Margie Agin on Building Messaging That Sales Teams Actually Use

Overview:

In this episode, Kerry Guard speaks with Margie Agin, founder of Centerboard Marketing and author of Brand Breakthrough, about what it really takes to align messaging across marketing, sales, and product. Drawing from years of hands-on work with B2B tech companies, Margie explains why messaging misfires usually stem from internal disconnects, not external competition. She dives into how to co-create messaging with cross-functional teams, why sales enablement starts with listening, and what to avoid when scaling your message with AI. If you’re launching a campaign, planning a rebrand, or just tired of marketing that doesn’t stick, Margie’s framework offers a smarter, more collaborative path forward.

Transcript:

Margie Agin 0:00

You start getting a lot of friction between those two groups about what a qualified lead actually looks like. It's just, it's just that you've got a mismatch of what the expectation was the message that you were sending.

Kerry Guard 0:15

Hello and welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. I'm so grateful you all are here. I'm your host, Kerry Guard, and today we're stirring up something special with Margie Agen, award-winning marketer, author of Brand Breakthrough, and founder of Centerboard Marketing. We're talking about why your messages aren't just a marketing problem, it's a sales product and leadership conversation from narrative building to brand voice. Margie helps B-to-B companies find their secret sauce, and today she's sharing the recipe. Time to spill the secret sauce recipe. Margie, are you ready?

Margie Agin 0:50

I'm ready. You're hungry? Yes, let's do it.

Kerry Guard 0:54

Here's what we're cooking up today, folks: we'll explore how to spot misalignment early, why your brand story might be falling flat, and how to build a message that doesn't get lost between pitch decks and sales calls. Plus, we'll close with my favorite, favorite, favorite question of all, which is outside of marketing: what is currently bringing Margie joy? Go for it. Let's do it. I know you love experimenting in the kitchen, so let's do a little brand recipe, word association. So, tell me what would be best paired with each of these. One thing you can't have is a sentence, okay? Phrase, word of phrase, brand, voice, personality, go to market.

Margie Agin 1:34

Sales, marketing, product, and customer success.

Kerry Guard 1:40

All the teams, Ooh, I like it. That is all the ingredients for GTM, right there. Sales, slide decks, rallying point.

Margie Agin 1:51

I'll get into that.

Kerry Guard 1:56

Yeah, we're gonna pack that, folks. Strategic narrative, storytelling, and for kicks. Audience, persona, soup, drama,

Margie Agin 2:07

I love it.

Kerry Guard 2:11

Oh, I love it. You are in for a treat today, folks, if that hasn't gotten you leaning in, I don't know. What I love hearing the messy side of marketing and cooking. I make such a mess in the kitchen. My poor husband, whenever we're done dinner, sorry. Husband, cooking when you it can be a messy endeavor. What's one kitchen-worthy marketing fail or hot mess you've seen that made you laugh or learn something?

Margie Agin 2:38

Well, I like cooking more than baking, because cooking, you can be a lot messier. Yes, recipe, but you also experiment with baking, you have, it's science. You have to be extremely precise, right? Or you get, you really get a mess. With cooking, you can usually clean up your mess and still find something salvageable out of it, right? So, so you're looking for like a marketing fail, we're gonna start, yeah, I think I mean the biggest lesson that I have learned along the way, and we can, we can unpack a lot of this, is don't cook alone with friends, right? So is really doing something in isolation. You know, you're so in love with your work, and I have definitely had moments when I, you know, because I like to to think and go away and cook things up and then present it as like, Here is the finished dish, ta, da. And I have learned the hard way that if I don't bring people along with me for the ride and show them a little bit of you know how the sausage is made, to extend the metaphor a little bit, right, then they I get nodding heads, but then they don't actually use it. They don't feel connected to it. And so I've delivered this beautiful, you know, playbook, and it never actually gets used, which is, you know, I feel smart, but if there's no purpose in the end. So that's, that's my big learning and where I think over the years of having done this and worked with clients, I've, I've had to really change my methodology to to kind of bring them along earlier,

Kerry Guard 4:30

Bring them into the process, bring them into the cooking process.

Margie Agin 4:33

Bring them into the process. Yes, even if it's messy and kind of embrace, embrace the mess and prepare people to that some of this is going to be messy, right? This is not a straightforward process, especially when you're talking about messaging and positioning. If it was, you know, if it was straightforward, we it would take a week and you'd be done. But it doesn't work like not take a week.

Margie Agin 5:00

It actually requires the mess to come out with something in the end that is usable and that people feel connected to.

Kerry Guard 5:13

There's the in the mess of it, there's big feelings, and one of the feelings, I find is frustration of, can we just go do the thing, like, there's this, like they want to move faster than like, I want to do the thing too, but I don't. I gotta be able to tell people what it is that the thing is to do the thing. Are you? Are you fighting that friction as well, and what are you doing about it?

Margie Agin 5:40

There is a reason that causes a company to say, We need to deal with our messaging. Almost nobody does it unless they have some kind of a compelling event that drives some urgency and that could be external, right? Like, oh, a new competitor, it'll enter the market, and they're saying the same thing we're saying. And so there's this urgency, hurry up. We got to get it out there, because we have to combat this competitor, right? And sometimes it's like a big trade show that everyone's going to be at. Again, we need to stand out, but there's a hard deadline, right? We need to be at this thing, right? Or we're, you know, the biggest is we're relaunching our website, beautiful, technical, gorgeous website, no content, right? So we need, we need to do it because the website, and then the website is delayed, so everyone is frustrated, and you're already behind before you even have begun, right? So I understand that there is that pressure that we cannot drag out this process forever, because we have promised our investors that on X, Y and Z date, we're going to do this right, or we've told the company that we're doing this. So it has to be done. So in those kind of situations, you have to go with, honestly, in all situations, you have to go with v1 right, and you have to set the expectation that this process is not done. We're going to do v2 and then we're going to do v3 and then we're going to, you know, just have learned from it. So it is better to iterate. Ship something right? It just give people some great and respond to Yes, and then actually that helps move the process along, in some ways, because otherwise you could just navel gaze forever. But I think that's where that urgency comes from, is that there has, there's some kind of external facing event that requires this messaging work.

Kerry Guard 7:44

You gotta go. You gotta go. I love that. We'll come back to this because I have follow-up questions, but I wanna know you said many companies think they have a lead gen problem, but really they have a messaging problem. You sort of alluded to it here. Can you walk us through what misalignment really looks like across a GTM team?

Margie Agin 8:05

Gosh. So I have a company that I'm working with now that was, it was the merger slash acquisition of seven different companies. This is like to the extreme. Many companies go through some sort of an acquisition or, you know, revision of branding. But here you have seven different companies that each had their own sales team. Each had their own essentially, they were competitors to each other, and they all merged. Each had its own sales team. Each had their own kind of process and way of the systems integrator, so process and way of talking about how what they did was successful to the client, right? Each had their own, slightly different ICP, right? So one's in South Africa, they're really into the mining industry, right? One's in one of them is in Canada. They're really into oil and gas. So everybody is slightly different, and that is the extreme that can also happen even within one organization that isn't the merger of multiple companies, because organically, as an organization, grows each sort of department, or sometimes there's a champion within that department. And these people are very smart, and they, you know, they've got tons of skills, and so they're building their own thing. And everyone is kind of building their own thing because they see an opportunity in their own area of business, right? So what this alignment looks like is, if, from a customer perspective, you're talking to this company in one type of scenario, and you're hearing a certain type of a story, you know they're hearing how they describe their company. You're hearing how they describe their products and services. You're getting a certain feeling about this company, and that looks. Your experience if you were talking to a different person within the exact same company, maybe even in the next meeting that you have, might as well be a totally different company, right? And so that can be extremely disjointing When you think about the customer experience, extremely disjointing to hear, see one story on the website, one story in your sales conversation, then you get passed to, like, a sales engineer or a customer, a success person, right? That's a totally different story. And now you have a technical problem, and you call in, and you get, like, it's as if you're talking to a different company, right? So that's, that's the impact of all of that is really erosion of trust, right? Erosion of trust because the customer doesn't feel secure that they know who this company is. And it's also a lost opportunity, because that customer is going to talk about you while you're not in the room, right? They're going to go to an event, or they're going to talk to their colleague who has a similar role at a different company, and the colleague is going to say, Hey, who do you know that does x right? And you don't know what they're going to say, right? You don't you know. You don't know how they're going to describe.

Kerry Guard 11:15

Fly on the wall.

Margie Agin 11:18

Exactly. And you're not there to help control that conversation you haven't armed them with your your elevator pitch, so it's up to their interpretation, and that's a huge lost opportunity for somebody to then refer you or talk you up when you're not in the room, because you have appeared to them as you know, kind of disjointed.

Kerry Guard 11:41

Right? You need to plant the seeds along the way of who you are so they can pick it up and be able to then present that back for sure. In terms of that trigger you sort of mentioned earlier, where there's like a trigger of where they need the thing, right, where they need to bring they need to readdress their messaging. And the alignment issue is there? Is there first signs that something's off, even before the numbers dip, like, what is that they got to go to this event, and now they've realized that their messaging isn't working? What? How do they realize it? What was that trigger? Right?

Margie Agin 12:15

So are the marketing team often where it trickles to the marketing team, right? Who may not be at that event, right? You're back at headquarters doing your thing. Is that the a salesperson often comes to you and says, I need a solution sheet for this event, right? Like that fire drill moment when they're like, I don't have any, you know, I need something. I need a sheet. Why do they really need a sheet? Right? Do they really need a solution sheet? I think what they're telling you is, I don't know what to say, right? I am not prepared to have a conversation that where I feel confident that you know that's going to resonate with the customer. So I need a piece of paper, essentially, to give them to do that work. So that tells you a couple things. One, you might have already created that paper, and they're not using it, which means basically it's not reaching your audience. And or also, you may not know what to say either. So it's sort of an indicator that, oh, wow, I'm sending people out there into the world to have these conversations, and they're not prepared. So that's, I think, how it usually hits marketing is through sales. Because sales is the one who has to actually go out into the field and have those conversations. You know, other ways that you may know that your messaging is not landing is you are also going to see it on your website, right? You're going to see high bounce rates. You're going to see very low conversion rates. You're going to see that even if you're sending traffic to your website, and your ad sounds really interesting, and it's, you know, visually compelling, and all of those things, it's actually not landing That's one way you might also be in the wrong people, right? So you may be speaking like at a certain level or a certain level of technical knowledge, or sending a message that you're a great fit for a certain type of customer, and maybe that's not the type of customer that your sales team really wants to engage with, though. Again, like between the marketing and sales side, that's when you may start seeing that disconnect is that you're sending what you think are qualified leads over to the sales team, because you've got 1500 people that attended a webinar, right? They spent the time going to a webinar. But in fact, perhaps those people are not really the best fit customers, and salespeople doesn't actually even want to talk to them, so things slow down. You start getting a lot of friction between those two groups. About what a qualified lead actually looks like. And that may, when you trace that all the way back, that may be because you were telling people that this wasn't, you know, an event or a webinar for hands on practitioners or something like that, right, right? And sales actually wants to talk to three levels above that. It doesn't mean that you can't do both. It's just, it's just that you've got a mismatch of what the expectation was, the message you were sending.

Kerry Guard 15:30

It sounds like the trigger is really marketing, realizing that there's a mistake. Marketing doesn't even know what to say. And then that misalignment between, you know, sales sort of showing up and saying they need to, they don't know what to say. That's, yeah, I mean, it's really hard to simplify what it is you do in a way that lands with an audience, right? So I think bringing in experts. We were even struggling this with ourselves. We just redid our messaging. I am very lucky enough to have a good friend who's product marketer. And I was like, can you just peek at this and let me know? And he literally changed three words. And it was like, just those three words that have now completely changed how we talk about what it is that we do. And so i What are the three words I really wanted the words are, so my internet, my internet keeps cutting out. Sorry, folks, we were talking about. So the thing that makes us different from other agencies, which there's, you know, a gazillion SEO digital ads agencies out there, and we, we do specifically work in a niche of B to B, you know, tech and cyber, but we're still not but, but still like so what right? The thing that really makes us different is we have what I call an Asana brain child of Yes, so, so when I talked about this asana brain child of the project management system that we have behind the scenes that makes all of the stuff work. He was like, oh, radical transparency. And I was like, because I was calling it, like, demand acceleration. And I was like, coming up with all these things. He's like, No, it's radical transparency. Just go do that. I was like, Okay, that is what we provide through Asana. You can actually see when we're going to deliver what we're going to deliver, and at what time we're going to deliver it. So, yeah, that would be.

Margie Agin 17:23

which is a lot, you know, why that's why that's really powerful, is because it hits a pain point that many people have with agencies, right? Which is that it's kind of relates to what I was saying before, too, which is, I went away and I cooked up some stuff and then I served it up, right? Didn't go so great, because you don't know what the heck they're doing, right? And sometimes then people aren't the best at communicating what their process is and and so to be able to actually track along and follow along is empowering for a client and comforting for a client. So I think that works is because it hits on the exact pain that is very specific to whoever is buying your services. So so I will say like I am I flipped the conversation on you, because it is so much easier for me to do this for other people than to do this for myself. So but I gotta tell you, like I could do this all day long and love it for other people, because I'm not as emotionally involved.

Kerry Guard 18:30

I think that's the thing, right? It's having that my coach always says to me, you can't read the bottle from the inside, right? You can't really get from the inside the bottle, so you have to get fresh eyes. So I, I just wanted to, like, share a moment of like, I thank you for flipping the script, because I do think it's, it's very helpful for people to understand, like, you can do this work, but man, is it helpful to have fresh eyes. And you've watched, you've actually worked with over 70 companies, and you've all been taught content strategy at John Hopkins so you see both sides of the real world and the classroom. So can you unpack an example, like I just gave an example, but can you share with us an example where you helped a team go from messaging chaos to clarity and that turned, you know, sort of the outcome?

Margie Agin 19:16

Yes. So there was a company that I worked with that had a really interesting technology that they had built, which was a custom technology, and it worked best with a particular IBM solution, okay? And IBM essentially, like storage and disaster recovery, kind of a solution, and sat on top of that, okay? And so I worked with the founder of this company and the marketing lead, and he says an example of being really emotionally involved, which I completely appreciate, when you are the founder of the company, right? And you have built, you have built this amazing. Amazing thing, and that's what, that's what they want to talk about, right? Their own amazing thing, and how it accelerated and sped up the process and was more secure, created a secure perimeter around all of your, you know, your your backup data, which is a major attack target, you know, for for ransomware and, you know, malicious hackers and so forth, they would, they'd love to get it all of your all of your backup data, because then you're really, then you're really Sol, if they, if they attack you, you don't even have your backup data. So, so, so that's what they wanted to talk about. And it took multiple meetings for me to really unravel that you actually couldn't buy this thing alone. You could not buy it without also having this IBM product. Okay, so this is, this is also, I think, a difference between brand messaging at a very high level and and product messaging, right? So from a brand perspective, you can definitely talk about how you accelerate or how you improve security, and how you reduce risk, and how you, you know, make things easier to use, and all of these things at an extremely high level, which is great, and it's a hook, but it's really that product level messaging that was going to bring qualified buyers in the door, because they need we need to say, oh, so we're going after the IBM customer base, right? We're not trying to move somebody from using some other product to using the IBM product and then adding your thing on type like, Let's go where the fish are. IBM people are, and then let's talk to them in their language, which is, you already have this right, but here's what, here's what's not working, or here's what's not strong enough, or here's where the gaps are, or here's right, you know, some of the that you have, and here's how it all fits together. So we had to sort of take them down to a more granular level in order to make the connection with the right people, and it was if I after multiple conversations, it took me multiple conversations to figure that out right. Think like, oh, what's where it is. Think about the message that you were sending to customers by talking at higher level, for them, they're just going to glaze over and move on to the next thing, because they're not going to spend the time. And the three meetings that I took, I was incentivized to figure it out they are not right. So you got to get very quickly to that message that is about their pain. And then you can also set a vision, but, but speaking to their immediate the job they need to fix right now that's on their whiteboard, that's what's going to just drive more urgency. So I think again, you can do both, but if you're, if the goal is, you know, build a pipeline, short, you know, pipeline right now. Then you got to be at that product level, and then then you you're also increasing your brand, and you're talking about thought leadership and all of that as well. But you can't just stay up here. You got to also go down with the people.

Kerry Guard 23:14

Yes, I actually had a follow-up question that I think is perfect timing for this, which is how AI has changed how we do messaging, because I feel like getting closer to that's one of the shifts that I feel like we're seeing is getting closer to the product. Is that what you're seeing too, and what else are you seeing in how AI is impacting how we do messages?

Margie Agin 23:36

I'll tell you how I have used it that has been helpful to me, and I've definitely gone through, you know, the stages of denial, because I'm a writer also right with AI, as I have come around, and AI has gotten a lot better. And, you know, and I know how to tell the slop from the quality content. I am using it. I am using it more as a partner and a sidekick. But what I what I use it for a lot of times, is to help with the research. So the best way that I know in order to understand what those pains are is to talk to customers, right? And so I will I will always make that a part of any project I do. Even if I talk to five of your customers, I will start to hear patterns. I will start to understand the language that they use, right? I will be able to sort of poke and prod and ask follow-up questions that sometimes they're willing to tell me as a third party that they're not willing to tell their salesperson or their project manager, okay? So I still think there has to be some element of that, but that takes lots of time, right? And that, and that takes, you know, lots of follow-ups, etc, to get to that depth. So to supplement that gong call. Calls, right chorus calls, being a fly on the wall in those sales calls. But again, then you have to analyze all that. So AI can be very helpful to analyze the feedback that you are getting in sales calls, again, to surface to surface patterns and ask questions. You know about, if you're if you're interested in, you know, when does a particular competitor come? Competitor come up, or when does a particular product come up? Or when does, you know, can you test messaging, specific messaging, and then gather all the feedback, so if you can't comb through, you know, dozens or hundreds of sales calls, and even to the point where you might say, hey, chat, GPT, right? You this. This is like a, you know, rough, but a prompt. You are a product marketing manager looking to create messaging. Tell it who it is, right for a B to B technology company, right? And you are trying to, you are trying to understand how your customers make decisions you are selling to, and give it the whole persona, right of the type of person that you're trying to reach, right? This is a persona. This is, can you give me some example five, the top five things that these people might ask of vendors. Why not? Let's see what it comes up with. One of them might be completely like off the, you know, off the grid, but, but some of them might be amazing and help you, you know, as a check to all the other things that you're doing, or to spur an idea so that in your next conversation, you dig into that a little bit more, because it has access to all kinds of information on the internet, including reviews, right? Including Reddit channels, all things that yourself can't go dig into on your own. So true. So I have been using AI to to help with messaging. Is to try and get inside, oh, hello, try and get inside the mind of the customer.

Kerry Guard 27:00

And build on that, right? Like, that's the power of AI too. I found is like to do all that research and have that be the base for them, building off of that into your messaging, to get again, that support, at least that's what I've been doing in terms of the actual messaging piece. Are you doing something similar, or you totally still very much of the belief of writing it from scratch and just using it for the research?

Margie Agin 27:26

I was gonna say, the other research thing I'll do is, then I'll ask it to check, okay, these are the four top competitors. Or here's my messaging: these are the four top competitors. How does this messaging compare to putting out so I can do that. I can go to their websites, right? And I can, and I do, and I go to all those things, but there's also a lot of information that's publicly available that you can use their compete tools that will go scrape it. But AI can also do a lot of that too, so that's on the research side. So for writing like I said, I've, I've, I've evolved. I say that like, in a begrudging way, because I love to write, and I feel like is, you know, you have to know what good looks like first. So, you know, I'm glad I taught that that course at Hopkins was a graduate level course on writing for the web, and I'm glad I taught that before AI came along right and I have a daughter who's now a freshman in college, so she was in high school when AI was kind of coming on the scene. And I'm really, I feel like you still have to understand what you're going for to have an idea of what good looks like, as I said, so that you can, you can compare and contrast what AI has given you versus what you know, an intern would be writing, or a junior marketer would be writing, right, or graduate student would be writing and where you want to get to. So it's a starting point. The other thing I use, so the other day, I wrote a storyboard for a script, basically for a video for a client, okay? And like all things you write, it's too long on the first go, right?

Kerry Guard 29:15

How's that problem? I write character limits on LinkedIn all the time.

Margie Agin 29:19

It always is right. So it was like four and a half minutes, which I was actually didn't think was that bad, but I said to AI, you know, help me trim this down so that it is under two minutes. And it did. And I said, you know, keep the personality, keep the tone. You know, here's again, here's the audience. Here is not going to be used. I gave it a lot of information, and it trimmed it, and I think that it just as we were saying before. Like, I didn't want to, you know, don't kill your baby. Is expression, right? I didn't want to get rid of some of the things I'd written, yeah, but it didn't care. I. It took my long sentence and went

Margie Agin 30:07

Right there, it served its purpose, and it hit the market. It's more likely to hit the market two minutes than in four and a half. So these are the ways that I have been using.

Kerry Guard 30:16

I have been saying this for a while now, and I still truly believe that for those who know what good looks like, AI is going to be a productivity multiplier. It already. I mean, it has been for me considerably. I think for those who don't know what good looks like, it's going to get really clear, really quick. So I definitely encourage people to still, you still know how to do math, like when you talk about a calculator, right? We still had to show our work, right? It's the same idea. This is just a fancier calculator. We still have to know how to map so.

Margie Agin 30:56

Right? And if you like, if you like systems and patterns, which I do, I'm always thinking about compare and contrast, right, or before and after status quo, from to the new normal, whatever it is, right? So if you're already thinking like that, AI can really help you, because it just it sees patterns much faster than an individual can. So if you have, like, a suspicion of a pattern, a hypothesis that you want to test, yeah, you can, you can, you can have it, you know, pointed in that direction. And I'll tell you if you're going the right way.

Kerry Guard 31:31

In terms of, you know, you've worked with over 70 clients, you've seen, you know, how the impact of messaging can really be super impactful. What's the cost of ignoring it and just like trying to power through and just say it'll work itself out, or using AI to, you know, help you muddle your way, you know?

Margie Agin 31:53

What's the one clear money waster that startups and scale ups, I think, use like a knee-jerk, you know, in terms of, like, go heading out into the market, maybe before they are really ready, is spending money on advertising, right? That there's a real clear spend there. But I think it's the most clear cut example of wasted, wasted budget an opportunity. I mean, certainly you could say, as we were saying before you know, your website is not converting like it should be, right, or people are falling off in the funnel like they should be. That's a little harder to calculate right or to trace back to messaging as directly as when you are spending money on advertising before you have before you have baked your messaging, at least, to the version one, when you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, right and trying a bunch of things you are you are really spending money that you won't be able to get back later on. So that's in a perfect world. You want to be doing the messaging piece and have a consistent story and some clear points that you want to make sure that you get across right before you go out and you start spending money on ads, especially LinkedIn, which is crazy expensive, right? You're getting, you know, 1000 $2,000 you know, clicks, cost clicks, a that's a very, very expensive click.

Kerry Guard 33:34

That rolls downhill, especially if your website is not converting. Then you're looking at hundreds of 1000s of dollars in your cost per conversion. That could have been alleviated. Two things I'll say about digital ads. One is, whenever a founder shows up to us as an agency and says they want to work with us, we say, Who's your marketing contact? And if they don't have one, we go and find them one, because they should not be directly spending money with us. That is a terrible idea to your point of you have to have that work done. The other thing I'll say is, once you do have v1 digital ads can be a huge helper in helping you find out if your messaging is resonating quicker.

Margie Agin 34:14

Limited way, then you're testing something against itself and you're iterating. You've got a few backups. You have a plan, right? You have a plan. And said, Yes, we have one idea.

Kerry Guard 34:25

Just keep that's just point of throwing spaghetti against the wall like that's the worst thing you can do with channel marketing in particular, because it takes so much time for the systems to learn, and you can't throttle them anymore. Can't turn them off and on. So once you start spending money to really see if it's going to work over a long period of time, you need a plan that testing plan to be iterating through, to give it, you know, three, 612, months to actually, like, get that positive ROI, especially if you're talking about long sales cycles, right? So, taking the time to do the work first, we highly recommend.

Margie Agin 34:58

We highly recommend, yeah, and. And also parsing out. It's very difficult to parse out, if something is not performing what, what is it? Right? Because there could be many reasons. It could be that the message was great, but then there wasn't any kind of an offer, right? There wasn't anything for someone to do. They got interested. They clicked, right? They were intrigued, but then what? Right? Then, why did you lose them? Did you just send them to your homepage? Right or no? What do we want them to do? They want them to read something, to learn something, or take a free, you know, do it to a free tool, some something to engage with. Yeah, so having a few of those elements in place before you go, before you go, spending money on ads will give you just a lot more bang for your buck.

Kerry Guard 35:54

You know you've worked across product marketing and sales. Out of those teams, who do you find is most relieved when a stormy when a story finally comes together.

Margie Agin 36:09

Wow, sales, probably sales out of all of those, yeah, again, because they are on the front line. Right? They are the ones standing in front of the customer, or virtually standing in front of the customer, and again and again and again. And I don't think I fully appreciated how that felt until I started running my own business. And right, it's given me such an appreciation for that and, and so I think a lot of sales people spend a lot of time also trying to make up the story, because they haven't received it from marketing, right? That's time they could be spending doing other things. There's, there's frustration, prospect, yeah, or, you know, building relationships, or, you know, doing things because they because they haven't they don't like the story, or they don't agree with the story, or there is no story, and they don't feel heard. And so they're making up their own stuff. They're using ChatGPT to just whip this together, and I'll put it in Canva, and I'll make up my own solution sheet.

Kerry Guard 37:22

I may know a few salespeople who are doing that

Margie Agin 37:26

Right, so that's a wasting everybody's time. They shouldn't. We shouldn't be in a situation where they're doing that. So I think they celebrate. I've seen like the founder that I was talking about before he ended up celebrating because he did not have to be in every meeting anymore. He was the only one that could really tell the story. Yeah, gravitas, you know, yeah. And he was burning it at both ends, because he had to be in every sales conversation, right and as well as working with investors and running the company and all the other things that he was doing, so he celebrated because now he could spend time doing other things, and felt confident that his other his company could scale because he actually had a playbook that other sales people could take without him having to be there, and demos, without him having to be the one to run the demo. Yeah, and it's I get it like it's really you feel this sense of control, like no one, no one can tell my story but me. And when you realize that, that it, there's a program now, there's a consistency now, there's you feel confident that they're going out and they're telling the story correctly, then you can actually breathe.

Kerry Guard 38:53

Yes, oh, I imagine. I mean, as founders ourselves, right? Like when we bring a team member on to do a thing. There's just that great relief of like, oh, I don't have to do, yeah.

Margie Agin 39:07

I'm working on that.

Kerry Guard 39:11

Me too, Margie, we could, we could have a whole therapy session around that. Let me tell you. Let me tell you, I do want to get to and tease out your insights triangle. One of the frameworks you teach is the insights triangle, bringing together customer, internal and competitive truths to build strong positioning. Let's give people some nuggets around what that is and why it's super powerful.

Margie Agin 39:36

I look at this as three legs of a stool, and just like a stool, you got to have three legs or the thing falls over, right? So your three legs and you're triangulating these different insights that you get from different sources. So one we've already talked about a lot is your customers, right? Happy customers, unhappy customers, prospects. What are they saying? What is their language? Change. What do they care most about? Right? What's going to drive them to change? That's one leg is the customers. One leg is your own internal team, which often includes executives, right and founders, but it also includes a lot of these frontline people who are having conversations because they are gathering, whether they realize it or not, they are gathering all of these stories and anecdotes and mistakes that were made along the way, and questions that they are asked, and a lot of times those are not shared across the organization. So they're stuck in their heads, right? Or they're stuck in decks that somebody has in their own folder somewhere, and so we want to bring those out into the open and share them in a way that is more continuous, so that when someone does hear something, right, or when someone does say, Oh, this anecdote, this customer success story, This was amazing. The rest of the company can learn about it and also be able to to leverage it and share that as well. Okay, so that's the internal part. So we do workshops and just a lot of like a listening tour, of going around and talking to these types of people. I love sales engineers, right? I love Customer Success people, people that are really intimately involved with customers. Really Know the dirt that you know. They know where all the drama, they know that's we're talking about drama. They know where all the you know, other things happen. They know the questions, the problems, the struggles. And then we look at building more of a scalable system so that these stories get shared on a regular basis. And we've touched on this a bit, but why that is so important is not just to get things out of people's head, but to surface any kind of misalignment. Right? This is the time to say this. The founder thought this, but now the CTO thinks that. And these things, I'm not sure how to line them up, and a I don't know the answer to those questions. I'm just surfacing them right sometimes to say we need to resolve this if we're going to have consistent messaging, because these things are saying different things. And then the third part of the triangle is competitors, because you are looking for a story that is different and that personality and a way of expressing yourself that is different from your competitors, but it has to be triangulated. So it has to be something that is authentic to your organization and feels true and real or and that you can back up, or it's just, it's just words, right? And it has to be something that your customers actually care about, because you could be hitting on some differentiator that nobody actually cares about, and right? And it's not going to move the needle. It has to be something that your customer said was important to them. So it's a lot of constant triangulation among these different parts of what I call the insights triangle.

Kerry Guard 43:06

That is so helpful. I was actually just running through my head of, okay, well, we just did this radical transparency thing. And so does it touch on all of these things? I think time will tell, because the customer piece is still the customers who have experienced it are so relieved with it. But is it enough to get people, you know, one of the hardest things, and we feel this all the time, Margie is running our own agencies, right? Of moving people off of, you know, what they already know? Is it better to just stick with what I know versus moving to another thing, right? So it will have to see if this messaging can help those folks feel like, oh, I mean, I don't have to babysit my agency, and they'll come to me with solutions. And that sounds awesome, but again, until you experience it like we can back it up all day in terms of customers, but it's the that's true.

Margie Agin 44:00

One customer or one client of mine who put it this way. And they said, we're trying to describe who is your ideal ICP, right? Who is your ideal target? And they said, the ideal person is someone who tried to do this all themselves but failed, right? How do you find that person that's you're actually sending out signals by talking about radical transparency, or talking about, you know, trying to have done this yourself, and how hard it with another agency may be, or trying to do this yourself, and what is the problem with that? And those are the people who are so attuned that they're going to pick up on those signals.

Kerry Guard 44:40

I've been we've been running an agency for since 2011 and we've never released. We've tried a couple times to sit down and do our own messaging, and we've really, really struggled because it's so hard; it's easier to do for other clients.

Margie Agin 44:52

Absolutely, I'm saying, until you get to that, that like, Okay, I have to do it now. So I'm, uh. Uh, you know, I, like, I have to redo my website, right? What? What? What marketer? What marketing agency or consultant doesn't say that, right? Like, yes, and it's going to be redone, and I'm excited for it to be redone. So when I said, I just want to circle back to the rallying point about the sales deck for a second, because I meant that to be a little bit controversial, like some some people don't even use sales tax, right? We've all been slide showed to death, and so it, for many people, it's kind of a crutch. How, having said that, right? I really, I believe that if we do messaging work or positioning work and we just keep it in a, you know, in a playbook, or worse, it's a PDF, right? Or it's a notion, you know, something I love that I dip into it and use that as my slush fund of messaging all day long when I'm creating other stuff, right? But I'm a marketer, so for the rest of the organization, they need to see something physical and tangible. And there, I can't tell you how many times I got, oh, the playbook looks great. This was wonderful, you know, what a great workshop. And then we go to create the sales, you know, the discovery deck, or the, you know, l1 deck, or whatever you want to call it. And they're like, I hate that. That's horrible. I don't that's not what I meant to say. And I'm like, you see right here playbook when you agreed to that. But somehow, it's not until they actually see it, yeah, in a format that they, you know are going to use, that you get, get like, the real reaction, right? So you have to go back to like, you have to ship something, and it's a lot easier to test and iterate on your deck, if you have good collaboration, especially with the sales team, to to test that out and change it and tweak it. Then I think it is on a web and then a web page, even though web page is easy to change, it's sort of, you don't get the real time feedback from conversations. So if you can test messaging in the wild, a salesperson can say, this deck, you know, this story landed, but this one I they were glazing over. Okay, then we'll fix it.

Kerry Guard 47:22

To know, good to know. Yes, I think a sales doc, from what I've been hearing in the in the universe, is very much helpful for trading to get people used to telling the story, finding which stories to your point stick, but they should. They should get off of it. IT people don't want to be presented to. We've been finding that in our own sales and marketing efforts, people just don't want to be they. They want a conversation, and they want to know what you're going to do about it, and then they want to move forward. So I totally such a good reminder. Margie, thank you for that. We I could clearly talk to you all day, all day long. Where can people find you? Margie, where they want to learn more about the center board, which is getting on, and how they might get your help with messaging.

Margie Agin 48:09

my LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me. Please. Do I love talking about this stuff. This has been super fun, and I'd love to continue the conversation with anybody that's interested in talking about this stuff, because there's a lot to unpack.

Kerry Guard 48:24

My favorite question, we've talked a lot about cooking that brings you joy, tinkering with recipes, trying something new. What's something outside of work that's lighting you up right now, even if it's totally random.

Margie Agin 48:36

My family is planning a trip to Florence. Yes, I know it's going to be very hot.

Speaker 1 48:41

I wish we beautiful that. So I'm

Margie Agin 48:44

I've been to Rome, I've never been to Florence, and so it's really fun to just think about where we're going to go explore and things that are off the beaten path. So if folks have recommendations, please share.

Kerry Guard 48:58

Yes, Florence is gorgeous. It was a long, long time ago that I was there. So I will leave others to give you recommendations. But I just remember having just my breath taken away about the architecture and just how, considering how old everything is, it still feels stil. It's still has this pristine feel to it. It's just absolutely breathtaking. I I'm gonna follow along, and I want to see pictures, and we're gonna, I'm gonna follow it will be.

Margie Agin 49:27

There will be gelato, there will be pasta, there'll be a cooking class, pizza, and tiramisu. That's what the cooking class is.

Kerry Guard 49:39

So good. Yeah, so good, amazing. Well, you have the best time ever, and I will follow up to see how it went. Thank you for our listeners. Thank you, Margie, for being with us here today. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share This episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that believes in radical transparency. To help you move your marketing forward without meeting after meeting after meeting. Thank you all so much. Have a wonderful day, and thank you to Elijah, our podcast sidekick. See you all next time.