The Framemaking Sale: Building Buyer Decision Confidence

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back.

You're about to listen to a career huddle where our flocking awesome community, CMO Huddles, gets exclusive access to the authors of some of the world's best-selling business books. At this particular huddle, Brent Adamson challenges how we think about trust and buying decisions. Drawing from his latest book, The Framemaking Sale, he explains why growth comes less from persuading buyers and more from helping them feel confident moving forward. It's a shift that changes how marketers shape content, anticipate obstacles, and guide complex buying groups. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome, huddlers, to this month's career huddle, our ongoing series of conversations with business thinkers whose work is particularly relevant to marketing leaders. Today's guest is someone many of you will recognize. This is actually his fourth time joining me. I mean, I need to get a coat or something for this. When you make five, it'll be like SNL—you get a five-timer coat. And he is already the most frequently interviewed guest in the CMO Huddles renegade marketing universe. So as most of you know, Brent is the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, two books that sparked a lot of rethinking of how the B2B sales process actually works. Oh, and he also wrote the—gosh, how can I forget that? It's not even in my notes. It's true. He wrote the forward, thankfully, too, for Renegade Marketing. Anyway, Brent—I mean, Brent, it's great to see you. How are you? Where are you this fine day?

Brent: I'm well, thank you. It's great to see you guys. I am in my home office in Northern Virginia.

Drew: Yeah, somewhere on that map. Yeah, I see it just above the panhandle of Florida, up there a little bit. All right. So we have a thing we do now, which is just in case the audience needs to leave early, or we need to convince them to stay. Let's start with three key misconceptions that marketers may have about the sales process, and then just list them, and we'll try to go through them one at a time. So I'm putting you on the spot. Here you go. Three misconceptions, and it could be marketers and salespeople, and could relate to framemaking. 

Brent: Yeah. So okay, the number one, and probably highest-level one, I'm going to do these super quick. So number one is we all want our customers—we all want to build trust with our customers, and we think that the thing that we need to do is help customers or encourage customers to trust us, trust our brand, trust our products, trust our people. We want to be trusted advisors. We want to be thought leaders. The single biggest opportunity to drive growth for your business is actually not to build customer-supplier trust, but to build customer self-trust. It's not so much whether or not they trust you or believe in you or are confident in you, but rather whether or not they're confident themselves in their ability to make a decision on behalf of their company.

Drew: Okay, we'll go through that one in a second. Now, what's number two? Perfect.

Brent: Number two is we spend a huge amount of time, and I think rightly so, have for years in marketing, mapping the customer's buying journey. The idea being, we need to align our sales motion to the customer's buying motion. If we could understand that buying journey better, we could somehow sell in a way that's more aligned to how they buy, and thus increase the likelihood that they make a purchase. Problem is, customers don't know how to buy. They are completely overwhelmed. And frankly, what's interesting is, you know better how to buy, not just your solution, but a solution like yours, than your customers do themselves.

Drew: Oh, I can't wait to go into that one. Number three?

Brent: Number three is that much of what we do in the name of customer centricity—and this is definitely a marketing, absolutely a customer experience thing—I can't tell you how many stages I've been on over the years where the motto has been "the year of the customer," "Customer 360," "we're going to surround the customer." You know, all the different slogans we have about customer, customer, customer, customer, customer, "the customer at the center of everything we do." The vast majority of what we do, in the name of customer centricity, is simply supplier centricity with a thin veneer of customer layered over top of it. In fact, the better approach is not to be customer-centric, but to be supplier-agnostic. And that's actually going to do a better job of driving growth for you. And all of those things are going to completely rewrite marketing going forward. How’s that?

Drew: That was great. And we got to pick those babies apart, because we got some explaining to do.

Brent: I got more. Man, let's do more. This is fun.

Drew: Well, let's go first with the trust self. And this is a big part of—and by the way, I get to this later, but it took me 209 pages to get to the book, to realize this was a mindset, not a replacement.

Brent: We buried the lead on that one, yeah.

Drew: It's on me, because I think you say it early on. I just, I was looking because I thought we were going to be, oh, this is a new way. No, it's a mindset. But this is a very specific thing. Trust versus self-trust—that's a mindset shift. Talk about what you really mean and why is it so important that we create this self-trust, that they have confidence?

Brent: Yeah, so by the way, let me just put a pin on that. We can come back to it if you want to. But just so you guys know where I'm coming from, there's a new book called The Framemaking Sale. We just published it. Very excited about it. Some of it starts with the work that we did at Gartner and CEB. A lot of it's with what I've done since then. I'm now out on my own as an individual. I'm just a founder. I'm just like Drew, except Drew actually has customers and clients and business. But I have zero real interest in putting a new sales methodology out in the marketplace. What I want to do is share with the world some really powerful research I think is going to reframe kind of how all of us think about going to market. So I think the heart and soul of The Framemaking Sale isn't so much a methodology, but a mindset. So that's—and we can come back to that if you want. It starts with a bar chart. The vast majority of anything I've done over the years, these decades now in sales and marketing, starts with data. And this one does too, starts with a really big bar chart. And it goes back to research that we did early—late CEB, early Gartner—about five years ago, when we first started doing this. We began to ask this question with our research teams: What needs to happen inside of a B2B purchase, or a B2B sale, in order to increase the likelihood of customers buying a what we call a high-quality, low-regret purchase? That is a purchase, a B2B purchase, where customers don't settle for status quo. They don't settle for good enough. They buy the bigger solution, with the broader scope, usually with the higher price point, the higher margins for us, the kind of bigger solutions that we're all trying to sell. Oftentimes, when you sell those kinds of solutions, they can come with a certain amount of buyer's remorse, right? It's like, the first time you bought your own home, you wake up the next morning like, "I bought what? And what? It's 30 years of mortgage of what?" Right? It's kind of scary. So what we're really looking for is a unicorn, which is customers increasingly likely to buy the high-quality deal, but with lower regret at the same time. Okay, so in studying that question, we have over the years run just about anything we could possibly think of through this research model to try to understand the different drivers and the proportional impact of those drivers on that outcome. So we took all the different aspects of Challenger—teach, tailor, take control—broke them down into component parts, and ran them through the model. Not surprisingly, the work around insight still has a huge pop. 180% increase. 190% increase. 90% increase. We looked at different marketing strategies, different components, or attributes, is the word I was looking for. We looked at different attributes of content. We looked at buyer group configurations, all of that. To say when all of that work was done, what we found is more than anything else was one attribute, one factor, well above anything else that would increase the likelihood of a high-quality, low-regret deal. And it was—if everything else was kind of like here or here, you know, like a small increase, a bigger increase, Challenger a really big increase. This thing that we found was like up here. It was an order of magnitude higher than anything else. It swamped everything else in results, and that was simply the degree to which customers report a high level of confidence in the decision that they're making on behalf of their company. So we've come to call that decision confidence. And what that's kind of indicated to us, and certainly indicated to me, and this story kind of got lost in the shuffle over the years, is that anything that we do in sales and marketing in B2B—and there's a B2C story, this is really interesting, but let's park on B2B—anything we do in B2B, sales and marketing and success, I think, has to be run, or should be run, could be run, through the lens of customer confidence. How are we engaging customers in such a way specifically that we're helping them feel more confident in what they're doing? And this, Drew, so that's the background. I can answer your specific question. And I know that's a bit of a lead-up. I apologize, but here's where the story takes this weird left turn. Because when you go into the—because people, when they hear that, it's kind of like this "no duh" moment, right? It's like, well, sure, customers have to be confident in the decision, otherwise they're going to choose not to choose, and we lose to status quo oftentimes. I don't know why, but it seems like CEOs more than anyone else—and I mean that with respect—but more often than not, CEOs will say, "Exactly, you're absolutely right, Brent. This is why we need to run everything through the lens of customer confidence. That's why we need to make sure that customers are confident in our product, in our brand, in our people, in our customer list, in our logos, in our—you know, that we're a trusted advisor, that we're a thought leader." And this is, again, where the story takes a left turn, because when you unpack this data and you look at the specific attributes that actually lead to this outcome, the single biggest driver by far of growth and quality deals for our company, what you find is it's things like from a customer's perspective: How confident are we that we even asked the right questions in the first place? How confident are we that we've done sufficient research on this really tough problem? Which, by the way, today, there's no end of research we can do, particularly because of all of us in marketing—and I raise my hand on this too. We spent the last 10 years doing content marketing. We've pumped more information out in the world than ever before. In the book, we call that the smartness arms race. And you layer AI on top of that, there's no end to the research which you can do. So how do you know when enough is enough? How confident are we that we've thoroughly examined all the alternatives, which, again, when things are changing as fast as they are in terms of capability right now, there's never any end to that. So the bottom line of all this is this. So here we've got this massive bar in this bar chart that shows that this is the thing by far that we need to solve for. And when you unpack it, you find two things. Number one, the first thing you find is none of this stuff has an objective finish line, because you think, okay, great, we need to know. So customers need to be confident they're asking the right questions. Awesome. Okay, so which questions are the right questions? Are those the right questions, or are these the right questions? What if you think those are the right questions but I think those are the right questions? You always get a debate about what's right or what does right even mean, right? So okay, that's hard. Let's park that. So at least, let's feel confident we did sufficient research. Awesome. What does sufficient mean? The way I look at sufficient is, if the deal turned out to be great, that was sufficient. If it goes south, it was insufficient, right? So it's like, again, what you find is there's this weird sort of subjectivity to all of these attributes. This is the engine of growth for a company, and every one of them has a subjective component to it, which tells me that at the end of the day, what really is driving our business isn't so much what customers know, because you can't know any of these things, but it's actually what customers feel and specifically do they feel confident. And so much of what we're doing in our marketing content—again, I say this with respect and absolutely what we're doing on the sales side—is working our derrieres off to help our customers know things. But the question is, are we equally solving for, you know, helping customers feel things and specifically feel confident? And that's point one. And then I'll take a breath. I promise, you know me, I get wound up. Is that when you look at these different dimensions of confidence, the second part that's equally critical is—notice, if I were to ask you, okay, so which one of these is about the supplier? How confident are we that we asked the right questions? How confident are we that we did sufficient research? You realize not a single one of them is about the supplier at all. None of these attributes are supplier-centric. They're supplier-agnostic. I need to figure this out for myself. And so this is where I literally dropped everything after keynoting on this about a year and a half ago and getting these incredible responses. It was very much like 2009, early Challenger days, when I decided—I walked into Matt Dixon's office and said, "I think we need to write a book." I had that exact same moment at a meeting I did in Miami where I walked out and thought, "This has to be a book." And I literally quit my job, dropped everything, and, Drew, I joke. I told you I'm all in. I just don't know if I'm all in on red or black yet. But I just felt compelled to get the story out in the world, because I think we're all walking past the single biggest opportunity to drive growth for our companies, which isn't to solve for customer-supplier perception, but to solve for their self-perception. And this book is an examination of, what would that even mean? What would that look like? What does it look like to go to market, to engage customers, through content, through interactions, in such a way that we're solving for self-perception and not supplier perception? Okay? That was, that was, wow, right? That was a lot, wasn't it? 

Drew: That was a lot. And I'm not even going to—there's so much in there, but I have to go back to this one thing about the buyer journey thing.

Brent: I won't do that again. You wound me up on that one. So that's—but now we got the field laid out, so I promise I'll go short.

Drew: Going back to the buyer journey thing. So almost every CMO who's listening now on this call has found that showing the spaghetti buyer's journey, which you were famous for at Gartner, showing that little thing, right? Really helps the CEO and the CFO understand it's not about first touch. It's not about last touch. There's a lot of touches that go along to create this. In your case, you're calling it self-confidence in order to make a decision, and there's a lot of back and forth. So I don't think you're saying the buyer journey doesn't matter, but I think you're saying—I don't know what you're saying, but I want to sort of—I don't, well, let's talk about it. So just help us. Because, again, this has been a solid tool, because it's so helpful for folks to realize there's no silver bullet when it comes to a complex enterprise business decision. There's a lot that goes into it. You don't get to "I feel good about this decision" by having them click on a Google ad or having dinner with a salesperson, right? Even if that chocolate mousse was incredible, it's not the thing that closes the sale. It's all of it. So I can't get rid of the buyer journey. So help me overcome this.

Brent: And we're not going to get rid of it, I promise. By the way, just take a moment. Like, can you imagine? Like, you know, "Drew, I wasn't going to buy from you, but that chocolate mousse was so good that now I'm going to buy from you." That's kind of actually hilarious to think about. But it's kind of like, "Oh, you guys were founded in 1875? I thought you were founded in 1885. Well, now I'll buy from you," right? It's like, that's an old line I used to use back in the day with Challenger, which is still true, I think. All right, so I won't go through the backstory, because I promised you I wouldn't, but we spent a number of years working with Bob Moesta. And some of you guys will know Bob, awesome. Bob's brilliant, and literally brilliant jobs-to-be-done, right? And one of the things we did with Bob is we mapped out together four key buying jobs of a typical B2B purchase. So problem identification, solutions exploration, requirements building, and then supplier selection. And I think what's so interesting to me and where we landed when we first did this work is, I think a lot of us—and, you know, you guys are all buyers too. You're not just marketers, right? So you've bought things on behalf of your company, with your colleagues, and I think we often go into these purchases, whether it's capital equipment or consulting engagements or training or whatever it might be, technology products, we kind of do it with a certain level of optimism or maybe amnesia, like we forgot just how painful the last time was that we did this. We think, "How hard could this be? We identify a problem, we explore solutions, we build requirements, pick a supplier, and bada-boom, we're done." And then reality hits, right, and then it's like two steps forward, one step back. Someone else gets involved. More questions are raised. Budget questions come up. "What about our priorities?" "Oh, God, there's new requirements in Europe," and on and on and on. And what happens is you wind up not moving linearly through these steps, but in a sort of—you just wind your way through them in this spaghetti bowl diagram that we generated to kind of depict that. Here's where—here's now we can get into the answer to your question too, which I think is really interesting. I've gone all over the world sharing that diagram back at Gartner, at CEB, at Gartner when we first did it. Martha Mathers, who's now a CMO herself, is the one that drew that drawing the first time, and she's brilliant. And I've taken that drawing all over the world, and we've modified it, and added to it for the book, but we still lean on it because we think it's a critical point. First point is this: when looking at that sort of crazy mess of arrows and circles and things going all over the place, I'll often ask heads of marketing, heads of sales, "Here's an interesting question: who's in a better position to know what that diagram looks like for your customer? Is it you or your customer?" So if this is your customer's buying journey, who's in a better position to know what that diagram looks like for your customers? You or your customer? And most of us will just almost instinctively say, "It's the customer. It's their buying journey." I would argue, based on everything I've learned from all of you guys, collectively as a profession over the years, that it's probably just the opposite, because what'll happen is, when your customer is going through this journey, they're thinking, like, "Okay, it's four things. We move through them." And then, "Oh God, now we have like, you know, like, bleep hits the fan," right? It all goes kind of south. You get really frustrated. And the way, here's where it gets really interesting, because the way this shows up at your company, for your sale, for your sellers, for your actual sales team, is, first of all, your customer will black-hole on you for a good, you know, weeks, months. They'll just disappear, and you're wondering what happened. And then finally, when you get them back on the phone, what you find is that they weren't avoiding you. What sometimes you're going to find is they were embarrassed. They were embarrassed. They didn't want to talk to you because they were literally embarrassed that you'd sold them. They saw the value. They saw the raving fans they saw. They saw the solution that you solved. They wanted it. They were excited about it. They said to get their colleagues on board, "No problem." And then six months later, three months later, three weeks later, they realized, "Well, this is harder than I thought," and they call you, and that conversation starts with, arguably the four worst words you can hear in sales. And the four worst words you can hear in sales, I would argue, are, "It turns out that…" because any sales conversation that starts with "It turns out that…" it's kind of like a relationship conversation that starts with "We need to talk," right? It's all downhill from there, right? It's like, "It turns out that procurement got involved, and they've got these three questions we don't have." "It turns out that the legal team looked at it and it turns out there's these new requirements in Europe that we didn't see coming." And on and on and on, right? The thing that's interesting to me about the "It turns out that…" conversations is, more often than not, when your customer calls you and tells you, "It turns out that…" they're actually surprised. They've run into some sort of obstacle, they've run into some sort of objection or stakeholder, something inside their company they didn't even know was going to be an issue. "It turns out, we have a Capital Review Board. I didn't know we had a Capital Review Board, but anything this size has to go in front of the Capital Review Board." That's a real story we tell in the book, right? What's also interesting to me, equally interesting to me, Drew, is that when you talk to sellers, chances are pretty good they're not surprised. In other words, their reaction is, "Oh, let me guess. It's procurement, isn't it? I bet I can guess the problem." Or it's like, "Legal got involved. Let me—I bet I can guess what they're wondering about." And in that little moment when I see a couple of you guys nodding your heads, which is, thank you. I appreciate that. This affirmation, I love it. But the thing that's interesting about that moment is, notice what you have there is an asymmetry of information. You actually on the sales side, or, let's say, on the supplier side, because I think you guys are absolutely contributors to this on the marketing team, we on the supplier side, arguably have a better opportunity, a better ability to anticipate customer buying obstacles than customers do themselves, because we see these things happen over and over again as pattern recognition. So whether it's your individual sellers—this is where marketing becomes critical—certainly, collectively we see it, and if we can actually take that knowledge and use it to help our customers, give them a heads-up, give them a "Hey"—and we can get into this too, if you want. We call it the phrase that frames. And there's some really important language here that we can pin on this. We'll circle back to it, but it sounds like this. "In working with other customers like you, one of the things we've often found is that procurement is going to get involved, and when they get involved, they usually get involved late, and when they get involved late, it blows everything up. Everyone's really frustrated. I hate to see that happen. What we found from a couple of these customers who are really doing something different, is they actually involve procurement really, really early, and it's something that we might want to consider." See what I'm doing? I won't go through the whole thing, but you get the idea, right? So I've essentially put myself as a seller or a supplier, because you can do this through digital too, right, in the role of a coach, a buying guide, a Sherpa. We actually know better how to guide our customers through their purchase process than they do themselves, because, frankly, they go on these journeys. I've asked quite literally tens of thousands of heads of sales and marketing to take their sales hat off, their marketing hat off, put their buying hat on, and think about their own purchase experience, think about buying with your own colleagues. "Give me one word to describe it." I've yet to hear a positive word: long, hard, frustrating, awful, landmine-ish. And then I always ask, "Well, how much of that was the supplier selling to you? How much was your own company?" "Oh, it's our own company. We're the world's most dysfunctional company." We are all convinced we work at the world's most dysfunctional company. I'm convinced we're all correct, right? So that becomes this really interesting asymmetry of information for us to essentially take some of these big and hard and overwhelming things and just put a frame around it. Just give them some guidance. Say, you know, "There's probably three steps that tend to get overlooked that you really want to focus on." I've left you the agency to decide whether you handle them, how you handle them. We talk a lot about this in the book. That's what framing is. I've essentially chalked the pitch. I framed the field such that you're more likely to feel not confident in me, but you're more likely to feel confident in yourself and your ability. I was talking to the guys at Salesforce at Dreamforce two weeks ago, and I said, "Where this comes up most is buying CRM. You guys have bought CRM. It stinks. It's awful. It's the worst. It's a slog." And it's not because CRM stinks, it's because the buying of CRM stinks, right? And so it's not because the salespeople stink, it's because the process of going through that with your colleagues is awful. It's fraught. It's complicated. And I told one of the sales enablement leaders at Salesforce, I said, "Your sellers are walking into customer offices virtually or in person every single day, fighting the fight of your customer's past bad decisions. That's what you're up against. That's your biggest competitor. It's not the competition or features and benefits, the speeds and feeds. It's the customer's memory of what they had to go through the last time they made a decision like this." That's where I think if we rethink sort of how we do customer buying journey mapping, I'll give an example in a second if you'd like to how we could do that. But let me take another breath. I just did what I promised I wouldn't do—there’s a lot going on here, isn't there?

Drew: I was listening to your interview today, actually, that you did with Chip Rogers, who's a member, and you were using, he was using the term coaching, and then it got into shrinking, and really, you know, therapy. And it feels like, if, in fact, you're up against all the bad buying decisions, it's like, you know, it's like all the bad boyfriends or girlfriends, whatever, all the personal bad decisions that you—you know, it's baggage. You've got baggage. And so as a therapist salesperson, you're helping them sort of anticipate the baggage and put the baggage over to the side and, "Oh, okay, well, let's work. We can help you work that through." That helped me understand framemaking well by having the therapist hat on.

Brent: Let me throw something out real quick because it's a great point to mention. This is such an interesting and critical opportunity for all of you in marketing, because someone's got to figure out what these obstacles are, right? Someone—someone doesn't have to, but there's an opportunity for a company to begin to aggregate, "What are the ways in which our customers are likely to get stuck that they themselves don't anticipate?" We advocate in the book for something we call an "It Turns Out That Audit," which is just a wonky, dorky way of saying, like, let's find out what these obstacles are and collect them and aggregate them, and then by that, it can turn into content. Like, you know, "Considering buying CRM? Three obstacles to watch out for," or it could just turn into tools, you know, that you give your sellers that's not about your speeds and feeds, but it's about things that they need to watch out for in their own organization. And one of the best ways to do this is with customer testimonials. So you guys, and I say this, I'm trying to lean into what you guys own and can influence, right? So I imagine many of you are on the hook for, or at least involved in, collecting customer testimonials, raving fans, all the things that we want to show the value of how much other companies have gotten value from our product. One of the things we found a long time ago, and I still think is one of the coolest things ever found in this space, is, what if you use customer testimonials? When you go out and do win-loss or interview your customers, find one or two that have managed to successfully buy your solution. They made it across the finish line. They made the decision. Hopefully they like the value that they're getting from you, but one way or another, what you're looking for is they successfully managed to make the decision. And then ask them, "If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently to make your life easier? What steps did you wish that you had done earlier? If you were to give advice to a peer who's about to go on a similar buying journey, what advice would you give them to make their life easier?" Whatever they say next is a piece of gold for framemaking that you could then put in the hands of your digital team, your sales team, to help be coaches.

Drew: So we are still like we did with Challenger, making buying easier. I just—I have visions of the slide that you did at Gartner, "make buying easier," that's in my head. Yeah, you got some mind space there. But we're doing that. But it feels like the buyer's guide is a little bit more advanced and a little more anticipatory, knowing that, in the fact that you have to go back to your customer that bought the thing and ask them what their journey was like and how we can do it better, it feels like…

Brent: Hold on, I'm going to stop you. The perfect moment to stop you. What you just said—because this is the false positive problem. This is the false problem. And I love you, Drew, you know, I love you, right? But what you just said is "how we could do it better," and that's a supplier-centric question. Okay, do you see what I'm saying? And I'm not trying to call you out. I'm not. But that's the gravitational pull. The gravitational pull of everything we do is so strong, back to, "How can we fix us?" You know, it's like, it's like a relationship, when someone says, "It's not me, it's you," and it's like, "No, no, it's me. And I'll put on better cologne, I'll take showers now, or I'll wear different clothes, or I'll learn to dance or whatever." Sometimes it literally is just the other person, right? And so the question is not so much, "What could we have done better?" It's supplier-agnostic. "What could you have done differently to make your lives easier?" And I only call it out—I'm not trying to correct you—but because it's so subtle, yet massively different in what we're talking about here. 

Drew: No, that's good. Thank you for that clarity. It really helps. So the question then is, is there a buyer journey that a marketer could think about that is agnostic to the customer. Is there such a thing, or is it always going to be a different spaghetti chart for every sort of thing? So we can't even use that as a framework.

Brent: Oh, it's a great question. So I don't think so. That's kind of what that example, the customer testimonial thing is. So there's a whole riff in the book. I think parts of it are still buried in Chapter 8, but it was way early in this, Chapter 2, and the Chapter 2 became like 30,000 words, which, if you guys are word counters, you'll know that's like four chapters in one. And the editor got a whole book. Yeah, it took a cleaver to it, just chopped it all out. But what I'd suggest, and I think still parts of this are in there, but it's great. I just went on a rant in Chapter 2, and it's like, I think what we need to do in marketing, or we could do in marketing, is not map the customer's buying journey, but map the customer's "I never want to do that again" journey. Map the customer's "I'd rather poke my eye out with a rusty butter knife than buy this thing again" journey. Map their "map customers, I hate myself and my entire company" journey. Map the customer's "if you ask me to do that again, I will kill you and then kill myself" journey. Do you know, I mean, like, map all of that. That's the thing we can go after. 

Drew: I always love the alliteration. And, you know, they so you've got your three E's, you've got establish, engage, and execute. They're not equal

Brent:. No, I don't think so.

Drew: Is it worth breaking those down, just to give another frame, a little bit of a frame for folks in terms of how to think about it, or we want to stay on journey?

Brent: No, no, I think this is good. So just so you guys know one bit of context which we can again, there's so much this book is, it's dense, it's rich, but this is I wouldn't want to write with otherwise. So there's a lot in here. But the reason why all this customer self-confidence matters, and what we argue in the book, is that it matters because customer self-confidence is arguably under more pressure today than ever before. And there's four challenges they're facing, beyond just the fact that we live in chaos right now. That's our sort of context for all of this, right? But the four challenges specifically are decision complexity, which you've essentially talked a lot about already with the spaghetti bowl. There's information overload in which we are all complicit as marketers. And I say this with love, because I've been part of this at the smartness arms race and just deciding content marketing would expand the world with even more white papers and videos. So decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment. If it were just up to me, I'd buy it today. But I don't. I lack confidence in my ability to get everyone else on board too. And then there's outcome uncertainty. And outcome uncertainty is this really annoying phenomenon where customers are looking to say, "I totally believe that you..." When you show them the value calculator and the total cost of ownership and all the happy customers you already served and all the value they're getting, they'll look at you and say, "I believe all of it, every bit of it. I just don't think it applies to us, because we're different, and somehow we'll screw this up." And again, notice that's a customer self-confidence problem. It's not a customer-supplier confidence problem. So when you start looking at these, then the question becomes, for any one of those four, and these are four chapters in the book where we unpack each of these, but for each of those four challenges, or challenges to customer confidence, the question becomes very much like I was outlining before, what's the nature of the challenge? What's the thing that's going to get in their way? And specifically, what kind of advice, what's the coaching, what's the framing we can give them that will help them feel more self-confident around decision processes, around information consumption, around objective alignment, around outcomes. And that's the, so we divide this into a three-step process, the first one being establish. We call this the 3 E's, so establish, engage, and execute. And establish is that it's essentially establishing the framing, or, if you will, establishing the coaching and the guidance. And here it could be anything from a very simple nudge or piece of advice, like you might want to get procurement... We've worked hard from other customers that getting procurement involved early is actually really helpful. That would be a nudge. Where this can get actually much more formal, be things like checklists, diagnostic exercises, maturity models. I've built maturity models in my last company, and it was this massive, complex thing, and I would have never asked a frontline seller to do that. But these are the kinds of things you guys can either guide or own as a marketing team. When you get down on this other end of this continuum of frame-making, where you get these more structured sorts of frameworks, that becomes, I think, more of a centralized effort that you guys could absolutely lead and do extremely well with. Where we're currently building a marketing-specific workshop for frame-making. And this is some of the stuff we'll get into, is the design principles and all that kind of stuff to do that. Engage is then, once I've kind of figured out what that advice is, how do I engage customers with that advice? And this is the thing I mentioned we, you know, I mentioned earlier, Drew, that we could unpack. But it turns out that here, I'll just say this real quick here, it turns out that once you approach customers with this advice, if your posture is largely one of individual expertise, you actually do more damage to their confidence than it helped. "I've been doing this for 30 years. Here's what you need to do." Turns out to actually damage the likelihood of a high-quality, low-regret deal. Not increase it, not increase it, because what you're doing when you adopt that posture is you're trying to solve for customer confidence in you again, and not in customer confidence in themselves. So working, you know, pulling up work from Robert Cialdini, many of you guys will know from his book Influence, which is brilliant, we suggest leaning into not your expertise, but social proof, the expertise and experience of other customers like them, because it's one thing every one of your customers wants to know. And I promise you this is true. From 30 years of doing this, they all want to know what other customers like them are doing, so go out and find that out. And I gave you a couple ideas how you might do that, with testimonials and stuff. But now, when you engage them, it becomes not "here's what I think you should do," but "in working with other customers like you, one of the things we've been surprised to learn is..." So now I'm leaning on social proof. I'm positioning myself as a co-learner, as opposed to an expert and a collaborator. And there's a humility to it that turns out to be really, really powerful. And what it also does is it shifts your value as a seller, from your expertise to your access. Because what you're what you really bring to the table isn't like, "here's what I think you should do," or "here's what I know," but rather, "here's the access I have to other people like you." And then the third of the E's is execute, which is essentially, how do I maintain that self-confidence across a larger buying group and across time? And there's all sorts of techniques and tactics we talk about in the book to make that happen.

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Drew: There's a really, really important moment that it's funny because it's the same in therapy, where you're not telling them what to do, you're hoping that you're equipping them to make their own lives, right? Otherwise, they're going to spend the whole, you know, their entire life in your office.

Brent: Which would be okay in a commercial where if they just keep buying and buying more, I'm happy, but your point is, right? 

Drew: Yeah, but, and I think it is instinctual for salespeople. And I was just thinking of conversations that I have sometimes with CMOs, and to want them to have confidence in the person who's talking, but it's so interesting, and I can see where it happens, and it's easy as a salesperson to get there. So retraining and helping sales see that it isn't about them. It's not even about your company. It's about that. In some ways, it's very liberating once you know it is, once you get over that, once you get if you can get over the process of business... It's not about me and it's not even about our company. It's about helping this person, you know, just get it done, get something done and feel good.

Brent: This is, this is so I was talking to, I don't even, have you had a chance to meet Charlie Green yet, Drew?

Drew: No.

Brent: Charlie Green is one of the co-authors of Trusted Advisor back in the early 2000s, so he's well known for the Trusted... That's where, like that term came from. Is Charlie Green and his colleagues in the... And I was talking about this the other day. First, I never met him, and we had a lovely conversation. But I said, "Hey Charlie, you know, I'm about to go out in the world, talk a lot about trust and some... I just want to see if it aligns with what you're thinking or not." And so we had this lovely conversation. And he's the one that actually mentioned this, the therapy metaphor. He says, you know, that a good therapist doesn't tell their patient what to do. A good therapist sort of sets out a framework such that the patient can come to their own conclusions about what's right for them. The term we use in the book for this is maybe not surprising, but it's a little wonky. Is the term agency, and what we want to do is we want to sell in such a way, go to market in such a way that we maintain customer sense of self agency, or just agency, because at the end of the day, because it's about their self-confidence, not their supplier confidence. Ultimately, they have to be the ones that make the decision. And so that's where this metaphor of framing comes from. Is that if you think about a frame, it chalks the pitch or chalks the field, it makes it feel less overwhelming. It's not 10 things you got to worry about. But we found working with other customers like you, it's probably these three are the most important. And by the way, one of them you never thought of before. And so I can prompt... There's prompt. So I just did is something called prompting and bounding. I bounded it, but I prompted you to think about something. But within that, I'm still leaving it up to you to make your own decision based on... I can give you ideas based on what we see other people like you were doing, so social proof. But we have to solve... This goes back to the mindset idea. Now we can come full circle to it, the mindset. And now maybe this makes more sense. Rather calling this a methodology, the mindset is simply, how do we help our customers make the best decision they can in as little time as possible? That's it. That's our go-to-market mind. How do we go to market in such a way that we're helping our customers make the best decision that they can, not we can. They can, in as little time as possible. If you're thinking, "Brent, how do I get paid for that? What if they choose the competition?" which has always been a problem with Challenger, too. And so we can talk, we can unpack that a little bit more detail. But this, this phrase, this idea, came from a friend of mine. Is one of these clients that's become friends, a guy named Brian Smith. Brian with a Y. Brian is the CEO now of a company called Expedient. Expedient is a cloud computing company, and I've heard Brian say this to his team a number of times after he saw our sense-making work. For example, he said, "Look, you..." Told his team like, "We have one job to help our customers make the best decision we can in as little time as possible." And there's always someone, I don't have to plant it on purpose Drew, but someone in the front of the room will say, "But Brian, what happens?" "We help them make a decision. They choose the competition." He said, "Look, I hate to lose." And he does. He's... "I hate to lose, but that's the second part of the quote. If we're going to lose, I want to lose early. I want to make sure that I don't..." You... The worst place to finish in sales is second, right? So if we're going to lose, let's lose, but let's show up and let's do it the right way, such that we're helping customers make great decisions. So the next time customers choose to make a decision, we'll be the first one they call, because that's how we show up consistently every single day. And ultimately, the crazy thing is, I think that's ultimately how you win trust, is by helping customers build their own trust. It's like the shortest path to customer-supplier trust is to build the... Build a better bridge for themselves to their own individual trust. It's this weird sort of... It's like to solve for the thing that we all want, which is, "I wish customers trusted us," is we have to stop solving for the thing that we all want, right? We have to solve for customer's own self-perception. And we'll get that trust as a result.

Drew: I just, it's funny, you wrote my... I'm halfway through Make It Snow, which is by the CMO and the CRO of Snowflake, and Chris, the CRO, talks a lot about early days. And the best thing that happens sometimes was that they would buy a competitor that was, and they do it quickly, that was inferior, but from a big company, I think it was Redshift, from Amazon, in AWS, and so they knew, was it, "We'll get them later, because they're going to be unhappy, and we know exactly when." So sometimes even that is okay. All right, but Brent, it turns out that you brazenly dropped this bombshell. I'm quoting, and I quote: "Brands get you in the door, but it rarely gets you a bigger, better deal." Unquote. Explain.

Brent: I think we've debated this over the years. This is not the first time this has come up on this show, I think Drew, but this is something we have found consistently in our research going back 25 years at least. So it's actually some version of this is in Challenger as well, in the world of large, complex B2B solutions, and there are some exceptions. But broadly speaking, when we go and we study customer's perception of brand, it's not that we don't find it matters, because it does, but we find it's a poor source of differentiation. Because what happens in brand? Let me give you some real words. It doesn't actually give you the commercial advantage. You think it might only because you're usually competing against other companies with equally well-known brands. So now, if you're an unknown brand, competing as well-known brands, the calculus changes a little bit. But let's take a... One I used to use all time in the Challenger world, like, you know, GE, this back... This is back, particularly when GE was, like, the monstrosity, amazing company that was, right? This back in Jack Welch days. But, you know, I used to say GE, and it's still true to some degree. But GE is like, it's like ABM, like, no one ever got fired from buying from GE, right? So that is, I think, like they've won the brand game. That is a world-class brand. It's like, obviously you buy from GE, because look at the brand. But here's an interesting question, what happens if you're GE and you're competing against Siemens? Because Siemens is also a world-class brand. So now the question is, like, who's got a better brand? I don't know. GE is great. Won't get fired from buying from them. Siemens is great, probably won't get fired from buying from them either. Maybe there's a skew towards Americans versus Germans or something like that. But other than that, they're like, they're both great. So what do I get fired for? What I get fired for is spending too much money on a solution, right? So what I really need to know is, which of these two world-class brands, which are both okay, is actually cheaper? And this is how your world-class brand can get commoditized, right? So the... And so if you're an upstart brand, competing as well-known brands very much like Brian Smith in the Expedient story. So he's cloud computing, and you guys have probably not heard of Expedient. He is competing against the huge companies you guys would all know. And so he's looking for sources of differentiation. But where he's going, Drew, is not like, "I need to spend $50 million another 10 years building an equally strong brand as AWS and Microsoft." He's saying, "Look, I could do that, but that's a hard slog, and takes time, millions of dollars. How about if tomorrow I just be the sales team that just shows up differently in a way that customers actually value? That is my much shorter, much more effective path of differentiation than building a brand that's equally good as these that are already well established."

Drew: Yeah, I guess. So it's really kind of depends on what we really mean by the word brand. I think is part of this, because differentiation is fundamental to brand. It's not spending advertising on the Super Bowl that worked pretty well for Gong and God. So I think there's two things I want to break it down. One is getting in the door is a big frickin' deal. Yeah, if you don't get in the door, you don't get a chance. And we know that awareness equals higher percentage of deals, yeah, but I think it's a difficult thing to sort of if you're a small player, you're not on the list, so yeah, you got to differentiate, and you need a lot more, and I feel like there's something missing in this conversation that I just feel like I gotta push back a little bit more on. 

Brent: No, it's fair. By the way, for what it's worth. So this is the other reason why we don't call this a methodology, but a mindset, is because frame-making is not meant to solve for everything. I think the word methodology tends to over-promise and under-deliver broadly. And as soon as we start saying frame-making is a methodology, it starts to feel a little bit like it should solve for this problem. And I don't know that frame-making will. I think frame-making will solve for... Is a powerful source of differentiation in the process of having come. But it won't solve for, how do I get opportunities into the top of the funnel? For what it's worth, guys, I am now a founder, and, you know, I'm building company, I've... This is the fourth company I tried to start in five years, and so only this one's got legs, and the others have already kind of already kind of died or on life support. And the thing that I have found the hard way is the top of the funnel is a complete and utter mystery to me. It just, it's and I'll just raise my hand and admit that. And if you guys are struggling with that, I'm with you. I like, painfully with you, and it's really frustrating. Chip, I see you here. It's like, this is why Chip, and all the cool work that Chip Rogers does with alliances, I think is actually so interesting, because I think community, think communities and alliances is one way to get into the top of the funnel, you know, sort of like the side door into the top of the funnel that is only just now being appreciated.

Drew: But, yeah, let's just talk about that. Why do you partner? You partner with a brand that maybe has customers at strength, brand strength that you don't have. That's how a small brand can become a bigger brand by partnering. So I again, this is why I feel like I wanted to get in that chapter. All right, good. I'm done. I can move on to that, Jamie, we're done with that, right? We're done with that. Because that certainly is something that both of us... It really stood out.

Brent: By the way, if anyone has got a list of 10 or 100 really great leads that they want to pass to me, I will give you a box of steak knives as a thank you. So just that would be amazing. There you go.

Drew: So I want to get at a few things. What is different, what is interesting? You do make this point about, you know, 55% of B2B buyers struggle to see sufficient meaningful differences across content. This gets to the content war that you described, yeah, but I feel like there is a role for content. And this gets back to my point about branded differentiation. If at the core, you have a point of view and a business idea that is different, that should inform your content, which should be different in theory. But there's a nuance here that is creating content that leads to self-confidence, and then, of course, you have to get in their hands. So is it worth spending a little more time on content that leads to buyer self-confidence, besides testimonials from customers?

Brent: 1,000%. In fact, there's two things about content we should talk about, particularly given this audience of marketers, because there's, I think, I think frame-making very much like Challenger. So you guys, some of you may not even around when Challenger came out in 2011, it's been a while. It's crazy, right? Drew. It's like, seems like yesterday, doesn't it? When Challenger came out, it was largely called The Challenger Sale. Very much like the frame-making sale is positioned largely, positioned largely as a sales approach, and only about 2012, a year and a half, two years later, and partly through some work we did at CEB, did it really hit marketers' radar screen as like, "Holy mackerel, this is as much a marketing story as it is a sales story," partly because the sales teams are turning around looking at marketing saying, "So where's this insight this guy's talking about?" Right? So, and I think frame-making potentially has the same sort of arc to it, which is, we are putting it out in the market. There's reasons why, as a selling story, but I'm more than happy to shortcut our way right to like this is as much a marketing story as it is a sales story. One of the things on the content side. So there's a whole chapter. It's Chapter 4 around this issue of one of the ways which customers are overwhelmed today is information overload, and AI doesn't help. AI, I argue, makes it worse, right? Because now you can just search for anything, have it at your fingertips. And by the way, you change your prompt by one word and get a totally different answer. It's maddening, right? So now I'm just, I just feel overwhelmed, and so just be super clear. I still raise my hand. I'm a huge fan of Challenger. I think we got so much right with Challenger, partly by hard work, partly by luck, but I still believe in a lot we would do with Challenger. For also, what it's worth, all of that IP is owned by now. Funny enough, the Richardson Sales Training team. So I don't have a skin in the game with Challenger financially. My name is associated with it. I believe in it, but there are limitations, I think, today, that just weren't true 15 years ago, which is, you know, I joke in the book, but I kind of don't, because we all watched it happen. Drew, you and I watched it happen, like somewhere around 2012, 2013, every CEO in the world all woke up on a Tuesday morning and said, "We're struggling to differentiate. I know how we're going to stand apart. We're going to become a thought leader," right? And so they all sent... And it's all those CEOs did. What they always do to you guys in the marketing side, is they sent you an email on Sunday evening, right? Y'all know that. You know I'm talking about. I just, I think... Guy, Miss Jamie, spit take. Sorry, Jamie, I apologize. But the right... Do y'all get that CEO email on Sunday evening where they're on your competitor's website? You totally know. It's like, "Oh God, hey, how come we're not doing this?" It's like, "Oh God, there goes my Monday," right? So the... But they all woke up one morning said, "We need to be a thought leader. That's how we're gonna set ourselves apart." And God love us in the marketing side, we said, "No problem. We got you, boss. We got you, boss. We got a strategy for that. We're going to call that content marketing." And shortly thereafter, out of, you know, out of Boston, Massachusetts, rose this company saying, "Hey, we got technology for that. We're called HubSpot, and we're going to call that marketing automation," and we're off to the races, spamming the world with huge quantities of high-quality content. And big data hit about the same time too. Now we got data and evidence to back up everything we're saying. This is the smartness arms race. And if fast forward to where we are today, and we unpack this with data in the book, but the punch line is simply the only one to lose in the smartness... The smartness arms race has ended in a tie. The whole point was that we were going to differentiate ourselves by being smarter than everyone else, and now we're all just really smart. Great. You know, the loser in the smartness arms race is your customer, because they're just overwhelmed. And in fact, it was actually in the very hotel, Drew, that you'll be at. Was it next week? It was the Garden Court. But as a meeting I was doing at the Garden Court, we're having this conversation ahead of sales. Said, "But Brent, this is true." He said, "But Brent, I did what you told me to do," which always makes me nervous when I hear this. But he said, "We did Challenger. We're doing Challenger. So our whole market is out there telling our customers they need to zig, and we're out there doing Challenger. We're telling our customers they need to zag. So we're okay, Brent, we're protected because we're doing Challenger." And I looked at him and asked the question. I said, "Well, let me ask you. I said, what happens if your competitors tell your customer to zig and they've got data, they've got evidence, they've got videos, they've got experts, so you're telling them to zag and you've got data, you've got videos, you've got evidence, you've got white papers. Where does it leave your customer?" And where it leaves them is just confused at a higher level, right? It's like now I don't know what to do, because I got good reasons to do two totally different things. We see this in the data, and so what they do is, "I better study this more. Call me back in six months." They never actually want you to call them back at six months. "Call me back in six months, and let me do a little bit more research." And you know what's happened in those ensuing six months, they're going to become even more confused. And what they're really looking for, we know from research, is not more freaking content. No offense to anyone. What they're looking for is, can someone please just help me make sense out of all of this content? Help me kind of put it together. Help figure out, like, which question should I even be asking? Which pieces of content matter most? And there's no one right now stepping up to play that role. And that's the role of frame-making when it comes to information. And this is the word, Drew, that we... It was just absolutely not on our radar screens with Challenger. It's because it wasn't important then, and it's the word context. The content that you all put out in the world today has to be understood in the context of all of the other content that your customers are consuming from all those different places, whether it's AI, whether it's competitors, whether it's the Gartners and Forresters the world, all of it, and to understand where does that content overlap? Where does it conflict? Where does it feel like it's too much? What questions does it raise? What questions does it answer? Because once, and this is again, now we're back into the engage, the established portion of frame-making inside of information. Because once you begin to map all that, you can begin to figure out where customers are likely to get confused, where they're likely to get stuck, where are they likely to become overwhelmed? And that allows us to begin to build some guidance around... There's lots of questions you think about the first time you bought your home. If you're lucky, in a really good real estate agent, she or he might have said, you know, for new home buyers, it's pretty overwhelming. This is really hard. You know, what are points, and what's a mortgage and what's a PMI and, oh, my God, it's like that. But really, what it comes down to is there's three things you need to think about before anything else. That's framing, that's advice. It's help me boil the ocean and help me focus on the things that matter most. And I think so. Two things is, one is in this established portion, this chapter, we talk about running what's called an information audit. I don't know what it is with us in audits, but we wanted to frickin' audit everything in this book, I guess. But anyway, so the information audit, like, and it turns out that audit is simply sit down, ask your customers. This is what, by the way, what Brian Smith did at Expedient. He saw this work. This is the, there's a version of this work in HBR that I wrote called "Sense-making for Sales," which some of you might have bumped into, and it's the same idea. And when Brian saw that work, initially, he did information on it. He had sellers actually go out and sit down with customers and say, "What information did you encounter? What websites did you look at? What white papers did you read? What calculators did you use? Was it helpful? What was confusing? What... Tell me about what... What sort of influenced your decision?" One of the things, Drew, that came out of this process, again, true story, and I tell it with permission from Brian, is that what they found is that one of their top competitors, one of these massive brands, had this video series, probably on YouTube that everyone was watching. They found every one of their customers told them, "We're all watching this video series, and it's really helpful." And the problem with that video series was it was leading his customers, or potential customers, away from Expedient and into the arms of his competitors. And a lot of it was out of date, because this world, data and cloud computing changes pretty quickly. And so Brian's first reaction was to, you know, write marketing a note on Sunday night, and he was, "Hey, we need a video series too," right? And so, and then he started thinking about it, and he said, "Well, actually, one, it takes time. We don't have time. It's gonna take money. We don't have the money. And by the way, no matter how good we make it, we're still Expedient, and there's still this other company that everyone's heard of." It's going back to your brand point, Drew. This is where brand actually he was challenged with that. So you know what he did? He decided we're not going to build a video series, because there's already a video series, and our customers are already watching it, so let's use that. So he trained his sellers to actually go out and not run away from the problem, but run right at it. Just to say, sit down with customers. Say, "Hey, have you seen this video series from this other company? Because if you haven't, you're going to want to take a look at it. It's actually really, really helpful. But as you watch it, and working with other customers like you, we find that there's two things it tends not to answer that are going to prove to be really important for you down the road, and I hate you to overlook them. And there's one question that's kind of actually evolved a little bit." So what I'm doing is essentially using the competitor's content to sell, which I'm not suggesting is always the right answer. But what I'm doing is giving you a teacher's guide or cheat code to consuming content. It's kind of like getting ahead of the RFP, but it's getting ahead of learning. I'm giving you a learning guide, such that I'm showing you or sharing with you, teaching you how to think about all the content you consume. And when you do that, I'm less worried about you consuming all that content from the competitors, which I can't stop anyway, but I've guided you. I helped you, not just a way to lead back to me, hopefully, but more importantly, it's going to just make it easier for you just to make a decision. It's like, "Oh, now I actually, I'm looking at all this stuff. It actually starts to repeat. I know which questions matter most. This feels... I'm so glad I talked to Drew, because that was really helpful." That's how we think about it.

Drew: I think the word that thing that comes to mind is you reframed it. You took their goodness and you reframed it.

Brent: That's, you know, you guys don't care about this. I'll just say this very briefly. My co-author, Carl, with a K, Carl Schmidt and I have had knock-down, drag-out, long, endless debates about whether this is different than Challenger or Challenger is a subset of frame-making. So it's a frame breaking... Now, frame-making, where we tend to think is that most reframing is just a kind of framing, right? It's a subset of framing.

Drew: No need to get hung up on that. We are running out of time and already, oh, my God, no, I know it goes fast, so we need to wrap up with two do's and one don't. We got a marketing group of marketing leaders here, things that they could start doing immediately to better, not use reframe, to help sales frame their pursuits more effectively.

Brent: I think so much of the opportunity for marketing is around this established portion, which is... So I'll make a little bit more concrete, but at the highest level, is to determine where are our customers likely to get stuck. So if, if buying is long, hard, frustrating, awful, land mine is, why exactly? Where do they get stuck? Is it information? Is it process? Is there one particular step? Is it if they lack confidence on implementation, as opposed to lack confidence on getting alignment, then how do I figure what specifically about implementation that I can go out and... Once I diagnose that, then I can go out, find other companies that have overcome those obstacles and use that as a basis of my coaching, and then package that as coaching, either again through digital, through content. Again, you might have a buying guide or something like that. This is as old as Marketo that built the original marketing automation buying guide. This is way back when, and there's a great example of that, right? That was a while ago, and it was, "Wow," but like, I can take my customer step by step, through a buying process, agnostic of me, and help them think through the decisions. The customer testimonial idea, I think, is a really practical one. Sit down and talk to a couple of customers who successfully bought your solutions. Ask them, "What would you do differently to make your lives easier? What advice would you give to others?" Package that, share it with your... Social proof is leaning into social proof and leaning into supplier-agnostic language in all of your content and all of your sales support, rather than saying, "Here's what we think," or "here's what we do," or "here's what we have found," put it on the shoulders of others, other customers like you have found this. That's like such a minor tweak, and it's so powerful, which is working with other customers like you, maybe we've learned this, but you've learned this in working with them. So it's take yourself out of the expert position and look across your content. You're going to find all sorts of places in all of your language and messaging where you've positioned yourself as the expert and rather position yourself as a co-learner who's providing access to social proof. And I think you're going to find that's a really powerful thing to do.

Drew: I have a recommendation for everybody listening, create a GPT that has this perspective, run all your content through it and see how much of it is, you-centric versus this frame that Brent suggested. I bet you'll find that most of your content is first person, you know. "Our product is better than this product because..." as opposed to "our customers in..." or "customers like you" or "customers have found this." And I also just really appreciate trying to get at... I'm going to use buyer journey issues, and I'll give a perfect example. I know there's like, a really hot software right now. The problem with buying that software is you can't find anybody who knows how to use it. So if I was that company, I would be training masses of amounts of people right really quickly to get certified, because otherwise the real cost of ownership is ridiculous. So, but they're the hottest brand in their segment, and it's funny, they talked about that in Make It Snow as well as that. "Oh, we can help the customer." Their big problem is they're thinking ahead to implementation. And as you started this conversation, CRM implementation is horrible. "How are we going to do that?" So understanding those things and having a sense of that, and then, because you could lose the deal for reasons that you just... It wasn't you versus another, right?

Brent: So we unpack all this in the book, in the workshops we've built and delivered for sales and now for marketing we're building, we unpack this in a lot more detail.

Drew: I love it. All right. Well, thanks for bringing the heat. 

Brent: Did you say the hate or the heat? I didn’t bring any hate. No, Drew, I bring the love, man.

Drew: My sort of framework, and thing is, remember that our goal isn't to move sellers through a sale, it's to move buyers through a decision, and the best way we can do that is boost their confidence with a frame that makes their job more manageable, not more complicated, as we say in CMO Huddles. Our goal, our two-word business plan, is help Huddlers, so that's one of the ways we do it. We bring in best-selling authors and wonderful people like Brent. Brent, thank you. The book is The Framemaking Sale. Where can people find you?

Brent: I hang out a lot on LinkedIn, so I'd love for you guys to reach out and connect. If you'd like to on LinkedIn, I post a lot of content there. The website is theframemakingsale.com and we also have a framemaking sale YouTube channel. So lots of different places, but LinkedIn is the place to find me.

Drew: If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!