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- [00:00]
Kate DeLeo
The biggest misconception is that we think brand is about loyalty. And actually, brand is not just about loyalty. Claudia, Brand is your path of least resistance to revenue. It is the singular promise you put into the world that tells people, this is what we do, this is how we solve your problem, and this is how we're different. And that is the stuff that your buyers need to know to remotely want to take the next step and buy.
- [00:28]
Claudia Tirico
The B2B Marketing Exchange brings together B2B marketing and sales practitioners from across the country to get the latest tools and tips they need to succeed.
- [00:37]
Kate DeLeo
Now we're bringing the insights from the stage to your ears.
- [00:40]
Claudia Tirico
I'm Claudia Tirico.
- [00:41]
Kate DeLeo
And I'm Kelly Lindenow.
- [00:43]
Claudia Tirico
And this is the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome Back to the B2BMX podcast. My name is Claudia Tirico. I am actually the content director for, for the entire B2B Marketing Exchange event series. And we are well along with our event planning for B2BMX west in Scottsdale, Arizona, coming up in literally just a few weeks. I can't believe it. We're all going to be in sunny Scottsdale very, very soon. And it's very exciting for me because I'm in freezing cold New Jersey right now. So it's going to be a nice change of environment. But we have a very special episode for you today just to get you guys even more excited for B2B MX West. We have one of our fabulous speakers on the line today. Kate deleo, one of my favorite people ever. We just met right before B2B MX west last year, 2023, because she spoke then and so she's essentially a B2BMX veteran and we love to have her back. So, Kate, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:56]
Kate DeLeo
Well, thanks for having me here. And I think it was before B2B at MX 2024, actually, because I can't believe we're already in 2025.
- [02:02]
Claudia Tirico
Oh, my God. Yeah.
- [02:03]
Kate DeLeo
Yeah, we don't know what day it is.
- [02:05]
Claudia Tirico
Yeah, I don't know what day it is. But yes, 2024, right before that event and you presented and I'm like, we gotta have Kate back. So we got her back, guys.
- [02:15]
Kate DeLeo
So excited.
- [02:15]
Claudia Tirico
We'll get into that shortly. But first, for those who don't know, Kate, Kate, instead of me reading off your bio or telling the audience how much I love you, tell us a little bit about your, your work and kind of how it all led you to this moment in time right now.
- [02:32]
Kate DeLeo
Sure. Well, so I am a brand strategist so in the world of marketing, really, my sweet spot is specifically in brand positioning and messaging. In other words, what I do is I help marketing leaders, CEOs and sales leaders understand how to reverse engineer the messaging for their companies that's ultimately going to drive revenue. Now, I've been known for the last decade of my career to really teach a proprietary approach to brand messaging, which is called the brand trifecta. And that's actually what I'm going to be teaching as a part of my workshop coming up at B2BMX here this year. And I love it because what's so exciting is it's really teaching a formulaic approach of how you can really unpack what are the three core components of a message that ultimately drives somebody into a conversion moment. But if we backstep, you asked me, how did I get here? I'll tell you, Claudia. Like a lot of us that are my age, as an older millennial, at around 40 years old, my career really began in sales. And it was really at the time that the market crashed that I started off in an early sales career selling to technology companies and professionals that ended up on a winding road into marketing and stumbling upon the power of creating a brand pitch that would ultimately enable me to excel in that sales career. And once excelling in that sales career, I got recruited out to go build brand pitches for other organizations. So fast forward, I started side hustling building brands on the side after working in the agency world and in corporate America, and have spent now more than 10 years doing this on my own as an entrepreneur. And I've worked with about 350 companies globally to take them through my process in that short term project approach.
- [04:12]
Claudia Tirico
Very, very cool. So obviously, guys, we are in the presence of a brand expert. So we definitely have some questions around that for Kate today. Um, so your workshop this year, it's expected to, you know, kind of challenge the way we think about brand messaging. Right? So give us a little more. I know you gave us a little tidbit, but give us a little more about the central premise of the workshop.
- [04:38]
Kate DeLeo
Yeah, the premise of the workshop, it's interesting. It's focusing around the difference in the juxtaposition between what we've really known messaging and brand to be about for the last decade, which is storytelling. And I'm really kind of throwing that on its head here for a lot of us. And I'm saying, okay, hang on. Well, I love a great story and I'm a fan of storytelling. Storytelling does not belong in the first 30 seconds of your brand pitch. Ooh. And so what I'm going to be teaching you is what does come in the beginning of your brand pitch. How do you create an order of operations in your brand messaging architecture? And how do you actually write it, not just talk about this? So this is not just theory of saying, okay, there's a tagline and a value proposition statement, but pen to paper, if we back up, what we're going to be doing in that 90 minutes is actually learning how do you create sentence structure and why do you write the way you write? So that you are creating the oh my gosh, you get me moment with your audience, what they really need in order to take the next step and buy.
- [05:39]
Claudia Tirico
Claudia, I love that. That whole you get me statement itself is something that I think all buyers are looking for with every interaction of a brand. They want that authenticity. They want to be seen, they want to be heard, and they don't want to kind of just be thrown in, in a bucket based off of their, let's say, company or title or, or whatever it may be. And even in your description. Right. In the description of the session, like if you were to go onto our, our B2BMX website and check out the agenda, if you haven't done so yet, please do. It's, it's awesome and it's getting bigger and bigger as, as time goes on, I promise. But the description states that stories don't compel people to buy, conversations do. Right. So what do you mean by that? And why do you think conversations are more powerful than stories when it comes to brand messaging?
- [06:29]
Kate DeLeo
Yeah. So if you think about it, at the core, while I understand that story is about creating a narrative that allows people to maybe enter in. When you really think about what a story often is, though, there's a level of passivity, meaning you have one person usually talking or presenting the information, often the brand, and then you have one person listening, AKA the buyer.
- [06:52]
Claudia Tirico
Yeah, it's a one way street.
- [06:54]
Kate DeLeo
It's a one way street. Right. And how compelling is that really for our audiences? And you know, I love this idea of storytelling, but has anybody really taught us how to write that story in such a way that audiences are engaging with it? In fact, if you've gone to a story based website and it's so funny, we've done our darn best as marketers and leaders and it's just paragraph upon paragraph upon paragraph of content, right?
- [07:17]
Claudia Tirico
Yep.
- [07:18]
Kate DeLeo
And so my whole thesis is that you can actually write in such a way that you can create A brand conversation. And how you do that is through this brand trifecta method that I teach, which is a layer of very specific types of sentences that start with short, crisp sentences and get a little bit longer. And they're composed of certain things which we can talk about. And every single layer allows room and space for your audience to go, well, hang on, what do you mean by that? Really? Tell me more. Ooh, how is that different or similar to this? How does it work? What does it look like? And so what it's really doing is creating opportunity for your buyer to self select into this conversation or narrative with your company and go down the rabbit trail.
- [08:07]
Claudia Tirico
I love it. So I definitely wanna hear more about that. But let's backtrack a little bit. What are some of the biggest misconceptions that brands still have about messaging today?
- [08:18]
Kate DeLeo
Oh my gosh. How much time do we have? You know, I think one of the biggest top two. Well, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about brand and messaging in general is that there's a few things I think, number one, if you're a larger company, you say, oh, well, marketing is the only group that owns that. Ooh, really? That's interesting.
- [08:37]
Claudia Tirico
That's a mess.
- [08:37]
Kate DeLeo
That's a mess. You know, I tell you what, I work for companies of all sizes and I won't take a brand project unless the CEO, heads of sales and heads of marketing are in the same room with me. Why is that? Yeah, that includes enterprise level companies. And why is that? The reason I won't do it unless the whole C suites in the room is because they all have ownership stake over revenue generation. And at the end of the day, the biggest misconception is that we think brand is about loyalty. And actually, brand is not just about loyalty. Claudia, Brand is your path of least resistance to revenue. It is the singular promise you put into the world that tells people, this is what we do, this is how we solve your problem, and this is how we're different. And that is the stuff that your buyers need to know to remotely want to take the next step and buy.
- [09:22]
Claudia Tirico
Mic drop moment. We could end this podcast right now. Right, we're done.
- [09:25]
Kate DeLeo
Done. There you go.
- [09:27]
Claudia Tirico
Done. There you go. But definitely a good clip. So share an example with me of a brand that successfully embraced like a more authentic, conversation driven approach. And what was their kind of like key messaging shift?
- [09:42]
Kate DeLeo
Sure. So I recently worked with a company called Go Nimbly. They are a rev ops consultancy. Jenny Gartua is the CEO. She runs the company and they recently doubled revenue this last year. It was really interesting I started working with her, but you know, four months into the year and originally their messaging was just simply RevOps consulting for mid level and enterprise companies. That's literally what it said when you went to the homepage and you're like, okay, well that's very clear. Like you know what you, what you do, I guess. But is that really saying a whole lot? And instead what we did, and I can kind of read this out to you, is now a tagline that says RevOps Agility GTM Velocity. What do you mean by that? And so follows up with the following. A fragmented funnel and a growing backlog are merely symptoms of the real problem. Your RevOps is a rigid and siloed support function that is slowing down your GTM. It's time to build RevOps flexibility. Click the go. Nimble difference. And then we have the three differentiators there. We're more than consultants, we're operators and technologists who help you solve what's different getting in the way of growth. 1, 2, 3. And they're very direct with their tone of voice here. You know, we've seen and solved problems just like yours at dozens of industry leading SaaS companies. Let's cut the fluff. You should only hire a RevOps consultancy if. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So what we did with this brand and this tone of voice is really leaned into the authenticity and allowed the right type of buyers that they were trying to attract to go, yeah, that feels like me. Oh my God, you called out. The pain that I totally am experiencing was this is siloed rigid experience. And they're saying we can solve that for you.
- [11:22]
Claudia Tirico
Yeah. And that messaging is delivered in a way in so few words, Right?
- [11:26]
Kate DeLeo
Very few words.
- [11:27]
Claudia Tirico
But it comes across, it's not paragraphs and paragraphs. So I feel like a lot of brands maybe are kind of used to that more complex narrative and those long winded stories. So obviously like I'm assuming, but I'll ask you, do you believe that these can actually hurt a brand's chances of winning or winning business?
- [11:47]
Kate DeLeo
Yeah, 100% what we find, especially in B2B. And I'll say this with extreme clarity, when you're selling B2B, the more complex your narrative or brand is, the harder it will be for you to get that deal across the finish line. What your buyers truly need is an order of operations in your content that crisply tells them in the first 15 to 30 seconds what you do, how you solve their deepest Heart pain or problem and how you are different and better than the rest. One, two, three. Those are the three big things. Now, by the way, I call that the brain trifecta. But that's like the tip top of the iceberg. And where most businesses go rogue and totally like cloud the waters is they get into all the details and we offer this and we offer this, and our technology does this and this and this and this and this. And you start getting into. Does it sound familiar? All the features and benefits of the thing and all. Oh, my gosh. And, oh, we all these complex services and all of a sudden it's just this, like this throw up. You just kind of like inundated them with all this information. And what you've done is created immediate overwhelm.
- [12:51]
Claudia Tirico
Yeah.
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Kate DeLeo
And your person's thinking about it. They can't decipher what you're actually telling them and what you want them to do.
- [12:57]
Claudia Tirico
Very good advice. So what else can brands do to balance that simplicity with intrigue? And what's the trick to kind of keeping it both clear and compact?
- [13:08]
Kate DeLeo
Great. So, and this is something I unpack a little bit in the workshop that I'm going to be hosting. Right. So if you back into that. And I gave that simple example with Go Nimble now, by the way, what's interesting is I read off almost their entire homepage. So if you listen to me, I was talking for 15 to 20 seconds. It's not that much copy. Okay. So when we think about how much we're talking here, it's really not a ton. There's not a single paragraph. Right. So, okay, so keep that in mind. All right. But if we were to back into how did that content sound? Why was it so edgy? Where did that come from? There's two big things that you need to do on the front end that are really important before you put pen to paper to write the message. And I do this with every client. And number one, you need to solidify your brand's tone of voice and personality. In other words, you really have to put a stake in the ground, Claudia, to decide who are we as a company and a brand, and how do we show up authentically today in this world? Because brand is not aspirational. You don't brand for who you think you need to be. You're not a chameleon. We're like, oh, well, I think our clients are going to like us if we sound like this. You can smell a fake a mile away, can't you?
- [14:09]
Claudia Tirico
Yes.
- [14:09]
Kate DeLeo
You ever walk down the streets of New York City. And you can spot a fake Gucci. Okay. Can you spot a fake inauthentic brand? 100%. Okay. And yet we do this all the time out of fear that if we don't show up how we think we're supposed to sound or be, that we're going to lose business. So, number one, though, you have to own your tone of voice. If your tone of voice is edgy, if it's. If it's really bright, if it's very maverick style, own it. If it's softer, if it's quieter, if it's more empathetic, own that. If you are more technologically focused, maybe you are a bit more intellectual, own it. The second piece of work you have to then do, though, is understand your audiences and who they are and how they show up. And I love to always say, you know, in the world of go to market, we always talk about icp. Who's your icp? Ideal client profile. I do a customer profile. Okay, can I just tell you who are the humans behind the category? When's the last time you actually thought about the psychographics of those people? Do you know how they think? Do you know how they make decisions? Well, Kate, we serve, you know, companies that are 5 to $50 million B2B tech or SaaS. Great. Who inside the company? Well, we serve the CMOs. Great. Is that CMO driven by ego to win? Are they driven to cover their butts and protect their jobs? Are they caring about supporting their team? What's in their mind when making a buying decision? And it's that stuff that really helps you unlock the secret sauce. So you can write a message that's compelling, it's authentic to who you are, and it creates this beautiful like, attracts, like moment that, yes, the end prospect goes, oh my God, you get me. But then you, as the business also don't feel like a slimy salesperson. And you're going, yeah, this is exactly how we would say it on a sales call. This is exactly how we talk about ourselves. Fast. The magic spot with brand. Right.
- [15:58]
Claudia Tirico
And how do you kind of learn about those specific buyers? I would say conversations. Right, exactly.
- [16:06]
Kate DeLeo
You do have to know your buyers, you know, and I get this question a lot. Well, how much data analysis and how much customer research do we need to do? Okay, so depending on the stage and size company you are, and I would also say depending on your personality and how much data you even like to consume, it's going to dictate how much formal research you do. But I would tell you, if you have been selling for a while, in other words, you've made money, chances are you have customers. If you have customers, when's the last time you called them or surveyed them or asked them, why did you choose me over the competition? What did you like or not like about working with me? When is the last time we actually talked to our current customers? How about your prospects? Why did you not choose me? What brought you to the website? There's something to be said about picking up the phone and talking to people or sending out simple surveys to get the feedback you need versus paying an arm and a leg for more formal research. Now, don't get me wrong, formal research is amazing and sometimes very needed. But you've gotta be willing to have the conversation with your clients as a first line of defense. Once you do that, and once you deeply know your customers, you're gonna spot the pattern to be able to then start to map out what does ideal look like for future buyers. Yes.
- [17:11]
Claudia Tirico
Awesome. All right, so let's get a little more into your session specifically. Obviously, these workshops are designed to be very hands on, right? And listen, after feedback from last year's west event, what I could say is like the biggest standout aha moment from all of the surveys and feedback from B2BMX in Scottsdale in 2024. Just getting my years correct here because again, it's crazy. The biggest feedback from the surveys is that we want more hands on stuff. We want more workshops. More workshops. More workshops. More workshops. So guess what, guys, I'm bringing you more workshops. There are two days of workshops you could choose up. You could attend two workshops for the price of one. All access pass at B2BMX. So with that said, the session, like I said, is designed to be hands on. So without, obviously we don't want to spill too much tea because we want people to obviously attend the workshop. What can participants accept, expect to walk away with after attending your specific session?
- [18:16]
Kate DeLeo
Oh, it's a great question. Okay, so let's get practical here. Cause I'm a total pragmatist. I love breaking this down. And my heart is to really teach. So I always say, you know, I'm more of a teacher than a speaker because what I love to do is like do the whole pen to paper. That's, that's the magic moment when you see the light bulbs and the people in the room going, oh my God, I wrote a tagline. Okay, so what we're doing, here's what we do. Here's the Flow of this workshop, my friends. Okay, first thing we do is I got to teach you a little bit. I teach a little bit of theory. 15, 30 minutes, we got to talk about it, make sure we're getting there. Then what we do is we actually are going to do heads down work. We go down for 5, 10 minutes at a time. We're going to try it. You're going to try writing a value proposition statement for your company and a tagline and differentiator statements. You're going to pop back up for Q and A. You're going to partner up with people next to you. Yes. Aha. Why? Because somebody sitting next to you probably had a great idea that you didn't think about. And this is where the learning happens.
- [19:10]
Claudia Tirico
I love that.
- [19:11]
Kate DeLeo
Uh huh. And then we get more Q and A and all of a sudden the end of 90 minutes rolls around. You're gonna have so many questions that I'll be standing in the hallway with you answering questions for another 90 minutes. Very common. But here's the cool part. You're gonna have a custom workbook that I built for you. Okay? So the great news is that no matter what our goal is, you're coming out of the workshop with a draft of your brand trifecta for this, your company or your organization. And you're gonna be able to walk away and keep practicing this. Cause practice is what's gonna get this thing nailed for you. This is muscle. You're flexing to write brand. You're a sharp person, you're a sharp marketer and business professional. But I'm guessing nobody taught you how to write a tagline. So let me teach you that thing. And then you get to walk away and practice that new skill. After Learning this at B2BMX, I love it.
- [20:00]
Claudia Tirico
So what would you say? And listen, I mean, obviously this workshop is pretty much for all marketers, but is there like a specific role or specific type of marketer that will definitely best reap the benefits of the workshop?
- [20:14]
Kate DeLeo
Yeah, I really think that if you're mid to senior level or you're directly touching messaging and positioning for the brand, you're probably gonna get the most value out of this. Because what we're really talking about here is the messaging that often impacts broader business strategy. There's things that we're gonna talk about too, of aligning sales and marketing and oh my gosh, who's in the decision making process with this. And so what I wanna make sure of is that you're in a position of strength and opportunity to Be able to make some of those decisions that we're gonna talk about and that you can be in a place of having infl over the conversations that you're going to need to have as you walk out of the room.
- [20:50]
Claudia Tirico
Awesome. I'm going to bring up this very famous kind of topic as of late. AI right, ChatGPT. Right. So what would you tell somebody that's like, I don't need this. I'm just going to ask ChatGPT to come up with my brand messaging.
- [21:08]
Kate DeLeo
You know, I think there's two ways to address this. But you have to remember that ChatGPT is like any kid and I'm a mom, that it has to be trained. Yes. It's like a dog, it's like an anim, it's like a kid. I got a 10 year old daughter and boy it took her a while to learn how to ride a bike. Here's what I mean by that. Is that any great tool or technology that we have at our disposal really still requires human interaction and human touch and human input to get the maximum output. When it comes to brand and writing in general and messaging in general, what we cannot take for granted is that it's rooted in language. And as a linguistic anthropologist, which is my background actually I was a Pre PhD student in Linguistic anthropology.
- [21:48]
Claudia Tirico
Oh, excuse me.
- [21:49]
Kate DeLeo
And then the market market crashed and I had to go get a day job and here we are. Right. But I'll tell you, understanding language is recognizing that in any language, especially the western languages and Latin based languages, there's really part art and science to how we craft language, how we write, especially in the 20th century business acumen. And I will tell you that's why it's really about the human interaction and human touch point. That's why tone of voice matters. That's why there's differences between the way people talk and write in the, in the south versus east coast versus Midwest. And sometimes we have to remember that you simply can't teach a tool all of those nuances. So I think we have to be brave enough to just try it ourselves and remember that we have what it takes to actually become a writer. It's just simply a learned skill. It's like going to the gym and you know, the, the first five times you pick up the weights it might be kind of hard, but by the 10th time and the 11th, oh, that I can do this. Hang on a second. So it's learning the pattern, it's learning the rhythm and remembering that this is a skill you can have in Your toolkit as a marketer that will take you through for the rest of your life. Whether you're writing, brand or anything else, the skills you're going to gain in this workshop are things that will carry you through for the rest of your career.
- [23:03]
Claudia Tirico
I love it. Very, very cool. And I'm so excited. All right, coming down to the wire here. It's a new year. As if we haven't mentioned it already. It's a brand new year. 2025. Let's talk about you a little bit. Do you have any personal or professional resolutions for 2025 that you'd be willing to share with our audience today?
- [23:23]
Kate DeLeo
Ooh, that's such a good question. Do you know I don't have any resolutions. I don't usually believe in resolutions because when I look back on years prior, I'm grateful for even the hard things and I'm grateful for a lot of the bumps in the road. I just firmly believe that you have to journey through a lot of the slog to get to the other side. And that includes your mistakes in a lot of the things that you maybe shouldn't have done. Sometimes you just have to make bad choices to learn how to make better ones. What I will say, though, is that I really set the intention moving forward with usually like a key word or key theme for the year. And my word for 2025 is thrive.
- [23:59]
Claudia Tirico
I love that for you.
- [24:00]
Kate DeLeo
That's the focus in all areas of my life as a mom of a 10 year old. Health and wellness in family, relationships and friendships, sure, certainly in business as well. But when I think about thriving, I think about somebody who is truly living life with fun and anticipation of every day and enjoyment and is sharing that joy and gratitude with others around them.
- [24:23]
Claudia Tirico
I love it. And people, this is why me and Kate have gotten along so well, because we're, we're just. We vibe. We vibe on the same level. All right, Kate, final question for you. You obviously have attended and spoke at B2BMX in the past. So tell me what, what you enjoy most about the event. Besides working with me, of course.
- [24:45]
Kate DeLeo
Besides you and your. By the way, if you haven't seen Claudia in person, her outfits are amazing.
- [24:51]
Claudia Tirico
Thank you. I know I gotta start shopping and planning my outfits for Scottsdale this year.
- [24:57]
Kate DeLeo
So there's two things that I love. I mean, the caliber of the speakers there is amazing. So for me, as a speaker, and I'm on the circuit a lot, I speak at a lot of events, I still really love the caliber of speakers that come to this particular event, I mean we could to hear Neil Patel, we get to hear Morgan J. Ingram, we get to hear people, you guys, that we don't, I don't even get to see in here at other events. So I don't think you understand. I'm over here fangirling about who's going to be on the stage for this event, kind of going, can I go sit in the front row and just fan girl. So that's exciting for me because I'm like everybody else wanting the autograph and wanting to just listen. But then I think the other thing is what really impressed me me was the caliber of networking. So this blew my mind is the level of events before, during and after hours that allowed for probably some of the best business networking I've ever had. I'm not just talking like happy hours, but the kind of conversations and the people I met, very like minded, down to earth, good humans, but also people that were very intentional about wanting to come to the table to unpack where they're at in their businesses. How do we support and advocate for each other, how do we create partnerships and how do we unlock opportunity? And for me that was very unexpected and I really value that. That was worth the price of admission right there.
- [26:09]
Claudia Tirico
I appreciate that so much because that's really all we strive for here on the B2BMX side is like delivering really great and solid thought leadership that you could take back to your office or home office immediately and start implementing and testing. But also the relationships that you make within the walls of the absolutely stunning Venetian resort. So thank you.
- [26:32]
Kate DeLeo
Absolutely. I'm so excited to see you. It's going to be a ton of fun.
- [26:36]
Claudia Tirico
It is, it is. I'm so excited. So if this conversation doesn't spark your fingers to go straight to the B2B MX website and register, I really don't know what else will. But please check out the website, check out the agenda. I am constantly adding more and more sessions as the days go by. And our podcast listeners get, you know, a little bit of a discount too. So please take advantage of that. And I really hope we both, Kate and I, see you in Scottsdale in just a few weeks. It's crazy to say, but it's only a few weeks away. But there's always time, still time. Listen, I don't care if you registered the day before, but we'd love to see you. So check out the show notes, there'll be more information about Kate. We'll throw in your LinkedIn Kate, so you could maybe connect with some people prior to flying out to Scottsdale. And that's a wrap on us. Kate, thank you so much. What a great conversation. It was so lovely to see you virtually and speak with you as always. All right, now, your homework is to start putting, if you haven't already started putting all that workshop, amazing workshop content together for our audience. And, yeah, we will see you in Scottsdale. Thank you all so much for tuning in. Catch us on LinkedIn and X Share any feedback you may have. Come say hi to Kate on her LinkedIn, whatever you want to do. And don't forget to check out those show notes. We have that discount code available there. And, yeah, that's a wrap. Thank you for listening and we'll take care and see you next week.