#184: Brand | How to Get Sales on Board with Your Marketing Content with Kira Federer, VP of SMB Marketing at Paramount

In this episode, Dave sits down with Kira Federer, VP of SMB Marketing at Paramount Advertising, and formerly at companies like Reddit and Glassdoor. Kira shares her journey from sales to product marketing and the lessons she’s learned along the way.

Dave and Kira discuss:

• How to align marketing and sales through co-creation to ensure your sales team uses the content you create
• The value of a strong messaging framework and how it drives consistency in B2B marketing
• Why you need to time your product launches and ensure that marketing resonates with both your team and the market at the right moment

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Kira
• (06:31) - - Kira’s Career Journey From Sales Enablement to Product Marketing
• (09:45) - - Challenges of Building Community / Getting Connected with Exit Five
• (17:32) - - How To Get Sales To Use Content from Marketing
• (20:07) - - How to Align Marketing and Sales Teams
• (26:13) - - Effective Messaging and Having a Core Company Narrative
• (31:21) - - Why You Should Identify What Differentiates Your Business
• (35:04) - - How To Create Strong Brand Positioning
• (37:49) - - Why You Need To Have A Clear Vision And Strong Point of View in Marketing
• (39:33) - - “The Risk Of Insult Is The Price Of Clarity”

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***

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Former startup CMO Dave Gerhardt and guests share their marketing knowledge to help drive revenue at your company and grow your career in marketing. The podcast mostly covers B2B SaaS, but there's something applicable for anyone working in marketing today.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:01]:

All right, here is here my favorite type of podcast. Let me tell you why this is my favorite type of podcast. Number one, I asked the community a couple weeks ago, like, who should I have on a podcast? What topics do you want? And a bunch of people said that you're awesome, which is great. Then you're telling me before we start recording that you're like, I look you up. You're actually an exit five member, which is even better. Then I'm, like, doing my whole spiel, trying to tell you about what the podcast is going to be like. And you're like, I've been listening forever, so that's the best win win.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:43]:

Kira Federer is here. Quick background. Who are you? What do you do for work? What's your B2B? Marketing, roughly. Career story to catch people up to speed before we dive in.

Kira Federer [00:00:51]:

Yeah. What's the TLDR? So my background is I, if there are other elderly millennials listening, headed to San Francisco.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:01]:

What is an elderly millennial? I'm 37. Is that an album? Born in 1987.

Kira Federer [00:01:07]:

You and my friend are an elderly millennial. I'm sorry. Yeah, you're near the top of the band.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:12]:

People are weird about their ages.

Kira Federer [00:01:14]:

They are?

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:14]:

Yeah. They don't want people to know their ages. Look, I get it. Like, you know, my mom will joke about how she's 40, right? Been 40 for 20 years. But I feel like there's actually this other. Sometimes people don't like to let people know. They feel like they're young and it's weird.

Kira Federer [00:01:29]:

Anyway, honestly, I'm gonna. And I will tell you. In my mind, now that it's the pendulum is swinging, where I understood that from a distance, but now that I am older, and I am one of the older people in the room, especially if you're in tech, a couple gray hairs gets you pretty far, or no hair gets you pretty far. And I'm like, I'm ready to lean into it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:51]:

Well, you know, what matters. We were just talking about our kids and stuff before this. I think this is one of those things. I think in my twenties, I would roll my eyes at experience. It really matters. FYI, like, the more you've seen in life, whether we're talking about marketing or business or raising a family or being a community member in your local. Whatever it is, spoiler alert. Oftentimes, the more time has passed, the more things you have seen, because you need to make lots of mistakes in this life, and you need to have a larger sample set.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:22]:

And so I'm not saying that that person might necessarily be smarter. I'm saying you could be 22 and very smart. However, there just might be somebody who has just seen a bunch of different things before and that really matters.

Kira Federer [00:02:32]:

That's it. I think you can be incredibly bright, but if you haven't already gone around the corner, there is inherently something you don't know.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:40]:

There was a time in my career where I was coming up in marketing at this company called Drift, and I was a director of marketing, and they had very candid conversations about wanting to bring in a CMO and hire over me. And they loved me. I kept getting promoted, more money. I was like, I don't understand. You guys keep promoting me. You want me to do all this, but you don't think I can be CMO here. And the CEO was like, you need to get this in your head. We love you to death.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:04]:

This has nothing to do with you. We are trying to become a thousand person global public company. You have not done that. Neither have we. Therefore, we need to hire someone who has. And I don't think I understood that fully at the time, but I get it now.

Kira Federer [00:03:19]:

And then if you do hire that person, if they hire correctly. Yeah. Then you have the.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:23]:

Aha. Yeah, well, they didn't. They didn't. And then I just made things worse for me.

Kira Federer [00:03:28]:

But, yeah, I could riff on that one for a while, but, yeah, I know that well. So I moved to San Francisco around 2009, showed up. I knew I wanted to be in the tech scene because that is where all of the inertia was happening. I had fewer than zero contacts. So this is the laughable part. Is yours truly caught on Craigslist? And I just started searching for sales jobs, hustling, got an interview, got hired on the spot, started the next day. And that should tell you about the maturity of that company.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:59]:

Well, there's just so much to.

Kira Federer [00:04:02]:

There's a lot.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:03]:

This woman that I'm talking to went to Craigslist for a job. Ladies and gentlemen, that is mostly. Half the listeners probably don't even know what that is.

Kira Federer [00:04:11]:

That's right. That's right. Honest to goodness. Yeah. Fourscore and seven years ago, we did not really use LinkedIn to find jobs or exit five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:20]:

That's nuts. That's what got you to revel.

Kira Federer [00:04:22]:

That's what got me to revel. So I stepped in. They were a company of ten, and I started my first sales job. And really, what I didn't know, I just tried to make up for in grit and hustle and then I started selling well, became their top seller, and then moved into a sales management position and then ultimately into a director of sales and ops role. And I loved it. I loved it. I love sitting in a seat. But I got tapped by someone that had previously been on my team to head to Glassdoor.

Kira Federer [00:04:54]:

And so, like, kind of the consistent theme of this is that I continue to move upstream and upstream and further upstream. But I think holding on to even at revel, the first thing I did was try to figure out what was our story. And so when colleague then went on to Glassdoor, you need to come teach people how to say it, what to say it here. So I stepped into the global head of enablement role there. So I was running sales enablement and then continued to go upstream. I got tapped to step into a product marketing function and then I was overseeing the majority of their products and then started to oversee the creation of their narrative, etcetera. They had a roughly billion dollar acquisition. Then I got tapped by Reddit.

Kira Federer [00:05:38]:

Another colleague over at Reddit gave me a call and said, come figure this thing out, because there's a lot to figure out.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:46]:

Yeah. And then you spent five and a half years at Reddit.

Kira Federer [00:05:49]:

I did, I did. I stepped in the then CMO, who is now CMO, still CMO today. She's wonderful. Roxy Young, she and I got on a call, she said, I'm a B2c marketer. That's what I do, you know, B2b, come here and figure it out. So I was the first b, two b marketing hire at Reddit. And there, there was an OpS person there for a bit. He moved on, but.

Kira Federer [00:06:11]:

So it was just myself. And then I began to build a very small team. Over time, we obviously grew considerably, but when I started, it was 100 and by the time I left, I think we were somewhere just under 4000, 3500 and, yeah, I just, that's a whole story to unpack and one I just couldn't be more proud of.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:31]:

All right, we're going to come back to that. And now you did your own thing for a bit, but you're going back in house to do what I am.

Kira Federer [00:06:39]:

I've been doing my own thing for a bit. Really enjoyed it. I thought I would keep doing my own thing, by the way. I was, like, ready to stand on the podium and tell everyone to do their own thing, but I'm going to. I found a company. When it clicks, it clicks. I'm going to step into a vp of marketing role for within a larger organization, an arm of that business. We're going to go out and really try and build a self service platform within their larger platform.

Kira Federer [00:07:06]:

And so we, again, I'm back.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:08]:

It's a company that's already established, like scale up phase ish, very well known legacy brand. Oh, boy.

Kira Federer [00:07:15]:

Yeah, it's really cool because you've got a lot of internal resources to pull from, but I still get to go back to my build days and be on a small, really nimble team.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:28]:

Cool. And I got a bunch of follow ups on that. Damn it. You're going to tell me where you're going after we hit stop on this. But I also want to just get this part out because now I'm really intrigued because now you're taking a big time vp of marketing role. You told me before that exit five has played a role in your career in some way. Can you just tell me that before I grill you and interview you? Because I'm dying to know.

Kira Federer [00:07:50]:

Absolutely. No, I mean, like, I'm ready to get on my exit five. So box. Well, one, I will tell you, I advise a handful of companies. I've had a number of companies come to me and say, we want to start a community. You should talk to us here from Reddit. And I say, do not start a community. I advise most people don't even think about starting a community.

Kira Federer [00:08:08]:

And it's not because I don't think it is a smart move or a great business move. It's that I think most people can't do it or just aren't willing to do the immense amount of work you have to do to create a thriving community. I tip my hat to you because you've done it. You really have done it. So I started when it was a Facebook page and I think I bought the laws of copywriting ebook. And that was as early as I've been hanging around. And now every time I have a question, especially right now, I'm working with a really small team, or previously it was just me in my lot of consulting work. I have a question.

Kira Federer [00:08:44]:

No one else could answer it. I go to exit five. I didn't answer that question usually same day. And then I get people in the comments, not just one answer, but often a handful of answers, and they're just each kind of building on the context of the answer before them. And so I feel like it has a Reddit esque way of being. But there's also some validity on the other side that I'm going to connect this person on LinkedIn. I'm now going to watch what you're up to. Back in the summer, I decided, all right, let me see if there's a.

Kira Federer [00:09:12]:

There, there in the. Trying my hand at consulting, I got on exit five. I saw one person post they needed help taking a product to market. Thought, oh, I can help with that. I reached out. That was my first consulting contract. It was then my second consulting contract. It was my third consulting contract.

Kira Federer [00:09:27]:

And if I weren't stepping into this role, it would be my fourth and my fit. So huge shout out to Lindsay Cave. And she is a very devoted exit five podcast or exit five member. But so I think, like, yes for my career, but also for actual dollars in my pocket for answers to my questions. I just brava.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:47]:

Oh, my God. That was amazing. That made me so happy. Thank you so much.

Kira Federer [00:09:52]:

And that's the show, so thank you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:54]:

Thanks, Kira. It's great to see you. Good luck in your new gig. I'm very happy for you. No, that's awesome. I'm so happy. That means so much coming from you. We put a lot into it and we really.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:05]:

We went from it just being me when you joined in the Facebook side. We're actually. I have a call right when I hang up with you. I have a final round with our candidate who would be our fifth teammate.

Kira Federer [00:10:16]:

Amazing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:16]:

And, man, was I dumb for not investing earlier because it's kind of one of those things that I wanted to pivot away from the Dave show and be more of a learning training education company for B2b marketing. And it's one of those obstacle is the way situations where if I invest and if I hire, we can go and create better content, do better stuff for the community because we already have an audience and product market fit. It's just, I know it's going to work. I know it's going to work. I know things are going to break along the way, but it's already there and now we're going to invest. And like, we have people running the community, we have people creating content. We just hired ahead of content. It's right here.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:54]:

And I'm really excited about it. So just to hear you, not even that, I want that as a testimonial, but just to hear you say that makes me feel really happy and validated. And just to hear someone at your level say, every time I have a question, I go to exit five and ask. Because one of the things that I battled with for the last couple of months is somebody will write a post and they'll be like, there's no engagement here. This thing sucks. And I'm like, well, there's not 700 million active users here like there is on LinkedIn. And so you're not going to get 100 comments on a post, but you're going to get one or two, like, real people that work here. And I think we're trying to do a better, you'll appreciate we're trying to do a better product marketing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:28]:

Product marketing is everything, right. If you set expectations, like, if the expectation is like, you're going to write a post in exit five and you're going to get 17 comments and 50 likes, we got to almost tell people, like, you might get one comment. PLUS, we also don't even Know, like, here's just one person. I'm talking to five clients, four or five clients from exit five. Like, we don't know that. There's no WaY to measure. There's no way that that shows up. So, and that's the hard part ABout community.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:51]:

Back to your community point about, like, why you don't tell most people to get community started. Because we try to look at the very, like, vanity, high level metrics about engagement and it's tricky to do.

Kira Federer [00:12:02]:

So at Reddit, we would talk about the number of communities. People are always trying to understand the distinction. And you can think about something like, ask Reddit. I won't get into a Reddit diatribe, but it is huge. And there are very fun conversations. But people are in and people are out. And that's kind of LIKE LinkedIn. People ARe in, people Are out of.

Kira Federer [00:12:22]:

But if you go to R Toyota.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:26]:

Runner, sure, it's nuts.

Kira Federer [00:12:28]:

Now we're having an entirely different conversation. Is it as big, is it as noisy? No. Is it going to get you the actual answer you're looking for? Yes. And so which do you prefer?

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:40]:

Yeah. What's really interesting, the Community is now built on this platform called Circle. And I'm saying this on the record because I really want them to do this. They should listen to me. I want to see how many people have viewed particular posts because just like Reddit, I use Reddit ten times a day. I've never posted on Reddit ever. There is a huge value in Community of the Lurkers, and we have so many Lurkers in exit five. I'll see it all the time.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:07]:

Somebody's like, yeah, I love this Community, but I've never posted or never commented, but they're reading and observing. I got into running last year and all of the stuff I learned about running was through subreddits. Right.

Kira Federer [00:13:18]:

Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:19]:

Never posted. But I read all the stuff there and I think there's a huge value to Lurkers from.

Kira Federer [00:13:24]:

Yeah, there's a whole study you could do.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:26]:

Yeah. All right, I gotta shut up. Enough about exit five. Who cares? Don't join exit five. Look, don't join it. Overrated. If you're listening, don't join the community.

Kira Federer [00:13:35]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:36]:

Kira has done nothing, basically nothing in her career. She has not worked in any meaningful companies. Don't take a word that she just go join somebody else. Just use the free LinkedIn. You don't need exit five. Don't pay for it. So you have an interesting story in that you started off in sales and then you got into the product marketing side, which I think anybody listening to this can make a lot of connections between sales and product marketing. I love that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:57]:

I love that path. I want to ask you a question that actually comes up all the time in the community. As someone who managed a global sales enablement training program, one of the questions I see a lot from marketers is, hey, we're creating all of this content for sales. They're not reading it, they're not seeing it. They're telling me it's not good enough. What's the disconnect, Kira? And how do you think about content like, and I've seen it, right? Marketing. We got every deck in the world. We got every case study in the world.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:24]:

Sales is still telling me that it's not the right one or they want more. How do you get sales to use the content that marketing is creating?

Kira Federer [00:14:32]:

Can you imagine? If I said to you today, Dave, I'm going to introduce you to your new wardrobe. And starting today, you will wear that wardrobe every day. I've picked it out. And here you go. You would tell me what? No, I didn't weigh in on this. This isn't mine. I'm going to go back to wearing the thing, the orange shirt that I love to wear. And that's what I do.

Kira Federer [00:15:01]:

And I think that that's so often in marketing, we go through our process. We do what we need to do. We stand up on a stage or in front of a zoom and we share. We did this great thing. Here's everything to go and talk about it. But so often, if they weren't part of the process, they are not going to be committed to taking that message to market. And I think we have to completely rethink the way we launch in a way that matters to sales. Because you and I actually both know this is a very long one that answers this.

Kira Federer [00:15:36]:

But you and I both know corporate Brook. We both know Ross.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:40]:

Wait, he has a real name?

Kira Federer [00:15:41]:

He has a real name. I prefer not to use it, but.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:47]:

I think Ross humanizes. I think Ross humanizes the brand a little. The fact that his name is Ross Pomerance humanizes the brand a little bit.

Kira Federer [00:15:56]:

For you. Oh, my gosh.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:58]:

He's never gonna listen to this, so it doesn't matter.

Kira Federer [00:16:00]:

No, I know. I know. It's good. Got to keep his feet on the ground. Just call him Ross Pomerance every once.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:07]:

In a while, but next time he's chirping, marketers just say, all right, Ross from Pomeranz.

Kira Federer [00:16:14]:

So that's it? I think it's like, that's exactly what I was going to point to. It's like corporate bro has one of his go. Most tried and true tropes is that marketing doesn't get it. They think they know, but they just don't get it. And I think the very unpopular opinion, but I think for all of us, is to move into what we do with the assumption that in the beginning, and especially, unless if you are a marketing leader and you are not working hand in hand with a revenue leader or if you work for that marketing leader that's not already hand in hand with the revenue leader, the entire sales organization, when you stand on stage, is kind of looking at you with a squint. And so I think when we roll things out, they should feel like their fingerprints are all over it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:59]:

You're getting at something really important, which is like, it's almost like being a manager, right? If you're the manager and you say, team, here's our plan, and here are the orders for the year. Go and do them. They're not going to do them the same as if you're like, team. Here are the goals for the year. Let's work on these together. Let's work on a plan together. You come up with a plan. It's like the best way to get someone to do something is to have them be involved in the creation.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:21]:

And so if I can spit this back to you, it seems like it's like, where we get in trouble is we create a ton of stuff, and then we're like, what sales? You don't want this. You don't want these 50 things we created where it's actually like, no, I actually wouldn't create anything. Don't create anything and do it together.

Kira Federer [00:17:35]:

I think that's right. Every time I have a launch, I create a core team. There's always a seller on that core team. And it's not a manager, it's not a sales executive. It's someone who is on the ground because there's just going to be contact manager.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:51]:

Well, it's just like a product launch. It's like you wouldn't launch a product without having beta customers or early users. So then you can launch with those customers and have them be included in your marketing. We're going to have Christina on the sales team. She's going to be basically a testimonial. You need to build advocates and a testimonial. So now in that sales meeting, Christina is going to stand up and she'd be like, yeah, actually, I helped Dave and Kira make this deck and it's fantastic. I've been using it in all my calls so far.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:15]:

It's really been great. Like, you need to build advocates like that. Right?

Kira Federer [00:18:18]:

I. Exactly. And even to be able to stand up and say, we all know that when we have calls, we get these three objections over and over again and everyone's signing their head. Those objections I haven't been able to be. And now here is this feature, or here is this product, and to have that person at the front of it. And I do think also when you do it with a senior seller, not only do they bring context, but they just have, they have a level of drive often that I found, you know, managers are inundated. They want to be promoted, and so they are going to be leaned into your process and really looking to shine. And so I think it's bringing sales in.

Kira Federer [00:18:53]:

I think it's launching at a time that matters to the market and to your buyer and to your sellers, where sometimes we will launch things. And I always remind my teams, product does not decide when we launch. Marketing decides when we launch. And we launch at a time that our sellers are going to be paying attention and our customers are going to pay attention. And while I'm there, heads up, it's June. I'm not sure when this episode is going to come out, but it's almost time for us to even start to think about what are we going to take to sales kickoff if your fiscal starts in January? Oh, God, I know we have to. And we're taking big enough things. You might even sandbag them a bit and watch them at a time where sales is paying attention, that they're ready.

Kira Federer [00:19:38]:

They're not ready to hear anything you have to say on September 15 because they're just thinking about Q four and they're not ready to hear anything you have to say in the middle of July, because they're probably going on vacation, but they are ready to hear it in before Q one. When Q two is slow. There are times I think it's just so they're in it, they're launching a time that matters. I think they're also. You can stop me if I'm giving.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:03]:

Too much information, but no such thing.

Kira Federer [00:20:05]:

A handful of ways where I think we give them the deck, but then they say to us, this is a ten slide deck and I've got my pitch already, just give me one slide. And it's these small things like that where it's like being able to stand in front of them and say, you can go through this deck, or we know you probably already have your own thing. Here's a single slide you need to talk about. And by the way, here are not only faqs, here are the objections we imagine you're going to get. We already thought about them. Here's the post. Don't just repost. Here's a post to do it, in your words.

Kira Federer [00:20:39]:

And you know what I did sales. We went ahead and took a look at everyone's territories. This doesn't apply to every ICP. This applies to two icps. So we pulled a custom account list that we think are going to be the most valuable targets for this particular product, this particular feature, this particular message, etcetera. And we've each of you, when I wrap this, you're all going to have your custom accounts, this deck, that one sheet in your inbox. And so I think there's a handful of ways that we can just remember that they don't get to just get on a call and walk through the deck. There are ten different ways they should be presenting this information and we need to make it work in a way that is realistic to them.

Kira Federer [00:21:21]:

And the first way we do that is that they're in the room on day one.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:26]:

Yeah, I think that's huge. It's like the answer to a lot of these questions actually ends up being very simple, which is like, you got to bring them into the creation of that. There also seems to often be like, we kind of go like death by a thousand cuts and we get really like, no, there's ten decks and there's 50 customer examples and there's this and there's this and then there's. I worked at HubSpot for not long, so it doesn't matter. Nine months. But I knew many people who worked there over a long period of time when I was there in 2015, they were like, we've been using this same two customer case studies for, like, seven years, and it ain't broke. And I remember I took that and I used to push back on the sales team at drift when they would be like, we need more examples. Do we really need more examples? I used to push back on the sales team at drift from the big, do we need more examples, or do we need, like, oh, what I'm hearing is, like, there isn't one specific to this vertical.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:11]:

Okay, that's different feedback. So we need one in this vertical, but maybe we just need three or five. And I feel like if you co create this content, you can create less. Where I think the marketer, what we do is we're like, no, there's. Look at this wiki page with 100 article. No salesperson is ever going to do that. They're going to go to one or two resources that they can go back to and use. Also, it's never going to be this, like, cookie cutter playbook.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:35]:

Maybe if you're selling at a huge, huge company where it has to be very standard, but, like, yeah, they want one slide. Okay. The one slide that's going to work for Cura might be different than the way that I sell, and I'm going to have one slide that's different for me. And so, like, make it a little bit more flexible. It's like, this is too long. No, this is a ten slide deck. It's going to be too long. Then I'll go do the one slide.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:56]:

But they don't like the one slide. Okay, so now the one slide becomes three. Like, it's impossible.

Kira Federer [00:23:05]:

It is impossible. That is why people that are good at this are very employable. I completely agree that once you say everything, you say nothing, and not just internally, but externally, you can look and feel like a significantly bigger company when every interaction with your brand reinforces the larger message. And if we turn into a place with a wiki, with a hundred links, you just can't control that. Where I like to create a modular approach, where we have our core narrative, if we're general presentation, whatever you want to call it, that is the move. Every time you're speaking with someone for the first time, we're walking them through this. The way I like to think about, like, I think you've had a lot of really thoughtful guests on this podcast talk about mastering the message and shaping your message, and we can talk about that, too. But I will tell you that I think I would a hundred times rather have a pretty good message and an entire company on message than incredible messaging.

Kira Federer [00:24:09]:

And no one using that message consistently.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:13]:

Well, because why are they not using it? They're using it because they don't believe it. Right. Like, that's right.

Kira Federer [00:24:16]:

That they think what they're doing is.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:17]:

Better or they don't believe that the company actually can deliver on that message.

Kira Federer [00:24:21]:

That's a whole. That's a whole other can of worms. Yes, but I think. Yeah, I think your initial assumption is exactly right. Like, I don't believe it or I don't believe that this is going to be valuable to my customer. So the building of that belief is that is around when, as you are creating a message. But to your question, around more and more and more content, I think everyone in the organization should agree on what is the core narrative? And you would be surprised how many companies do not have that singular story, and then once that core narrative is done.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:57]:

No, I would not be surprised.

Kira Federer [00:25:00]:

You would not be. What am I talking about? You would be not at all surprised to know that so few people know their narrative. When I arrived at Reddit, there were narratives just kittens with lasers shooting through their eyes, and that was like part of the sales deck. But how do we look at that, as this is the story everyone hears, and from there, when we pace the buyer's journey, do we have a piece of content for every part of the buyer's journey, and how do we optimize for the vertical as we go throughout? So I think about, like, a messaging framework. I've got the messaging framework. We all know the messaging framework. We should all know the words messaging framework. But my commitment to you is once that is figured out, we will then pull down from that.

Kira Federer [00:25:42]:

We will modify this. What does this look like for your vertical? We're going to build a content program around each of the three pillars of this messaging framework. Yes, I think there's still content to be made, but if that content isn't laddering back up to the framework and the primary message, then it does just look like a bunch of WikiLeaks. So I am certainly quality over quantity. I know the ask for more will always be there, and sometimes I think you say yes to that, but it needs to ladder back to the greater message.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:14]:

So I think that you can be the greatest writer and communicator in the world, but I think that a true, strong, strategic narrative, positioning, whatever you want to call it, it comes from, look, I'm a marketer. I believe that we can do really good work. I believe that I believe in the Ogilvy quote of like, there are no dull products, only dull writers. But I think that was also in an era of like, 1960s when there wasn't so much competition. There's so many products now. There's so much skepticism in the market. Great positioning and messaging, for me, starts with the founders vision. And we can only do so much.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:49]:

We can be like a one plus one equals three situation where when we team up, we can make that explode. Right? But I've, before really going into full time exit five mode, I was doing some consulting, and most of the companies that wanted to work with me on consulting wanted to do so from a positioning and messaging standpoint, from a storytelling standpoint. And I tried my hardest, but there was a couple companies that I work with that were, they, they were looking for me to come up with their differentiator. That's going to be very hard. To compete and win, the differentiator has to be embedded in your product and your story and your vision. There's no marketing consultant in the world who can tell you what your differentiator is. Am I wrong for thinking that?

Kira Federer [00:27:27]:

That's exactly it. I'm nodding my head ferociously because I'm thinking about a particular organization. But yeah, if you can't tell me, why do people buy you over insert competitor here? This is not the place to start. You got to start way upstream. And also, speaking of sales, take a time out and go have an empathy session with your sellers because, my gosh, how are they doing what they're doing? Yeah, I think without a doubt knowing what is the founder's vision. And I think that's why Andy Raskin, I think he won't take a call with you unless you're willing to connect him with your CEO. And I respect that so much because it does just reemphasize. This starts there.

Kira Federer [00:28:13]:

And I will always tell people, if you want to do the single biggest thing that will ever meaningfully change your business, it is to get this right. So I will. Plus one that is identifying that differentiator and understanding what it is and then figuring out what is that when we go into market with that today, what is the impact of that shift look like for our buyers? How do things meaningfully change for them? I've done a ton of message testing of all different types. Mass scale blast out. Do you like this message or that message? Mass surveys. And then I've done, you just get on the phone with buyers and every time that is the one that's the most fruitful where you just hear a buyer specific words when they talk about their world. And so I think it is finding that differentiation, it is understanding what that looks like and the impact of the day to day of a buyer. I appreciate April Dunford's framework.

Kira Federer [00:29:04]:

I think it's great. I think it's very, very helpful of positioning yourself against status quo, grouping those competitors in categories. You don't need to name that competitor, but how might you reference them as a group? And not all companies have the luxury of doing this. We haven't heard a lot about it in a lot of narratives, but I also, or a lot of from a lot of thought leaders. I think if you can begin to create a data set around this that is unique. I've launched thought leadership when I've launched a narrative and that it changes the level of excitement about what you are saying. My comms team will not take a new narrative to market if I'm just rearranging the furniture.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:47]:

I think people also have misguided expectations about what you don't just unveil positioning and the whole world is like what that is. You're not Apple in most cases, especially with this audience. We're selling B2b takes six to nine months to buy something. And so you need to pair it with thought leadership. It needs to be repetitive. It needs to be over and over and over. Like at drift, when we created started talking about conversational marketing, it was like, huh. The initial expert says, hmm, this is pretty interesting.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:16]:

Then it's like CEO presentation, keynote, sales deck, product launch that mapped. It's like then over two years. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All these things that tie back to the vision. And like Salesforce, obviously Mark Benioff is like greatest at this, where he is incredible at. They will compete forever because they will take whatever's happening that's relevant in the world. He's going to tie it back to the business. Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:40]:

In some way. And so it's like the workforce is changing, communications are going boom. They bought slack. They do that and they're like, it's a messaging first world. Then they're talking about AI. He's fantastic at taking like what's happening in the world, relating it back, and then they repeat the same thing over and over and over and over. It's not just a one time launch and so you have to be able to do that. And so I love what you said about pairing the positioning and strategic narrative with the thought leadership over time.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:07]:

And what was so great about like conversational marketing as an example it made every product thing that we did in the future so easy from a positioning standpoint. We acquired this video company and we were launching that at one of our upcoming events. And our whole premise was conversational marketing. Like marketing should be about two way conversations. So what's the hook for this video product that we're launching? Video is the number one way to start a conversation online today. That's how we're all consuming information. I didn't have a positioning frame. I don't have a framework for that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:36]:

I didn't use some magic like positioning statement. I do think that when the roadmap, when the company vision is really strong and aligned, you don't necessarily need Andy Raskin's framework or April Dunford's framework or Dave Gerhart's framework. Whatever. It's there.

Kira Federer [00:31:51]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:52]:

It's not going to be the positioning exercise that gets you there, I will tell you.

Kira Federer [00:31:56]:

I don't know that I've had the luxury of working at a company that did have that, where it was so obvious, and Reddit is there now. But when I started at Reddit, I asked around the company from the top to the middle to the, you know, all over what is Reddit? And no one could answer that. And I think that if you don't have that, if you don't have that very strong conviction across the executive team, I also think the inverse is true where that positioning exercise puts the chip on the table. It says, like, all right, we are all coming together and this is going to become our North Star, and this is, should be complementary to what's already happening. But now we're all going to stand on stage at a sales kickoff and you, head of product, are going to say how you're building toward delivering on this.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:45]:

I will say, yeah, that's fair. So you're saying, like, there's value in the exercise because it forces everybody to commit to doing it.

Kira Federer [00:32:51]:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And to your point earlier, I'm just saying it everywhere. We did a campaign, and I will always love this campaign. I've read it where we worked on, we wanted b, two B and b, two C, to be much more closely aligned. They had different taglines. They were different. And this is when we, at least at that point, we had already run some thought leadership previously, but we had been saying that in market for three years.

Kira Federer [00:33:17]:

I will tell you, 29 when I joined Reddit or we launched new messaging in 2019, no one would touch this brand. We were a brand safety risk. I will say nothing. No one touched. We were seen as a brand safety risk. And by 2021 we were named as ad age's hottest social media platform. And the team grew by seven people. Not a lot, it was just that we just kept saying it in market.

Kira Federer [00:33:43]:

And then later we did a campaign where B2c side, we are tagline with find your people. B two b was find your people where they find community. And you know that advertiser is the audience for that B2b line. But it's all about what changes obviously, when you find those that care about the same thing. But the way we, we have our pillars of messaging. And I say this to plus one to your fact that once you know it, it is easy where when we went to south by or cds, we knew we were going to say this. Pillar one. And I come back to framework because I do love missing framework for the cleanliness of it.

Kira Federer [00:34:20]:

Then once we will spend the next six months talking about pillar one, by the time we get to Cannes in June, we're going to talk about pillar two. Or sometimes we would space them years out. Like we were just maniacal about every event. Everything we were doing in market laddered back to this. And the conversation with drift did that so well.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:41]:

Yeah. And I think this is where like, if I'm interviewing for CMO or VP of marketing or head of marketing, or even if you're a junior marketer coming up, do you believe in the company's vision? Is there clear, is it clear that someone there has a strong point of view? Whether you believe they can deliver on it is second question. But like, even as the company had like eight or nine employees when I joined drift, and in the interview they had just started, they were selling something completely different. But in the interview, David, the CEO, he told me like his ten year vision, and he's like, we're going to launch this product, then we're going to do this thing. And all that made so much sense to me. And I was like, yes, I can get on board that. I think the marketing job that's not fun to do is when the founder has no vision and they can't tell you where things are going, because it's very hard to show people to promised land and talk about the future and think about what you could be doing if you don't have a vision beyond the, like one thing your product does right now. And part of the positioning exercise that you talked about is the way you might whittle down to strong positioning is to actually stop doing some things.

Kira Federer [00:35:45]:

Absolutely. Where you just like come back, like now are we actually building toward fulfilling this promise.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:51]:

Well, let's just make something up. We're recording on like Zencastr, right? And you could very easily make the case that this could be like a webinar platform and they could do other things. Right. But by honing in on one specific use case, this is not a great example. I'm just trying to riff on this, like by just saying we do podcast recording that opens up a world of possibility. And it's like with positioning, oftentimes less is more. If you're like, well, but some people, this is where, and I've been in this conversation where like the cross functional vps and other people in the product team were like, well, this one little pocket of people use our product to do this and they, some other people use this. That's great.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:25]:

You have to actually be okay with turning off revenue and saying no and saying no. There's this great book called the wizard of ads by this guy Roy Williams, and he has this quote. I use this quote a lot. Not a lot of people understand it, so I'm going to say it anyway. He says, the risk of insult is the price of clarity.

Kira Federer [00:36:42]:

Yeah, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:44]:

Do you understand that quote?

Kira Federer [00:36:45]:

I do.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:46]:

Sometimes I say that quote and people are like, I don't get it. But that to me means like the risk of insult is the price of clarity. But the risk of saying no to these customers and these different business units and these different product lines, by saying no to them, you're going to get to the clarity, which is like just doing the one or two things really well.

Kira Federer [00:37:06]:

The less business oriented version of this is that I love to just use in life is clear, is kind, unclear, is unkind, but similarly, clarity is actually kind. Clarity is actually good for your business. But saying yes to everything it will, and especially in a marketing seat, and maybe even more especially in a product marketing function, it will take you down if you are trying to serve that many icps and you don't have the resources to do it. Without a doubt. Without a doubt.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:36]:

All right, do you have any favorite example? We got to wrap up. I want to keep talking to you, but we have to go. I got to talk to a candidate in two minutes, which I'm really excited about. Do you have any examples of companies that you think are doing a great job with marketing in the space in B2b today?

Kira Federer [00:37:51]:

Actually, funny enough, I'll send this back to you that I really appreciated your post. You posted just yesterday about ten companies that are doing it well.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:59]:

It was great. There was three bros that didn't like it. They were like, these are all market. These are all companies that sell to marketers. I'm like, well, all right, great. Give me some good examples, because this is the space that I'm in. So what do you got?

Kira Federer [00:38:09]:

The space that I'm in as well. After being in. I'm using that list, by the way, to go and look at candidates. So kudos to people that work at those companies. I'm thinking more about, I think you've nailed the like, drift does it very well, or, you know, the conversational marketing component. I, from my time at Reddit, I continue to look at. I think Pinterest does it visually very well. I thought that Snap uses data in a really interesting way.

Kira Federer [00:38:36]:

I think Spotify, if anyone knows how to wrap around a moment, it is Spotify. If you want to see what it looks like to cover the market. You know, they do Spotify wrap for advertisers as well. So the B two B side of the house does that incredibly well, different than the SaaS companies you usually get in a response like this. But when I think about social companies that I pay a lot of attention to, exit.

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