Goodbye Product. Hello Movement.

0:01 the most successful B2B SAS companies feel less like they're selling a product and more like they're evangelizing a movement think gong's goodbye opinions hello reality Zora's subscription economy or the OG Salesforce end of software the Beating Heart of these companies goto Market identities is a very simple story that I call a strategic narrative and it drives success and Alignment not only in sales and marketing but also in fundraising recruiting product everything in this

0:33 talk I want to explore what I've learned about how you structure a narrative like that and what makes it powerful in the way most of us have been taught to pitch is like what I call the Arrogant doctor you have a problem you know a pain I have a solution some treatment and here are some claims about why my treatment is better for you given your particular problem than other treatments so the focus is on on product claims you

1:02 know this doesn't come from nowhere the Arrogant doctor was The Guiding metaphor of the sales methodology that was all the rage in the 80s and 90s called solution selling you were supposed to probe for pain similarly another popular Business book from that era crossing the chasm told us that the way you cross over the chasm to convince the skeptical mainstream buyers is by touting what the author Jeffrey Moore called your claim of undisputable Market leadership you

1:29 know crafting a brag about your product if that approach is working for you keep doing it but I found that it didn't work for me and before I get to why I think it's relevant to remember that the books I'm talking about their advice and philosophy this arrogant doctoring where you make product claims the focus of your pitch were published about 40 years ago you know the buyers they were talking about were individuals deciding between relatively simple static widgets

2:00 in relatively uncrowded markets you know people shopping for cans of soup on Supermarket shelves or cars and dealerships even software back then came in shrink wrap boxes that didn't change very often but when I started Building Sales pitches for B2B SAS companies selling to Enterprises this was back in 2009 you know my buyer was a very different animal and they fac a very different landscape every year this guy Scott Brinker puts together this chart

2:32 of companies just in the B2B marketing technology space but it might as well be the chart of whatever B2B SAS sector you're trying to sell into and the Arrogant doctor is going to struggle here because Le this is what I found buyers are bombarded by an Ever growing number of product claims or brags and these products we're talking about are complex sprawling platforms very often with thousands of features that are constantly evolving so even if your

3:00 claim is backed up by your product it's really difficult for buyers to validate that to sus out whose claims hold water and as you grow it gets harder to nail down some distinct ICP you're talking to multiple personas and stakeholders in the buying decision all with different problems they want solved and different takes on which ones are the most urgent so I started asking a question is there a better metaphor you know to guide how we pitch than this arrogant doctor

3:30 and when I started asking this question I thought back to an experience that I had way earlier this is back in 1998 so like 25 years ago I was a software engineer and with a colleague we built a web app that we thought could be a business we got some users we decided to reach out to VC's we wrote A business plan we sent it out and the response was really bad and this 1 VC wrote back Andy

3:56 I rate every plan I get on a scale of 1 to 10 and and yours is a one and then next to that he wrote in parentheses worst in case we thought one might be the top of his rating scale no but under that he wrote not a compelling story and a few weeks later I was walking by this Barnes & Noble and I see a sign that's next to this stack of books that says for anyone wants who

4:20 wants to tell a compelling story and turns out that the books are about screenwriting which I knew nothing about and so I bought them and I read them what I learned from them was that every movie is a sales pitch really for a movement so what movement is Star Wars a sales pitch for it's a pitched for abandoning the game of self-centeredness you know all Luke wants at first is to have Adventures to be a pilot that's the

4:48 game he's playing he's just thinking about fun and glory and that you only win by playing a new game where the goal is selflessness introspection what movement is Frozen a pitch for the spoiler alert this movie was on heavy rotation when my son until he about turned like eight or so but it's a pitch for a boning an old game where the goal was marrying royalty that's how you got happily ever after and playing a new one

5:14 where you develop your own strength and embrace friends and family of course when I discovered these books and this screenwriting stuff you know I wasn't building a 3A screenplay I was pitching a business so what applied what didn't 25 years later I'm still asking these questions but I did my best to answer them in rewriting our pitch and this time we started to get interest and a few months later we had a term sheet a year after that I see Mark benof doing

5:44 the same thing he launches Salesforce as a movement his pitch is that the old game the old mindset called software in the sense of code that you host and own is now the enemy and now there's a new winning game he's championing he calls it the the cloud he's making this pitch first and foremost not to investors or his own team but to potential buyers 7 years later employe 11 at Salesforce tieno goes on to found Zora where he

6:12 does the same thing he Champions the idea that to win you now have to abandon the age-old game of selling things that's your enemy now and embrace a new one where you offer things on subscription notice that this isn't really describing a problem it's going to create a lot of problems obstacles to overcome but it's not a problem statement in itself that's not the structure in 2016 I wrote this post about Zora and gave my first take on how

6:39 you structure a pitch like this and and still barely a day goes by when someone hasn't emailed me to say how that structure made them more successful at selling but I think the folks who really got this got that it wasn't just about a sales deck that it's about how winning companies from the CEO on down their embracing a new metaphor instead of behaving like that arrogant doctor you know I'll tell you about your problem I'll tell you about my

7:08 solution and then I'll spew my unique differentiators Zora and the other breakout companies I saw we championing a movement powered by a narrative about naming an old game as an enemy and evangelizing a new winning one like we just saw Salesforce software is the enemy embrace the cloud Zora transaction of the enemy Embrace subscriptions Services models over the last eight years I've gotten to work with dozens of CEOs and Leadership teams on building

7:38 narratives like this and I consistently hear how they power growth not only through sales and marketing but also via alignment in product and fundraising or recruiting so I'd like to share a few narratives I've worked on and five principles for building an effective one one that you can use to structure your sales pitch but that ultimately defines movement that your team and your buyers can rally around when a meet bendoff reached out to me in 2018 gong

8:07 was still a series B company they were growing but still just seen as a tool for sales Ops to record and replay conversations they were still struggling to reach cro sales leaders so am me said to me Andy we're going to be big I mean he could see the trajectory already but how big depends on the narrative he saw the narrative as a potential growth multiplier especially if it could hit home with sales leaders in actual sales

8:35 calls this was gong's website back then the sales pitch was similar all about how gong was for sales teams that wanted to like add science to have great conversations I remember at my first session with am me and his leadership team he was like you know I don't really love the beers and udy leore was like what I thought you love the beers and he was like not really and when I dug into it I found you know me he wasn't really

8:59 the beakers that he was talking about he was thing that ad science just felt like kind of a nice to have a lower level thing so we talked instead about the movement that Amit saw gang evangelizing and this was how he fleshed it out in one of our sessions together sales leaders used to win by gathering sales people's opinions on things but now they can only win with a view of reality it's different from adding science it's about

9:28 you know do you want to make decisions based on what's really happening now or not this ultimately turned into goodbye opinions hello reality and it's right after this that you start to see gong be seen as something much bigger as a solution for sales leaders because this has real Stakes for them I'll show you in a few minutes how Amit drilled those Stakes home but my first principle for a movement defining strategic narrative is to evangelize an old game

9:56 new game shift in which buyers see life and death death Stakes this is how with the narrative as opposed to just saying like here's your problem and spouting product claims you're conveying urgency it's why Chris orlob who I met during my work at gong recommends starting with the old game new game shift for Discovery and totally I mean I would go so far as to say if you present the old game new game shift by the way you don't

10:22 need slides to do this you could just talk to it if you want and the various by personas don't open up about how that shift is playing out in their lives and what the challenges they face are around it in other words like giving you Discovery gold if you're not getting that then you haven't nailed it yet let's look at another example when Kabir Bard reached out to me last year One Trust had gotten really big both

10:47 organically and through Acquisitions it was an amalgam of nine companies but Kabir and his leadership team were struggling to pitch this new combined entity like the whole Suite of stuff particularly to sea level prospects as Kabir told me our slide deck showed 20 different capabilities we'd say what do you want so he wanted to uplevel the conversation frame it with a story The Narrative we built together with a lot of participation from One Trust leaders in not only sales and marketing but also

11:16 product and finance and strategy starts with life and death Stakes so it turns out a few years ago companies with a higher trust rating started to outperform others in public markets could beer made the case that these companies were the ones that had made a shift from seeing trust as kind of siloed compliance initiatives or a bunch of like isolated games to seeing it as a new game where the goal is coordinated trust intelligence where you connect all

11:45 aspects of trust because privacy ESG ethics all this stuff is increasingly interdependent this is the movement that one trust Champions but the group they're pitching to they're are multiple personas in there so cesos CTO Chief privacy officers CMOS so to bring this home for each of those audiences to make it emotional for for them Kabir spells out how has their role shifted such that they have to jump on this

12:17 trust intelligence bandwagon this movement for example in the middle on top the CDO Chief data officer that job used to be governance enforcer but now organization are looking to that person to enable a trusted data use inside and outside the company so we have one narrative but we can make this movement personal very quickly for multiple personas on my podcast Kabir talks about how this slide just really hits home really fast when he's pitching groups that include a mix of these

12:48 people so my second principle is show why every Target persona's role has changed such that they have to embrace the movement by the way this also works really well for verticals too I won't show that here but you can see how you might show how each vertical is also changing now I've said that the way the Arrogant doctor conveys differentiation is usually you talk about a problem you show your solution and then you product brag usually some version of this you show

13:18 others have you know maybe some of what we have but we have some special stuff that they don't have or you come up with some attributes and explain why competitors are worse on those ATT why we're up and to the right and they're down to the left strategic narrative lets you take a totally different approach to differentiation and to see the power of it let's go back to gong so Amit knew that in some that that some

13:42 sales leaders would say you know already have a view of reality it's called My CRM thanks so amid showed this slide and he said yes you do have data from your CRM but let's look at that data it's basically digitized opinions if your salespeople are bother to fill it out at all they might decide yeah I wasn't in the zone so if you want a view of reality your CRM isn't like worse it's literally not built for this new reality

14:11 game this movement that amid is championing at One Trust Kabir says this explicitly he lists up the buckets of competitors and doesn't say one trust is better in fact at this point in his pitch Kabir hasn't mentioned one trust at all not their product of the company instead he's first making the case that if you believe in this trust intelligence movement well these tools can't help you I'll show you another example of this Kelly Watkins was a

14:40 senior marketing leader at slack before coming in a CEO at abstract which makes software for design teams Kelly championed a new direction for abstracts product but in order to bring her team along she told me I need a narrative to make sense of the new product direction for buyers yes but also for her team and the narrative she landed on was about how design had changed from a game of just producing the best outputs like designs to a new game where winning

15:09 design teams see themselves as a strategic function that collaborates with other departments to deliver measurable business outcomes now Kelly wanted to do what gong and one trust did and say the old tools weren't Built For This to do that in her case she said it up with what I call the how will use she says okay you agree you want to shift from outputs to outcomes well how will you make it natural for these teams to

15:37 partner how will you standardize things to boost productivity without quashing creativity how will you attribute outcomes results to design so that the business sees that and the return and and invest in it without the context of the narrative these are random like problems to be solved but in context text of the narrative they take on emotional weight they become obstacles to living happily ever after in this changeed world we've described now Kelly can say not we're

16:10 better than competitors but literally no one else is focused on this so principle number three use the Strategic narrative to position competitors not as worse but as fundamentally not built for the movement that we are championing I talked about movies earlier and in every movie we learn very early about a goal State for the main character some State the go the character has to reach in order to achieve happily ever after in Star Wars A New Hope we learned

16:43 really early on that to live happily ever after at least until the next movie Luke and his friends are going to have to destroy this this Death Star thing then when Obi-Wan lets Luke try the lightsaber this is like Obi-Wan is giving Luke a product demo here we already understand what's at stake you and why this product matters a great strategic narrative does the same thing it articulates a goal State we're putting out there for the buyer to

17:06 strive for in order to live happily ever after and this gold state frames product and features with emotional resonance or or put another way with urgency I call this goal State the buyer mission statement let's see an example of that and how it how to work it into the pitch Adrien mcneel is the CEO of Fox Club which makes software for robotics developers say you've built a fleet of robots or self-driving cars and something unexpected happens to one of

17:36 them out in the world you're going to need to collect tons of data from that machine maybe recreate what happened in a simulation remotely deploy a fix Fox clove helped you do all that now when Adrian reached out to me he said we do a decent job of pitching features but not so much the kind of big picture business value we're delivering and so I asked Adrian to show me his sales deck and it looked like this this you

18:03 know this has the advantage of being very simple I mean he's saying hey you have lots of data on the robots that's on the left that you need we'll clean it up for you make it easily accessible in all the ways you want it but like Adrian said this doesn't really get to the urgency like why having this data is easily accessible is life and death for the robotics company that we're they're selling to so we interviewed a bunch of

18:25 Fox Glove customers robotics engineers but also leaders at these companies seite folks and we teased out that there is this huge high stakes shift happening that they see in their world even well-funded robotics companies used to be playing kind of the prototypes game now that's over these companies only succeed if they can make production happen you know repeatable success which means knowing at scale what your robots are doing out in the world like why and and iterating fast we

18:56 knew we were on the right track because when Adrian's team tested this in sales calls prospects opened up they would say that's right this is happening to me as Chris Voss famously says when we get that's right that's when we know we're building trust next this is like Kelly watkins's how will you slide Adrien lays out the obstacles to winning in production how will you process tons of multimodal data this means like visual data location data all the sensor data

19:25 all the different types that's coming from the robots how you keep tabs on potentially hundreds or or thousands or millions of devices especially when many may be in limited bandwith environments like there's no Wi-Fi for like your robot that's you know mowing the lawn by the way when sales teams present a list of obstacles like this I love when they ask you know anything we missed another great discovery opportunity you knew this was coming next the old tools

19:49 weren't built for this and then before they get into product Fox lays out that goal State I was talking about this buyer mission statement understand how your robots sense think and act of course Adrian and his team arrived at this not only because it's what they believe in but because it's differentiating you know no one else in the space is talking in a big way about this buyer mission statement and what's interesting is you know after they show

20:16 this you know Adrien tells me next they often go into to a demo or sometimes they literally just show a list of capabilities now obviously this could be much more interestingly designed but even now that it's he's framed it with the buyer Mission like the stakes around getting to production scaling Adrian tells me he's having really fruitful conversations because now you know something like say Edge sight agent like it isn't just a capability it's a kind of lightsaber for

20:42 overcoming an obstacle to winning in production the the production robotics game so goodbye product does not mean when I in the the title of this talk goodbye product El movement does not mean don't talk about features does not mean don't talk about speeds and feeds it does mean don't start there like instead use the narrative to very quickly create context for why product features speed and feeds whatever matter so my fourth principle before you introduce product present a new

21:12 differentiated buyer mission statement we're not making contextless claims about how our product is different from or better than other products we're claiming we're different because we built our product to fulfill a different buyer mission one that's born of the movement we're championing now I'm often asked what happens if our movement succeeds like the new game we've been evangelizing goes mainstream lots of competitors come in and start saying the same thing there's a knee-jerk tendency to fall right back to arrogant doctoring

21:41 like let's spout claims about our unique differentiators but then you're back to the he said she said feature bragging the best example I think of how not to do that and what's possible instead comes from no surprise the OG strategic narrative CEO himself Mark Benny off here he is in 2000 he famously got Salesforce employees to pick it outside a seil conference with no software signs but this is more than a PR stunt in his Memoir beyond the cloud benov says that

22:13 what was successful about this was that the audience and the Press remembered the story of change we were disseminating he literally saw himself as championing a movement over the next 15 years that movement took hold the shift to the cloud became in many Industries kind of old news so Ben off began evolving The Narrative this is from his 2016 dreamforce keynote it's all about this I would say bigger story about the age of the customer customer

22:41 power all that 5 years later that's kind of old news so at the 2021 dream Force he evolves it again and then this year you can see it in the upper right corner now everyone's in Einstein a new goal state by our mission about empowering every person with AI so my last principle for a powerful strategic narrative is if and when it gets old which could be because the movement goes mainstream or just became too obvious

23:08 evolve it U make it bigger or different because if you don't probably someone else will I've heard that benof asks employees to get certified on his dreamforce talk every year and not just sales and marketing folks I love that because I too see the sales deck and it it that's what is Dre force is essentially a highle sales deck as the primary instrument for crafting and conveying the Strategic narrative that's controversial you know the traditional approach is marketing is going to build

23:39 some kind of messaging architecture thing and the sales deck will be an output of that I ask CEOs and leaders in sales and marketing and product and other areas to collaborate on building the sales deck directly and then make sure with sales team participation first that it works in real sales calls and then marketing can start start telling that story everywhere but not just marketing yes sales and marketing alignment is crucial but wouldn't you also want as Amit bendol told me he got

24:11 sales and marketing align with product you know am me told me his product team used the goodbye opinions hello reality story as a filter to decide what features they're going to build wouldn't you want sales and marketing also aligned with HR you Kabir told me that at one trust the n narrative was this unifying element for employees across what were formerly nine companies and I hear from every CEO that the narrative becomes the core of the recruiting pitch

24:38 wouldn't you want sales and marketing also aligned with fundraising you know on my podcast TN swo told me that investors who believed in the subscription economy narrative invested in Zora those who didn't didn't and wouldn't you want sales and marketing aligned with overall leadership strategy Kelly Watkins told me that her output puts to outcomes narrative was in addition to the words that sales and marketing said to buyers also how she gave her entire team a kind of compass

25:06 to steer by to make decisions by when she wasn't in the room I think you would want that broader alignment and that's why I always advise that the CEO should lead this and when I work with teams I insist on the CEO being the one literally in the trenches with me authoring the narrative yes with guidance from a small team that includes the leaders from sales and marketing but also product and sometimes finance and HR because isn't the real goal

25:34 alignment across all these teams you know I've long searched for a theoretical framework that can explain why these simple narratives are not only effective with Buyers but also why they have this great aligning power across teams and the best answer I found comes from a kind of blogger philosopher I follow a really smart guy you may follow him too his name is Vates raal Ral says that for relatively simple straightforward decisions humans employ

26:05 what he calls calculative rationality you know we list up the Alternatives calculate some kind of bestness score for each and then we choose the winner of course the Arrogant doctor assumes that this is how all buyers make decisions The Arrogant doctor's claims are essentially hey score me higher but when decisions get complex like which sprawling B2B software do I need among dozens of options or what features should our team prioritize among the many we might build

26:36 calculative rationality breaks down there's just too much uncertainty and complexity to do reliable calculations so Ral says that we switch over to this other mode that he calls narrative rationality here we think we make decisions and act based on the most compelling and elegant story that we can improvise about a developing enactment and that's a lot of fancy words he's saying that when things get complex we observe the world and try to tease out

27:07 some compact powerful story about how you win as a heuristic a rule of thumb to guide us and what I think the gongs and the sales forces and and these others are doing with their narratives is teasing out that story for buyers employees investors spoon feeding it to them the way movies do as a compass to guide their decision is in the world this is why Ben harowitz famously says companies that don't have a clearly

27:38 articulated story don't have a clear and wellth thought out strategy why he says the company story is the company strategy if you want to go deeper on this stuff one way is to check out my podcast the bigger narrative I've talked to 25 CEOs and Counting so far about building and deploying their strategic narratives though many listeners do tell me the best part is my mom she introduces every episode come for my mom stay for the CEOs I also post my

28:05 learnings and thoughts about this stuff on LinkedIn if you want to follow these posts or talk I invite you to connect with me there I love talking about this stuff if you tried anything I talked about today let me know how it goes thank you