020: Power of Storytelling in Software, Managing Perceived Value with Kyle Lacy

Kyle Lacy is the VP of Marketing at Lessonly, a high-growth, venture-backed enterprise learning software. He is the author of 3 books and he did over 100 speaking engagements around the world between 2012 and 2014 when he was at Exact Target (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud). We discuss ego, your perceived value, storytelling, and using event marketing and personal branding to build meaningful connections with both buyers and peers.

Show highlights:

06:00 - Kyle's music background made him love marketing. Playing in a band got him interested in applying marketing concepts to get shows and promote. Music also taught Kyle how to tell a great story.

09:00 - Ego and your perceived value are reflections of your truth. And, they help you move forward when you're a young professional. One thing that Kyle learned early in his career: if you can't execute and deliver on your perceived value then you're a liar, whether you mean to or not. Kyle started his early career with his own firm, Brand Swag, which was both successful and struggled because of Kyle's ego early in his career.

12:30 - Then, Kyle was on the global speaking circuit at Exact Target (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud). He learned the importance of balancing his personal-self with his professional-self. He felt that if he wasn't careful, there actually wasn't a lot of distinction between Kyle the speaker and Kyle the human. While it was fun for him, his profession got somewhat over-consuming.

14:30 - From speaking so much around the globe, Kyle learned how to tell a story better than his competitors in software. While they were dumping marketing tool feature sets on audiences, Kyle was focused on how lives changed from email marketing and shared those wins, relevant to the audience, whether that was in Germany, Asia, or the US.

15:30 - Kyle is more nervous in front of 50 people or small networking room, but can more easily get in front of a huge room of people. How can I control my personal brand better? In a 3,000 person setting they cannot question you, but in a small setting you can.

18:00 - Executives building a personal brand and network. All LinkedIn is doing is a place to cultivate the network. You can only handle 100 relationships well, how do you handle the rest?

22:00 - managing tech stack, Kyle things about if it's helping to hit goals or not and if it's a nice to have, probably won't buy it as a narrow "point tool"

25:00 - SDRs at Lessonly tying marketing to SDR activity. Doing a lot of direct mail sends. Marketing is good at continuous rapid improvement, which works for SDR team which is very process driven. When running a test, need a kick-off and a retro. SDRs feel more creative under marketing and more license to test.

29:00 - 5 Tradeshows and 14 field events per territory. No presentations, doing "Taste of Lessonly" where prospects come and talk and hangout, versus come and have content. Why does it work? Great customers and people are tired of being sold to. Instead, people just love meeting peers and learn from each other. Don't like when vendor tells them what to do. For paid, doing Google and Bing but no real banner ads. Spends focus with direct mail sends.

33:00 - Paid versus direct mail when thinking about Contact-based approach. Do you spend $300 to maybe put a banner ad in front of that person, or send $100 to get highly personalized direct mail to their desk, and with tracking you know they got it? Too easy to buy tech to scale and automate, but really we're just human. Feature sets are old news, so how do you win

35:00 - Comes back to focus and targeted, who are your lists? If you feel you need leads you're just going to thow money wherever. VERSUS we want 10 top call centers in US, we are going to create campaigns specifically for that. It depends on go to market, because MailChimp is doing something different because their contract values. Fundamentals: know your deal size, know how many accounts you're going after.

39:00 - Getting ready for annual event. NOT a product conference but it's all about learning, developing, and teaching people how to do better work. Most keynotes are customers. How do you have better conversations? How do you share products before you're ready?