S2E18: How to use authentic customer stories to power B2B marketing - ft. Indy Gregg, Founder of WeDo

Hey Mindful B2B marketing listeners, this is Keirra with a quick note about today's episode. This episode was recorded a while ago during a time when the podcast focused solely on software companies, so while you won't find much content about mindfulness in this one, it's still packed with practical advice and features some great guests. Regular content will resume next year, and in the meantime I'm sharing these older episodes while I work on new interviews. Thanks for listening and now on to the show.

Welcome to Mindful B2B Marketing, where we share the stories of marketing and business leaders who are not only achieving remarkable business outcomes, but also making a meaningful difference in the world. We're creating a community of marketers who believe that values like honesty, inclusivity, and sustainability aren't just good for the world, they're great for business too. a new app that simplifies work for freelancers, gig workers, and small business owners. Indy is an executive and creative visionary with a career spanning over 20 years.

She's actually worked and led teams in the tech, fintech, real estate, music industry, fashion, cosmetic industries, and she's also consulted various brands like LVMH, Ikea, and Sony, just to name a couple. So, Indy, I'm super excited to chat with you today and dig into your background. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah.

So, tell me a little bit about how and why you got into founding your current company, WeDo. Well, it's a really long story, so everybody brace yourself. But the reality is, I've been in tech for about 20 years, and I had left one company that I had founded. We had We had other people running it.

It's still going today, and it was in the cosmetic industry primarily because I didn't feel like I was being creative enough, so I started to become a consultant and work as a freelance consultant for several startups for a period of about 10 years. It occurred to me one morning I woke up and I'd been watching the market, and I was aware that there was going to be a mass change in the workforce and do time. More and more people were beginning to freelance as we headed into the 2007, 2008, 2009 recessions period and did the double dip.

We saw a lot of the workforce be laid off. Another thing I noticed is that the freelance marketplaces don't really rate fair for the freelancer in the sense that they take big chunks out of people's paychecks every month or every time they get paid, sometimes 20%, sometimes even more. So I thought, "There must be a way around it. I get why people charge a SaaS to go fish if it's a lead gen machine, like, say, sites like Upwork or Fiverr, or why certain types of payments or necessary to operate a business, a chunk of 50 % just seems completely unsustainable when you see a J curve in the workforce that's so steep.

By 2027, 52 % of the global workforce will be freelance or gig economy, independent economy. We're heading into a long winter right now. It's that there may be another recession. And I thought, okay, we need to solve this problem and we need to help people.

So the last thing we want to see is more homeless people, more people, you know, losing their jobs without very many alternatives or where the barrier is too hard for them, you know, where the price is too high. So I thought, how can we deliver software that can help people really run their business and remove that barrier and the idea was to become a financial services banking services application where you service the front end for people with communication apps, calendar, invoicing, contracting, all the things you need to run a business and communicate online and offline, taking payments, et cetera, and banking and wrap that into one place and then make it virtually free so that we only charge, We only win when they win.

So when we process a payment, we take a tiny percentage compared to a massive fee or commission fee like some of the other sites or platforms do. And that was really why we built it, it's really to help hopefully millions of people. Okay. I love that.

So what is kind of the growth trajectory since the time you started to now? Well, first of all, being a fintech and in the regulatory environment, things take a little bit longer, even if you're building your tech and your business at rapid pace. So we spent the first year and a half or so really working on our banking opportunities. So our contracts, our partnerships across the U .

S. and the United them in Europe. And then building the brand, building our presence and really getting our story together. But the most time was invested in actually talking to customers, talking to people who would use the app and finding out what resonates the most, where their pain was, how they currently run their business, really figuring out the why, why would they change?

You know, why would they switch over to something like us if they were already present as a consultant and why would someone new really want to come towards us if they had lost their job or in hard times or in circumstances like that. And what we really wanted to find out is could we run this company, could we run this model regardless of a bull or a bear market? And if so, how would we do that and make it financial sustainable and have have a model that's robust. It's been a lot of time like that on that.

Now we have around 37 ,000 people who are testing the app and will be doing a harder launch later on this year in September. It's been a wonderful journey, really being able to understand what people need, what people use the most, how they perceive things and how we can make something so easy and seamless that it doesn't feel like it's software. And that was the goal. And so that's about where we are right now.

- Yeah, that sounds great, 37 ,000 users already. So what would you say has been one of the biggest insights that you've learned either throughout your journey with growing leader or throughout your career that you would share of executives in the B2B size startup marketing space? - Yeah, so one of the things that I think is extraordinarily important is story and actually getting a story out there, not just about your company or your product, but a story about a customer. A story about that customer and what they go through on a day -to -day that really resonates with a new customer.

So either that can be an example of one of your current customers and the pain points that they have and the reason why they use your app. But not as just a testimonial, but actually explaining how it's benefited their life, how it's benefited their company or their peers within the company, depending on what the service or product is. And I think that's really important. When you land people, people like to buy from people.

They don't buy from robots. They don't buy from web pages. They buy typically even executives and decision makers in business still are emotive creatures. And most people love to think that they make rash decisions based on logic, but You know, they're sold more by feeling more often than not, and every marketer knows this, right?

But I think it's really even more important in the B2B space because there is a lot of competition and it's not always price -based. People will pay more for a more robust product or what one that they trust more, and trust is a human connection. And I think people need to really pay attention that, um, in terms of their story and how they, how they line that up on, on a page. Um, you know, obviously video works, but, um, you know, video and audio are better, of course, but it at least have it on the page in a written form as well.

Great. We mentioned something about, um, how a lot of companies tend to compete over price, like maybe they're undercutting their prices, But there are other ways to compete like on value or on trust. So could you talk a little bit more about that and what have you seen with that? Well, I think, you know, framing your offer is extremely important.

So on value, when you frame your offer, if you differentiate your offer from the competition, that's one way to, you know, not have to compete on price and even raise your price. And a lot of times it becomes more attractive because psychologically, people don't necessarily want to buy the cheapest, especially in software. Everybody who has been in business for any amount of time realizes that if I buy this cheap product, I'm probably not going to get the result. They just intuitively think that even if yours is the cheapest and the very best product out there, and if that's the case, you probably shouldn't be in business because you haven't priced yourself right.

But that's another whole kettle of fish. So competing on value and competing on trust, trust is really has a lot more to do with your values on a page, your values in the way you treat your community, the way you treat your customers, the way someone refers to you if they're being used by one of your former customers. It's a human thing, and I think it's essential that you portray that trust on your page or in your testimonials or in your video or on your social media and remind people, don't be afraid to say it more than once.

I think it's kind of funny because a lot of companies think, okay, well, we have a value statement. We have a mission statement. We have a vision statement. We have all these things.

And then they put them on a web page and it always sounds so stale and horrible. It's like, yes, our brand attributes are, we are kind. But you don't feel it anywhere, right? You just don't feel it in your hands.

It's our glorious team and they shove five faces of whoever's on the team, you know, on the page. And I think trust really comes from like a voice and generally your voice as the founder or the founding team, the people in your company. And by voice, I mean the way you express yourself and a feeling that people get when you read, right? You're reading something and you got, oh, this is believable because they took the time to be authentic.

They didn't just like throw up the website and think that we'll just talk about what's under the hood of this of this technology or the software, right? And I think that this is really important. If you take time to express yourself in a way that's profound and visceral to yourself or humorous or expressing the motions that you use a lot in your character, then you're going to attract people who, you know, want to want to work with you or want to want to use your software because they you've expressed a feeling and there's an interchange there, you know.

Okay. And you also mentioned the story of the customer, like understanding what was the journey of the customer leading up to working with you and what has been their journey sort of after working with you and expressing that in your content in such a way that it resonates with other people who might have had the same experience, the same trigger or kind of identify with something in that story and that attracts them to your company. So do you have any tips on how to come up with customer stories like that?

I mean, the best way to come up with a customer story like that is ask your customers, you know, what was your life like before? And I don't think doing that by a survey does it justice. I think that one way, one good technique to use is the jobs to be done technique. In jobs to be done, there's a journey that you can take a customer through when you're asking them questions.

And what you really want to do when you're you know, a customer is starting the middle, you know, or find out where they are now and work backwards and then say, what happened before you did that? You know, can you tell me what software you were using before you started using our software? And what were you doing before that? What made you choose them?

And then what made you change your mind? What happened? Right? Were you going through a problem?

Did you need was it, you know, were your margins too tight? Was it whatever your problem solves in market? Was it this? Was it that?

What made you change? But if you start from where they are and work your way back or you start in the middle and find out where they want to go, you'll get a good story arc from the customer. And I think you can apply other customers' pain points and how they resolve them and how it made their business better, Not just in a testimonial, which is the sound by anybody can throw us a testimonial up on a website, you know, these days that I mean, you know, trust pilot work, some of these, some of these, you know, review sites work, don't get me wrong.

But what really matters is a real human story that captures the emotion of the customer who's thinking about being, you know, changing over to you or or buying your product or service and Triggering that emotion in them. That's like me. It worked for him. It will probably work for me because that's what's going on in the customer's brain, right?

But they're feeling that through a story and it's not like, "Hey, buy my product. I'm right in your face." Here's a list of what knots them. This card, all the features in the car.

Yeah, you got your conditioning. Also, there's a Honda. You've got got this, so it's afford. You've got a stick shift, whatever.

If you compared software to the automobile industry, but there are reasons why you would buy the Mercedes over the Honda or you'd buy the... And so in every industry, that emotion needs to be portrayed and putting the customer into a feel situation. This is either going to remove my fear, remove my pain, improve my life, give me a higher status in life for my business or whatever, help me grow my company or help me become more profitable or streamline a number of pain points if it's software, maybe running your HR team, who knows, whatever your pain points are that you're solving for in market.

And creating that human story that resonates It's super important. That's why people buy from people. People buy for reasons. It's not just because it's a cheaper price point and they just have some material problem to solve.

I mean, software has a motion attached to it a little bit more than just maybe a hammer and a nail. You know? Right. That that makes sense.

So when you're uncovering these sort of insights, are you reaching out to your current or previous customers and kind of inviting them to get on a call? And then you're kind of asking them these interview style questions, trying to dig up the story of working backwards to how they actually came across your brand and what they were struggling with before? Yeah, like usually what I do is I reach out to a customer and say hey I'm the CEO of we do or whatever company is I'm working for and currently we do and I'll say hey Can I do an interview?

I'm really interested. I'm really curious about you know What brought you to us and just would like to ask you some questions about you know How you make decisions and usually they react really fondly to that. They like to have the attention, especially if they're in business themselves, which most business customers will be, because it's an opportunity for them to be discovered or be part of something as well. When you get on those calls, you don't just start and dive right in.

"Well, tell me what happened at the very beginning. Why did you ever use Zoom or why did you ever use PayPal or whatever that was?" Usually you talk about, well, how's it going right now? How are you feeling?

It's a real opportunity for them to even complain to you about something that's wrong about your own product, and how you're giving you an opportunity to fix it. And without talking to customers, you're completely out of touch anyway. So I feel like every CEO, every founder, every marketing officer, every CTO and product It should be talking to a few customers each week, at least in general, but it will help you actually formulate a story that does resonate because you'll find patterns amongst your customers for why they've made the decisions they've made.

Okay. So kind of walk me through how you're doing this. So right now, for your current company, you have over 30 and current active customers, so what would you do? Would you just send out an email like every once in a while and just invite people to get on this call with you and then book out your calendar or how exactly do you do it?

Well, it really depends on your position in the company. For me, what I do is I'll notice a new user. They may have reached out and gone through a customer service portal at some point, I'll pick up on it and say, "Ooh, I'd like to talk to this person." They seem to have had a problem.

I really start from there. You want to catch the problems anyway, but you really want to find out what their story is and take interest in those people, first of all. Nine times out of 10, their story will be really interesting. They'll have done something on your app or on your software that literally no person would ever do in the first place, right?

They've done something that you've never thought of, or they'll be using the product in such a way that it wasn't really intended for, right? 'Cause you just don't know. It's like you go, you know, when I was talking about the hammer and the nail, you know, you go to the hardware store, you pick up a hammer and a nail. How many different use cases for a hammer and the nail are there?

Well, you think it's just to put something up on the wall, but, you know, there are people using their hammers to, you to break other things, to chop wood. People do crazy things with their tools. You'll find that some of your customers might be doing crazy things or they might be doing really insightful, amazing, and genius things that you want to know about those things. I don't have a real strategy or method of doing that.

I know that our tech team do and our product team do. They'll interview maybe every 20th customer who are doing a certain thing on the app and they want to find out why they're doing it that way or what they can improve. Or if there's a drop -off, when did they drop off, when did they leave and not complete the task, what was the barrier for them, things like that. But for me, it's really about finding out their story generally when they were, I'll generally react to people who write into us and say, "Hey, you know, when are you going to have this feature?"

Or, "Hey, I had this issue more than I do." Just randomize it. Okay. Okay.

So it seems like there's multiple triggers that you and people on your team are noticing as people use the app. And Then other people on your team have a systematic way of identifying people that they'd like to reach out to based on how they've used the product, or you're just going in and saying, "Okay, this person seems really engaged," or like they might have something interesting to say, or they're using this a little bit differently. I wonder why that's happening, and that curiosity sparks you to reach out to them.

Yeah. In my case, it's the curiosity. In the case of typical tech teams, it will be due to some data that they'll realize that, okay, there have been X number amount of users who haven't been able to accomplish a specific task or do a particular journey on the app. We need to find out what they're doing or if there's something different about the way.

And then you'll look up, so maybe they're on a certain type of phone, they may be using a specific OS. And these are kind of early days for us, so we troubleshoot quite a bit. So it really depends on the use case, but in terms of storytelling, if you want to get the story out, and what I would encourage, say, a CMO to do, or a founder who's really interested in getting a story on their page, I would just pick up the phone of any customer that you have and especially the ones who have followed you on Twitter or that are following you on LinkedIn or who are more engaged than other ones because they're going to be likely to respond and be helpful because you know they're interested and then get their story and figure out how that story could relate if it's a profound enough story that you could relate to a lot of people.

And say you segment 10 people and they all are telling you a similar story, you probably know there's a lot more people out there with the same story who will resonate with that and those decision making processes for why they bought your software. That makes sense. And do you have any tips on pulling the story out of the customer. So you talked a little bit about kind of starting in the middle of the story or like asking where they ended up now and like going backwards.

Do you have any other like tips like that? What what really pulls out like the emotions or like how do you identify the very specific moments that are going to be useful and how do you identify what you can use within your marketing cop? Okay, so I think really is about having a human conversation with them. So being relaxed, probably easier to do face -to -face like on a Zoom call or in person than over the phone.

You're not always going to be able to meet someone in person, but Zoom is pretty available to most people. So video conference with them starting in the middle matters because most people don't remember what the first step they took was in their user journey. They'll remember that they were referred to maybe they were referred to you or that they land on a website. But I'm talking about the real emotions that were behind what was going on in their business.

So if you start in the middle, You get more insight and they start to remember the steps and they'll go. Oh, yeah. Oh, it was because The hat particular software didn't have a second camera And so I thought because I like to demonstrate things this way. I chose your software or they'll say because The price point was too high and I wasn't using that software because I had to combine it with something else And And this, your particular software gave me both of those features that I needed.

That's valuable insight, because you may find that there are a lot of people who are looking for a combined approach of a particular two features that you have, they might not use the rest. It depends on what your software is, of course. Pulling that out from them is generally a conversation, and sometimes it's distracting them from the objective of the call. You can ask them a series of questions.

How do you feel now that you're using the software? Are you feeling pretty settled? Is there anything that's bothering you? Okay.

How do you remember feeling that ever when you were using previous software? Okay. So when you were using the previous software, did that, was that frustration big enough to have made you change or Do you, can you identify the moment and then boom, they were like, oh yeah, the moment that caused me to change, even though you didn't ask them this question, you know, you're leading up to it. So they're going through a whole scenario in their mind.

They're even envisioning where they were sitting when they made the purchase. They remember going to your landing page that was orange and purple or whatever color your landing page was, right? Even if it's not on the app or the software that they log into, because a lot of times, You know the landing page is totally different than what the software is developed into and You're taking them through this storyline and you're finding out What was really bothering them, you know, if you're a financial services software that helps people optimize Their expenses, right or a software invoicing software, whatever you are, right?

You could be any type of software. You really want to know what their pain point was What made them choose you. And then you went to reverse engineer that question into, "So how were you feeling? What was a typical daylight?

What drove you nuts about other software? What bugged you?" Because there's usually something that bugged them. It could be any number of things.

A price. Sometimes it is. It could be a lack of quality customer service being listened to. nobody cared about them.

They had three bad phone calls where nobody helped them solve their problem. So they jumped to you because you had the stellar customer service policy. You were adding this extraordinary value that made them want to switch to you. So again, I think it's just pulling those pieces out and only you will know what story is going to resonate because when you see the patterns, you'll know what copied right after you've interviewed enough customers.

enough customers. Right. Okay. That makes sense.

And then you also mentioned that you would encourage multiple people on the team. So not just like the CEO, but like several other like of the executives in the company to be regularly interviewing customers. So what people on the team would you encourage to be doing that consistently? And do you have any tips or advice on how they could systemize that or set up a program or what they should be looking for as they're trying to make customer interviewing and pulling out the insights, a regular part of their business?

So first of all, definitely this CEO and the founder, you need to have your finger on the pulse. So first of all, the CEO, founder, and you need to be in touch with your customers. You can't let that, you can't let that drop. You really do need to be talking to your customers and have your finger on the pulse and also be watching what's going on in market, in your category, in your niche, in your business in general at large.

Clearly the product officer. So whoever owns product, whether it's your CTO or you have a designated product officer, he should be touching base with customers. Anyone who is a designer designing front end development who's doing user experience needs to be talking to customer. And of course your customer service representatives and the people who are sales, you need to find out what what the follow -up, once you've sold, if you're actually phoning people up to sell, the sales team need to be following up and getting them in touch with help if they need help.

All of those help to produce stories, but the intent of why you're talking to the customer can help you produce great copy that can help sell more of your product and help resonate people to your people that you're targeting with story, people resonate with people who are in similar situations to them in terms of in businesses, what they're struggling with, what they're looking for. You'll get a good indication by the keywords you might be winning in Google of what type of customers are looking for you, and you probably have a good idea of who you serve, But you're not always in touch with exactly their story or why they're using your software over something else or your product over someone else.

So yeah, I think, and then in terms of a system that you asked, there are a lot of different softwares that can help you rotate and, and, and randomize talking to customers. And you can also assign that through tasks, whether you use a customer workflow or task flow or team task flow like Jira or Asana or even monday .com or even a schedule or like outlook, something very simple can be used to help you schedule routine calls with customers and automate that process. - Okay, so if we have to look at this on a macro level and we've It looks like I'm working at a B2B SaaS right now, and I'm a head marketing person.

And I want to say it's time for me to start integrating customer stories into my marketing. And I want it to resonate and I want to be across like all channels and all my coffee. So if you have to give me a step -by -step of what to start doing to implement this, What would the step -by -step be? - Talk to your customer, find at least one story that is similar across several of your customers.

Highlight that story and make it real. Give the character in the story a real name. Maybe pull out one of your customers to be featured in that story. begin to write the story down of how this person's life, business, headaches, went away, you know, came in, went away, got better, whatever, and how they were before, why they changed, and what made it all the better for them.

Was it because of this outstanding service and trust that they have with your company was it because it's a far superior software at a more reasonable price and it really has saved them time and energy or created this wonderful lifestyle for them, helped them leverage their business, whatever that is, write that down, and then use it across all your platforms. So you may use it in an audio format for podcasts and radio. You may use it in a video format where you're telling the story with some visuals.

You may use it as a strap line on your homepage. Bob's life got better because of your brand, and this is how. And you just start spreading that across so it resonates and then you test it to see how effective is and find out, you know, if you're, if you begin attracting more and more customers who have similar story, you're probably hitting a really great niche or target. And then you can expand that to other, other people's stories, you know, there's not just one story for every customer.

But if you start doing that, I think you'll have more of a emotional attachment and to, to your brand, because people will associate your brand with a feeling. Hmm. Okay. I like these steps.

Especially the last one, which is testing the story after you put it on all of your channels to see how effective that story is and whether or not it's attracting similar people. So how are you testing whether it's attracting people similar to the original person? And how are you designing kind of these tests in general? Okay, so if you have this specific kind of customer demographic or psychographic or value graphic, and you know Bob, Bob, Bob's buying your software because it makes a certain noise to deter, I don't know, birds, who knows.

He's a farmer, he's whatever, right? And whatever your software does, okay, that's a poor example, I Yes, but that's an example. So let's say you want to find more Bob's. So you find out a lot more about Bob.

Bob may be age 26 to 32. He's on his mobile phone, scrolls all day. He's on WhatsApp, nonstop. He really needs a tool that deflects the birds, so that they don't attack him while he's sitting scrolling or whatever, right?

So you're gonna go find more Bob's that have the same maybe age range, same interests, same skill sets, whatever, and see if you tracked more bobs, with more bobs by your software, then you're probably telling the story pretty well. They need the same thing, right? Okay, birds are stupid, but I don't know why angry birds is coming to my mind. But whatever your app You know, a certain type of user, a certain type of member, a certain type of individual is going to be attracted to your software because you know how to answer that question.

They're going to be attracted to my software because my software saves them 52 days a year by automating their invoicing, by automating their contracting, by getting them paid on time and relieving them of stress, okay? And my particular customer, I know that they're coders. I know that they have to interact with their clients on a regular basis because they're in constant builds, right? So maybe I'm gonna target a certain type of engineers who build product and the decision makers who buy software for communications within their company.

So I'm going to target those people. They have a certain type of demographic. When they land on my homepage, what do I want them to feel, right? I want them to feel cared about because they might be concerned about how effective or robust the software is because they're engineers themselves.

You know, there's a lot of things I'm going to know about that person. And then I'm going to Test that story to make sure it resonates with them, make sure that that story is their story and they, they reckon that most other people have the same similar story who are in the similar situation as they are. And then the more that works, then you keep doing it and you improve upon it. And then you start with the second story.

Who's my second customer besides engineers? Well, they might be designers, right? Who's my third customer. Well, they might be copywriters or marketers, right?

Because they communicate. So who might be my fourth customer? Well, they might be, they might be a customer service agents or salespeople, right? So then, you know, I'm working on my funnels.

I'm segmenting my audiences. I'm telling each one that I want to attract a story that should resonate because I have a customer who's like them, Who has gone through a similar set of problems or has received status or has their life has become easier Or they've saved time money or an energy because as a result of using my product And I want my other customers to know their story because this could help them too right, so it's it's kind of doing that and then tweaking and If you find you get a ton more people over here on the you know Marketing wing here resonating with your software and buying it and those decision -makers are selling like three times more or five times more, you know, your products Bottom line increases because they're just buying it buying it buying it Focus on them get more of them Right because then you have a good chance at owning that niche and that's how story I think works and why why it's important Yeah, once you put that together it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I can see how this would be really valuable, especially as those stories start to stack up and your brand ends up being known for like these multiple different niches of customers, but you can actually speak to each of them really, really well. So yeah, yes, indeed. This was a really great insight. And as we're wrapping up, it's time to shine a spotlight on you.

So are there Any projects that you happen to be working on? Is there anything you'd like people to know? And is there anywhere that you'd like people to get in touch with you? - So projects, well, I was recently invited to be part of Forbes Technology Console.

So I've been writing pieces to help startups and help SaaS companies. - Yeah. - And so I've decided to write a book. And yeah, And I'm hoping that everyone will download We Do when it comes to their country.

All right. You're exciting. Thank you so much for sharing your story, Indy. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Mindful B2B Marketing. If our mission to leverage marketing as a force for positive change resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe to the email newsletter at forwardlaunchdigital .com /podcast. Thanks again, and I'm so excited to have you as part of this journey.