The Transaction

All right, here we are.

By the way, if this is, we had this conversation and then hit record, but for anybody watching on YouTube, this is Foster City.

Yeah, Andy asked, but when I'm on calls, like with people that are from around here, they'll be like, oh, Craig, do you live in Miami or Marina Del Rey?

I mean, honestly, I'm like, no, this is Foster City.

They're like, where?

I mean, honestly.

It's true.

If this might be the best view of Foster City, like real, right?

I mean, it's from up here.

The other thing is that chemical you guys put in the water makes the water look really blue.

Yeah, well, it's not a, it's dye.

Oh, I thought it was like a chemical for the bugs.

Well, I imagine it's a chemical, but it's just dye.

Oh, my God.

From ABM to PLG, from Meddic to Meddpicc, the world of business is constantly evolving.

We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly, how you get The Transaction.

I'm Matt Amundson, and he's Craig Rosenberg.

Let's get started.

All right.

Well, today, just for everyone as I lead into who we have on the show, we had them on our previous show and it was amazing, and Matt couldn't make it during the interview part, and he was really jealous because our guest today is one of those dudes.

You don't get them very much in B2B where you read his stuff and you knew about him and he influenced you.

He was this mythical creature, and then on that first pod we're like, I'm going to go for Andy Raskin.

He's like, dude, go for it.

Holy crap, if we get that guy.

And it's because all of us were deeply changed by a blog post, or a medium post years ago.

I don't even know, it was 2015, 2016, which was the post, the greatest sales deck I've ever seen.

It's Zuora, it's brilliant, and here's why by Andy.

And it was like, that was the most shared, right?

Most influential, probably most printed post, I think, in B2B history.

I know that's a big claim, but like, it changed all of us.

So think about that.

So since 2015 to last year, we're like Andy Raskin is this like incredible thinker.

And then, you know, you saw, you know, obviously you have other work, Andy, but that like started are the process of us just going, man, and now we've got you on the show.

We had you on the previous show.

Now we have you on the show again, which is like a total honor.

Matt's been so excited, was so bummed that he missed the last time we did it.

So we had to have you back.

So for the folks listening, today's guest is Andy Raskin, a B2B famous person, and even if you may not even know that, Andy, do you know that you're famous in B2B?

I was once in a Miami restaurant and somebody came over to me, I was like, are you Andy Raskin?

This was a couple of years, that made my life, that was really fun.

No way.

Was it not even an industry event, just someone walked up to you?

Yeah, I was just said, having dinner with my family really surprised me.

But, you know, but thank you for that.

Thank you for that great introduction and great to meet you, Matt, too, and get to talk with you this time.

Yeah, yeah, it's a pleasure meeting you.

I can attest to Craig's intro.

I think, you know, I've been fortunate enough to do a lot of advisory for people.

So early stage companies, usually CEOs, who are either seed stage or just raise their A and I always, always send them that medium post.

That's the right way to start.

Yes, that is totally true.

I changed one of our founders lives by sending that.

Yeah, because he had it in him.

That's something we'll get out of Andy today, because I've talked to Andy before.

He it's in it's in these companies and he helps sort of bring this thing out.

And yeah, so OK, well, let's get going.

Let's I can't we can't wait.

See, we just want to stop.

Let's stop complimenting Andy.

The Miami story is incredible.

Also, the fact that it was done in Miami.

There's there's an element there on the sort of environment that makes.

Yeah.

Well, my wife grew up there, so I go.

We go there a couple times a year.

See her family and stuff.

Yeah.

Amazing.

OK, so the way we like to start the show is to sort of talk about something the market should be thinking about differently.

Right.

So like, you know, especially today, a lot has changed as well.

That makes it really interesting idea.

And Matt and I have sort of used the podcast to figure out how we can help people think differently on their approaches and go to market.

And so, you know, we kind of would love to hear from you like what, you know, what are those that is that thing or things that they should be thinking about differently?

And we'll start there.

And then let's just see where the conversation goes.

And we will complement you maybe once during the rest of the show.

And I might I might return the compliment at some point.

So just be aware.

OK, we're both we're both forewarned.

So, yeah, tell us your thoughts on that sort of set up there.

Yeah, well, I think everything going back to that blog post made before and since with me is really about about suggesting a different mindset about pitching.

And and if I were to sum it up, the traditional mindset about pitching is you have a problem.

I have a solution.

Let me tell you why it's the better than the other solutions.

This is what I call the arrogant doctor.

So you're the arrogant doctor.

Dang it.

Came out of the gate with it, too.

OK, keep going.

I love the arrogant doctor.

The arrogant doctor and the arrogant doctor is not wrong.

I mean, I just bought this.

This is one of those point clicker pointers for remote things.

And I was on Amazon.

It's pretty much what I need.

I need each one of them to tell me why you're the best.

And I have a bunch of criteria I'm looking for.

And it's very, very clear.

And I don't need a big song and dance from the company to buy that thing, the price and the shipping terms.

But what I started to see was that the winners in SaaS were doing something different than companies that were breaking out.

And I think it really goes back to Benioff was the first one where he comes out and he says, this is in 2000, you know, I was around, I had just founded a company, in fact, and was kind of really watching him intensely.

And he comes out and he says, software is over.

It's the end of software.

And, you know, there's this new era, we're now in the era of what he called the cloud.

That is not a problem.

It's not even a claim about their product.

It's not even about them directly, right?

It's about a belief about where the buyer's world is going.

And this zero to one shift in the buyer's world.

And that is, if you think about that, you know, what's the metaphor for that?

If the arrogant doctor is that problem solution brag slash claim.

The metaphor for this, I think, is really movement.

You know, he's championing a movement.

He's a movement champion.

And I started to see this pattern in a lot of startups.

And that was what I started to write about.

This term movement, I started using later, but it's really that.

And of course, we see it in politics.

Donald Trump, love him or hate him.

I'm not a huge fan, but one thing I'll give him is he defines it in terms of a movement.

And I think when both sides are always trying to frame it that way.

And I think the best leaders, I'm not even talking about marketers really, I'm talking about CEOs, frame their companies this way.

Yeah.

So Salesforce is an amazing example there.

And I think we all were around when all that change was happening, and it did create the talk of the town.

So was the Zuora, just out of curiosity, because I want to talk about Zuora for a sec.

Because what's the background for how you came to the blog post and just out of curiosity there, and then let's talk about that as a moment as well?

Well, maybe I'll give you my background first that led to that.

So I mentioned I started a company back around the time of Benioff.

So I was a software engineer out of school, and a few years after that, a colleague and I, we were working at a Japanese tech consulting firm, and we had an idea for an app.

So this is late 90s Windows app.

We coded a prototype, and we put it out on a website that people could download, and we had 30,000 users in a few weeks, which at the time was a lot.

We started thinking, hmm, while our servers are going down, it was, hmm, maybe we could get some investment for this.

And so I wrote the business plan, we sent it to some VCs, and the reaction was really bad.

And one of them wrote back, Andy, listen, I rate every plan I get on a scale of one to 10, and yours is a one.

And then in parentheses, he wrote worst, in case we thought one might be the top.

Yeah, I clarified that.

And then he wrote though, this is when they would print it out and mail it back to you.

So he wrote in the margin, not a compelling story.

And it was a few weeks later, I was walking by this Barnes and Noble, and there's a sign in the window that says, for anyone who wants to tell a great story, something like that.

And then there's an arrow pointing to these books, and the books turn out to be screenwriting books.

And I knew nothing about this, but OK, I buy the books and read the books.

And what I realize is that, you know, great movies have this similar structure to what I was talking about with Benioff.

So, you know, if you think Star Wars, well, the, you know, on the surface, it's a, it's, oh, Darth Vader is a problem.

Luke solves the problem and happily ever after.

But I think if you dig deeper down, really it's the enemy is, when we first meet Luke, he's complaining, he's this complaining teenager.

I want to have great adventures, all this kind of stuff.

He and in his own, in order to win, to defeat the Darth Vader, he has to embrace a new mindset, which is something like selflessness and introspection and caring about other people, the opposite of the Vader mindset.

And so in that sense, this movie is, and all great movies, I think, are pitching a movement from one mindset to another.

So anyway, we rewrote our plan, trying to do this stuff.

And we started to get more interest.

And within a few months, we had a term sheet.

And it was really striking that this turnaround was somehow related to this.

And so then when I saw Benioff, I was like, huh, he's doing the same thing.

It took me about 10, 15 years to, I did other stuff, but anyway, I started consulting with, CEOs basically heard these stories, and over the years started, hey, maybe you could help me do this.

And eventually I decided I started doing it as work.

And one of the first teams I worked with, there was this guy there who was, he was head of sales.

And he was like, you know, what you're talking about really reminds me of the way we pitched at Zuora.

And I said, really?

He said, yeah, let me show you this, let me show you our sales deck.

So he sent it to me.

And that's how it happened.

And then it turned out, no coincidence, the CEO of Zuora was employee number 11 at Salesforce, Tien Tzuo.

Yeah.

So this, and when I've talked to Tien since then on my own podcast, and yeah, it comes directly that line from him.

That is amazing.

All right, so if you don't mind, I've done this with you before, but for our new listeners here, well, actually, Matt, any, sorry, I just jumped right in, but.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, a couple of things.

Like one, usually when I'm chatting to an early stage company and they're kind of like, hey, take a look at my sales deck, they almost always universally look the same, right?

Where they either try to do some level of personalization at the front, like, hey, here's what we know from, you know, what we collected either off your demo request, or maybe we had a preliminary call or something like that.

And then they basically just go into, you know, here's our company, maybe here's who invested in us, here's almost like a fraction of a slide that's like, here's why we built what we built and here's what it is and here's what it does.

Right?

What I love so much about the Zuora deck and why I always send it to people is that, you know, it's really hard to sort of encapsulate what a movement is very briefly, but it does such an excellent job of doing that, which is like, hey, you know, the world was this way for a long time and then the world has changed.

And as a result of that change, there's going to be companies that win and companies that lose.

The companies that win go this way.

And it's interesting because the deck does such a great job of sort of telling people exactly what they know, but maybe they don't put it all together in the terms of then why I should be buying a solution, in this case, like Zuora.

And the best decks really do that, right?

And almost everybody's decks are the worst version of what a deck is, which is like, hey, here's what I know about you.

Here's people who have invested in us.

Here's the customers that we serve.

Here's like a timeline of when we were founded and when we launched our product, et cetera, et cetera.

And here's the use cases and maybe some metrics that we're throwing in there to make you impressed.

But I think that that's what you see time and time again versus a deck that says, hey, there's a movement and here's what's happening.

Here's who's going to win and who's going to lose.

The winners are going to look like this.

Why do you think it is that so many companies opt for the less impressive version of this deck, which in a lot of cases is maybe technically harder to create than one that assumes like, hey, there's a movement here or at least takes the position that there's a movement and this is what winning and losing looks like.

When in reality, those decks are actually, in a lot of cases, more simplistic and I think do a much better job of getting people into your boat.

Why is it fear?

Is it what's, you know, there are VCs that are driving them?

Is it, well, if every other deck looks like this, I just need to copy that one, it's sameness.

What do you think it is?

Well, I think part of it is it comes down to what we've been taught to do and what was, you know, that arrogant doctor, you know, most people don't say, I wanna be like the arrogant doctor, but that metaphor is kind of how, you know, what guides us, I think a lot, even though we're not, might not be using those words.

And it's also, you know, yes, when the deck like Zuora's, the kinds I try to work on with teams, leadership teams, when we get them, yes, they can look a little bit more simplistic.

I don't think that means it's easier.

You know, Zuora, so I've talked to, and again, I don't think we mentioned, if people are unfamiliar with the Zuora story, Tien and their sales deck and every talk that Tien gave, and all the executives, they all start out with, hey, we are now living in a subscription economy, which in 2015 is a kind of radical statement.

They are saying, okay, we have Netflix and maybe some other Uber, which is sort of subscription-like, and that we are having the service rather than buying the thing.

But they are saying, hey, this is the way it is going to be.

And so they are calling it early, first of all, so that takes some courage.

I think also, they came out, so they had the idea for, and you said very correctly, hey, they said, the world has changed.

They don't just say, the world has changed.

They name that change, the old mindset and new mindset very clearly.

So they say, hey, it used to be about transactions.

We would sell things one off in department stores or whatever.

Now, we wanna subscribe to things.

Initially, this was like those razor blades and things like this.

And we want, and they called it, this is the age of usership.

We want to use things without the hassles of owning them.

And I feel like even now, there's like a backlash against that in some ways.

But anyway, we're talking 2015, so this is radical.

And name it very clearly.

But Tien told me, they came up with this subscription idea probably a year or so before they started using it very strongly.

In part because I think they thought, well, subscription, people are just going to think it's like, we're just about magazines or something, which is actually what I thought when I first heard it.

Like, oh, they're serving magazine company.

And so I think it takes some time and courage and thought to name it in this simplistic way that, also, Matt, I think you really hit on something important, which is you're telling them something they might know, but you're making sense of it by naming it in a very simple way.

And that is not necessarily so easy.

And it's not the first, it's not the way that I think, we're talking about a lot of engineers, probably who are creating the decks you're talking about.

And that's what I was, right?

Like, what's the engineer mindset?

There's a problem, I'm going to come up with a solution, and let's see if it's better than the others, right?

So there's a lot of training on that approach for folks who are in the space.

Yeah, the one thing that also really struck me about that deck is, although it's a sales deck, it would have been very easy for any of the executives to go on stage at Dreamforce, Saster, a large scale event and present it, and the audience not necessarily think that they were being pitched to.

And so I think that that's a big mindset shift for a lot of these organizations, which is, if you think about creating a sales deck, but instead of the mindset of it being just like a sales deck, have it be like a presentation that you would give, whether it's a keynote or a session at a large scale event.

And then weave the story in there, and then make that your sales deck.

To me, it's a slight mindset shift, but if I'm thinking, oh, I gotta build a sales deck that an account executive can deliver five or six times a week versus, hey, this is a presentation I wanna give to a live captive audience, my mindset's very different when I'm creating two decks that look like that.

But I think the reality is they should be the same.

Absolutely.

Yeah, when I work on decks with teams, we always wanna test it and improve it before we roll it out to the whole sales team.

And so very often that's the CEO using it in all kinds of contexts.

Recruiting conversation is very common, especially high level execs who want to know about the company.

And of course, investors, sales, sometimes it's media conversation with reporters.

And do they get it pretty fast?

And is this interesting to them?

And I think in a way, there's a little journalist inside all of us and this approach really appeals to that journalist because what's the journalist always looking for?

News, change, news about change and to make sense of it.

And this is where really spoon feeding that.

And like you said, it becomes more of a consultation than, hey, just here's my thing.

The Transaction is presented by Ringmaster, the go-to branded podcast team.

You know, when Craig and I were thinking of starting this podcast, we had all the ideas in the world.

But you know, all the ideas in the world won't get you a great podcast.

That's where Ringmaster comes in.

They handle the creative, book guests, and do all the production for the podcast so we can focus on what we do best.

Talk to one another and our amazing guests.

To discover how your company can leverage B2B podcasts to deliver outsized ROI, visit ringmaster.com today.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I was going to say when Matt was asking you the question before, which I would sum up as, why do you think everyone chooses to create the worst sales deck instead of that?

But I'm just having talked to Andy before.

And if you look at his work, this is a company decision.

The mission comes really is brought in.

I think you work with CEOs most a lot of the time.

Andy, it's like, there's this, like if you don't like this is, and this led into your second thing, which is like this is the company's mission.

And like it manifests itself into the sales deck and how you talk about it, how everyone talks about it.

And by the way, when you do that, okay, and you think about it as this is what Tien literally went around the world, basically with this story.

It also helps you be distinctive in how you think about the mission.

I'll give you the second example of people trying to do what Andy wants them to do.

And failing, which is every sales and martech startup, there's a lot of them, not everyone, but a lot of them all use the buyer is dot, dot, dot down the buying cycle as the change in the world.

And that's actually not a differentiated way to think about the change in the world.

As a matter of fact, when I was an analyst, I had to tell people, you're not allowed to show me that slide because, and I worked at a company that had the data on it.

You can't do that.

Like that's not a distinctive change in the world.

It's really interesting because when you have that and you think about how Andy's talking about, like this is everyone's talking about, this becomes like a really strategic decision about why you exist.

Then that trickles down into every communication.

I think, I don't know, maybe I'm summing up what you guys said.

I don't know if you guys have any comments on that.

But I do think when you think about Dex, that's either the engineer's critic is very seed feature centric or salespeople are trying to survive.

When it comes from the top, and the mission is what we do as a company, and that changes things, sets them up to not create the worst Dex of all time.

I don't know what you guys think of that.

Yeah.

I think in general, people are just in a rush to have something out there.

They start off being usually founder led in their sales motion and they just try to replicate whatever worked really well.

The last couple of times, they sold a deal.

It's very challenging, I think, to replicate a CEO's conversation with a prospect, their passion, their forward thinking.

It's very hard to duplicate in an account executive.

I think if you're selling a very technical product, oftentimes it gets misconstrued as that founder's deep technical understanding and then they sort of try to brute force the technical side of the product into the deck as opposed to what I think is actually most compelling to your captive audience, which is what is the narrative?

Why does this exist?

Why do you think this is a movement?

You would just pitch to a VC who probably gave you your first round or whatever.

That's a different story than the technical story that you're using here.

I think oftentimes, early stage businesses and even later stage businesses get too far wrapped around the technical axle of, hey, this does this, this API is that, this connection is that, whatever, whatever.

Instead of leading into, here's what's actually happening in the market.

This is why the solution like this exists because the people who are going to win are going to have a business that looks this way and they need a product that does X to serve Y function.

Yeah, and totally, Craig, you said, you think, did I work with CEOs?

When I first started, I would say, if the marketing leader wanted to lead the project and be the main person working with me with support from people, including the CEO, okay.

And after a few years, I looked at it, and which were the projects where it was really good and it really seemed to impact company?

It was all the ones where the CEO was literally the one who called me and was literally the one in hours and hours of calls or meetings with me working on the details of the narrative, supported by and guided by a team that included head of marketing and sales and product and the rest.

So I did make that decision to only do this work with the CEO.

One of the things I learned was, when does this rise to the CEO cares about this?

Because like you both said, it starts usually with sometimes the technical people are writing it or the salespeople are writing it.

In a way, that's all well and good.

I think it's hard at the very beginning to know what this narrative is going to be.

We learn a little bit by going in with, hey, here's the thing.

What do you think about?

We'll just learn a lot of stuff.

One thing I learned was there were a couple of interesting points along the journey where CEOs tended to reach out to me.

One was, I'd say it's usually around like late AB stage where one CEO put it like this to me, he said, I've been leading every sales call, or me or my founding team, we've had tremendous success.

But now, in order to grow, it can't be like that.

Our success to date has been like brute force of the founders, he said, and it can't be that way anymore.

And I need to transfer, like you said, like this, what is the story I'm telling, not only for sales, but for even for product development, like that's going to guide everything.

I have to start giving people that, so that I can be in the room without being in the room.

And all the CIs I talk with, there seems to be this point where that becomes a big deal.

There's another point often down the road when they're much bigger, where they've acquired nine companies.

So for instance, I've just worked with a team called OneTrust.

It's a big company in the security space.

They acquired like literally nine companies.

And what's the story we're gonna tell now about all these?

And it's a very different challenge because now we have lots of competitors at the different company levels.

And how are we gonna wrap this together in a story that makes sense about what, you know, that brings it all together?

So those two seem to be really big points, exceptions, but those are those are the biggies.

So the base, the basic rubric is the, we're gonna describe a relevant change.

We're gonna name the relevant, that the change in the market or that, yeah.

And then we're gonna talk about the, that there will be winners and losers and what those will look like.

Then you have this, I've always loved this phrase, so I just have to bring it back, which is tease the promised land.

Can you tell us, talk a little bit about that?

That's kind of where, when people talk to me about like, well, you know, when we move sort of from setup and like, and like get a little bit more specific about where things are going, right?

So talk a little bit more about that stuff.

Well, one of the ways that this name, the name, the change in the world, I found like some people like were a little unsure about that.

Like, what does that mean?

So one of the ways I started talking about it was to name the shift, name the old game and the new game for buyers.

Meaning, so with the Zuora example, old game was we bought things, people wanted to buy things.

The new game that the buyers is they want to use things without the buying of things.

So as a way to crystallize it, I started thinking of this Promised Land thing as, what's the object of the new game for our buyer?

So I'll give you an example.

So OneTrust, OneTrust is, they had the story that they came up with was, hey, used to be maximize your use of data and AI.

And now, there's this new game where it's about responsible use, and which has many, many, many different facets of what responsible use means.

And for the winners and losers, they show like there's this correlation that started just a few years ago between stock price and trust of how trusted you are with the data.

So, this is, you know, they're showing, this is a matter of life and death.

This winners and losers really, we're trying to make the same case that the movies make, that this story is about life and death, or something close, that there are stakes that we want to care about, right?

That the buyer cares about.

Then, okay, in a world of responsible use of data, what is the.

What is the destroying the death star that we need to do?

That leads to everything happily ever after.

Right.

And in their case, it was, I won't say exactly, but it's something about bringing the risk teams and the, so every, there's this conflict on, and I think every company now, between the risk teams and like the data teams, you know, the data teams want to do all this AI and use it and do all kinds of things, give customers all these superpowers, and the risk teams are like, yeah, I want to enable you that, but it's, we got to be careful about this.

And it was something about bringing those teams together, you know, like bringing down the wall between those two teams, you know?

So that's how I think about that, that Promised Land thing.

Sometimes people would, when I say Promised Land, they just say, oh, like, we're going to be making a lot of profit and it's going to be real, and it's just too vague, you know?

So I always try to, so I found this like, what's the object of the new game that we're pitching of this movement and for the buyer, what do they have to do to live happily ever after in this new world?

And that seemed to be clarifying for folks.

Okay, cool.

Love that.

Okay, and then, so the features are must-haves for overcoming obstacles.

Is that part of the story around Tien Tzuo, The Promised Land or is that?

So it sounds like you're going through that greatest sales deck post, which is now eight years old.

I know, but it's my thing.

I know you have new stuff, but like, I'm sorry.

No, no, no.

And I think it still expresses like the basic idea, but I sometimes have changed how I think about it.

So I'll start with you, like how I think about this now.

So yeah, so the first thing is obstacles, right?

So in every movie, of course, there's the hero can't just go and, you know, go and do whatever it takes to live happily ever after.

There wouldn't be a movie.

And same here, if it was just easy to tear down this wall between the risk teams and the data teams, or easy to give customers this usership life, no reason for these companies to exist.

So first thing is, well, what are the big obstacles that are in the way?

And these are what a lot of folks might start with, which is the problems.

You know, what are the things getting in our way?

And so, you know, for OneTrust, you know, these might be things like, oh, we have, you know, security systems and privacy systems, all separate and different teams, and, you know, how are they ever going to talk to you?

All this stuff, right?

With Zuora, it was, well, oh, you know, in a world of transactions, we really didn't have to know that much about our customer.

We, you know, if you're a department store, all you had to know is what styles are selling.

Who cares who's buying them?

But now we have this, you know, if you're gonna be like in Amazon, well, okay, we have to really know about a lot of details.

How are you gonna know this, right?

It's really these how will you questions.

Well, okay, if this is new, how are you gonna do this?

How are you gonna do this?

How are you gonna do this?

Right?

And there's a step I like to add here now, which is to say the old tools weren't built for this.

Normally, when we're, you know, quote unquote, positioning against other teams, there's some, it'll be some version of like, there's the two axes, there's us to the upper right, up and to the right, all the others left and below us.

There's a comparative thing.

We're better than they are on some axes.

And what the narrative lets us do, if we've really done it well, I think, is just outright say, they just weren't built for this.

We're not better than them.

They're not even built for this world.

And so, that's what Zuora did with, their big competition really was ERP systems that we're doing billing.

And I say, hey, they're just not, they're not going to do all these things like have customer purchase history and lifetime value and all the kind of stuff that we need.

And then, yes, now we can say, well, okay, well, here's how we knock down those obstacles, which is now we can start to show our features.

But what we've done is now instead of just these are features solving some problem, the problem and the features are all tied to life and death stakes in a changed world.

And so they take on this different resonance.

Yeah, I love it.

Matt, any thoughts or comments?

I'm sorry, I was just enjoying revisiting the...

I just sent it out the other day.

So, but...

Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I think the biggest challenge that I always get when I send that deck off to early stage folks is they're kind of like, yeah, but like, when do we talk about the products and the features?

And so I think illuminating that aspect of it, yes, it still belongs in there, as long as you're setting the stage appropriately, it's natural to move into that space as you sort of near, like, you know, the mid to the, to somewhere between the middle and the end of the presentation.

Because I think, like, you know, at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, let's paint this great big narrative, but also, like, let's get specific too.

I think, you know, Craig and the folks at Topo have always eschewed the values of being highly, highly specific.

And so I think, like, finding the right opportunity to introduce those ideas into a deck that starts off very narratively driven can be a little bit complicated and feel potentially a little bit jarring.

But I think it's, I think, you know, may be the most challenging part of creating a great deck.

But I think, like, it is still very essential in order to getting your prospects and your customer to understand what the value is.

Not just that there, you know, that there has been a change and that there are winners, but specifically the ways in which they can win with your product.

Yeah.

And one of the things I see teams do is they'll just sort of put up some change slide because that's what you were supposed to do.

Yeah, and you know, that's one of the reasons that I think it's really important to go out and try it.

I mean, yeah, what we really want to see is the person saying, oh my God, yeah, that's that's right.

This is kind of like the Chris Voss thing.

Chris Voss, this negotiation guy.

Yeah, never split the difference.

Yeah, never split the difference.

His big thing is, you know, forget about getting to yes, get to that's right, which is, which is, you have summed up my world in a way that I see, that I acknowledge is correct.

I mean, like you, like I think Craig, you were saying, like, hey, if the, you know, if the change in the world is something that's sort of obvious or just talked about, or, you know, for a while I was seeing, now, now it's all about experience for a lot of marketing dex.

And, okay, who cares?

You know, like, you're wasting my time.

You know, what is, and one way to think about this is, instead of what problem does our product solve, what shift in mindset does it represent?

You know, I was talking to a company pretty early stage.

I won't say the industry just for their confidentiality, but the CEO was saying, he had said, hey, yeah, I have this shift.

The shift is we've gone from paper to, you know, to digital.

And this is an industry where things are very paper based, even still.

And I was like, yeah, you know, that's, it's sort of, that's sort of the, really what you're saying to them is, you know, waving your, wagging your finger at them, like, hey, you have to go, you have to buy some software.

And so I asked the CEO, well, what, what is happening in the buyer's world that is, means if they don't make this shift, they're dead.

And then he started talking about, so this is an industry where there's a lot, so, well, without giving the details, there were two kind of aspects of what the buyer was doing that were very separate, I guess, very similar to the OneTrust thing.

And their software really brought this stuff together.

And this started to be a much more interesting story, like, oh, those things that we always handled separately.

Now, if we do that, we're dead.

And here's why.

That, I think, became a more, for the buyer, like, wow, yeah, you know, that's happening in my world.

And so we always want to make sure that it's got this emotional resonance, and not always easy, as you have said.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Amazing.

So, well, I'm sorry, Matt.

Keep going.

Did I steal your thunder again?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm good.

I'm good.

I'm not sure you guys had to exactly articulate it, but you actually you did bring it up when you talked about, well, I talked about the the buyers down, the buyers, how you say everything's about experience, you know, you know, part of this is to dig out of them.

The whole the whole everything about the story is intended to be unique.

But it still has to be relevant, you know, it's funny, I was thinking about when you guys are talking about Dex, I remember years ago going in, this was literally probably around the time that Andy was doing, that I wrote the post and that they brought us in and they said, well, we're trying to go into the, they were transitioning from selling to IT to selling to the marketers.

They said, we did 50 meetings with CMOs and 50% of the time they walked out of the meet.

And we're like, okay, well, what were you guys doing?

They're like, oh, well, we have our SC and he comes in and does the demo.

And it was just like, okay, but like you're trying to transition into the CMO's office, you're not, they want to hear the story on why they should even see this.

As a matter of fact, they might never look at it.

I just was thinking about that there where it's like the power of the story.

Because there's a second part to this, Andy, one of the things you find now with all the different software, just getting meetings requires that you pitch that you're going to tell them a story.

And so you think about this, like I'm just going back to this idea that like part of those were a thing was, at a certain point, Zuora was being brought in to tell the story to the exec team at Killer Company X because they created the storyline, not the media, not anybody else, they did and they were brought in.

Yeah.

And it's like, when we think about advising anybody now who can't get in the door, particularly in executive teams, or frankly, they're young and nobody knows who they are.

They try to dazzle them with features, we all get those e-mails every day.

And actually, we need the story to start to hit the market even before anybody tries to talk to someone.

Yeah.

And offer to tell this really unique story, becomes this really powerful instrument to just get in the door.

And I think a big part of that is, this arrogant doctor, I think works really well if we're talking about an audience that's one person with a very well-defined problem.

The thing about B2B, as you're pointing out, is, yeah, we might have people who are directly involved with this, you know, literal problem we solve with our software.

But then we have, like you say, the CMO or C-level execs or people in between, or the CEO, who are removed from that thing.

And how do we talk to them?

How do we make this life and death for them?

You know, a great example, I think, of that was Gong.

Gong, you know, was really seen early on as a tool for sales enablement, you know, record the calls.

And Gong struggled to initially to get the attention of the CRO.

And I worked with that team, but also they were just totally dedicated to tell this story about goodbye opinions.

Hey, the old world, we ran our sales team with opinions.

Hello, reality.

We're going to run it now by a view of reality through AI and all kinds of stuff.

And this became a C-level story.

And they conveyed life and death stakes to that buyer.

And I think that's something that the story can do.

The movement can do, if we define it properly, that just the arrogant doctor pitch of you have a problem, here's my solution, here's what's great, cannot.

Yeah, I love it.

Love it, man.

That was the perfect mic drop to hit the buzzer beater.

The buzzer beater commentary.

Well, I know that there are kids to be picked up, too, so yeah.

Well, yeah, we didn't even tell you, hey, come up with a big close, so that you did that naturally, so we appreciate it.

Okay.

So yeah, so we're going to we'll have links to some of your great stuff in the show notes as well.

I think people would behoove themselves to study you.

Yes.

I found out in this show, I still share your old one because it just resonates with everyone I can.

And so it's, I mean, honestly, we were kidding.

It's an honor to have you on the show.

We told you we would compliment you during the show.

We'll compliment you after.

Great stuff.

Thank you so much.

It was an honor to have you.

And thank you for having me in.

And just clearly you guys have thought really deeply about this stuff too.

So, it's really interesting to have a call with you guys.

Thank you.

Matt was in a year deep thinking about this.

He's got it all in the booze drug.

All right, guys.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you, Andy.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction.

Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end.

What are you actually doing here?

For show notes and other episodes, please visit us at thetransactionpod.com, like and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other place you get your podcast from.

The Transaction is sponsored and produced by Ringmaster, the go-to branded podcast team.

To discover how your company can leverage B2B podcasts to deliver outsized ROI, visit ringmaster.com now.

Either you have walked away from your podcast device, or this is playing somewhere in the background.

Someone in your house would really like for you to shut this off now.