Hey everyone, what's going on? Welcome to Stacking Growth. I am your host, just for today, Matthew Schnellas, Senior Director of Demand Gen at Refined Labs. And I'm really excited to have a Refined alum, my old podcast partner, ML partner in crime, on my original content escapades on LinkedIn, MJ Smith.
What's going on, MJ? I was almost going to call you MJ Peters, but I know you now go by MJ Smith. What's going on? How are you doing?
I'm doing awesome. Yeah. There's been a name change since the last time we recorded a podcast together, I suppose. Yeah, I spent a lot of changes as we last recorded a podcast together.
For those who do not know, you should. But MJ is the CMO of Colab, which has got to be one of the leading design collaboration softwares for value engineering that exists, selling into scores of enterprise companies, like Ford, the Schneider Electric, I believe as well, et cetera. So Colab has got an incredible roster of clients. And MJ has been basically leading the helm on marketing at Colab since Colab decided to really take marketing very seriously.
And I think the results pretty much speak for themselves. You can just add to Adam, their CEO. So I wanted to bring MJ on the show today, because MJ recently revisited the strategic narrative for Colab. And while I've seen lots of LinkedIn post podcasts, webinars, content pieces in general, pontificating on crafting a strategic narrative, I've really not yet heard someone talk about the factors and the decision making process that go into revisiting your strategic narrative after launching an initial one that was successful, not even that long ago.
So I wanted to bring MJ in to talk about the factors that went into revisiting the strategic narrative, the initiation process, like what were the triggers, and then sort of just walk through that whole process to their end result, which MJ was kind of to share with me five minutes before the podcast. So MJ, welcome to the show. And let's just dive right into it. I mean, if you're down for that.
Yeah, let's do it. OK, all right. So first I just want to ask, just let's just take a whole step back and why even revisit the strategic narrative for Colab in the first place? Because you were the one who crafted the first one with Adam and the rest of the team.
So what was the trigger? What made you decide to do this? Yeah, I think you could say that we've done this three times since I started. And I've been at the company for two years.
So I think it's really common for a new marketing leader to be asked like, we need to do the company story or the brand story. And I think company story, brand story, strategic narrative, whatever you want to call it, there's many different formats. And so I think a lot of people are just not quite sure where to start. And it's a really complex project, especially if you're new to the company and haven't had much time to digest all that there is to digest in terms of the many ways you could talk about your products starting from a nice late.
So I will say we started with a company story that maybe isn't a strategic narrative in the anti-rascan sense of the word. But it was basically our first attempt at a fairly comprehensive sales deck that kind of started with the problem, the solution where this shows up in our customers day-to-day lives and how that informs how we build technology and then some social proof. So we built the first iteration of that deck, and we launched a new home page. That was all within maybe four or five months of me starting, like Colab.
And I think that was great for the time. I think it's all a couple of problems for us. Number one is there's a piece of enterprise technology that nearly all of our customers use called product life cycle management software. And people were confused how Colab was different from product life cycle management software.
We really needed to clarify the positioning there, where Colab is supposed to be used with or as a compliment to PLM and not instead of it. So we accomplished that with the first iteration of the company story. The other thing that we accomplished with that first iteration was this orientation around use cases, jobs to be done. So we started talking about Colab, not just in terms of what the technology could do or what the brand stands for, but also practically what does the before and after look like in terms of the customer's business processes, design review, value engineering you mentioned at the top of the call and supplier collaboration.
So we did all of that and that worked really well for us for a very long time. Then we started engaging more high level execs in the sales process. And I think when you engage in execs, certainly from the point of view of being an exec myself, it's really easy for the messaging to creep into just being surface level. Because at the end of the day, all execs care about the same things.
They care about make money, save money, deliver the company strategy. And there's all a million vendors out there that'll just be like, our product helps you make more money. Our product helps you save money. And that just becomes a chorus of the sameness.
And so I think to really break through to execs and we started to really need to equip our sales reps in particular to do this, you have to connect the dots from those high level goals that are very much their goals via a unique perspective or point of view on how the market is shifting and how they need to respond all the way down to what your product and technology does. So the second iteration of the strategic narrative was really more with that role in mind. We really used Andy Raskin's framework. We actually used a different framework that was not his framework first.
And I think what we ended up with in that first revision, which we didn't really roll out to the company. So we'll call that like 1A or 2A or whatever you wanna call it, was something that was like a little bit still stuck in that like differentiation, how are we different than PLM? It was very much like other technology centric. And then when we finally like broke through and solved those last couple of issues, we got to this story that was really about like the shift in the customer's world and not any other technology.
And so I think we actually did a great job in the end, but it took us a long time to really apply that framework in a way that makes sense and resonates. And I think Andy Raskin himself talks about how like, it's really hard to answer the five questions that he asks in his framework. So that was a bit of a ramble, but I'm sure there's plenty of tangents we can go off of based on that. Yeah, I kind of wanna start with first off, you said you did the first narrative and it wasn't really necessarily one that got rolled out to the company and my guess is it, did it get more sort of injected into the sales narrative and the discovery call process and then the senior leadership level before and didn't end up getting injected all the way through the rest of the org.
So the first narrative was rolled out to everyone. So it was rolled out on the website, what sales deck and that's the one that was kind of like differentiation in use cases. The second narrative was like an attempt at that executive compelling like connect all the dots version of the story. And it never really made it past like the three page narrative doc which is like my first output from a narrative workshop when I do this process.
And I think it's just because I felt like it wasn't quite there. And I was like, we need another turn on this before I'm gonna be ready to like put my full reputation behind it honestly. I wrote on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago about like how we launched this narrative. And I stood up in front of the whole company and said this is the most important messaging project I've done in my entire career.
And the first draft that went that two A version, which is not something I was ready to stand behind. And it took me a couple more weeks, a couple more months. I actually saw Andy Raskin speak during that time. Maybe that unblocked me a little bit.
And then finally, I saw him speak and then I got on the plane home and I wrote the entire draft of the narrative that ended up being really good. So I don't know, maybe he inspired me, but it ended up being one that we fine tuned and then rolled out as a company. Gotcha. So it sounds like you're actually the one who initiated this most current version that you all did.
I was wondering who initiates the messaging refresh whether it's just something where you felt it wasn't quite there to your liking or maybe it's something that Adam, your CEO, felt as well and you both agreed on. But I'm curious about that initiation. It sounds like it was just sort of epiphany almost when you heard Andy talk about it in more detail and just decided that this is the unblocked. I needed to get this thing to the level where I could stand behind it.
But it sounds like even from version one to one point one to two, which is I guess what you're at right now, it's more of an evolution, not necessarily reimagining your narrative, but just continuing to as you said, turn the wheel until you find yourself in a place where you feel you can really stand behind and it can become your siren out to your market. Yeah, I do think at one point Adam did say, like we need to do another turn on the top level messaging and we made it an OKR I think in one of these quarters, which is what spurred me to run the first workshop and do the first draft that I was only semi happy with. And so I think this is actually, I mean, in some ways I think this is good in this part of the process. Like you might need to write a first draft that you're not totally happy with and like have another conversation and search for these like core ideas that ultimately form the narrative in order to ultimately arrive at something you're super happy with.
So I think it was an OKR like maybe in Q2 or Q3 of last year, but we didn't end up shipping like the version that I'm super happy with and really rolling it out to the whole team until Q4. It feels like it's a fuel thing for you. Was there anything plateauing demands on the use on the performance metrics? I was also giving you this inkling or so it just was it much more qualitative for you?
It was pretty qualitative. I think the two drivers were engaging with the executives on calls noticing that Adam just had a very compelling challenger sales narrative that he sort of just like naturally started piecing together through talking to customers. And so a lot of it was basically how you reverse engineer and stitch together all of the stuff that Adam already says that customers respond to. Because a lot of times the narrative is just the clearest articulation of the CEO's vision.
And so it was at sales piece and seeing kind of the gap between what was like scaled messaging in the company and like Adam's bleeding edge visionary messaging, we needed to close the gap there. And same thing with the product, right? Like the product is also often a reflection of the co-founders vision, right? And so the product was evolving rapidly in line with this vision and the messaging needed a refresh in order to really catch up with the value of the product.
Yeah, you mentioned the messaging it creeped into being surface level once you got to the executive level. Like what were aspects of it that were kind of creeping into being surface level from your observation that made you know or feel it was not enough? Yeah, I mean, like in manufacturing or in engineering and new product development within manufacturing, people want to collapse time to market, right? They want to deliver new products.
Faster, they want to deliver products like on spec, on margin, on time, you know, they want to succeed in launching transformational technologies, right? And you can tell an exec, like, oh, our product will help you do that. But if you don't have like a compelling reason why that an exec like, you know, is actually compelled to listen to you and says, wow, actually, these ideas are really interesting and I never thought about this before in this light, then it's going to be really hard to convince them to make a bet on you versus any other of the many technology companies that all claim that they can improve your time to market, where they can help you, you know, launch projects that are at the right margin or improve quality or what have you. Just saying those things is not enough because everybody, it's not hard to figure out that that's what execs care about.
It's hard to articulate a vision that makes execs stop and think like, actually, this company might understand something or might be building something that's transformational. I'm going to revisit that whole piece right there in a minute because I don't want to jump too far ahead because I wanted to go into one thing you had mentioned was about just the revision process. You said it was like two dozen revisions. I'm curious about how that process works, how intense are these revisions.
Is it like, let's slam this on a work dock, let's put the members of the team that we want to have input from on there, give me a sense of like what the revision process looks like once you put, you know, pen to paper, ink to word doc or whatever. Yeah, so the way that I do this is kind of the way that I do all projects, which is a lot of marketing, the highest levels of the organization, product marketing, strategic marketing, you need to like deliberately force there to be an output, you know? And so otherwise it's easy to just keep talking about ideas and I call this the shift from divergent to convergent thinking. So in order to do this well, you need to start with divergent thinking, you know, this is like your workshop, your strategic narrative workshop with the leaders on your team.
You need to get all the ideas out on the table and people are going to think differently, right? They're going to pull in different directions and that's fine. It's actually that's a lot easier than going from that wide, like lots of ideas, lots of angles, lots of value props and then consolidating back and finding agreement in that like single stream of thought. And I think forcing yourself to have an output forces you to shift from divergent to convergent thinking.
I think a lot of projects like this is all out because companies just never make the shift and never force those conversations. This is such a great point. The diversion that convergent has almost its own sort of topic in and of itself because like it's very natural, everyone has a different vantage point into the company at a senior leadership level. They talk to different parts of the market, there's different stakeholders involved, they understand the product differently and the value differently.
So they're going to bring their own sort of unique perspective to it and it's not always going to mesh with sort of how you envision that project going in the first place or maybe what the CEO's thinking. So inviting, it's almost like inviting conflict in some way but it's like friendly conflict in order to get to a level set understanding which I think is fantastic. I guess the one worry that would exist is like the concern that maybe it would get homogenized a little bit. So how do you go from divergent to convergent and then still craft something that you think is not overly diluted because you're trying to make everybody happy?
Yeah, I actually think that most of the conflict doesn't happen in a divergent phase because everyone feels like they're being heard. It happens in the transition from divergent to convergent because at that point you need to throw out some of the ideas or else it's going to be like a mishmash of just everything. It's going to be a homogenous group think kind of lens on it, or you're just never going to choose a lane. What I like to do is you do this divergent thinking you do the workshop, you get all of people's ideas and their vantage points down income, some kind of brainstorming format, we use Big Jam, digital whiteboard tool.
And then I will take away these ideas and I'll write a two page version of the narrative like four different ways as fast as I can. And every, it's like just a short essay basically, right? And as with any short essay, right? Like you kind of end up with a point of view, right?
You can take the same, you know, 25 thoughts, ideas, pieces of information and rearrange them in certain ways and talk about them through certain lenses and you will end up with, whether it's two, three, four, whatever, very different versions of all the same ideas. And then you put them back in front of the group, like which ones do we like, which ones do we not like? And what you hope happens is the group starts to converge on one of them. What can happen is like the groups what's in half and one feels very strongly about one way and the other feels very strongly about another way.
But those are good conversations to have, right? You should be forcing the attention and that conflict to like which lane do we pick out of possibly two very compelling options. So how did this end up playing out for you when you were doing this for, oh, having this most recent iteration? I mean, did you, I mean, it doesn't sound like you created a couple of different variations here.
It sounded like you had a pretty, pretty clear idea of where you wanted to take it. I'm curious like, did you just kind of start with one and then we work from there? Or is it like, no, I still created a couple of different versions that have to have like just a menu of options essentially? Yeah, I'd help the friend do his strategic narrative for his company.
Also like last summer, just in like a day or two, we did the whole thing. And we ended up with several different versions and the group all gravitated towards one. So that's an example of where you can timebox this and that kind of effect can happen. Colab, we, as I kind of mentioned in a very rambling way at the top of this call, Colab went through this process several times.
Like we kind of evolved the company story several times. And I think each time we came up with something that we were like, oh my God, that's like a breakthrough amazing idea. And I think you, when you were kind of browsing through this strategic narrative before the call, you're like, I can see some of the stuff that I've been seeing all along, right? And so we kept those ideas.
They were validated, people love them. And so for us, it was more about like filling in the blanks. And yet Piphany was really about like the last couple of blanks that we had never fully come up with the great idea for. And once we filled in those last couple of blanks, we had a whole story flowed really well.
So an example of that, and Andy Rassen talked about this a lot, is the first part of his framework is name the shift that is happening in the world. And we try to name so many shifts, right? And I think for a long time, we're working specifically enough. So for a really long time, we would say products are becoming more complex.
And that's the shift in the world. But I think the problem with that is that like you could argue that many technologies solve for that shift of products becoming more complex, including product management systems, which is the other big enterprise piece of software that our customers all have. So is that the right shift to name for Colab, if it's not only Colab and Sol for it. And my feeling was no.
But we were on the right track with that. So what ultimately was one of the epiphanies, I would say there was two epiphanies that resulted in the end narrative. One of the epiphanies was it's not just the product complexity. It's the fact that as a result of product complexity, these companies need bigger teams of experts where every person on the team is now more specialized than they used to be before.
So the price really complex, so now you need someone who's an expert in mechatronics in order to be able to make the right decision before you decide the mechanical and the electrical person, right? And so as a result of that, you might have a design review now that has 20 people in it. Whereas 15 years ago, you designed what you've had four people in it. And so actually how you manage that conversation, how you conduct that review, how you track all of the issues that happen as a result of that review becomes exponentially harder and more complex.
And if you're jamming all of that complexity and all of those people's expertise into the same outdated systems that was used 15 years and 16 people ago, you're gonna have stuff looking through the cracks and you're gonna have just cycles that extend out super long. So the missing link there was the fact that it's not just complexity, but it's the knock-on effective complexity of more people needing to be consulted as subject matter experts in a product development process. Yeah, I love that because you're talking a lot about like here's a known fact and known known. We all know things are more complex.
What's the consequence of that? And then how do we invariably fit into the consequence of this state of things, this shift? So that's all just about to me going deeper than the surface in terms of the thinking, to kind of come to that sort of epiphany and then realize how you distinguish and are distinct in that landscape. Because like you said, lots of products can solve for products are more complex.
There's a bunch of different products adjacent and even unrelated to what Colab does, that could say we solve for that. But in the sense of like these review teams are much bigger, there's much more feedback. There is a need to make this more simplified, streamlined and visible. That is something that we're very uniquely qualified to solve for that not many others can.
That's awesome. I didn't want to ask about the main sources of revision because I think there's always a conversation about, and I always think on the subject matter, sort of the team, the sides of the team, kind of what the workshop looks like. But who are the main sources of revision in the feedback? Like who do you caucus with when you guys are disusing this strategic narrative refresh?
Who are the main stakeholders involved and kind of whose feedback really gets considered in that process? So in the development of it, Adam is the main stakeholder. And then myself, Jeremy and Taylor, it would be just like the next group. So the four of us work closely on it together.
What are those people sitting in the org just like positionally speaking operations, engineering? Yeah, Jeremy is the other co-founder in the CTO. And Taylor is the chief strategy officer, who's almost like third co-founder. She's been there since the beginning.
She currently also runs the success org. And I think we get a really well-rounded point of view. Taylor obviously works with customers day in and day out. Adam works with a lot of big customers.
He's also currently running sales and is the visionary. Jeremy, and I think Jeremy had treated back and forth in terms of who's been the visionary at different times. So Jeremy is definitely owns a lot of the product vision as well. And obviously, runs the product work.
So between those four people. And I'm just trying to make sure that ideas come through clearly. Gotcha. So I talked a little bit about like time-boxing this.
And you said you had one example where you did it. And like just a couple of days, do you put a time box on yourself? Or like, we're going to start this project, and we have to have it finished by an X amount of time? Or is it like, we just have to organically let this play out.
And so we get to a state where we're extremely happy with it. We can all stand behind it and we can get the entire org on board. Like, how do you sort of manage the, I guess, the need to update it with like getting it right and wanting to get it rolled out quickly, you know? I think there's an argument both ways.
I think time-boxing it forces you to shift from divergent into convergent thinking. And I think it's really easy to just get stuck at the pivot point between divergent and convergent if you don't time-box it. At the same time, we, like I had to step away from this project and get a little breathing room in order to have those last couple of pippinines that allowed us to create a narrative that doesn't have holes in it. And that is applicable to our business and not every business solving any problem for an engineering or an engineering or an manufacturing company.
So I think there's a balance. But I think probably most teams would benefit more from deliberately time-boxing it. And then rely, like time-boxing it to the extent that you can. And then if you realize, hey, I really need to step away from this, you should get yourself self-space to do that.
But I think most teams fall into the trap of not time-boxing, more than the trap of over time-boxing. Interesting. You said you had to take a step back to just feel you were too deep into it. You were just hitting a rock there in terms of your thought process or was it just, you know, there was just too much feedback going in and you just needed to take a step back from that.
What was the impetus? Yeah, I think there was like one or two gaps still remaining in the story. I could sense like kind of what they were, but I didn't have the answer quite yet. One of them is like, I felt the shift was too broad.
I knew we were on the right track with the complexity piece, but I felt the shift was too broad. And there, like when it comes to ideas like that, sometimes you can't just wheel yourself to come up with it. So I took a step back. I worked with some other things.
And I think that is probably part of what allowed me to ultimately get unblocked and come up with these last couple of concepts that stitch it all together. Gotcha. So when you finish this, you have this drafted, you go through the revision process. You all are super happy with it.
Even before the rollout, do you do anything? I know you're a huge advocate for having a customer advisory board, for instance, and I'm sure you all have one at Collab is, do you solicit feedback from that group of people? Do you do any kind of battle testing before you roll it out? Or is it just a feeling amongst the leadership team that this is ready and we should roll it out?
Do you do any kind of gut check on yourselves before invariably having this become your new strategic narrative and your battle cry? Yeah, I think this has been an interesting project to own and go through over the last 12 to 18 months because as you alluded to, I definitely cut my teeth on customer research. Yes, I think I'm talented. For sure.
And I actually think the narrative is often stronger if there are some ideas that didn't come from the customer. Like they need to come from a customer need, but it's the Henry Ford, they would have asked me for a faster course thing, right? Like the founder often has a really compelling vision that other people just can't see, right? And I actually think one of the most powerful functions of a good strategic narrative is stitching together that story in a really compelling way that helps other people see it, right?
And so I think there are elements that are validated, right? Like we knew that customers believe that product complexity is getting higher, right? But we, customers weren't telling us, oh, and there's a lot more people in the meetings, but then when we pointed that out, they're like, oh, yeah, actually you're right. Like that's weird, right?
It's like, and then we pointed that out, and we pointed out the connection between that and the fact that more errors feel like they're slipping through the cracks. Like it takes really a lot of thought and a lot of vision to connect those seemingly unconnected or disconnected ideas together. And I think that is part of the genius of the strategic narrative. So I would, if you're just starting this project from scratch, look in a couple of places, I would look at like what do the customers say over and over again?
What do they love about your product? What did your product solve for them? But I would also look at like, what are the things that your founder says that are sort of like provocative on sales calls that always seem to land? And then try to stitch all of those ideas together.
You're gonna end up with like 25 ideas in both of those two buckets. Like pain points, customers, the reason they love your product, pain points for products for, and provocative things that your CEO constantly says that land. It's gonna be a lot of disparate ideas. And that's why I think this is a hard project.
Like what's the common thread between those? And as I mentioned earlier, sometimes there's like 15 different ways to arrange the common thread, right? You could break this narrative a bunch of different times. Like what's the correct way, right?
So I mean, I guess the answer is there really is no, maybe there is a correct way, but I mean, I'm losing my own chain of thought as I think about this now you just broke my brain. So I mean, how do you settle on the correct way just knowing you have one thread of customer pain points and other thread of like provocative, aha moments that occur organically in sales calls and like, where do you kind of mesh those two together? I mean, it comes down to like that, where acting those different narratives, I guess, and then converging on one. And I suppose that process ends up creating something magical for you guys.
Oh, I thought entirely there. Well, like, I actually hate giving this as the answer because you know me. I'm like practical, process driven, like you can reverse engineer anything, but at a certain point when you're at this level of messaging, I do think there's like a little bit of an art to storytelling, right? And I do think some people naturally are good storytellers in that they have that spidey sense that I was talking about earlier that something's not quite right, or like we haven't gotten to the right level of detail on this or there's still a gap in the plot, you know?
And I think like collectively as a group, if you're all gravitating towards one of the lenses of a strategic narrative, it's probably because it's the one that has the fewest plot gaps that really, you know, stitches things together in a way that is storytelling. And at the end of the day, like the human brain responds to stories, there are certain patterns across stories that help make complex information really digestible. And so the difference between one way of stitching things together and the other, I think is just the art and the skill of storytelling. Absolutely.
I want to circle back now to the engaging the more execs and that sort of gap because it feels like it could spot to bring that back in, knowing that I want to talk about the rollout and sort of the difficulty you had with that initially. So you mentioned that there were, you all were saying things and it just wasn't quite enough and you had to change the way you were articulating, I guess, the problem. Can you shed some light a little bit on that initial big strategic narrative one, the second iteration you did where you really worked it? And then you noticed you were not saying enough or there was something that was missing as you were engaging with more execs and you had to take this thing to a new iteration in order to find that.
Can you give a little bit of insight into like what we weren't saying then that we are saying now that ultimately was getting execs more on board and understanding how you all fit into their fit into their solution separate engineering and product rollout? Yeah, I think it's like how do you make a really compelling case that by investing in how you do design review and the qualities of your design review, the quality of your design reviews, is the most important factor that ultimately drives all the downstream metrics that engineering leaders and manufacturing leaders really care about. So one of the strategic ideas or unlocks as part of this narrative process was this idea that engineering excellence upstream drives manufacturing excellence downstream. So all kinds of manufacturing leaders are looking for obsessing over six single quality all day, right?
Like you don't want warranty claims because warranty claims hurt your gross margins. And we have low gross margins, you don't have money to invest back in the next generation of the product. And if your competitor has the opposite story where they've got great quality and customer trust and warranty claims and excess cash flow to reinvest and innovate like the difference between that first company and that second company is gonna compound over time. And so this is one of the key ideas in our narrative is that, hey, if you catch these little issues that are slipping through the cracks in design reviews, that's ultimately gonna result in design quality, which is ultimately gonna drive product quality, which is ultimately gonna compound into huge performance differences for the company.
And we needed to enable every sales rep in the company to be able to speak to that, right? And really connect the dots between these things that are showing up in an annual report and the things that CoLab solves for. And I think a lot of people on LinkedIn let's talk about business acumen as being something that's really important for sales reps. And I think like it's super admirable that sales reps feel like they need to go out and develop that business acumen, but gosh, that's a hard thing to do all on their own, right?
And so I think having a really compelling strategic narrative that connects the dots like that and then training the sales team on it is one way that you can scale business acumen across your entire sales team. Yeah, it's especially hard when a sales rep is coming into selling to an ICP that they've really not had a ton of exposure to. I mean, you're talking about selling to a lot of engineering directors or VPs of engineering where the business acumen require there is, it's a different kind of vantage point at the camera when we talked about vantage points earlier and how people kind of come in and see value and for a sales rep coming into that, that's definitely something to a consideration. So.
And some of the time sales reps do just literally go out and figure out their own business acumen, which is freaking awesome, like those people you want in your company. But I mean, at the same time, it's like they've got a full time job, just like selling the thing, right? And so I don't think it makes sense for the company to expect a sales rep to take it upon themselves to like study the industry and develop business acumen. Like I think you need to help your sales reps get there, you know, help them help you basically.
Yeah, 100%. So I want to get into rollout because you talked about this and you're linked in post. I thought this was maybe one of the most interesting things because it sounds like, you know, your new narrative, it wasn't this huge departure from your last narrative, it was very much a refined one and your sales team was struggling a little bit initially with it. So what was the initial reaction with sales when you rolled this new narrative out?
Like do they sort of struggle to comprehend it? Did they get it, but they didn't know how to articulate it? Like give me a sense of what the reaction was. Cause obviously the biggest stakeholder internally, I suppose, besides the senior leadership team is going to be the sales team that's going to go out and present this narrative and help it resonate with people who have maybe not been explosive at before.
So I'm curious about initial reaction and then what happened once it actually was getting just tested. Yeah. So I think where your comment is coming from is that part of my post where I wrote about like the awkward face. Yes.
Exactly. So one of the things that I said when we launched this messaging is, you know, this is one of the most important pieces of messaging work I've ever done in my career. And you know, we put all this time and effort into it, but what happens next is not really up to me, right? It's up to everyone in the company.
And what I'm about to ask you to do is go through like a very awkward transition of, you know, old messaging that you're comfortable with that has landed like at least some of the time you're closing a lot of deals on the old messaging and rip it out and try something new that probably for the first couple of attempts is gonna feel worse, right? Because you're not comfortable with it yet. You haven't delivered it a bunch of times you haven't closed deals with it yet. And I acknowledge that just from a place of like, I've seen this happen before.
It's really hard to make new messaging stick. And so I felt like just being upfront, like, hey, I know I'm asking you to do something hard is important. But actually, I don't think that our sales team struggled with this nearly as much as a lot of sales teams when they have to launch new messaging might because inherent, and that's not a comment about sales teams. That's just like launching a messaging is really hard.
I think there was first of all, there's a pull from them. Like they were like, I want like, tell me how to connect all the dots in a way that is like consistent compelling where I can like have these executive level conversations because they wanted to have those executive level conversations. So that was awesome. Cause I think people were motivated to try it.
The interesting thing about the rollout was like, we had we have like five or six slides. That's our strategic area to be turned into five or six slides with sales team. And every slide communicates like one or two points. And interestingly, like every rep was really good at one, you know, one or two of the slides and like had one that they always stumbled over, but it was different for every rep.
So what we did was like maybe five or six weeks in, we just cross pollinated like, oh, like this one's really hard for this person, but like just watch this other person do it. And it was like an epiphany moment for them like, oh, oh, that sounds great. Like I can, you know, I can put my own spin on it and pitch it that way. And I've now seen somebody else on my team do this live on a customer call like I can do that.
And so we were just basically like filling in the gaps by showing people how others were being successful with various parts of the narrative. Awesome. Man, that was a, that's tactically, it seems like a really effective way to do it. And definitely, I mean, you have a pretty small sales team too.
So it was probably fairly straightforward and simple to actually end up doing that kind of cross foundation to get everyone on the same page. So let me just ask like, how's the narrative doing now in your opinion? Like what is this evolution doing for you all as a company? What is reaction like?
How is it landing at the moment compared to how it was landing before? I think it's landing well. We, it's, it just allows us to explain the technology and elevate it to a place where like it's really strategic priority for people. I will also say, I think so in sales and having the desired effect, I will also say it's had effects that we didn't initially plan for or predict.
You're talking a little bit about this at the beginning in the prep for the episode. One thing that's been really interesting is like, it's so fast and easy to write like a long form landing page or a long form sales page for a demand-gen campaign because we basically decide what's going to be the hook, right? Maybe the hook is product quality. We want to hook people that are product quality stopping length of them.
Okay. How do we basically the point of the sales pages, you know, connect Colab and what it does to this objective of product quality? Like you don't have to think that hard about that. It's in that narrative document.
And so you have like all these long form sales pages that are versions of our strategic narrative that are just angled different ways with different hooks. I think Obed and Todd do a good job talking about this in their realm of relevancy. So I think you have a strong narrative. Like it just feeds your demand-gen machine and feeds your content machine.
And I guess in retrospect, like that should have been obvious. But like there's been a real effect there, even though the initial impetus to do the project was kind of sales driven. Yeah. I want to give people like a sense of like what this narrative is.
I mean, this is not like, you know, just a couple of paragraphs. This is hundreds of words, if not maybe closely with Aosin, where you're kind of going through it. So the ability to go through a narrative of that level of detail that really is holistic in terms of your POV of the world that you're selling into and basically creating a product for. I mean, if you have that kind of breadth and depth, it makes it very easy to figure out angles and hooks, as you would say, to go into for content ideas, updating website messaging, you know, helping with FlexEx for the sales team, all those sorts of aspects.
So just to get people a sense of like the narrative and like how long should it be, like how much detail? It's like you're writing something of substance here. This is not simply a couple of paragraphs and then you're off and running. Yeah.
It's interesting. I think in, I don't know, the late 90s, early 2000s, like this idea of like a white paper, that like a white paper that started at all. I think it was like pretty popular. Like I mean, the Bitcoin white paper is probably a good example of this.
Like that's basically what this is, is a white paper. Basically talking about like, why this technology is necessary and the vision for the technology. Like I think in a lot of ways, you could like a really, really transformational technology, white paper is basically another flavor of a strategic narrative. So I don't know if that would help people to think of it that way, but that's what I use as the first output.
And of course we translate it into into a day. And you also, I mean, you inject data into it. You have a survey that you cite here within it to help give some statistical relevance to the narrative and obviously plenty of social proof. So it's not simply just lubiating all the time.
You obviously come from a very well-formed place. You support it with whatever sorts of data points that you, I assume you source those yourself in order to help reaffirm the narrative. And then plenty of social proof from successful use cases that you've had. Look, I mean, MJ, you're one of my dear, dear professional friends.
I always love having you on any format at the top, whether that's here or otherwise. So any parting thoughts for people who are, let's just talk about just wanting to get a student out of the ground or they're inheriting one and they want to evolve it. Like just any sort of parting words of wisdom for people listening to this, being inspired by you and wanting to essentially try to endeavor something like this for themselves. Yeah, I think this is really hard.
Yeah. The first CEO I ever worked for, I had a phone call with her like four weeks before I started the job. It was in the home rotation program. So I basically was choosing between a number of projects at this company and I got on the phone with her and they had like eight projects, but she said, don't do marketing, it's too hard.
And I think about that all the time I didn't do marketing. I went and did manufacturing engineering, which was really not hard. I don't know. But I think about that a lot.
I'm like, why did she say the marketing was too hard? And in retrospect, I think it's because as the CEO, her perception of marketing is that it's like, it's the brand, it's the narrative, it's the company story. And like a fresh out of college person is not gonna write the narrative in the company story. So her version of marketing was only the hardest parts about marketing.
And so I don't think you should feel discouraged if this feels really hard. And I don't think you should give it to someone in your company to own who's not capable of owning like really, really hard things. I personally don't think I was at a point in my career to own a project like this until like the last two years. If you're hearing about strategic narrative, but maybe you're in like a mid-senior role or even like an entry level role, you're just consuming this podcast because you're eager to learn.
I think what I might suggest, even though I believe deeply in this is like there are other types of messaging that you might wanna take on first, right? Where you can make a more immediate impact and cut your teeth. Like I'm really glad that I spent a lot of time on customer research and building value props and like writing about features and benefits through the lens of like the customer pain points they solve for. Like all of those things, I think are repetitions that you can get in that'll build that storytelling muscle, that'll build that messaging and positioning muscle so that you can eventually take on a big project like this in the future.
For sure. All right, MJ, thanks so much for being on second growth. Refine alum, amazing CMO, co-labs and awesome company, tremendous job with narrative in and of itself. And yeah, we'll see you around.
Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.