Tell The Story of Your Authentic Self

Highlights
0:07 Telling an authentic story in your business

1:12 We’ve got a 100% success rate

2:50 The story we’ve been telling at Enfusen, and how we got it wrong

Transcription
Hi, I’m Roger from Enfusen, and today I want to talk about telling an authentic story in your business. I think the best way to talk about this is to talk about how, in my personal career with an agency, I did this right, and then how, in my personal career with a software company, I did this wrong and had to take corrective action to fix this.

My first successful company was National Charity Services. That was the name the first day the company was founded. That was the name the date that I sold it, and it’s the name today. It spoke directly to the industry that we served. We were a marketing agency that served non-profits. We provided it at a national level. We ended up with some service and product lines that were outside of just marketing, but it fell under that brand, National Charity Services. From the day that we were created, we helped organizations do digital marketing to generate car donations, cash donations, and then we added in the service of liquidating those donated products the 5th or 6th year that we had the business. The story there was simple. I could walk in to a non-profit, and I could sit down with an executive or sit down in front of a Board and say, “Hey. We’ve implemented over 100 campaigns. We’ve got a 100% success rate. We’re so good at what we do, we’re actually going to pay for your marketing. It’s not going to cost you a dime. We’re going to spend our money, use our team and our expertise to generate revenue for your organization. We’re going to take a piece out of that to recoup our expenses, and then you’re going to get the rest. You’re going to get a check every single week, no matter what. You’re never going to get a bill.” What do you think my close rate with that story? It wasn’t a pitch. It was an actual story. It was an accomplishment that we had. It was something that we knew worked every time, and it was something that you could call any of our Goodwill, Red Cross or Salvation Army clients, and you knew with 100% certainty that the story was true. That’s how to do it.

Not let’s talk about you, when you’re thinking about your story. In a lot of cases, you’re trying to sell or do something that you’ve never actually done. There’s a saying that “You’ve got to know how to eat your own dog food before you can sell that food to someone else.” This happens way too often with marketing agencies. A lot of times, when people come to us either for a software solution or a coaching or training solution, the first thing that we see is they’re not implementing their own best practices, i.e. what they sell to their clients and tell their clients to do in their own business. They’re looking at their business as if it’s different for some reason. If you’re not eating your own dog food, then you’re not telling an authentic story to the people that you’re selling your product to. I know a lot of friends in the supplement business. They take the supplements that they sell. Now if they sell hundreds of them, maybe not all of them, but they believe in the product, because they’ve seen the personal usage they could have in it. Again, there’s a wide variety of people that might not apply to that, but there’s enough of them that do to make it a true case.

Now let’s talk about the story that we’ve been telling at Enfusen, and how I got it wrong for two years. When we started Enfusen, I had a vision for what I wanted to do with the company. I wanted to do something with data in the sales and marketing space, but I wasn’t quite sure how to get there. This actually goes back longer than two years. This has been an idea for four years, a business for three and a product for two, so we started working with Microsoft. What are the problems that Microsoft had from a sales and marketing automation perspective? Okay, we figured those out. Now what were the problems that Microsoft partners had from a sales and marketing automation perspective? What we started to see was a disconnect. Our goal was data, and we were looking at automation. While they are somewhat connected, they aren’t necessarily congruent. The story of Enfusen became convoluted and hard to tell. Who were we? What were we doing, and why should you care? As much as we tried to tell that story, it was just a very complicated story. If you went to our website in the past six months, you might have still seen that complicated story. As we started to do reflection on what I’ve done in previous businesses successfully, what we can model from other successful businesses, we came to the conclusion that we had a branding problem. If you’ve watched anybody on their videos about how to scale a marketing agency, when you come to the conclusion that you have a branding problem, 9 times out of … Let’s say this. 9.99 times out of 10, you’re actually looking at things wrong. It wasn’t about what we called our company. It wasn’t our colors. It wasn’t our slogan. It was lack of an authentic story. Who were we, and why did we create what we created? When we asked that question, our story became so much clearer and so much more simplistic. I had a marketing agency. We scaled and sold successfully. Our clients had a 100% success rate. What drove that success? Was it hustle? Was it staff? Was it branding? Well, it was a little bit of all of it, but in reality what it was, was data.

What we’ve spent the last few years figuring out how to do was how to capture all of the data that was needed, and then how to use data science to not just present data to individuals, but to actually tell them what the data is telling them. I always tell this story when I’m teaching that if you sat down 10 professional marketers and set in front of them the same exact analytic set, all 10 of them would come up with a different go-to-market strategy, a different campaign strategy. If they’re good at SEM, they’d say one thing. If they’re good at SEO, they’d say something else, but the data is telling you exactly what you need to do, when you need to do it and how you need to do it. When we thought about that, and we figured out what our story is. Our story is, is that being an agency owner previously that scaled and sold a business, I wanted to make it easier for other agencies to do the same. We created a data-driven dashboard that captures all of their sales and marketing data, brings it into a single stream and then analyzes it using data science to make exact recommendations on what they need to do next for themselves and what they need to do for their clients. That story takes 15 seconds to tell. It ties back my authentic story, my experience as an agency, and why I sold, and why I decided to build this company. It was no longer convoluted about sales and marketing automation using Hubspot, or SEO using data, or email automation using a word cloud. I could go on and on about that, all with things that we tried to say that we did with predictive analytics and cloud systems, I get tired just talking about it.

When you look at your business, what is your story? Why are you doing what you’re doing? – Tweet This!

When you look at your business, what is your story? Why are you doing what you’re doing? What is your authentic story? How does it relate to your personal experiences? Why should your audience care? If you’re going to offer a product solution or service to them, why should they believe that you’re the right person to get it from? Think about that authentic story and worry less about what you call it, what colors you have, what your hook, what your offer is. If you get your story right, everything else falls in place I promise you. I promise you 5 million times over again. I promise you that you can scale and sell your business when you get your story right. Worry about that first, and everything else will take care of itself. I’m Roger from Enfusen, and this was a video on how to tell an authentic story.