How CMOs Should Think About Building a Strategic Narrative
Learn from Andy Raskin, Strategic Narrative Consultant, about crafting your strategic narrative and getting CEO buy-in.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Caspian Studios,
and I am joined by a very special guest,
Andy Raskin.
Andy, how are you?
Great, great to be with you, Ian.
>> So excited to chat with you today.
I am a huge fan of yours,
huge fan of strategic narrative,
in a roundabout way.
We worked together years ago with publishing one of your articles
that is one of the most viral articles that I've ever seen for B2B World.
It's just great to chat with you about strategic narrative
and your background, everything in between.
>> Yeah, great talking to you,
and it was great to hear about that connection from way back when.
>> Yeah, what a world.
Today we're going to talk about how CMOs can think about building a strategic
narrative,
how they can get their CEO to spearhead the project or maybe not at all.
And so we'll dig into all that.
And today's show, as always, brought to your friends,
brought to you by our friends.
I qualified, you can go to qualified.com to learn more about the number one
conversational sales and marketing platform for companies revenue teams
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They got it all going on.
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Andy, strategic narrative, what the heck is it?
I keep changing over the years.
It depends on when you talk to me what I'm going to say.
But the definition I've been using for probably about the last maybe nine
months
that I really like, it's growing on me is it's the story that every one of the
company is telling,
that transforms the act of buying into the act of joining a movement.
And we could expand it, the act of selling into the act of evangelizing a
movement,
the act of joining the company as an employee, as the act of joining the
movement.
And what I mean by that is, you know, typically the way that most of us are
taught to pitch
our ideas or our products or whatever, what I call the arrogant doctor, which
is,
you have a problem.
I have, you know, some pain, I have the solution, some cure.
And let me describe for you why it's better.
So I'm going to make these claims of superiority.
I do think that that is a valid approach for a lot of things, you know, things
I just bought
some things on Amazon the other day.
That's pretty much how I made my decision, right?
But I think when things get complicated, which is really we're talking about
the world
of, you know, B2B SaaS software, B2B software, where there are many, many
competitors.
The scope of the products are so big, like it's not just like one little thing
I can search
for on Amazon.
You can't even usually know all the features that are in a lot of the platforms
we're talking
about.
And then also we have a very complex buyer group.
It's not one person with one set of needs that are clear.
It's a lot of people with a lot of different needs.
And what I started seeing back when I wrote that article you're talking about,
that was
almost, that was eight years ago, was that the companies that were winning were
taking
this other approach, which was really defining themselves, like I said, kind of
as a movement.
And we can talk about more about that, but maybe I'll stop there.
Anything I may be confusing in that?
No, not at all.
If anything, you've solidified more things in my mind.
Yeah, I think I think I think you're exactly right that so often we just go to
this sort
of pain point type narrative.
The problem with the pain point narrative is that your CFO doesn't care, right?
Your CFO inherently cares about you wanting to solve a problem because they're
supporting
the business.
But if sales has a pain point and marketing has a little bit of one and maybe
customer success
has a little bit of the same one.
And ultimately this layers up to revenue.
So your CFO definitely cares about it.
You're just, there's so many different people.
There's so many different stakeholders.
The level of their pains is very different.
And so then it's just a very, very complex, confusing sale because you have to
speak to like
all the different pain points that each individual person has.
And it's like, if my son scrapes his knee, it hurts my son's knee.
It doesn't hurt my knee.
It hurts me because I have to now go to the doctor, which is going to take time
out of my
day.
That's my, and I don't want my son to be hurt, but also like now I have to take
, you
know, two hours out of my day to take him to the doctor and get an x-ray and
you know,
all those sort of things.
So it's like that's part of the problem is like there's no like clear way to
have
this like beautiful compelling, amazing single pain point because that's not
how it is.
It's a series of a million pain points.
So then what do you do from there?
Yeah, exactly.
And you can try to build a kind of pain point story for each of them, for each
person
you're talking to.
The challenge there then becomes, you know, sometimes you're talking to diverse
audiences
that might include many different personas or you know, biotypes from different
industries,
different roles.
Or you might not even know, you might, you know, for instance, like you're
talking in general
to a very large audience.
And so what's the high level unified message in many, many cases I found that
this, this
approach lets you do that.
What I call this strategic narrative becomes the glue between the pitches we're
making
to everybody.
Yeah, and one of the reasons why I every shout and wanted you on the show other
than to,
because you're great.
But because so a bunch of the people that cast me and works with, that we had
customers
in common.
So we had people that were making a podcast for them and then you had
previously built
their strategic narrative.
And it just got me thinking I'm like, you know, it's interesting.
And this was actually pointed out by Kaley Emenson, shout out to Kaylee, where
she was like,
hey, I wonder if people who do business with you, after they talk to Andy, if
they should
just immediately talk to you and turn it in sort of operationalize their
strategic narrative.
And I was like, that's incredibly insightful.
That's an interesting thing.
And so I started looking at those type of companies and wouldn't you know that
those type
of companies had a much more clear delivery of why they exist than their
competitive landscape
or then other folks that I'd used to been working to, working with.
And I was like, huh, turns out that, you know, you can layer everything else
from your marketing
perspective underneath this if you have this very clear strategic narrative
that comes
from the top that oftentimes comes directly from the CEO.
And the companies that didn't have that, well, they just weren't as clear as we
know, confusion
equals no sale.
And I mean, probably by this point, people listening, well, this narrative
thing, like, what is it?
You know, there's a structure that I started to see that I first wrote in that,
so that
post that you're talking about is called the greatest sales that I've ever seen
And that was my first attempt to kind of lay out the structure of a strategic
narrative
like this.
And the, there's really just a couple of core pieces of it.
And the first piece is that instead of saying you have a problem.
So instead of the pitch being, you have a problem out of the solution, that
arrogant doctor,
the companies that I saw winning were doing this other thing where they were
saying, hey,
the winning mindset in the world used to be X. And now it's Y. And I mean, the
winning
mindset for buyers, give you an example of this.
Well, the one I wrote about in that post was Zora.
Their whole story was, hey, people used to want to buy things outright in one
off transactions.
That was the world of, we'll say ownership.
And now people want to subscribe to things.
So instead of always, you know, buying movies and cities, we're going to, you
know, subscribe
to some service that's going to let us see them all the time.
And services like Uber and Lyft become, you know, subscription like in that
instead of, you
know, buying a car, you're kind of getting the services of that car.
And they basically made this whole big story about what they call the
subscription economy.
So hey, and back in 2014, this was like a really, you know, big new thing.
I started seeing other companies do this too, where, for instance, actually,
for me, the
OG is Mark Benioff.
So he comes out in 2000.
I'm old enough to remember when this happened, he comes out and he says, hey,
software is over.
Of course, he means software in the sense of stuff that you own and operate on
your premises.
And he says, hey, there's this new world called the cloud, new mindset, where
we're not
going to do that.
We're going to host everything out there.
And, you know, he's doing the exact same thing.
It's no accident, by the way, the CEO of his war, TN Swo was employee number 11
at Salesforce.
So he saw this firsthand.
And then you see other companies that some I've worked with.
So for instance, like Gong, you know, Gong comes out and early on, Gong was
kind of seen
as like a tool for sales enablement people.
And if you don't know what Gong does, they make it easy to record your sales
calls on things
like Zoom or Google Meet, whatever.
But then they sick all this AI onto it to figure out like, well, is there a
competitor
is getting mentioned now or, you know, what messages are resonating, things
like that.
And the CEO of Gong said to me, like, listen, we're going to be a big company,
I think.
That sort of clear, but how big is going to be determined by how good a
narrative we can
create and how good it will be is how well it connects with senior leaders in
sales,
CROs.
And the narrative that we wound up building was this thing about the shift from
opinions.
You're going to run sales on opinions to you're going to run sales on, on a
view of reality
that this new technology was going to give you.
Which instead of just relying on whatever your salespeople decide to put in
sales words,
you're going to have this real view of what's happening.
And so the first big core element of this strategic narrative is how can we
define the
world of our buyer as a shift from some old mindset to a new one that we're
championing.
This as as you can see, like this becomes the structure of the movement that we
're evangelizing.
I love this mindset because marketers are constantly selling the future, right?
We're selling ahead of where we're going.
And you have to read the Teeleys because if you're choosing a vendor, you need
to you need
to have someone who, you know, is reading the Teeleys when you are up and
coming, right?
When you are someone who is coming out of nowhere, there's a reason why they
would go to you.
It's like, hey, we read the Teeleys better than ever and else.
The old way of doing things which they've built a billion dollar business on is
this way.
They are not going to shift their thinking of the way that the world should be
because
their entire business is predicated on it.
Our way of thinking is actually very different than novel.
And I think when you get that sort of like, you know, with the going piece, you
get something
where the product 100% meets the reality of the situation where like any sales
person,
no matter how old school you were, was trying to get at the truth, right?
So this is the tool that gets you to the truth, right?
And it allows you to see, you know, your sales team in a totally different way.
And like, and it fits and the product meets the expectations of that reality.
Now sometimes as marketers, we don't meet the expectations of what we're
promising,
but always it's future looking.
The train is already going.
Yes, it's future looking, but it's not.
Hey, this is where we see it going in the future.
Yep.
It's the train as you said has already left the station.
So we want to be able to show as Zora showed.
Hey, yeah, there's, look at all the successful companies who are coming up.
They're all basically subscription companies, you know, and with, with Gong,
look at the sales
leaders who are winning and even, and in their case, they actually looked at,
you know, leaders
and other roles like marketing, whatever.
These are all the ones who are getting the data and getting the intelligence
and not just
going on opinions anymore.
Yeah, and I think that that ability, that FOMO, that, that, hey, you will get
left behind
is the thing that we're all afraid of, right?
We all know innovation is coming no matter who you are.
Like I, I was, you love the example of, you know, the lamp lighters didn't
think that anyone
was coming for them until electricity came, right?
It's like everything, everything will be sort of quote unquote disrupted in
some form
of fashion.
And we all know that inherently and in technology, we know that even more that
it's that thing.
Oh, God.
And you hit on a kind of another interesting point, though, which is a little
bit of a pitfall.
And sometimes people will bring this up.
Like, well, you're basically then telling your buyer, hey, you're doing it the
old way,
you're doing it wrong.
So how do you, you know, that yes, on the positive side, yes, we want them to
feel the FOMO,
but how do we handle this thing of where we're kind of saying, hey, you know,
if you're still
in the world of transactions, you're a loser.
And I thought a meat bend off the CEO of Gong did this really, really well.
And what he did was when, usually when you would tell this, tell this story
about opinions
and reality, he would say, hey, I, I used to be in that world of opinions.
It's not just you.
It was me too.
And he would talk about how he had, you know, kind of a conversion when he saw
what was
possible.
And that way, it's not pointing fingers.
So to the degree, it's possible.
I always try to have CEOs do this.
Hey, listen, I remember I was there, you know, it's not just you.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, you have a great quote on your website from Ben Horowitz
that says
the company story is the company strategy.
And I think that, you know, that is part of that founding story, that founding
impetus,
you know, like I was talking about for me and and Cass being is like, I
literally, I didn't,
I had the worst sales leader in the world.
He was in the worst, but he's pretty bad.
And I didn't know how to, you know, learn sales.
And so I started listening to podcasts, you know, over a decade ago, and I was
like, oh,
these are the smartest people, sales people in the world.
They're, they're teaching me all this information.
If only, you know, companies were making more of these little puppies that we
could democratize
information a lot faster.
And this is what I'm learning on this bike has is better than in a literal book
about sales
or marketing or whatever it is.
And it's like it started with me having that realization and then, you know,
talking to
marketers and be like, how are you creating things and, you know, whatever.
But it's like, it has to start with that company story of like the reason for
being to solidify
it.
And if it's humanized to say like, I was right there in your shoes, I saw the
same thing.
Boy, does it work a lot better?
Right.
Right.
And what I'm going to see with teams I work with is that story is a little bit
easier for
the CEO, someone like a meat to tell.
But okay, now we're going to have, you know, hundreds, thousands, maybe sales
people who
might be more junior or certainly don't have the experience that a meat had or
whoever
the CEO is.
And they can't, they can't just say, hey, you know, our CEO said, you know, it
's just not
going to be as credible or as relevant.
So sometimes we have to find a way to kind of rip the story apart from the
founder so that
we're still, you know, I think there's still a story in what you were saying
about, you
know, podcast being this medium for another meat and maybe being this medium
for sales education,
marketing educational kinds of education.
But, you know, as it gets to other people who didn't have your experience,
maybe, maybe
this story has to be, you know, sort of like more generalized.
Yeah, how do people do that without just watering it down?
Because like you see a lot of, sometimes you see people clearly are trying to
do this.
And then you read whether it's their mission statement or whatever it is.
And it's like to help people worldwide.
And you're like, right.
Well, that's kind of all of our goals.
So like, what is it about you, you know?
Right.
So first of all, it's that, you know, identifying this old game, new game shift
, I sometimes call
it old mindset, new game, new mindset shift that becomes the heart of the
movement is something
that takes a lot of work and something that with every team I work with, yeah,
the leadership
team, the CEO, I always SSCO by the way, to create a team that to support them
in this
work.
And usually this will include the CMO, the CRO very often lately, it's been the
CFO has been
in there.
Sometimes there's a co-founder or like a COO kind of person is very important
where the
team has of course their ideas, but we always, I always get them to ask
customers to for this.
Like the last thing we want to do is tell customers some story that's sort of
like meaningless
to them.
For instance, like that story, like, oh, we're now in a subscription economy,
we're, you
know, we don't buy things.
It's a little bit, it's an old story now.
In fact, I've even seen now some companies like, hey, let's get rid of
subscriptions.
Like, yeah, I just saw someone that did that launch a product that's like that.
That's basically like buy once forever.
And yeah, like forget subscription.
So okay, so it comes around, right?
So the second kind of criteria or principle for a really good story is that the
buyer,
meaning all the people, the personas, sees life and death stakes in it, whereas
close as
possible.
So when a meat was coming to me and saying, hey, you know, we got to have this
CRO buy into
this.
A long story at the time was something like, like, let's add science to sales.
That's not a, like, the CRO doesn't look at that and say, like, well, that's my
success hangs
in the balance.
It seems like sort of a nice to have.
But when you start phrasing it as, well, do you want to be making opinions on
decisions
on opinions?
Or like if someone is to ask you, like, why are we losing deals?
Do you want the answer to be based on whatever your sales people have to have
them put in
sales arts?
Or do you want to make that decision and what you do in relation to it based on
some truth?
Well, okay, now this is starting to feel like it has some stakes.
So the answer to how we make sure it's just not this vanilla thing that nobody
cares about
is we get it from the customers.
And one of the big questions that I have teams asked customers is, what has
changed in your
world such that what we're delivering to you is life and other agent.
And sometimes we'll literally get the words from them that we wind up using.
And always it's the, those answers are a good hint about where we might go.
Sometimes back to sort of like the general to making too general, what I see a
lot of is
like, hit your number.
Push your quota, kill your pipeline, reduce costs.
Like there's so many different things there that people reduce it to something
that, and
like from a positioning perspective, I think you could make a good argument
that those are
not well positioned because your competitor also can claim those, right?
So you could make that exact same comparison.
But with the movement piece, like there's going to be other people in the
movement there.
So, and not to get too far into that part.
But the first question basically being is like, life or death stakes like, is
hit your quota?
Like do you want to miss your quota?
But that's not what you went with, right?
Because that would have been a little too broad I'm guessing or what do you
think?
Yeah, so there's another piece of the narrative that I call the buyer mission
statement.
And the buyer mission statement is, okay, if this movement is happening and you
see life
and death stakes in it, well, what's your new goal state to achieve happily
ever after?
Right?
Like if you see a movie, usually at the beginning of the movie, it's pretty
clear within the
first, I don't know, 15 minutes, what is the, you know, Lou has to destroy the
death
star for happily ever after?
There's some goal state, you know, but of course, there's, you know, then he's
going to destroy
the death star here in the, the friends.
And then he's going to be celebrated and then it's, you know, happily ever
after, at least
till the next movie.
Which one of those, like let's say we were, we were, you know, we were trying
to build
a company based on, you know, I don't know the lightsaber.
Should we say happily ever after or should we say destroy the death star?
Because those are both goal states, but one is much more concrete than the
higher one.
There might even be a more, a more even more concrete one before destroy the
death star,
which is like, trust the force, which is what lets you do that right.
And I always talk about this with, with the teams I work with because, you know
, I think,
I always asked him, which would you choose?
And without fail, almost everybody says, live happily ever after because it's
the highest
level goal state.
The problem is what you just brought up, which is, well, I mean, your company,
Michael,
we could all say live happily ever after, it's not differentiating, right?
And so the, on the other hand, if it's too granular, then it's not inspiring,
you know, it doesn't,
doesn't, wow us.
So, but I find usually like going a little bit lower than we would is, is
better.
So yeah, hit your number.
That is not really a, it doesn't speak to any kind of movement, specific
movement, right?
Make decisions based on reality, get a clear view of reality.
That's a differentiating one that nobody else is talking about.
So it's a kind of a test for me.
You know, one of the things you said earlier is like a lot of people are going
to be in the
movement.
Well, if we've defined the movement properly, no one else wants to say they're
in the movement.
You know, they might later.
But we're going to define it. So there's a goal state that is differentiated
and unique
that nobody else is talking about.
Do you?
Okay.
So we did one and two.
Is it?
What was three?
Yeah.
Well, so three is that that buyer mission statement.
Okay.
Three.
Yeah.
So I always try to see like, can we, and usually this statement is in the
second person
command form. So, for instance, Zora's for a while was turn your customers into
subscribers.
Yep.
They could have said, hit your number.
Right.
Or grow really fast or, you know, this was a little lower down on that, you
know, latter
of benefits.
And, but it speaks to the movement, right?
Another one company I worked with recently there in the, they make software for
robotics
companies.
And there's a really big shift.
So that the shift they identified that the movement was about the shift from vi
ability
to observability.
So used to be, if you're a robotics company, you can be kind of successful if
you're sort
of like proving viability of something in the lab.
And that's totally shifted now to where you have, in order to be successful,
you have
to demonstrate, you know, success at scale.
And the challenge there is not just, is not just viability of one thing.
It's, how can I observe a million of my robots out in the world?
And so the buyer mission statement that this is a company called Fox Glove.
And the buyer mission statement they came up with was understand how your
robots sense
think and act.
And that speaks to, you know, we're going to be able to see and understand them
all
over the place.
The four is a kind of a two-parter.
And I, this is different from a little bit from what that article I wrote a
long time ago,
one that I've, I started to use.
So if it were super easy for the buyer to get to this goal state, well, they
don't need
us, right?
They don't need help.
So there must be some obstacles.
And so what are those obstacles?
So for instance, how do you observe a lawnmower, a robot lawnmower that's on
someone's lawn
in the Midwest?
And there's no Wi-Fi and it doesn't have a connection or it's a weak connection
You know, and you can imagine all the other kinds of problems.
Observing servers is a well-known problem and, and, and lots of solutions for
it.
But that's very kind of like homogenous data with a robot.
You might be talking about videos and GPS data and all kinds of stuff.
That's like for a.
And then for b is like, well, the old tools weren't built for this.
And this is where we then say, well, you know, all those alternatives you think
that you
might see as alternatives.
Well, here's why they're not built for this movement.
And those may be things that people think about, you know, people talk about
categories,
or those may be things that people think about as other categories, maybe
things that think
about us as being in the same category, but we're differentiating by the
movement, you
know, they're, they're not really built for this.
And then the last piece is evidence.
So what can, you know, now it's we can show our product, but ideally we're
showing how
it has helped others get to reach that goal state, embrace, but you know,
embrace the movement
and reach that goal state.
And that proof comes in, that evidence comes in from customer testimonials, it
comes from,
you know, gardener or stories, gardener, whatever.
I think the ideal thing is success stories, you know, actual stories of, of
customers who,
you know, used to kind of have the old mindset.
Now they, they, they've shifted thanks to our stuff.
And here's how they're, they're thriving.
But of course, you know, it depends on the stage of the company might not have
a lot of
that yet.
If we're really early, might be other stuff like you say.
Yeah.
Is this different from positioning?
Is this different from category creation?
How do you see it all as same different?
That's a loaded question.
You know, I think positioning goes back to these two guys who were like, they
were ad guys
in the 60s, 70s.
They wrote their book in the 80s.
And you know, they were really talking about, hey, there's a supermarket shelf
and, you
know, it's a section of the supermarket.
And there's a, there's a number one player in that, in that section like Coke
in the, in
the beverage section.
How are we going to get people to buy us?
And the solution is, well, we're going to, we're going to target a certain kind
of buyer.
And with certain needs, and we're going to hit home on advertising and all the
rest.
Well, how are we different from the, you know, that in a way that is better for
this buyer?
So essentially that arrogant doctor approach.
And like I said, I think that's fine for many, many products.
It makes total sense.
There's a guy online, Venkatesh Rao, I really love.
He has this idea of, uh, cumulative rationality.
So positioning, I think at least the traditional approach to it assumes that
the buyer is, has
a bunch of criteria, you know, and they're going to look at all the options and
say, well,
which is the product, the alternative that scores the highest?
If I were to rank them based on, you know, weighted, weighted criteria, which
one scores
the highest.
And that makes a lot of sense.
That is how we make a lot of decisions.
But like I said earlier, when the products become very complex and we're doing
a lot of
different buyers in the group, each with their own ranking formulas and all the
rest, I
think that starts to break down.
As you were saying earlier, and this narrative approach, it is like positioning
in that it's
trying to give buyers a reason why to, you know, why to choose us.
But instead of the describing, uh, instead of starting there, we're starting
with this,
at this other point, which is what is happening, what is happening in their
world.
So it turned it from a description to a narrative.
Yeah.
I, I love that approach.
And I think that as people enter your market and enter your movement,
competitors do
that.
There's, you have to figure out ways of differentiation as soon as the
competitor says,
Oh, yeah, we're in the movement too.
The world is changing that way.
They're exactly right.
They were the first ones to do it.
Our product actually is a little bit better than theirs.
And here's why then you're like, Oh, we got to start working on our freaking
positioning
because they believe the same truth that we do.
Yeah.
The thing is though, usually this doesn't happen.
What you're saying is like usually they'll come in and say, Oh, we're in the
same category.
Sure.
But they might not actually be saying we're in the same movement.
And I think those are two different, sometimes different things.
You know, a great example is HubSpot when they came in, you know, there's this
market, this
category of marketing automation.
And they come in and they say, Hey, we believe in the shift from outbound to in
bound.
And they didn't create a category called inbound.
They just created an identity around inbound.
And none of the big players are then going to say, Oh, well, we're inbound.
Does that mean when you're going to sail, you might have to have battle cards
for your
salespeople to say, Oh, yeah, this is what, you know, and the fun and all the
rest, potentially.
But ideally, you're using that narrative as a way to back to positioning.
Well, here's why while they say they're, they say they're built there for this
for our movement.
But here's why they're really not built for it.
And to your point about Mark Benioff is like, he didn't, he wasn't saying no
software for 20
years.
Right.
Like, he, you know, like that's not what he did is once it was no longer useful
And there were other companies that now had SaaS solutions.
Like he wasn't, you know, banging the table on that.
It moved on to, you know, what is now, you know, the 360 degree of your
customer, right?
Exactly.
Like, so Benioff, it was right around.
I think it was like 2015, you see Benioff start to move to, to like evolve the
narrative.
And that, you hit on a really good point.
Yes, I think the knee jerk reaction is often, okay, we built this narrative.
Someone else comes in and says they're doing the same thing.
We got to be evolving this thing so that we can stay ahead.
If it's the same thing for years and years and years, then yeah, we're going to
, we run
that risk.
I think one of the things for me that I look at for, you know, for these
strategic narratives
when they're so good is, you know, you know, you was here with these like the
adoption
curve and early adopters and all those sort of things.
And like I mentioned earlier, like the product has to actually meet this.
Like you can't just say like, hey, the world is changing this way.
And you do, you, and all the other, you know, steps, the other four steps of it
, you
know, you talked about there are not, are not true.
If you don't have any evidence to back it up, well, nobody's going to believe
you.
But is there something that you see that people sort of like miss with
strategic narrative
or something that they, they think they're doing it right, but they're actually
doing
it wrong?
There's a few things.
So sometimes I hear it.
I've heard it described as just sort of like, I'm going to say how the, like
old way
new way.
So, and the old way is like defined as some old product that people used.
Right.
And the new way is our product.
That's not a strategic narrative.
When Benioff first introduced this, no software narrative, they went to a sales
conference,
or actually user conference that was being held by Sebel systems, which was the
800 pound
gorilla of CRM and Salesforce automation back then.
But it was not a cloud solution.
It was something you would buy and install on your machines.
And this was at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Salesforce famously got a bunch of its employees.
They didn't have that many of that time.
And they picketed in front of the conference center.
And their science didn't say like down with Sebel or, you know, anything about
Sebel.
All they said was no software.
They're protesting what Sebel represented, the Sebel mindset.
And I think that's a really big distinction to make.
Always going to champion a mindset and kind of be against an old mindset versus
, you know,
defining this as one product versus a new product versus old product.
It seems subtle but quite different.
To me, yeah, I totally agree.
And to me, it seems like if Mark Benioff had just been a dude that didn't have
a software
company and he had walked around and been, you know, walked around the street
saying,
no software, he still would have been right.
And that is where I think the movement piece is right is the same thing with
Teen talking
about Zora.
Like he was right.
Whether or not people bought Zora software or not is almost irrelevant or not
to their
business, but to the rest of the world, he was right.
Like the move, the world was moving towards the subscription economy.
Everything was doing that.
Now how you solve that problem eventually, you know, hopefully that they figure
out Zora
is the best way to go.
But I interviewed team back in when he had just written, subscribed.
And I just read that book and I'm like, man, this is exactly right.
I mean, it cast me in as a podcast service company for that exact reason.
You meet the good side and the bad side is super easy to start, you know, buy a
guess of
us super easy to fire us, you know, and not have to lose any employees, right?
It's like it's the gift and the curse.
But the feature is the bug that right is like you can immediately switch.
Switching costs is now, it's not zero, but it's much lower.
So anyways, that idea, the movement exists already.
It is already going whether or not you ever want to buy that person software.
And I think that's the thing that people get the most wrong.
I think that they just fundamentally don't understand the like you have to, you
have to be, you
have to really do the work to dig in in order to find where the movement is.
And hopefully your product has already been doing that.
But yeah.
And what I'll say too is the other, you asked about sort of like misconceptions
about it.
If you were to ask somebody around the time, Tien, you know, came up with this
or Mark Benioff
came up with this, the concept that there was this movement happening, these
things happen
slowly.
So just by naming it, they create it.
Yeah.
A lot of teams I work with, they're like, oh, you know, I wish the thing where
the movement
we're talking about was just as immediately like powerful as subscription
economy.
And of course, when I talked, when I talked to Tien, he told me, yeah, when we
first came
over that, I hated it.
I thought it would sound like we're going to be selling magazines.
That was how, you know, so the act of defining it and how you define it is, I
think at least
half the game and maybe more.
I love communities in general and I think about it all the time and I wrote
this post that
sort of about communities.
And I think that there's like people get community really wrong.
I think that community is actually made up of many, many sub communities.
And you have like your total addressable community in your customer community.
You have your, you know, all these different sort of things.
And I think that part of the thing is that much like you can't sell, you know,
a product
to no one, you need to sell into a community of people that are doing that.
And to find those people that identify, that see, see that like, hey, it kind
of has been
a little rocky over the, there is actually something that I see that sort of
isn't working.
Like for us and for, for Cass me and the thing that is when I was talking to
people, they're
like, I'm kind of sick of spending money sponsoring other people's stuff.
I wish it was just our audience.
Like we just make like original content and series that like we make that we
own that
are just as good as something that, you know, at age could put out or whoever.
So we control the costs and we're not just paying to like rent other people's
audiences.
And I was like, oh, yeah, I should just make a company that does that so that
you can have
your own shows.
But like that, that's the sort of thing is like there has to be that
understanding of like
that group of people that are going to be like, would you join this movement
with me?
And they're like, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, totally.
I see the same thing that you do.
Yeah, absolutely.
Every company starts pretty small and whatever their solution is probably doesn
't fully, it's
not fully like a lightsaber yet to fully deliver on the movement, you know.
And I hear this a lot from teams when I'm working on an earlier stage team, you
know, around
like an A or B where they'll say like, hey, do we, does our product really
deliver on
the movement?
And I think as long as we're defining it in the right way, then we're getting
like kind
of like what you said that people are reading the tea leaves about us and say,
yes, I want
to go with them because the way they're thinking is I can see what they're
going to be building.
Like I can imagine it.
And so I think it works that way.
Andy, it is an awesome chatting with you so far.
We got our final segment here, quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers, just like how qualified house
companies generate
pipeline quickly, tap into your greatest assay website to identify your most
valuable visitors
and instantly start sales conversations.
You can go to qualified.com to learn more quick hits.
Andy, are you ready?
I'm ready.
Go for it.
Do you have a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
I can speak Japanese.
It's not on my resume.
Do you have a favorite book podcast or TV show that you'd recommend?
I really love Station 11.
Hmm.
That's a good one.
And in terms of podcasts, rumble strip.
Ooh, I don't know.
I've never heard of that.
Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby or business hobby that might make
you a better
storyteller?
I love to cook and I actually recently released a cooking video on LinkedIn.
So we'll see if I'm going to do more.
I'm not sure, but it's possible.
Andy, what is your best advice for a CMO who's trying to figure out if they
should do a strategic
narrative or not other than the fact that they should just go to AndyRaskin.com
and
solicit your help?
But other than that, what do you think a CMO should do?
Should be thinking about?
Well, I really believe that this has to be led by the CEO.
So I think about this strategic narrative work, not as really a marketing thing
, although
of course, marketing is going to play a big role in it and benefit from it.
But really is a leadership thing that this has to be the story that not only
marketing is
telling, but we want finance and sales and product all aligned to this.
So I think the biggest thing is, if this stuff makes sense, then talk to your
CEO about whether
that's with me or whatever, about whether they make sense to that person and
whether that
person, not every CEO sees this as their job.
I've been grateful that enough to.
This question here, Andy, I'm curious.
I'm sure you could spend an hour just on this topic.
How many times do you get in the room where the CEO says, this is great.
I'm on board.
Everybody's on board.
They're sitting down.
They're ready to do the exercise.
And they five people in the room and all five of a completely different idea of
where
they're going.
Well, I always start kind of asking, you know, well, okay, what's this, what
are the pieces
of this story?
And yeah, I can't tell you, well, I'd say there's always there's sort of like a
little bit of
alignment, but almost every time there's, you know, people are going in
different directions.
And very often I'll get, you know, oh, yeah, you know, the CEO said, yeah, me
and the CMO
or me and the CFO, we're totally on the same page, like talking to the same
person.
And then I'll ask and turns out quite different about where, how they want to
talk about
the company and build this narrative.
So it's a very common thing.
Yes.
And while back I changed the, when I send out a proposal, I used to say like
strategic narrative,
creation or something like that.
And I changed it to strategic narrative alignment because I really do think
that that, at the end
of the day, that's the work.
And that's why I think it's so important to work with you Andy because, and I
don't just
mean that as a plug, I do mean that 100% seriously because I think you need a
third party in the
room.
I really do.
I feel the same way about like our work with Caspian of making a show for
someone.
There's just so much intellectual debt that happens in an organization that it
's really
helpful to have someone come in and be able to like help you through those
problems.
Maybe I'm biased, but I do think it's really important to have someone come in
and, and
mediate that.
Otherwise, somebody is at fault.
And I've seen that happen to CMOs where they're like, I'm going to lead this
initiative.
And then all of a sudden, two years later, they scrapped the whole thing.
And they're like, that was a dumb idea.
And it was the CMOs fault megafight.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm sure there's examples of CMOs who are successful doing that.
But for sure, I mean, I really come to believe that the CEO is the only person
in the company
who has really the authority to align everybody and to then get buy-in from
everybody.
And so at the end of the day, I think, whether, no matter who's leading it, I
think ideally
CEO, but even if it's not, then somehow that person has to be playing a pretty
important
role.
Any wonderful chatting with you today?
Any final thoughts?
It was great talking with you, Ian.
It was great to see you after all this time since that article.
Yeah.
Great talking with you.
Awesome.
Thanks so much, Andy.
Everybody check out AndyRaskin.com for more stuff on Strategic Narrative and
Reach Out If
You Want Help.
Take care, Andy.
Thanks.
Great talking with you. (upbeat music)
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