Building Trust in Complex Buyer Journeys: Insights from Heidi Joy Tretheway

Overview:

Welcome to "Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders." In this episode, host Kerry Guard talks with Heidi Joy Tretheway, a seasoned marketing expert with a focus on building high-growth SaaS brands. They discuss the importance of personal branding, the evolving buyer landscape, and strategies for addressing internal stakeholders who can present late-stage objections in the sales process. Heidi emphasizes the need for products to be easy to adopt and the power of building trust through accountability in marketing.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:00

Hello. I'm Kerry Guard and Welcome to Tea Time with tech marketing leaders. Welcome back to the show, the first episode, 2024 thank you all for your patience as I settled back into the swing wait toy for y'all, I don't think it like happened out of nowhere. How about you? Heidi, how are you settling in?

Heidi Joy Tretheway 0:30

Oh, man, I'm so glad to be back from the holidays, from COVID-19 And you know, just kind of that, that like holiday slump, where you feel very busy, but you don't accomplish very much. The last couple of weeks, I feel like I've been flying like, just a lot of projects getting out the door. So it's been good.

Kerry Guard 0:51

You gotta, like, shake it off a little like the cobwebs and all the things you need a week I did a very terrible thing where I had all these meetings scheduled for last week, and I made none of them just having to reschedule. I don't know what in my right mind, thought I could come back from a two-week vacation with my kids at home and still try and create some sense of normalcy that did not happen, folks. Oh, thank you all for your patience as I took a week off and settled into the new year. But we are here for it. This is going to be a wonderful, wonderful show. I can't wait for this conversation. If you're here with us, live on LinkedIn or YouTube, say hello. We'd love to know that you're here. I'm paying attention to the comments. We both are, and we cannot wait for you to pop on and say hello, and for all of the questions and all of the land, we are ready for them. We're ready. It's going to be great, especially as we unpack the topic of today, I'm going to I'm going to be really vague about this, because it's going to be wonderful when you actually have that aha moment of like, oh, that's what you're talking about. We're talking about the seventh persona. Stay tuned, folks. Stay tuned today. I have with me. Heidi Joy, Trethway. Heidi Joy builds and leads globally distributed marketing teams for high growth of SAS brand, she offers deep specialization of B to B, brand marketing strategy, and content marketing for demand generation. In 18 years of directing a marketing team, she's led every marketing discipline across the acquisition life cycle. I want to dig in more that work use coming up a life cycle. I want to know more about that we're not circled back on that. Id toy. You just wait. She fits best in high-growth tech companies with startup optimism and hustle. Her favorite challenges are creating new categories and scrappy go-to-market programs that move the needle. She also loves handful work, especially while coaching and feeling a world-class team. There's so much there, and we're gonna get to some of it, and then I'm gonna dig another I'm gonna poke the bear in other places because I want to know more about that as we get to our conversation. But Heidi, welcome to the show.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 3:08

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

Kerry Guard 3:13

So excited to have you before we get to the heart of our story, the seventh persona. You're all on the edge of your seats. I know you are before we get there. The description I just read, a beautiful description, is what you do and what you do best, but how and why, why we're all here. So tell us your story of how you got to doing all these wonderful things.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 3:39

Well, it's a strange and circuitous route, right? I started as a journalist, and I covered commercial real estate, I covered crime, and all sorts of local, local, and exciting things. I got subpoenaed twice. I learned to read upside down. I ran after people in high heels, and after about five or six years of working as a journalist, especially focusing on commercial real estate, I kind of kept one foot planted in commercial real estate and pivoted from journalism to marketing. And then I spent about a decade in commercial real estate as marketing and research director, as Head of Global Communications for Colliers International, which is one of the largest commercial real estate brands in the world, doing global strategic initiatives, kind of working with all of the presidential heads from all of the different world regions, and also running north american marketing, which was 147

offices. And probably the best part of that job was realizing that we had 147 offices, each of which had like one graphic designer, and we needed to upskill those graphic designers into marketers, not just like designing flyers, but actually doing PR doing top of mind awareness campaigns, doing demand generation on behalf of their brokerage practice. And.

Whereas, if you are getting a regular paycheck from just one business, you are you know you don't have to sell yourself for the next month. But what I found is that it's allowed me to reconnect with what I love, with my enthusiasm for marketing, with doing some of the nitty gritty. This morning, I was working on a Miro flow chart that we then installed in a PDF guide that we're then some, you know, sending out to customers and prospects. So I'm getting the on the hands-on work. I will tell you, probably the most challenging thing in all of that has been my work on getting the second book out the door. So I published the first book in September. It's called atomic branding. My lovely mentor and longtime colleague, Craig Robbins, was the primary author on that book, and then I stepped in as the editor and publisher. And then the book that we're working on now in as full co-authors, is called Market Force. It's about the invisible game of business, and how can you uncover habits and by your own biology and your history and your language to basically be more effective in your work transactions and in your work with other people, and so getting working with a co-author, first of all, is insanely difficult. And also, people think of writing a book as like, oh, the writing part, that's really hard, but that's really only the first third of it. And I feel like, when I'm in the writing part, I think of how hard it is. I finished the writing part, I get to the editing part, the next third of producing the book, and then I'm like, Why did I ever think it was so hard to write? Because editing is far worse. And we've retitled and moved around chapters so many times, and then finally, the production of the book is, is like the next third of the challenge. So that's really kind of taken a lot of my focus this quarter and last quarter because I'm really excited to get this out the door.

Kerry Guard 12:04

Well, we've all taken note of these books that we're going to look into when that happens, and you're going to help me hide you and make sure that we have those dropped into all the show notes and all the land because we're on the edge of our seats for those. Yes, and that sounds

Heidi Joy Tretheway 12:21

good. You can get atomic branding now because it has been published, it's available on Amazon, and it's really about how you take your how you take your personal brand, and you make it fully authentic to yourself and your own approach, your own experiences. And then how do you develop a market for it? How do you communicate your offer to the market? And what, what that does is it kind of, it allows you to tap into your own atomic energy source. And so, you know when you're when you're working away, sometimes you let get in flow. Sometimes you get, like, so engrossed in a part of a project or in a function that you're doing that you're like, time flies by, and you're just like, oh my gosh, I have an unlimited energy to do this. And so that's kind of the root of the title atomic branding because it's about kind of tapping your own internal atomic energy source, the thing that you do best, the thing you would practically do for free, like, for me, brainstorming. Is it right? I would do brainstorming for free all day long. Buy me a cup of coffee, and I will brainstorm anything you want. So, so, yeah, so that's, that's kind of the idea behind that book.

Kerry Guard 13:37

Let's talk about that for a second. Because I think as marketers, for founders, which I am so like, I'm totally on board. I'm like, hell yes, we all need personal branding. Everybody, should we get on board? We should all be doing this. But I'm also a founder, and so I understand the benefit of doing that as somebody who's trying to pull a brand behind me and give myself a platform to sort of jump off of. But for marketers who are have a full-time job, or maybe you're doing fractional but are part of a bigger entity in terms of a brand. Why is it helpful for them to consider personal branding in and putting energy back into themselves in relation to the work that they do?

Heidi Joy Tretheway 14:19

Well, I can say from my history, right? My game films, I'm always better at something that I am excited about, right? That's one of the reasons that being a fractional CMO suits me so well. I only work on projects I care about. I only market stuff I understand and I'm excited about, and I only work with people I like, that's a huge deal, right? Like, that's not something you get to claim about having a full-time job, asking about what's so important about a personal brand. Let's, let's say, for example, you took me and said, All right, we gotta go get Heidi a new job, right? This fractional CMO thing that's for the dogs. We gotta, we gotta go get a full-time job. Where do you where do you place Me? You. And then if I told you that my personal brand is being a fire starter for good ideas, I am somebody who you bring into a business to add rocket fuel to the business. You do not bring me in to steer the ship straight. You don't bring me in to cross t's and dot i's. You don't even bring me in just to optimize something that's already working well, you bring me in when you either say, Look, I have nothing. I need you to use bubble gum and duct tape to make something out of nothing, or you bring me in and say, Hey, I don't have a rule book because I've never had a chance to write one. I don't have an instruction manual, because that's your job. Like people would bring me in from scratch, right, to start something. And so would you consider, if you're like, oh, Heidi, we gotta go get you a new job, would you go send me to an insurance company or to a bank? Like, even if I was in marketing, I would be terrible there, right? I would they would resist, and I would be frustrated. And so I think that understanding your own personal brand leads you to the kind of opportunities that are really exciting for you, where you're going to thrive and where people are not going to be well, for example, with me, they wouldn't be annoyed if I'm constantly trying to start something. They're like, yeah, yeah, give me more of that. And so I tend to work with the kind of people who are like, I am here and I want to go there, and I want to see that hockey stick of growth and so that's that's kind of the where I align myself. That's why the bio says I'm about startup optimism and hustle, not hustle for hustle culture's sake, but because it is exciting to build something from scratch like I'd rather build a ship than sail it.

Kerry Guard 16:44

So what you're saying is, take all those beautiful things we understand about how marketing works for a brand and apply it to yourself. You'll make sure you have your own personas, people you'd want to be working with the brand you're gonna be working with, yeah, the services you offer, and why you offer them, and what problems you solve, yeah,

Heidi Joy Tretheway 17:04

and more important, then, oh, I was gonna say. And importantly, you need to understand what is your natural approach to it. Because some people are very methodical. They want to, like, read all the documentation before they dig into a problem. And some people are very like abstract with their thinking. Some people are really big-picture thinkers. Some people want to get to work. Give me the checklist I will get. I will punch through it really fast. So understanding kind of the natural way you come to marketing or to a situation is part of that, like that atomic brand or that rocket fuel that allows you to really excel in your career?

Kerry Guard 17:45

Yes to all of this? Yeah, I totally agree. And every and not everybody gets along with everybody, right? And I think the last thing I'll add being a fractional mark, you know, VP of Marketing myself, like for myself with CML, not there yet, working on it. But in terms of being, you know ahead of marketing, and helping through the ship of marketing for a startup is knowing that you're not right for every CEO or CEO and like finding that juice between like there's got to be a symbiotic relationship there, that you feel like you could fuel each other. So because you've been talking so much about startups Heidi Joy, which I totally agree with, in terms of this realm and knowing like who you partner with best, yeah, I love that. Ah, find your ICP, which leads us so perfectly into our conversation today, around our own you know, when you're when you are in a brand, when you are a marketing BP or CMO or a brand, one of the most important things is to know your audience, which is where we're going to sit today. Yeah, because it's not just about a single person, it's a Heidi joy, no, so why don't you tell me, you know, start with a brand as a fractional you get in the door, you get your you get your heels on. You need that firepower. Where do you start?

Heidi Joy Tretheway 19:21

Oh, I start with a list of key questions, like, I actually have 10 discovery questions that I ask, and whether I'm in an interview or whether I am a doing intake, I kind of punch through these questions in in a really deliberate way, because I don't just want to understand the content of what they're saying, but I want to understand the context. Like, how solid do you feel about this, this answer? Or, you know, how much has it changed in the last year or five years? And I'm also kind of listening for you. How people explain what they do. You know, the investor Peter Lynch, always said you shouldn't buy an investment unless you can explain it to a fifth grader. So I'm kind of listening for for what do we do in 1050, or 100 words, and if you can't explain not just like what you do, but the value of what you do in pretty short, simple words that don't have a lot of marketing speak layered on top of them, then you're not there yet. And so I have a better understanding like, oh, this marketing project isn't a matter of like, you know, boots on the ground, deploy, deploy. This is actually like, we need to take several steps back and figure it out, and you might find that the client thinks they're already at deploy stage, and so you're kind of listening for like, Do you have a match in terms of what your assessment of their needs are versus what their assessment of their needs are?

Kerry Guard 20:58

So many times you show up and clients are like, Okay, I have a product. Let's go. And it's like, that's the leg work to do here. Yeah? I think that's such a key. I feel like we tend to get on the bandwagon with these brands like they're so fired at the ready-to-go, and we're like, let's go. Yeah, we're on with you. Like, go time, but I love what you're saying, of like, well, yes, and I want to move with you, and I want to match your speed, but I also want to make sure we're, you know, in sync, one terms of doing that. And so one of the key, key components of this is product market fit, which comes back to the buyer, which they what I feel like I heard you say in terms of making sure that, like you're matching the market in terms of product-market fit and kind back to the buyer, the world has shifted in the last two years. Yeah, I could get on a pencil talk about this for days without me, and I recognize that so and I want the experts to sort of speak to this of what you're seeing in the market, of and now that you're working across multiple clients, it's probably a little easier to see. But how has the buyer landscape changed? And what's one way that's really stuck up? I mean, it's changed a lot, but what's one thing that's really impacting your work?

Heidi Joy Tretheway 22:26

Well, I think one thing I've seen possibly more than, more than anything, and it's really if I could shout this in someone's ear, I would shout it in that like Product Director, like, you know, the head of product, I would be shouting this at not just the product marketer, but I think products now need to be even easier to adopt. you know, I see a lot of kind of early-stage startups with wild, amazing technical innovations that you have to crawl through glass to be able to use because they are so difficult, challenging, and complicated. And I work for one company where it was like we had the greatest hot tub of all time. All you have to do is climb Mount Everest, and then you can get in the hot tub. And because you had to, like, you had to build all of these, like, system dependencies and, like, feed all of your information and so it's kind of like if I were a bank to simplify this off the back of like, like DevOps or data stream processing. If you were to simplify it and be a bank, it would be like saying, hey, all I need you to do is give me all your financial records for the last 10 years, and also your social security number and your passport and your, you know mother's maiden name, and like every account you've ever had, and like whatever you know your GPA was on college and your shoe size, and then I will be able to do This small but very helpful thing in your life, and it's like you have to grow the value of the product so big that somebody would be willing to do all of that pain to get there. And unfortunately, most products aren't that big in terms of their value, because we see such a segmentation and layering in the market. So instead, what you need to do is figure out, how do you put your hot tub at base camp before Mount Everest Right? Like, how do you show value, ideally free, value, to a customer, and get them really woven into the use of your product? I think Miro does this really beautifully because I can use it individually. Notion does this beautifully as well. I can individually use it get true value out of the product, and then think to myself, am I willing to pay money? And now, you know, it's fully out of my pocket as a fractional CMO, am I willing to pay money to go to the next level with this product? And I. Say, with Miro and with notion absolutely like, these are, these are essential business pillars for me in terms of tech adoption. But then, like, now, if I'm already in the hot tub, I'm at base camp, I love it. I'm getting value out of it. Now they can lead me up and over Everest to higher levels of value, where I'm willing to pay more, where I'm willing to be more invested. And so if we think about like enterprise software, we've got to have the hot tub at base camp because you're you're wanting to aim for a, you know, quarter million dollar contract. But if you can't get some developers or some marketers in the door to start using your product for free, you won't have enough advocacy internally to actually convert on that that sale, and I have found that there's kind of a speed bump persona that exists with every software product where there's going to be some internal department that deeply resists change like it doesn't want you to mess with any data stream processing software because you might take your own data and expose it in a bad way. Marketing doesn't want you to change your your website platform, because then it's like, oh my gosh, you'll pry my CMS for my cold, dead hands, right? I don't want to have to relearn a system, and furthermore, you're proposing that I go headless. CMS, that's like that. That's like giving too much power to the developer. So you'll always have this, like speed bump persona that's holding you back. And so that's why it's so important to build that other kind of internal adoption in a way that's free and has very limited resistance, so that they can, like, experience the value, and basically clamor for, push for the opportunity to go up the mountain.

Kerry Guard 26:53

Think about where to start, because I guess I would unpack all that which we're going to do because that is the seventh persona is that speed bump persona who shows up at the seventh, eighth, ninth inning to say, Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You want me to do what now? Yep. So let's take a beat there because one of the challenges you talked a lot about free and offering your software for free at base camp, as you call it. I didn't so much pushback at the early days. So one of my very first clients was box.com Yeah, and we balanced a digital ads campaign of doing Pay Per Click stuff with very cheap, very bottom the funnel and direct site buys, which is very expensive, very top of the funnel, very brand awareness. And we were getting them. Their goal was leads. We're getting them a ton of leads. We're getting them a ton of free sign-ups all day, every day, free sign-ups. And they were pissed. They're like, No, or like both being you asked for free sign-ups, like, look at all the times we got you. No, no. They were the solopreneur. They were students. They were people who were bank bargains with stealing anything that was free at any given point. It wasn't the enterprises that were signing up for the free product. It was people who couldn't afford it to save their lives. And so I want to speak to that because I'm sure I'm not the only one who's having a visceral reaction of, like, wait a minute, if I give my product away for free, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to get it into the hands of the right people that I want to buy the Enterprise product in the long run.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 28:44

So let's, like, let's pretend that we are trying to pitch to our CEO that we want to create a free component, or have a free component in our product. I did not want to emphasize to the CEO, this is free ie lost revenue, because, like, for example, when I, when I started off out as an author, I released a one book that was enormously successful and the very day it was released, it appeared on all these torrents websites where people could download it for free. And I was pissed, right? I felt like I was losing money, like more money than I was even making from the people who are buying it. And I called one of my dear friends who is a much more successful author than I am, and she's like, Heidi, you need to chill. That's not your market. Those are not book buyers. Those are book stealers. You're never going to sell your book to a book stealer. Don't worry about it. So, my first argument to our fictional CEO is the people who are signing up for free and would never have paid for our product. We don't care about them. They're never going to pay for our product. And hopefully, within our kind of product build, we can mitigate the amount of computing or networking or storage, or cloud costs. Dollars that are going to go into providing those folks with a free offering. But instead of thinking about it as a loss for our business, let's think about it in terms of those people who are adopting free and then investing in us, and think about how much time they are investing in us. When I get Miro for free, I now have to invest time in learning this. And then if I've invested time in building something on Miro, I also am going to invest time in showing it to other people, because otherwise, it doesn't really have a lot of value unless you're just using it as your own mind map. And so what I what we found, it Contentful, for example, is offering a free Developer Edition caused maybe six developers to each invest six months in free products that suddenly a business that like had wasn't paying any money wasn't doing anything, they're suddenly like, holy moly, we have six developers that just spent the last six months building something on our free platform. Now we're hitting our limits. Now we need security. Now we need enterprise features, whatever. So now we need to go to paid and we can't re-platform because we literally just spent $300,000 in salaries on people investing in our free product. And so if we decide to not pay $50,000 or $100,000 in an enterprise contract, we're going to lose the $300,000 that with no permission, with no purchase order, are developers already invested here? So, yeah, you could go to a different, cheaper, similar product, but then you would lose everything you've invested. So I would say that free is not so much about what the business is giving away, but it's about how much value you can get your potential customers to invest in you, in learning you, using you, making you a system of record, or making you just essential to a project that has to get out the door. And then I feel like you have a very strong leg to stand on as a salesperson to show this is how we create value continuity. Here's how we're going to up-level the value you get. Here's how you're going to get more features, benefits, services, etc. And so it's, it's not so much free. It was just we took the friction of getting that first approval off the table by making it free. And we, you know that's, that's the price of getting in the door.

Kerry Guard 32:44

It needs to be a yes. And to your point, people who are looking for free products are going to find free products all day. No matter where they're looking, they're going to find them in their sign up for the benefit is if you're making your and I love the products that make full feature, like products free at full feature with limited to your point of like, okay, I only get one mirror of work. I gotta make about this mirror work, but I only get one right. And then the minute you need to expand, the minute you're like, Oh no, I gotta start paying because I want more than one. But I've had the full feature list, and I haven't been limited in what this thing can really do within this one board. I think it is so beautiful and powerful to be able to do it that way, rather than being like, oh, but you need to pay to get this feature. Oh, you need to pay to get this feature.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 33:37

We tell our fictional CEO what we're doing is not giving out a free product. What we're doing is causing future customers to invest in us, and we are going to quantify the value of our free product based on how many minutes they spend, how many logins per day, how many you know, how much information they store on us, how much stuff they build, I think that's the value that you quantify. And then, I mean, I've seen multiple software organizations take their free list may or take their free license and make it something where you can only use this if you also agree for us to use your logo. And so suddenly they had this. You look at these tiny little software companies, you're like, how do they have these enormous logos? Well, I'll tell you how they do it. It's because somebody in their organization, potentially unauthorized, used their free product to accomplish something they wanted to accomplish, and in doing so, basically gave away the right to use that company's logo. And, I mean, there's all sorts of ways to kind of mitigate that legally. But, I mean, I'm seeing when a company claims that, you know, a large portion of clients are using them, using is not this. Is paying for, and yet they are able to claim using, it's like PR math.

Kerry Guard 35:10

PR math. I love that. I think this is really important because I think for the companies that lost sight of this. For me, there's this, I'm going to get my high horse for a second. You're going to it's going to be okay. I feel like, for the companies who have been so focused on the low, on the bottom of the funnel, leads, leads, leads, leads that can buy right now, need to build a big sales team and cultivate those leads right now have lost sight of the long game, which I feel like is what you're leading into. Having a free product is not in the short term, it's the long term, and it's the cultivating of those people who really turn into loving your product because they were at the ground, and they use it from the beginning of either your of you building the thing or then building their career. And then you get joined that journey, and then they get to bring you along. And there's something to be said that's hard to measure of what my dear friend Peter Wheeler calls the referral friends, right? So you get people who come in and love your product, and they can't necessarily buy it yet, but to your point, how you joined, they're showing it to all of their friends, and then they're buying into it. And so you have this beautiful referral network that happens well, and I think it gets lost when you get so focused on down the funnel that you lose that mentality of the bigger picture and the bigger footprint that you can create. Let's talk about you've been mentioning the CEO for a while. That is definitely a speed bump. I don't think that's a speed bump. I think you like that. Sometimes that's a brick wall. Yeah, goes up at the very end. Speed bumps that show up, right? So you have the street product. You're like, Okay, I'm ready to buy this thing. I need this thing. And you're getting buy-in through this EBM approach of making sure that when you're looking at bringing your audience in and through that you're not just talking about a single person. That's really what's happening here. You're talking about all these folks that sort of can come in and come through and start to engage in the buying process, whether it's directly or indirectly. And you mentioned the speed bump. Let's get there for folks. Yeah, I keep tanging for them, and I'm sorry, but it's even so good, yeah,

Heidi Joy Tretheway 37:42

so, I mean, like, I mean, we created this idea of the seventh persona after we had created, uh, six, like, be, you know, kind of the six core personas, which are, like, your C suite, your business unit, unit leaders, and Your daily users, or your power users, I mean, and so this, this, like, kind of seventh persona is the one that nobody pays attention to, and they're, they're thought to not be influential in the process, right? You have a, you have a you have a pioneer persona, who's the one who goes and finds this thing and brings it into the company. And then, you know, you kind of have your, your squeaky wheel persona, that's the one that's like poking the business unit leader to say, hey, I need this. I need this. I would go faster if you could give me this. But, but for me, I want to give an example from Contentful, which is that we realized that the marketers were the speed bump. Persona, early in, say mid, mid-2018 obviously that business has grown a ton. And I would say the marketers are now sometimes leading the charge into adopting Contentful. But back in the day when I joined Contentful in mid-2018 they had had five years off of business operations, and they had focused exclusively on business-to-developer marketing and and kind of bringing on the developers in that, in that free, free trial way, and I mean, and it was working enormously well. But in addition to that bottom-up, B to D, we wanted kind of a top-down B to B motion. And so what would happen would be sales engineers would get on the phone with the developer, right? Like, we've had your initial sales conversations, you started to sell this into an enterprise, and then they're like, Okay, great, I need my, like, head of developer, or my head website developer, to kick the tires around with a solution engineer who's highly technical, who can talk about Contentful and all the ins and outs and content modeling, et cetera, et cetera. And what would happen is that marketers would show up on the call and completely ruin the conversation. They would be like, but what about my interface? What about my existing CMS? But what about my? Migration of content. But what about this? And they would just pour resistance into the conversation, completely distracted from the technical tire kicking, where we had already kind of been ready to validate everything that they needed. And so instead of freaking out about this, we just started paying attention to it. Started empathizing. I was leading the content marketing and branded communications for Contentful and so my content marketing team just started wrapping our arms around the marketers who were having that exact same problem because we were lucky enough to be able to sell software that we used every day, I would routinely just pop into our own Contentful instance. You know, dogfooding, right? You get to our website, off your own software, and um, and so we started thinking about, well, what do we need to do to educate marketers so that they feel comfort, comfortable and confident, and, you know, open to adoption and, and it was actually like a full mindset change, rather than headless CMS, which is a terrible thing to say. I mean, it sounds like, you know, Ichabod Crane crossed with some, like, black box of, of terrible web arm name, um, yeah, but, but, like, how do you explain the idea of atomized content or structured content to a marketer? And so we actually ended up building an entire video sequence led by an amazing person, Liz Osterlo, who helped to kind of build all of those videos and use it as like an explanation and education. And as soon as we were able to divert the marketer speed bumps off of the path of getting in the way of the technical validation, and give them their own stream of content, their own education, and resources, and make it like very personal to them, so that they knew they're being taken care of, and so Oh, and nothing to see over here with the technical validation right, like, but you're being taken care of because we're addressing marketers concerns. And how do marketers do things? Then we were able to kind of allow that sale to go through faster, rather than trying to cram too many people with competing agendas in one room, and maybe that's the key takeaway here. Don't allow people with competing agendas or differing needs to show up in the same room in a sale process. Make each kind of part of that sale process unique to that person's needs, and you will be able to answer objections better, and you'll be able to educate better, and it'll be a kind of a more comfortable sales process for everybody.

Kerry Guard 42:50

Okay, let's pull this apart for a second because I think it's really important, but until we get there too. So when you're talking about competing, how do you even figure out? So for you, you figured out that the marketers have speed bump because it sounds like they were showing up in the sales call,

Heidi Joy Tretheway 43:03

yes, and the same the in the sales engineering technical validation call, specifically,

Kerry Guard 43:10

right? Okay, so if you have somebody showing up in a specific persona, where you have a questions list of like, okay, this person's gonna show up, and these the questions they're going to ask, and I got them, and then they bring somebody along. So a great example for us is as I'm a founder of a digital marketing agency who also markets to marketers, which is so fun, I can't even tell you it's the best and the hardest at the same time, because they know all the in the now, nothing is worse than them showing up with their CFO.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 43:46

Yes, it is. CFO is a total

Kerry Guard 43:48

speed bump in my world, and so making sure that I sort of pull those things apart and have separate meetings, I think, is key. Whether I can get those separate meetings or not, is neither here nor there, but that I can be able to address each of their different challenges is what matters. And so I think that's so key to what you're saying. I would love it if we could all figure out you know how to have different meetings, but also being prepared for when they show up in the same room. It's really helpful.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 44:19

It's weirdly connected to this market force book that I'm working on where we're talking about, like, different styles, that people have different concerns, that they have in a meeting based on their kind of like, own intrinsic habits. And CFOs are very often the kind of people who are all about reviewing history, making sure all of the boxes are ticked, all of the T's are crossed, i's are dotted. They're very they're kind of averse to making a decision. They would rather not make a decision if it contains risk, and they are going to almost exhaustively put you through the wringer to make sure. Sure that's working. And so one of the ways that we we approach this, one of the strategies that we we suggest, is adapting your style, right? Like my style is pretty chaotic, adapting your style to the person, to the listener, in a way that they are excited, in a way, not even excited that this is the way that they think. And so with this, with the CFO, I would be sending the agenda advance, in advance. I'd send all the materials in advance. I would start the conversation to say, you know, what are your concerns? What are the red flags you're seeing? What are the hesitations? Let's build our agenda around your assessments and your concerns, and then that's going to allow us to have a more productive conversation. And they may want to review things like you might feel like it's just like, when are we going to move forward? But you kind of have to check your own biology that feels impatient and allow this other person's style to take the lead. And so we take each of the four styles identified by market force and kind of like cross-reference them, like if you're this style presenting to that style, what kinds of things do you need to say in a negotiation, what kinds of things do you need to say? I mean, like, how much idle chit-chat do you do? And, and with some style for the CFO

Kerry Guard 46:29

done.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 46:30

And with the CFO exactly with, I don't want to say a CFO is a particular style, because they, they come in all shapes and sizes. But, um, if you get a read on this person that they're like not into they're not into the small talk, they're not into the Hey. But we could also do fun idea brainstorming. You need to check your own biology and your own kind of way of being and allow their way of being to drive the meeting.

Kerry Guard 47:02

So let's guess this, and that actually leads us perfectly into my question around trust. So if you're trying to talk to multiple audiences, this is, I think this is one of the biggest challenges and shifts that we've seen in the marketplace as we talk to about buyers. So buyers no longer have a single decision maker, right? It's now by committee. Much to our dismay, it's the speed bumps that we're talking about that show up in these calls, like, what we thought you were the decision maker, Mr. Cmo, and now you're telling me you have to get buy-in from other places. Yeah.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 47:36

Oh, this would try you. Oh,

Kerry Guard 47:40

so you're not really making your spearheading. This the decision, but you're not making the decision right? So there's the yeah switcheroo that happens, and there's this level of trust that you need to build because I feel like the switcheroo is happening. This is my own personal take, based on what I'm seeing in the market, on my side, as well as for my clients, is that everybody's scared to be wrong. Uh-huh, there's especially when it's a big decision, a big purchase decision, right Mark, any technology that we bring in these days is subscription. The model is long-term. Does take to your point, if the developer sitting there on Miro board for six months, I might not be paying for that Miro board, but I'm paying for their salary to sit on mirror for six months. That's time and money being spent there. And so everybody's scared to make a big purchase decision, and nobody wants to be the one in the driver's seat having their finger pointed at them if the decision goes wrong. And so there's this level of trust that needs to be built these days that I that I think we could take more care of, yeah, and more intention with. And so when you have to build that trust and now multiple decision makers to your point with multiple agendas. Sales is an easy, quote, unquote easy way to do it because you can get in the room with them, you have individual conversations. You can sort of check those boxes, but from a marketing standpoint, where it's a bit broader, what are some tactics ways you're going about building that trust with those different personas? That helps make sales job easier, because the Trust has started sooner, yeah,

Heidi Joy Tretheway 49:36

so, um, there are two habitual ways people assign trust, right? There's, there is the sincerity based trust, right? I trust that what comes out of your mouth is the same thing that's happening in between your ears. I trust that you will, you know, when you promise to do something for me, you're going to do it because, you know, you just seem like a really nice. Person, we have a good vibe. Seriously, like we have a good vibe, it's the basis of a lot of sales. And then there's also this, the other way of, kind of assigning trust. And this is something that people do by habit, not like, necessarily, they're not necessarily consciously thinking, is this person sincere, or is this person competent? But they literally do it by habit, viscerally. And that's the competence-based trust assignment, right? And that's, I've seen you do this a million times before. I see the degrees on your wall. Your waiting room in this law office looks really nice. You must make a lot of money. So you must be, you know, winning a lot of cases. You know, whether it's like a subtle cue from somebody's appearance, or a more, usually more specific, like, I have this many case studies. I have this rating on trust pilot. I have this rating on g2 that's the kind of more the competence side problem is. Both of these are subjective, and they frequently run into each other, right? If you have a CMO who gets a good vibe and a CFO who's all about like, what's their g2 rating, you do not have a sale because neither of these people can agree on how to assign trust. So there's another way to assign trust that I think is at a higher level, and it's what every organization needs to be striving for, and that's accountability. When I do X by y, when I say I'm going to do X by y, and then do X by y, then I start to kind of put another brick in the wall of this, of this trust, right? I trust that accountability is going to breed trust. Trust is not necessarily going to breed accountability. You could trust somebody and then they could go off and be like, Eh, I'm not, I'm not going to do this. So I would say that you are building as a marketer, every time that you can show accountability you are building, as a marketer, your brand. And every time you fail to be accountable, you are taking away from your brand. So then, what does that look like when you're actually marketing? One example would be having a change log on your website. I think having a change log, especially if you're an early-stage startup, and you're doing developer tooling or something like that. I think kind of showing them the business, showing them what you keep adding, what you promise to do. I think that shows accountability that you are going to keep building and that your software has a future. I think that's a really great way of showing accountability. You can also show accountability in your you know, your sales process, your marketing materials. I don't know if you've ever given your email address to get, like a white paper, but if that white paper doesn't get delivered crisply and without seven additional screens, then you know, or, like, you, you sign up for a white paper and it comes out, and it's like three pages of, like a written crap. That's that that just is aware ability. So, that's an example of where marketers can really be accountable to, for example, value somebody's lead by typing in their email address, value their lead. Give it. Give them the paper. Give the minimal hoops to jump through. Don't make them go through seven screens. Don't make the Oh, now you can go download it over here. Like, be accountable to your promises. Say what you're going to do and then deliver on that.

Kerry Guard 53:39

I think that's so important. I feel like we've lost trust with our customers as an industry. They want nothing to do with us. We are a necessary evil, and we have work to do, y'all, and what a great playbook you just gave us, Heidi, in terms of even just a change log to show that transparency and then, as marketers that accountability from we're going to give you a white paper. Here it is. Aspect, yes, we gotta lose, we gotta lose the hoops, y'all. I think this is such a powerful conversation. I feel like we've had, we had so many micro conversations, and we didn't quite dig into the things that I think we had hoped for because we had so many beautiful tangents that I think were so important for where we are in the world. But when you're dealing with your persona and multiple personas, and once that butt head, it was like the DISC assessment of all this assessments that happened here, of how we as marketers and sales can navigate managing those audiences and meeting them where they are speaking their language, talking to their pros and cons and challenges that they are having as different personas, and then help helping them feel like they've been heard and seen as. Of and address their challenges to help them come on board if we're the right place for them to begin with. So yes, that Heidi, did I miss last word? Tell us what we the last thing we need to hear as it relates to building trust with these audiences and these speed bump folks that show up out of nowhere. Ooh,

Heidi Joy Tretheway 55:24

I will tap Joe to turn off. Who is one of the marketers I look up to most? And he always talks about how, you know, good marketing makes you look smart. Great marketing makes your customer feel smart. And I really feel like being genuinely helpful, making your customer feel better educated, and not that they had to go through, you know, a bunch of hoops or a bunch of email entries or a bunch of white papers make making their day better, making their lives easier, like a DevRel getting on Reddit forums sort of about their product or their industry, and just answering questions helpfully, even if they aren't precisely going to lead to a sale. I mean being genuinely helpful is, I really think, the coin of the realm for for marketing. I think it's where the where the marketing is going. When I look at Tiktok, and I spend far too many hours on Tiktok for as old as I am, but when I look at Tiktok, I am learning all the time. I'm getting takeaways that help me in my life. And I would love to see marketing more and more kind of move away from I need demand gen I need to get a bunch of email addresses and move closer and closer to I helped somebody solve a real problem they had. I dug into that problem. I made their lives better and easier, and as a result, I've kind of won a fan over that when they have, you know, the time they need the money to go buy my software, they're going to be thinking of me because I was able to be helpful in the moment.

Kerry Guard 57:08

Yes, I'm going to quote that and put that everywhere. 100% great. I am so grateful for this conversation. Heidi, if people want to learn more about your fractional services if they want to do more with you. Where can they find you?

Heidi Joy Tretheway 57:25

I am Heidi truthaway.com, so H, e, i, d, i, t, R, E, T, H, E, W, A, y, you can reach me there, on LinkedIn, me, there, all of the above, email me, call me, etc,

Kerry Guard 57:41

amazing. We're going to put that all in the show notes before we go. Heidi, you're more than a marketer. You're clearly a human with a wonderful workspace. And so tell us. You know, the last few years with COVID, we've learned to figure out how to like live in this new world order. It's what sometimes creeps in and disrupts our lives, but at the end of the day, it is a new normal. So what are you most looking forward to walking into 2024, outside of the work you're doing in terms of your personal life? Are you traveling more? Are you picked up by new hobbies? What are you what are you most looking forward to?

Heidi Joy Tretheway 58:15

Ooh, I love it. I challenge myself to learn German. And we have a German exchange student from Berlin that we're hosting. So I am, I'm building language skills. I always thought I was going to be bad at languages, or that I always thought I would be bad at languages, but I mean at, you know, a very ripe old age, picking up a language. My first kind of second language, was really exciting, learning German, and I've been traveling a ton. I was in Germany four times last year, and then I have a whole bunch of, you know, trips planned coming up. And honestly, if I have four plane tickets in my future, I'm a happy girl. Some people buy shoes, some people buy furniture. I buy plane tickets. It's my jam.

Kerry Guard 59:02

Come on over. Let's make it happen. I'm so incredibly grateful. This is what a wonderful conversation to kick off for 2024 if you liked this episode, please like subscribe, and share to Tea Time with tech marketing leaders. I'm your host, Kerry Guard, CEO and founder of MKG Marketing. This episode was brought to you by MKG, and if you'd like to be a guest, DM me. Let's hang out. I'd love to have you on the show and to have more amazing, authentic conversations like I just had with Heidi. Heidi, thank you again.

Heidi Joy Tretheway 59:33

My pleasure. Thank you. You.