing, right? It's that it's having that my coach always says to me, you can't read the bottle from the inside, right? Can't really read from the inside the bottle.
So you have to get fresh eyes. So I just wanted to like, share a moment of like, I thank you for flipping the script. Because I do think it's it's very helpful for people to understand like, you can do this work.
But man, is it helpful to have fresh eyes. And you've watched you've actually worked with over 70 companies. And you've all got content strategy at Johns Hopkins.
So you both sides of the real world ends at the classroom. So can you unpack an example like I just gave an example, but can you share with us an example where you helped a team go from messaging chaos to clarity and that turn, you know, the outcome? Yes.
MARGIE: So there was a company that I worked with that had a really interesting technology that they had built, which was a custom technology, and it worked best with a particular IBM solution. Okay. And IBM, essentially like, storage and disaster recovery, kind of a solution.
And and sat on top of that. Okay. And so I worked with the with the founder of this company and the marketing lead. And he's an example of being really emotionally involved, which I completely appreciate when you are the founder of the company, right?
And you have built amazing thing. And that's what that's what they want to talk about, right? Their own amazing thing, and how it accelerated and sped up the process and was more secure, created a secure perimeter around all of your, you know, your backup data, which is a major attack target, you know, for ransomware and, you know, malicious hackers and so forth. They'd love to get it all of your, all of your backup data, because then you're really, then you're really a so well, if they attack you, you don't even have your backup data. So so so that's what they wanted to talk about. And it took multiple meetings for me to really unravel that you actually couldn't buy this thing alone. You could not buy it without also having this IBM product. Okay, so this is this is also, I think, a difference between brand messaging at a very high level and and product messaging.
Right? So from a brand perspective, you can definitely talk about how you accelerate, or how you improve security and how you reduce risk and how you, you know, make things easier to use and all of these things at an extremely high level, which is great. And it's a hook. But it's really that product level messaging that was going to bring qualified buyers in the door, because they need we need to say, Oh, so we're going after the IBM customer base, right? We're not trying to prove somebody from using some other product to using the IBM product and then adding your thing on type like, let's go where the fish are. Let's go where the IBM people are.
And then let's talk to them in their language, which is you already have this, right? But here's what here's what's not working or here's what's not strong enough or here's where the gaps are or here's right, you know, some of the things that you have. And here's how it all fits together. So we had to sort of take them down to a more granular level in order to make the connection with the right people. And, and it was if I, after multiple conversations, it took me multiple conversations to figure that out, right? Like, oh, what's where it is, think about the message that you were sending to customers by talking it to the high level for them, they're just going to glaze over and move on to the next thing, because they're not going to spend the time and the three meetings that I took. I was incentivized to figure it out.
They are not, right? So you got to get very quickly to that message that is about their pain. And then you can also set a vision.
But, but speaking to their immediate, the job they need to fix right now, that's on their whiteboard, that that's what's going to just drive more urgency. So I think, again, you can do both. But if you're if the goal is, you know, build pipeline short, you know, pipeline right now, then you got to be at that product level. And then, then you, you're also increasing your brand. And you're talking about thought leadership and all of that as well. But you can't just stay up here. You got to also go down with the people.
Kerry: Yes. I actually had a follow up question that I think is perfect timing for this, which is how AI has changed how we do messaging, because I feel like getting closer to the pot that that's one of the shifts that I feel like we're seeing is getting closer to the product. Is that what you're seeing too? And what else are you seeing in how AI has impacted how we do message?
MARGIE: I'll tell you how I have used it that has been helpful to me. And I've definitely gone through, you know, the stages of denial, because I'm a writer also, right? With AI. So as I have come around and AI has gotten a lot better and, you know, and I know how to tell the slop from the, you know, quality content, I am using it. I am using it more as a partner and a sidekick.
But what I what I use it for a lot of times is to help with the research. So the best way that I know in order to understand what those pains are is to talk to customers, right? And so I will, I will always make that a part of any project I do, even if I talk to five of your customers, I will start to hear patterns. I will start to understand the language that they use, right?
I will be able to sort of poke and prod and ask follow up questions that sometimes they're willing to tell me as a third party that they're not willing to tell their salesperson or their project manager. Okay. So I still think there has to be some element of that. But that takes lots of time, right? And that and that takes, you know, lots of follow ups, etc. to get to that depth. So to supplement that, that GONG calls, chorus calls, being a fly on the wall in those sales calls. But again, then you have to analyze all that. So AI can be very helpful to analyze the feedback that you are getting in sales calls, again, to surface patterns and ask questions about if you're interested in when does a particular competitor come up or when does a particular product come up or when does, can you test messaging, specific messaging and then gather all the feedback.
So you can't comb through dozens or hundreds of sales calls. And even to the point where you might say, hey, chat GPT, right? You this this is like a rough but a prompt. You are a product marketing manager looking to create messaging.
Tell it who it is, right? For a B2B technology company, right? And you are trying to you are trying to understand how your customers make decisions. You are selling to and give it the whole persona, right? Of the type of person that you're trying to reach, right? This is a persona.
This is can you give me some example, five, the top five things that these people might ask of vendors? Why not? Let's see what it comes up with. One of them might be completely like off the grid. But but some of them might be amazing and help you you know, as a check to all the other things that you're doing or to spur an idea so that in your next conversation, you dig into that a little bit more because it has access to all kinds of information on the Internet, including reviews, right, including Reddit channels, all things that yourself can't go dig into on your own. So true. So I have been using AI to to help with messaging is to try and get inside. Oh, hello. Try and get inside the mind of the customer and build on that, right?
: Like that's the power of AI, too. I found is like to do all that research and have that be the base for them building off of that into your messaging to get again, that support. That at least that's what I've been doing in terms of the actual messaging piece. Are you doing something similar or are you totally still very much of the belief of writing it from scratch and just using it for the research?
MARGIE: Are you I was going to say the other research thing I'll do is then I'll ask it to check. OK, these are the four top competitors. Or here's my messaging.
These are the four top competitors. How does this messaging compare to what? Yes, putting out. So I can do that. I can go to their websites, right?
And I can and I do and I go to all those things. But there's also a lot of information that's publicly available that you can use their compete tools that will go scrape it. But AI can also do a lot of that, too. So that's on the research side. So for writing, like I said, I've I've evolved.
I say that like in a begrudging way because I love to write and I and I feel like, you know, you have to know what good looks like first. So, you know, I'm glad I taught that that course at Hopkins was a graduate level course on writing for the web. And I'm glad I taught that before AI came along, right? And I have a daughter who's now a freshman in college, so she was in high school when AI was kind of coming on the scene. And I'm really I feel like you still have to understand what you're going for to have an idea of what good looks like, as I said, so that you can you can compare and contrast what AI has given you versus what, you know, an intern would be writing or a junior marketer would be writing, right? Or a graduate student would be writing and and where you want to get to. So it's starting point. The other thing I used.
So the other day I wrote a storyboard for a script, basically, for a video for a client. OK. And. Like all things you write, it's too long on the first go, right?
Kerry: That's not a problem. I write a character limits on LinkedIn all the time.
MARGIE: It always is, right? So it was like four and a half minutes, which I was actually didn't think was that bad. But I said to AI, you know, help me trim this down so that it is under two minutes.
And it did. And I said, you know, keep the personality, keep the tone. You know, here's again, here's the audience, here's not going to be used. I gave it a lot of information and it trimmed it. And I think that it just as we were saying before, like, I didn't want to, you know, that don't tell your baby is expression, right?
I didn't want to get rid of some of the things I've written. Yeah. But it didn't care. It took my long sentence and went. Oh, right. But we got there and it's it hit the market. It's more likely to hit the market two minutes than the four and a half.
Kerry: So these are the ways that I have been using. I have been saying this for a while now and I still truly believe that for those who know what good looks like, AI is going to be a productivity multiplier. It are. I mean, it has been for me considerably.
I think for those who don't know what good looks like, it's going to get really clear, really quick. So I definitely encourage people to still still know how to math. Like when you talk about a calculator, right, we still had to show up and show our work, right? It's the same idea. This is just a fancier calculator. We still have to go out of math. So yeah.
MARGIE: Right. And if you like, if you like systems and patterns, which I do, I'm always thinking about compare and contrast, right? Or before and after status quo from to the new normal, whatever it is, right? So if you're already thinking like that, AI can really help you because it just it sees patterns much faster than an individual can. So if you have like a suspicion of a pattern, a hypothesis that you want to test. Yeah, you can you can have it pointed in that direction.
MARGIE: And I'll tell you if you're going the right way. In terms of, you know, you've worked with over 70 clients, you've seen, you know, how the impact of messaging can really be super impactful. What's the cost of ignoring it and just like trying to power through and just say, it'll work itself out or using AI to, you know, help you muddle your way. You know, what's the one clear
MARGIE: money waster that that startups and scale ups, I think use like a knee jerk, you know, in terms of like heading out into the market, maybe before they are really ready is spending money on advertising. Right. And that there's a real clear spend there. But I think it's the most clear cut example of wasted, wasted budget.
Budget and opportunity. I mean, certainly you could say, as we were saying before, you know, your website is not converting like it should be, right? Or people are falling off in the funnel like they should be. That's a little harder to calculate, right?
Or to trace back to messaging as directly as when you are spending money on advertising before you have for you have baked your messaging, at least to the version one. When you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, right? And trying a bunch of things. You are you are really spending money that you won't be able to get back later on.
So that's in a perfect world. You want to be doing the messaging piece. And have a consistent story and some clear points that you want to make sure that you get across, right? Before you go out and you start spending money on ads, especially LinkedIn, which is crazy expensive, right? You're getting, you know, a thousand, two thousand dollar, you know, clicks cost clicks. That's a that's a very, very expensive click.
Kerry: That rolls downhill, especially if your website is not converting. Then you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in your cost per conversion that could have been alleviated. Two things I'll say about digital ads. One is whenever a founder shows up to us as an agency and says they want to work with us, we say, and who's your marketing contact? And if they don't have one, we go and find them one because they should not be directly spending money with us. That is a terrible idea to your point of you have to have that work done. The other thing I'll say is once you do have V1, so digital ads can be a huge helper in helping you find out if your messaging is resonating quicker.
MARGIE: Limit way, and then you're testing something against itself and you're iterating, you've got a few backups. You have a plan, right? You have a plan and said, we have one idea.
Kerry: Let's just keep. Let's just point of throwing spaghetti against the wall. Like that's the worst thing you can do with channel marketing in particular because it takes so much time for the systems to learn. And you can't throttle them anymore.
You can't turn them off and on. So once you start spending money to really see if it's going to work over a long period of time, you need a plan, that testing plan to be iterating through to give it three, six, 12 months to actually get that positive ROI, especially if you're talking about long sales cycles. So taking the time to do the work first, we highly recommend.
MARGIE: We highly recommend. Yeah. And also, parsing out, it's very difficult. But parsing out, if something is not performing, what is it? Because there could be many reasons. It could be that the message was great, but then there wasn't any kind of an offer.
There wasn't anything for someone to do. They got interested. They clicked. Right? They were intrigued. But then what? Right? Then why did you lose them?
Did you just send them to your homepage? Right? Or no. What do we want them to do? Do we want them to read something, to learn something?
Or take a free tool, something for them to engage with? So having a few of those elements in place before you go spending money on ads will give you just a lot more bang for your buck.
Kerry: You've worked across product marketing and sales. Out of those teams, who do you find is most relieved when a story finally comes together? Wow.
MARGIE: Sales. Probably sales out of all of those. Yeah. Again, because they are on the front line. Right? They are the ones standing in front of the customer or virtually standing in front of the customer. And again and again and again. And I don't think I fully appreciated how that felt until I started running my own business. And right?
It's giving me such an appreciation for that. And so I think a lot of salespeople spend a lot of time also trying to make up the story because they haven't received it from marketing. Right? That's time they could be spending doing other things. There's frustration.
Prospective. Or building relationships or doing things because they don't like the story or they don't agree with the story or there is no story. And they don't feel heard. And so they're making up their own stuff. They're using chat GPT to just, I'll whip this together and I'll put it in canva and I'll make up my own solution sheet.
Kerry: I may know a few salespeople who are doing that.
MARGIE: Right? So that's a waste of everybody's time. They shouldn't be in a situation where they're doing that. So I think they celebrate. I've seen like the founder that I was talking about before. He ended up celebrating because he did not have to be in every meeting anymore. He was the only one that really tell the story.
He had gravitas, you know. Yeah. And he was burning it at both ends because he had to be in every sales conversation. Right? And as well as working with investors and running the company and all the other things that he was doing.
So he celebrated because now he could spend time doing other things and felt confident that his company could scale because he actually had a playbook that other salespeople could take without him having to be there and demos without him having to be the one to run the demos. Yeah. And it's I get it. Like it's really you feel this sense of control like, oh, no one no one can tell my story but me. And when you realize that that there's a program now there's a consistency now. There's you feel confident that they're going out and they're telling the story correctly. Then you can actually breathe.
Kerry: Yes. Oh, I imagine I mean as founders ourselves, right? Like when when we bring a team member on to do a thing, there's just that great relief of like, oh, I don't have to do so. Yeah. I'm working on that.
Me too, RG. We could we could have a whole therapy session around that. Let me tell you. Let me tell you. I do want to get to and tease out your insights triangle. One of the frameworks you teach is the insights triangle and bringing together customer internal and competitive truths to build strong positioning. Let's give people some nuggets around what that is and why it's super powerful.
MARGIE: Look at this is three legs of a stool and just like a stool, you got to have three legs or the thing falls over, right? So your three legs and you're triangulating these different insights that you get from different different sources. So one we've already talked about a lot is your customers, right?
Happy customers, unhappy customers, prospects. What are they saying? What is their language? What do they care most about?
Right? What's going to drive them to change? That's one leg is the customers. One leg is your own internal team, which often includes executives and founders, but it also includes a lot of these frontline people who are having conversations because they are gathering, whether they realize it or not, they are gathering all of these stories and anecdotes and mistakes that were made along the way and questions that they are asked. And a lot of times those are not shared across the organization. So they're stuck in their heads, right?
Or they're stuck in decks that somebody has in their own folder somewhere. And so we want to bring those out into the open and share them in a way that is more continuous so that when someone does hear something, right, or when someone does say, oh, this anecdote, this customer success story, this was amazing. The rest of the company can learn about it and also be able to leverage it and share that as well.
So that's the internal part. So we do workshops and just a lot of listening tour of going around and talking to these types of people. I love sales engineers, right? I love customer success people. People that are really intimately involved with customers really know the dirt. They know where the drama, we're talking about drama. They know where all the things happen. They know the questions, the problems, the struggles. And then we look at building more of a scalable system so that these stories get shared on a regular basis. And we've touched on this a bit, but why that is so important is not just to get things out of people's head, but to surface any kind of misalignment, right?
This is the time to say this founder thought this, but the CTO thinks that. And these things, I'm not sure how to line them up. And I don't know the answer to those questions. I'm just surfacing them, right? And sometimes the elephant in the room to say, we need to resolve this if we're going to have consistent messaging because these things are saying different things. And then the third part of the triangle is competitors because you are looking for a story that is different and that personality and a way of expressing yourself that is different from your competitors. But it has to be triangulated. So it has to be something that is authentic to your organization and feels true and real and that you can back up.
Or it's just words, right? And it has to be something that your customers actually care about because you could be hitting on some differentiator that nobody actually cares about. And it's not going to move the needle. It has to be something that your customer said was important to them. So it's a lot of constant triangulation among these different parts of what I call the insights triangle.
Kerry: That is so helpful. I was actually just running through my head of, okay, well, we just did this radical transparency thing. And so does it touch on all of these things? I think time will tell because the customer piece is still... The customers who have experienced it are so relieved with it. But is it enough to get people one of the hardest things? And we feel this all the time, Margie is running our own agencies, right? Of moving people off of what they already know.
Is it better to just stick with what I know versus moving to another thing? So it will have to see if this messaging can help those folks feel like, oh, I mean, I don't have to babysit my agency. And they'll come to me with solutions. And that sounds awesome. But again, until you experience it, like we can back it up all day in terms of the customers, but it's the experience part.
MARGIE: One customer, one client of mine who put it this way, and they said, we're trying to describe who is your ideal ICP, right? Who is your ideal target? And they said, the ideal person is someone who tried to do this all themselves, but failed.
How do you find that person? That's... You're actually sending out signals by talking about radical transparency or talking about, trying to have done this yourself and how hard it... With another agency, maybe, or trying to do this yourself. And what is the problem with that? And those are the people who are so attuned that they're going to pick up on those signals.
Kerry: We've been running an agency for since 2011. And we've never really... We've tried a couple of times to sit down and do our own messaging. And we've really, really struggled because it's so hard. It's easier to do for other clients.
MARGIE: That's what I'm saying. Until you get to that, that like, okay, I have to do it now. So I'm a... I have to redo my website. What marketing agency or consultant doesn't say that, right? Like, yes, and it's going to be redone. And I'm excited for it to be redone. So when I said... I'm just going to circle back to the rallying point about the sales deck for a second because I meant that to be a little bit controversial. Like, some people don't even use sales decks, right? We've all been slide-showed to death. And so it's... For many people, it's kind of a crutch.
Having said that, right, I really... I believe that if we do messaging work or positioning work and we just keep it in a playbook or worse, it's a PDF, right? Or it's a notion, you know, something, I love that. I dip into it and use that as my slush fund of messaging all day long when I'm creating other stuff, right? But I'm a marketer.
So for the rest of the organization, they need to see something physical and tangible. And I can't tell you how many times I got, oh, the playbook looks great. This was wonderful. You know, what a great workshop.
And then we go to create the sales, you know, the Discovery deck or the L1 deck or whatever you want to call it. And they're like, I hate that. That's horrible. That's not what I meant to say. And I'm like, you see right here in the playbook when you agree to that. But somehow, it's not until they actually see it in a format that they are going to use that you get the real reaction.
So you have to go back to like, you have to ship something. And it's a lot easier to test and iterate on your deck if you have good collaboration, especially with the sales team, to test that out and change it and tweak it. Then I think it is on a web, on that a web page, even though web page is easy to change, it's sort of, you don't get the real time feedback from conversations. So if you can just messaging in the wild, a salesperson can say this deck, you know, this story landed, but this one, they were glazing over.
Kerry: Okay, then we'll fix it. Good to know. Good to know. Yes. I think a sales deck from what I've been hearing in the universe is very much helpful for trading to get people used to telling the story, finding which stories to your point stick. But they should, they should get off of it. People don't want to be presented to, we've been finding that in our own sales and marketing efforts. People just don't want to be, they, they want a conversation and they want to know what you're going to do about it.
And then they want to move forward. So I totally, such a good reminder, Margie, thank you for that. We, I could, I could clearly talk to you all day, all day long. Where can people find you, Margie? Where they want to learn more about Centerboard, which got going on and how they might get your help with messaging.
MARGIE: My LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me. Please do. I love talking about this stuff. This has been super fun and I'd love to continue the conversation with anybody that's interested in talking about this stuff because there's a lot to unpack.
Kerry: My favorite question. We've talked a lot about cooking that brings you joy, tinkering with recipes, trying something new. What's something outside of work that's lighting you up right now, even if it's totally random?
MARGIE: I mean, my family is planning a trip to Florence. Yes, I know it's going to be very hot. That was really beautiful. So I've been to Rome. I've never been to Florence. And so it's really fun to just think about where we're going to go explore and things that are off the beaten path. So if folks have recommendations, please share.
Kerry: Yes, Florence is gorgeous. It was a long, long time ago that I was there. So I will leave others to give you recommendations, but I have just my breath taken away about the architecture and just how considering how old everything is, it still feels, it still has this pristine feel to it. It's just absolutely breathtaking. I'm going to follow along and I want to see pictures and we're going to follow.
MARGIE: There will be pictures. Yes, there will be gelato. There will be pasta. There will be a cooking class. Pizza? Yes. Pizza and tiramisu. That's what the cooking class promised us.
Kerry: So good. Yeah, I'm excited. So good. Amazing. Well, you have the best time ever and I will follow up to see how it went. Thank you for our listeners. Thank you, Margie, for being with us here today. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe, and share.
This episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that believes in radical transparency to help you move your marketing forward without meetings upon meetings upon meetings. Thank you all so much. Have a wonderful day and thank you to Elijah, our podcast sidekick. See you all next time.