136 | Building confidence: The power of communication & storytelling

Jon Busby: Welcome again to another episode of the Tech Marketing Podcast. I'm joined in the virtual recording booth today by Rebecca McKenzie, global director of product marketing and salesforce. Rebecca, welcome to the Tech Marketing Podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Rebecca Mackenzie: Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

Jon Busby: You, you're both global director of product marketing and salesforce and founder of the Confident Communication Coach, something that. It's also a big passion of mine, but probably the first thing to cover off, because we were just debating the weather in our prequel. You're based in Madrid.

Like how did you end up being, you start in the U. S. How did you end up in Madrid?

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah, so I, like you said, I grew up in the U. S., which you can tell from my accent, I sounded like I arrived yesterday. But I I left there when I was 18. So I haven't lived in the U. S. for 15 years. And I went to university in Scotland.

And then after that, moved to London. I did six months in Australia and then moved to London and was working in London. I started at Salesforce seven and a half years ago. So about a year after I'd moved to London and during COVID, I got tired of being in lockdown. I lived by myself and I was like, I'm tired of being by myself.

I'm a very extroverted person. So I decided to take advantage of all the working from home. And went to Spain for six weeks and lived in a different city every week and just worked from there, traveled around Spain, and I honestly just, I fell in love with how I felt when I was here. Like my experience in Spain is that you just feel like you're living life every day.

And I, I loved that, like I would wake up and I would do something in the morning and then I would work and then after work, I wouldn't sit and watch Netflix. I would go out, have dinner, walk around. There's so much life that night here. And I was just I love the fun of being here. So I went back to London, then did another two trips out to Spain.

And I had actually planned to move back to California. I talked to my manager about it, telling her, I want to be closer to my sisters and my family. And we'd made this whole plan for me to move back to California. And then I went out there for one of the Salesforce Dreamforce conferences.

And I just felt like it didn't feel quite right. I felt like I was settling, going home. And then I did a trip to Madrid with my friend and I was walking around and I was like, I wish I could just live here. And she was like, you can. And I was like, no, that's crazy. I can't live in Spain.

She's it's not that crazy. And I was like, it's not. And then the whole weekend, I was like, what are 10 reasons I should live here? What are 10 reasons I shouldn't? And then I came back, thought no, I want to live in Spain and had to go to my manager and say, you know how I said, I want to be close to my sisters and I miss my family.

And she's yeah. And I was like, Instead, I want to live to a country where I don't really speak the language and don't know anyone. I I've been here for a year and a half now and really just chased that feeling of living life and that's how I felt every day since I got here. I feel like I really live my life.

I have three days every day and I'm just so happy, I wake up happy every day. So that was my journey to Spain.

Jon Busby: Have you embraced the CSD yet? Is there a, is there, cause that was one of the things that I spent a fair amount when I was at university, it was cheaper for us to actually go out to Spain than it was to go home at the time, which is crazy to think about it and horrendous for many kind of ESG reasons, but it was a different time.

So we did a few trips to Barcelona and some of the other cities. And I remember the culture of kind of, things would just be open later. So have you fully embraced the working culture in Spain yet?

Rebecca Mackenzie: I take a proper lunch now when I lived in London, a state lunch at my desk.

Now I go out to a restaurant. There's a lot of restaurants here. You probably experienced this when you're in Barcelona, they do a menu del via. So it's like 11 to 15 euros and you get bread, a drink, a starter, a main course, a dessert. And like you sit and you have lunch and so I do that pretty much every day now.

So that's been really nice, like I've really adopted that part of a culture. And then going out at night. Life starts at 9pm and at Salesforce, because a lot of my team is in the US, I work shifted hours, so I start around 12 and then I'll work till about 8. And anywhere else I would have no life, but here it's oh, perfect, it's about an hour till we start heading out for dinner.

So it works really well for me and my shifted schedule. Yeah, it suits my life very well, but I have adapted, yes, to answer your question. Which is the

Jon Busby: absolute polar opposite of what it's like going out in California. The amount of times I've missed lunch in California because canteens just close at 1.

30.  

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah, California's like early. I think because it's almost like last in the time zones, it's three hours behind New York. So everyone starts earlier and then I think everyone's like catching up and they finish earlier. Whereas in Spain it's the opposite.

Jon Busby: I got told it was the traffic.

I, that's the reason everyone told me it was the traffic. But I think this comes on to this comes on to our next, important question because we're debating the time that we're having lunch here, but it's what unique perspective, and being in, you've had. You just mentioned three different cultures, maybe four if we count Scotland how has that shaped your approach to communicating and storytelling?

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah, I love this question because I think, I love different cultures. I think it's really interesting and the way that you communicate in different cultures is very different. Like I said, I grew up in the US, but then I have British parents. My parents are Scottish, so I grew up with sort of British sense of humor.

And and then I lived in Europe my whole adult life. So I feel like I know both and it's been very interesting. Working for an American style company and Salesforce is a global company, but it's still an American in style. And previously at Salesforce, I had an EMEA role. So a lot of my role was really thinking, how do we adapt our messaging to fit with a European audience when it comes out so American?

And I think it's really interesting, the difference, like I would say in the U. S. The storytelling is all about inspiring people. It's that Hollywood story, that hero's journey. And you're focusing on success. You're persuading. You're focusing on action. Whereas European communication is a little bit more subtle.

I think it's more about debate and getting to a resolution. For example, if I'm running one of my coaching courses in the U. S., I might call it something like the power of persuasion. But if I'm running a coaching course in Europe, I might call it something like the art of storytelling. So it's a little bit different, like this, the strengths versus the subtleness.

Or in, in marketing, if I'm doing a webinar, in the U. S. it's very interactive. Like we grow up, our grade, part of our grade is based on participation. So if you don't raise your hand, you're not going to get an A Whereas that's not a thing in Europe, you're not graded on participation, so the interaction is different.

So I might do a lot of Q& A for a webinar in the U. S., whereas for a webinar in Europe, I might do a panel with different perspectives, and they're debating on the merits of different things. So that's where I see you can do a webinar, but the way you deliver the webinar is different depending on your audience.

Jon Busby: Yeah, no, I think I always think, and obviously I've grown up in the UK and spent time in the US and I've always thought that having a foundation in Europe where we do have, every European culture is different as well, right? The Dutch tend to prefer making decisions in committee, in Germany it might just tend to be one person, or in France it's, in France it would be very democratic and be made up of a committee, like even inside that small, say small, but like in the group of of those European countries things can be very different in how they communicate and make decisions.

But I've always felt that it's given us a better perspective to then grow into the US because we have that. More subtlety to our approach that would, would you agree? And what was it a big adjustment coming across on understanding those differences?

Rebecca Mackenzie: I think I started to understand the differences.

It's funny because my whole working life has been in Europe. So I would say. My communication style tended to be more European, even though I grew up in the U. S., but I went to university and everything in Europe. So I, I really noticed when I started working at Salesforce oh, this feels very American or this messaging feels very like what I, Would do sort of the way that I would communicate and not in high school, but that my experience there and so I Found it really interesting sort of understanding like how you tailor things and because I had an EMEA role Like you said you can talk about Europe overall, but every country is also very different So the way that you would then tailor that messaging, we did a customer advisory board once and we had this And we all thought I don't know, our customer is going to want to see this.

Maybe it's like too much. And then we put it up. We talked through it and we're like, okay, that went well. And then we had a German customer. And she was like, do you have a more detailed version of this? We were like, Oh, yes. Because German's a lot of detail and a lot of richness. And so it was really interesting.

We were worried is this too detailed? And they were like, this isn't detailed enough. So it's really interesting how every country is different and that's why it's so important to have local marketing, local sales, local perspectives, because it's not about delivering everything as a script.

It's about knowing the story that you're trying to tell and then adapting that story for the audience, whether that's culturally or what their role is.

Jon Busby: The No, completely agree. I was just thinking about how we make decisions in the UK and I think we just we what the difference in the UK is we go for what would make what would be the worst decision and then prioritise that it tends to be based on our history.

Very sorry, fellow Britons. The I want to come into a question that you said in one of our prep calls, and it stuck with me as someone that has, hosts as a podcast host has also gone through my own journey on being a public speaker. It's something that really resonated with me, which is, you mentioned this concept of doing things even when you're scared.

And, can you share a moment when you had to push through that fear and what it taught you? And what would be your advice to other people that may, might not be confident communicators themselves?

Rebecca Mackenzie: I think it's, the reason why it's so important to do things even when you're scared is the most important things are scary.

So those things that are going to dramatically change your life, whether you're asking someone on a date or, applying for a job or doing a big presentation, these things are scary for a reason because we're, we know that they're important and we know that they have significance and that's scary because we want a very specific outcome.

And so that's why I say it's okay to be scared, but you have to lean into doing those things because you want to have the life that you want. And I think even a great example of doing things scared, move me moving to Spain. Like I didn't know anyone, but I knew I wanted to live in Spain. And I knew that I would figure it out and advice I give a lot as a way to help manage those nerves is to think about times in your life where you are successful.

So if you have a big presentation coming up and you're like, I'm not a good presenter. I would usually ask you tell me about a time where you did give a good presentation. And you'd be like like a year ago, I had this, panel discussion, and that went really well. But ever since then, I've been really nervous.

And I'm like, okay, but you can do it well. And you'd be like, yeah. And you're like, okay, why would this time be bad, or like moving to Spain for me, I was like, I've moved to Scotland. I've moved to London. I moved to Australia. It seems really scary, but I know I can do it because I've done it before.

So looking for those proof points where you actually have been successful and focusing on those. Instead of focusing on what you're making up could go bad because you're usually we're imagining things will go really bad, and that's not reality, but we feel what we imagine. So we feel that fear if we imagine it going badly, if we imagine it being successful, we feel excited.

And so it's really a lot about your perspective and especially if you're about to give a big presentation don't think about what could go wrong. Think about what could go right.

Jon Busby: Yeah I think that's a great concept. And as I think of, as I now let's dovetail this into the B2B marketing world.

Confidence is what I think is at the, is at everyone's fingertips. And I put that in multiple different ways. I think if we look at the B2B buyer today, we were at an element where we're seeing a crisis of confidence. I, what is it? Something like 40 percent of, sales are currently stuck with people just not being confident.

It's the right way to move forward. So it's some, it's ludicrous figure nearly 2 trillion. I think it's stuck in B2B sales pipeline somewhere. Um, do you go about, and I'm trying to think of the right way of phrasing this, Rebecca, because I think there's, it wasn't in our talking points, but it's just something that kind of struck me is like, how do you go about trying to build confidence in your marketing and in your, like, how do you build confidence in someone that you're the right solution to go with?

Because there's one element where you've got to be confident yourself as a communicator, but then you also need to make them feel that you're the right solution or you're the right outcome.

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah. To build confidence in you. Yeah. And I think one of the best ways to help build other people's confidence in you is showing them, not telling them, but showing them how you've been successful.

So if I want you to hire me as a coach, I'm not going to tell you, Hey, I'm a great coach. I'm going to show you the 50 presentations that I've done and show you if I can do this, I can teach you how to do it. And it's the same thing with B2B marketing. We can say this is our solution. This is what you can do.

But it's much more powerful to say, here are your competitors. Here are how they're doing it. Here's someone else in your industry. Look how successful they are. So it's almost like the, that fear of the unknown, like you're not making a purchase because you don't want to make the wrong decision and go down the wrong path.

So it's about. Building that confidence that is the right decision because look at these other people who made this decision and look how successful they've been. They have the scale that you want. They've saved the costs that you wish you wanted. They have the customer satisfaction that your manager keeps telling you, you need to deliver.

And so it's showing, not telling, I think is the best way to build confidence in, to build other people's confidence in you or your product.

Jon Busby: I think that's, you've struck a real chord with me there because especially in the world of AI. I see that I'm calling it AI fatigue, we back during COVID, we had this concept of digital fatigue, if any, if everyone members of everyone's sick of doing zoom calls and it's all too virtual.

But I think we're seeing the same impact with AI, and that's where there is a lot of companies talking about the theory about what it can achieve, but very few people really showing tangible evidence of where it's been successful. And yet the hype is there that the FOMO is there the hype is there alongside it to say you should be doing it.

And I, I see that as a fundamental kind of, if we combine all those different elements together, the FOMO on one side and the. FOMO and hype on one side and the fatigue on the other. I would say I'm concerned that a lot of businesses are not necessarily making the right decision today with how they're applying it.

And we agree that showing stuff is the better way of, showing it, bringing it to life. Actually being able to demonstrate it is the best way of building confidence in that solution.

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah. And doing it yourself, like Salesforce is customer zero for. A lot of our own products, we launched AI agents for our own customer service, and we use our own Salesforce products and we run sessions called Salesforce on Salesforce, which is, let me show you how we use our own products.

So it's again, having confidence, like, why would you want to do something that I don't do myself, you

Speaker: know?

Rebecca Mackenzie: So it's again, showing other people successful, but I think also you're right, which. With that fatigue where it's like everyone does AI or provides you with an AI solution, like where's the proof if I'm confident that I can use my own product?

Salesforce is a huge company and if we're confident in leveraging our own products to help us be more successful. Then other companies should feel confident doing the same.

Jon Busby: And that definitely shows I'm speaking to a product marketeer. I remember the first time I used the term dogfooding in a meeting and everyone looked at me super blank.

What are you saying? And this whole concept of eat your own dog food, everyone thought I'd gone mental. But, I think, and I've been to some of your Salesforce and Salesforce sessions. That, that's one of the reasons, together we've been a user of Salesforce for.

Goodness, probably coming up close to 10 years now. And it was those, it was the confidence that, that, that was built there that allowed us to. Be confident that we were making the right decision, which kind of brings me on actually to it, to a question that I love to ask anyone from Salesforce.

Having been to two dream forces, having seen multiple world tours, the way I would describe how anyone presents at Salesforce is they are the best presenter you'll ever see. Like you have a culture of presenting that is so far in excess of any other B2B brand, like how is that shaped inside an organization?

Like, how does that come to life?

Rebecca Mackenzie: I think it starts from the top. Mark Benioff is a hundred percent a storyteller and he might be a CEO, but he's also a marketer and that culture, the culture of your executive team weaves down into everything else that you do. If I want to come up with a new project, I need to tell a story around that.

I can't just say, Hey, I want to go do this. Voice of the customer thing. It's Hey, these three things aren't working. Here's how we're going to solve it. It's that culture of telling a story is really important. And our internal events, our internal trainings are just as, I would almost say beautiful as our external events.

We take just as seriously everything that we do internally as we do externally. And it's if you want to get things done, In corporate, in a very matrixed environment, you need to be able to confidently present your ideas. When I was on our EMEA team, the way that we were structured, I was on an EMEA product marketing team, but everything was executed locally.

So it was, a local marketer or a local sales program person who would execute on my ideas. And If I can't do the last mile of execution, I have to be very influential because I'm convincing someone to spend their time, their budget on my ideas instead of someone else's. So that ability to present the vision of why my idea is going to help them achieve their goals, and then we can partner together to do it, is really important.

Jon Busby: That begs another question in my head, especially managing You know, I've managed technical teams and brought them along on a journey. And there's one thing about techies is some of us are good at presenting and some of us, much happier being behind the curtain. Do you not think a culture like that favors extroverts over introverts?

And how do you. How would you coach someone who might not be that comfortable who might label themselves as an introvert to be able to succeed in that kind of culture?

Rebecca Mackenzie: I don't think being an introvert means that you're not good at presenting like X extrovert and introvert is how you get your energy and your thought process.

So an extrovert might think out loud. So I'm going to talk to you while I'm thinking, and then I'll come up with the decision and I'm very extroverted. So I talk through my ideas. Whereas introverts will think through their ideas first and then say something and what they say may be very powerful.

Speaker: And

Rebecca Mackenzie: so it's just about if you're introverted and you don't feel comfortable, just thinking your ideas out loud, that's okay. You can help adapt. So maybe you want to prepare more ahead of time or ask whoever is running a meeting, for example what's on the agenda? So you can think about what is your point of view on things.

Before you go into that meeting so you can come prepared. It's about preparing in the way that works best for you so that you can be the most successful. But Even if you're introverted, it doesn't mean that you can't be persuasive. You may be more persuasive because you might say less things, but the things you say are very powerful and important.

Whereas an extrovert might tell you a bunch of stuff and then someone grabs onto one of the things that they say. So it's just different different kind of ways of communicating and thinking, but. I would say prepare for preparing a way that helps you be most successful and adapt to the culture. So if you are at a company where a culture is presenting and sharing ideas, if you're introverted, like I said, do that extra preparation so that you can show up in a way that helps you be successful in the context of how you operate because you want to be successful.

Jon Busby: Yeah, no, I, it's, you're exactly right it was just it's something that always goes through my head to make sure that you get the most balanced view in the room, because I think a lot of people feel that, you have to be loud and boisterous, and maybe not boisterous is the wrong word, but very extroverted to get your opinion across and I think it's important to make sure you always get things balanced.

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah, and being a great communicator is not just about speaking, it's equally important to listen. Because you want to respond and in a way that's appropriate and it should be a conversation. So if I just share all my ideas to you, that doesn't make me a good communicator. That just makes me very outgoing, talkative person.

But if I'm sharing my ideas and then I notice that someone isn't talking, I could, ask them what they're thinking. Or I might adapt to say Hey. Let's all take two minutes to think about this, and then let's have a conversation if I know I have a lot of introverts in the room, for example. Or maybe I'll have the meeting, but if someone was quiet, maybe I'll ask them after the meeting Hey, what did you think of that meeting?

What are your thoughts? What's your point of view? Maybe they don't want to speak loudly in the meeting, but they might still have a strong point of view. And the worst thing is to do a meeting where the people that talk the most share their point of view. And then the quiet people afterwards are like I actually thought this is not a very good idea.

But you don't know that you don't get that information. That's when bad decisions are made. So making sure that you're getting everyone's point of view, whether it's in the meeting or outside of the meeting, is also important if you want to be a good communicator and you want to be a good leader.

Jon Busby: It's it I, it tends to be referred to as the hippo effect if I remember correctly that highest paid opinion in the room I think is that correct? Yeah, the hippo effect, right? I've even thrown people out of meeting rooms before for that reason, for that exact reason, because I just think sometimes, you don't want a hierarchy to get in the way of making a good decision.

But talking about balance, one question that always comes up is if we talk about brand versus demand a lot in the podcast, but you mentioned the voice of the customer before, like, how do you ban it? One thing that Salesforce is very good at, and you meant you did talk about this earlier with bringing, um, the voice of the customer or the The customer being the hero.

Like, how do you get a balance between brand and product messaging and the voice of the customer is in everything that you do?

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah, I think it's really about understanding what are the key challenges that customers face? And are in your marketing? Are you answering those challenges? So I love doing our keynotes.

And one of my favorite moments is actually after you present a keynote and you walk down from the stage, everyone claps and Gets up to leave and they'll always be like maybe 10 people that come up to you and ask you a bunch of questions and that is the gold dust because they're either telling you this is really top of mind for me so I need to ask it right now while you're here or they're going to ask you something that they didn't understand in your presentation and that tells you that something in your messaging is off or something in the way you're communicating is off because you didn't communicate in a way that like, I didn't quite understand this or how do I do this?

So for me, like those are the moments where I really love listening to customers. And after the questions, I write down all the questions that they asked, because that should then inform the next time I do that keynote. Am I making sure I'm answering those questions or am I starting to see a trend in the questions that are being asked?

And sometimes it's interesting to have a question back, like maybe I'll ask, how much of your service do you think will be run by AI in the next five years? And if I'm in an event, every person I speak to, whether it's the networking drinks, just walking around sitting, standing next to someone having a coffee, ask them that same question.

And then you can start to do this sort of focus group of information where you can be like I talked to 30 people today. And almost all of them said it's going to be close to 50%. That's really interesting for me to know and I can use that information. The next time I do a keynote, I can be like, Hey, around 50 percent of you, or most of you think 50 percent of your agents will be AI.

Raise your hand if that's true. So you can start to gather that information just through having those conversations and really paying attention to the questions that people are asking you. That's why I said listening is just as important as speaking when you want to be a good communicator.

Jon Busby: That begs a question for me because having a role in product marketing, like asking those kind of questions when you're speaking to your potential customers, like what's your relationship with some of the other departments and specifically I'm going to start with kind of product management or product ownership, is your role to feed those back into that teams.

And therefore to make the product better. Like how does that manifest itself?

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah, exactly. So when you're thinking a voice of the customer, there's someone could tell you a piece of information and the value of that information is different depending on who, what your role is. So if someone tells me a challenge and I share that to the product manager, maybe that's informing a feature in the product.

And then I tell that to, our CMO and maybe that is then informing. A change in the way that we message or I tell it to a salesperson and they think, Oh, this is a question that I should ask about because we have a solution for that. So if I ask, that's a challenge. Now I have a reason to have another conversation.

So that same piece of information is relative to the department that you're in. So for me again, it's like sharing that information back and that's where you then get into. How do you tailor your message? Because if I'm coming back, I spoke to a bunch of customers and events. Okay. And I'm presenting back to product.

It's much more like these are the challenges that they're facing in the product. And then I'll go to our marketing team and say, they're all talking about cost cutting. We don't have cost cutting anywhere on our challenge slides. Like we need to fix that. And then I'll go to sales and I'll say, the next time you're with a customer, ask them, like, how important is cutting costs to you right now?

So it's adapting.

Jon Busby: What I love about this because I think product marketing is one of these roles that people are going to tack on. But from what, how the way you've just described it there, I, it almost feels like it's the nexus point, the center of how sales, marketing, product management, everything kind of ties together.

Because that, the product managers may not get to go where they should be speaking to customers, but they're not going to, they're not going to be out to necessary at customer events like you are sales team are going to be speaking to prospective customers, but potentially not existing ones.

And marketing we rarely get let out of the box as well. So it's I feel like I'm seeing that as almost as a triangle between product sales and marketing and then product marketing being the center. Think it tends to, normally it tends to be lathered under marketing and kind of put.

Put to one side would you say firstly, would you agree with that diagram that I've thrown together but also would you say it's a miss that from other companies in the, how they've operated?

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah, I agree with your diagram. Because when I'm thinking about who are my stakeholders, it's product, it's marketing and it's sales.

And so I'm supporting all three of those stakeholders. And I also. Do all three of those roles. I have more in depth knowledge on our product than a marketer would. I know our market and our customers maybe more than a product manager would. And I, when I first started at Salesforce, I was in a room with a bunch of AEs and I was like, Oh, I'm the marketer and the product marketer, I'm not in sales.

And the head of sales stopped me. And he was like. You are in sales. And I was like, Okay, I learned my lesson. I'm also in sales. If I'm speaking to customers, I'm also selling. It's just in a different way than an A. E. might. So you are fulfilling all of those roles, and they're also your stakeholders at the same time.

And I think a lot of companies product marketing such a new function that a lot of companies, I think, don't quite know what to do with it. And product marketing can be Yeah. really different. Like you can have product marketing that's very focused on sales enablement. You have product marketing that's very much partnered with the product team or you're really close to the marketing team, helping them really deliver the right messaging through their marketing campaigns.

So depending on the type of product marketer, you can lean into those. Groups more. And if it's you're at a big enterprise company, you might have 40 product marketers on a team. So everyone's obviously going to have different strengths. If you're at a small startup, you might have one person trying to do all those things.

And so I think a lot of companies don't quite know what to do with a product marketer yet, because it's such a matrix role and the skill set really varies.

Jon Busby: This is the kind of debate that I love having. The way that you describe it there, I actually think it needs a different title because I don't feel, I didn't feel calling it product marketing is quite right.

I feel like that does ladder it into the marketing team. While in some ways it's much more of a evangelist or It's a role that should sit up and above and outside of some of the other departments to be able to recognize the matrix responsibilities. You, I guess I'm gonna, I'm gonna say if you were to give yourself a different title, like, how would you describe it?

Rebecca Mackenzie: That's a hard question. I was actually going to ask you what would you call it? That's why I was thinking

Jon Busby: about saying, I think we're onto something here. I think there's going to be a fundamental shift. Like we're seeing businesses move towards solutions and products. Like Salesforce started that model with with Sassy, I believe was your original mascot.

Saying, software doesn't need to be, you were talking about cloud based software before cloud based software was a thing back in 2001. So you've built some of the models here, but yeah, I don't know how to answer it. Like I product evangelist is okay, but I think that doesn't quite recognize some of the roles in sales.

Rebecca Mackenzie: Yeah. And that seems very outward facing whereas product marketing is also very. Inward facing. Exactly. You're the expert of your product. You're the expert of your buyer. And you're the expert of your market. And you leverage that expertise inwardly and outwardly depending on who you're talking to.

So it's very hard. Yeah. I don't have an answer for what I would call it. But it is a very it's a very matrixed role and it means different things to different people depending on their experience. I work a lot with Product Marketing Alliance and they have like blogs and diagrams and all these things to try and figure this out.

And I don't think anyone has an answer to what is the right title for this very complex matrix role?

Jon Busby: Because I think part of the problem is just, it's got the wrong title today. I think it should be something, you could call it a product communicator, but even that's not quite right.

Like it's a product comes, it just. There's definitely something new, but this kind of brings me on to the next question. We've talked around that trifecta of product sales and marketing. But there's a third layer to the fourth layer to this, if depending on how we're going to look at it.

So if we think of it as a triangle, there's something at the top, which is how you then go and communicate to your C level execs or your leadership. And I think that's something that is going through a lot of change at the moment. On some of our previous podcast episodes, we've debated. How the CMO role is now changing to be in some organizations to be about growth and disruption to handle AI and others to handle things like revenue and sales ops and potentially in product to be things like the chief product officer.

So I think that's evolving, but What would be your, as you adapt your communication strategy to speaking to those other departments and specifically C level or leadership, like how do you change your style to gain their buy in?

Rebecca Mackenzie: I think it really depends on what their goals are.

It's with any sort of communication, like the very first thing you want to do is understand your audience. And so you could tell, for example, if I'm talking to a customer and I'm going to speak to their CEO, and then I'm going to speak to their CFO, I may tell the same customer story, but I'm going to tell it in a different way, depending on the measures that they care about, like, how are they measured?

What do they care about? So if I talk about a customer story and talking to the CFO, I'm going to focus on the ROI or the cost savings or how did this company scale? So how did they become more efficient? And if I'm talking to the CEO, I might talk more about how is this innovative? How are they growing their brand?

How are their customers more successful? How are their customers happier? How are they gaining market share? So it could be the same story, but The lever that you pull in the story or the part of the story that you spend more time on changes depending on the person that you're talking to because there's only certain things that they really care about and you should talk about the things that they care about to them.

Jon Busby: I love that analogy of different levers because I think that's what the reason why we're seeing so much change in the CMO role. We've seen a, I'm going to think of it as a shift away from traditional CMO metrics of leads or vanity metrics, as you might call it towards ones that are much more aligned to how the business makes money and what they, what levers they need to pull in order to grow the business.

And I think it's just having that framework of being cognizant of who you're communicating to is absolutely vital. So yeah, no, couldn't agree more. Shifting gears now. Cause you, we talked a lot about Salesforce recently, talk about one of our, both of our passions here, which is being more confident communicators.

I, myself is I'm a Toastmaster, which is a very American organization, which I'm sure you've heard or been part of. So it's always been something that's been dear to my heart. And part of that is how you come across with your own brand and how you're perceived by others. Like, how do you, how.

What's been your tell me your story on how you've built your own personal brand and how and the journey you've been on to to create the confidence code that I'm going to get this morning. Confident communication coach. There we go. So many C's. I love a good bit of alliteration. Tell me the story on how you've got that.

Rebecca Mackenzie: Really thinking about my personal brand a couple of years ago. So in 2023. As like very early 2023, like January, February there were all the big tech layoffs and every tech company was laying off 10 percent of their employees. And that kind of shook me awake a little bit because I realized like I'd been at Salesforce for a long time and so much of the value that I had of myself was my role at Salesforce.

So I was a director of product marketing at Salesforce. That's who I was. And I realized how easy it is for that to get taken away from you. If someone gives you something, they can take it away. If you build it yourself, no one can take it away from you. And I realized then that if I got made redundant and that got taken away from me, I would be like, I don't know who I am.

What is my value? Am I good at anything? And so I I went on this journey to decide I need to create a personal brand that no one can take away from me that really is focused on who I am intrinsically. What are my values? What am I passionate about? And And for me, that was communication and public speaking.

I've done keynotes at Salesforce for years, and the reason I've done so many keynotes at Salesforce is because I kept raising my hand. I would say for the first five years, like I put my hand up for all of these presentations that I did. No one was like, Rebecca, do you want to come do this thing on stage?

It was like, No, I was like, I can do it. Let me do it. I'm going to do it. Kept raising my hand, kept advocating for myself. And for me I think that the way. That you can build your confidence and your visibility by being a good communicator and stepping into those situations where you have a lot of eyes looking on you.

It's scary, but it's really transformational for your career. And so that's what I was passionate about. And then I decided to lean into my passion. So I started creating content. On LinkedIn, talking about communication and sharing my journey. Here's how I'm preparing for a keynote. This is what I do.

I loved I love teaching and helping people. And I did this work with a career coach a few years ago to define what is my purpose? Because I didn't feel like just marketing software was, like, my purpose in life. It was what I did. I liked it, but it wasn't my purpose. And what I concluded was that my purpose is to inspire people to be the best versions of themselves.

And I came to that because I loved whenever I would do something and someone would say Oh, you inspired me to do this too. Or, I didn't think I could do this, but then I saw you do it and maybe I can. And I loved that feeling of helping people become better, become more confident, step into themselves.

And and so I just started creating content on LinkedIn, sharing this, and it's amazing actually, like my visibility grew internally a lot. And Salesforce is such a big company that just sharing what you're doing on Slack, like it's hard for people to notice. And sometimes you need to pick a different platform.

So by sharing what I was doing on LinkedIn, like a lot of people noticed. And I remember I was in the elevator once in London. And some random person I never recognized was like, Oh, you're the girl that posts those videos on LinkedIn. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like I was recognized. Wow I am building something.

Then that started evolving and I wanted to start helping people more and that involved into the Confident Communication Coach. And then last year I launched my business doing communication coaching on the side and I'm following my passion, which is amazing because then I love what I'm doing.

I could talk about it all day. I've taken 10 minutes to answer this question. Because I could take the whole hour just talking about this.

Jon Busby: No I, no, I completely, I think it's important for everyone to find their passion as well. Strangely, I did a talk last week, so strangely, I did talk last week to a bunch of school to a school assembly around exactly that topic, which is if you can find your passion and I like, there's Steve Jobs quotes.

I can't remember the other quote I used, but there's. If you can align your passion with your work, then you're just going to create great work. And so I think it's important to find that and get the two aligned. And I can't think of anywhere where being a confident communicator, you would be more successful than Salesforce.

Cause every, like I say, everyone there is the best presenter they've ever seen.

Rebecca Mackenzie: I love it so much. And seeing people transform is really amazing. I have a client I was coaching her. She had a big presentation. Coming up and she was very nervous. She'd had some feedback in the past that she didn't like.

And she really, it was really important to her. And so we did a lot of crap. And then I texted her afterwards and I was like, how was it? And she's I felt like I shined. And that's what I want people to feel like. they're shining and if I can help them feel like that, then that's wow, that's amazing.

Jon Busby: Talking about being confident and shining, like one of the pieces of learning that I've gone through being a communicator. So I'm interested to see if you've learned a a similar lesson or whether this is bad practice. I'm not sure. But the I remember the first few public talks I did, and I felt like it probably took me days to prepare for those scripting them, prepping them, and I actually find now, and the general feedback I've had is, that almost the less I prep, the better they come out, because they become much more natural, they become much more natural.

Yeah. The storytelling just bubbles to the surface and it becomes easier to connect with the audience. So I'm gonna ask that question as as coaching others to be confident communicators, do you think there's a, do you think there's a stigma about you have, you've got to do lots and lots of prep, or do you think it just, does it just vary per person or is it about confidence?

Rebecca Mackenzie: It varies per person and it varies by experience and And the type of presentation that you're doing. So for example, if I'm doing a presentation about my coaching, I might prepare less because that's intrinsically I'm coming up with all of that information myself. If I'm presenting the keynote at Salesforce, there's a lot of different minds that go into putting that keynote together.

So it's not just coming out of my head, but it's coming out of. A lot of different heads, and it's a lot of messaging that I need to get right, and it's really important to get

Speaker: right,

Rebecca Mackenzie: and so for me, the amount that you practice, again, depends on, did you put the content together yourself, or is it someone else's content that you're presenting?

What is the audience like? Are you going to have questions? Can you answer all those questions automatically? Or do you need to do a lot of prep beforehand? I always tell people I, I don't like slide notes. I have a rule for myself and for everyone that I coach, which is no slide notes, no cue cards, because the goal is that you always want to appear as confident as possible.

And so slide notes make you look less confident because you're reading, you're looking down and you're relying on them and cue cards are the same thing. And if you're nervous and your hands shake and everyone sees the cue cards shaking, that's a dead giveaway, and so I say practice so that you can deliver something without notes.

But again it's not about learning a script. It's about knowing the story that you want to tell. For example, when you think about your favorite movie, so my favorite movie is Die Hard. I love Die Hard. I've seen it like, I don't know, 25 times. I watch it every Christmas, and I used to watch it whenever I was sick when I was a kid.

So I just love this movie. And if someone was to say, tell me Die Hard. Tell me the story of Die Hard. I wouldn't tell them the script, but I could give a pretty detailed account of what happens in that movie. But they feel like they've watched the movie and it's the same with doing a presentation.

So every time you do your presentation, it might sound a little bit different. If you're trying to remember a script, then you worry like, what if I don't remember what to say? If you stop trying to know a script and instead know the story you want to tell, that fear goes away because you can always tell your story in a different way.

Just what's the story that you want to tell? What are the key points you want to get across? And practice those things. And then make sure that you can do, if technology fails, you can still deliver your presentation. So I've had demos break. I've had technology fail with 900 eyes staring up at me. I still need to deliver my presentation.

So I would say prepare so that if technology fails, you can still tell a good story and get your key points across. And don't rely on notes. Just no notes now. That's the rule. Forever.

Jon Busby: Yeah. Yeah, I remember actually being taught that lesson about preparing for if technology breaks by one of my university lecturers as his technology broke and he wasn't prepared for it.

It was it was that that, that left a lasting memory with me. But the, I would probably say that the two things that really stood out and the journey I've been on, one element was that, your audience. don't know what they don't know. So if you forget something, it doesn't matter.

As long as you told the right story. And the second one, and this is stuck with me all the way through my speaking, speaking career is people are there to listen to what you have to say. So you should feel confident in how you're going to, how you're going to say it. Like it, and the way that manifests itself is, I think we have this need when you first get into speaking of wanting to fill every second with content.

And actually you should try and own the pauses and the spaces and not be afraid because they are there to listen to you. Those are the two bits of advice that I was told what if you were to give our audience two bits of advice to be better and more confident communicators, what would their takeaway be?

Rebecca Mackenzie: I think my first piece of advice is it's okay if you don't feel like you're good at presenting, like you can get there. There's this saying that I really like, which is in order to be a master, you must first be a disaster. And it's very true, like the first time we do something, we're not good at it. The only way we get better is by doing it.

Every time we do it, we get incrementally better. And then one day we're good at something. And it may feel very natural or to the outside, it might be like, wow, they're just really good at presenting, but they didn't know the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 presentations that you gave before that weren't as good. And so I think the first step is to not be so hard on yourself and accept that yeah, maybe I need to practice to get better and the more you do it, the better you'll be.

And I think the other piece of advice I would say is. Don't try to be someone else. So lean into your personality. If you're super analytical, then lean into that, present your, do your presentations with the depth and information. And if you're like really energetic person and you like to bounce around, Don't try to be very stoic.

Just lean into being energetic because when you lean into your personality, you come across as authentic and people want to get to know you. People like different types of people. So I would say I don't really the advice, pick someone you like presenting and try and copy what they do.

I don't think it's very good because that person might be totally different from you. But if you lean into who you are, you're going to come across as more authentic, you're going to come across as more interesting, and you can focus on what you want to say because you're not trying to portray someone else when you're in that meeting room or on that stage.

Jon Busby: I couldn't agree more. In fact, that's a journey I've been on myself. Like I always felt like business present presentations need to have slides with points on and and that's the way that we make them is through PowerPoint. And actually I've learned that the more genuine and authentic you can be, the better your message will land.

So some great advice there. One final question, Rebecca, before we close out is. We've talked about how you can be better communicators personally, but how about as a culture? Like, how would an organization go about creating, a storytelling culture like you have at Salesforce? What would be your one tip there?

Rebecca Mackenzie: I think that starts with the individual. So if it's a CEO that wants a storytelling culture, again, like I said, things start from the top. You need to start telling things in this, like using storytelling to get your point across. If you want a storytelling culture in your business, you need to be a storyteller yourself.

And I think a lot of people We talk a lot about storytelling in business without really knowing what that means. And I think it's really important to figure out when I say I want to be a storyteller, what does that mean? Does it mean that I want to convince you of something? Does it mean I want to entertain you?

Do I want you to come on a journey with me? Do I want you to just leave knowing more than you knew before? So what is, why am I telling you this story? How do I want you to feel afterwards? It's the same if you're, writing a TV show or writing a movie. How do you want the audience to feel after you tell them this story?

And in business, it's maybe we want to persuade our employees of something. We want to get them really excited about the new launch that we're doing. Or we want customers to think of a challenge that they didn't know they had. Oh, I didn't know I had that gap. I'd never thought of that before. So it's about really thinking what's the effect that you're trying to create and then figure out the right story to get you there.

And there's so many different storytelling frameworks, you can look them up online different ways to communicate your story. No,

Jon Busby: I know. I love that. And I think I agree. It starts from the top. Rebecca, it's been a pleasure having you on a tech marketing podcast today. I've learned a lot about how I can communicate better.

Hopefully our listeners have learned the same. But yeah, thank you. Thank you for joining me in the virtual recording booth.