This Is Where Brands Start to Break | Brandon Triola Ep. 3

0:00Chris Cruz:When you look at the tech industry, there's a massive disconnect happening. Companies are creating incredible products, but completely failing to connect with the humans who need to buy them. What good is revolutionary technology if no one understands its value? Brandon's agency, Forrest Co., discovered this when they created a video for a metals industry. It's not about having the fanciest tech or the most impressive features. It's about understanding what keeps your customers up at night and showing them you get it. But here's where things get interesting for creative professionals. Talent may open doors, but it's humanity that keeps them from slamming shut.

0:34Chris Cruz:In the end, breaking through your value ceiling isn't about what you make. It's about how you make people feel. All right. I genuinely think this is going to be probably the funniest episode we've done. Hands down. Now the pressure's on. The pressure is on you, Brandon, because of one, because I have had enough conversations with you that I end up just like almost peeing my pants laughing where I'm like, this is going to be great. But also I just think it's going to be fireworks because we're a few episodes in now and I feel a lot more comfortable. Yeah. You got the good background now. Background set.

1:05Chris Cruz:Plus, like, you and I have had so many impromptu, like, hour-long conversations around all the stuff we're going to talk about today. So many. But this doesn't feel like we're just kind of like this polished episode as much as it's, like, getting to sit with my friend and talk about it. But what the reality here is, here's what's interesting about you, Brandon. Well, first off, you're from Ohio, right? I'm from Northeast Ohio. Are you actually a LeBron fan or no? Yes. Oh, you are. So are you like, but you're not a team fan. You're like a LeBron fan. Like I root for the Cavs. I root for all the North and South.

1:35So devastating this year. Yeah. Yeah. Massive bummer. But like, whatever. We got one. Yeah. We're good. Yeah. But the way that I frame it is like everybody has their era. I was, I loved Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan growing up was like all my art projects in school were MJ. But for me, I didn't get to watch him play a lot. Right. It was Kobe. Yeah. Kobe was like the.

1:56Chris Cruz:I did not like Kobe until after he was done. I was upset. Kobe, my dad took me to see Kobe play the calves when Kobe and Shaq were on the Lakers and it was like, I was like, this is amazing. But then 2003, 2004 rolls around. I'm a sophomore junior and in Ohio in Northeast Ohio. And I'm in 15 minutes from St. Vincent, St. Mary high school. Okay. So those that don't know that is the high school of LeBron. Everybody's talking about this kid, LeBron. You gotta go see him. so i don't even remember how but when i was a junior i got to go twice that year to see him play when he was a senior okay and it was like in high school the way that i describe it is this it was like watching an nba player play with high school kids that's how good he was but this segues into creative stuff okay so go ahead well i've got questions for you anyway in conversation i was really into drawing do you ever go to like the fair or like six flags or something like that than the people that draw the caricatures.

2:54Yeah. I was obsessed with that. I thought it was the coolest thing as a kid. So I would sit and I would just get my mom's head people magazine. I would draw celebrity caricatures. Well, when LeBron became this massive thing, I drew before he was drafted by the Cavs. Everyone was like, we hope the Cavs get him. I drew this and I'll send you an image. Maybe you guys can throw it up on the screen on the video. I drew a caricature of LeBron in a Cavs jersey, wearing a crown, holding a scepter because they were saying he's going to be the king of Cleveland or whatever. and call it prophetic if you will my dad came into my bedroom one day while i was sitting there and he's like you should send this somewhere and i was like where should i send it well at the time i was obsessed with slam magazine oh slam magazine became my gateway massive if you're in the basketball world and you just heard me say that you immediately know you have credit now unbelievable so i was like well i'm a kid i'm 16 17 years old like they're not gonna publish my and my dad was like, how do you know if you don't send it to them?

3:53Yeah. So I get a edition of slam magazine. I find the address, the publication address. And I made a copy. Didn't send them the original, but went to the store to make a photocopy. Cause we didn't have scanners at home back then. I make a photocopy of the illustration and I mail it to slam with a written letter that I wrote out. My name is Brandon Triola. I'm 16 years old. I live in Northeast Ohio. I think LeBron's going to be, I would love it. If you put this in your magazine month goes by next edition of slam. I open it. a month ago another month goes by next edition of slam i open it the october issue and that year carmelo anthony's on the cover of the magazine because he was getting drafted by the nuggets uh i open it three pages in there's my illustration inside slam magazine oh bro what happened to you on the inside there well what happened first of all i didn't know how to react but the next day at school all my basketball buddies found out about it people were coming up to me in the hallway it was like my moment they were my art teacher was like so proud of me and that was it was at that moment when i realized i don't think creativity is a hobby okay i think i'm gonna do this oh wow

5:01Chris Cruz:it felt so good we have a very different high school experience high school like absolutely that was the one all of my creativity well that was the one good thing that ever happened to me in high school by the way like other than that high school sucked it was terrible i had terrible i went to public school horrible got terrible grades got a's in art that's it so anyways so that was my gateway into like oh you can like you can be creative and like it's a good thing it's not i'm not a weirdo maybe maybe it's actually cool that i'm like this maybe i'm actually maybe i actually have some potential so art was has always been the thing that like well everything else in my life sucks when i go through seasons where nothing feels like it's working i can always make something yeah i always just felt like a part of yeah exactly yeah let make and that that's interesting because the it'd be another great conversation for us to go back to like our origins with creativity because my high school moment is very kind of eye-opening to like my history of like kind of stepping away from it as a career choice but it's just keeping it as a hobby but yeah um that's another conversation like to set up people that are listening you and i were both 38 yes to give context when we were in high school yeah you could not be creative as a career it like wasn't a thing oh no they pulled out the books and were like you don't make any money you're either going to go be an accountant you're going to be a male nurse or you're going to come back here and teach at the school those were your three options let's get those ambitions high people yeah which is great i'm not dissing any of those things but i was like well i'm screwed yeah i know totally oh 100 i get it entirely um so the there's there's a couple things we're going to dive into one we're we'll talk about niching because you have a lot to say about niching down you've got a lot to say about what every tech kind of firm needs to be thinking about it all yeah um about human-centered uh tech design and then we'll jump into some creative myths because you've got a book coming out as well that's just i think worth every creative listening or reading to it'll be on audio as well or just i don't know yet i think probably it'll end up on audio because people are asking for that now it's like who reads right yeah exactly it's like podcasts um so here's one of the things about brian when i think about you there's a movie and i'm probably going to butcher the moment in the movie but the concept still remains the same okay and have you seen uh world war z yes okay so there's a there's a red pit right yeah exactly i mean it's a very underrated zombie movie i think um but anyway there's a scene when he's when he goes to israel and you find out that israel has preemptively built a some kind of defense system to these zombies before anybody else of course yeah before anybody else yeah right and they ask how did you guys like think so and ahead of the curve to prevent this from occurring here and they go they get to this concept of i think they called it the 11th man or something like that but it was the idea that if everybody has said yes the responsibility of the last person is to say no and there's just this like energy of hey if everybody has gone with the current yeah one of us has a responsibility now to go the opposite direction just to make sure we're not doing that yeah and i feel like some of the reasons why you and i jive is like we are that like person that's willing to be like everybody has said yes yeah we're gonna say no or like look where the crowd's going i'm out of here yeah i'm gonna go this other direction yeah because you have this willingness even on instagram to say things not in a rude or blunt way but you say it in a way that calls out the things that need to be called out for brands for creatives you have this willingness to to talk about things that others maybe shy away from because the current is going one direction they don't want to mess with the status quo but there's definitely you have a respect for the industry because you work in it yeah but you don't have a i would say you probably have a very much inside of you a willingness to look at the status quo and be like don't know if we need to be listening to that so when when i take that energy into the four things that every tech firm needs i'm looking to see like okay how is brandon thinking because brandon has a default setting almost that is like i'm going to think a little bit different than everybody else yeah you've guys been doing this for a long time you're a seven-figure b2b tech brand agency that does brand and marketing for tech companies how are you guys thinking about this what are these four things that you guys kind of push out that every tech firm needs yeah well first of all thank you i'll take that as a compliment yes i love the zombie analogy like it is a call we don't want to become zombies no no not that part so when we started forest it's actually really interesting because what you're describing it kind of played out in real time and i would say that my business partner, Nate, like, you know, Nate, he's the same way.

9:28We're like, if everybody's doing this, we're not going with the crowd, but here's what happened. So when we started for us, we never wanted to start a creative agency. Okay. In fact, even to this day, like we laugh all the time. If you were to say, if, if my business didn't exist and someone were to come to me, like, you should start a business. What would you start? Creative agency would probably not be at the top of the list.

9:50Chris Cruz:It's, it's hard. It's hard to do this. Yeah. It's really hard. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of skills and it takes a lot of late nights and crying and laughter and there's fun, but like it's hard. So when we started Forrest, what happened was we were working as just a small team, Nate and I, on some of these really big projects with these technology consulting firms. And about a year in, we realized that after working with a bunch of them, there's like, here's the theme. These people are avoiding being human. they're avoiding from a brand level, from marketing level, from a product level.

10:27It's stiff. It's corporate. Isn't even the word to describe it. And so we saw this theme happening and what we realized two things. One, why, what we were doing was working and also what was missing were the same thing. And we were just bringing this human perspective, things that we learned working in B2C, right? Okay. Things that we learned working.

10:49Chris Cruz:Because you have a big history in that space. We didn't even dive into that. Like helping push out personal brands for a lot of these well-known authors. Yeah. You have a history with that. Yeah. So I was helping people create personal brands before, like now it's a thing, right? There's courses, like nobody was doing that. We were just, so in the personal development space, if you want to write a book, become an author or build like a, any kind of coaching thing, you have to build a brand. Right. So back in the day, if you want, were a successful author, you're not going to make all your money on books.

11:15You're going to make all your money on your blog, your website. And so that's the kind of stuff we were doing. So when we started For Us, we just brought some of that thinking. Like, here's how you empathize with people in messaging. Here's how you tell a story that makes it clear what you do. And nobody in tech, even still to this day, like the bar is very low for being human and standing out and storytelling. So that's what we just started doing.

11:38Chris Cruz:So when you say human-centered, storytelling, empathetic, how does that work out when you talk to them? What do you say to them that they all of a sudden are like, they get it now? Well, yeah. What's the transition point? How do we sell a hardware asset management offering to hardware asset managers in hospitals? These are the people that are managing all of, think about all the laptops. Think about all the devices that 6 ,000 hospital employees have. There's somebody sitting in an office that hates their job. That's a hardware asset manager. And they're in charge of managing all the hard assets.

12:13So when these tech companies build a platform or an integration that helps them do that easy, they have no idea how to talk to the hardware asset manager okay so it's like well one i'm not we're not experts on hardware asset management right but when you understand the human level what's keeping that hardware asset manager up at night yeah what do they really care about yeah what are they where are they not feeling seen and just weaving that into talking about how that product is going to help them get where they want to go it's like revolutionary because you're tying

12:44Chris Cruz:you're you're you're trying to tie it seems like that the product is worthwhile that it actually can help this yeah this asset manager yeah but the reason that it's not being utilized is because it's a great product yeah but it doesn't have the right kind of pathway in which we would talk about that we would you and i would probably agree on the idea that that is kind of the power of leveraging brand is when you have this great product that would otherwise be kind of unnoticeable forgotten wouldn't convert to the right people and so there's a there's a pathway to that and you're saying if you can get out of just loving your product and into kind of understanding the person am i following where yes 100 and here's where it's different in b2b right so in b2c like your audience is like an avatar of a person that you're selling to if you're selling high-end organic soap, right?

13:36You know that you're going to be selling to Jenny who's 40 and maybe has dreadlocks like my wife, right? And she's really into clean stuff and she's not going to shop at Walmart or the grocery store. She's going to look for a boutique organic soap. So you have an avatar and now you can get inside that person's head easily and understand them and create messaging that invites them into a narrative where now you're telling this emotional story and like that brand can blow up and you can, but with B2B it's different because there's always like five different people that have to make the decision.

14:07So when you create a campaign, you're not just creating a campaign for one, you have to create it for five. So one of the things that we developed was this thing called a story script, which is literally a script, a messaging script that talks and invites each of those different people into a similar but different story based off what their pain is. Because the CFO has a different pain than the hardware asset manager and the ceo has a different pain and all of these people are going to buy together nobody but so that's what makes b2b so freaking hard but you're but you're saying there's there's some kind

14:39Chris Cruz:of cohesiveness to the story but you have a different like it's like almost like you're you're taking it it's layers yeah i was gonna it's layers to like segmenting out like who and how do we talk to the cfo because if we talk to them they they're all these components come together but you're that means which i know these things but i'm saying them out loud because i think it's It's great. Yeah. Like, I know these things that you do because I hear you say them. So I don't want to act like I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't know insight into Brandon's company. Like I know what you guys, you guys are doing.

15:05Chris Cruz:And so I'm not trying to play like, oh my gosh, I pulled this out of the internet. But you guys then are actually kind of looking at it like an engine. There's something different about your approach that you're like, there's these elements, which I kind of jive with. It's not simply going, all right, have you guys thrown a good logo on here and designed a good logo and designed a good website you guys have we we jive in that like holistic kind of perspective looking at it but you have this kind of engine i've seen these kind of matrix that you guys have that feels like that fits into that matrix a bit yeah so there's this so we developed this thing called a value loop and we can get into this a little bit we're getting a little bit technical it's good and i just want to say too i'm not a marketing guy i am but i say that like maybe i probably shouldn't say that maybe i'm telling myself i was gonna say yeah there you go but I don't come from that world.

15:53I come from like being creative and like, how do you make a brand stand out? And how do you find a brand's essence? And then the rude awakening that I had in tech was like, nobody cares about that. Nobody values that. And they see it as fluff. It's not.

16:08Chris Cruz:Which is so great. I love that you're calling that out in this because I think so many people get a lofty idea of all of it. And they don't realize they get to the conversation when like, which I've had those conversations too, where you're like, the person goes, I don't think it really matters. And you're like, oh you're like okay it's equal parts that they don't i'll say it's a small pinch it's like a three-part recipe small pinch of i don't think it matters yeah a little bit bigger pinch of i don't understand it and then mainly i can't see the value right because think about in b2b everybody's constantly getting analyzed reviewed and measured and if you do things that don't make the company money or that don't help the company grow it becomes a yeah and so when a creative comes and says, Oh, if we just elevated your brand and did this and like, like double down around this essence of who you are, like it would make you stand out.

16:58And they're like, how to, how does that help me make money? How does that help me avoid? Which is such a good exercise for

17:02Chris Cruz:every brand strategist, every brand designer to get in that conversation already. Like if you're not happy, I think you and I have even talked about this. If you are not having that conversation, you will be eliminated in the next X amount of time. Who knows what it is. Like if you're simply going only saying i design things that look good yeah you're it's that was enough before i don't think it's enough anymore you won't be eliminated i think i think you're right i think some will but i think that you'll just stay under what i call the value ceiling where there's a fair enough market's perception of you like you'll just have to work with companies that only value aesthetic yeah that's fair enough or the cosmetic side of it so what's the value loop thing that you talked about so so let me yeah the value loop let me get let me bring it back to tell you to to start with the whole cohesive picture.

17:48So what we realized in B2B tech is most technology companies, midsize enterprise, there's a range, right? There's, you've got small, you've got mid, you've got commercial enterprise. A lot of the smaller to midsize technology companies, marketing doesn't work for them. If you ask them, how's your marketing going? Nine out of 10 are gonna be like, it's not, we don't really do any, it's terrible. They're sales heavy organizations. So everything is about going to events, getting person to person. when you even think about digital marketing but there's problems with that because it limits them for what they can do it limits them with how they generate leads there's a cap that they can only do so much so a lot of companies come to us and they say we are tapped out with what we can do with our partners like they get all their leads from their partners right or for their technology partner or whatever yeah and there's only so much you can do so they fished upon baby we've fished it we've got all the fish out of it, but they don't know where to start or what to do.

18:47So in B2B tech, there's this statistic that we use often and it's the 95, five rule. Okay. And the 95, five rule is basically 95 % of buyers at any given time are not in market to buy what you're selling. This is important. Only 5 % are. And of those 5%, those people will only spend 5 % of their time with your sales team. So here's where the problem lies. Marketing is focused most in B2B tech on only reaching that 5%. Okay. All of the activities, we're going to events to find people that want to book a demo. Now we're going to do activities. We're going to buy a list online and we're going to spam email them, hoping that somebody is ready to get on a call and they're in market for this.

19:28But that number is so low that when all of your resources go towards that, it's really hard to show a return on that. So they either stop doing marketing altogether or they just, it's just a failure. So what we realized is you have to meet your buyer across all of the stages of the buying journey where they're at. And I won't get into those right now because I don't want this to become like a marketing, like B2B tech marketing, because honestly it's can be very boring even for me, right? Like it is, but you understand it. There's a science to it. And it's the human thing, right? When you understand where your buyer's at in the journey, now you, it's not a one size fits all.

20:03Now you can build an approach, but in B2B tech, what we realized was if you create a value loop, which is things like podcasts, content, do all of the things that you need to do, but not just shoot everything out there like a shotgun, build a system where the people that you're trying to reach are seeing the right content at the right time based on where they're at in the buying journey. It's like this unbelievable thing happens where one, they start engaging with your brand while they're not ready to buy which is really valuable yeah and it's valuable because mckenzie or i think forbes somebody came out with a statistic that b2b buyers will choose 75 of the time when they're ready to buy they will choose the brand they remember

20:47Chris Cruz:bro that is that is so crazy so crazy but but it's like in that what what what led to them remembering like what are the elements like that's what i want to deep dive into that report on my asking these people like what does it mean that you remembered was it that you like you're saying like was it that you saw one of these value system moments was it that the visuals actually arrested you in a way was the language and i think it's all of it right it's not one thing like that it's the value loop it's all of it it's all of it it's all part of it and then when you know where they are so the other element of what we do is we use an ai powered targeting platform this that's so nerdy i'm like we're getting galactic on you guys but so in b2b everything is about building lists and going after those lists.

21:29So let's just say you sell a Microsoft implementation. You typically need to like, if you're going to do effective marketing, you can't just start being like, we do Microsoft stuff. You actually find target companies that you want to go after. And let's just say it's 150 of these companies and we've identified these have, they're like, they're the right company. I just want to say,

21:48Chris Cruz:like I want to say, I'm not trying to interrupt your flow here, but like the way you're thinking and saying out loud, it may not apply to every industry specifically but what i love about it in our conversations is it makes everybody elevate their game and how they're thinking about it yeah if you're not even at least engaging with that thought yeah like going okay do i just do this or do i just do a microphone do i like it's so important so i'm trying to pull out these moments where to take what you do in b2b tech to make sure people are understanding this way of thinking doesn't just apply there though it may not be apples to apples there is some methodology takeaway that you can go Like, are we thinking this robustly about our customer?

22:26Chris Cruz:Are we thinking this in depth? So they're building this list. You're saying, don't just shout to them. Yeah. Go from there. Yeah. So I won't talk a lot about the target list thing because it's a whole, it's very technical, but like you basically want to make sure that you're going after the right people. And that's where, this is where a lot of marketing falls down. For example, right now, what most people do is they buy a list and then legally, you're not even really allowed to start emailing those people. Yeah, I know. And we call it spam marketing. We've had companies come to us and be like, marketing doesn't work.

22:52marketing is not working. Marketing is a joke. And we're like, well, tell us what you're doing. Exactly. Yeah. Well, we bought the list and nobody's clicking. Nobody's clicking through and we email them. I'm like, oh, you're spamming everybody. Yeah. It's not marketing. It's not marketing. So we use an AI tool to basically find what are called exographics. I told you I was getting galactic on you. I won't even explain it.

23:09Chris Cruz:We just talked, we are hitting a different. And what that does is it enables us to help our clients find more accurate, right fit buyers so that when we do do the outreach or the campaign, it resonates on such a deeper level that even they're not ready to buy, they're going to opt in, they're going to stay engaged. And now you're going to get the brand awareness play. But I'll talk about something that connects because here's what we've learned. And this is where the B2C and the B2B thing overlap. This is what's really important. The value loop when we create that for generating demand works best when a brand has a strategic narrative.

23:42Yeah. Makes sense. When there's something about your company that is challenges the status quo of an industry or is wildly different and wildly more valuable than what everybody else is doing. And when we can get under the hood -

23:54Chris Cruz:Is challenging the status quo wildly different than what others are doing? What was the other thing you said? Challenging the status quo, wildly different than what people are doing, or wildly more valuable on like a unit economics level. Like our thing generates 25 % more X than all these other competitors, like with less effort and less cost, boom. Where that's important is because in B2C, as you guys understand, building a brand that has, that stands for something and has a purpose is really, really powerful and important. And I call it the fifth P of marketing actually. I wrote an article about this two years ago.

24:28So people are starting to say this now, but like marketing now has a fifth P and its purpose. So in the B2B world, that translates into that strategic narrative.

24:35Chris Cruz:So how do we find out what that is? And when a, when a B2B brand has a strategic narrative and has a value loop and has the right execution and the right strategy, demand is so much easier to generate you can generate pipeline is so much easier to generate getting your people on calls with people ready to buy is so much easier to do the costs go down to do all of it like it's crazy and that's the part where i think the in the brand conversation where we see people go like oh but that's not the biggest part of our company it's just generic we can bypass that it's like i i think about it oftentimes like branding has so many moments where things are small enough to feel like there's salt yeah where it's like without it you notice with it you notice is it the biggest ingredient no yeah no like i make biscuits all the time for my kids on the weekends yeah salt is not the biggest ingredient but when salt is gone yeah you know it's gone what is the salt i would say in b2b it's emotion yeah and it's so hard to put emotion in to b2b for multiple reasons one it's very risk averse industries they're afraid if i If I tell a joke on my LinkedIn post, I can get fired for that or I can get the company.

25:43Chris Cruz:That's kind of the psychology of it all. So a couple of years ago, here's an area where I've changed my mind actually on this. I made a, I wrote an, a comparison article about liquid death, love liquid death, love what they're doing in B2C. In fact, if you sell to customers, if you're in B2C, take a page out of their freaking playbook or look at what they're doing. And I made the comparison. It's the darling of every marketing, like go look at liquid death. It's amazing. Like I'm not going to bash it, but in B2B, I actually thought, oh, B2B companies just did more of what liquid death is doing.

26:13Then everything will be what since changed my mind because five years in and B2B, like I said, they're highly regulated spaces like healthcare, legal. I mean, risk management, all these things, technology, it's highly regulated. And with AI, it's only going to become more regulated. So if you try to do something like liquid death and you're at a big tech company, or Let's just say as a brand strategist, I come and pitch a big tech company. I'm like, we're going to do something like liquid death. You're going to lick someone's back. Yeah. You're going to lick the sweat off their back. And guess what?