B2B Storytelling That Scales (and Sells)

   

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 recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. In this episode, Marca Armstrong and Caitlin Cassidy share how they're building marketing teams that think like storytellers. From defining a clear "why" to weaving consistent messages throughout every touchpoint, they show how curiosity, customer voice, and clarity bring stories to life across the brand. 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 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 to CMO Huddles Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I'm your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. Storytelling is the rallying cry of nearly every marketing leader today, yet few B2B brands actually deliver great stories that resonate internally or out in the market. The truth is, building a team skilled in authentic storytelling is a competitive advantage too often overlooked. In this episode, Marca Armstrong and Caitlin Cassidy reveal how they cultivate storytelling excellence that drives connection, clarity, and business impact. With that, let's bring on Marca Armstrong, Head of Marketing and Customer Success at Sensera Systems, and a returning guest who has previously appeared on the show to discuss many topics, including customer advisory boards, leadership strategies, and customer marketing. Hello, Marca. How are you, and where are you this fine day?

Marca: Hi, Drew. I am doing well, and I am in beautiful Boulder, Colorado today, in my home office.

Drew: Boulder. I love it. Gosh, we had someone else on a show recently who is also in Boulder. I know it, and I'm going to connect you, but I won't remember it this second. Anyway, let's talk about embedding storytelling into the structure and culture of your marketing team. How does that work at Sensera?

Marca: Yeah, so I think—and this might be implied in our topic of discussion—but I think the very first thing is to be really crisp on what the story is that you're trying to tell. I'm a big fan, and have been for many years, of Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. When you think about the "why," and you continue to bring the team back to the "why" you all exist and what you do every day, then from there, you can talk about, well, how do we do it? What do we do? When you have that conversation on an ongoing basis, you start to build that culture of storytelling. People remember, "Wait a minute, are we talking about this in the right way? Are we telling the story we want to tell? Are we off on some tangent because somebody drove us down a rabbit hole?"

Drew: You know, one of the funny things is that Simon Sinek provides such a brilliant and simple structure, and it is easy for people to understand. It is hard for people to stick with it, and sometimes there's this fear—"Didn't we talk about that already? Shouldn't we be moving on?" So talk a little bit about the "why" in the case of Sensera and how you help folks understand and internalize it so they can articulate it.

Marca: Yeah, no, I'm glad you asked. So when we talk about ROI at Sensera, we're in the construction industry, and what we say in our story is, "Helping our constituents and our customers build with confidence." The interesting thing about that is, when we first started it, people said, "Well, our customers are confident." They said, "You're missing the point. It's not that they're not confident; it's that you want them to be able to do their jobs confidently by using our technology day in and day out." When I came to the company, we were talking very much about product, and it was a very product-centric discussion. It's very hard to build a story on product features alone. The conversation became, "What's the headline? How do we elevate everybody up to a headline that then can be supported by how we do it," which is really the product features, right? "And the what we do," which is ultimately to deliver job site intelligence through our technology so people can make decisions around safety and security and such on their sites.

Drew: It's funny, I've thought a lot about the word "confidence" and what that means. "Build with confidence"—obviously, there's a pun, because you're in the construction industry. You're kind of building confidence, and you're building with confidence. There's a lot going on in that language. But I could imagine that some people might say, "That feels soft," like it's an emotional idea. How do you help them get to the point where they see it and go, "Ah, I get it"—right? And this is internal first, before we even go and bring that story to the market.

Marca: Yeah, 100%. So I think you have to then take what is important to the customer, which is, at the highest level, building projects on time and on budget that are safe so every single person on a job site can get home safely, and reducing the risk and improving security on a site, right? You have to bring the confidence to those things that matter and say, "Don't you want to go home confidently, knowing that everybody went home safely and nobody got lost in the trench? Don't you want to tell your financial folks that you're on budget and you didn't have any issues paying subcontractors? Don't you want to make sure that you were able to reduce shrinkage on a site and didn't have a delay in your project?" When you bring those types of elements—those things that matter to your buyers—into a message like "build with confidence," that's where it starts to resonate. And you're right—we had to start internally, and there were a handful of naysayers. Fortunately, we're a small company at Sensera, so I was able to literally shop it around to everybody's office and desk. But you can do that; you can scale it across teams in larger organizations if that's what you need to do.

Drew: I think it's interesting. Thinking back to the agency days when brands really embraced a story, the fact that you have these layers of confidence you can draw on—it's not just that word—you sort of make it real by talking about the things they might not be confident about or the things that, if they go wrong, provoke a visceral reaction. "What do you mean it's not safe?" There's an element of emotion and fear involved here. The absence of confidence is, "Oh gosh, what happened?" It's really interesting how you've done that. So we've talked a little bit about internal. Well, I'll keep going on internal. What kinds of things have you had to do besides shopping it to your team? When you hire, are you looking for folks that can embrace this story? How does that work?

Marca: One of our values as an organization is curiosity. So the people that I look for are just infinitely curious. Because if you're curious, you're going to ask all the hard questions. If you're curious from a demand-gen perspective—how things work, and you're very metric-centric and analytical in nature—you might ask, "Wait a minute, what does this confidence thing mean? How do I build it into keywords?" You push on things that may not have made sense when you came into the building, but then you start to embrace it because you hear other people talking about it. So your question about how I find people—I look for folks that, whether they're in the tech support team or the customer success team or a marketer or a product marketer, are asking questions that are curious about the brand, the product, our customers. From there, you can dig into whether they have the chops for the discipline you're looking for. But curiosity is front and center to all of us at Sensera, and is, in part, integral to our culture.

Drew: Interesting. And this is a moment—because a lot of conversations we're having are about AI. AI can do so many things, but if you lack curiosity, what happens is you take that first result, you don't challenge it, you just say, "Oh, this is great, let's go," and that's when a lot of "AI slap" happens. I think there's another part of curiosity that relates back to storytelling, right? If your team is actually thinking about confidence, or the absence thereof, and they're asking questions, they're exploring, they're going to find their own things to add to the table, in theory, if they've bought into the bigger idea.

Marca: Yeah, 100%. The funny thing that you mention AI—because I was just talking to my marketing manager a little while ago. We were talking about a nurture campaign, and she showed me what she came up with. I said, "Okay, how much of this was Gemini versus how much of this was you?" She laughed and said, "Well, when I first asked Gemini for some content, I got five pages. Then I had to go back and say, 'No, I don't want five pages. I want a short email with a couple of bullets, with our tone of voice that speaks to our confidence as a team and provides value to the client.'" So, back to your comment there—if she had just gone with the first thing, she would have shown me probably five pages of copy, and I would have said, "What are we doing?" That's where curiosity and using a tool like AI comes to bear; you do have to consistently ask questions. I find that I'm a better CMO, I'm a better head of CX, by the questions I get asked by people that make me go, "Oh, I hadn't thought about it that way."

Drew: Oh, don't you know, I just wrote one of my editorials over the weekend. A lot of people asked a lot of questions, and I went, "Oh yeah, I missed that. Oh, I missed that one too. Oh, okay, I better rewrite this." And yeah, if you're not curious, you don't look for that—you're unable to sort of absorb some feedback that you might get. I wonder, as you were—as people were beginning to get this idea of confidence as the story—is there a story, an aha moment where you were sharing this internally, or maybe someone else shared it externally, where they came back and said, "Oh my God, that's amazing"?

Marca: I think there are a handful of examples. From a sales perspective, we are constantly training our sales team, and you know, I'll talk about that in a little bit. But I think there are moments when a salesperson connects with an ops manager, a salesperson connects with a health and safety officer, because that's the big thing I mentioned—safety earlier. When they say, "Listen, don't you want to have confidence that you know when your teams are up on a scaffolding and there's a storm coming, and our AI solution can help flag that," and all of a sudden the team's like, "Yeah, Marca, it actually worked because I used it in a phrase, and the safety officer said to me, 'Yeah, no, I actually want that kind of predictability. You guys can help me with that.'" So there's that. There are lots of little examples that I've heard from the sales organization, again, figuring out what the use cases are and talking to our different personas. I wouldn't say there was one, like, grand aha. Like, you know, right? Bang the cymbals. I think it's just little stories that come along the way. I had it when I sat at a trade show about a month and a half ago, and I had a gentleman come to me. They were a subcontractor working on behalf of the large general contractors, and they said, "What does Sensat do?" And I gave my pitch, and then I showed him our AI tool, and I said, "Well, if you want confidence that your walls are going up right, exactly where the model is telling you to put them, right, so that you're not two inches off the slab at the end of the day, we can help you see what's happening." He's like, "Oh wow, you can do that? Okay, I need your card. I need to have a demo." So that's just an example of a conversation I was in just six weeks ago.

Drew: Right. It's, you know, it's funny because when you think about it, we always, you know, marketing and sales has been about pain points. You talk about pain points, and yours is the opposite of that, but it's a way of talking about pain points without, right?

Marca: And nobody wants to talk about their challenges, right? Part of great sales discovery is understanding what the challenge is. But if you can do it in a way—and we talk about empathy selling, and I know we've discussed that here at CMO Huddles—but if you do it in a way that you're leaning into the opportunity and saying, "Hey, don't you want to have confidence you can do this properly? And, you know, tell me about how you're managing it now," if you ask them, "Tell me about how you're managing it now," and then they tell you, then you can pick apart the pieces. You're like, "Oh, but don't you want to do this better, easier, faster?" I mean, that's ultimately what this whole AI revolution is about. But again, without the message and the understanding of how you're trying to help the client, then it often gets lost.

Drew: Yes, and by the way, the little stories are great. We call that anecdata. I don't know who we stole that from, but it's often what gets senior executives behind a particular campaign—they get a story from a customer or a prospect that sort of plays back the fundamental story, and they're like, "Oh see, I heard that, and therefore it's right." All right, we're going to come back to that because I do want to talk about how this got translated into sales. But for now, let's bring on Caitlin Cassady, VP of Marketing at Beyond, who is joining this show for the very first time. Hello, Caitlin!

Caitlin: Hello, Drew! Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Drew: Well, we're excited to have you. And so how are you and where are you this fine day?

Caitlin: Thank you. I am doing great, and I am also in my home office, continuing the trend here with the three of us, and I'm located just south of San Francisco, so in California, but not quite in the city.

Drew: Got it. All right, well, talk a little bit about, you know, Beyond and your story, and your team's storytelling. Let's just talk about, sort of, how are you approaching it?

Caitlin: It's interesting. I came from—I worked in marketing technology companies for about a decade, and so, like, marketing to marketers, I think really helps hone your storytelling experience, or a judging lot, I guess I will say. And I also started my career personally as a journalist, actually, so stories are very near and dear to my heart. So when I joined the Beyond team just about three years ago now, and really started digging into what we were doing, I was just consistently impressed with, like, the stories that our customers actually brought to us. Like, we—Beyond, for those who don't know, is revenue management software for vacation rentals. So from folks that own one Airbnb and are just trying to maximize their pricing, how they're managing their channel distribution, all the way up to, like, 1,000-unit property management groups—we help with the revenue management. And so there's these incredible stories coming out. And so as I really started to dig in and figure out, like, what was Beyond's storytelling strategy and what the vibes were, I was trying to build into the team, I looked to the customers first to understand, like, what stories I had to play with, to be honest.

Drew: And what do you find?

Caitlin: Yeah, I think what I love is that you get such personal stories. Like, we get folks that grew up in a vacation rental market on, you know, the eastern seaboard, and they lived and breathed hospitality, and now they're building their own business, and they're only hiring local to make sure that they're bringing those, like, traveler dollars back to the community. It's been a very cool experience to work in this where, like, you have those personal stories, and you can really understand how the technology that we're selling is directly impacting not just the person buying it, but, like, a whole community around them too, which I think makes it infinitely more powerful.

Drew: Yeah, it's so funny because it's sort of—you sell stuff to, you know, nameless people, that's one thing. But when you're actually selling stuff that helps people that you can sort of see in your mind, and they give you the feedback of the difference that it's making, it's very gratifying. That's what marketing is. It feels really like such a wonderful world we live in.

Caitlin: It is, it is, and it's how I've helped structure how my team thinks about it. Like, how do we bring storytelling into just the fabric of what we do? And I can talk more about, like, how to build a team mentality around it, but I think, for me, as we think about, like, the actual practice of, like, how do we put storytelling front and center every day, what we really think about is, like, you know, we have, like, the higher-level story around "grow your business." Because, as I mentioned, you can be someone who just has, like, one listing, and really all you're trying to do is, like, cover your mortgage because maybe it's, like, a family vacation home, and you just want to make sure that it's, like, available for people. So your goal is much different than this, like, massive property management group who's looking to scale into a new state or expand internationally. So really it's about "grow your business." But what that means for my team in particular is, like, we're a big fan—it's, I know it started as more of, like, a product marketing practice, but I've asked the whole team to infuse it, no matter what part of marketing they're in—is the principle of "so what?" So we're launching this new product feature, so what? And really boiling that down to the point where, like, what does that mean to the customer? Like, what value are they actually getting? What challenge is it actually solving for them? And the more and more we started to really implement this and share it broadly, we're not only seeing, like, our team just do it naturally, which I love as a marketing leader, to just see it happening without me having to prod—but I've actually seen, like, parts of our product team actually, like, we have a monthly product session where the product team, you know, gives an overview of, like, what's been launched, what's coming, and they actually now have a section where it's like, "Why do you care?" And it's actually talking about, like, what this does for the customers. And so it's really starting to bleed across the entire organization, which is just incredible to see.

Drew: It's not the first level still—it's like six. I mean, you got to keep asking, right?

Caitlin: Exactly. Usually, level three is where you start to even get kind of interesting, where it's not just talking about who we are as a company, but it's really digging deeper. And I think this is my fifth startup. I think at this point, it's really hard in any B2B business, but I think especially in early-stage software, where you are just frenetically trying to figure out product-market fit and where to sell and who you need to hire, I think it's hard for people to put that front and center. It's easier to just fall back on, like, "Hey, this piece, this feature, is really damn cool." And so I think really pushing to keep that emphasis on the "so what?" and push yourself to those, like, six, seven, eight layers is really where the magic starts to happen.

Drew: And can you give us an example of a "so what?" I mean, as I dig down a little bit?

Caitlin: Yeah, I think one of those that I was really proud of is that we actually started digging into the "so what" of, like, when you think about short-term rentals, that's just one tiny section of the entire accommodation industry, let's call it. There are hotels out there. There are all sorts of places where people can stay. And so we started digging down when we were talking about data. Actually, I've worked in other companies where you're begging for data to try and support your stories. Beyond, I have the opposite. There's so much data, sometimes it's hard to cut through the noise. But we were looking at market data of like, "Hey, supply is growing. How are we trying to tell people about what to do, like, what their business strategy should be if the supply of vacation rentals is growing?" And we really started digging down to the "so whats," and what it came down to is that whether your supply has grown or shrunk, it's ultimately, like, how are you standing out in the market? That's why people care. They want to understand how their property, their listing, compares to the people down the street, the town over, the hotel next door. They want to know how they stack up. And so we actually launched this massive campaign last summer. We called it the Stays Industry. But it was really looking at the fact that with the way consumers actually search for vacations now, with the introduction and more acceptance, I think more broadly, of AI solutions, it's no longer people just searching on one site. They're being fed any number of combinations of places to stay, things to do, these experiences to have. And so we actually brought it full circle into this massive campaign where it's like, "This is about the Stays Industry. This is about creating an experience and using your data to make sure that your listing is showing up for the right person at the right time, at the right price." And it was a massive success. And it started because we just kept digging deeper, like, "Why does this matter? Why are we continuing to push this data? What is it actually doing for our audience?"

Drew: Very cool. And I'm just—I mean, my brain is flooded, and I just made two reservations at two different hotels for two different cities online. And, you know, old school, because I knew it's either going to be Hilton or Marriott. Boom. It was a simpler search. Every single day I'm on ChatGPT, and it says, "Hey, would you like to use our agent to go book a trip or something?" Right? Clearly, this whole world is going to change pretty quickly, and you all are doing it. But I want to get back to storytelling, because this is an interesting moment for stories, because a lot of brands are saying, "Hey, we're AI," and, you know, there's a lot of AI washing going on, and I'm curious how you are managing that aspect of your story.

Caitlin: It's interesting, watching the full circle of how things come about like that. But I think absolutely, with the AI side, we also—I'm not selling to technologists for the most part. I'm selling to people who have a side hustle in the vacation rental industry, or who maybe started in hospitality. And so from a story perspective, we are very conscious about looking at this as, like, we need to make sure people understand the why behind it, and they need to understand that it's not scary. And so as we think about how we weave AI into our external story, into our Beyond story, it's really more a supporting factor. It really kind of goes again to the "So what?" How are you being more efficient? How are you saving time? How are you accelerating things without having to increase overhead? So really giving them the value proposition. And then the reality is, like, "Oh, and by the way, it's because we have this AI element buried within our application."

Drew: Yeah, it's an enabler. It's not the thing.

Caitlin: It's not the thing, and I feel that way about it in all industries, to be honest. That's how I look at it for my own team as well. But I think especially when you are talking to folks that want to use something but are a little fearful because they just don't know what or how to get started, I think focusing on that enablement piece and really putting it back centric to how it's going to help them is really critical.

Drew: One last question before we take a quick break, but I want to understand how you were able to help—sort of with Marca, we talked a lot about how she was able to get the organization to buy in and start to tell the stories and then feel the value of doing so. You know, did you run into any barriers? And how have you addressed those?

Caitlin: We didn't run into barriers in terms of people pushing back on the story we were telling. I think where we ran into barriers was people not realizing that storytelling was part of their job also, to be honest. And so I think it started with the marketing team. You know, you hire content marketers, and they are inherently storytellers, because that's their job. That's where I started. My marketing career was on the comms and content side, but that's just your base of storytelling in my perspective. And so with every new team member I brought on to marketing, I really pushed, like, "How are you going to think about stories, independent of what their role is?" And I think one of the moments where it really started to unlock some success was actually on our CRM side. I had someone on the team come in, and they're like, "Hey, our landing pages aren't performing. And I think we're not carrying the story through from the email to the landing page to what they're getting." And we actually redesigned how we thought about custom landing pages, and that aha moment of, like, "I'm not telling the customer the story" was this huge unlock that everyone's job—I don't care if your job is managing HubSpot and promotional flows and thinking about just the numbers—your job is still to be a storyteller. And so once we started to unlock that, I didn't experience pushback that people thought the story was wrong or they didn't care. It was more that they didn't understand how they would weave it into their day-to-day. And so that was the bigger challenge, I think we saw internally. And for me, it was, you know, with the marketing team continuing to beat the drum, but with maybe our CX teams, or our sales team partners, or even our product team partners, it was really finding that champion internally that cared, like I mentioned earlier, the product manager, the product meeting where they have the "so what" on the slides. It was just working with those people to be like, "Hey, here's the story we're telling here. How are you translating it here?" And just really building those relationships so that people understood that that story is how we're going to connect with people, and ultimately, that's how we grow our business. It's been a really fun play for me to weave back into internal comms and internal PR, as we grow their businesses, we're growing our business, and this is how we're successful across the board.

Drew: All of that—exclamation points on. There are two pins I want to put in what you said. One, the second one is the consistency of message from story all the way down to landing pages. It breaks everywhere, all the time, and it always blows me away. You spend all this energy building this one story, and then you get to landing pages about price, or it's about feature, or it's about some other thing, and there's no connection, and no wonder the consumer gets lost. And often it's because of the way you're measuring the performance of that individual aspect as opposed to the collective thing. So that's one. Secondly, I think what's really interesting, and I want to talk to both you and Marca about it after the break, is a lot of folks out there are reducing their content teams because they think they can get away with fewer people, just editors, because of generative AI. And I wonder if one of the outcomes of that is you're really losing the heart of your storytellers. And the risk, the corporate risk, is a lot greater than you think. Anyway, we'll deal with that when we get back. It's now time for me to talk about CMO Huddles. We launched in 2020. CMO Huddles is the only community of flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders, and that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? Yeah, well, a group of these curious, adaptable, and problem-solving birds is called a huddle. Yep, that's the aha moment. And the leaders in CMO Huddles are all that and more, huddling together to conquer the toughest job in the C-suite. Oh, got that pun right in there? Okay, well, Marca, Caitlin, you're both extremely busy marketing leaders. Marca, you've been with us a long time. Perhaps you have a specific example of how CMO Huddles has helped you recently.

Marca: I have an awesome example, and I think it's the person you were thinking of earlier, Drew. So CMO Huddles is not just a way to network with other CMOs. It's a way to network with people that might be in your industry that you might not otherwise have a chance to meet. Mortenson is a big general contractor. Drew, you put me in touch, or somebody on the team did, with a woman who was considering joining Huddles, and so she and I have kept up a rapport. There are people who have certain disciplines within marketing where perhaps that might not be my forte, and I look for those outlets within CMO Huddle studios and conversations within the actual huddle groups themselves. Most recently, an example is, Drew, you put me in touch with an AI practitioner who's fantastic. Happens to live five minutes from me. And the two of us are going to dinner tonight in Denver with a bunch of other CMO leaders in the Denver metropolitan area. And she is the guest speaker.

Drew: I love it. It's Liza Adams, and she's terrific, and has joined us many times. And I'm so glad you guys were able to connect and pull that off-set. That makes me very happy. So Caitlin, you're brand new to the community, so it may be too early, but I'm hoping that you might have an early example or an expectation of how CMO Huddles is going to help you.

Caitlin: I absolutely have an example. I mentioned earlier with you, Drew, that I shifted from, like, more of, like, marketing technology industry. Now that I'm at Beyond, not only is it new for me to come into the travel industry, but we actually sell both B2B motion as well as a B2C motion for our smallest audience members. And I have way less experience doing that, more like B2C self-service motion. And so through CMO Huddles, actually, I was able to get connected with someone else who has a similar business structure where they sold massive gaming system types of deals, like massive enterprise deals, but also have this self-service motion to get consumers on board. And so it was so helpful for me. You can theoretically know that there are different audiences and that you have to have slightly different plans. But I was just really struggling with a couple of things as I started out: team member bandwidth and how to prioritize budgets and the timing of how those different sales cycles looked. And so to hop on the phone with someone who had, like, been there, done that—she actually had also done a similar transition of, like, pure B2B into this hybrid world. We're able to expand my network of people who can just, like, help bounce ideas off of each other, which for me is really critical at this point in my career.

Drew: Well, thank you for that. Well, if you're a B2B marketing leader who wants to build a stronger peer network, gain recognition as a thought leader, and get your very own Stress Penguin, please join us at cmohuddles.com. Okay, let's bring everybody back, and let's talk about, you know, this first—I just this notion of, if we get rid of a lot of our content players, or we're losing all our good storytellers, I mean, is that a risk?

Caitlin: I think so. I think that there's—I think it's a balance. And Marca, I'm definitely interested in your thoughts on this too, but I think that there's so much you can get from AI. Like, I feel like a couple years ago, I was pushing content team members to explore generative AI more and get comfortable with it and use it to build foundations for what they were doing. But I think those creative hooks where you take an idea from a disparate industry and apply it to your own, that's what you lose, like those creative jumps and those nuances, which I think those are the types of storytelling that really, like, disrupt your market or capture someone's attention in a way that an AI tool is just not going to get you. I think, to me, it's like, don't get rid of your content players or your content team, but supercharge them by, like—if I see someone writing an email without using generative AI to, like, jumpstart them, I'm like, "What are you doing? Like, save time, give yourself more creative space," instead of having every day just be about, like, writing a certain number of words. You know?

Drew: Yeah, I mean, I think this fine line—and it's funny, and I use AI quite a bit, but I have found I have sacred territory on my Saturday editorials that I can't, I won't, because that is a moment where it's got to be all me, all exposed with weaknesses, and no way is it slopped. So let's get back to what makes a good storyteller in marketing, and how do you find and develop those people? Marca, you already talked about curiosity. I'm just curious if there's anything else that we should be talking about for storytelling. I mean, I feel like people should actually study this as an art form before they even join marketing.

Marca: So I think where I would start with that, Drew, is marketers are storytellers, and I don't care what function you're in, that's what we do. Caitlin, you know, to hear that that's your background in content. I started my career as a product manager, and so it was up to me to make sure that my product was one of the ones that came out of the salesperson's bag when they were in front of a client. I started in B2C, and if I didn't have a good story around that product, let alone how much money they were going to make on the margin, then you know what? They were going to sell the other product manager's stuff, because it was cooler, slicker, and the story was better, right? So I think the approach that I take to this, Drew, back to your question about curiosity being a trait: I think you got to be nimble, you got to be creative, you got to be willing to learn. And at the end of the day, whether you're in product marketing, whether you're in product management, if that falls under your marketing purview, whether you're in marketing—and I'm going to use the example of my demand gen manager, who literally came to me two months ago and said, "I want to write a couple blogs." And you know, my initial instinct was, like, "You're supposed to be driving leads to the salespeople," right? And then I thought, I'm like, "Marca, dial it back, right? This is your 30 years of marketing talking. Dial it back. He's a millennial, or not even, he's like borderline millennial, Gen Z." I'm like, "Go write a blog. Go write three blogs. This is awesome," right? And so I think that nimbleness, that curiosity, definitely, but also creating, back to the topic at hand, a culture on a team where you come in as a storyteller regardless of what your function is.

Drew: Yeah. And I'm just trying to imagine, as I think about all the teams out there and all the members of the folks that work for the various CMOs in CMO Huddles, and I wonder how many of them actually think of themselves as storytellers. You know, I don't.

Marca: Well, that's the challenge, right? I mean, and I think that also, then, that's the responsibility of us as the leaders of these organizations, is to instill that culture into the team and to say, "Listen, you need to come prepared to tell your story," and then hold each other accountable. And we're in small—it sounds like Caitlin, you're in a small startup as well. When your teams are small, it's easier to do. When you've got larger teams, like when I was at Panasonic years ago, and I had 40-some-odd, more like 100 people, including agencies, running around, like, I was chasing folks and making sure stories were consistent. And it was hard. It was really, really hard. So it comes back to being really succinct, how I started our conversation, really succinct and prescriptive about what the story is, so that in your own way, regardless of your function, your vertical, your ICP that you're going after, that the core is there. And I think that's really, really important. We can't lose sight of that.

Drew: And so I'm wondering if the two of you, as we're having this conversation, I'm imagining, you know, PE firm, or a CEO or a CFO going, "What are you guys talking about? We should be talking about revenue and sales-qualified opportunities. What do you mean stories? The only story I want to hear is more net new customers." How do you sort of deal with that? Because it's real. We know it's real. I mean, we are doing businesses here. This isn't the arts and crafts department. Help us sort of connect folks who are afraid to even use a term in the same way people are afraid to use the term "brand" because it feels fuzzy.

Caitlin: I think it's a little bit of, like, internal storytelling, to be honest. I think for me, it's like there's the meetings where we talk about the storylines and the creative hooks, and then there's the meetings where we talk about the numbers. I actually just had ours this morning, where it's all of go-to-market leadership, plus our finance team. And we were talking about, like, "Hey, where'd we hit last month? What are we doing to achieve it?" But when I get pushback on things, I know I have the data in the backend to say, like, "Hey, the campaigns that go out that are just like, 'Hey, cool new feature,' absolutely bomb. They're not even worth the time of my team to do it," and I have the data to back it up. Whereas I'm like, "I am going to take more time to make sure that we really have a creative hook here and do well with this campaign, because that's how I'm going to get you those revenue numbers. That's how I'm going to get an increase in inbounds for you." And I will say, like, when you've built—and it sounds like Marca, you've done the same thing—like, when you build teams that trust you on that, like, I actually—one of my favorite pieces of feedback I've gotten recently, one of our sales leaders came to me, and he was like, "Hey, I've really seen the, like, creative storytelling improve in a couple of these regions where we had been struggling in Europe." And he was like, "I'm really seeing it improve, and I'm really excited." And to me, that was just like that aha, where he knows that us taking the time to create the right story is what's going to fill his team's pipeline. So it is really cyclical. But I think the best marketing teams know how to talk about both. You are always a storyteller. To Marca's point, like, no matter what role you are, you are a storyteller, but you've got to be able to talk about data, too, especially in the modern world of marketing.

Drew: Yeah, so I am hearing two things. One is that it's not an "and," it's not an "or," it's an "and." We can talk about revenue and pipeline, and we can talk about story, but there's also sort of this direct connection: good story might equal good pipeline. And you know, if bad story—in the example you just gave, bad story is bad pipeline, there's no pipeline, right? So there is some linkage here, potentially, if someone wanted to listen and you had some data to back it up. Marca, what'd you want to weigh in on that?

Marca: Well, actually just took the words out of my mouth, Drew. I agree with everything Caitlin just said, and I do that on a consistent basis. But I think the real way, if I'm toe-to-toe with our VP of Finance, who is our best-selling salesperson, what does their pipeline look like? What do their conversion rates look like, whether you're on the account management or the account executive side, right? And then you back into, "Who can answer the question, 'What does Sensera do?' And then how do they answer that question? Do they start with the headline, or do they start with features?" What I used to call "speeds and feeds," back in the laptop days of the product, right? You start down in the speeds and feeds area, you forgot the headline altogether. And guess what? Your customer has no idea what you do and why they should buy you. So, you know, back to that connective tissue of "I got to tell a story, and I need to do it succinctly" to "How does the customer understand and feel about what they're doing and why they're purchasing Sensera?" I'm telling you right now, there's a direct correlation with the people on our team who can tell the Sensera story and the ones who are making quota.

Drew: Yeah, and that's awesome. And that connects the dots. Connects really well. It's funny. I'm thinking of a CMO in a huddle who said our one of our, quote, better salespeople is always going rogue, off script, off story. But then when we dug into the conversation, what we discovered was they were selling a lot, but they weren't selling to big customers. They weren't selling—they were selling on price, and there was a lot of churn at the back end. So even though the numbers looked good, they weren't getting them in the door in the right way, and so you lost them whenever the contract ended really fast. So it's really reassuring if your top salesperson is, in fact, using the same story. I know there are circumstances when that doesn't happen. It's just like they got relationships. They know people. They call Bob and Joe, or she calls Bob and Joe, and they get the deal done, and there's not much you can do about it, and you just take that revenue and keep on moving.

Marca: That definitely exists. And back to the beginning of my journey with SinceSara, which is almost coming up on two years, there was definitely an individual in the organization who was pressing me about the build with confidence story and saying, "Yeah, but that's not really what we do. We sell cameras." That person's moved on to other pastures, doing extremely well, and helped the company get to a certain place. But you know, you have people that you ride the wave to a certain place, and then you got to go to the next level. And where we believed our opportunity to be was in this enterprise play, working with the top, call it 50, general contractors across the nation, and they want to understand why the heck we exist and what we're going to do for them, most importantly, right? And so that's the story. You just—if you call up Turner Construction and say, "We sell cameras," they're going to be like, "Okay, goodbye," right? So you got to be really succinct about how you're going to help these clients.

Drew: Yeah. So I'm going to come back to you in a second, because your job also includes customer success. But I want Caitlin to weigh in on this first. What role does customer voice play in your storytelling strategy?

Caitlin: Oh, it's critical. I actually have a sign in front of me that says, "Is it in customer-centric language?" And I have requested that every single team member in marketing have the same sign, or however, whatever version they want to make it in. But the customer voice is how you tell the story, because whether it's a customer that you are trying to upsell or just trying to retain with your CX org, or it is a prospect that you were hoping becomes a customer, putting it in their voice, making sure that it is focused on their challenges, on how they talk about the industry and the features is how you make it resonate. And I mean, coming from a communications and comms background, there's so much research out there that similar language and how they think is going to make them open that email—it's going to make them spend the extra five seconds to scroll. And in a world where capturing people's attention is getting infinitely harder because there's so much out there, that initial connectivity at a psychological level is what's going to make it or break it. So customer voice is absolutely a core part of every aspect of storytelling that we roll out at Beyond, whether it's internal or external.

Drew: And this is one of the things that when I think about AI, one of the most exciting opportunities is if you are able to record all your conversations and they're going into a GPT that you can then mine for various stories. I think the opportunity there is huge, both in terms of the positive and the negative that you hear. So if you're not recording customer conversations, please start. Marca, you have the dual title of customer success. So I'm imagining it's a little bit easier for you to get that voice than some others, because often I hear from CMOs, customer success team holds the clients dear. The account managers won't ever let us near the customer. So how does it help that, because you also are responsible for customer success, keep a unified story across the company?

Marca: Yeah. I think what it highlights for us actually is where some of the blind spots are. So where we believe we have a tight story and we believe we have a tight message, then when a client comes to us on the back end after they've been onboarded, or even during the onboarding process, and they didn't fully understand, "Wait a minute, can the product do X, Y, or Z to solve for A, B, and C?" Then you can be like, "Oh, wait a minute. Ruh-roh, we've got an issue with what we're talking about over on the front end." And this is an ongoing thing, and we're getting better at finding those hairy eyeballs, so to speak, so that we can go back and retrain and say, "Wait a minute, team. Like, you have sold past the client, or you didn't listen to the client in terms of what their use case was, and you sold something that didn't meet their needs." Those are all those little pieces that every single time we come up with that, then maybe every month or two weeks—I mean, we meet as a go-to-market team every Friday morning, and we bring these things up. But there's ongoing training that has to transpire between CX, sales, marketing, and product to make sure we're all on the same page. So having responsibility for the customer experience piece has been really fruitful from that perspective. I would also say, Drew, that it's really important to make sure the customer experience team, or the customer success and the tech support team even, that they're speaking the same language as the sales team. And so August is our training month, and we're literally running everybody on those teams back through messaging training, how we positioned the company, why we positioned it this way, what the use cases are. So I spent most of yesterday doing that. Going to do it again next Tuesday and more on Friday. I mean, we just—it's like constant repetition. Guys can't forget this.

Drew: Two, actually three, different thoughts. One is this is another interesting use case for AI. I know that a number of companies are recording their engineers talking about various aspects of the product and responding to all the questions that customers might have or prospects might have technically. And those all get put in a GPT, so the salespeople can sort of use those on the fly. The other part—earlier you were mentioning was this issue of a salesperson essentially over-promising. "Yeah, we can do that. Yeah, we can do that. Yeah, we can do that." And then, "Now we can't do that or that." You know, the customer is really excited about one particular feature that is on the roadmap but isn't there yet. So there is that, and obviously that can create some real problems. And obviously there's where compensation really comes down to it—the balance between how much they get for closing the deal and how much they get for the renewal, right? I would think that would matter. So we've talked about customer voice. We covered a lot of that. I'm curious, how do we measure the effectiveness of storytelling, sort of beyond any kind of vanity metrics? And you know what, what does that look like? Do we even bother?

Marca: I think we bother. Caitlin, I'm actually gonna let you go first since this is very much in your wheelhouse. I've got—I got my notes, but you go.

Caitlin: Yeah, I think it's like any other good marketing metric is you have the leading indicators, and then it rolls all the way through into revenue measurement as well. But I think with storytelling, there are these intrinsic pieces of, yes, I can measure social engagement from different types of messaging. To be genuine, like, is it a story, or is it a product feature announcement that goes into what I was mentioning earlier? Of, I know I can track pipeline by campaign, and I know which campaigns have a full-fleshed story and what were some of the early ones where people are like, "We just need to announce this product. Just put it out there." And they bombed, and we got no pipeline off of effort from the marketing team. I think the biggest thing when you measure the success of your storytelling is when it comes back to you, when I hear customers iterate our stories back to the CSO, because we do—actually, we record everything, mostly on the go-to-market side, not so much on, like, the engineering side you're just mentioning, Drew. But when I hear that come back to me, when I hear people at conferences, when I'm speaking with customers or prospects and they're talking in the same language that we have been focused on as a marketing organization, that's when you know your story has hit success, because it has become part of industry lexicon at that point. It's no longer just a Beyond story.

Drew: Well, I think it's so interesting what you said, and I wish more folks would sort of get away with this, because you essentially had two parallel tests—one where we have a story that's really talking about benefits and emotional connection or whatever, and the other, you just, here's the product, and one worked and one didn't. And you would think, if you did that a couple of times, then your leadership would look and go, "Oh, gosh, this stuff really matters. Packaging matters. Story matters." And because when we don't have it, we don't get sales.​

Caitlin: Exactly. And I think for anyone, it applies across both. Like, if you're an emerging market, you need a story to tell people why they should even care. If you're in a competitive market, you need a story to step up and show how you're differentiated from the other products out there. I mean, telling that story is just a critical way to cement your brand in people's minds. It's not market like the feeds and speeds. Like, every company can get down to the nitty-gritty of like, "Oh, we do this at 5% better here," or, "Oh, we give you these three levers that our competition doesn't." But when you actually have them believing in the story of what you're delivering them for their business, those features and functionalities become way less important in the sales conversation. It's a check-the-box versus a decision factor.​

Drew: You know, as you're talking, I'm thinking about LLMs and how they are just going to be looking at features and functions. And I'm wondering, as these things get more sophisticated, they're also going to somehow or other, if you do it right and your website enabled them to read it, that they can also find that nuance of the story. And it'll be interesting to see. Marca, are you—we're going to talk about measurement?​

Marca: Yeah, I think Caitlin nailed it. If you want to talk about storytelling in its purest sense, it's the content engagement and then all the metrics that come along with that, whether it's through social or SEO or who downloaded what on your website, that kind of thing. But I 100% agree with Caitlin's comment that when the story comes back to you, and not just back to you from the customer—like, that's the coup de grâce, I think, at the end of this—but when I hear our CEO telling the story, when I hear our CFO telling the story, when I hear people in manufacturing telling the story, I take all of that as a win as well, because that means when they're talking to other people and having the elevator pitch from the first to the fifth floor, they're articulating what Sensera does, and they're able to tell the story succinctly. And we do pop quizzes. Like, don't go to a go-to-market meeting, a product meeting, a sales meeting, and not expect to be called on and have somebody, whether it's me, the CEO, or my counterpart in sales, saying, "What does Sensera do?" Right? And before she actually asked that question, or I asked that question—and we did it last Friday—she said, "Okay, I need three volunteers," and three people raised their hands. One of them was a field technical manager on my team, and she asked, and they had to leave the room so they couldn't hear the other people talk, and then they came back. I mean, it sounds like kindergarten, right? When you're in the room full of 15 or 20 go-to-market people and you're asked, "What do we do?" your story is being told properly.​

Drew: It's so funny. I'm just remembering a conversation with a CMO whose CEO said, "Oh, everybody knows the story." I said, "Okay, I'll tell you what. I'm going to go to each of the executive team members and ask them what the story is and see what they say playback." And of course, they were seven different stories. But so I love that. Well, let's move to—we're running out of time. Final words of wisdom. What advice would you give to CMOs who want to build a team of storytellers but aren't sure where to start? Let's end. Let's start with Caitlin.​

Caitlin: I think you have to commit that storytelling is a core part of your job. I know for me, when I came into Beyond, it was a pretty light marketing team. I had a lot of building to do, but I had to put storytelling front and center. And so I think that you have to own that as, like, that is the number one job of yourself. Like, you have to commit to owning the story, believing in the story, asking people to poke holes in the story too. Because I think that's another big piece. People have to believe it, and if they don't feel like they've been able to push back and help you refine that story, that starts to fall apart a little bit on that trust side. And so to build that team is like, help everyone understand how storytelling helps their job. I think once you start to hit that, you get some of those key stakeholders across the board. And it's a slow roll. It's not something you can do ever overnight because it does take trust. It takes time. But that's how you do it. Like, you commit to being, not just the head of marketing or the CMO or whatever your title is—like, you are the chief storyteller of your business, and from there, you just start to flow it down.​

Drew: I love it. Marca?​

Marca: Yeah. I love the idea of chief storyteller. There was a day where we were all brand police, right? And I like chief storyteller a heck of a lot better than being the brand police. But it starts with being crisp on what the story is. And so that's the one thing that I would just add to everything Caitlin just said—make sure you have a really crisp story. And when people come in, they understand what it is. And then again, that is part of their job to tell it, regardless of the function that they're a part of. And I think for all of us who are developing teams, you have to understand where you have the talent and where you have the gaps. And when you go to fill that gap, whomever it is you bring in—a product marketer, a content manager, a demand gen person—their job is helping to retell that story.​

Drew: I love it. All right. Well, I want to, first of all, thank you both for being incredible good sports. I did want to—sort of, one of the things that I love in this conversation is, if you think about your story and going across the organization, it's a harmony when everybody is telling it. It's just everybody is in sync. And obviously it's disharmony when it's not. And then the second thing is, when you're doing it right and you really have the right story, stick with it. It's just so easy to walk away from it, and it just takes time for those things to go. All right. Thank you both. Thank you, audience, for staying with us.​

 

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we're live, join us on the next CMO Huddle Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile. That's Drew Neisser, every other week.

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!