Building Better Tech Messaging with Joel Benge

Overview:

In this episode of Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders, host Kerry Guard chats with Joel Benge—founder of Message Specs and creator of the Message Deck Method—about how startups can avoid the costly mistake of rushing into marketing without first defining their messaging. Joel breaks down how message clarity and focus are foundational to building trust, why aligning teams across sales, marketing, and product is essential, and how to uncover brand authenticity without falling back on tired industry tropes. He also shares insights from his background in theater, video games, and federal cybersecurity, and how those experiences uniquely inform his work with technical founders today.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:00

Kerry, hello, I'm Kerry Guard, and welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. And we are glad you are here. I have been waiting, counting down to this conversation, mostly because I am launching many websites, and I want all the juice on how to do this properly and get out in front and get my messaging locked in. So this is like kind of for you all, but mostly a little bit about our guest before we get on in. He's definitely ready to go. I appreciate you. Joel, today's guest, he's not your average messaging strategist. He's a message therapist. Joel Bench is the founder of Message Specs and the creator of the message deck method, a system designed to help technical founders, product teams, and yes, even the engineers, pull the real story out of their heads and into a message the market actually understands. Before he started helping cybersecurity startups and SaaS founders talk like humans. Joel was a theater kid turned video game Help Desk wizard, and then somehow ended up writing comms at Homeland Security. We are going to get the full scoop, and he says, spill all the tea in just a second for this conversation today, we are going to unpack why marketing too soon is one of the biggest mistakes startups make how to differentiate without pretending you are CrowdStrike, even though you're two people in a garage, and what happens when you build your message before your marketing and get the whole team aligned around it? I am so excited. Joel, welcome, welcome, welcome. Oh.

Joel Benge 1:37

Kerry, thank you so much for that introduction. It sounds great. You make me sound really good, so I'm excited.

Kerry Guard 1:43

It's part of my mission of being a good host is to make you look awesome. So I'm glad I am upholding my end of the bargain. Joel, before we get started around the heart of our conversation, I sort of gave people a brief synopsis of your story, but I'd love to know your journey.

Joel Benge 2:00

Sure. So my home planet was destroyed by an astronaut. No, I'm kidding. My background is in theater education and video games. So naturally, I became an IT analyst. I went from a help desk at a video game company to a help desk at NASA and doing, you know, all the things I don't want to help people with their problems. I want to build these computers. I want to build these computers. I want to secure them. So I eventually became a compliance analyst, living day in and day out in Microsoft Excel, and I applied at the Department of Homeland Security. They were hiring cybersecurity people, and they looked at my resume and they said, theater, education, video games. You worked for Nickelodeon for a summer. You were an early podcaster. Do you want to be a communications manager? And they said, What's the difference? And they said, well, communications lives in Word and compliance lives in Excel. And I'm like, I'm a theater school dropout. I do word stuff real good. So I spent six and a half years at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters as the primary Cybersecurity Communications Manager, coordinating all the cyber programming, working with all the different CISOs at the components, writing the memos up to Congress and the Executive Secretariat, or contributing to those memos, and also writing the change your password as frequently as you change your underwear awareness messaging. So had a whole lot of experience communicating laterally and up and down and all the things. And I had an opportunity to join a startup that was actually founded by the same guy who hired me at Homeland and he finished his PhD thesis. He says, I got this, this algorithm. It's based on my thesis. I got some money. I'm going to start a company. He was actually one of the early employees at a company called found stone. So if you know anything about cybersecurity, companies out of found stone, we got CrowdStrike and we got silence and fish. What are they now? CO fence. So all these companies kind of came out of that. And he said, This is my time to start a startup. So I said, That's awesome. What's the product do? And he said, Well, it's a self defending artificial intelligence multi nodal network using the behavior of you social insects. It's an ant swarm algorithm that tells you where you might be hacked next. So I said, we got to work on this messaging a little bit. I came on board of director of comms and marketing very early, and actually invented a card game to explain his thesis in about 40 seconds to use as a sales enablement tool. And that really unlocked something in the way that I realized how we can talk about technology. We showed it off at RSA and ISC Squared. He still uses the cards today at Carnegie Mellon to teach CISOs how to communicate to the board. So when the money ran out, I found a marketing agency right near my house. Our primary customers were. Defense Department, the intelligence community, and cybersecurity startups. So I said, I am helping the same nerds that I used to be do the thing. I don't have to do the things anymore. I just help them talk about the things that they do. And I kept seeing the same mistakes happening over and over and over again. They would come and they would say, we need to do a new website. And you know, I was the content guy, so I would take a look at the website and say, well, we need to sit down and do some messaging first. Well, no, we didn't, you know, and I would be told by the agency, well, we didn't, we didn't really build in time for messaging. So just, just look at them. Look at their competitors. Google what they do, and just like, make the words better. And from that might work, if you're doing consumer product goods, or you're doing a market that doesn't have as savvy as a buyer. But when you're really talking to technologists, you've got to do a lot of work up front. In fact, I call what I do so not, not to lean into the Superman thing too much. I call it what I do, message therapy. So I wear this t shirt around, you know, don't confuse me with a massage therapist. Oh, can you get these on my website?

Kerry Guard 6:11

All right, do it?

Joel Benge 6:12

Yeah, I've got this one on the website. So I decided to take a step out and not do the marketing per se, you know, and really do like the groundwork with clients, get the founder in a room, get the sales and marketing people together and and I accidentally invented a second card game, which is what I use in my in my workshops, to help The Nerds remember how to talk good and and align messaging and marketing and sales. And really, it's about building a platform for your messaging that crosses the company. It crosses, you know, all different strata of audiences as a foundation, as like a player's hand guide to doing your execution, you know, making sure your campaigns are in alignment, and all that type of stuff. So it's been about two years now, this month, I've been doing this for myself, and it's been, it's been a ride. I love what I do.

Kerry Guard 7:12

I think we're all sort of figuring out finally, maybe slowly, but surely, a little bit of both that lead generation the day of just straight up performance marketing was maybe never a thing, or was like a thing for a hot second, but it's not the sustainable thing. And brand is where you need was, where you need to build that credibility and trust to eventually get the lead generation, and we sort of put brand on the back burner, and it's COVID hot and so, yeah, I think this is very, very you're you're primed in terms of your positioning right now, of what we all desperately, desperately need. So we're grateful for you, and your little carta tricks over there that we're gonna dig into in a second. I gotta know Joel in terms of, you know, where you are now and what you're up to. Is there any challenges you're currently facing? Is there anything in your way that's making your job feel maybe a little harder than it used to, or something new? You know, I'd love I have a question. I'm gonna hold what's, what's the challenge for you right now?

Joel Benge 8:23

I think the biggest challenge for me, and forgive me, while I'm a bit of a light flashing back there, I'm trying to figure out how to turn off that is distracting me as a solo business person. It is the distractions, right? But it's the same thing that a lot of companies face, which is, I see this thing over here, and I gotta, I got to do it. I want to go and, you know, tackle this problem that's sitting right in front of me. When you've got a lot of fundamentals that that are that are that are behind, it's almost like tech debt, right? It's almost like messaging debt. We're doing a lot of work. We're building the website as we're flying and you bring an expert in, you know, who can take a holistic look at look at everything, look at the website, look at the socials, look at, you know, your paid and performance and all that type of stuff, and point out, hey, you've got four or five different conflicting messages. You're changing your message from, you know, audience to audience, and that can be confusing, and looking at that holistically, but most of the time, I've got clients coming to me and they're like, I need a new website in six weeks. And I'm like, if anybody can promise you a new website in six weeks, you're going to be redoing it again in another year, because it's not going to have, you know, they say, well, we'll figure out the words later, and words and the messaging are so critical to the information architecture and how this how people experience the site and all those journeys, that if you don't do that up front, you stand to just waste a lot of time. So there really is an investment up front. But a lot of people. I don't think a lot of people appreciate and understand that. So my biggest challenge is maybe evangelizing a little bit, that we do need to spend some time on. We do need to do some message therapy, get everybody in a room. Yes, talk about our fee fees a little bit, even though, even though it's technology, because the, you know, the the major thing that we forget is we're still and I'm tired of the B to B is still B to H, it's still human, like it is a different market, but you are still talking to humans. And so humans have more than intellect. They've got emotion. They've got instinctual things that they feel in their gut. And so what I do is I talk about, you know, the difference between balancing emotion logic this way, emotion logic and credibility. That's a hamburger, because if I put three organs up on one screen, that might be kind of gross, but that's what it is. It reminds people that you can't sell by white paper. You can't shove all the data at somebody, because you're going to overwhelm their brain, right? So you soften their brain a little bit by getting them engaged and excited, and, you know, getting people on board, and then you give them just enough information to not confuse. Don't bring up the ant swarm algorithm because then you have to have a biology conversation. That's one of the things we learned at my startup, right? So that was an impediment to us, but we thought it was the coolest thing, right? And so it's like, I

Kerry Guard 11:33

think you think is cool versus what you're like, thinks is cool too,

Joel Benge 11:37

yeah. And I mean, it's in, it's, it's so true that our sales cycles, you know, don't really tap into what the clients want at the time or the customers want at the time. We're like, like Zach saying here, right? It's like, you've got to understand their whole process and where they are. It's not just, let me show you a cool whiz bang thing now, right, check right and right. And we think it's that cool because we've maybe gaslit and convinced ourselves that our tech is the way, and sometimes we need to understand that there's a lot more involved in those brains and a lot more conflicting constituencies at play.

Kerry Guard 12:20

Yes, definitely. All right, let's get into it, because I think we're all feeling this challenge of knowing we need to do the hard work, but skipping over it because it's too hard, and just doing the pretty stuff because that's easier. So let's talk about what, first of all, what does messaging even mean to you? I feel like we all have different ideas on what messaging could be, and when we say messaging, it feels like a single thing, but the way that you talk about it feels bigger than that. So, how do you see messaging? So

Joel Benge 12:51

I take a philosophical approach to it. So I stole, I'll cop to it. I stole the emotion, logic, and credibility from Aristotle, right? That's pathos, logos, and ethos. And this is, this is, goes back to a philosophical basis. There's another concept that I sort of misappropriated a little bit, but it's the difference between clarity and focus and so, so, you know, again, message specs, I've, you know, I've, I'm wearing these glasses. To me, there's a difference between what I want to say and what I need to say and how I'm going to say it, right? So the clarity of a message to me is maybe it's not as flowery. It doesn't have all the final, final verbiage to it, but it is just a basic understanding across everybody about what is the purpose of this particular message. And so I chunk out with my clients all the different things they want to say, literally get them out of their head onto the table, using the cards so that we can objectively say, now, what is the purpose of this statement? What is the purpose of including this fact? What is the purpose of including this story? So that's understanding the clarity. And then, so if I've got an apple in front of me, right, and it's a perfectly clear apple, and if I had perfect eyesight, and I would look at it, and I would see the Apple as intended. But then you enter focus, and focus is where you take your message, and you look at the situation that it's in, you look at the audience that you're targeting. You look at where they are in their journey. And you have to highlight certain bits of that of that message, so you might use different messaging or different verbiage, right? So that it's really a journey of self-discovery, literally having a toolbox of everything in front of you, what you could say or what you'd want to say, and then being able to make decisions of what we should say and how. And so many people jump straight into the well, the market's using this phrase, and so we've got to use that phrase, or, you know, and we also. Fall into the trap where we're so used to the market trends and tropes and cliches that we we say it without even thinking about it, right? So I've got lots of clients, and I say, Well, what's your big idea? And they'll say, you know, our technology, your success, sounds good, feels good, and then we Google it. I'm like you, and 22,000 other websites are saying the exact same words. But if we peel it back, I would say, you know, that is a partnership message. It's a one plus one equals three. It's maybe a force multiplier. Don't use the word force multiplier. We killed that, you know, in the mid-2000s, but if I understand what you want to say, then what I can do, live, laugh, love, please don'.t Yes, exactly. Don't just say, don't just say, innovation, collaboration, acceleration. I mean, that is literally the live laugh, love of the enterprise, right? But we love it. We're like, Yeah, that makes me feel really good. It's because we've heard it so many times, because we're cavemen, we're creature brains that are just like, that's comfortable to me. I recognize it. I don't have to think too hard about it, right? But what does it mean? Yeah, when my startup, you know, so I have this concept, another card deck that I'm working on, and I kind of tease it in the book that I have coming out of the periodic table of bad B to B, big ideas. And so it would be those things like, you know, we're the global leader. Who cares? Why? Right? We're we we do X, so you can do Y. My favorite is at the speed of business, at the speed of the cloud, at the speed of the mission, at the speed of your customers, at the speed of the cloud. You know, it's like, it means it means nothing. And my startup, you know, and this was again, 2015, we were like, secure, what matters. And to me, that's like, one of the biggest cop outs, because it's like, it's like, the dude, it's like, hey, whatever that means to you, man, I don't really, I don't really know what matters to you. I'm just going to give you a tool. I'm going to put it on you to figure it out. And so it's like, you know, we get wrapped around these axles of these things that feel really comfortable, and sometimes you need somebody to come in, and so your baby looks ugly, but there's something here we can, we can, we can work with

Kerry Guard 17:29

I gotta know, have you ever run into a situation where there was no product, market fit, positioning opportunity, where it was kind of like you, or can you always find a way?

Joel Benge 17:45

I think you can always find a way to spin a story. And I think that's another challenge that we have, like you said, like now we're starting to realize we need to invest in brand. We need to invest in positioning. And there are a lot of people who are trying to force, you know, square pegs into round holes, or whatever the adage is, I think you can, you can tell a story. And, you know, I think we're sick in cyber security, of the big claims and the big promises and that we're going to do everything, and it's like, I think you can always find a way through. I think the challenge is thinking you can bluff your way through, thinking you can act really bombastically. So, you know, to the thing, I have a client. They're a very successful government IT contractor. Now, the challenge is, the guy who brought me in is like, I want to redo this website. I want to do it, you know, for a reasonable amount of money. And I said, Who are your comps? Who should we position you guys as? And he's like, I want to look like CrowdStrike. And I'm like, you got CrowdStrike money, you got CrowdStrike capabilities. You know, it's like, you can't bluff that type of thing. And there are a lot of people out there who, you know, and maybe this is just where we've gotten in the IT industry with private equity and VCs and like that, where we're trying to inflate value. But you know, there are a lot of people out there cosplaying as bigger companies than they are when they should really focus on the one thing that makes them really unique, the one thing that makes them really special, you know? And it's not the people I have this card, which is your unique sauce, and they're like, like, oh, it's our people. And I go, no other companies have people out there. We've got all these companies, you know, and it's like, what is it about them? So you really have to do a little bit of digging. And you can always find something. You can always find an audience. It may not be the audience that you thought you were going after. It may not be as big as you wanted or hoped that it would be, but, you know, it's there. There. Are so many problems out there that I think you can find a product market fit for just about anything, but you can't. You can't start at a product if you start a market.

Kerry Guard 20:11

Okay, so here, if I'm hearing this right, in figuring out your differentiator when dialing in your messaging and going through your process, it sounds like you need to do that first and then identify your audience. Where I feel like people generally do it the other way around.

Joel Benge 20:35

So yeah, I do. I do take a little bit of an inside-out view, right? Because the way I look at it is, if you're chasing, you're chasing an audience that doesn't fit you, or that you can't really service, then what you're going to be doing is basically ambulance chasing. So, for example, if I go to the cards, and again, the basic basics of the cards are, you know, you've got to make somebody like you before they can understand you, before they can trust you, right? And that is the marketing funnel right there for simple executives, right? Get their attention, give them a little bit of information, build trust, and to convert them. So then you've got kind of like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs, of messaging. Everybody's stuck down here at technical details and proof points, but you know, we want to be talking about a big idea story of value. So I'll ask a client. I'll say, Well, what is your big idea? And they'll say, Well, we're a cloud-based identity access management solution. And I say that's your Gartner category, but why would somebody want you? What is your differentiator? And they go, Oh, you've got identities in the cloud, and you need to manage their access. And I'll say, No, that's, that's, it's not thick enough. What is something you want to change about your industry? And they'll say, Well, do you know why we do things the way we do because Microsoft is too unwieldy, and you can't just get blah blah blah without buying the whole package. And Okta requires blah blah blah, blah blah. And we believe that we should do one thing well, and it's this. And I'm like, do you feel the emotion? Do you feel that you've gotten a little bit of excitement there? And that's why there's a heart on this card. Or I'll say, you know, what's the opportunity that you see that others don't? Who do you advocate for? Right? So I talk with a lot of managed security, managed service providers or things like that, and, you know, I'm sorry, and I've said this before, they all do the same thing, but they don't always do the same thing the same way or for the same people. So I'll say, you know, who do you do this for? You know, look at what you have. And they'll say, Well, you know, most of our clients are mom and pop construction companies, right? Because we believe in supporting the enterprise of building homes for people. And I'm like, do you feel how that's a big idea. There's not a lot of depth to the to the density of thought, but it's very emotional. It sits up here, you can find that idea, right? So, the process is going through a lot of these cards and throwing things at them that they don't, that they know but they don't always think about and going all the way down through the stack. What are the stories that your customers tell you? You know what my favorite is today?

Kerry Guard 23:28

Yeah, I was talking to a client. We're redoing their website, but we're doing their messaging first good, and that happened today, where we were going through some of their messaging pillars. And I got to this point, and he started to tell me customer stories, which totally pinpointed exactly how they were different. And I was like, that's what I need, that is so specific to what you do, and that credibility is so there, it was, just like, this beautiful moment, aha, yes. Like, yeah.

Joel Benge 24:02

And then, and then you say to them, Have you ever pulled that out and used that as a some of your front-end credibility building? And they'll go, No, you know, we'd never thought about that. You know, it's like, it's like, yeah, we hear it all the time. You hear it all the time, but your market needs to hear it. You know, it's like, my absolute favorite card is, where do you feel tension between your consumer and their stakeholders, which shows that you've thought through their experience, and that is the best way of building credibility. And maybe you're selling a technical solution, but you're like, look, this is a technical solution, but what it's going to do at the end of the day is get your CFO off your back, because it gives it makes this easier. And you're really talking about a relationship, a downstream, pay it forward type of relationship. I think Jeffrey Wheatman calls this selling through. I heard him say that once, and I stole it. But you know, that's the kind of thing that you have to do. You have to do this work. Work to pull out these little, these awesome, gold nuggets, but then you have to actually take a step back and be critical about it. Apply that clarity. Understand what will what do we mean by this? Is there a better way that we can say this? One of the items that I talk with a lot of with a lot of clients as proof points, and so they'll say, you know, they're throwing statistics at me, or they're throwing metrics, you know, we can reduce your workforce by, you know, or your man hours by 47% like, okay, great, that sounds nice. Yeah, maybe I would want that. But if you can get a customer to say, I no longer have to double staff my sock the exact same proof point, but you're turning it into a qualitative one. You're turning it into a testimonial. You're turning it into a story, right? So, but you have to gather those things and figure out how to polish them and reposition them so that you have a variety of messaging points that touch people in different ways. And you can only do that by bringing literally the whole company, not the whole company, but people with perspectives besides just sales or marketing. Right product people, Customer Success people, the CEO, the founder, if they're, you know, still very vision driven, and you've got to do the work

Kerry Guard 26:23

You, when you flip the script the way you just did it, it's rolls off chunk and it feels, I don't know, maybe to some people, it feels easy. It doesn't sound doesn't feel easy. To me, this feeling is really, really hard. And I'm going through right now with multiple clients where I am doing. I'm gonna go buy your carts and use those next time, but this is like where the rubber meets the road. This is not easy. How do you and I love how you break it down into smaller steps so it feels easier? But how do you take something so conceptual as a big idea, and you break it down into, you know, into the funnel, so to speak, into that credibility piece. And then how do you like? I feel like we're missing a ton of steps between the ideation and the brainstorming to actually get it onto paper and onto a website.

Joel Benge 27:22

Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of work. And when I do the messaging workshops, I tell people, I'm like, Look, this is the beginning of a journey, but we're going to walk away with a lot of really good stuff, like, literally, with eight people in the room after an hour and a half. Because the other, the other key thing is having multiple voices, multiple constituencies in the room very frequently, when you're doing a brand discovery, turns into, what Hogwarts house? Are you Aria? What's your favorite color? Are you a Ford f1 50, or a Ferrari? Right? Which is great for branding. And the cards came out of my experience as a content guy, I had to write web pages and content for these companies, and I had a list of like 200 questions I wanted to ask them, and I just was like, I'll turn it into a card deck. But, you know? But the other thing is, sometimes you'll get the very strong personalities in the room. I see this a lot with startups and co-founders. So I do a lot of mentoring with startups and things like that. Actually, probably too much, because they don't have the money yet, but I'm still working on it, and I'll have co-founders that it becomes a negotiation. I ask a question, they'll say this, the other person will counter. The other person will counter. Somebody in the back is not speaking, and before I know it, my 45 minutes or my hour is gone, and I've really gotten two questions out. So the key thing with this process is everybody works in parallel, so I'm literally throwing cards out, like I've got a little, little bitty timer here, and I throw the cards out about every 30 seconds, and I'm just asking them to write. So no speaking. I don't let anybody talk at the beginning of my workshop. And I even tell the CEO, I'm like button it. I don't want to, I don't want to poison the well. And they're writing their answers on index cards, color-coded index cards. So by the end of that process, because we're all working in parallel. It's called a forward-facing activity. We can have 400 different things out on the table, which sounds like an awful lot, right? Yeah. But then we work. Then we get to we've got everything out of our heads onto the table. Now we need to move into clustering. And we need to pair them up, and I say, now you can talk. I want everybody to sort of take an area of the table and start to push together cards that feel the same, maybe have the same words in them, or maybe they're not the same words. But now that we understand clarity, we can understand what did you meant by that? Oh, these two fit together, and we start to see areas of concentration. And then, you know, there are outliers, and sometimes. We'll rewrite outliers, or we'll just pitch them out altogether. I've got a whole other set of cards called Focus cards that are like my Uno Reverse cards, where I'm like, this card has got eight bullets on it. You need to break this out and make it eight cards, because they're individual thoughts. So once we've cleaned and clustered, we start to see patterns, and then I can pair it back to them, or reflect back to them the stuff that they didn't even know they were thinking collectively. And so it's like, wow, there's a real feeling here about, you know, sticking up for the underdog, or, you know, being scrappy. I know that you guys really want to be CrowdStrike, and you've been trying to take a step out at CrowdStrike, but you guys are really good at being agile and working at the fringes, and blah, blah, blah, and I'm reading a lot of that here. It's a little bit like tarot cards little boo. And I'll say, have we used that yet? Have you tested that in the marketplace? And they'll say, we had no idea. We were all thinking the same thing. And I'm like, that's a gold nugget, right? So once we've done that, make some decisions about what's in and what's out, and then I actually take all of the feedback and I build them a database, because nerds love systems. So this, yeah, we love it. And you know, you can't just do a PDF. It's not a brand PDF. Nobody, but marketin,g is ever going to read a brand PDF, right? Do they, though? And do they even right? Because, yeah, so. So in order to build a message that will stick with your company, stick in the minds of your audience, and scale across multiple people who need to touch this these messages, you've got to give them almost like Lego blocks. So again, we get back to the idea that every thought is very carefully tagged, with emotion, logic, and credibility. Where does it fit in the marketing stack? Maybe, what audience does it work for? Where do we use it the most? Maybe we've got that one proof point that can be that can be flipped, either quantitatively or qualitatively, but it's the same proof point, so we want to keep those together. And the idea is, put that all in a database. I literally built a notion database or a SharePoint database, and it becomes the player's handbook of everything that this company could need to say has and has decided that they will. And then, because it's data, it's super easy to build a picker. And, you know, you're like, Okay, next month, we want to do social media. We want to talk to this audience, and we want to really focus. It's social media. So it needs to be, you know, high up in emotions. Broom, filter. Here are our starters, right? So it may actually makes content creation, it accelerates content creation. It makes it a lot faster, keeps everybody in alignment, so that you're not out there, looking, sounding and smelling like every other company, right? You're chasing messages. And that, I will say, is a hard thing to get to, because you do, you know, if you don't do the stuff up front and you just deliver messaging. People don't connect to it. They don't feel where it came from, right? But if they were in the room, if their thoughts were represented going into it, they're much more likely to be able to snap these pieces together and they see themselves in it. So that's what we end up doing. And then, you know, we rewrite websites accordingly, or, you know, do what's necessary to then implement all the things.

Kerry Guard 33:26

Yeah. I have a couple questions I'm going to I want to just double down on this, because I we did something very similar at our company, mkg marketing, and we did something out of a book called clockwork, where it's to find your one thing that you do better than anybody else, I don't know if you is that? Mike Michalowicz, I think so, maybe, maybe. But it was a really cool exercise, especially because we're async. So everybody took the time to create. We did it all in Asana, and they filled in a form, and they wrote five things that they do for their job, that they consider the most important things that they do. And then we went, one person by one person, and we each had to take one thing off. Like, okay, well, we we do that, but it's not quite that important. And so we each took something off until we only all had one thing left. And it turned out that the one thing to your point of like, that big idea that that more feeling thing was actually the communication that we do with our clients and why we're better at that than anybody else. And the slogan that came from that that I use everywhere, you probably heard me say it is slow as smooth and smooth as fast, yes, right? And so now we can hang our hats on that and help clients slow down to not make reactive decisions, so that we don't anger the Google gods, right? And so it has changed everything in terms of how we communicate. And so I just wanted to sit. At that for a second of like a case study of, yes, doing this work is so important, and this was one way we did it. But I think that if we could all, I'm thinking, maybe I'll get your cards. And when we do our summit, what can we pull out from that to go through this exercise too? One thing I asked you before, and I want to come back to it, is, you know, now that we have the slogan of slow, smooth and smooth as fast, it makes me question our audience and who we are working with, and whether they're the right people because of how we operate right so I'm curious for you, like, once you have those messaging pillars or those nuggets. How do you help people find the audience that's going to resonate with? Where do you is that something you do, or you get them to the messaging, and then that's the work they do afterwards. But I feel like that's where we sort of have a " come to Jesus moment.

Joel Benge 35:58

Yeah, well, there's, there's a little bit of work that has to be done. And, you know, do what you do best, right? So I do look for partners who like, like Danny at the audience first, who really are able to be in those spaces. And, you know, bring the people to the table of the test. But the other thing that I'm really a big advocate for is minimally viable messaging, right? We've got a great idea. Let's go tear this website down and let's build another website. Or, you know, you've got a lot of opportunities to test balloon marketing, to test balloon changes. Now, you can do that at the risk of being a little bit split personality, or seeming like you're trying a whole bunch of things, but you know, there are ways to say, let's take this into the marketplace, and, you know, on a small scale, and see if it works. Let's bounce it against this audience and that audience. And so then the other thing that my messaging platform really is becomes that system of record. So it's not just a here's your messaging, here's a PDF with the tag lines, because it's data, because it's a system, people can actually give back and say, Hey, I tried saying it this way, maybe commenting. So in Asana or SharePoint, you can tag, not so great in Excel, but in Asana and SharePoint, you can maybe do a hot wash after an event and say, we tested these out. These are the ones that will really work really well, or we discovered a new one. We're going to throw it in the messaging stack, we're going to mark it as draft, and maybe quarterly, we're going to do a refresh, and we're going to see, does this fit with our first principles messaging. You know, did it? Was it a one-off? Was it a fluke? Does it support? Does it fit into another one of our messages? One of the things I also so I'm very addicted to buying card games, and I just got this one. It's called in a pickle. And it seems very, it seems very ridiculous, right? And the idea is you're basically, and it's for, you know, for 1010, plus you're throwing out cards. And you're like, somebody throws a baby card. Well, a baby can fit in a bathtub. A bathtub can fit in a house. A house can fit in a parking lot, right? You're not going to throw a pickle in a thimble, right? So, if you, if you introduce that concept, then you can say, are any of these messages that we have coming in? Yeah, that worked really great. But does it fit somewhere else? Is it subordinate? Is it, does it? Is it supporting? And so then you're actually able to build, this is a new thing that I'm adding, sort of that, that dependency tree of messaging, because you could very easily say, find something that's great and take something else out, and then everything else falls apart. So the idea of having a living, breathing resource, that's a guideline for messaging and marketing and products, you know, the product team should be able to say, Hey, I know what you're building. I know why you're using that story. Here's a story of ours. Here's why we take this approach instead of that approach, right? That's a choice that you can now use as a marketing story, you know? And so it has to be living and breathing, and people have to be able to feed back before you tear everything down. Spend a whole lot of money, you know, 6070, grand, for a website that you're just gonna redo in another, you know, 18 months,the active learning cycle.

Kerry Guard 39:34

I think that the and it being iterative, I think is so key. Even if you did do a website redesign, that doesn't mean you have to. And I think this is one things you were sort of mentioning, of like, you don't have to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it. You can iterate your messaging to it might be Gen probably most likely. The reason why this isn't working is not because the. Navigation was bad or the CTA wasn't in the right spot. Yeah, it's that your messaging wasn't on point. One of the things with messaging that I'm dabbling with my clients right now. I sat down with a client this week and I said, we're doing all the right marketing things, and I haven't touched your messaging because you said that you that you really loved it from your previous agency, and it was really important to you. I gotta be honest that we are. We have high engagement rates. People are engaged with your brand, but nobody's nobody's buying because my assumption, and I'd love you to weigh in on this, Joel, to tell me if I'm off base, is my assumption is we're not pressing on the pain. And I'm not saying we need to be fun about it. We don't need fear, uncertainty and doubt, but we do need to pinpoint what people's pain is on a regular basis that we can help solve. And I and we're being very wishy washy and high level about it, and we're not being crystal clear and sort of poking the bear a little bit on that paint, yeah. And I feel like I'm experiencing this across the board with some, with most of my clients, of like, yeah, we're doing all the right marketing stuff, but you're frustrated that people aren't converting. And this is why I think that is,

Joel Benge 41:16

yeah, it's, it's something that needs to be, needs to be tested, and that is a point where you're going to go audience first, and you're going to really bounce what you're saying against what you're hearing, or, you know, what's in the marketplace. And you know that, I guess I should, I guess I should have cards that are double-sided, like I have that one, that one proof point card, because you can also have corresponding pains and gains, right? So, you know, we've got pains and gains, right? I think now, just from a psychology standpoint, I do think that people are more likely to want to take away pain than they are to elevate, right? So it's like you have to be able to offer a painkiller and a vitamin for every situation, because it depends on how they see it. Are they looking to advance, or are they looking to fix and so if your whole thing is about being leaning forward, we're making you faster. We're making you leaner. We're making you, you know, reducing, I guess this gets into sort of that, yeah, bigger, better, faster, right there. Live, laugh, love. Maybe they're like, that would be great. But I feel chained down here, right? You're giving them a picture of the future. You're giving them a picture of what you can deliver to them, and they just don't buy it. They don't believe it. But if you can identify and pinpoint that thing that is really holding you back, that is bothering you, what if we could just take care of that, and you could run faster on your own. Now you're promising pain relief. You're promising removal of an impediment, as opposed to a superpower. And I do have a concept of superpowers versus villains, right? If you can put a name to that villain that nobody else is talking about. We saw this many, many, many years ago. And I was a, I was a knock sock analyst for many years, right? I did the 12-hour overnight shift in an enclosed room for a couple of years. And, you know, that's really hard. And you know, we started talking about Sims, and we started talking about single panes of glass and all these things. And I don't know who came up with the concept or the big idea, and they said, you know, the real problem is not so much the technology. It's analyst burnout. And we started hearing that word. We started using the word analyst burnout, and to a guy like me who had been sitting in that seat, right, who was nearly driving his car off the road every morning, when you're driving back to commuting back home, I'm like, that's the name. You put a name to the thing, right? It's almost like, if I'm a soap company, and I'm like, you know, many people with teenagers have a stinky sock problem. And if you've ever been in a teenager's room, you know, there's a stinky sock problem. And do you in? You know, I'm using stinky sock problem capitalize, and I'm making that a character. I'm making it a villain. And all of a sudden, you got people going, might have us, and they didn't. They had that experience, but they didn't have a name for it. Yeah. And so if you can put a name to that pain, you can then position either that pain reliever or that vitamin, that superpower that's going to counteract it. And that's why you have to do this work up front. You can't just identify one thing. You've got to identify how things counterbalance and how they work against each other, and then you have to use them together. But yeah, I agree. I think so many people are just beating their chest, and we're bigger, better, stronger, faster, and, you know, again, we've got humans. They have feelings, they have they have different pressures that they're facing, right? And. Maybe you're not pushing on the thing that is going to make them take that action and move, but showing empathy, showing building trust, right? That is, is the way to get that gut reaction that I talk about. It's like, yeah, because you've had people who have given you all the right words, all the right features, all the right data, and you're just like, just not, just not buying it. I've just don't feel right. But when you start to engage that gut and you're like, I have a good feeling about this story, they're telling me, it's so much more powerful.

Kerry Guard 45:37

Then my last question, because we are closing on time here.I'm sorry, folks, if you're going to want to learn more, you're just got to learn more, you're just got to follow up with Joel and hire him.

Joel Benge 45:44

I'm thinking of listening to my podcast. I haven't plugged it yet,

Kerry Guard 45:47

yay. Yeah, we'll do that in a second. My last question for you is around, Nope, it's gone. I know I had it, and it was a good one. I had to follow up with you, Joel, but it this notion of doing this work up front, taking the time to understand what it is that you do best that no one else does. And I think we've all talked, we've talked around it, but just to come back at it more poignantly, it's not necessarily the thing your product does, right? Like we do SEO and digital ads, but I'm talking about how we communicate with the client and approach those systems from a slow, smooth and smooth as fast motion, right? The thing that we do the best is an SEO and digital ads, right? It's that. So I you've sort of pointed at it, and I just want to call it out of taking a beat and taking that big step back of, you know, so many people and you said it earlier. So people do the thing that you do, but how you do it is the thing that makes it different and powerful. So thank you for that wonderful reminder that we also needed this morning as we launch into our day or into our afternoon, if you're if you're heading off to lunch right now, and for that second third cup of Joe, third cup of joe. Joel, any last pieces of advice for people who are going down this, who are who are finally being like, Yes, I do need to do this work. I'm willing to get on the train to make it happen.

Joel Benge 47:34

Last piece of advice on this,you know, it's, you don't have to do everything at once. You don't have to boil the elephant, or whatever the whole thing is, right? There are improvements, there are gaps and opportunities that you can look for to assess what you've got and to try pivoting that focus just a little bit. And so that's one of the things that I start out with. Is just content, messaging assessment, looking across everything and going, Hey, one of the reasons people don't know who we are is because across four different pages, we have a positioning statement, and they're all different. And in our sales pitch, it's a completely different one, and that so it's like you have to take a step back holistically. You have to look at everything. Sometimes you're too close to it. That's when you bring in an expert or bring in a consultant to do it, but that it's not a whole lot of money to do that upfront. If you jump straight into discovery and you just jump straight into building, you're going to, you're going to turn your back on a whole lot of really good stuff. You don't even know what you're working with. I mean, this is something you do in SEO. You've got to understand what is and isn't working first, right? So that's the first thing you've got to understand what you're working with, so that you can move forward. And that's cheap, that's pretty easy to put on somebody else as an outsider. The other thing is, you know, I'm starting to realize that this works for companies. It works for relationships, it works for team alignment. It works for individuals. And it's, you know, it's something that I'm really excited to just give this to people and have them do a little bit of it and see how things change. Like, you know, you're at a conference, you pivot your message just a little bit, if you understand what your message is first, right? No, chase a message, but you can pivot just a little bit. And that's what I'm all about, is helping nerds talk well. It's why I put it in the name. It's why I've got the domain nerd that talks good.com, it's kind of a vanity domain, but I saw it and I grabbed it. Had to have it. But yeah, that's what I'm all about.

Kerry Guard 49:39

I love it. I figured out my question, so I am gonna, I'm gonna end with it. It's around the jargon piece, because we are in an industry that just happens to have a lot of technical words that have to go into, into it to some regard, or maybe it doesn't. And that's sort of where my question is, where does the. Words that are human, but the technical side, where does that rubber meet the road?

Joel Benge 50:06

That's a really good that's a really good question, especially in our industry, you have to use words that people recognize. They don't always have to be the word of the day or the word du jour, right? I mean, just look at our industry, you know, go to market, lead gen, all these, you know, growth hacking, all these things. Yes, there are different flavors, and there are different things that people do in all those But aren't we all kind of fundamentally doing the same thing? Right? We're putting messages out there, and we're getting people excited to get them to buy right and again, it's humans balancing jargon with the human I talked about my focus cards, and my absolute favorite is strip it, remove any technical terms or jargon from this card. Yes, even the one you really love. So if I see somebody, and we're talking big idea, and we're talking value, and I'm starting to see acronyms in there. I throw this card down. It's kind of like my uno reverse card, because I'm like, Look, if you can't say what you want to say without using that term, which Gartner just coined three months ago, then you're not really doing it, and you don't really understand what you're talking about. And I think that's where, yes, we have to have the technical information three clicks deep. You know, don't put the white paper on the first page. Maybe put it on the second or third page, because the person who needs that information, you've got to lead them to it so they can find it. But you also have people who don't speak that language. You might have somebody who is tangential to that technical person, and they need to understand just enough to be able to go, Oh, I saw a company. It does kind of like that thing that you were talking about you were having that problem with, because nobody is complaining about the technology they don't have. They're complaining about the problem that they have, right? And so if you can say, Hey, I heard you were having a problem with this. I don't really know what this company does, but they say they do your right? So then you're, you're speaking at this top level, enough that someone can, like, grab their hands around it and then find their way or hand it off to the technical person. So, you know, use technical language. Just keep it in the white paper, keep it in the data sheet. It

Kerry Guard 52:17

adds that credibility, right? That you do still need to speak that technical language to the technical person, but I do think we don't need to lead with it. And I yes yes to that. Yeah, oh my gosh. I could go all day, Joel, but this has been amazing. I'm so grateful. Where can people find you? Elijah did drop her links to your podcast in the comments here. Where, where do you normally hang out?

Joel Benge 52:40

So I'm, addicted to LinkedIn. You can find me there a lot, and I'm working on my own personal content. You know, it's a journey, but, you know, I call myself a nerd that talks good. I own nerd that talks good.com because it was easy. The company's message, specs, it's just a redirect. But there I've got, I've got videos and some resources. I have a book coming out in a couple of months. Actually, this afternoon I'm going to nail down the release date, and it's on being a nerd that talks good. So it is all the philosophy, all the research, the process, so that you can do it yourself, cards, hats, T-shirts, all that fun stuff. You can find it at message specs or just, you know, grab me in the hallway at any convention, because I'm still a nerd. I still go. I've still got my servers running behind me and everything. So you know, you'll find me all over the place.

Kerry Guard 53:36

Oh my gosh. Well, I hope to see you again. It's our marketing conference in December. It's kind of far away, but I look forward to it. One last question for you, Joel, because you were more than a messaging therapist, what's one thing outside of work that is currently bringing you joy?

Joel Benge 54:01

Oh, boy. See, I look. I love closing with this. You know what? I enjoy playing the didgeridoo. I don't play it well, and I never play it in public. I'm still working on it. So if you feel, if you find me at a conference, ask me the story about how I accidentally won a didgeridoo on the internet 10 years ago, and I'll tell you that story, but I find it's a way to just unplug. There's something very harmonic about that. I'm doing a lot of unplugging and a lot of breathing. I start every morning with a lot of deep, deep breathing and breath holds and things like that. So I'm not jumping in the cold shower as much as I used to, but now that it's going to be getting warmer, maybe I will, but it's it's unplugging because for the longest time. And I mean, anybody who's in this industry, anybody who's done startups, knows, go, go, go, go. And now that I'm running my own business, I still feel the pressure to go, go, go, go, go. And I have to remind myself, it's okay to stop and unplug and just do something. So yeah, those are the, those are kind of the two big things for me right now. Who knows what I'll be into next week?

Kerry Guard 55:10

Well, you'll have to keep us posted as we as we all stalk you on LinkedIn now. Just gonna be great. And as we all go to Google, what a judge. Reju, we're headed out to go do that right now. Joel, I am so grateful, and thank you to our listeners. Zachary Hyde, for hanging out. Ashley Elijah, I appreciate you as always. This has been amazing. Thank you all so much. This episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps complex brands get found via SEO and digital ads, hosted by me, Kerry Guard, CEO and co-founder of MKG Marketing, Music Mix and mastering, done by my amazing sidekick, Elijah Drown. And if you would like to be a guest, DM me. I'd love to have you on. It would be more conversations like this.