The Framemaking Sale: Building Buyer Decision Confidence

[00:00:00] Hello, Renegade marketers. If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back.

You are 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 bestselling business books. At this particular huddle, Brent Adamson challenges how we think about trust and buying decisions. Drawing from his latest book, the Frame Making 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. Alright, let's dive [00:01:00] in.

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 Nier.

Welcome hustlers 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 code or something for this. When you make five, it'll be like SNL.

You get a sweet five time coat. Uh. And he is already the most frequently interviewed guest in the CMO Huddles Renegade Marketing universe. So, [00:02:00] uh, 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 B2B sales process actually works.

1. And he has also, uh, wrote the, um, gosh, how could I forget that? It's not even in my notes. It's true. There he is. He wrote the, uh, forward, thankfully to, for, uh, Renegade Marketing. Anyway, grant, uh, I mean, Brandon, it's great to see you. How are you? Where are you this fine day?

Uh, I am, I'm well, thank you.

It's great to see you guys. Uh, I am in my home, my home office in Northern Virginia, which is right. Uh,

yeah, somewhere on that map. Yeah, that right there. Yeah. I see it just above the, uh, that panhandle of Florida up there. A little bit. A Alright, 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.

Yeah. 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 [00:03:00] 'em 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 frame making.

Yeah. So, so, oh, okay. So the number one and probably highest level one. Uh, I'm gonna do these super quick. So let's do number one is. We all want our customer, we all wanna build trust with our customers. And, and we think that the, the thing that we need to do is help customers or help, you know, encourage customers to trust us, trust our brand, trust our products, trust our people.

We wanna be trusted advisors, we wanna be thought leaders. The single biggest opportunity to drive growth for your business is actually not to build customer's supplier trust, but to build customer's self-trust. It's not so much whether or not they trust you or believe in you or confident in you, but rather whether or not they're confident in themselves and their ability to build a or, or, make a decision on behalf of of their company.

Okay. Well go through that one in a second. Yeah. Now what's number two? Perfect.

Number two. Number two is we spend a huge amount of time, and I think rightly so, half for years in marketing. Uh, mapping the customer's buying journey. the idea being if we need to align our [00:04:00] sales motion to the way, to the customer's buying motion, if we could understand that buying journey better, that we could, uh, 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, they're, they're completely overwhelmed. And frankly, what's interesting is, you know, how better how to buy not just your solution, but a solution like yours than your customers do themselves.

Oh, I can't wait to go into that one. Okay. And number three.

Number three is that much of what we do in the name of, customer centricity. And this is definitely a marketing, it's 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 gonna surround the customer, you know, all the different slogans we have about customer, customer, customer, but 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 gonna do a better job of driving growth for you.

And all of those things are gonna completely rewrite marketing going forward.

[00:05:00]

Wow. Okay.

How's that?

That was great. And we gotta pick those babies apart 'cause we got some, we got some splaining.

I got more man. Let's do more. This is fun.

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

That this was a

Yeah, we, we, we buried the lead on that one. Yep.

And, but it's on me. 'cause I think you say it early on, I just. I was looking because I thought we were gonna 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, what do you really mean and why is it so important that we create this self-trust?

That they have confidence.

Yeah, so, so, uh, by the way, let me just put a pin on that. Be, and we can come back to Drew if you want to, but just so you guys know where I'm coming from, there's a new book, it's called The Frame Making Sale. We just published it. Very excited about it. Some of it starts with the work that we did at Gartner and [00:06:00] cb.

A lot of it's what, what I've done since then. I'm now outta my own as an individual. You know, I'm just a founder. I'm just like Drew, except Drew actually. Customers and clients and business. But the, um, I I have zero real interest in putting a new sales methodology out in the marketplace. what I wanna do is share with the world some really powerful research, I think is gonna reframe kind of how all of us think about going to market.

So I think the heart and soul of the frame making sale isn't so much a methodology, but a mindset. So that's, and we can come back to that if you want. The, it starts with the bar chart. You know, the, 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. It starts with a really big bar chart, and it goes back to research that we did, um, early, uh, late CEB, early Gartner. So it was 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. It's a purchase, a B2B purchase where customers don't settle for status quo. They don't settle, 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 [00:07:00] bigger solutions that we're all trying to sell.

Oftentimes when you sell those kinds of solutions, they, they can come with a certain amount of buyer's remorse, right? It's like the first time you bought your own home is like, you wake up next morning and I bought what and what? It's 30 years of mortgage of what it is. Kind of scary, so. What we're really looking for is a unicorn, which is increasing likelihood to classify 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 challenge or teach, tailor take control, broke them down.

You know, and component parts around, through the model. Not surprisingly, the, the workaround insights still has a huge pop, you know, 180% increase, 190% increase. We looked at different marketing, strategies, different components, or, um, attributes is the word I was looking for.

We looking for different attributes of content. Uh, we looked at buyer group configurations. All of that to say is when all of that work was done, what we found is more than anything else. Was one attribute, one factor well above anything [00:08:00] else that would increase the likelihood of a high quality, low regret deal.

And it was, it was not just like, see if everything else was kinda like here or here, you know? It was like, you know, you know, like a small increase, a bigger increase challenge, a really big increase. This thing that we found was like up here, it was an order of magnitude higher than anything else that swamped everything else in the 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, 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 and 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 it 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 a 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 this, so, 'cause people when they hear that it is kinda like this no dumb moment, right? It's like, well [00:09:00] sure customers have to be confident decision, otherwise they're gonna choose not to choose and we lose the status quo.

Oftentimes, I dunno 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 con customers are confident in our product, in our brand, in our people, in our customer list, in our logos, in our, you know, in our, that we're a trusted advisor, that we're a thought leader.

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, and, 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 ask 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 'cause of all of us in marketing, and I raised my hand on this too. We've spent the last 10 years in 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 on AI on top of that, and there's no end to the [00:10:00] research you can do. So how do you know when enough is enough? How confident are we that we've thoroughly looked at all, you know, 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, the bottom line to 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. 'cause 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. I always get a debate about what's right or what's right, even mean, right?

So, okay, that's hard. Let's park that. So at least let's real confident we did sufficient research. Awesome. What does sufficient mean? Uh, well, you know, the, the way I look at sufficient is if, 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.

It's the single, this is the engine of growth for a company, and every one of them has a subjective component to it, which [00:11:00] 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, and so much of what we're doing in our marketing content, and again, I say this with respect and absolutely what we're doing in the sales side, is working our dairy ears off to help our customers know things.

But the question is, are we equally solving for. The what, you know, helping customers feel things and specifically feel confident. And that's 0.1, 0.2. And then I'll, I'll take a breath through, 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 it notice if, 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 and get this incredible responses.

It was very much like 2009 early [00:12:00] challenger days when I decided, when I walked into Matt Dixon's office said, I think we need to write a book. I had that exact same moment. And it was 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, I joke, I, I tell people I'm all in. I just don't know if I'm all in on red or black yet, but I, I had, 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?

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

and I won't do that again. Drew, you wound me up on that one. So that's, but now we got the field laid out, so, so I promise I'll go shorter.

So going back to the buyer journey thing, so. Almost every CO who's listening now, uh, yeah. On this call, has found that [00:13:00] 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, this, in your case, you're calling it self-confidence in order to make a decision. and, and there's a lot of back and forth, so. I, 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 in, I don't, I'm, I'm confused.

Well, let's talk about it.

Let's, uh, yeah, so just help us, 'cause again, this has been a solid tool because it's so helpful for folks to realize it's not, 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? Totally. Uh, even if that chocolate MOUs [00:14:00] 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

and, and we're not gonna get rid of it, I promise. By the way. Just take a moment. Like, can you imagine like. You know, drew, I wasn't gonna buy from you, but that chocolate mousse was so good.

No. That, that, now I'm gonna buy from you. That, that's kind of actually kinda of hilarious. You think about it. Yeah. But the, um, it's, it's kinda like, oh, you guys were founded in 1875. I thought you were born, I thought you were found in 1885. Well, now I'll buy from you. Right. It's like that, that's, that's an old line I used to use back in the day with Challenger, which is still true.

I think. So, so I won't go through the backstory 'cause I promise you I wouldn't. But we, we, we spent a number of years working with Bob Messa and some of you guys will know Bob, MO,

we had him on the show. Show.

Awesome. Bob's brilliant, literally brilliant, um, jobs to be done, right? And one of the things we, we did with Bob is we mapped out together four key buying jobs of a typical B2B purchase of problem identification solutions, exploration requirements, building, and then supplier selection.

And I think what's so interesting to me and what, [00:15:00] 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, I, you know, I think we often go into these purchases, whether it's capital equipment or consulting engagements or training or whatever it might be, with a tech technology products.

We go in 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 like, how hard could this be? We identify a problem, we explore solutions, we build requirements. Pick supplier in Boston, we're done. And then reality hits. And then it's, it's like two steps forward, one step back, someone else gets involved, more questions are raised, a 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 this, this, these steps, but in a, in a sort of a, just a, you wind your way through them. And 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 Garner c being Gartner when we first did it. Martha Mathers, who's now A CMO herself, is the one that drew that, that drawing the first time.

And she's brilliant. And I've taken that drawing all over the world and we've [00:16:00] modified it, adapted it, and added to it for the book. Um, but we still lean on it because we think it as 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 customer? Is it you or your customer? And most of us will just almost instinctively say, what'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's going through this journey, they're thinking like, okay, it's four things. We move through them.

Oh God, now, you know, like thin, thin, you know, like bleep hits the fan, right? It all goes kind of south and you get really frustrated. And the way, here's where it gets really interesting, 'cause 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 good.

You know, weeks, months they'll just disappear and you're wondering what happened. And then finally, when you get 'em back on the phone, what you [00:17:00] find is that they weren't avoiding you. What sometimes you're gonna find is they were embarrassed. They didn't want to talk to you because they were literally embarrassed.

They, they, you'd sold them, they saw the value, they, they saw the raving fans. They saw they, they saw the solution that you solved. They wanted it, they were excited about it. They just had 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.

And 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 starts with it turns out that it's kinda like a relationship conversation.

It starts with we need to talk, right? It's all downhill from there, right? It's like it turns out that procurement need got involved and they've got these three questions. We don't have It. Turns out that the legal team looked, had looked, it turns and it turns out there's these new requirements in Europe that we didn't see coming.

We got on and on and on, right? The thing that's interesting to me about the, turns out that conversations is that 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, uh, uh, OB [00:18:00] objection or, or stakeholder.

Something inside their company they didn't even know was gonna be an issue. It turns out we have a capital review board. I didn't know we had a capital review board, but anything the 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. Is it, I bet I can guess the problem. Or it's like a legal got involved. Uh, let me, I, I, I bet I can guess what they're, they're wondering about. and in that little moment, I see a couple of you guys nodding your heads, which is, thank you.

I appreciate that this affirmation. I love it. But the, uh, but the, the thing that's interesting about that moment. Is it, 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, 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 or not your individual sellers see it. This is where marketing becomes [00:19:00] 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, and we can get into this too, drew, if you want. We call it the phrase that frames, and there's some really important language here that we could put a pin in this, we'll circle back to it.

Okay. But it sounds like this, in working with other customers like you. One of the things we've often found is that procurement's gonna 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 really doing something different is they actually involve procurement really, really early. And it's something that we might want to consider. And you see what I'm doing, so I won't go through the whole, 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?

But you can, in the, 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 heads of sales as a marketing to take their sales hat off, their marketing hat off, put their buying hat on and think about their own purchase experience, is to think about buying with your own colleagues.

And gimme one word that [00:20:00] describes it. I've yet to hear a positive word, long, hard, frustrating, awful landmine. And I always ask, well, how much of that was the supplier selling to you? How much was your own company? Oh, is this our own company? We're. We're the world's most, 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, so that becomes then this really interesting asymmetry of information for us to essentially take some of these big and hard and overwhelming and just put a frame around it. Just give them some guidance. Say, you know, it's, it's, there's, there's probably three steps that tend to get overlooked that you really wanna 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 frame 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 a Dreamforce two weeks ago, and I said. You, where this comes up most is buying CRM. You guys have bought CRM. It stinks. It's awful. It's 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 the, and it's not because the salespeople stink, it's because the process of going [00:21:00] through that with your colleagues is awful.

It's fraught, it's complicated. And I told one of the sellers sales enablement leaders at, at, at Salesforce, it said, your sellers are walking into customer offices virtually or in person every single day fighting the fight of your customer's past bad decision. That's what you're up against, that's your biggest competitors.

It's not the competition or features and benefits and 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 you 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. I got a slow hair.

Well, it's funny, I was listening to your earlier,

there's a lot going on here, isn't there?

I know you're, it's, uh. I was listening to your interview today actually, with that, uh, you did with, uh, chip Rogers, who's a advisor, longtime member, uh, yeah.

And, and, uh, you were using, uh, he was using the term coaching and then it got into shrinking and, 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 [00:22:00] the bad boyfriends that you, or girlfriend, whatever, all the Yeah.

Personal bad decisions that you, you know, it's baggage, right? You've got baggage, and so as a therapist salesperson, you are helping them sort of anticipate the baggage and put the baggage over to the side. Oh, okay. Well let's, let's work, we can help you work that through. I that helped me understand frame making.

Yeah. Well by, by having the therapist hat on. So let's get in.

Well, can, let me throw something out real quick 'cause we're, because this is a great point to mention it. This is such an interesting and critical opportunity for all of you in marketing because someone's gotta figure out what these obstacles are.

Someone, someone doesn't have to, but there's an opportunity for a company then begin to aggregate what are the ways in which our customers are likely to get stuck, that they themselves don't anticipate. We, we, we advocate 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.

Collect them and aggregate 'em, and then by that can turn into content [00:23:00] like, you know, considering buying CRM three obstacles to watch out for. Or it could just turn into, you know, tools that 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, you guys, and I say this because I'm, 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 at least involved in collecting, you know, customer testimonies, 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 it's one of the coolest things I ever found in, in this, in this space, is what if you use as 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've made the decision. Hopefully they like what you're, the value that they're getting from you, but one or another. What you're really looking for is just they, they successfully managed it 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, did you, yeah. Would, would you wish that you had done earlier? If you were to give advice to a peer who's about [00:24:00] 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 frame making that you could then put in the hands of your digital team, your sales team, right, to help be coaches.

So we are still, like we did with Challenger making, buying easier. Yeah. I just, I have visions of the slide that you did at the Gartner make buying easier. That's in my head. Yeah. Yeah. You've 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, and 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 could do it better. Mm-hmm. It feels like,

hold on, wait, wait. I'm gonna stop you, drew. Oh my God. I'm gonna stop you. The perfect moment to stop you. Do you know what you just said?

Because this is the false positive problem. This is the false pro, and I love you, drew. You know I love you. Right? Okay. But what you just said, 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? Guilty. LT is charged. Guilty is charged.

No, and I'm not trying to call you out.

I'm not. But that, that's what's the gravitational pull, the gravitational poll of everything we do is [00:25:00] so strong back to how can we fix us? You know, it's like, it's like, it's like a relationship when someone says, it's not me, it's you. And they say, 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.

It's like. Sometimes it literally is just the other person, right? And so the question is not so much what could we have done better, right? It's supplier agnostic. What, what, what could you have done differently to make your lives easier? And I, I, I, I only call it out your nuts, I'm trying to correct you, but because it's, it's so subtle, yet massively different in what we're talking about here.

So then,

sorry.

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. Uh, agnostic to the By us, the provider. The supplier, yeah. Is there such a thing or is it always gonna be a different spaghetti chart for every sort of thing?

So we can't even use that as a framework.

Yeah. Oh, it's a great question. So I don't think so. 'cause that's, that's kinda what that example of the customer testimonial thing is. [00:26:00] So there's a whole riff in the book. I think parts of it are still buried in chapter eight, but it was, it was way early in this chapter two.

In the chapter two became like. 30,000 words, which if you guys are word counters, you'll know That's like four chapters in one. And I, the editor got a hold of it. It's the whole book. Took whole book. Yeah. It took a cleaver to it and just chopped it all out. But what I'd suggest, and I think still parts of this are in there, but it is great.

I just went on a rant in chapter two and it's like, I think what we need to do in marketing or what we could do in marketing is not map the customer's buying journey, but map the customers. I never want to do that again. Journey. Map the customers. 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 customers. If you ask me to do that again, I will kill you and then kill myself. Journey. Do you know what I mean? It's like map all of that. That that's, that's the thing we can go after. Yeah.

Okay. Um. I'm always, I I I love the, uh, alliteration and, you know, they, so you've got your three s, you've got established, engaged, and execute.

They're not equal.

[00:27:00] Yeah. No, I don't think so. Yeah. So what are they? Yeah. So should we talk about 'em?

Yeah. So shall we, is it worth breaking those down? Just to give another frame, uh, uh, a little bit of a, a frame for folks in terms of how to think about it, or we wanna stay on journey.

No, no, I think this is good.

So, so just so you guys know, just 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 it 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, but that is 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 'cause I've been part of this, of the smart Disarms race and just deciding to content marketing or expand the world with even more white papers and, 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 laugh. I, I lack confidence in my ability to get everyone [00:28:00] else on board too. Then there's, uh, outcome, uncertainty, and outcome. Uncertain is this really annoying phenomenon where customers will look at you and say, I totally believe that. You know, when you show them the value calculator and the total cost of ownership and all the happy customers you already serve that 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. 'cause we're different 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, or you know, challenges to customer confidence, the question becomes very much like I was outlining before. what's the nature of the challenge? What, what's the thing that's gonna 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. that's the of, so we divide this into a three step process. The first one being establish, we call this the three E, so establish, engage, and execute, establishes that. It's essentially, it's establishing the framing or if you will, e [00:29:00] establishing the coaching and the guidance.

And here it could be anything from a very simple nudge. or a piece of advice like you might wanna get procurement. We, we've heard from other customers that getting procurement involved early is, is actually really helpful. That would be a nudge where this can get actually much more formal will be things like checklists, diagnostic exercises, maturity models.

I, I've built maturity models in my last. Uh, uh, company and it, it was this massive, complex thing, and I would've 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 is 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 get absolutely.

Lead into extremely well with where. We're currently building a, 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 meant. We, you know, I, 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 you, if your posture is largely one of individual expertise. You actually [00:30:00] do more damage to their confidence than help.

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. And not increase it. Because what you're doing when you adopt that posture is you're trying to solve for a customer's confidence in you again, and not in customer's confidence themselves.

So working, you know, pulling up work from Robert Sheldini, many of you guys will know from his book Influence, which is brilliant. we suggest leaning into, not. Um, 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.

'cause from 30 years of doing this, they all wanna 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 on that 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, I'm leaning on social proof. I'm positioning myself as a, 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, your value as a seller from your expertise [00:31:00] to your access.

Because what you, 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, here's the access I have to other people like you. And then, and then the third of the ease 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.

We're gonna take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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

So. That's an important part,

which, which would be okay in a commercial world if they just keep buying and buying more. I'm happy. Yeah. But, but, but your point is, right. Yeah.

But, and I think it is instinctual for salespeople, and I've just thinking of conversations that I have sometimes with CMOs and.

Mm-hmm. To want them to have confidence in the person who's talking. But it's is so interesting and I can see where it happens, and it's easy as a salesperson to get there. So retraining and helping [00:33:00] 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.

Oh it is. Yeah.

Once you get over that, once you get, if you can get over the precipice and say, 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 about it.

This is, this is, so, I was talking to, I don't know if you've, have you had a chance to meet Charlie Green yet?

Drew?

No.

Charlie, Charlie Green is the, one of the co-authors of Trusted Advisor back in the early two thousands. So he is well known for the trusted that that's where, like that term came from is right. Is Charlie Green and his colleagues in the uh. And I was talking to him about this the other day, first of all, I'd 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 wanna see if it aligns with what you're thinking or not.

And so we had this lovely conversation and, And he's the one that actually mentioned the psycho, the, the therapy metaphor. He says, you know, a, 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 [00:34:00] 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 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 gotta worry about, but we found in working with other customers like you, is 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 what 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 Ben, I can give you ideas based on what we see other people like you are 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 than 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, right?

That's it. That's our go to market [00:35:00] mantra. 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. And 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 in a little bit more detail, but. This, this phrase, this idea came from, uh, a friend of mine is one of these clients that's become friends, a guy named Brian Smith. Um, Brian with a y uh, 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, since making work, for example, he said, look, you told us team, like we have one job to help our customers make the best decision we can as all time as possible. And there's always someone, I dunno if it's a plant or on purpose, drew, but someone in the front of the room will say, but Brian.

What happens if we help them make a decision? They choose the competition. He said, they said, look, I hate to lose I, and he does. He's, I hate to lose. But that's the second part of the quote. If we're gonna lose, I wanna lose early. I wanna make sure that I don't, the worst place they'll finish in sales is second.

Right? So the uh, so if we're gonna lose, let's lose. But let's show up and let's do it the right way so that we're helping customers make great decisions. So the next time customers choose to make a [00:36:00] 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. Right is by helping customers build their own trust. It's like the shortest path to customers, supplier trust is to build, to build a better bridge for themselves to their own individual trust. It's, it's this weird sort of, it's like to to, 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 stop solving for customer, uh, supplier centricity and solve for customer's own self perception, and we'll, we'll get that trust as a result.

I just, uh, it is funny you wrote my, I'm halfway through, make it Snow, which is by the CMO and the CRO of, of, uh, snowflake and mm-hmm. Uh, and Chris, uh, the, 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. Right. But from a big company, uh, I think it was Redshift from Amazon and [00:37:00] AWS and, and so they knew, well we will get them later 'cause they're gonna be unhappy and we know exactly when. So sometimes even that is, is okay.

Alright. But Brent. It turns out that you brazenly drop this bombshell in the book.

Oh God, what have I done now? All right. Tell me

brands I'm quoting and I quote, brands get you in the door, but it rarely gets you a bigger, better deal, unquote. Explain.

I, 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 the, uh, this is a, 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 to this, but broadly speaking, when we go out and we study customers 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, if you, let me give you some real words, some words, it doesn't actually [00:38:00] give you the, the, the commercial advantage. You think it might. Only because you're com usually competing against other companies with equally well-known brands. So now if you're, if you're a, if you're an unknown brand competing against well-known brands, and the, the calculus changes a little bit, but let's take it.

One I used to use all the time in the challenger world, like, you know, ge this is back, this is back particularly when GE was like the monstrosity amazing company that it was, right, this is 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 IBM's 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 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 [00:39:00] are both, okay. Actually cheaper. And this is how your world class brand can get commoditized, right? So the, uh, and so if you're an upstart brand competing as well known brands, very much like Brian Smith in the expedient story.

So he, he's Cloud computing and you guys have probably not heard of Expedient and he is competing against the huge companies you guys would all know. 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, uh, look, I could do that. But that's a hard slog and it 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 to differentiation than building a brand as equally good as these that are already well established.

Yeah, I guess so it's, it really kind of depends on what we really mean by the word brand. Yeah. I think is part of this because differentiation is fundamental to brand. It's, it's not spending advertising on the Super Bowl. All that worked pretty well for Gong and got, yeah, so I think there's [00:40:00] two things. I wanna break it down.

One is, getting in the door is a big fricking deal. Yeah. If you don't get in the door, you don't get a chance. Mm-hmm. And we know that awareness equals higher percentage of deals. Yeah. But I think it's a difficult thing to sort of, if, if you're a small player. You're not on the list. So yeah, you gotta differentiate and you need a lot more.

And I, I feel like there's something missing in this conversation that I just feel like I gotta push back a little bit more on.

No, that's fair. Uh, by the way, for, for what it's worth, and I, so this is the other reason why we don't call this a methodology, but a mindset. It's because frame making's not meant to solve for everything.

I think the word methodology tends to overpromise and underdeliver 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 a, it is a powerful source of differentiation in the process of having come.

But, but it won't solve for how do I get opportunities into the top of the funnel? For what it's worth, guys, I, I'm now a founder and you know, I'm building company. I've, I, this is the fourth company I've tried to [00:41:00] start in five years. And it's only the, this one's got legs and the others have already kind of died or are on life support.

the thing that I have found the hard way is the top of the funnel. It's a complete and utter mystery to me. Uh, it just, it's, and I'll just raise my hand to admit that. And if you guys are struggling with that, I'm with you. I like painfully with you. Um, 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. 'cause I think communities and alliances is one way to get into the top of the funnel. You know, sort of like the, the side door into the top of the funnel that Absolutely, that is only just now being appreciated.

But, but yeah, let's just talk about that. Yeah. Why do you partner, you partner with a brand that maybe has customers and strength, brand strength that you don't have? Yeah. That's how a small brand can become a bigger brand by partnering. So the, I, again, this is why I, I feel like I wanted to get in that chapter and say, wait, because this doesn't, no, it, it's fair.

Yeah, it's fair. And so, alright, good. I'm, I'm done. I can move on to that, Jamie. We're done with that, right? We, we, we we're, we're done, uh, with that. 'cause that, uh, certainly is [00:42:00] something that both of us. It, it really stood out, uh, to

by, by the way, if, if anyone has got a list of 10 or a hundred really great leads that they wanna pass to me, I will give you a box of steak knives as a thank you.

So just, just that, that would be amazing.

Uh, there you go. so I wanna get, uh, add a few things. What is D what is interesting and you, you do make this point about, you know, 55% of B2B buyers struggle to see sufficient meaningful differences across content. Yeah. This gets to the content war that you described.

Yeah. But I feel like there is a role for content, and this is gets back to my point about branded differentiation. If at the core you have a point of view. Business idea that is different. That should inform your content, which should be different in theory. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but there's a, a nuance here that is, uh, creating content that leads to self-confidence.

And then of course you have to get in their hands. So Is is, is it worth spending a little more time on content that leads to buyer [00:43:00] self-confidence? Besides, yeah, testimonials from customers,

a thousand percent. In fact, there's two things about content we should talk about, particularly given this audience of marketers.

'cause I, there's, I think, I think frame making very much like challengers. So you guys, some of you may not even been 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 large, it was called the Challenger Sale, very much like the frame making sale.

It was 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 cb did it really hit marketers radar screen as like, holy macker, this is as much a marketing story as it is a, as a sales story, partly 'cause 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, uh, as a selling story, but, but I, 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, on the content side, so there's a whole chapter, it's chapter four, around this issue of.

one of the ways in which customers are overwhelmed [00:44:00] today is information overload. And AI doesn't help. AI 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 to 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 what 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, I don't have a skin in the game with Challenger financially. My name's associated with it and 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. It's 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 gonna set apart. We're gonna become a thought leader. Right. And, and, and so they, they all sent, and, 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 you, you know what I'm talking about. I just, I [00:45:00] think I missed Jamie spit take, but the, sorry, Jamie, I apologize. But the right, do y'all get that CEO email on, 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, uh. But they all woke up one morning and said, we need to be a thought leader. That's how we're gonna set ourselves apart and God love us on the marketing side. We said, no problem. We got you boss.

We got a strategy for that. We're gonna call that content marketing. shortly thereafter out of, you know, out of Boston, Massachusetts Rose's Company saying, Hey, we've got technology for that. We're called HubSpot and we're gonna call that marketing automation. And we were 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 to 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 punchline 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 gonna differentiate ourselves by being smarter than everyone else.

And now we're all just really smart. Great. You know, the, the loser in the smartness arms race is your customer because they're just overwhelmed. And in fact, it was actually in the very [00:46:00] hotel Drew that you'll be at. Was it next week? It was then, yeah. Then, then the Garden Court. But it was a meeting I was doing at the Garden Court.

We're having this conversation that head 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 I asked the question. I said, well, let me ask you. I said, what happens if your cu, your competitors, tell your customer to Zig and they've got data, they've got evidence, they've got videos, they've got experts, and you're telling 'em 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 'em is just confused at a higher level, right? It's like, now I don't know what to do because they've got good reasons to do two totally different things. We see this in the data. And so what they do is they say, I better study this more. Call me back in six months.

They never actually want you to call 'em back in six months, right? Call me back in six months and, and let me do a little bit more research. And you know what's gonna happen in those ensuing six months? They're gonna become even more confused. what they're really looking for, we know from research is, is not more freaking content.

No offense to anyone. What [00:47:00] 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 me 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 because it wasn't important then. And that'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 Foresters of 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 enga, the established portion of, of frame making inside of information. Because once you begin to map all that, you begin, you can begin to figure out where are customers likely to get confused?

Where they likely to get stuck? Where are they likely to become overwhelmed? And that allows us to begin to build some guidance [00:48:00] around. There's lots of questions you think about the first time you bought your home, if you, if you're lucky in a really good real estate agent. She or he might have said, you know, for, 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 helped me boil the ocean and help me focus on the things that matter most.

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 fricking audit everything in this book, I guess. But anyway, so the information audit like, and it turns out that audit is simply sit down and 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 it wrote called Sense Making for Sales, which some of you might have bumped into, and it's the same idea. When Brian saw that work initially, he, he did an information audit.

He had his sellers actually go out and sit down with customers. Say, what information did you encounter? What, 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 [00:49:00] 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. 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? Uh, and so the, and then he started thinking about it and he said, well, actually.

One, it's gonna take 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 everyone's heard of. It's going back to your brand point. Drew, this is where brand actually he was. He was challenged with that.

So you know what he did? He decided we're not gonna build a video series. Because there's already a video series and our customers are already watching it, so let's use that. So we trained the sellers to actually go out and not run away from the problem, but run right at it, [00:50:00] which is to say, sit down with customers and say, Hey, have you seen this video series from this other company?

'cause if you haven't, you're gonna 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 that tends not to answer that are gonna 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 it's 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, a teacher's guide or a cheat code to consuming content. It's kinda 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, from the competitors, which I can't stop anyway. But I've guided you, I helped you, not just a way that leads back to me, hopefully, but more importantly, it's gonna just make it easier for you just to make a decision.

It's like, oh, I now, I actually, I'm looking at all this stuff. It actually starts to repeat. I, now I know which questions the matter most. This feels, I'm so glad I talked to Drew, because that was really helpful, that's how we think about it.

I think the word, the thing that comes to mind is you reframed it.

Mm-hmm. You took their goodness and you [00:51:00] reframed it.

That's, you know, uh, 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's, 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? Yeah. It's a, it's a subset of framing.

No, that's fine. It's, yeah. No need to get hung, hung up on that. Agree, totally agree. We are running outta time.

Already. Oh my god.

I know, I know.

It goes fast. Uh, 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, I better not use reframe to help sales frame, their, their pursuits more effectively.

I, I think so much of the opportunity for marketing is around this established portion, which is.

So I'll make it a little bit more concrete, but at the highest level is, is to, is to determine where are customers [00:52:00] likely to get stuck. So if, if buying is long, hard, frustrating, awful landmine, 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, then how do I figure out what specifically about implementation? Then I can go out. Once I diagnose that, then I can go out and find other companies that have overcome those. Obstacles and use that as a basis of my coaching. And she, and then package that as coaching, either again, through digital, through content.

You again, you might have a buying guide or something like that. This is an old, it was Marketo that built the original, marketing automation buying guide. This is way back when. and this is a great example of that, right? That was a while ago. Now I wasn't. 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. Um, the customer testimonial idea, I think is a really practical one. Sit down and talk to a couple customers who have 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 with your social proof is leaning into social proof and, and, and leaning [00:53:00] into so, 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, so powerful, which is in working with other customers like you, maybe we've learned this, what we've learned this in working with them. So it's, take yourself out of the expert position and look across your content.

You're gonna find all sorts of places in all of your language and messaging where you've positioned yourself as the expert rather position yourself as a co-learner who's providing access to social proof. And I think you're gonna find that's a really powerful thing to do.

I have a recommendation for everybody listening.

create a GPT that is, that has this perspective. Run all your content through it and see how much of it is you centric versus, this frame that, uh, 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 [00:54:00] appreciate trying to get at. I'm gonna use buyer journey. Yeah. Issues. Uh, 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. They're the hottest brand in their, in their segment. and it's funny they talked about that and make it snow as well, is that, oh, we can help the customer. Their big problem is they're thinking ahead to implementation. And as you started this conversation, the CRM implementation is horrible. How are we gonna 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 guy. A hundred percent, right? Yep. Particularly software.

That's exactly. Alright. So we unpack all this in the book, in, in the workshops we've built and delivered for sales and now for marketing, we're building, uh, we unpack this in a lot more detail.

I love it. Alright, well, thanks for bringing the hate, Brent. did you say the hate or the heat? I [00:55:00] didn't bring any hate.

Okay. The hate. No hate. Well, a little hate on brand, but we resolve that.

No, no. I bring the love man.

Love, love for brand. Good. Yeah. Uh, 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. 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 and see, well huddles our goal, our two word business plan is help hustlers. So that's one of the ways we do it. We bring in bestselling authors and wonderful people like Brent.

Brent. Thank you. Uh, the book is the Framework, your Sale People, the Making. Frame making sale. Where can people find you?

I, 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 the frame making sale.com and we also have a frame making sale, YouTube channel.

So, uh, lots of different places, but LinkedIn's place to find me.

If you're a B2B CMO, and you wanna hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring and [00:56:00] daring cmos@cmohuddles.com. Renegade Marketers United is written and directed by Drew Nier. Hey, that's me. This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkin, and Eschar Cuevas.

The music is by the Amazing Burns Twins, and the intro voiceover is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests and learn more about CMO Huddles or my CMO coaching service. Please visit renegade marketing.com. I'm your host, drew Nier. Until next time, keep those Renegade marketing caps on and strong.

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!