B2B Storytelling: Michael Brenner on Empathy-Driven Content

Hello and welcome to the Beyond B2B Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Lee Odin, CEO of Top Rank Marketing. And today our guest is an absolute pioneer and OG in the B2B marketing and content marketing industry. We've known each other for something like 15 years um and his deep marketing leadership experience includes brand, uh platform, publisher, and agency roles.

So he's done it all. He co-founded business to community founded marketing insider group and he's author of two books, Mean People Suck and the Content Formula. And he's long been an advocate of connecting the dots between marketing, ROI and authentic customer engagement. With over 20 years of marketing leadership roles, he's been at companies like Nielsen, uh SAP, News Cred.

Today he is VP Thought Leadership and Customer Advocacy at Workday. And of course, I'm talking about the legend and the nicest smart guy in B2B, Michael Brenner. Welcome to the show, Michael. Thanks so much, Lee.

I don't know if I deserve most of that introduction, but I do appreciate it. Well, it's all true. It's all true. And I'm so glad to connect with you.

It's been a little while and I know you're doing great work at Workday, of course. And I think there's a lot to unpack, a lot of things that our community will benefit from, from getting to hear from you. So let's get right into it. Let's hear about, one of the things I like to dig into right away is like your origin story as it relates to marketing.

Look back, how did you first get into marketing in the first place? Yeah, it's interesting. My first job was actually in sales, which is, know, I was an English Lit major in college and was basically just getting out, trying to find whatever job I could and, you know, landed at the Nielsen company in a sales role, uh doing something I never thought I would do. And what's interesting, you know, we'll probably bring this full circle, but I did what I thought I was supposed to do in sales and that was sell stuff.

And what I found was that it didn't work. Like I was struggling for the first couple of months and And then finally, like I'll never forget, I was sitting at a customer and I put a contract in front of them and I just decided to just be quiet. And what I saw was I saw this gentleman, really smart guy, talk himself into signing it. And the conversation we'd had before that was just like, are your problems?

are your challenges? And so I kind of learned that listening is actually a better way of selling than talking. And, you know, I became really successful as a salesperson at Nielsen. think I was number two, you know, in the company when I left um the sales organization.

But I came into marketing because I was frustrated. I was frustrated with the amount and the type of marketing support. Again, it was like we were getting brochures and we were getting product details and spec sheets. And when I would hand that over to a customer, that's not what they wanted.

What they wanted was, you know, education and insight and, you know, help, really. And so, you know, sort of the foundations of what content marketing became. And so I moved into marketing to try to really uh enable salespeople with the concepts of helping customers, of telling better stories, of uh really focusing on outcomes. And so that really began the start of a long career in marketing.

That's a great story. And I think there's a lot to be said for having had sales experience virtually in any career that you pursue in the future. And especially the empathy that you can have as a marketer who's generating demand and getting that pipeline full and all those sorts of things. That's awesome.

So tell us a little bit about your role now as VP of Thought Leadership and Customer Advocacy at Workday. What are you doing? it's funny, my role at SAP before I left was actually leading an initiative on the future of work, which was really a, my gosh, we've got this new cloud company Workday taking, eating our lunch in the HR space. so, going back to 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, Workday was a leader in the conversations on the future of work and how HR professionals can really drive strategy and change and how they can enable and engage their employees and drive better outcomes.

so in the interim period, I think Workday lost its way. just like a lot of companies that we've all worked with, they just forgot the value of content marketing or lost that vision, that sense for the value of content marketing. So yeah, I sold Marketing Insider Group in December of 2024. had stayed on to help the...

the owner that I sold to for about five or six months. And like the day I was done, I got a call from an old colleague of mine from SAP saying, you know, we've got a job here at Workday for Thought Leadership. So when I came in, was like, it was really, I think a team trying to support the business, doing what they were asked to do. um you know, and it was like, I always say that propaganda is insidious.

It seeps its way into content because everyone in the organization wants to sell. Everyone wants to say, hey, we're awesome and our products are great because we believe that stuff. uh But as thought leaders, we have to really protect that church and state separation between thought leadership needs to be pure. It needs to be intentionally helpful, intentionally outside in an audience focus, and it needs to protect and put up a wall of garden against those insidious desires to want to sell.

So that was really the goal. The challenge when I started was really getting the team to think in a couple of ways. One, to think like a business. um We can't do one blog post a month per person and be successful.

The world we live in is there's way too much noise and way too much volume. got to create stuff uh consistently. We have to create stuff that people actually want to read, uh which sounds obvious, but it's important to set that as a guardrail. um And we need to really focus on just the value of storytelling.

And so those are some of the key tenants that I brought in. And it's been a wild, great ride building this amazing team. I think we've moved from stuff we weren't really proud of to stuff I'm proud of. Now we're trying to get to the next level of stuff that's really going to be sort of market moving.

And then a few months in, I picked up customer advocacy. For the first time in my career, I've always worked with customer teams. picked up customer advocacy and now bringing those same elements into the customer advocacy organization, which is awesome because our best stories are coming from the people that use our products, but we don't have to talk about why they use our products. We just tell the stories of the people that are using it.

So it's been fun. It's been a lot of fun. What a great combination really in terms of that idea of authentic authenticity, know, um that sort of impartial thought leadership, you know, some of the tenants of that leadership and being, know, as a, was it Cindy, Cindy Anderson, I don't know if you know the book um ROI thought leadership, but Cindy Anderson and Anthony Marshall, but she talked about, know, it's got to help business leaders make better decision. You're not trying to sell to them.

You're just trying to inform them and educate them. and how that reconciles with customer advocacy and the storytelling that can come out of both of those centers is a powerful combination. Obviously, you know that, but uh that's awesome that Workday has saw to give you both of those responsibilities. I'm sure more in the future too.

uh So when it comes to thought leadership, it's interesting as we've done some research on thought leadership and obviously, both of us have played roles and emerge whether we've identified or not. uh putting forth thought leadership types of ideas into market, right? In our various roles that we've had. And then there's the organizational management of it.

And anyway, there's just a lot of different interpretations of what thought leadership means. um And I'm wondering how you would, in your role now, how would you define thought leadership? Yeah, it's funny. It's a funny story ah in my answer.

I'll try to make it brief. But a couple of things that you've heard me say probably on keynote stages is marketing has a marketing problem. And what I mean by that is if you ask your mom or ask most people what marketing is, they think it's ads. And I'm not going to say anything negative against brand people and advertising because it certainly has its place.

But no one woke up this morning and said, I really need an ad from Workday. My life is going to change. because of an ad from Nike or Coca-Cola or whoever. And so what people do need is they need help, right?

We are business professionals with knowledge and experience and we can help them for the people that we're trying to reach with knowledge and experience. um And so, you know, I believe marketing's goal and role is to help people. Marketing that helps people is more effective than marketing that tries to sell. That's just, you know, too many studies.

Mm-hmm. This one quick study that I love to talk about is the Advertising Research Foundation found that after 40 exposures to a brand ad, those people are less likely to buy from that brand. ah And so, you know, there's a lot to unpack there. But the point is that people are always looking for stories, are always looking for help.

Thought leadership is something that I actually wrote an article in Forbes about 15 years ago and said that thought leadership is business jargon. And what I meant was it just like marketing. It has a marketing problem. so, true thought leadership, a lot of people will argue it's like, it's a unique idea.

It's a single point of view that no one has ever said before. And I'm like, I don't know that there's any real new ideas out there. Like we're not Einstein. We're not gonna ever be ah someone coming up with a brand new idea the world has never seen.

To me, thought leadership, and I wrote this in an article, at SAP that my boss at the time disagreed with in a comment on Forbes. Needless to say, it was not long after that I was no longer at SAP. But the point was, what I was trying to say was that it's about showing up consistently for your audience as often as you can. We know Joe Pulizzi used to say, it's like you're scheduling an appointment with your audience when you have like a newsletter or something like that.

And so. That's what I always believed thought leadership was. It's not necessarily about that single unique point of view that no one's ever said. That's too big of a thing to try to, it's an unrealistic goal.

But a really simple idea is just let's show up every day and try to be helpful to our audience as often as we can, as best as we can um with the knowledge and the expertise and experience that we have. So that's it. It's just about being helpful and being helpful consistently. We were, I was presenting the results of our annual plan to our North American field marketing leader.

And we saw significant, know, some folks on your team have been really helpful, uh significant increases in our share of voice. And she's like, how is this, how did you do this in a world where LLMs are taking over? And I was like, it's not hard. It was just consistency.

We just, we decided to be, to create good stuff that answered real questions and we do it consistently. And that's it. It's just a simple formula. You know, Michael, you've pulled on a really interesting thread because you mentioned LLM visibility in a time like this and the notion of consistency.

And there's absolutely uh an element, well, very, very true, this idea of continuity of message. uh And that creates credibility. Because in an LLM world, it's trying to probabilistically determine what's the best answer for a thing, for a query, for a prompt, or whatever. And so one of the mechanisms with which to make those technologies, make those choices is continuity.

ah Not the exact same thing, but consistently helpful is a much better way to say it. And I appreciate you articulated it that way because that's exactly what's good for both the technology, but more importantly, it's good for the humans who are actually making the decisions and that can move things forward. You know, we, as I mentioned, we did, we've published a research report. did some research around thought leadership and published a report not too long ago, the state of B2B thought leadership 2026.

And in that survey of 797 senior B2B marketers, an overwhelming number, 97 % said that thought leadership is critical to success throughout their entire customer life cycle, you know, awareness, consideration, decision, but less than half are using it. let's start half, less than half are using thought leadership. to engage their existing customers. And I'm wondering what you think about that, that opportunity to use thought leadership type of content, messaging, whatever makes up that value prop um with your existing customers, not just trying to inform your total addressable market around a particular idea, but also using it for hopefully influencing retention and engagement types of objectives.

Yeah, I believe there's four real goals in marketing. And I always try to simplify it. Reach, engage, convert, and retain. And retention is like the long lost stepchild of marketing objectives, right?

Everybody loves to forget about it because we think we have to get net new. And that's the sexy stuff. But there's the Harvard study that 5 % invested in retention generates 90 % return. It's the easiest way to generate a return for marketing.

But everybody wants to chase the net new. So what I love about my role with being both thought leadership and customer advocacy is we use thought leadership to target our existing customers and we use customers to target our net new in thought leadership. And so it's really a full funnel approach. like I said, I sort of alluded to this, what we're trying to do is much more storytelling.

So we don't need to tell people. the story of why our customers bought our stuff. I we have to do some of that for sales, obviously. But what I wanna do is I wanna tell the story of, let's say, Lee, who is a customer of Workday, and what you do every day, and the things that keep you up at night, and how you solved a big problem, and have a conversation just like we're having today.

That's what's really interesting to people just like you, and those are the people we're trying to reach. And so we can accomplish two things there. We're celebrating you as a customer. And we're then generating that sort of advocacy that, without having to say, this is why I chose Workday.

And we're creating thought leadership that helps other people that are maybe considering becoming a customer. And so I really do see it as kind of a continuous feedback loop of positivity, all based on sort of customer-centric storytelling. And so, like I said, thought leadership for customers, customers that are thought leadership. The other thing that's really interesting, I tell our digital team this all the time, every page on a website that I've ever seen that's tested a piece of thought leadership has seen an increase in conversion.

But digital teams always think, brand teams, marketing teams always think that we need to put more promotion, more product. And so you have to have some product, we have to explain what we do, we have to have demos. But when we put a demo next to a piece of really interesting state of the industry type research. or something really interesting one of our customers may have said, conversions increase because we're being helpful.

so helpful helps convert at every stage. And so that's something that I'm continuing to advocate for and screaming into the wind sometimes, but we'll always fight for. well, keep fighting the fight. It's a good fight and it's one we're behind too um because it is a full circle opportunity to create value, right?

And that's what people are after, especially these days. um It's, know, things are more competitive and there's some, you know, uh choices are not as easy to make sometimes. And so being able to provide that utility, that helpfulness obviously opens the door um to moving. you know, in the mind journey, I guess, and helping people make that choice on their own, right?

Feels better when you make that on that choice on your own. Our research also found is I want to talk about influencers and and the intersection with influencers and and, you know, marketing but thought leadership to we found in our research, 74 % of marketers that frequently collaborate with influencers, the performance of their marketing was very effective. And That's compared to 29 % of all others. So those who don't frequently engage with influencers or creators, I guess is what a lot of folks are calling that type of engagement.

Now, only 29 % were very, very effective. Whereas if you do frequently collaborate at 74, and I'm just wondering, what do you think is holding brands, B2B brands especially, back from engaging with outside experts in this way? think it's the classic B2B conundrum. B2B brands want marketing, again, back to the marketing problem that marketing has, to talk about how awesome their products are.

And especially in technology, right? We've got technologists who are super smart, and everybody thinks they're a marketer, everybody watches the Super Bowl ads and thinks that they could have done a better job. And it comes down to, we should figure out the right way and the best way to say how awesome we are. And that's the best way to do marketing.

And so, you know, then actually thinking about handing that responsibility to someone outside of the organization is just, it's just too big of a leap. It's too big of a leap for folks. And, you know, and sometimes the smartest people are the ones that, you know, struggle to be able to see that. um That's why customer advocacy is such a great thing, right?

Cause having someone else say we're great is so much better than having us say we're great. Well, if you take that one step further, having someone completely objective and independent, now maybe you're paying to. collaborate with them, but to say things on your behalf, you know, is just one, you bring credibility, you're borrowing on the credibility, two, you're tapping into an audience that's already engaged with that creator. so, you know, and then there's six other, you know, good reasons to do it.

but it's back to that marketing problem. It's too big of a leap. And so that's why, like, I really do think that marketers, just need, we need to educate people on what marketing is. And I always use that Venn diagram you've seen me use where it's like, what we want to say and what people actually want.

There's very little overlap. And I try to use that as much as I can to say, let's create the stuff people want. Let's start there because it's not going to be, I'm awesome. It's not going to be my brand is awesome.

It's not going to be, here's why you should buy from me. It's going to be more interesting stuff. And a lot of times that interesting stuff is coming from other people. yeah, we just got, we got to educate our audiences in the, in the senior leadership positions inside B2B to, understand the value of taking that leap with people that have already built.

an audience that have credibility, that know how to create great content and have them do that on your behalf. Exactly. Well, you know, for folks who are interested in data around this, we've published four research reports specifically on B2B influencer marketing. Just Google B2B influencer marketing report.

You'll find these reports and we'll be publishing another one this year. And it's growing in popularity for sure. It's the number one thing we get asked about from companies is how can we effectively connect with the most trusted voices in our market? What's the right way to partner with them?

We've got to find the right people first, and then what's the right way to partner with them in a way that's authentic? And so yeah, it's a growing field, and yet there's a lot of folks who are, as you know, they're still stuck on, uh well, status quo sorts of things, things that are familiar. uh I wanted to mention that there's another aspect of uh content that we found, thought leadership content especially, that was a differentiator between top performers and all others. 78 % of the marketers that we surveyed say that interactive or experiential content increases engagement, but only 33 % are building it into their campaigns.

And I'm wondering, what do you think about this idea of publishing experiential elements in your thought leadership content? Whether it's embedded videos of your internal SMEs or external SMEs. you know, interactive tools, podcasts like this, even events, anything that, you know, creates an experience. Yeah, so for me, starting here um over a year ago, foundational element was really to start telling better stories.

And so that was step one. uh Step two for us was let's tell the stories in a way that people actually engage with them. And so it's really just about, again, if you focus on what people want, um what people want is TikTok. They want stuff that's short, visual, engaging, funny, entertaining, educational.

uh And so, you know, that's been a big push for us in sort of phase two uh is being more visual, uh you know, learning the, you know, uh how to tell stories in visual and audio platforms like this, uh using outside influencers, certainly being experiential and interactive with some of our research reports, for example. uh But, you know, it even extends to something, and, you know, this might make you chuckle a little bit, but even things like printed magazines, you know, That's an experience.

we're talking about, you know, what can we do at our big event coming up in uh September to bring like a printed, you know, sort of a printed piece of thought leadership content for all of our, you know, all of our audience where generally they were getting a backpack with, you know, partner materials and brochures shoved in it. So, you know, that's an experience just having, you know, a solid piece of something that people can read on the plane ride back home. So we're thinking about experiences in all the ways that people are consuming content and.

trying to map to what those things are and documentary style. um So yeah, we're trying all these things for sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You you mentioned TikTok, you know, we work with this project management software company and we had a target of, you know, I don't know, there's like a million, let's say one million, you know, seven figures of exposure, which is dramatically more than what's typically involved in a B2B influence campaign.

And it hit eight figures in visibility. It was crazy because B2B is absolutely functioning in a platform like TikTok. And I also love what you say about the tactile. like something you can hold on to.

I think that's a smart move. I think people are hungry for authenticity and they're absolutely hungry for storytelling. uh So yet again, more great reasons you're in the right role, I think. uh So Workday is no stranger to, obviously you thought leadership in original research and you had a post about uh beyond productivity, measuring the value of AI.

report that was, I thought, really insightful. And in one particular statistic was that nearly 40 % of time is being spent reviewing. 85 % of employees say AI is already helping them save time, but 40 % of that time is being sent fixing the stuff that AI broke. And I'm just wondering, can you talk about how business leaders that are listening or watching can kind of escape that trap, that productivity trap?

and how leadership really becomes that ultimate advantage when it comes to AI. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna take a step back if I can and answer this in as big of a way as I possibly can because I get really passionate about this. So I wrote Mean People Suck as a book. It had nothing to do with the agency that I was running or it wasn't to sell anything, it was a passion project.

And it was a reflection on the thing that I had seen um drive success in my career and for others. And it was really a focus on people. And so, where I was focused, like back to my sales example, when I was focused on the person I was trying to sell to and their actual problems, I was able to sell versus trying to actually sell. And thought leadership and content marketing has always been about the audience.

um So when I joined Workday, I was super excited. first, so this was a Davos research report that we did for Davos. And a year ago, um I brought in this concept of what I... always been calling the paradox of AI.

And I said it like seven or eight years ago where I was like, you know, the more people use technology, the more we're going to want to interact with humans, the more human the world can become. I'm really kind of an optimist about sort of the technology that we're all using in AI specifically. So a year ago at Davos, our research report was on this paradox of AI that the companies that are focusing on their people are actually more successful with AI than the companies that are focusing on the AI.

And so this year we wanted to take it a step further. It was a super optimistic point of view and maybe a little bit too much. um It differentiated us at Davos where there's a lot of big brands saying a lot of big things, um but it was maybe a little bit too idealistic. It felt, I think, too idealistic for some people.

So we wanted to dive into the pain and the real pain was this sort of productivity tax. that's that AI is driving technology, has always driven some productivity gains, but in the case of AI, it's also driving this kind of rework. It's really just back to the technological shifts that we've always seen. It's changing work.

It's not taking work away. And so what we found, and again, it's back to the productivity paradox. And this is something that we do with my team as well, is that I'm not pushing them to use AI. I'm pushing them to identify the problem they're trying to solve and how we can measure the outcome.

So this is what we found in our research is that the leaders that are effective at eliminating that productivity tax, the ones that are full on highly more productive are leaders that are focusing on identifying the problem and figuring out how to measure the outcome. uh They're also investing those savings back in people. it's retraining and skills and how to sort of um understand. One of the really interesting things was uh employees were saying that they just didn't understand the strategy that their companies had for AI.

But the leaders in the research that we did, really understood, the employees at those companies really understood the strategy and the impact of AI at their company. So it's a leadership problem, right? So one is identify the problem. Two is really focusing on, know, sort of skills and your people.

And then three is really changing the role, like actually saying your role, like let's talk about writers for a second. Writers are no longer just writing. We're now editing and we're collaborating with AI to do writing. And so, when we talk about hiring a writer, we're not hiring a writer, we're hiring an editor.

We're hiring a collaborator, someone who's gonna collaborate with an AI or an LLM to try to figure out an outline and figure out the topical white spaces and those kinds of things. That's a different role than just writing. And so rewriting those jobs and understanding that we're all kind of partnering with our. technologies, especially AI.

anyway, so that it's been really fun. It was, we saw 100 % increase in our share of voice from the pickup for old dirty media in the research. A lot of discussions from, earned discussions that we were really surprised about. And then it's just, we were just following the story and following on from the story that we started the year before.

it's also not a popular. opinion to take that, one of the things that's really interesting, our executives, like, can we really say that some AI, some people using AI aren't effective or aren't productive? Like, we sell our product. I'm like, yes, we need to be, we need to say the truth.

We need to tell the truth. Like, the research is interesting. And we have a guideline, have, you guidelines for leaders to how to navigate this time. anyway, we had the courage to go out and say these things and, you know, we saw the marketing impact from it.

I think there's a lot of reward for simply reading the room as it relates to empathy and listening to your customers and then telling, you know, sharing the facts of the situation. And if it's not good news, then you're judged by how you lead them from where that bad news falls to where they could be in the future. You know, um people are going to appreciate that more than simply uh evangelizing over optimistically about one technology or one thing or another for sure. So you're right in the center of, you know, like the research that Workday is doing around workforce trends and, you know, how the nature of work is changing.

Cause you know, surely it has changed quite a bit. You know, people are in these, like you say, you know, someone who was previously a content creator is now in an orchestration role where they're, you know, a conductor and their orchestra are these different AI and humans and processes and workflows and that sort of thing. I'm just kind of curious, what are some of the major you know, workforce trends that you're seeing as it relates to AI adoption or even marketing. Yeah, mean, the biggest one is the one I sort of alluded to is that the biggest frustration employees have right now is they're afraid.

Employees in general, we do a global workforce report that comes out every September as well. And the big finding from that was that the biggest lever of dissatisfaction is this lack of understanding of the corporate strategy. Companies have, since I think the rebound from the pandemic, this no hire, no fire sort of situation, And I think leaders, they're looking at their investors and they're looking at their boards and they're trying to explain how they're generating productivity from AI investments.

What they're not doing is they're not translating their strategy overall and their strategy specifically for AI to their employees. And so that was a huge alarm bell that we saw go off in our last report in September, the Global. So if you want to search for Workday's Global Workforce Report, you'll see that stat. We saw that, yeah.

We saw that top talent is leaving. So not a lot of people are leaving, but who is leaving is top talent. And the number one reason they're leaving is because they're frustrated with those same things. So a lack of understanding of the corporate strategy and a lack of buy-in really on the sort of the role of AI in that corporate strategy.

uh And so this is a talent crisis. We're also starting to see a little bit of a rebound from the sort of work from home, know, oh time in the office, especially the younger generations, just, you know, they're... Resisting it not on you know, not surprisingly uh and so we're seeing we're seeing that as well uh And then just you know sort of just general Empathy driven leadership is you know, and again, it's back to my mean people suck It's you know putting people at the center is the companies that put people at the center are winning The companies that are putting sort of profit at all, you know Overall are less likely to be more profitable And so again, that's a paradox.

It's the paradox I wrote about in People Suck. It's like, you know, when you focus on your people over business outcomes, you get better business outcomes. And so those are some of the key things that we're seeing in the global workforce trends and that we're super excited to continue talking. You know, it's an interesting thing that the democratization of the ability to do things with AI has really had an impact.

you know, a lot in marketing has to do with how you can differentiate, you know, how you can come to market with more interesting stories, more interesting formats, narratives, that sort of thing. But you contributed to an article that um we posted about, you know, you know, giving advice, giving marketing leaders advice on how to navigate the current environment. And the question was that when everyone has AI, how does anyone differentiate? Right.

And I'm wondering, you know, this is a while ago, but you know, how would you answer that question today? Yeah, it's uh the same answer, I think. I loved when Google came out with their EEAT framework, and I know you know what that is, but for those who are SEO nerds like us, it was expertise, experience, authority, and trust is the fourth one, but I think trust is the outcome of those three. anyway, trust is not something you can get, it's something you earn.

And so you earn it through experience, sharing your experience, your expertise. and your authority um to generate the trust that's required for someone that want to spend a million dollars on your software or whatever. And it's the same, it's the same and it's the unique things, I think. we've got a bunch of executives who some who want to tell their story, some who are a little more resistant, they're all really interesting.

And what we don't want them to be is mouthpieces, right? So um we've got a woman named Cathy Pham, she worked at the White House, a leading researcher in the world of AI, and she tells these amazing stories. We've got a woman named Ashna, who runs our, Ashna Kurcher, runs our sort of technology division within the HR product and technology space. Super interesting background, super interesting perspectives.

oh We've got our leader of the P &T organization, guy named Garrett, and he's really, really smart and got some great unique perspectives on how technology is driving change and innovation in workforces. So we want to tap into the unique personalities, the unique experience and expertise of each of those individuals. Now we want to talk to analysts, we want to talk to influencers, we want to create more experiences. it's really figuring out, it's being human, it's back to being human.

So the only way to break out in a noise of AI created slop is to be as human as you possibly can. There's a thing, I don't know if you were at the Adobe Summit that I was at. few years ago, or Drew Brees was the keynote. Were you there?

you call that? All right, so I was paid by Adobe to go and like live blog, which was kind of weird. This is the first time I was ever doing something like that. And Drew Brees was the guy who was being interviewed by the CMO.

And in fairness, he wasn't very interesting until the CMO asked him, know, hey, you turned 40 last year. You know, what's your change? What your life has changed? And he paused for a moment and he looked down and he was like, turning 40 was a really big moment in my life.

And all of a sudden, everybody in the room looked up from their phones because you knew he was about to say something really personal. And I'll never forget that moment because I was like, okay, here was a keynote sort of interview that was not going well for the audience. And all of a sudden it turned because the CMO did the smart thing and asked him a really personal question. And he was really, you know, like it...

it was obviously something he was struggling like, gosh, I'm old now. Like I just retired, I'm over 40, I've got gray hair, I've got less hair. Like, you know, and the answer, don't remember the answer. I just remember the audience looking up and being like, oh, I really want to hear what he has to say.

Cause half of the audience here is about to turn 40 or just turned 40 or whatever. Like we all, we get it. We can relate to that stuff. that's really, you know, I think that's what it comes back to for me is how to break through is we focus on the most human thing.

about you and the people and the content that you're trying to create. It's kind of like, there's a connection to that um famous Maya Angelou uh quote about, it's not what you say or do. It's I'm butchering this, I apologize, but you know, it's not what you say or do. It's how you make people feel.

Right. And there's a lesson to be learned there as it relates to the, you know, uh engagement you have with the audience that you're trying to connect with and what experience are you creating? What stories are you telling? How are you empathetic to their pain and what potential solutions there are?

And how does it make them feel that experience? So um fantastic. uh So you've been in this business, uh well, yeah, we've been in this business a long time and there's been a lot of changes, right? um And we've both actually had some pretty significant changes in roles.

think you've covered a lot of bases more so than me for sure. And I'm just wondering when you look back in your early career, right? And you know, like when you were in sales at Nielsen and you, you know, you found out, okay, I can take these learnings and go into marketing. And as you've gone through those different roles, especially all that time at SAP, you know, what are some of the major things I guess I'm asking that have changed, you know, from, you know, the early days of your career in marketing and where we sit today.

Yeah, mean, think, um obviously, I think especially for marketers, the most drastic change has been the complete rapid evolution of the number of channels that we can use. Probably nothing has changed marketing more than going from three major TV networks to 200 channels on whatever YouTube TV or whatever service you're using. And that channel proliferation has happened. It's Instagram, it's Facebook, it's TikTok.

We all know the evolution of social media, the evolution of digital channels, the number of websites, the bifurcation of media that now we're red and blue and all those things. So that has changed dramatically. Even as recent as when I was hired by SAP to be the first head of digital marketing, which is kind of crazy to think about. And they were like, you have Twitter account, so you should figure out digital for us.

I'm not even sure I know how to use Twitter, but okay, like, you know, we figured it out. But, even since then, right, and you and I were both kind of early in the B2B marketing space on Twitter, like, you know, now it's just, it's crazy. And so there's, you know, again, breaking through is important and, you know, there's still people using AI to create AI generated slop on LinkedIn. We see it all the time.

uh But it's the people telling, you know, real kind of sharing real stories that are, that are breaking through. That's been a huge change. The technology has changed, but the technology is always going to change and it always has changed. you know, to me, that's less and important.

I'm a little bit shocked at how uh I don't know that marketing has done a great job of, uh you know, back to where we started, uh of explaining the value and pushing back on that insidious desire to be, you know, to be blatant promoters of what I think we become better at the math. uh I don't think we become, and this was chapter three in the content formula and like chapter eight in Mean People Suck. We need to become better storytellers for our story. Like how does marketing drive value?

Why is storytelling a better way to reach people? What's the ROI of being more empathetic as a company, as a marketing organization? I don't think that while we've gotten better at adding up the numbers, I don't think we've gotten better at telling the story. So yeah, so those are some of the, you know, I think the channels, you know, the channel proliferation, the bifurcation media, um you know, back to the how do you, how do you break through, which we've already answered, but also that it's just storytelling.

It's back. Like I talk about the Pixar storytelling formula as a simple one. um I tried to train my team on there's, you know, there's, you know, the Star Wars hero's journey, whatever, like go figure out, go use Chat TVT or go use your favorite LLM to figure out what's a good, easy, simple storytelling formula. and train your team on how to tell better stories.

Like when you give a presentation, how to tell a better story, how to start where the audience is, how to create tension, how to, you know, don't give the answer right up front. Like all of those simple things, you know, uh you know, create a hero for the audience that they can relate to, like simple things that I just don't think we've done a great job of marketing, you know, over the years as, as, you know, folks that should carry that torch for organizations. So yeah, a lot of changes, but those are the things I'd focus on.

You know, the greater complexity has put this pressure on productivity. And there's really, I think, an opportunity to go from this sort of mechanical to more meaningful, you know, and that's an oversimplification. But I think that connects well with this idea of storytelling that you're so adept at that is so effective. When we look at everything, when we look at the math, you know, it's storytelling that's breaking through.

In fact, that kind of relates to another question I want to ask about. There's been this expression I've used for a long time and honestly, I don't remember where I heard it first, but it was uh facts tell story sell. you know, I just, I'm wondering from your perspective, what is good storytelling look like in B2B? It's, you know, this is sort of an extension of some things you've already said, but what is great storytelling look like in B2B marketing?

you know, in the, in the fact that, you know, we've got AI resources to deal with. have a AI transformation or disruption however you want to look at it in terms of content creation and content proliferation. So I have a goal, an informal, unstated, not public goal for my team to make people cry. And so it's, maybe it's not achievable.

We got close. We did a story. It was kind of almost like an ad too. And it was a story with the PGA.

It was a great customer of ours and oh their CFO. We were on site and we were recording there. And I was like, I want you to take a couple of minutes and pull her personal story out of this larger, sort of advocacy story that we were telling, which was done really well by our team and it did well, it was on Bloomberg. they did a great job of telling sort of a workday customer story.

But there was a moment where we asked this customer of ours, Megan, like, what's one thing you could ask or you could tell your younger self? And again, she looked up and she thought, and... She delivered this line and it was like, got chills. And I was like, oh, we're close.

I'm not crying, but we're close. I got to meet her at our big event in San Francisco. And I was just like, so happy to meet her. was like, I feel like I know you, because I saw you have a moment on camera that was really touching and oh wise.

The advice that she was giving her younger self was awesome. uh And, you know, those are the things that we're trying to do is just let's, it's back to your Maya Angelou quote. Let's make people feel something. um For most of marketing content, I think it's the delay gratification of the answer.

Like, I keep saying own the pain and marinate in the pain. I want it like, if we're going to tell a two minute story, I want a minute and 50 seconds to be the pain. And then let's deliver the punchline in the last 10 seconds. You know, those, it's almost like Hollywood, right?

Like we're creating movies, but it's just delayed gratification. Own the pain, marinate in the pain, make people feel that we understand how they feel. They'll be happy we gave them the answer at the end, but let's not get there too quick. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it reminds me of an expression. It's not enough in B2B marketing to inform people anymore, right? We've got to make them feel something. And that opens doors, uh especially as people are closing doors to information overload and distrust of information sources and that sort of thing.

So um being able to connect at that level means everything. uh And I'm wondering if you have Are there any other examples that you can think of that come to mind? And they can come from Workday or they can come from other companies or even in other industries that are a great example of storytelling. Yeah.

I, you know, I reached out recently to, uh to a good friend of both of ours, Jay Kunzo, uh because I'm trying to teach, yeah. And I'm trying to teach my team to do what he, you know, what he's done and bring that documentary style, real thoughtful kind of customer focused. And he did, he did, and you should, you should look it up or put it in your show notes, but it was uh a series called Against the Green. Are you familiar with it?

Yeah. And so I shared that with my team and I was like, because it's part of what we're doing this year is a four part documentary style series with customers where we're not going to talk about Workday at all. It's just going to be about four really interesting people. And I want to use Against the Grain as kind of the model because I searched so long and hard for really powerful customer stories.

If your audience hears this, would love for them to share with me any examples they have. Andrew Davis, a good friend of ours, he's got some great examples. Jay Akunzo created that series Against the Grain, which was a great example. Tim Washer did some good stuff with Cisco back in the day.

It was Valentine's Day. I shared his funny Valentine's Day. uh video. I'll link that.

People have to see that. It's just such a, you know, he's a master of deadpan humor, right? uh was great. I just shared that with my team since we're recording this the week after Valentine's Day.

yeah, so those are some of the examples I always point to. And they're so few and far between. my challenge out to your audience is share with me any that you've seen that really do focus on storytelling, emotion, things that you think others should emulate. And let's celebrate each other for the successes that we have in Absolutely, you know, over, what was it?

10 years ago or so, it was more than 10 years ago, because I published a book called Optimize in 2012, wrote it in 11, but there's an idea called Best Answer in that. Anyway, and you talked about that, you've heard it from me and from other people about the value of being the best answer for your customers. And so fast forward to today. And I'm wondering how important you think is this notion of qualitatively, credibly, um and visibly being the best answer for a thing, especially as AI is playing such a big role in how buyers are discovering and consuming information.

Yeah, I'm going to contradict almost everything I've said in the last 50 minutes or so. ah But first, I want to say, you were such an inspiration for me when I read the book and saw that being the best answer uh as a goal. And when I was at SAP, that was one of the mantras that I was running around and trying to give you credit as often as I could. ah And I know you and your agency were doing a lot of great work with LinkedIn, which was a and continues to be, I think, an example of some great B2B storytelling.

But it can be boring. And so this is how I'm contradicting myself, right? So we need to be human and we need to be emotional and we need to tell stories. Being the best answer is kind of boring.

And so I have a new editor on my team. And so we love to contradict and sort of disagree with each other. And one of her first observations was some of our most successful content that you and the team developed before I got here was kind of boring. And I'm like, yeah, that's okay because sometimes answering a question in the way that people need it answered, you it's like, you've got headlines and subheads and question answer within the bigger question.

um It's kind of, it's not very interesting. It's not very emotional, m but it's really informative and it's really educational. And there's kind of a formula that, you know, in the SEO world we learned and now in the GEO and AIO world, is becoming even more important. And guess what?

Guess who shows up in LLMs? The companies that answer questions in the same format that worked for Google. And so, you know, I think the challenge for us, at least for me, is how do we balance being both a little bit boring, you know, helpful in answering questions? And then also, and I call it, we do SEO and we do narrative, basically.

And we try to balance it out like yin and yang. And so we try to put some interesting emotional customer stories in some of our boring SEO content. And we try to put some question and answer stuff in our thought leadership narrative content. it really is, that's the world we live in.

Like flooding the market is a way to break through the noise. uh Being more interesting is a way to break through the noise. And we're trying to do a little bit. Well, know, there's, there's an, it is a, an interesting dynamic and there's a time and a place, right?

For different types of content. And, um, you know, you can get attention with that emotionally resonant content in some channels in some places, let's say an influencer or a customer is advocating through a story about a pain point and how it's been solved. And maybe it's through video format or an event or something. So there's that.

Then I've got other questions I need to understand as I unpack, well, what does this mean for my company? And now you've got. you know, uh, structured answers and FAQ maybe for lack of better characterization type of content that helps me, uh, check the boxes on the things that I need to know before I go and advocate for a particular solution one way or another, my organization. On the other hand, we can also look at, well, from a discovery standpoint, if I search on, if I go to GPT and I say, you know, what is the best this or that, right?

And I'm going to get some recommendations and I might pop over to Google. And I might, I want to validate that, you know? And I might go ask a person. And when there's continuity of those boring answers, as it were, that might open the door for me to go investigate owned or brand content, which might then uncover these emotional connection opportunities to dig deeper into what is different about this brand.

How are they unique and effective about solving problems that are relevant to me? And so I think there's, you're right, there's a very interesting yin yang sort of dynamic, and it's not always the same way, but architecting that is based upon insight about what customers expect and what they value. So that, as you've talked about already, listening and empathy uh and deciding that we're not going to egocentrically beat our chest in the world about products, features, and benefits and that sort of thing.

We're gonna listen and then we're gonna put forward what is know, empathetically going to be the most effective for our customer and help them pull themselves through the journey as much as possible, right? So a lot of marketers are feeling pressure to do more with less. And like I've said, in an environment where there's a little bit, it's a little bit harder to make some of those choices because of some uncertainty. And these are different times indeed.

And yet we're still seeing marketers run the same campaigns as you've talked about, the same motions. And I'm wondering what advice do you have? for folks listening, watching uh to break free the status quo trap that they're stuck in right now. Yeah, the status quo trap I see most marketers in is order taking.

And this is, we've been talking about, this is the through thread of the whole conversation is that the reason marketing has a marketing problem where we started is because we just do what we're told. And, you I always used to say behind every piece of bad content is an executive who asked for it. It's my favorite famous tweetable. Sorry, I had to throw it in.

Because, I know you've seen me deliver that line. And I like to say that it's not always that guy's fault, because it's an old white guy that I have pictured on the screen, a grumpy looking executive. We are sometimes that person. And it's not always an old white guy.

It's all of us. It's all of us that we just think, we just go do what we're told. We've got to stop. So to break through the status quo is we need to think like a business.

And so within my team, when I was just thought leadership and now we're thought leadership and customer advocacy, we're looking at the money that we're getting and the salaries that we're paying our employees. If we were a business, how would we spend that money? Are we doing things that we can justify? So thinking like a business is, I think, the way to break through.

And if you're thinking like a business, you've got to build the business case. You've to understand the problems you're trying to solve, the investment it takes to solve it, the return and outcomes you're going to get from it. thinking like a business. have to learn like you're doing an entrepreneurial pitch to an investor.

You have to be able to tell the story. um You have to be able to measure the results. You have to break through the noise, like all the things that we've been talking about. But if it's like, if you want me to break it down into one line, it's think about what you're doing like a business.

um Think about not order taking, but are you really lined up to a strategy that's tied to customer outcomes that you can then show to the business? That's, think, the call to action for marketers to break through. Great, great advice, excellent advice. You're making me think of the two of the most creative, most effective marketers on my team have businesses, like Side Hustle or more types of businesses and have for years.

And their understanding of how a business is run directly affects their accountability, their vision, their strategic thinking. and all those other elements that are necessary in order for a thing to have a use case and then be successful when it's executed. Not everyone gets to see 360 degrees of a thing. As you say, if we're just taking orders and we're executing tactically on a thing, we probably don't have as much empathy for the accountability necessary in order for it to be successful because we get paid either way.

So yeah, great advice, Michael. Very, very good advice. Let's wrap up with... A dream career question.

If you could be doing anything else as a career option, what would it be? This is good, you're gonna hate my answer. So like you kind of almost retired, right? Like I sold my agency in 2024.

We were in a position where my kids are getting a little older now. I still got kids in college, but we saved up. And I was gonna go like cut lawns for the school or drive a bus or something. And I got this call and I hate to say it, I love what I'm doing.

mean, it's... It's fun to be back inside a corporate environment. It's fun to be in the technology space. We've got the SaaS apocalypse happening, where there's this narrative that software companies like ours are going to be obsolete, which I truly believe in my soul is not true.

In fact, I think we're going to be driving the future of technology. um I'm trying to advocate for storytelling and business mindset and oh strategy over tactics. uh fighting for our customers as the hero of the stories that we're telling. I really, I love what I'm doing.

um I've got a great boss, which is, if you read Mean People Suck, it's kind of everything. You know, she's, I like to say, supremely capable. She's a chief communications officer, a supremely capable leader, but she's super supportive of what we're doing. ah You know, me the leeway to do what I need to do, but also the right, it's funny.

Last year we were launching something called an agent system of record. And I was like freaking out a little bit. I'm like, we've never really talked about this. And she just said to me like, I trust that you're gonna do your job.

And I was like, God, isn't that what we all want in our lives as a manager that just tells us that they trust us to go do what we know we need to do. And so, know, so yeah, I'm good. Like, I feel like I've reached the thing that I wanna do. And so maybe I'll go cut the lawn at the local school, but until then I'm pretty happy where I'm at.

Wow, well, congratulations. And I am very happy for you that you found that because not a lot of people do get to experience that type of satisfaction and joy. And I think your combination of intelligence, um your creativity and your care, how much you care um has everything to do with the success that you're having and work days benefiting from it. And certainly everyone on your team is benefiting from it.

My team is benefiting from it um indirectly or directly, and I think it's fantastic. So ah where's the best place for people to connect with you to share those creative stories that you asked about? Yeah, just connect to me on LinkedIn. That's the social network for professionals.

So yeah, reach out to me on LinkedIn, linkedin.com forward slash Michael Brenner. I got that vanity URL as soon as I could. um But yeah, I would love to hear, like I said, please share for all of you out in the audience, share any great examples of B2B stories that you think we should emulate and I'll share the crap out of it.

Because I think we need to do more of that as a community. Excellent. Well, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much, Michael.

Yeah, thanks so much, Lee. It's great talking to you. I want to thank you for tuning in to the Beyond B2B Marketing Podcast. Make sure that you subscribe so you can stay tuned for our next guest.

And remember, there's no better time than now to become a Best Answer brand.