1505 – Problem Focused with Author Brendan Dell

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0:54With us right now, it's Brendan Dell. Well, Brendan, you are a messaging expert. You're the author of the book, High Impact Messaging. You're a podcaster. Your podcast is called Billion Dollar Tech. Your website is brendandell.com. Brendan, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah. And so you've worked with lots of startups. In fact, it's, I think, where did I see? Well, it's a lot. And there's also, you've worked with a lot of very notable companies as well, HP Expedia. And then the list is expansive. But would you mind maybe sharing a little bit more about the work that you do and kind of where you come in?

1:39Yeah. So every company out there, obviously, we are sitting in the most competitive landscape, business landscape in the history of the world. That's just a factual statement. Every category has more competition than it ever has before. And so every company where I focus my work is in tech, but we all have this problem of how are we going to stand out and be perceived as unique and the best choice for our buyers. And so I come into companies and help them answer that question. And for small companies, that's often they're at a place where maybe they've gotten a few customers. They've started to get some product market fit, but they're not sure how to communicate for the audience in case we're not familiar.

2:21basically they've built a tech product and their buyers are starting to get some value out of the thing, but they haven't figured out what's the way we're going to communicate in a scalable, repeatable way. And large companies, it's often they've either hit some kind of a plateau that they're not growing at the same rate or they're launching a new product and they're trying to figure out how do we communicate the value of this thing we sell and show up as different and unique. And that's the question that I helped them answer. Yeah. What is that process like? Because I know it's really hard to do that work internally because we just, you know, we see our products, our services in a way that the market doesn't.

3:01And so for me to think that I can lead on that, I can't, I'm way too biased. I'm, I, you know, I have to have that objective process for, for, for truly understanding the market's view of who we are and what we do. Do you have like, like a standard process for like what that ends up looking like? Yeah. So the first thing that every company should do and the mistake that folks often make is most companies start and go, here's what's very unique and special about this thing that we've made that everybody should understand about our product. And you're smiling. So, you know, probably a similar sentiment of this, but the place to begin is who is the person that has, who is the person that I'm focused on and what is the problem that they have and how do they articulate that problem and going there.

3:53I had a gentleman on my podcast by the name of Tony Jammu who founded a company called Oyster HR, which went from zero to two billion or three billion dollar valuation, I think in like two and a half years, just the guy's remarkable. Wow. And one of the things that he said to me on the show was that there's too many companies out there with solution seeking, seeking problems. And we need to be the other way we need to be really problem focused. What's the problem that these people have? And then how do we create a solution to solve that problem? So that's step one, who is this person that you're trying to sell to?

4:29What are the jobs that they have to do? And then what are the problems with the, the jobs that they, you know, have to accomplish in their role? And it'd be, you know, jobs to be done framework is, is sort of a way of defining how people go, you know, break up their tasks in their work and consuming life. We can talk more about that if that's interesting to people. Yeah. So for example, like I'm just like looking at my own website, like if, so if the gap we solve and my copy is going to be messed up now. Sure, sure. But like right on the spot. What's that? Yeah, right. real, real life lab. But, you know, if the, you know, identifying the problem, so like, so, so we serve like, you know, agencies, we serve consultants and, you know, and I'd say the thing that, that we try to solve would be like consistency and predictability when it comes to sales conversations.

5:29And, and like, that's what I think makes us unique, but I don't know that. Well, I think there's a lot of different ways that you can start to figure out how to define your differentiation. But one of the first things, again, I would start with, so you just said solving for consistency. I would say, what's the problem that these agency owners have that you're solving? Is it that they can't scale? Is it that they lack predictive, you know, they can't train reps to deliver their mess? You know, that you've got a founder who understands how to sell, but they can't seem to get past that founder-led sale.

6:04And I would get really clear on what the initial problem is that you think is consistent across a lot of your buyers. I think a mistake people often fall in is they try to over-index on, and this can be a strategy, but they try to over-index on, okay, well, we help agency owners, female agency owners who are under five foot three tall you know, and live, like they get overly specific in who this person is instead of figuring out, okay, what's the problem across, you know, a variety of like similarities that we are fixing. And so I would get really clear on what that problem is. And then with services, I would explain the process in which you solve that, right?

6:47You have to have some, you know, some, we can talk about all the elements of effective messaging, but in order to tell that story, you need to have clarity of the problem, clarity of the solution and clarity of the unique mechanism in which you deliver that solution. Wow. Okay. I'm going to go back. I'm going to have to go back and listen to this episode here. What would be an example, like for example, like HP or some of these other folks that you've worked with, where does the, where does the conversation start? And then they're probably, you know, going to get to a point in the conversation.

7:23It's like, okay, looks like we have some action items now? And, and are those action items, a lot of like maybe customer conversations or just kind of researching the market? Yeah. So for someone like that, I think perhaps if, if we're speaking mostly to small business owners, I think we could, you know, it might be useful to take an HP out of this and think about more, you know, for a small business owner, you could think about, you know, where I would start is I would go to the market and I would start to have conversations about what was the problem that you had when you came to me. The challenge that you're going to have when you, so there's three elements we just talked about.

8:01There's the problem, the solution, and the unique mechanism to solve. So to say this in really plain terms, it would be agency owner, I know we help agency owners who have problems scaling their sales teams by teaching their reps a predict, you know, by recruiting appointment setting reps for agency owners and teaching them a predictable script using a five-step process that I developed that helped me scale my agency from 5 million to 100 million in revenue. Okay. Like that, that, that's like a real clear, clear, I'm making this up on the fly. Right. So you want to start with who are these people and what, what are the problems they're, they're, they're suffering with.

8:47And the next thing is you want to figure out what was the things that they liked about your business? What were some of the things that they found particularly useful? The problem that you'll find when you interview B2B customers is that everybody's going to tell you how awesome Josh was, or they're going to tell you how awesome whoever your teammate was, or those sorts of things. So you have to ask the right kinds of questions to get in there and get beyond, I thought you were smart or interesting or my brother-in-law or whatever, right? you know like you were related so i used to kind of things and then um brendan then obviously let's say we we do get some really good data about like you know what are what our clients really need or what they were worried about or concerned about or what was you know what was keeping them up at night so we're like i think we've got some really good data here like we understand we have more compassion for the problem or the challenge?

9:50And then where do we go from there? Like, how do we start saying, okay, we're going to make this a part of, you know, how we explain our product or how we communicate to our audiences? I mean, how do we implement on that data? Yeah. So an effective messaging framework is going to have a couple of different components to it. And I can share with you afterwards, if it's helpful to share with your audience, It's a visual that brings this to life. But you're going to have essentially a narrative strategy, which says that you can think of this as mission, vision, values. What's the reason we exist?

10:25And your team should understand that because the reason you exist helps to create clarity around new service offerings, how you serve as clients, all those kinds of things. Sitting underneath that, you're going to have a brand strategy. And the brand strategy communicates some of these points that we just articulated. And this should be a document that communicates a brand strategy. And then underneath that, you're then going to have value messaging, which is how you help individual personas. And there should be templates and best practices set out for your team that show this is the deck we use.

10:54This is the kind of questions we ask. This is how we conduct a discovery call. This is how we conduct a, right? And there should be rigor around the way that message is delivered, the way outbound messages are delivered. And there should be a feedback cycle with the people on the front lines who have to deliver those messages to understand what's working, what's not, and how do we continue to enable that? Because without it, what you end up with is a very disconnected process. And what many companies end up with is a non-scalable. They've got it like using agencies as an example. It's very common to end up with like a 10 person agency, right?

11:29Because that's just large enough where the founder does all the biz dev and then they can kind of keep their people busy, but it's not an organization that runs on its own. And so it's because that they don't have this clarity and rigor around how they tell their story and who they're going to go service as a prospect and a customer. When we think about how B2B sales, Brandon, are done today, are there any trends that you've been seeing, you know, regarding those who are involved in sales and marketing that, you know, you're going to want to, I appreciate that this is something that you believed in or learned five to 10 years ago, but today you're going to want to be a little bit more sensitive to this, or you're going to, your activity is going to be more aligned with this, you know, any, any trends that you've been seeing?

12:16So do you mean tactically, like in terms of channels being used or philosophically, you know, around like if it particularly, you know, cause I know part of what you do is obviously is b2b um so i and i'm really interested in that uh yeah so overall observations all of my work is uh i would you know 98 of my well yeah i'm not even a caveat 100 my work is in b2b yeah yeah the the um so in terms of trends i think one of the one of the big shifts especially for organizations that have been around a long time is this move towards customer centricity in the way that you do business. And I'm not sure if this sounds like a novel insight, but I can't tell you how many companies that I'll engage with.

13:01And they'll go and I'll say, one of the first things they do is go, great, pitch me. I just came in. I'm one of your potential prospective customers. How do we start this call? And they show me a sales deck that says, hey, we're Acme Healthcare, Inc. We've been in business for 75 years and we have 235 employees across 16 states and we have 1 ,000 customers, right? Me, me, me, me, me. Why we're so great. Where the companies that I see growing the fastest are the ones that enable customer-centric conversations. So who is this person? What are their problems? Are you asking problems to, or are you asking the right questions to contextualize those problems and having an ROI and a value-driven conversation rather than a commodity-driven conversation of, well, here's why we're the best widget.

13:51It's here's what your problems are, and here's how our widget is going to help you solve them in a way that's going to produce a positive return on the money you give us. Yeah. Brendan, so someone's been listening to our conversation. There's a few things that I would say would be great next steps. Obviously, you know, one is your podcast, then here's your book, and you also have a masterclass called the$1 billion pitch. Can you maybe talk about some kind of great next steps to engage with you? Along those lines that I just listed. Yeah, so I think all those things are wonderful places to begin.

14:29I think so billion dollar pitch is, if you look at how the best companies in the world position themselves and how they tell their story in their sales presentations, in their investment decks and so forth. There's predictability there. You see the same eight elements in all of these pitches. And so that class is a great place to go and familiarize yourself with what are the elements that I should be defining to tell my story in an effective way. And in a world where like if you're an agency, there's a lot of choice and a lot of competition and you need to set yourself out as the expert in the space, right?

15:06You don't just wanna be another... Facebook ads agency, right? You want to be the Facebook ads agency for a particular kind of buyer or however you define, you know, your delivery mechanism. So that course is a great place to sort of familiarize yourself with what the best in the world are doing. Awesome. And then your podcast, what do you talk about on Billion Dollar Tech? On that podcast, we talk about how to grow tech companies. So it's, I will say though, that the lessons are really applicable to anyone who wants to be in B2B sales. But what we're doing is talking with founders of high growth companies and understanding what are the techniques and tactics and best practices that have allowed them to go.

15:54You know, like I said, Tony Jimmu was on there. We've had, you know, dozens and dozens of founders of household brands, Peter Smith of blockchain.com. He built that company to 14 billion. And what I found is how So these tactics and the sort of the what works really transcends technology. And it's really about how do you build a great business? Yeah. And then finally, there's your book, of course, and that's the 12 Immutable Laws of High Impact Messaging. Who is this book for? Yeah, that's for anyone who's trying to figure out how they should communicate to their buyers in a very noisy and crowded world.

16:32and what it does is give you a set of principles to think about and to keep in your mind to understand what is going to be effective. Actually, just before we spoke, I spoke to, on my podcast this morning, I spoke to Jonah Berger, who is the, I don't know if it's New York Times bestselling, but he just wrote a book. He wrote Contagious. He's written a number of these books and he's got a new book coming out called Magic Words. It's all about how just changing slight nuance and how and how we speak and communicate has profound measurable impacts in the way that people respond and follow the advice or the you know the the way they engage with how we communicate and so one plug for his book but two that my book is doing the same thing it's communicating what are the rules for effective communication so that you out there and get more people to do whatever it is, the thing you're trying to get them to do.

17:31Brendan Dell, again, thank you so much. Your website is brendandell.com. That's B-R-E-N-D-A-N Dell, D-E-L-L.com. And then from there, you can get all the links from there to your podcast, to your book, and again, the masterclass as well. And in fact, I think the shortcut to that is just brendandell.com forward slash masterclass. Brendan, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you very much for your insights. I really appreciate it. Cheers. Thanks for having me.

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