Mindful B2B Marketing | Business Growth and Social Impact (Former: Forward Launch Your SaaS)

S2E9: Why Clarity is King: The Power of Simple Messaging, ft. Ben Guttmann, author of 'Simply Put'

• Keirra Woodard • Season 2 • Episode 9

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Main Insight:
Effective B2B marketing hinges on clarity; the clearer the message, the greater its impact.

Guest Bio:
Ben Guttmann is a seasoned marketing entrepreneur, educator, and author known for his expertise in clear communication. He authored "Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them." Over a decade, he managed Digital Natives Group, a marketing agency that evolved from small local projects to prestigious collaborations with major entities like the NFL and Comcast.

The Five Principles of Simple Messaging: 

  • beneficial, or matters to the receiver
  • focused, meaning articulating one thing at a time rather than multiple things 
  • salient, or standing out amidst noise 
  • empathetic, or speaking the language that the audience understands and meeting them emotionally
  • minimal, or excluding everything unnecessary.


Key Takeaways:

Emphasize Clarity in Messaging

  • Clear and simple messages are more effective.
  • Avoid jargon and complex language.
  • Make your value proposition easily understandable.

Know Your Audience

  • Understand the needs and pain points of your target audience.
  • Tailor your messages to address these needs directly.
  • Use language and examples that resonate with your audience.

Consistent Brand Voice

  • Maintain a consistent voice across all platforms and materials.
  • This helps in building a recognizable and trustworthy brand.

Storytelling

  • Use stories to make your messages more engaging and memorable.
  • Share success stories and case studies to illustrate your points.

Data-Driven Decisions

  • Use analytics to understand what messages are working.
  • Continuously test and refine your messaging based on data insights.

Visual Clarity

  • Use clear and professional visuals to support your messages.
  • Ensure that your design is clean and free from unnecessary clutter.

Simplicity in Design

  • Apply minimalist principles to your marketing materials.
  • Focus on key messages and avoid overwhelming your audience with too much information.

Focus on Benefits, Not Features

  • Highlight how your product or service benefits the customer.
  • Explain how it solves their problems or improves their situation.

Educate Your Audience

  • Provide valuable content that educates your audience about your industry.
  • This positions you as a thought leader and builds trust.

Leverage Multiple Channels

  • Use a mix of marketing channels to reach your audience.
  • Ensure that your messaging is consistent across all channels.

Customer-Centric Approach

  • Always put the customer at the center of your marketing strategy.
  • Listen to their feedback and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Give feedback on this episode by sending the host a text message.

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[0:34] Okay. So today I am sitting down with Ben Guttmann. He is a marketing entrepreneur and educator and the author of Simply Put, Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. So Ben, I'm super excited to chat with you about clarity and the power of simple messaging. Likewise. Thanks for having me, Kara. I'm excited to be here. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get into writing your book and your worship and all of that good stuff? Oh yeah. So I've worn a lot of different hats, but the one that's most relevant is I ran a marketing agency for 10 years. I started that more or less right out of college, actually in an old professor's basement. And we worked with like the local ice cream shop, the local camera shop. And eventually we punched our way up and we started working in slightly bigger companies. We got an office, we had some employees, I got a bigger office, got more employees. And after 10 years, we were working with the NFL and Comcast and I love New York and all these really great brands. And then we decided to sell it. You know, after doing something for 10 years, you decide often that, you know, it might not be the thing you want to do for the next 10 years. I really enjoyed it, had a great ride.

[1:47] But I was excited to explore a few other opportunities. And one of the things after we sold was to look into, two, you know, how can I take what I've learned over the past 10 years and all these great projects and not so much, you know, kind of tell like the war stories of it, but what was the fundamental question we were trying to answer in all of those projects, which is, you know, how do you make something that a message that works, right? How do you make a message that communicates that gets your point across? How do I answer that question in, in, in actuality? I've done it in practice, but how do I, how do I answer it kind of in, in theory? That's what drove me to write the book. The research question behind it was, why do some messages work when others don't?

[2:35] Okay. What does it mean to do simple messaging and to have clarity in your marketing messaging? I define simplicity as something that is easy to perceive, understand, and make use of. This is related to an idea called fluency. So if you ask you and I about fluency, we can say we're fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin. We can be fluent in cooking or in chess or something else like that. But if you ask a cognitive scientist, well, fluency means something a little bit different. It means how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head, and make sense of it? And it turns out when something is more fluent, when something's easier, it takes less mental processing power.

[3:24] Well, that is associated with things that we're more likely to like, to buy, to trust. And the opposite is also true. When things are less fluent, when it's more friction, when it's more sweat to process something, to perceive and process something, well, we don't like it. We don't buy it. We don't trust it. And when we're a marketer, when we're any sort of leader, really, we want something to be fluid. We want all of those positive associations. And so that's what we're trying to achieve when we talk about simplicity. Yeah, I feel like I've seen that before. Like if you just ever stumble across a web page for some kind of product and then it's just like cluttered with text or like it's using like some technical jargon to explain whatever it is, as opposed to just like framing it in terms of, you know, what the buyer needs to know.

[4:16] And so what are all of those touch points that you need in your marketing copy to make it be perceived as fluent?

[4:26] Yeah. And so what you mentioned is really the crux of the problem here, right? Is that we want something as a receiver, as a reader, a buyer, a voter, a donor, we want something that is fluent. But when we're the sender, when we are the person speaking or writing or advertising, well, we are often incentivized to do the opposite. Internally, we're faced with biases like our additive bias. We're more likely to add than subtract.

[4:59] Externally, we're influenced by all sorts of different forces on our team, in the marketplace that want more and more and more. Well okay that's that's the gap then right so internally we have you know sorry not internally as a receiver we want one thing and as a sender well we aren't really prepared to do that so ask how do we how do we bridge that gap right well in the second half of my book that's what i dedicate to these five design principles that i've identified that help us get there and it's not it's not a checklist it's not a rubric it's but it is it's kind of just design principles that if we can activate more on them we're going to be more effective in how we in how we we get there um so i'll go over them real quick then we can we can dive into things later but the first one is beneficial what does it matter to the receiver what's in it for them second one is focused are Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once? Third one is salient. Does your message stand out from the noise? Does it rise to your attention? Does it stick out, stand up? Is it noticeable?

[6:11] Fourth is empathetic. Are you speaking in a language that your audience understands? And both the literal language, of course, but also are you meeting them where they are emotionally? Are you meeting them where they are in their motivations? And then finally, minimal. Have you cut out everything that isn't important and left what is? Hmm. Okay. So how, yeah, how, how did you identify these five things? Like, how do you, how do you know that those are the, those are the five things that are going to make the message fluent? Is that like from science or psychology research? Or is that from you experimenting with marketing? Or how did you come up with it? A little bit of all of the above, but I really try to, in this book, lean as much as I can on the science. Because I've personally found in my experience, when I've read other business books, when I've listened to TED Talks or podcasts, I always appreciate it when it's not just somebody's kind of war story, right? It's not just like, this is the big heroic thing that I did, and this is why it works. Because I'm a believer that...

[7:22] Almost all, my favorite quote, and I actually have this in the book now, is all advice is autobiographical.

[7:29] People aren't giving advice to you, they're giving advice to themselves in the past. And once you put that framing on, it helps you actually make sense of a lot of stuff that people say. So I wanted to avoid some of that because I think there's lots of value in that for certain people and for certain markets. But I was personally more interested in saying, well, what is the real core truth here about this? And so I looked at hundreds of academic studies, and I looked at all these different case studies from the marketing world and beyond, and I began to distill the differentiating factor here into those five different buckets. And having the kind of boots on the ground marketing experience did certainly help me organize my thinking and put me in the right path for this. But I didn't want to just rely on that as my own experience. That's a limited lens to look through. I wanted to say, what is the psychology behind why something works?

[8:31] So since you put this into a framework, who have you used it with? Have you used it in your own company? Have you had readers or clients or whoever who have used this and like what was the results that they got from implementing this step-by-step kind of simple messaging framework well yeah it's funny you know now that the book's been out for a couple weeks and i've been hearing from some folks that have read it it's that's been the best thing right like so i i've i've used some of these principles in my own career for sure but i sold my agency before i before i wrote this book and so i i don't I don't have the same opportunities that I had a couple of years ago to put all of these things into action. I've done some in my consulting work, for sure. But what's made me really excited is when I get an email from somebody saying, hey, I just read your book. And I immediately changed X to Y. I changed my subject line in my email from this to that, or I'm rewriting my homepage, page, or I am, you know, like reconsidering the speech that I'm writing. And I've, I've been, that's been a relatively new phenomenon, because the book just came out and but it's really been making me smile every single time.

[9:45] Nice. Okay. Well, so in addition to your, your, your book writing and your experience running an agency, like you're also a professor, correct? So tell me a little bit about that. And like, you also teach marketing ethics. Is that correct? it? So I do teach ethics as part of my marketing course that I teach at the Zicklin School of Business, which is at Baruch College here in New York. I have been doing that for about 10 years. I love it. It is like my favorite thing. If you have ever thought about teaching, and I say this to you, Kira, and I say this to anybody who's listening, if anybody's ever thought about teaching, try it. Go ahead and do it. Listen, you're not going to get paid. I teach at a public institution. I'll get paid a couple bucks for it, but you can't do it for that reason. You have to do it because you love the act of doing it. And every semester, I get a fresh batch of students, and I'm so honored to get to help teach them and educate them and prepare them for their careers. But I'm also honored that I get to see them at this pivotal moment in their careers and their lives where they're college seniors. They are about to go out and start their career.

[11:04] And to be able to see them go for that mind shift of being a student to being a professional, that's what I try to facilitate in my class. And I really, you know, every semester, by the time I get to the last couple weeks there, I'm blown away by some of the stuff that they do.

[11:21] Awesome. And so what are some of the things that you teach and how does it kind of relate back? Does any of it like relate back to your marketing experience or your,

[11:31] your simple messaging framework or even what, what do you teach in the ethical marketing component of your course that, you know, marketers, especially B2B marketers would need to know about? I added an ethics module to my course a few years ago when I realized that it's always been complicated, but the environment got more and more complicated to build an ethical career in as these platforms like Facebook and now TikTok and everything else have begun to muddy the waters as to what does it mean to have privacy? What does it mean to you know how do we want to use these platforms for good and are these are they being used for for misinformation and so i i felt like it was becoming more and more urgent and so i put this this lesson in and but basically my thesis on it on marketing ethics is that marketing does have the potential to be used for bad right like it is it is an.

[12:34] It is the fundamental component of propaganda. It is something that can make people question how they look. We've seen for decades the stuff about the Dove Real Beauty campaign a couple of years ago was so important, a couple of decades ago now, was so much that's a big deal because it challenged the kind of female body issues that advertising perpetuated for decades. We see it more recently with Facebook and Instagram coming out of reports saying that their product hurts the well-being of teenage girls, right? This type of stuff happens over and over again throughout history. We've seen advertising and marketing used to market products that kill people, like guns, like tobacco products. We've seen it used to hurt people's financial well-being, right? Rent-a-center and payday loans and all these other pieces that are financially kind of vulturous a lot of times. We have seen it be something that obviously there's the privacy and the data concerns that people have. So there's a lot of issues that you can point to and say marketing is evil.

[13:45] But I also would argue that marketing is actually neutral. Marketing is the act of connecting a producer to a consumer it's the chain that that you know brings something from people who make stuff people who want stuff or people who need stuff there's nothing about that that's inherently bad it's the problem is we have to individually and and as an industry make sure that we're using those powers for good because it's really easy to go out and take that paycheck and to do something that's going to be and you know it's going to hurt society and hurt you individually.

[14:20] But my argument is saying, and this is why I emphasize this as much in my class as possible, that it's up to us as people in this industry to have a code of ethics and to have a constant vigilance about us to make sure that we're not using this work. We're not using the skills that we have and the tools that we have to hurt people. And so I always, I try to i i try to emphasize this to my students in my own work and my agency i would go out of my we we had clients that came knocking on our door where we we could have really used the money at certain points but we turned them away right because we we didn't want to deal we didn't want that stain on our reputation you know both kind of you know that's that's a very tangible piece of it we didn't want to be be associated with something

[15:10] there's a real cost to that but But also just morally, we didn't want to work. We don't want to spend our time working on stuff that we felt wasn't making the world better.

[15:19] Yeah. And I think you're making some very like interesting points that I generally tend to agree with.

[15:27] I think one thing that I struggle with specifically is like figuring out how far is too far when you're creating some kind of code of ethics, because I feel like people can kind of swing on some kind of pendulum where one side of it is like, oh, well, I'm just like kind of neutral. I'm just kind of like for this company. I'm just, you know, I'm trying to do the best I can in the sense that I'm trying to make profit for the company. And so you're measuring kind of your job against like, you know, how well did I do what I was hired to do? And then the, oh, potential long-term impacts to society of working with, you know, this company or the other is kind of like, that's somebody else's problem to deal with. And then there's the other like opposite end of the spectrum that I've encountered with some people, especially like smaller business owners who maybe start their businesses like with this mindset of, oh, I want it to be ethical and this and this and this and that. And then they get like too hung up on, you know, trying to make everything perfect, like some kind of moral perfectionism. So how do you strike kind of that balance and make sure that you're coming up with some kind of ethical code in a practical day to day sense of running a marketing team or business?

[16:52] But yeah, you're not you're not going too far in one direction or the other. Oh, yeah. That's the fundamental problem, right? Like it's that there's always going to be the forces that say, hey, you know what? This is a way to make a buck.

[17:06] I think as a business owner, you'll understand that the world is more malleable than you think, right? When you're an employee, the mindset, and nothing's wrong with it being employed, by the way, the mindset though is often that it's a fixed world and you have your job and it's a job, and you got to do these things, and you have a boss, and you have subordinates, whatever it is. And the world exists as it is, and you play a part in it. When you are an entrepreneur, you are quickly slapped in the face of the idea that the world is malleable, that you can choose what you want to do, or how you spend your time, or how you spend your effort. And there's pros and cons, and there's consequences to whatever you do, but you're not so much prescribed a course of accent in the same way that you feel is the case when, when you are in that kind of W2 job versus the, you know, versus the independent life. Um, so that's number one. The other thing I would say is, is a lot of times. I mean, ethics is really, it's not about saying, here's the big laundry list of the things we do and don't do. And sometimes that's helpful a little bit, but it's more about kind of asking the question, what ought I to do? Right. What am I supposed to do here? Having just that interrogative mindset will put you in the right direction 99% of the time. What am I supposed to do?

[18:30] And answer it for yourself. And there's outside influence that can help you for that. You can look at laws. You can look at religion. and you'll get industry code. There's lots of different things you can look to, but that's the only thing you really need to prepare yourself with. You don't need to have a 50-page ethics guide that everybody gets a quiz on.

[18:50] It's about having the intentionality. Hmm. And so how do you kind of set that intentionality as the norm as like a marketing leader? Say you are an employee in a company, but you have a team under you, like you have direct reports. Like, how do you let people know and help them feel comfortable in being ethical and thinking of things through that framework as opposed to just like having these, you know, profit metrics that we're supposed to be optimizing for? I think it's important to model that behavior, of course, and that's a big piece of it, but also to make it understood that not every dollar is always worth it, that profit is important, revenue is important, but it's not the only thing. And that we would rather not make a dollar if it means we're going to sacrifice

[19:45] our ethics than make that dollar and become lesser because of it. So it's about kind of setting that, again, setting the example, but also letting it be known that there are things more important than just the bottom line. Mm-hmm. And you have students, meaning that most of the people you're interacting with on a day-to-day basis are people who are entering the workforce for the first time, right?

[20:11] So when you're giving advice to people in that position, they're usually going to be on the quote-unquote bottom of the corporate hierarchy. Hierarchy and so what could they potentially do with you know ethics if you know maybe maybe they enter a department where their marketing team just doesn't think about this sort of stuff they don't really have an ethics code they just kind of exist you know this is one of those things that's easier said than done but i mean you can basically you can try as much as you can within your confines of your environment but some and try to model it try to question things try to push for things sometimes environments have to be left. And sometimes if you feel like you're in a place where being in that place is not going to make you, It's not going to make you better. It's not going to fulfill your ethical needs.

[21:06] Then sometimes, go find another job. There's lots of jobs. Losing a job sucks. Leaving a job is a tough decision to make. But I would recommend somebody leave a job and maybe go find something else that maybe pays a little bit less, maybe is a little less prestigious, just but it's something that you can sleep better at night every single time you're you're doing your work okay well that's that's easier to look at it yeah it's a lot easier said than done right, is you know like most people in this country need a job right like every day we need every single paycheck like most americans can't put together 400 in case of an emergency it's very, easy to go say hey go leave the job and just say i i need a job everybody needs a job, But at a certain point, you have to just weigh the pros and cons of who do you want to be. And if that requires you sacrifice, if getting the paycheck requires you sacrificing that vision, then it's not worth it. You can find something else.

[22:16] Okay. Yeah. And maybe, maybe counter, not, not add to that advice with something like get a, get a new job before you quit the old job. Like if it's at all possible. That's a great advice, right? It's always easier to get a new job when you currently have a job. And it also, you know, for many reasons, number one is optically, it looks good for the recruiters, but also number two is you don't have that internal pressure a lot, right? You can say you want to go leave someplace.

[22:44] But, you know, you can still kind of toughen out for a little bit longer. And that gives you a lot better of a place to stand on when you're going through the arduous process of applying and interviewing for a job. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so how does the clarity in messaging and the advice you're promoting in your book tie back into marketing ethics, if at all, like how can having simple messaging benefit, you know, not just our bottom line, because obviously it's helping customers come find us and actually want to buy from us and trust us more. So there's, there's the obvious profit motive there, but then what else, what other benefits can it have to society or to the people using this framework

[23:39] as they do their marketing? Yeah, I tried pretty hard to find examples that weren't just confined to marketing, actually, in some of the work I was doing. And I have things as big as the space program and as small as flossing your teeth in my examples.

[23:58] Anybody who has something they want to say, who has a change they want to make in the world, they're a marketer, right? Right. Anybody who who wants to inform or persuade can benefit by doing so simply. That is that this is not confined to marketing. Marketing happens to be the industry that most people who are professional communicators end up in and where there's the biggest financial incentive a lot of times to be a good communicator. But that doesn't mean it's the only place where communication is important. And this book will live on the marketing shelf at a bookstore for sure. But it's not something that is limited to being useful to folks in that arena.

[24:42] The flossing example, to give you that, right? I've always had bad luck with my teeth. It's just been some... I blame my parents for genetics and whatever it's going to be. But I go to the dentist one day, and as he's doing all sorts of very painful things, he says, well, you only have to floss the teeth you want to keep. You only have to floss the teeth you want to get every single day since then i floss and it's something that was was exhibiting this level of empathy talk about empathetic communication where he met me where i was it was language that i needed to hear was the motivations that are important to me and and it's something that that was not related to selling a product at all, but was something related to making a change in the world. Okay. You just made me want to floss. I don't know if that was the point of this conversation, but now I'm going to buy some more. I think that's going to be the biggest effect of this conversation and all the stuff I'm talking about. I think more people are going to floss.

[25:47] More people are going to keep their teeth. Yeah. There we go. Awesome. Yeah. I love that. So let me switch gears a little bit and talk about, you know, If you were giving advice to a B2B marketer and they wanted to go through their website, their messaging, their communication, and step-by-step start implementing this simple messaging framework, what would you have them start with? Walk them through the steps of advice they would go through. Well, I would say this is not, as I mentioned before a step-by-step plan for something, but that's a little bit of a lie. Because I think that the first one, beneficial, is important to be at the beginning of your process. I think that minimal is important towards the end, because minimal is about everything you need, but only what you need. And it's hard to know that unless you've gone through and examined the other principles.

[26:46] Beneficial is the most important piece. So this is something that anybody who's who's who's done sales who's done marketing in their life will probably know which is that we don't buy features we buy benefits we don't buy the thing we buy what the thing does for us that's what we ultimately want you mentioned my students before i tell them this sentence every semester and i say if you don't remember anything else from this class from this entire you know degree that you get if you remember this sentence which isn't mine it comes from theodore levitt a harvard professor from the 60s he said, People don't buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. People don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. And if you remember just that, you're going to be so far ahead of everybody else in marketing and sales because it encapsulates this idea that we don't buy the thing, we buy what the thing does for us. We don't want the drill, we want the hole. But actually, we don't even want the hole, we want the picture on the wall. We don't even want the picture on the wall, we want that feeling of love and belonging. We want to see our family every day and feel that kind of warm fuzzies.

[27:58] This model of just kind of shifting what it is you're focusing on is something that I think B2B companies in particular have a really hard time with. I think that B2B companies are all about the features because a lot of times the people who are in charge of messaging and marketing and sales are kind of pretty far removed from the genesis of what the problem was. They're out there saying, I got this big piece of software. I've got this big piece of equipment. I got to go sell it. And I see, hear, smell, taste, touch with my five senses all these things about the product out there that and i talk about them i suppose it's got you know this this type of you know widget on here and it's got this type of you know casing and it's got this you know this piece of warrant this warranty that we have all those things are just features they're nice we we do care about them at a certain point but we ultimately want We want what those things mean for us. We want the problem solved that this thing is addressing.

[29:06] Okay. So the first thing is drill down in a literal and metaphorical sense to exactly how it's going to benefit the end user.

[29:18] User essentially. And like you mentioned, it's difficult to do that in a B2B marketing context a lot of the time because you're not really interacting with those customers, especially like the bigger the sale is, like the less you interact with an end user if you're a marketer. So how can you like overcome kind of that gap and then make sure that you're really understanding, understanding you know what the what the future is rather than the feature oh yeah so the tool is appropriately very simple it's so what oh what well let's talk about go back to dental care for a second mint toothpaste you have mint toothpaste nobody really wants mint toothpaste what they want so what is fresh breath okay well mint toothpaste so what fresh breath that's your first level benefit. That's your functional benefit. We'll call it that.

[30:16] Okay. I don't actually want fresh breath there though. So what? Okay. Well, I actually, what I really want is to make a better impression on my date tonight. Okay. Well, you got a couple of layers down there. That's the emotional benefit. That's what I want there. And you ask it again, you say, actually, okay, well, so what? Well, I don't really, I don't even want the, I don't want them in toothpaste. I don't want the fresh breath. I don't even want to have a successful day tonight. I want one of these kind kind of core Maslow motivations. I want love and belonging, or I want a physiological need if the day is going to go really well. And all of those things ladder up to that motivation.

[30:54] And so you go, so what, so what, so what? And you somehow connected a toothpaste flavoring with this fundamental desire and need that you have. And so once you do that, you understand the different levels of where you should invest your messaging resources.

[31:13] These motivations will point us in the right direction and then we look at the emotional benefit and maybe that's the hook right maybe that's that first line in our website maybe that's the headline in our email maybe that's the title of our presentation the sales copy and then you look at the functional benefit well okay maybe that's the second piece that's the second headline that's the the next couple sentences in our email whatever it's going to be and then eventually you get back down to the features and say okay what is important to have So I'm going to talk about those later on the website. I'm going to talk about those later on the brochure. That's the way to organize your communication that will actually match how the receiver wants to receive that information. Hmm. Okay. I like this. You go in reverse order of what's the most important. Yeah.

[32:04] Okay. I like this. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So once you've figured that out, what is the next step to actually like implementing this as a B2B marketer? Well, I think it's going to depend 100% on everybody's individual situation, right? If you're building a website that organizes your stuff differently, if you're building a deck, that's a different format. So there's not a very prescriptive next step for it necessarily, more so that, okay, now you have the pieces and you sort of apply them to your individual situation that makes the most sense. The other pieces here, when we talk about focused or salient or empathetic, this is This is how we begin to interrogate what is the language that we use there? What is the formatting that we use? Focus is about saying one thing instead of saying a lot of different things.

[32:55] I'll give you the sub-headline of focus, which is it's about fighting the Frankenstein idea. So the Frankenstein idea is, if you read the book Frankenstein, Mary Shelley describes the monster as having individually beautiful features. Right individually the hair the muscles the eyes everything was selected to be individually the an ideal element however when you put them together it formed this gruesome composite it formed something that was worse than the sum of its parts and so this is this happens a lot in marketing and in messaging which is that we try to throw everything in there we try to talk all the time about this and this and this and this and it's a lot of ants that get tied together for this but the problem is we can only focus on one thing at a time we can we can do things sequentially but we can only really get one bite at a time uh priority the word priority is singular by the way right so you can only prioritize one feature one benefit in each go so you want to you want to do the hard work of figuring out what is the hierarchy

[34:02] what is the order of things which you want to message you can't message everything what's the one that is going to stick the most.

[34:10] Yeah and then salient i mean if you want i can i mean salient is about how does your message does your message zig when everybody else zags right like why are you using, messaging or using a language or using a vessel that that contrasts against everybody else if everybody's doing one thing how can you do something a little bit different, and then empathetic to finish that this line of thinking is empathetic is are you are you kind of meeting people at the lowest common denominator, meeting them in the language which they're understanding, making sure you're kind of getting out of your own head, out of your own bubble, and connecting with them in a way that they understand. Hmm. Okay. So let's talk about the salient piece of it and the getting different. So when you're in some kind of professional environment, especially like B2B, I feel like this is it's it's almost like discouraged at some points or at least in like some company cultures or maybe with some clients or things like that to, you know, stand out too much, like in a way that's like interesting. And it depends on the industry as well. Like maybe maybe software can get away with it a little bit more. But some some industries just like very, very conservative.

[35:30] And so how do you stand out when people don't really want you to stand out? Because standing out is perceived as unprofessional and it makes people trust you less. Oh boy. It sometimes is a tough sell, right? There's a bit of politics in that. One thing that is a valuable mindset when you're dealing with those type of situations is that people don't often have the motivations you think they have, or they might have those, but they're going to have other ones as well. So internally stakeholders, especially. Right.

[36:04] There are going to be people in the food chain there that all certainly, at least on face value, they say, I want this project to be successful. I want to sell more widgets. I want to do that. And that's great. But also there's going to be a copywriter that has a lucky turn of phrase or hates semicolons or whatever and doesn't want them in there. There's going to be the CEO that really just wants to stick it to his golf buddy at the country club or something. Everybody has these different motivations so it it takes a little bit of of understanding and and kind of inquisitiveness to go out and find how do you match everybody how do you get them all pointed in the same direction what are they looking for and how can you address that in your in the work that you're doing but the real thing that a lot of these that that unites all of these different stakeholders is people want the thing but they also want to be able to justify their decision. They want to be able to look good to their boss, their board, whoever, and say, hey, you know what? We chose this agency. We chose this supplier because of X, Y, and Z. They were justified in that decision. That's almost as important to people as actually the deliverable which you generate.

[37:23] It's a little cynical to look at things that way, But that is the reality is that people care about the results, but they also care about kind of protecting their butts a lot of times. And understanding that helps you battle through the obstacles that would get in your way to become simple or to become salient. Hmm. Okay. So if you had to distill that down to like one little mantra to remember, what would that be? Oh, boy. I would say, I mean, that's a tough one. Here's the thing, just because something is simple doesn't mean it's easy, right? And so I'd have to think for a second about how we would do that. I would say that it's about understanding all of your stakeholders' motivations, not just the ones that are kind of out there in face value. I think that's the important piece. The other thing I'll just throw out, I mean, right now, as a consulting project that I'm working on, I was helping somebody do a B2B selection.

[38:27] And they got dozens of proposals for something. And I was helping them go through stuff. And the ones that stood out, the ones that were salient, that maybe they had a different type of design, they had a different name that stood out. Well, all of a sudden, out of these 50 or 60 different proposals that we got, a lot of them blended in together. Well, these ones stood out. This one's had that funny illustration of their team members. And this one had this interesting page shape that they had.

[39:01] All these different pieces, they did the job of getting somebody into that final consideration set when everything else was just kind of that background noise. Hmm.

[39:13] Okay, so push, push to other people who are kind of looking at you funny for trying to do something different. Like, hey, well, different works, they'll actually look at it now. Yeah, and go and go, you know, back yourself up, arm yourself with statistics and studies and stats and all these different things. Go dig for the books, a ton of them in there. And that will all help you in that kind of internal sales process. Okay, makes sense. And then another piece to your framework was, you know, speaking in a language that meets the audience where they are. So that's kind of another thing that's that could be difficult in a B2B setting as well, like, especially, you're not interacting with customers on a daily basis. So, you know, do you have any tips to make the language more like closer to the way people talk in that scenario? So I'll give you an example. Like I interned, I did a marketing internship at a company, a tiny company that sold construction software. It was an app for reselling used parts.

[40:27] So I knew absolutely nothing about construction before getting into that job. And now I know like 5% about construction after that job. And so just wrapping my head around, okay, how do I write a blog post now that is going to resonate with somebody who's in the construction industry? And then they have their own little like ticks and nuances of the language. Like, you know, construction people, they like things that are direct and short and to the point and practical as opposed to like, you know, some long, windy blog post that winds in some anecdotes or whatever. So it's even different from the marketing language that I'm kind of used to as a consumer. So how do you deal with that situation? Basically, how do you be empathetic? Well, it sounds like you were doing a little bit of already, right? So the, the biggest thing, and this is like the most no duh recommendation, but so many people just don't do it because it's a little scary.

[41:31] Go talk to your users, talk to your audience, talk to your target customers.

[41:37] They will, they will be the test market for you. You don't have to go out and run a huge dying campaign. You don't have to go spend a bajillion dollars to get an agency to come in and do focus groups. You just have to sometimes call somebody up and be like hey does this sound right to you or email somebody real quick hey does this resonate with you or what i've done in the past i've stood on the concourse at grand central terminal here and flagged people down to ask them about things these type of these type of acts are kind of awkward right like the first time you do them you're really uncomfortable but fifth time you do them the tenth time you do them yeah it's great like you're a pro you got it it's natural people don't like to like to test their stuff because they're fearful that the answers they're going to hear are going to go against the stuff that they've done.

[42:23] But I would argue that's the best possible thing you can hear is that somebody says, what the hell are you talking about? You know, what are you trying to get to here? Because if they do that, that saves you the time, the money, the work that would go into putting that message out into the universe when it wouldn't connect to anybody. Hmm. Okay. So just get over your fear of public speaking and of calling up your customer. And you know what? Here's the thing. You don't have to do that many. That's the real big secret is that, yeah, you don't want to rely just on one person always. But, you know, you can gain a lot of insight just by having a few conversations.

[43:04] Okay. That makes sense. And are there any potential pitfalls or challenges that people might encounter as they try to apply simple, clear messaging to their organization or their marketing copy? Oh, it will be painful at every step of the way.

[43:26] That I cannot promise you it will be something that will be easy. Getting simple seems like it should be a thing that is simple but it's not the case we are built to complicate that is our our biological programming that is our societal programming is that complication is the default move for anytime we communicate anytime we build something.

[43:54] And so pushing back the other way is going to face resistance at every single step. That's why being intentional about it by saying, okay, here's what I need to be beneficial. I need to be focused, salient, empathetic, by activating on those tools will help you overcome that resistance. Okay. That makes sense. Well, Ben, thank you so much. I have really enjoyed this conversation. I just want to now shine a spotlight on you and anything that you'd like to promote or anywhere you'd like people to get in touch with you. Likewise. Thank you, Kara. I really appreciated you having me on. I had a blast as well. If you're interested, feel free to go check me out, bengutman.com. There's two Ts and two Ns, and you can grab a copy of the book. There's a free chapter there. You can sign up for my email list or just connect to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from you if this is something that has resonated. All right. All right. Sounds great. Thank you so much, Ben. Thanks for having me.