Fractional Hustle

Welcome back to Fractional Hustle. My guest today is Zach Messler. I am very excited to talk with Zach today. Zach's a storyteller. Right?

And storytelling is near and dear to my heart. You know, every kid growing up loves good a good story, and it's one of the oldest methods of knowledge transfer in human history. Right? Before the written language, you know, we were telling stories around campfires. And, we have an expert here in that today.

Zach, welcome, and thank you for being a guest, for Accenture. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me here. This is really fun. Glad, glad to be here and chat with you.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. No. We appreciate it.

So you got twenty years experience, right, in b to b marketing for technology companies, and then you kinda went more into storytelling and communication and branding. How did that transition happen? Yeah. So it it wasn't really much of a transition, to tell you the truth. So I spent twenty plus years in product marketing for enterprise tech.

So enterprise tech, I mean, like SaaS. It was always software. Right? But back in the day, SaaS was like, oh, what's this? So it was software, sometimes a little hardware, definitely SaaS models, that sort of thing.

So product marketing, it's important to understand product marketing to get the full context of this. Product marketing is a marketing discipline. That's it. It's just another marketing discipline, where you're connecting the product with the audience through capabilities and channels. So those capabilities are positioning.

How do we show up in the minds of our buyers? It's messaging. What do we say to show up that way? It's certainly a lot of writing and a lot of copy. How do we say that?

It's audience research, buyer personas. It's, competitive analysis. It's a whole lot of different things. But at the core of it, at least to me, was always positioning, messaging, and copy. So I have so many stories about how I got out of the corporate world, but, you know, I I did that for twenty years, just just helping salespeople sell deeply complex tech to nontechnical buyers.

And what happens often in those situations is salespeople gets transfixed by technology, and they start talking the features. Oh, this is really cool. And that often happens because they're learning about the product from the product organization. Product is focused on product. Product marketing is focused on product, for sure, but also focused on audience.

So in order to sell a deeply complex technology to a completely nontechnical buyer, you have to be able to tell stories. You have to be able to get to the essence of what it is that you're selling in order to connect it with the cares, the wants, the needs of that buying audience. So that is product marketing. So I left that world, and, hint hint, these are definitely questions to ask because I have some juicy stories, man. Oh my goodness.

But I left that world, seven years ago this past September, so it's it's been a a hot minute. And now I I have product marketing advisory, service. I, you know, I work with really, I work with founders and their teams on what to say and how to say it. So they attract more buyers and they sell more stuff. Yeah.

So seven years ago, what made you make the jump? What was the final thing where you're like, I'm out of this. I'm going out of this. See, that's the question. There we go.

I was always I might give you the long version here. Okay? The long version. Yeah. Alright.

I was always the good corporate soldier, and I was fortunate, extremely fortunate, to impress the right person early to mid part of my career, where I was relatively new relatively to product marketing. I had my first real launch, and this guy was the CMO, and I was a product marketing manager. And this he was my boss. The person you know, the woman I reported to was amazing and would always promote her own people. So if you did something good, you knew that the people above her would hear about it.

So he asked her, hey. Who did this launch? Oh, Zach. Zach, the new guy? Yeah.

The new guy. So I impressed him really early. I built up a relationship with this guy. That company where we worked ended up by being bought by three m, like the this big, big company. Yeah.

And he was laid off because three m Health Information Systems, they had a VP of marketing. They didn't need him. He was laid off. When he was laid off, I learned, I didn't know ahead of time, the dude lived two miles from me. And so I asked him if, you know, you wanna meet for coffee.

I'm happy to help you, yada yada. One thing led to another, and I'm helping him with his resume. And I always think of of self promotion, in a certain way. Self promotion is really hard for a lot of people. It really is.

It really is. So one of the ways around that, and this is what I did with this guy, is think of yourself as the product. The product is you. You are the product. It's like LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn, when you're writing and building your profile, the you are the product. So just disassociate from you, the person, and think of you as the product. So what what is this product? Well, I'm a product marketer, if I'm doing it for me. I'm a product marketer.

Okay. What does that mean? Like you said, I tell stories. I get things really clear. I help people understand things in an instant.

I I perhaps persuade them or show them why what we have is the right choice for them. So so I helped him with his resume by positioning him, hey. You're the product here, so let's talk about you as the product. You're a CMO. You're not just any CMO.

What are the things that make you stand out? We rewrote his resume based on that. He ended up landing a job at a health tech company, a start up y type company. They were on their way to being public, and he pulled me along. And that was the beginning of ten years of working with this guy, where we'd go to a company, we'd either build it up, take it public.

In one case, build it up, take it public, and then and then it was sold. That was VisiQ, was sold to Phillips Healthcare. The the positive of that was this guy was amazing. I learned that my my boss at that first company, where I first encountered this guy, his name's Rob. So when I first encountered Rob, he instilled that same thing in his directors, so I learned that very quickly.

So I was always I I was always getting the right, attention from from people. I was able to do great work. Rob had this thing where he'd always give you enough rope. And he used to say, I give you enough rope to either hang yourself or explore. It's one or the other, right, and find the right way.

But it was always safe. You could do anything, and it was safe because you knew that the CMO had your back. So that was great for ten years, until it wasn't. We were at another start up that wasn't performing, and the board was impatient, and they kicked out the founder. And so they installed someone from the board as the CEO of this company, and this guy was a bully.

And my my guy, Rob, the the VP, or CMO, he became kind of the whipping boy. He was like he was getting oh my gosh. It was it was brutal. Yeah. Punching bag.

So so that's exactly right. So so he's a punching bag, and he just, he's just like, I'm I'm gonna start looking. So they kicked him to the curb as he was looking. He's like, you know what? I'm gonna retire.

I'm moving to Florida. I'm out. And he left. He moved to Florida. So I'm still at this company.

I'm still doing my thing, but I was the right hand guy. All of a sudden now, I'm the punching bag. And it was brutal. So I started looking. And I I didn't I didn't look I didn't look to go somewhere.

I looked to run away from something, and that's what I was doing. So I got the first one that came up, I took, and I'm building product marketing out at this company. I got was the the job. First product marketing hire, we wanna build out product marketing. We have a killer product.

They did. I mean, that product was absolutely still is. Absolutely unbelievable product. They've been successful, hugely successful on the back of that product. So the first few months there were honeymoon.

It was fine. But, again, VP of marketing there, he was well, I let me let me take a step back. The double edged sword of working with that guy, Rob, for ten years was I was always the right hand guy. I never had a seat at the executive table. I had a lot of accountability.

I had a lot of responsibility that would have been similar. I did board reporting. I presented to the board. I I had a lot of high senior level, responsibilities that were mine, that I took on. But I didn't have the title.

I wasn't I didn't have a seat at the table. I was influencing, but I was influencing it Happens a lot with product marketing. You influence without having true authority. But that was 10. You can see all my gray hair.

I started going gray in my thirties. Marketing in technology is a young person's game, and I learned that very quickly. I learned that very quickly. When I first started looking for that job, it was like I couldn't find anything, and then this one came, oh, let's go. So long way long way of saying, I I never had that seat at the executive table.

So I'm building out product marketing. VP at this new place is an old school GE manager, and to me, that's a pejorative. Right? His his way of managing was exactly like this. If it's your idea and it's a good idea, it's my idea.

And if it's your idea and it's a bad idea, then it's your fault. Yeah. And that's how he managed. And I learned it pretty quickly, but I kind of ignored it. I remember one of my first days, I was invited out to a dinner with a Gartner analyst.

So if you know technology, Gartner's a a, industry analyst, super influential. And this may be something for another podcast. I think The Analyst Game is it's a it's a scam. Yeah. It's such a scam.

But but, anyway, people, they're huge influencers. Gartner, they're huge influencers. And so we're at a dinner. I was invited to go. There were probably, like, 10 people sitting around the table with this analyst.

And I was new. And I wasn't confident with what I was saying at all, because I I didn't really know. I said something very quietly in the conversation. No one heard it, but this VP was sitting next to me. He repeats it.

And the analyst goes, oh, yes. That's exactly right. That's that's what I'm talking about. And this guy just took all the credit. Nothing.

And so, in that moment, it was like, oh, that's how it is here. So I had my I had my antenna up, you know. It was but, anyway, it was it was a really great honeymoon for a while until it wasn't. And that's when the yelling started, Because I was being told what I needed to do all the time, and I knew this stuff was wrong. This guy was a micromanager.

You need to say this. You need to do it this way. You need, you need, you need. So I I, I'm being yelled at all the time because the things that I'm doing aren't working. I get a performance review that I'm used to getting stellar performance reviews and doing stellar work, and I'm getting performance reviews that are like, you you know, you met expectations.

What are you talking about? Like, I did everything. Well, it didn't work. What you did didn't work. Well, I did what you told me to do.

So I, I remember the date. I I mean, I was I was so stressed out because I would started looking for a job, and I couldn't find anything. You know, it was always $5,060,000 dollars apart. It was crazy. People wanted to hire me for lower level positions because I had never had a seat at the table.

So I remember those days. It was July of twenty fifteen. So, it's a while ago. But July of twenty fifteen, I used to keep a pad by my bed, kinda like here, kinda like this one, little notebook. I used to keep a pad by my bed because I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and I'd I'd wanna write.

I just had to get it out of my head. If it was out of my head, I could go back to sleep. So this one night, I woke up. I had this epiphany. And I went downstairs and I wrote it out.

Like, this is pretty good and I wanna post it on social, you know, on LinkedIn. I was writing a lot of articles on LinkedIn back then. Articles were like the thing in 2015. Oh, articles. They were kinda new.

And so I wrote this article, and I published it then on LinkedIn at, like, two in the morning. Because I said I thought to myself, if I don't publish it now, I'm gonna chicken out. And I called it the key to the universe. It was 07/21/2015, and I remember this explicitly because it really writing this and living this truly changed my life, I mean, for for the positive. Yeah.

It goes back to a book I read, but that's another that's another thing too. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to this is side note, and I'll come back. When it comes to writing, when it comes to storytelling, a lot of writers, not just a lot of marketers, a lot of writers, anyone that writes all the time, you get into creative ruts sometimes, and it's hard to write. The best thing to do in those circumstances is just start to consume, and consume the right things.

Right? Not go on social media and consume all this stuff, but find good books. Yeah. You know, I love to watch movies. I get so such great ideas just from watching certain movies that have nothing to I mean, not not documentaries, like, actual movies.

I remember, you know, there's a movie with Ben Affleck, called The Accountant, which is about this accountant who's like, yeah. And he's like, I I wrote a whole book because I'm watching The Accountant on a plane. This is a few years ago. And I it just gave me so many different ideas. Had nothing to do with the movie.

It had nothing to do with accounting. It just gave me so many ideas. So when you're in a rut, definitely consume. So, anyway, I, I wrote this thing. I called it the key to the universe, and I started living this way.

And the key to the universe is two things. They're really hard. Let me rephrase that. The key to the universe is two things. They're really easy.

They're really simple. They're not easy. They're really simple, but it's they're not easy. It's simple to do, but it's not easy to do. Yeah.

The key is you have to do them together. Those two things are, one, do the right thing. And the idea behind that is if you have experience in what you're doing thinking of your job. If you have experience in what you're doing, and you have even just a modicum of ethics, you know what the right thing to do is in any circumstance. And if you're not sure, you have a good inkling what the right thing should be.

And the second thing is don't be afraid of what happens when you do the right thing. And I truly believe that some of the greatest things to ever happen won't. And part of that part of that, of course, is because people don't know how to talk about their amazing innovations. But part of that also is just fear. It's it's fear.

It's uncertainty. It's doubt in your own abilities. It's that fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And the reality is that the worst thing that could happen usually isn't that bad. This comes straight from that book.

I've gotta pull that book out. Four Hour Workweek. Tim Ferriss, Four Hour Workweek. I've never read this full book. I've just read the first section.

But that first section was enough for me. And he talks about the what's the worst thing that could happen? And the worst thing that could happen usually isn't that bad. It's not that bad at all. And usually doesn't happen.

Right. But if you make a plan, of what you would do in that circumstance, if that worst thing happens, well, now you have nothing to be afraid of. So I started living that way at that at that company. I started doing what I knew was right and not worrying about being yelled at, not worrying about being fired, not worrying really about anything at all. Just knowing that I was going to do what I knew was right, and I was going to do it to the best of my ability.

And I have so many stories from that company of different things that I did, which, look, it takes a lot of guts to do to take this approach. A lot of guts. You have to get comfortable with this comfort for sure. I did a lot of off the wall things. I also did my best work my entire career at this company, by far.

I have relationships with salespeople now. I left that company seven plus years ago, almost, you know, seven and a quarter years ago at the time we're talking today. I still speak with some of them regularly. It was just tight relationships, and I made them a lot of money. A lot of money.

So now to answer your question, I told you it was a long story, but you needed that context. Yeah. At this last place, I got pushed out because I was doing the right thing. We had so this company again, it's a it's it's a pretty stellar company. They were they were, Wall Street darlings for a while.

You know, they were a unicorn before they were unicorn. Or before they were public, they were one of the unicorns. They were it's it's a stellar product that they have, and and they do really well with that product. The founder of the company, super smart guy, super nice guy. He though always wants to have his head he loved marketing.

He didn't really know marketing. He thought he knew marketing, but he always wanted to have his hands in what was done. And his VP of marketing was always a yes man. Always. And so, at sales kickoff, he'd always he'd always deliver the new corporate deck.

This sales is what you are going to present in every first meeting. The corporate deck. It changed every year. She shouldn't really do. If something's working if something's working, you keep going at it till it's not working anymore.

It's like my basketball game. I'm tall. You may not know from me sitting here, but I'm about six foot four. Yeah. I am terrible at basketball.

I play xylophone. I don't play basketball. Yeah. I know. I'm I'm six two, and I play piano.

Yeah. There you go. Yeah. There you go. But but when I was 14, I wanted to get better at basketball, so my parents sent me to this, mister basketball camp.

You know? So I went to this basketball camp for a couple weeks, and I was terrible. But after the first week, they're like, you're terrible. We're moving you to be when you were 14, you were either with the nine to thirteen year olds or the 15 18 year olds. I was super tall, so they put me with the 15 18 year olds.

I was terrible at basketball. It was the worst. Yeah. I hated it. They moved me down, which was fine, except when you got moved down, you bunked with the people that you played with.

So I got moved out of my bunk and put into a bunk with, at least to me, a bunch of little kids. Yeah. So, we had the one on one contest. And I won the one on one contest for the eight to 13 year olds as 14 as, like, a six foot two fourteen year old. Yeah.

But but I learned one move at basketball camp, and it always worked. So I never evolved. It was like it always worked. Ain't broke. Yeah.

You know? Yeah. It's it's like messaging. Right? So messaging I I like to say this all the time.

All messaging is a hypothesis until it's not. And messaging you should use, once you figure out that you have the right message, should hammer that again and again and again, and figure out the different ways to say it, and say it again and again and again. And when you're sick of it, when you're sick of it, that probably means it's starting to really embed itself. You go back to that message until it doesn't work. So anyway, this guy would do this this presentation every every year.

And it was '2 so this was 02/2017. And he was like, 2,017 is gonna be the year of the story. It's gonna be the year of the story. He was bit by the story telling bug. So he told he did this whole presentation, which I had access to because I was in marketing, and marketing helped them put it together.

So make it pretty. Yeah. Yeah. Roll your eyes, make it pretty. You hear that a lot as a marketer in a a product marketer in the corporate world.

So I knew what his I knew what his presentation was gonna be like, and I knew what he was telling the sales team, how he was teaching them to tell the story of the company was wrong. He was positioning our product as the hero of the story, which now, it seems as common knowledge. Hey, hero journey. We're not the hero. We're the guide.

Like, a lot of companies understand that now. But back in 2017, that was relatively a new way of thinking. Yeah. Even though it was a new way of thinking, even though, really, that way of thinking has been around since 1948. Joseph Campbell is a researcher and author, wrote a book called, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 10,000 Faces?

I don't remember. I should know this. But we'll say, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and he did research on storytelling throughout the ages. And he found that all storytelling follows a similar pattern, and it's called the hero journey. So I won't go into that.

But so what I did is he presented in the morning. I was I was presenting, at night or in the evening. And I was supposed to present in the evening. I got bumped to the next very next day. First slot.

So that first slot, I got up on stage. I had it was a thirty minute presentation. I had a twenty minute attention step. So at sales kickoff, I would always have a presentation, and I'd always do something a little more outrageous every year. The first year, I danced down the aisle to a song.

I called out some messaging that I was told that I shouldn't use. That's another story too. I don't wanna go I don't wanna go into too many different stories here. Yeah. The next year, I decided I was gonna show up late.

I wasn't late, but we were talking about getting into the mind of your buyer. I was talking about the buyer journey and how to get into the mind of your buyer. And I I would always have a resource when I was that that they'd they'd get. So in that case, it was something called the buyer journey baseline. So it mapped behaviors, learning needs, different needs of the buyer, different mindsets of the buyer as they go through that path to purchase.

Because if you know on a general sense what your buyers are thinking as they go through, as they go down the path to purchase, you can better serve them. You can give them more of the right more of the right information. You know the right way to articulate things. You know what messages are gonna work and what messages aren't going to work based on where they are on that path to purchase. So, that year, I waited for the the sales leader to introduce me and get aggravated.

So he's like, Zach? Zach? Has anyone seen Zach? Where the hell is this guy? And then I have a I had a wireless mic, and I was behind the closed door just peeking in.

And I'd say, hi. It's Zach. You know, that product marketing guy? You know, you can stop looking for me. I'm in your brain.

And and so, you know, it did wild stuff. So at the attention step at this sales kickoff, I found this really obscure, study by this team of researchers at Northwestern, and it was about olfactory perception. So olfactory perception is a theory that olfactory is your means your sense of smell. That it's a theory that you predict a smell before you smell it. And it's a combination of your senses, your sense of smell, and your memories, your long term memories, you predict a smell before you smell it.

It's why you've smelled roses before, and before you smell those roses, you know they're either gonna be unbelievable or they're gonna be total crap. There's nothing in between. If you smell roses, they're either, oh, oh, wow, or, nope. Nope. When you when you see, when when you're taking an old bottle of milk out of the fridge, you're not quite sure, it's right on the cusp of that date, You're not sure and you open it up.

You make a face when you're smelling it because you're predicting that smell before you smell it. Right. When you when you, see a a skunk. You know? And I the last example I used for them, I said, you know, it's like when you when you see the coffee urn, you know, when you see that coffee urn, you oh oh, yeah.

Coffee. Yeah. You don't even have to, smell it. If you've been out late on sales kickoff, you don't even have to smell it. You see it.

Boom. You're predicting the smell before you smell it. So I said, okay. So if we can predict a smell before we smell it, what about other senses? How about what makes a song a hit?

There has to be something that makes a song a hit. That's the difference between some dude sitting on his couch and another dude playing in front of a hundred thousand adoring fans, and there is. There there is a thing that makes a song a hit. So I I found out I found this one song. It's really fun.

It's it's called Four Chords. It's by a band, a comedy band out of Australia, maybe New Zealand. The Axis of Awesome. And they they play four chords, and they sing over those four chords. And there are thousands and thousands of pop songs, rock songs, any songs that follow the same chord pattern.

So I didn't say that. I I found the one song that had the same four chords from start to finish through the refrains, through the chorus, through everything. Just the same four chords. It's Demons by Imagine Dragons. I don't know if you know that song.

It's been a hot minute since that was on the charts. Yep. I got the karaoke version of it. I embedded it in my slides. And I said I said to people, I said, who can name this song?

I'll give you some hints. This is a former college band out of Las Vegas, Nevada. I had all these other stats. Oh, it's it's Imagine Dragons, and and, you know, they have had a lot of influences. You know?

And some of them are strange, you might not imagine. But some of them, you know well, you know what? It's just easier to show you. I have to I have to apologize. I'm a terrible singer.

And I I sang parts of eight, ten songs right on stage. I gave a standing ovation, whatever. Then I say, okay. So we know that you can predict a smell before you smell it. We know what makes a song a hit.

So what makes a story stick? So I had all of the dude's slides, all the founder's slides. So I took the one slide that he did of the case study. It was for Sprint. So Sprint doesn't really doesn't exist anymore, but Sprint was a top three mobile carrier.

They were pretty big, and the way that he told the story, he was just saying, hey, you know, our product because of our product, our product got this program, the service to you or something like that, out, and it was amazing. Our product's amazing. It was basically just showing that we're we're the best, we're amazing, which is the stuff I've always railed against. So I said I did I used to say I said that story on that slide exactly how he told it, and then I said, well, I think our product's great. You know, I think our company is great.

You think our company is great. But do we want our buyers to want to be like our company? No. We don't. We want them to be like Sprint.

We want them to want to be like Sprint. And so I presented the hero journey. And then I said, what would this look like? What would this story look like, this case study look like, if we told it this way? And I told the story with the hero journey.

And the hero of that story was the crack IT team at Sprint that that built the Sprint Direct to You program in three weeks because they had a secret weapon. They had our product. And they went from an idea that the CEO had in his shower to an app that was functional and working an entire program across three different cities in three weeks or four weeks. I don't remember the numbers. That was that was amazing.

Our crack IT team at at Sprint, they they were phenomenal. So I then went through and gave the the reasons, the the top 10 of how to tell a story, and I'm teaching them how to tell a story. So I essentially got up on stage and told the entire company, you know, Salesforce of about 400 people at that time, that the way that the founder CEO was telling them they should tell stories was wrong, and they should tell stories the way that was right. And as soon as that was over, standing ovation, it was great. I loved it.

I'm a kudos hound. Yeah. I'm passing my new boss, the new CMO, who is the college former college roommate of the founder. I'm passing him in the hall, and I look at him, and he looks immediately down and to his right, and he will not look at me. And I thought, uh-oh.

And so the next next nine months over the next nine months, I you know, they started to build a case to get rid of me. So I had two weeks I I got a put on a performance improvement plan, which I had never been on. PIP. Yep. Yep.

Which was complete and utter bullshit. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Unbelievable.

Like, unbelievable. My boss, that CMO, told me to stop coming to a meeting for free trials. I was in in charge of communication for it because he said, your work has been stellar and it's done now. I don't want to waste your time coming to these meetings. You have lots of other things to focus on.

Awesome. Don't have to go to a meeting. Great. Thanks. Appreciate it.

He said, I'll I'll clue you in if you need to come to the meeting. Great. But he said that to me. He never sent that to me. He said that to me.

I stopped going to the meetings. The number one thing on that PIP, you stopped going to the meetings. It was unbelievable. So I I didn't have anything lined up. I was fortunate because the company had gone public.

I had a decent amount of shares. Not life changing money, but more than a year's worth of salary. Yeah. And so I said, you know what? If there was ever a time to go out on my own, I I don't I knew already, like, not gonna find anything.

I didn't even try to look this time. I just started trying to line up clients. And so those two weeks, they told me they they didn't kick me out. I was trying to finish and wrap everything up. I was told not to do any of it.

So I brought in my own laptop, and I just did my own work and lined up clients for those two weeks. And then, then I I left. And then I left. But I quit. The the day I quit was the best.

He had moved me to content from product marketing because he wanted to do product marketing. I think this guy wanted to do all the things that I was doing. Yeah. And have the relationships with sales and all that stuff. So he moved me to content.

Content marketing is not product marketing. Very, very different. And so I convinced the company, because I did have the company's best interests in mind. It was the right thing to do. I convinced them to invest in another analyst, SiriusDecisions.

They were eventually bought by a bigger analyst. But they had a whole content framework, and we brought them in. And they were we were embedding their framework in everything that we did. The kickoff was the day that I was going to resign. So I came back from the beach from a two week vacation, And that day, that Monday, it was it was launch day of of Sirius.

They were coming in to kick off. I went through that. Sirius took me to lunch. I came back. I my boss said, hey.

Can we catch up with you about that? That was awesome. The Sirius was awesome, because he was a likable guy, at least to your face. And he came into my office, and he's like, what did you think? I said, I thought that was awesome.

He's like, yeah. Me too. And then I had my my resignation letter, and I said, I'm out. And he just sat there, like, he just sat there. So I went out on my own terms.

I wasn't gonna put up with the pip because they clearly didn't want me. And and, you know, and I like I said, I pushed the envelope. And some you you have to be willing to do great things. I truly believe you have to be willing to take risks. And it was a risk.

It was a risk. And that always could have happened. I did a lot of crazy things at at that place. Yeah. And and so, you know, it it I'd also did a lot of great things at that place.

Most of the crazy things ended up being pretty great. Made some salespeople a lot of money. So that is how I left the corporate world. And the very first day after my last day, I actually went back to the same area because I had a client in the same city. It was pretty fun.

There you go. There you go. So switching gears a little bit into storytelling. Right? You you mentioned the hero's journey.

You mentioned companies are becoming more aware of that. Is there any another is there another way to tell a story, or is that just like the Oh, sure. There are lots of ways to tell a story. You don't have to have a hero journey. That's just one way of telling a story where hero journey is an adventure.

Right? It's an adventure. It doesn't have to be an adventure story. There are so many stories out there that are hero journeys, a lot of movies that you wouldn't expect. Yeah.

Like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. That's a hero journey. But the hero isn't the person you think. It's not Ferris Bueller. The hero in that story is Cameron.

Cameron is I don't know if you know the movie. I mean, it's Yeah. No. Yeah. Cameron Law.

Father. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The bar scene. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

K. It's it's about it's about Cameron and Cameron's journey to overcoming this angst that he has with his father and his family. Yeah. It's finding Nemo was a hero journey. Yeah.

You know? And and and Nemo's dad, Marlon, is the hero. He's he's the hero. But, anyway, you asked about stories that aren't hero journeys. I have to think about that, but, of course, their story doesn't have to be a hero journey.

Yeah. Now I wanna study that. I wanna I wanna look at that, and I can't think of one. Yeah. I can't think of one off the top of my head, but I'm sure they're I'm sure that Well, storytelling is just it's it's it's always held such an interest with me and, you know, especially when it comes to getting people to care when there's so much noise in the Internet, you know, in today's world with all this technology and, like you said, social media.

Like, we're getting we're getting inundated with so many things at all different times that how do you set yourself apart? Like, how do you tell a really good story, you know, and how do you get people to care Well in this environment? Part of it is not just the story. It's what you say and how you say it. A story can a store now a story can be a word, or a story can be a sentence for sure.

Yeah. But, really, when it comes to b to b marketing, it's the message that drives the story. The story is how how you tell the story is based and rooted in what's the thing we want to get across. Yeah. How do we wanna say that is the story.

So, you know, from a messaging perspective these days, it's there are a couple things. First off, you can't make stuff up. And companies do this all the time. Companies that that don't either don't put the research in and don't understand their audience, Don't dive deep and and get in the mind of their audience so they truly understand the problems that they solve that their audience is facing, how those problems show up, what the effects of those problems are, what the business impact is of those effects, what are the feelings that that are that problem causes, the negative emotions that those cause in the buying audience, in the the audience. How do those show up?

How do they articulate those things? It's it's it's uncovering all of that stuff, and then presenting the message, that goes back to the buyer journey. It just depends where people are on the path to purchase. If you're targeting people who are unaware that they have the problem that you solve, even though you know that they have it, well, then how you deliver that message is not gonna be about your product. It's gonna be about that problem.

Yeah. It's gonna be about the effects of that problem. It's gonna be about the warning signs of that problem. So a lot of it has to do with the how, how things are articulated. So it is storytelling partially.

You know, not all copy is storytelling. I've seen a trend recently, I guess, where it's just, you know yeah. People especially with tech, right, where it's like they're just throwing features and they're throwing, like, you know, here's all the advantages of this thing, right, instead of, you know, necessarily why it might help you or why, you know, why you should care or how it'll impact your life. But it's just like, you know, here's here's here's the updates. You know?

And it's just like, well, that's not that's not, you know, that's not getting people to really Well, no. Because you know why? You know why? Because no one gives a shit about your product until they do. Yeah.

No one gives a shit about your product until they do. Yeah. And when they do, that stuff works. When they care and you you've already broken through, yeah, talk about features all you want. The features that they care about.

Right. You know, the features that address the needs that they have. Sure. But before then, nobody cares about your features. No one cares until they do.

And so that's why I say, I said it early on, it's the first rule of product messaging. You don't talk about the product. You do. You do talk about the product, but it's peripheral. You talk about those warning signs.

You talk about that you have a problem. You talk about the problem itself. You talk about the emotions that are felt when you have this problem. You talk about the ancillary effects of the problem, the business impact of all those effects. That's what you talk about.

It's still about your product, except it's not. Yeah. Zach, I wanna thank you so much for appearing on Fractional Hustle today. You know, if there's a if there's a place where people can come find you, where they can connect with you, where would be the best place to do that? Yeah.

Sure. You mostly find me on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn on posting all the time there. Zachmessler.com. That's my website.

You can read blogs there. There's some resources there. And then I I just started something. I committed to myself that I do it for at least six months. The third Wednesday of every month at 3PM eastern time, I'm hosting a program called Nail the Message, Sell More Stuff.

It's free, and what we do is is I deliver, I I train, I talk about one core messaging thing, a way that you can get your message across more effectively, show you how to use it, how to do it. And then we open it up for questions. It's an hour. It's ask me anything. It's free.

And it's it's truly for founders, marketers, consultants, anyone who's selling something who has a a little bit of trouble articulating the value of what they sell. The third Wednesday of every month, and you can hook up on the on the registration at nailthemessage.com. Amazing. Zach Messler, thank you very much. I I got a lot out of this podcast recording today, so I really, really appreciate Yeah.

Awesome. You know, fountain of wisdom. And, we appreciate it. Maybe, you know, we'll have you again sometime. You know?

Hey. Anytime. I anytime. We'd love to come back and chat with you more. You because, you know, I think we're gonna discuss the surface.

You know? I feel like Dude. Dude. Twenty years is a long time. Like, I have so many stories.

Holy cow. I I you know, sometimes what happens is you get stories in the stories, which happened today. So Yeah. Yeah. Well, no.

We appreciate it. So, yeah, we'll definitely have to to revisit this in the future. And thank you so much again, and we'll see you next time, folks, on Fractional Hustle.