Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Jess, welcome aboard to the show today. I'm happy to have you.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Thank you, Ari. Good to be here.
[00:00:05] Speaker A: I want to jump right into it. Give us a horror story and don't mention names of people or companies, but give us the worst communications horror story that you've experienced.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Oh, goodness.
Well, I think that it would stem from a place of not knowing your audience.
I think that's key is understanding who your listeners or our viewers are.
So I think that coming into a room and not having the good fortune or sort of curiosity to learn who you're speaking to is going to set most people up for failure at worst. But at best, maybe sort of medium connection with that audience and maybe not them taking away your key points.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: So when you see these ultimate, let's say, failures of communication and branding you mentioned, like, who are you talking to?
What are the other aspects of where you see people really need to improve?
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Knowing your audience is key. When we think about the idea, like in marketing, we use the term creative brief. And I'm sure you've heard that too many of your listeners have.
The first question that's asked in a creative brief is, who are you? Who are you talking to? Who are you targeting with whatever this product or message is?
So I think that goes a lot farther than just kind of our typical demographic questions. Right.
Gender, income, geography, age. I think where it really gets interesting is knowing what the fears of that audience might be, what their aspirations might be.
So it can be as simple as even in many of the digital spaces that we spend time today, the ability to ask for questions in advance before you jump into a conversation so that you already know what the 5, 6, 7 sort of hot topics are for the audience. And you can weave those naturally into whatever your narrative might be, which shows empathy for where they're at, but also just shows sort of an organic humanity about the way that you speak.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: There's. I come across a lot of people that are like, well, everybody can use our product or service, Right. It's broad enough that the answer is everybody. So why would we even have a target focus audience if everybody needs us? Let's just go fishing and just say, hey, this is who we are. This is what we do. You need us like everybody else. What's wrong with that approach?
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And there are products like that. Right. There are a lot of consumable products, sort of that. That consumer packaged goods CPG industry is toilet paper.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Right. Like why everybody needs toilet paper.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Right. Laundry detergent. Yeah. So in many ways, actually, and coming from a little Bit of experience, my early days at Nestle.
It's one of the harder jobs as a communicator is to sell something that frankly, everyone could use. Because there's that saying, you know, when you're trying to be everything to everyone, you're nothing to no one. I know. Seth Godin, you know, years ago, talked a lot about this.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: I love him.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Yeah, me too. Me too.
So he talked a lot about this idea of your market should actually be a sample size of 1. If you can really narrow down the single person that you are marketing or communicating this thing to whether it's a product or a service, then. And you cater your communications and positioning and all of benefits, all those things around that individual.
Yes. There's going to be people that don't want it and don't understand it and don't like it. And that's actually okay. In fact, it's a good thing because now you've differentiated yourself from the many competitors that likely are on the market.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: You're saying that narrowing your audience actually creates differentiation. How do we use that? So let's say we've gone ahead, we've defined our quote, unquote Persona. What do we do with it? Like, does this impact anything after we've defined who we're selling to that one person, or is it just a thing we need to do to get through it?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Well, I mean, it definitely affects everything from if the product or service is still in development, it certainly can affect the features and the literal delivery of the thing.
So that could be like package size. That could be. Right. Like the difference between even if I'm going to sell in through a convenience store like 711 versus I'm going to sell in through a Costco. So, number one, those are likely in many cases different demographics that shop. But there could be some crossover. But the use case, I could buy milk at both places, but I'm probably buying milk at 7:11 for a different reason. It's maybe a bit more of an urgent need. Right. Than I am at Costco, where maybe I'm planning way ahead. So it definitely affects the product, the packaging and the distribution model.
But when it gets into sort of the world of marketing and communications, it absolutely affects the way in which we talk about that product, the way in which we try to address the needs or wants of the customer, again, based on what their fears and aspirations. Right. Which many of us are driven by those two things might be. So 100%, knowing your audience is literally the through line from the development of the product all the way to the distribution and the communication of it to your audience.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: So really, what we're saying is, who are we going to say no to? Because what's going to happen is that we're going to go down the line. We're going to agree on our person of one, so to speak, or the Persona, and then we're going to have to make a decision. And the decision is going to be, you know, you know, who are we marketing to? What is the product feature that we agree to? And then we're going to ask ourselves, well, do we compromise? Let's make it a little bit for these people, too, so we have a broader audience, and that creates a really difficult discussion. Now, I'm sure you've been in a lot of these discussions.
What does that look like? What's the challenge and what is it? What is it? How do you make a good decision or a bad decision? And how do you. Is there even such a thing?
[00:06:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, first of all, the word that comes to my mind is courage.
It takes a lot of courage as a. As an organization, as a leader, as a marketer to say, no, that this thing or this service is not for them. And that's okay. There's lots of other people out there making great products and services. That is for them. But what we're doing is for this subset.
By doing that, you attract the right customers and partners and you build a much stronger brand because people can identify what you stand for. Because ultimately, a brand is really a symbol or representation of what a company stands for. And I think that that's the courage it takes is that in the beginning, and I'm experiencing this right now as a new business owner myself, in the beginning, it's very tempting to try to chameleon yourself to fit many different audiences.
But in the. In the midterm and the long term, it pays off to be judicious about who you want to work with.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, the. The method for the. We work with a lot of very logical people. And the way that I like to explain this is you want to think about the pipeline, the pipeline on conversions. And the thing is that if you try to be everything for everyone, and this is kind of mathematically explaining that you're nothing to nobody, is that if you have a message that really you're speaking to one person and they don't resonate with your message because it's very generic, the conversion is going to be very low. The amount of people of that you're speaking to that are going to resonate with you is just low. And then really what we do, we go from marketing to sales to decision, you know, decisions around purchasing at every point. If your conversion rate is low, then your aggregated conversion low is going to be nothing almost. But if your message just resonates, it hits it every single time in that process, then sure, maybe you're not talking to, you're talking to maybe, you know, one tenth of the audience, but that message is resonating a hundred time fold. And that's the math that we need to have in our mind. Right. It's that we're converting through that process as opposed to people are just like. And you never get anywhere. So that's. I resonate deeply with your message. I appreciate it.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you kind of talked about the fancier word of a qualified lead. Right. You know, a marketing qualified lead, an mql. Like if it's someone that we already know, has an interest, maybe has the financial ability to buy our product or service, has expressed, maybe again through digital channels, kind of raised their hand and said, you know, I want to know more. Those are. You're already further down that pipeline. So to your point, you're going to convert at a higher rate and yes, that's great for business, but frankly, on the qualitative side, if I'm managing a sales team and I want to keep them motivated, I want a higher conversion rate because they're going to feel like what they're doing is actually making a difference.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's something. This is so interesting when you're talking about the actual people. Right. That are interacting. If you're as an, as an individual, as a human being, if I don't know who's on that other line, other side of the line, I don't know what they care about. I don't know what's going to be. It kind of surprises me every day it's a little bit more hard to build that relationship. But if I know what your values are, what you care about, you know, I know a little bit more about your industry, I know a little bit more about your objectives and your pains and how you're incentivized as a person, it's easier to get to that human click, that human connect than oh, I don't know who I'm talking to today.
Which I think is an undervalued point in general when we talk about sales teams.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: And I remember being at an all hands meeting in one of the companies that I worked for where we spent 70% of the all Hands meeting, looking at basically a P L and talking about the combination of our finances as well as the really the specs of the next generation of the product we were working on. And so I'm sure for many people in the audience that was right up their alley and you know, checked a lot of boxes.
And so I remember sitting there and first of all having to like Google certain words. Even though I have an mba, there were still words that I just, I was like, what is that? What is that again? You know, so there's that where I thought, wait a minute, you know, I'm, I'm decently educated, I'm decently experienced and I'm not completely tracking every single thing we're talking about. I bet there's other people that aren't either.
But two I really missed in that All Hands meeting, I missed that kind of, that inspiration. I wanted, yes, I wanted to know financially we were on track. Yes, I wanted to know that our next product launch is going to be successful, of course. But I wanted to hear from leadership about what they were excited about, maybe about what they were seeing in their travels internationally in different markets, maybe what they were proud of that had been accomplished the last quarter across different parts of the company that I might not know about.
So I was missing that other side of the equation which I think is so vital when you're communicating as a leader.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: I would love to say that what you saw is just a freak accident and that it's not a thing, but unfortunately I think you're spot on.
Is there an issue here with. First of all, I'm going to just call it out and I'm going to say that's egocentric bias. It's this thing that way we see the world, we think everybody else sees the world that is just completely false. But beyond that, what are we missing in our communication? What is the thing that we need to do more of? Why are we falling into these, let's call them traps of over focus onto the analytical or the data or the money?
[00:12:47] Speaker B: Well, I'll build on a conversation you and I had prior to the call, which is around this notion of there's this sort of portfolio of psychological biases that we all carry and we all knowingly or unknowingly have experienced in our own life. And so I think a lot of those psychological biases are so kind of COVID and often hidden that unless we really are looking to be hyper self aware and really constantly iterating and making progress in terms of how we show up and Present, we fall back on those inadvertently. So I'll give just one example here that might be a fun one.
There's the term anchoring bias. We think of an anchor, and that idea that we might rely too heavily on information that came in first and made the most important or impactful impression on us, and then things that sort of come later may, even if they contradict it, they may be disregarded or diminished, is not as important.
So one example from my experience, I worked for Adidas for a while before I was in the tech space in marketing. And, you know, Adidas is based in Germany, and I worked in the North American headquarters in Portland. And so while we. We spoke all the time, we were constantly in conversation with Germany much back then, much of the footwear and apparel was designed in Europe first and sold often in Europe before it would come to the U.S. maybe a season later.
And so there would be times when there would be certain products, specifically apparel for men, where it had done very well. Europe and that market very much embraced those styles, those silhouettes.
And although the market research is very positive that they had done. And so there was, again, this kind of anchor of positivity that was coming from hq. When it would get rolled out in the US it wouldn't do as well.
So I remember there was one example that we. We would laugh about where it was a pair of pants for men that were what we would call knickers, so kind of right below the knee, which at that time, men in the US weren't really wearing knicker so much.
And so we would have to have these conversations with our partners in Europe about how it's not so much that the marketing isn't hitting. It's not so much that we're not trying to sell it through into our.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: I love the initiation of the blame game. It's like you're not selling this well enough.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Right. I mean, of course there's always room for everyone to improve. And I'm sure there were some things we could have done and we. And we tried to do from a marketing standpoint, but ultimately the product was the product, and it just wasn't the right look for us men back in, you know, 2006.
So that was a good example of kind of anchoring bias because it was hard for the European team HQ to kind of extract itself from that great momentum they saw in the very beginning.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I. It's amazing how many times we get back to this on this show, but I'll say it for the probably, you know, 15th time go read the book. Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Koeneman and Amos Tversky. They are the fathers of, you know, psychological biases. And anchoring is, is one of more than a hundred.
I gotta tell you, from a personal perspective, when I kind of dive deep in social psychology, it just opened my eyes to how many things I'm getting wrong and I don't even know it. And it kind of explains to you why for me, my top one, anchoring is of course incredibly famous, but for me, my top one was actually egocentric bias, which really what it says in simplistic terms is that you think other people think the same way as you do. No, no, they don't. Yes, that is untrue.
And we make decisions based on that. So that that CEO, right, that you told before, you know, he was thinking or she was thinking that, oh, like this is the most important thing to me, so it must be the most important thing for everybody else. No, it's not. Yeah, that's a false assumption.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think feedback is key. Just to add to that.
I think feedback is so key and listening to the feedback, which is you can get that in, you know, in sort of classic, like surveys, you know, post a meeting or post a presentation. But I think this is honestly one of the areas where social does try and do a good job, is if you have an engaged, quality network and you're sharing content, say on a LinkedIn, you know, you can tell by the commentary and the shareability of something whether it hit or it didn't.
So I think that that feedback loop and then internalizing what you heard and trying to iterate is like magic, right?
[00:17:54] Speaker A: That's so important. This, this idea of curiosity as, as a tool for self improvement. And you, you called it self awareness. Here's my argument. Self awareness is a superpower that most of us don't have.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. See, and again, I. Here's my ego. Egocentric bias. I assume everyone is self aware.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: Okay, I will tell you for sure that that is not true.
So here's the interesting thing, right?
When we approach our audience with curiosity, it's always surprising to me to find out the reactions, and I would argue they are significantly better than any other approach because you're really opening yourself to step away from the, this is what I think is important. And then figuring out what actually is important to the audience that you're talking to, which I think is so, so important.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, and it's. And again, it takes discipline. I mean, I work on this all the time. There's the message. If you're a leader, a communicator, if you're up in front of any group, there's the message that you want to get out, right? Your agenda. And it's very important and meaningful often to you in that moment to get that out.
And if, if what you've been told the audience is interested in is, is not aligned necessarily with that, it really takes putting yourself kind of in the backseat and being very audience centric, which that's a discipline for sure.
[00:19:36] Speaker A: How do you even approach that? I mean, I mean, that's clearly a conflict of interest. If you have a story that you can tell of, you know, dealing with that, I'd love to hear it. But. But what's the method? How do we approach a conflict like that? How do we even think to work through it?
[00:19:52] Speaker B: I try to think about, again, I love that saying, begin with the end in mind.
And I try to think about what is it that I want people to feel and remember when I leave.
And so, I mean, I even sometimes think about this. If I'm going to a party, this doesn't have to be in a business setting. And I think through, okay, who's going to be there? What kinds of questions might I want to ask or topics might they want to raise? And I'm an extrovert, so naturally I'm very comfortable talking to people and expressing my feelings and my thoughts. But I, at times when I have the discipline, I will try to go in sometimes to those parties, those gatherings, and go, okay, I'm going to talk less. And so if they ask me questions, that's great, I'm happy to answer. But I'm going to kind of reverse and shine the light on the other people and I'm going to ask some questions and then follow their lead and let them maybe share what's on their mind. And so if my goal, if I'm reverse engineering, my goal is I want to walk away from that party with having accomplished two things. One, I want the people I speak with to really feel like I cared and I listened to what they had to say.
And then two, I want to learn some stuff. And, man, I can learn a lot more when I'm listening than when I'm talking.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
This is so, so insightful, Jess. I really, really appreciate it. I want to dive into this because I think it's so important that it's worthy of kind of more exploration. So I want to throw some problems at you. I have an agenda. I know what I want to Talk to, opening it up to questions and exploration in this all hands meeting, let's say, right, 100 employees, whatever. It could take us on unknown paths that I'm not prepared for, I don't know how to handle them.
But on the other hand, I still want to do what you're saying, right. I still want to be connected. Right. What are, what are the hacks? What are the methods? What should I do?
[00:22:02] Speaker B: So how do you balance the two. Your agenda and maybe. Yeah, yeah.
Again, I find it actually kind of surprising how much of the time many of us are sort of walking through life without at least, at least 70% clarity on our goals. Right. Maybe not a hundred, but at least some idea of the direction we want to go. So I think again, number one, start with, all right, if I'm. Let's just say I'm going to get up on stage in an all hands and I know I have 90 minutes, or I'm going to do a podcast like this, you know, I'm going to do an interview and I know I have 30 minutes.
What are the two or three things that are most important for me to communicate?
And also sort of, what's the presence? How do I want to show. I want to show up in a serious way? Do I want to show up in a thoughtful way? Do I want to show up in sort of a light hearted, comical way?
So what is my goal in terms of the content? Right, because there's the what, of course. And then what is my goal in terms of the delivery? So the how.
I think if you go in with that and then allow. I always use the term buffer time. Right. I do this in my day to day life. Rather than having everything sort of squeezed tightly next to one another and there's no buffer in between, allow that buffer. If you have a 90 minute all hands, maybe your three points will take up 50 or 55 minutes. And so you allow like a half an hour of whether it's Q and A, other people's questions that they've asked you in advance, levity and just sort of, you know, having some fun in between the, the serious points you're trying to make, then you can both accomplish your priorities. Maybe not all 10, but maybe your top three. But you also allow that squishiness, that buffer space for other people to participate, engage and be there with you.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: You said something so important, but you just glanced over it. If everybody does this and understands it. You said questions that people that you may have asked in advance, I mean, that's such a That's such an interesting and important topic. I mean, if the only thing you do, you're going to talk to 100 people. If you go to, you know, five of these, a hundred people before the meeting and you're like, look, this is what I'm going to talk about. But I wanted to get your perspective and I wanted to get, you know, what's important to you, what are the pain points that you're considering? What do you think are the important points? And, you know, am I missing anything? Give me feedback. Like, even that can make such a tremendous, you know, change in. You might catch yourself saying, oh, my God, there's this incredibly important topic that I'm completely ignoring that everybody's mind is on. And actually, I have to address this or you might get some deeper insights around, you know, how this impacts the teams that you didn't even imagine. It's been such a powerful tool that I've experienced. So I really appreciate your point of this. Yes. Just go and, you know, sample what people think about it before you have the meeting. Be more connected to your audience. And there's easy ways to do that. So what a wonderful, wonderful point.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And you'll see, I'm sure you've been to many conferences over the years. Um, but you'll see speakers do that. I mean, like the good ones, right. They'll go out, they'll be in the audience, they'll listen to the speakers in advance. Right. And then. Cause they'll kind of read the room. How are people responding to those, you know, couple before me? And then maybe if there's a lunch or a break, they'll sort of be mingling and talking to people and then you see they're up on stage.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: And to me, like, that's very important. Maybe the most important part is that sort of, you know, research, that kind of audience research and kind of building a little bit of connective tissue and rapport before you're up on. On top.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: What, what drives me absolutely mad is that the magic that people do is the stuff we don't see. It's not necessarily only the stuff on stage that we all see and we appreciate. It's the stuff we don't see. It's what they did before. It's their mingling with the audience, it's the questions they ask. It's really hard to learn from the things that we don't know is happening. So I really, really appreciate it. Jess. Believe it or not, we're at the end of the time. I wanna. This is what happens when you're having fun? I wanna ask you one final question. This is a personal question. It's the only scripted question we have.
And the question is this.
If you had to put yourself back into the shoes of 20 something year old Jess, what advice would you give her?
[00:26:45] Speaker B: So much you're better than you think you are.
And the, you know, you. You are your harshest critic, right? Those voices inside your head are.
The expectations are so much higher than most people around you will ever have. So rather than, you know, be critical and, you know, at times even beat yourself up for not being, quote, perfect, which I believe perfection is a fallacy.
Aim for little bits of progress every day and continue to tell yourself that you belong here and you are probably more worthy than you think you are. Because with that mindset, you're setting yourself up to win, right? You're planning to win. And to me, you'll never win, whatever your goals might be if you don't believe that you can.
[00:27:50] Speaker A: Jess, what an absolute delight. Thank you so much for joining our show today.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Thank you, Ari, good chatting with.
