On this episode, I was joined by Daryl Stickley, Founder of Rich Interactive, a corporate storytelling and customer advocacy agency that has worked with global brands like Microsoft, Adobe and Accenture. Something he said early in our conversation really resonated with me, which is that it’s easy for organizations to get tunnel vision around their value proposition, when it’s really about the outcome for the customer. He also shares his golden rules on bringing out the best in your customers on camera, the five things to remember as an interviewer, and the importance of showcasing your customer’s customer. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Daryl. 

Margot Leong:   Thank you for joining on this lovely Friday afternoon my time, and I know later afternoon for you. So thank you for spending the rest of your Friday with me, basically. 

Daryl Stickley: Well, thanks for having me. It’s a good way to round off the week. 

Margot Leong: I’d love if you could tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, as well as the story behind Rich Interactive and the services that you provide. 

Daryl Stickley: So Rich Interactive is a specialist storytelling agency. So we focus very much on bringing our customers messaging and language to life. Predominantly, that’s customer advocacy, but it’s not entirely customer advocacy because we also use it for other types of promotional comms and internal comms, where we focus on the target audience and what the target audience wants to hear, which sounds fairly obvious.

But when you actually do it every day of every week, it takes on new meaning and it generally changes the way our customers communicate with all their various parties, the customers and their internal target audiences. Our approach is very much focusing on the quality of the content and the impact that that content has, and more and more so with the voice of the customer. Today, we have a number of big global brands, so people like Microsoft, Adobe, Accenture, Hitachi, Ericsson, and then we have some other customers that are still fairly large organizations, but generally they’re sort of larger partners of some of those channels.

 Margot Leong: Something you mentioned a little bit earlier was the focus on the target audience and what the target audience wants to hear. And it sounds quite obvious, but it actually takes on new meaning because you’ve been doing this for so long. Can you expound on that a little bit more? 

 Daryl Stickley: Yes. So most organizations obviously understand their customers to an extent and the language tends to push into the customer organization a bit, but then stop. You know, they spend all their lives in their organizations and they develop terminology and acronyms and so on, and so they know much more about their proposition then the absolute impact it has.  They obviously have to understand their customers to an extent, but they generally don’t tend to think the way that their customers think. 

The customer comes along and they’re actually paying for an outcome. The tool, the product, the proposition is just an enabler and it’s the outcome that is the key thing. And most organizations lose sight of that, so it doesn’t take them very long before they get into what they do. But it’s really what is the outcome that counts. And what is the outcome from the position of that industry? What’s the outcome from that role? And how can you evidence that? 

 And again, it still sounds obvious, but what we find is that when we actually work with our customers and  we’ve done workshops for some very large sales teams within big organizations and some of their channels, and they are good for a few minutes on talking about their customers, but they just don’t go all the way into the way that the customers think and speak.

I can give you an example, actually.  So we were doing a project for Adobe recently about  Adobe Sign, which is a software solution that allows you to send documents to people, they sign digitally and then it’s tracked and managed, and it’s effectively a digital contractual arrangement. So it’s great for organizing all of your important documents, and if you talk to most people about what that does and what that is, and talk to some of the people in Adobe, they’re very good at telling you how easy it is to use, because it is and how simple it is for the person you send it to to sign it because they can sign it just by typing. They can sign it with their finger, they’ve got four different ways of signing it.

 But the thing is the reality of that is somewhat different. If you look at it from the perspective of the customer. So to turn that on its head and we were, doing a piece about the impact it has for small business because it works in small business as well as large enterprise. And we picked up on an element from a customer story, which is that they have to send statements of works out to their customers to get the customer over the line.  They’d say, this is what we’re going to do for you. Here’s a statement of works. And then they get the statement of work signed and back, and they can start the project.

But the thing is if you do that as an email attachment, which is what most people do, the customer then has to print that, they have to sign it on a piece of paper, they then have to photograph it and then they have to send it back. So it’s a bit of hassle. So quite a few of them don’t send it back. The sales person proceeds anyway, because they get an email confirmation of some sort saying, yes, we want to go ahead, but it’s not the confirmation of the document. And so with Adobe Sign, when you do that it’s easy. People sign it quickly, they send it back.

And so what happens for that business is their success rate of getting contracts signed and returned goes up. So they’ve got much more formal arrangement and much quicker. And also they don’t have to chase the customer because the software chases the customer automatically. You can set a chase every day, chase every other day, chase twice a week, that sort of thing.

And so the real language there, the hidden language is that if you adopt Adobe Sign, you will get a faster and higher uptake rate of your statements of work signed off, and you won’t spend any time chasing your customers, which means you will be able to get on and talk to them and you will have more time investing in the relationship rather than hassling them. And that’s sort of the perfect example of how customer language is different in the customer organization than in the vendor organization. 

 Margot Leong: It’s interesting that you bring this up because that sounds like the job of product marketing. Wouldn’t the product marketing team be involved in a lot of those conversations to get to know the customer and then to be able to craft the value prop in that way? Or I’m trying to sort of understand what’s the discrepancy here. What’s that worth? Where’s that gap happening, you know?

Daryl Stickley: Sure. Okay. So here’s the difference, really. In 2019, we interviewed 404 C-level execs. And for every story that we tell, which is typically two to three interviews, and they’re not all C level execs, we would spend two to three days crafting the narrative. We would transcribe and typically get  30 to 40 pages of content which we would mark up. Then we would take that marked up content and we’d turn it in audio timelines, which would then be edited until we craft it down to two and a half to three minute piece. And then from there we’d spend another week, week and a half overlaying all the visuals, we’ll go back and shoot visuals to match the story because we want them to sync.

But my point is that we’ll spend about two weeks focused on that story, and we’ll also spend a couple of days with the customer. Sometimes only a day, but often a couple of days. And you get all this content and all this knowledge and all this perspective that nobody else can get because we spend our lives with our customer’s customers, which means that the language we learn and the things that we don’t put in the videos is so much more comprehensive.

So those product marketing people absolutely want to learn their customers, know their customers. But they just simply can’t spend the amount of time that we spend because we just literally get paid to talk to customers all the time and tell their stories. And so that’s really where there’s a discrepancy and there’s also one thing that we do differently to most of our competition, and that is that we have a team of producers and all of them have been senior level marketeers. So they obviously understand what we’re trying to achieve for our customers because they’d been managing sizeable marketing programs themselves, and they spend about two years learning how to actually work with the creative process, how to interview people, how to relax those people, have to get the right content, how to direct a camera man to get the content that’s telling the story that you’re telling, how to work with the editors and the animators to pull it all together.

So it’s quite a specialist thing, which is why we’re a single site agency in the UK, and yet we work all over the world. And that’s really the reason that there is that discrepancy just simply because we spend all our time doing it. We spent 20 years considering how to do it. And just to back up that 404 interviews, that’s literally thousands of pages of transcripts that we’ve got and they’re all digitized. So they’re all searchable. So that means that we can effectively go and search across a set of transcripts and say, did this phrase crop up. And if this phrase crops up, who’s using it, how are they using it? And that gives us intelligence that product marketers don’t have. 

Margot Leong: Got it. And then talk to me a little bit about, okay. So when you are, you know, spending the time with customers doing interviews, bringing these customers on camera, are there any tips that you would share that work really well when it comes to having them be the most effective and powerful that they can be in expressing that story. 

Daryl Stickley: Sure. Okay. I wrote the list for this, cause there’s quite a few. So let me just run you through.  One of our golden rules is performance versus content. Performance is king. You can have fantastic content, and if it’s said in a drab and dreary way without any enthusiasm, no one’s going to believe it. No, one’s going to follow it. Whereas you can have a really enthusiastic performance where they don’t nail every phrase, they don’t say it how you wanted them to, but you can just tell that they absolutely are in love with the thing they’re telling you about. And so performance is king always. And so therefore it’s really important that you relax your interviewee and therefore develop a bit of rapport with them.

If we’re filming them onsite, we actually tend to make jokes about one of the other people in the crew who knows that’s going to happen and that’s fine. And because it gives you something to laugh about, and we’ll also settle them in, often with questions that we don’t want them to answer, that we know aren’t going to make the edit, but we’ll just get them talking a little bit. You know, often we’ll talk about their role  so you can ease into the story. So firstly, you need to relax them. We also let them know that we’re there to make them look great because there are different types of film crew, and some of them, you know, the news film crews are out to get a story and that story isn’t always favorable.

And so we explain the edit process and how actually we’re going to spend literally days making your delivery really slick. When you hear it back, you won’t realize how much we’ve done. And you’ll say, Oh, actually I was really good. And that’s a result for us because that’s the outcome that we want and we’re just going to pick the best bits, they’re going to get the approval of it anyway. So anything they say that they don’t like, they can just take out. 

So there’s that element of relaxing them, but then we actually get into the conversation, we want them to have a natural flow. It’s their story. They’ve lived it. And I like to tell people that if if you don’t know it, then how important is it really? Because you’ve lived this story and we want your story. So generally we will ask very open questions, that allow them to tell their story in their order.

So going back to a before, painting a picture of what the situation was like, what the need for change was. Sometimes it’s an opportunity. Sometimes it’s a problem. It could be an acquisition or merger, but let them paint that picture and then just follow them. We don’t have any predetermined questions, so literally never have predetermined questions because if you do, then you can’t explore in a sort of very natural and conversational way. But what we do have is a great knowledge of the flow of the story and a story arc in our minds of what we’re looking for, but with the flexibility to let it change and morph.

 Another thing that we do is we don’t fill the gaps, and if somebody is thinking and they’re aren’t giving the answer,  the tendency is to help them, but that really doesn’t help them. Because if you say it, certainly when we’re telling a customer story, we need them to say it because we’re not in the story. So leaving the gaps and letting them think often you get a really great answer because they were really deep in thought. And then they suddenly think of something and they tell you, and you get a good answer. So not filling the gaps. 

You might have a number of things that you want to bring out of this story, but you just wait until they’ve told their story. And when they’ve told their story and it feels like you’ve got most of it. If you didn’t get everything that you needed, then you can ask questions then, and you can pick up on that. And of course you can ask as you go and they tell you about something, you can drill into it a little bit. But if you’re dictating the structure and the pace and the content of the interview, then you’re not helping them tell their story and be most relaxed and be most conversational.

And so one of the things that we teach ou r interviewers is remember five things during an interview. And this is sort of like juggling. You can’t do it straight away. So while you’re talking to someone and you’re making eye contact and you’re relaxed and you’re there. You’re always considering their performance. How relaxed are they? How are they doing? Do I need to actually say anything, do anything to make them feel more comfortable. 

Then you’re thinking about the content you’re getting because you are following their journey, not yours. Which means you’ve got to remember the story that you wanted and mentally tick off the things that you’re getting. 

And then as they going, you’re also thinking about, does this answer that one? Because it started off really well, then they waffled off, went to this direction that I don’t want. And now they’ve come back to this bit. Does it edit properly? Is it the right thread? Do I need to ask them something that gives me some context and of course you need to know your next question, even though it might change as the content goes along. Because when they finish, you need to be ready to come straight back because if you pause and stop and go, Oh, what’s next, it doesn’t give you this sort of natural back and forth. It makes them forget that there’s a process going on here. And then of course, you’ve also got to remember what new questions and topics you want to ask them about based on what they’ve just told you. 

So there’s actually quite a lot going on there, but all of those things are designed to fit around the person that you’re interviewing so that they have the best experience. That will help them deliver much better content.

One other thing that I would say as well is that people often spend a long time asking them about the decisions they made to choose whatever proposition or thing that we’re telling the story about. And so they ask them about how did you decide and what was the reasons? And if you spend too much time there, then they think they’ve told you all around why your proposition is great. So when you actually get into the after, now you’ve consumed it. Tell me what’s good about it. They tend to summarize what they’ve already told you, because they think they’ve told you, you know, we decided to buy this because we thought that there would be lower cost of ownership. You’d be able to deliver twice as much in half the time, but that was all based on a before. 

It’s an opinion, and it has less gravitas than if they actually say, well, we’ve been using the product for six months now and we’ve got a lower cost of ownership and we can deliver. And we are delivering twice as much in half the time. That carries much more weight because obviously we want to hear from people that are really doing it and living it.

I mean, there’s quite a lot there, and there’s probably more to it than that. But they’re all designed to sit around the interviewee and make them feel like they’re just having this natural conversation.

There’s one other thing I just thought about as well, which is we pretend that we don’t know the story. We pretend that we know a little bit, but not much. And we go out of our way, when we prepped with the customer, that the person who’s doing the interview, doesn’t spend very much time with them so that you can actually say, I  know a little bit about this. I’ve got a few notes, but actually I don’t know a lot. And then when you ask them the question, you need them to explain it to you is what you’re putting across to them. So you say, well, I know a little bit about it, but tell me about that. And so they feel that they actually telling you a story for real.

And when you’re explaining something to someone who doesn’t know, you do a much better job than when you’re explaining something to someone and you know that they know, and they’re just looking for content. So having that belief that you don’t really know that much really means that their delivery is actually just better, more natural and has the right sort of level of detail. So all of those things go together to effectively make a good interview.

Margot Leong: It’s a lot to keep track of, but I can see how all of them are really important to keep in mind, not only while you’re filming, but also thinking about the future of when you start getting into the editing room. Right? How do you make sure that you are capturing everything as effectively as you can, because you also have the limited time in which you are working with that person. So it’s really important to keep all of these things top of mind.

Daryl Stickley: Yeah. And it’s something you can’t do straight away. Anyone who’s new to this? I would say the first thing you want to do is just be aware of the other person’s performance and think about how you can relax them. Then, if you can’t keep on top of everything else, just naturally follow the conversation because you will get a story and you will be able to edit that story. You’ll learn from it that maybe they didn’t say this, and you should have asked that, but that’s how you get better.

 But if you start by saying, right, I’m a bit nervous, I haven’t done much of this. I’ve written a list of questions, then already you’ve just ruled yourself out of getting a natural delivery because it becomes a question and answer session and not a conversation. And we most commonly get interviewees saying, wow, that was really easy and much more straightforward than I thought, and I quite enjoyed that. And you know, we’ve had some fairly senior, I’m thinking of a CIO of a multi-national organization saying, well, I really like it when you come and talk to me because I don’t really have to think. I just talked to you and you actually do all the hard work and that’s how it should be. You know, you want people to feel good about talking to you again, because actually there is often a story in going back and finding out what happened a year or two later, and you want those people to enjoy that. 

 Margot Leong: We talked about capturing the interview itself, but what are some of the ways in which you enjoy telling the arc of the story the most? How does that typically flow and look like? What do you think is the most impactful there? 

Daryl Stickley: What I would say is that we teach a sort of go-to story arc for people that aren’t that experienced and can’t therefore flex and change and work differently, depending on what they’re seeing. You know, one of the most common problems we see with customer stories is that they tend to be a collection of soundbites that are a bit disjointed and it’s hard for the viewer to know where they are in the story. And generally we like our stories to flow so that they start somewhere. You understand who the protagonist is, what their aspirations are. You then understand what they’ve managed to achieve, their success and then you get into how that was achieved and who with, and then you end on something really emotionally positive. 

So to break that down sometimes you don’t need to know the organization. If you’re talking about a large organization, take Boeing or in the UK, the NHS. You don’t really need to introduce who they are, so therefore you can get straight into what was the problem, what was the situation? And just get the story going. But if it’s  another organization, a more specialist one, you need to know a little bit about them, but not more than 15 or 20 seconds, just enough to understand and relate. And then you want to get straight into what was their problem, because hopefully that problem or challenge or opportunity is like yours. And if it’s not, then you’re probably not the target audience. So you need to know a little bit about that and then what they did about it, so you’ve got some context of what the story is.

 Then you really want to get into what’s happened. What are the outcomes? What’s changed as a result of this? And that’s where you’re going to spend mostly for time and generally break it down into different modules of outcomes, because most of these things have a number of different benefits from different perspectives and different types of outcomes. Some are financial, some are market share some are customer satisfaction, et cetera.

When you’ve done that, when you’ve got a good story, you understand what the problem was, you understand how they solved it and that they really have solved it. Then who did you do it with? What was the technology? And that’s really a 30-second piece in a two and a half, three minute video.

Which is something that most people get wrong because they just want to get their proposition in there all the time. But of course the prospects they’re targeting, they don’t really care about the proposition. They care about the outcomes and when they hear the outcomes and they think I want that, I definitely need more of that. I can’t do that in my organization to the level that they’re doing it there. That’s when they’ll only explore the proposition, they’ll explore the partner. And so that’s why you leave that towards the end. 

 And then really you want to close on some sort of emotive answer. So generally we like to ask our interviewees right at the end, how they feel about what they’ve achieved. Often they’ll give you an answer that is sort of more procedural, more of a rationale. And if they do, we’ll ask them again, yes, but how do you feel about it? And that’s really where you get your nice closing statements because you actually get a level of pride or what it means to them, what it means to their colleagues or something that is memorable and really highlights the fact that they want to talk about this solution because they’ve enjoyed it. They’ve enjoyed the outcome. So that’s the standard arc that I would suggest as a go-to. Then of course you can flex that and do all sorts of things. 

So a format that I really quite like is what we call a day in the life, and to give you an example we spent two days in the back of a number of different police cars with one of the UK police forces. We didn’t know what was going to happen. They were the first force in the UK to use tablets to get live information so they could get information about a suspect, they could get information about a person that got missing, they could get map information, they could share pictures with members of the public to say, have you seen this person. And we literally sat in the back of a police car for two days and waited for things to happen, and then we filmed it and we interviewed the police when they had time to talk to us.

Interestingly, when we were doing 60 miles an hour in a 30 mile an hour limit, and we’re on the wrong side of the road with the lights flashing, but we were still talking, they’re happy to talk to us. And then what you do is  you effectively have something that’s more of a documentary that you can follow, and that’s an interesting storyline because actually the viewer doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Just like we didn’t know what was going to happen and you can therefore find the best bits and construct it. 

In a story like that, we’re selling the technology of this tablet. But at no point, do we actually talk about the tablet. We just show it and we see it. And we see them say, this man has gone missing, and in fact, he’s got a learning disability, so therefore we’re a bit worried about him. Have you seen him? And they hold up the picture. And then of course you can see that the picture came through to the tablet and we showed another person taking a witness statement for a crime.

And it was in situ, on the scene. They were able to get the people, get the statement, sign on the tablet there and then, nobody had to go back to the station. It was much more efficient for everybody and that video amassed something like a hundred thousand viewings in 12 months. So that’s a great way to tell things and police force is an easy one to do, but it can also be, we’ve actually followed a sales manager around one day to see how technology had changed the way that he works and that worked really well as well. There’s a couple of examples there. 

I’d also like to just bring in the power of the visual, because we’ve talked a lot about the messaging here and the narrative, but having a visual that maps to that narrative. You know, I talked about showing the tablet and seeing the person on it and showing a member of public, have you seen this person? That’s a really strong way of telling a story. 

And often if you do an interview based story, you need to make sure that your shots actually support the narrative and tell the narrative, and ideally say more than just the narrative itself. And often what you get is you get people that go and do interviews in the morning, and then they shoot B roll in the afternoon and then they stick it all together, and hopefully they’ve got a story. That usually means that you don’t have visuals that map exactly to what’s being said, cause you didn’t know what was going to be said exactly until you got there. And then it’s fairly difficult to organize that in the afternoon and have done with it, so we tend to like to go back if possible.

And we often talk to the customer organizations about the importance of them having not our customers, but our customers’ customers about the importance of them having a powerful story, because it has value for them, maybe with their customers, but certainly, internally. That means that we can get more buy-in from them. We can then go back and we can shoot to order. So yeah, edit the story, then we shoot more shots and just the ones that we need, and that really brings the story to life. 

And if we’re working with software, for example, we might then also float overlays of software simplified so we can just see exactly what’s happening.  So you see two people working, but you float the software next to them and you can see what they’re doing, but in a simplified way, so that suddenly you’ve got this extra context. So the power of the visual in telling a story and supporting the story arc is not to be underestimated.

 Margot Leong: I think it’s a really good point because I do think that the standard is exactly what you were saying is that, the B -roll is that person just kind of doing things, and it’s more to fill the time in between when they’re just kind of a talking head. What are some examples of things that you can shoot outside of the product itself that relate directly to what the person is talking about. How can you capture that? 

 Daryl Stickley: Okay. So I’ll give you one that we’re working on right now today which is  a charity that effectively works with organizations that have food. So food manufacturers, large supermarket chains and it collects the food that’s going out of date or gone out of date and then provides it to food banks. So it’s effectively a distributor of food, and it’s the largest one in London. I’m just trying to remember the numbers because we’re working on it now, but I think they want to provide a hundred million meals a year by 2024, and I think they’re doing something like 30 million this year. 

So it’s a large scale organization and they’re using technology to make sure that they can get the right food to the right food banks, so they’ve put in technology to manage this and the drivers have got apps and there’s technology back in the warehouse. And it’s a very fast moving, but very well organized operation that now manages to deliver twice as much food with the same level of resources, which is really important because it’s a charity. So it’s limited for resources. 

So you could, for example, simply say, right, we’re going to film the food, we’re going to film the app. We’re going to film the drivers. We’re gonna film the distribution. But what we’ve actually done is we’ve brought that to life more by going out and then filming one of the food banks, one of the kitchens that provides food and talking to the people that run that. And what does it mean to them to have access to this greater stream of food because of the technology the organization, providing them is delivering. 

And then we go further and we then actually talked to one of the people who’s unemployed and unable to feed themselves fully at the moment coming to consume the food bank. So we effectively make a very humanitarian story and we follow the process of this along the way, even to the point, for example, we talked to a couple of the drivers who are volunteers, they give up their time for free, and we rigged up cameras and then we just called them and we talked to them while they drove around. And you get a very natural someone driving around pretty much like the James Corden’s carpool karaoke, but we didn’t sing.

So you get this very natural delivery of these drivers that just having a good time, having a chat with you actually while they’re on their rounds. And so the whole story is so much more than it might’ve been with a bit of planning. It took a bit longer, but you’re out in the community. You’re talking to people in the community. You’re seeing the food being cooked. You’re seeing people queuing up for the food. You talked to the people in that queue. So you move away from what was actually a piece of software and you have a slice of society. That’s really how you can bring the story to life. You make it more human and you just think further and wider. 

To give you another example, cause obviously that one’s quite an emotive story. We were asked to tell the story of the performing rights society, which probably most people in the UK would know, but for other people around the world, it’s the organization, which tracks all of the airplays  of music. So if you’re a composer then it’ll track. If it’s been on the radio, if it’s been on TV, if it’s been played in the gym and then you can sign a contract with them and they’ll do that all around the world, and with the power of the cloud now, they can track so much more, which is just as well, because there are a lot more platforms than they used to be. It used to be the radio and TV and then you’d license or things like that, you know, shops that would play music. 

But now there’s so many platforms that the performing rights society has had to have a massive cloud infrastructure with  large data lakes and artificial intelligence to effectively manage all of this. And we thought, well, that’s an interesting story, but it sounds like a lot of people who are measuring numbers and doing data analysis. And so we wanted to make it more human, so we actually spoke to them and said, do you have a recording artist that we could talk to, to bring this to life. And so they gave us somebody who is an up and coming recording artist that played at Glastonbury a few times.

So we spoke to that artist who had no idea how the performing rights society were able to tell him exactly where his air plays were all over the world and on different things. He just got this really great breakdown and money, and we got to hear his music. We got to see him. And then we cut to the fact that we can talk to the people at the performing rights society who were telling us that that they processed something like 8 trillion transactions in a year, which is more than MasterCard and their report that used to take them 22 days to run now is in 11 minutes. We have these great numbers, but what we also have is a recording artist saying these guys are like wizards, that the exact word he actually said. And I just love the fact that I can get on with my day job, which is making music. So that’s another example, really, of how you take something that was purely data and analytics really, and big tech and make it human again and make it a real story.

Margot Leong: Yeah. I mean, I love that example and I think that when it comes to a lot of testimonials, it feels as though it’s really just rooted in, okay, like this is the vendor, and then this is the end user. And so what you’re talking about is really thinking outside of the box, what’s the true human impact of this technology, not just on the end user, but  there’s all these other ripple effects. And so how are you weaving all of that together to tell you know, a story that’s incredibly resonant to a lay person?

Daryl Stickley: In fact, there’s one thing I haven’t told you about, which runs through everything we do and that’s the principle of the customer’s customer. So we always believe that if an organization is thinking about their customers, then they’re not thinking like their customers, because their customers are thinking about obviously their customers. So if you’re not thinking about your customer’s customer, then you haven’t aligned yourself with your customer. So everything we do does attempt to resonate with the customer’s customer. And that is one of the ways in which we, it changes the thinking changes. Our customer’s thinking because we, we start talking in those terms and, you know, just like the performing rights society is actually about musicians collecting money.

It just changes the nature and simplifies the conversation because the customer’s customer doesn’t really care for all that tech and all that detail. They care for the outcomes, as I said at the beginning. So that’s really where. You know, that’s another one of our golden rules. Think about the customer’s customer and you’ll be in a much better place.

Margot Leong: Yeah. This also allows for whomever you’re filming to feel even more excited about sharing that to their customers, right. Because it’s a great advertisement for how they think about their customers as well. 

Daryl Stickley: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we work with our customers to talk to their customers so that we get more on board because the challenge we often hear is ah, yeah, but we can’t get our customers involved because they don’t want to give it their time or they see it as a favor. And so one of the things in our workshops is that it’s not a favor because you’re going to produce a piece of content that’s for them, that’s paid for by their vendor. It’s all about them. It’s their story. 

And so that has a number of benefits. It’s obviously a great piece of internal comms for the team that procured the solution and delivered it so they can show their colleagues, look what we’ve done. We’ve enabled our organization to move forward, so that works really well. It often works well for the individuals involved because there’s a great thing that they can put on LinkedIn and show this is something I’ve worked in and we actually have people in customer organizations who are now in great jobs, and partly they’ve said that the video has really helped promote and boost my profile. 

More importantly than both of those things are that if you tell the story in the right way, let’s take the performing rights society that I just mentioned.  They’re now able to produce a granular report of all the platforms that this recording artists content was played on in minutes when it would have taken them hours and days before. The video that we produced shows that they’ve got all this tech and it shows that this musician is just delighted. He thinks they’re wizards. So they’ve actually got a video that they can put on their website straight away, and it highlights how leading edge they are, how great a service they’re providing. And  here’s one of our customers who’s just falling over himself to say how wonderful it is, so we are producing something for them and that does change the success rate at the engagement level when you’re looking to tell these stories. So going at it with that angle really gets people on board because they realize that actually there’s something in it for them. And then when there’s something in for them, they try hard and you get a much better outcome. 

Margot Leong: I think this is such a fantastic place to wrap up actually like, thinking about the customers’ customers, and what can you do to really entice your customers to participate in a video.

So this chat was just packed with amazing, amazing tips. So a lot of really good stuff in here. Thank you so much for coming on. Daryl. Really enjoyed the conversation. 

Daryl Stickley: Well, thank you for asking me. It’s not often we get to talk about us. We normally talk to everybody about them, so it’s nice to try and reverse for change.

Margot Leong: You are definitely an expert in this area and it’s very apparent. So yeah, thank you. 

Thanks for tuning into this episode of Beating The Drum. For more interviews with advocacy leaders and tips on creating customers that will sing your praises, head on over to our website, beatingthedrum.com. If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and don’t forget to rate and review us. If you know someone that would be a great fit for the show, I would love to hear about it. You can reach out at beatingthedrum.com. Take care, everybody.