Sharing the Right Stories Through Your Team | Stories With Traction Podcast

SHOW NOTES:

SUMMARY: In this episode, Chris Wallace and Matt Zaun talk about how leaders can align the right stories with their frontline workers.

CHRIS WALLACE BIO: Chris is a marketing and customer experience strategist. His expertise centers on how organizations can improve alignment between their go-to-market strategies and their frontline channels (sales, customer service, support, etc.).

As President of InnerView, Chris and his team have developed the breakthrough InFront platform, which applies market research processes to collect and analyze employee and partner perceptions of customer needs and company value proposition.

Chris shares his unique perspective as a teacher, speaker, and author. He is an adjunct marketing professor at Villanova University (MBA) and is regularly published in outlets including Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

For more info, check out Chris here:
LinkedIn
Website

MATT ZAUN BIO: Matt is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers organizations to attract more clients through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry.

Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with executives, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact.

For more info, check out Matt Zaun HERE.

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors.

 

Matt Zaun 

Chris, welcome to the show.

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

Thank you, Matt, for having me. excited to talk with you.

 

Matt Zaun

Thanks for your time. I know you're extremely busy. So I want to dive in and really unpack a lot of what you do.

And I want to start with talking about decision makers. And I think that the, you know, we talk a lot about the kind of the say new gap.

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

I think that a lot of times organizations have a picture of what they think customers do and how customers behave, whether it's through their market research or, you know, our customer satisfaction surveys.

Nobody quite knows how customers act the way that your front lines do. They're there in the moment. They're interacting with these people.

They're seeing them, you know, seeing the behaviors that are sort of in the heat in the moment, if you will.

And I think that part of the disconnect comes from just sort of executive not understanding the reality of those moments.

What's truly happening? How do those interactions go? And it's hard for the executives to see the world through the eyes of their front line teams and what they see is really, So I love that.

 

Matt Zaun 

I love you mentioning market research versus what people front line are experiencing. I remember a story regarding barefoot wine.

One of the things the owners of barefoot wine did was they went into the warehouse and they talked to individuals in the warehouse.

And one of things that they recognized was there were so many crates of wine that were being busted. And a lot of these crates, you couldn't even

Tell the difference on what wine it was. So one of the warehouse employees said, why don't we have ours a lot more colorful, something that stands out, and then we're going to make sure that we keep in touch with these warehouse workers so they know when they see this box that's colorful that's barefoot wine and they actually took care of those boxes more than the other boxes that there was less damaged goods.

So back to your point about market research they could have done all the market research they want on wine.

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

I know it that house streetelsen They've grown an Australian brand and they went to the states that had a state control state liquor bulbs where there were state stores, the Virginias, the Pennsylvanias, and they struck a deal with them to send people into their state stores and do sampling and things like that.

They built that brand really on the backs of these ambassadors going into these state stores and driving. So you think about having that person telling the story, telling a convicted story about this brand and what is, by my understanding, not the greatest wine in the world, has turned into an empire based on that, if you will hand-to-hand combat and really the strength of those front-line ambassadors.

it just goes to show you that in both instances that the influence that those folks can have, what they see and also what they say can really influence customers tremendously.

 

Matt Zaun 

That's such a good point and one of the dangers that I see.

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

Keywords, Zaun, Zaun, Zaun, Zaun, Zaun, Zaun, Matt Zaun, Zaun, Matt Zaun, Zaun, Matt Zaun, Matt Zaun, Matt Zaun, Zaun, Yeert successfully from the out.

Kate companies, it's nuanced. You can peak interest through marketing and people can show up. But in a lot of cases and a lot of products, even in the wine that we were just talking about, a lot of times there's a human involved in that interaction.

So I think the idea that AI is going to help you get the message exactly right, that's like unicorns and rainbows type of thinking.

It's not exactly going to work that way. You still have to make that connection with the person. still have to pull that story through.

So I think that idea of we can get the perfect message down and our marketing is going to be done.

We think it's just missing a huge part of the equation. And when we talk about the frontline teams and kind of their perspective, if people acknowledge that their frontline teams are an important part of the equation, an important representative of their brand, an important messenger of their story, then hearing from them and understanding what their perception is, is really important because what they perceive is what they're going to project on the customer.

And in the case of those yellowtail representatives, if they were bought into that story and they're bought into the wine, what they project down to the customer is going to be much more compelling than if they don't agree with it or they think it's garbage.

So I think if you acknowledge that the frontline or the customer facing team members or associates or ambassadors are an important part of the equation, listening to them and understanding how they see the world, it's critical to understanding what your customers are going to hear.

 

Matt Zaun 

One of the things I always recommend leaders do is to have story strategy sessions with different departments and two questions that are so important

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

to ask is what is exciting our customers right now and what's causing fear within our customers right now and those two questions sprung so many problem solution conversations and it really allows leaders to understand okay here's what's happening here's what's causing fear anxiety here's what here's what's exciting them to achieve what they want to achieve there's a lot of stories that come out of that so outside of storage strategy sessions what are some other practical steps that leaders can make so just to have a better connection with frontline workers yeah the it's one word listen right and do it in a structured way and that's where you know our team and interview developed a platform called in front which is a it's a platform that allows you to take what you just said and collect that information on a regular basis be finding the things that what what aspects of your story do your people gravitate to which

I think that to have that in your fingertips, and to have that, it's just another input. We don't think that we've invented the best things since slice bread.

But what we have is there's a lot of dots you need to connect as a leader. we've given you insights into one of the dots being your people and the people who serve your customers and Illuminated in a way that you simply haven't had it before so you know that that comes back to ask and listen in a repeated Systematic way and use that information to inform decisions It doesn't mean you're gonna take every piece of it and act on it immediately And this is something we advise our clients on but having the information Understanding what's happening up there in the trenches is critical to making sound decisions.

Otherwise, you're making guesses Right and we've asked leaders within you know medium-large organizations. How are you getting?

Matt Zaun

Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner Zaun, Matt Zaun, interviewed by Matt Zaun, Different trends. They see things going viral and they think because it's culturally acceptable, I should share this story too, but it might not land with their audience.

And how dangerous is this? You know, I've mentioned before on this show, I talk a lot about ICP slash C, ideal client persona slash community.

Mine is older genaxers and baby boomers. Most of my clients have children. Overwhelming amount of my clients have children.

So I'd be a fool not to share stories of my kids with business themes intertwined. Most of them have advanced degrees.

Most of them live in a certain part of the country. All these different dots help me share stories in a better way to connect with my audience.

What are some other dots that leaders need to be aware of regarding the story strategy and brand alignment?

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

Oh man, how long are your episodes?

 

Matt Zaun

Matt, I have a feeling we could go on for a while.

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

So I'm going to give you an example. Okay, so from our in front studies, one of the things that we see consistently.

We ask a question about confidence. If it's a new brand positioning that the company's rolling out a new product, most cases it's a new product, so company's rolling out a new product, and we want to get a sense of whether or not the front lines are aligned to the story.

We talk about belief confidence and pride. We believe we can measure belief confidence and pride and share that back with the leaders.

What happens is we will ask a question about how confident you are, but we don't trust that question. We ask it on purpose.

The reason we ask it is to get a gauge on whether or not they are saying something, but in the background it's not really true.

I'm going to give you an example. When we ask a confidence question, front line people, typically it's a sales person, typically, they're going to say, I'm confident, I'm sales person, I'm confident.

Then what we also do, core of our studies, we do an alignment calculation. We ask leadership to do the assessment.

We ask the front lines to do the assessment, and they take eight minutes, by the way. When we talk about structured listening,

It only takes eight minutes to do these studies. We ask leadership their perspective. We ask the front lines their perspective.

What happens is we'll come back and we'll say, you and your front lines are 35% misaligned. 35% misaligned. Here's why.

93% of them told us that they were either confident or extremely confident in delivering the story. If you are confident and you are misaligned, what are you confident in?

If you're uncomfortable confident in knowing exactly what I'm doing, but you are getting the key points of the value proposition, you're elevating things that aren't necessarily claimed your company can make or you're not focusing on the thing that is the true differentiation of your offering, then that's bad.

Confident and wrong is the worst thing you can possibly be. Through the studies by listening to the front lines, we're helping organizations see where they may be confident and wrong.

I'd rather have people be uncomfortable. I think it's important to recognize that you've got to have that secondary check.

You can't just go out and say confidence is good.

 

Matt Zaun

It's going to be confident and right. All right. So let's dive more into this confidence piece from an example perspective.

So clearly, if you have someone that is C-suite or maybe they're the founder of the organization, clearly, they have a lot of ties.

It's their baby, so to speak, and they are confident in what they're selling. So then you come in, you ask sales reps, hey, how confident are you with this product?

Well, course, back to what you said, of course they're going to say, yeah, I'm confident. I'm excited about it.

But then when you start peeling back the layers, you recognize they're not near as confident as what they may have led on to believe.

So where would the disconnect be between someone? It's their organization. They're super passionate, of course, because they're doing everything.

I think they possibly can to keep it afloat and maybe one of their sales reps that says they're confident, but they're not really as confident as they should be.

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

Where's that disconnect? Yeah, you got to know what to ask. I think you got to know what to ask.

It's not typical, especially if we're talking about salespeople, really anybody, but it's not typical for a salesperson to say, yeah, I'm struggling with this, right?

So I think that the key is you've got to ask it in the right way. And to just send out a survey monkey and say, how do you feel about this?

And people say, great, that's where you get the struggle coming in. I think when you take the example of the founder, the founder has a story.

To me, a lot of times what it comes down to is the differentiation. Anybody's going to tell you, especially in a business to business, but even in business to consumer.

In business to consumer, maybe even harder to differentiate one service from another. I think the people need to be confident in the differentiator.

They need to be confident in the what makes us different and better as opposed What are some things we're good at?

Some things that we're good at might not be a differentiated story. The founder is going to be much more likely to say, no, this is why we're different.

when we do our measurement, talk about providing leadership with a picture of a wind zone. And we come back and say, here's where your people think you can win.

These are the attributes. Here are the value points, the benefits that they think you can win on. that, and since you have to fix it, we jokingly say that our in front tools, kind of, it's like a myth-buster on steroids.

We can really get underneath where the perceptions are wrong and the myths are out there. And the leader can say, no, no, The other thing it can do, the other thing it can do is inform the leader that, you know what, I hadn't thought of it that way.

Maybe that is an angle that we should be playing. So we can't just assume always that the founder leader is right.

If you take the input from the front lines, you know, alignment of the messaging can work both ways.

 

Matt Zaun 

One of the things you mentioned earlier was market research. I'm imagining people in a room, are unpacking elements of research, and there's no alignment with what's actually happening on the front line.

It's almost horrifying for me to even hear the term market research based on one of my episodes that I did recently with a gentleman, name is Craig Andrews, and he talked about the market research of New Coke and how the research was on point, but we know it was a disaster.

And also the research regarding the ad, you mentioned Apple, the ad that was ran, I believe it was in 1984, was a Super Bowl commercial, arguably one of the best Super Bowl commercials of all time.

And the focus group, the market research said that that was a horrible commercial before it launched, but Steve Jobs said, no, it's going to connect with our audience, we're going to run it.

So clearly, and this is not just those examples, as you know, there are boardrooms across the

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

I think that the, I'm going go back to where I started with the say do gap. There is a say do gap, right?

put people in a certain environment and you ask them questions and they are, they're going to provide you with, you know, I'm not going to say they're not being truthful, they're just not in the environment, right?

When I talk about getting the feedback from the front lines, they're in the moment of truth, right? They're at that connection point.

They're in those interactions day in and day out. So they're getting that, we'll call it more real time, if you will, insight into what, you know, customers are going to behave.

One thing I definitely don't want to do is market research is important, right? Customer research is important. And we actually think it's so important.

What we do is the difference between what we do and what most organizations do is we actually use the same principles that you're collecting consumer information and we apply that inside the organization.

We're doing sentiment analysis. We're gathering frontline perceptions. You want to know what your customers think of your value proposition.

We want to know what the people talking to your customers think of value proposition. So, from a methodology standpoint, things like that, there's a lot of good stuff.

I think the challenge is other than changing your messaging or changing your ad or things like that, honestly, I think what I hear from executives is I have so much information, but nothing to actually do with it.

I've nothing to actually do with it. When you bring the frontline perspective in, it becomes more actionable. You can make tweaks turned out.

You can bust a myth. You can bust one myth that can drive too much better connections between your people and with very simple fixes.

don't have to go. I think it's, to me, it's not so much about market research being wrong. It's about being incomplete, right?

It gives you one part of the equation, but there's other dots when we talk about these dots.

 

Matt Zaun 

There's other dots that you need to understand and make sure your message gets to the customer effectively. Yeah, that's really good to recognize.

I appreciate you sharing that. know, one of the things that came to my mind is I remember, you know, years ago, my wife introduced me to the undercover boss show.

I remember watching it for the first couple shows with her, it was just so hysterical to watch, right? Because you have someone who they think that they know their customer intimately, and then the employee that they're working with is showing, hey, here's the disconnect, here's what you need to do.

So clearly, everyone listening to the show can't go on undercover boss, but are there creative ways that you've seen outside of meetings, outside of what you mentioned regarding the structured listening.

Are there other things creatively that individuals in decision-making seats can reach out to their customers? Not surveys, not that, but what would be another way that they could do this so they can pull the curtain back to recognize, hey, here's the market research.

How do we actually align this with what's happening?

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

I have an answer for it, but it's not an easy answer. think it's sort of taking the spirit of undercover boss, which I think is a great tie in here.

There are organizations that mandate that people in their organization are certain, people in certain leadership roles that they perform front-line roles a certain portion of the year.

There will be, I heard about an airline, I forget who it was, one of the better ones, I'm sure, that requires, because they're not all great, that requires their people to spend two weeks out of the year on the phones.

Taking, reservists. I know that's not an easy thing to do, but if you want to inform people that are in marketing, customer experience, sales, leadership type roles, then doing it is key.

But I will caution. That's one thing I think you can do. Actually go perform it. Go perform it. Actually have to take the call.

Actually have to service the customer. I'll tell you what is can be very unproductive. day of write outs. Half a day in the call center.

The anecdotal, I got one piece of, you do not understand how many organizations Matt we have talked to. Every time I tell these stories people laugh because it happens to them where marketing went and did a write out with sales for a day.

They came back and they're like, we've had this message all wrong. We need a better demo. We need a, they wrote with one rep and saw three customers and they came back and they went to completely overhaul their marketing strategy.

That's, I would call that unproductive.

 

 Matt Zaun 

The best customers. Where, what you said about actually taking on a role for a couple weeks or even a day, how much more are they going to be able to experience what's happening than a ride along?

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

So I really appreciate you saying that. Yes, so I have a couple of points there. Let's take your undercover boss example.

How does every undercover boss episode end? Right? Anybody that's ever seen a movie, Jerry Maguire, there was the joke in there that, you know, I'm an Oprah, everybody cries at the end, right?

Everybody knows. How the episode of Undercover Boss is going to end. It's going to end with this realization of how hard their people work.

It ends up with, you know, the boss will be like, I need to serve these people better. And I think that that's the thread I want to pull on for this idea of doing it from a position of being a servant as opposed to being a top down, know, command and control leader.

And to me, it really is about who you're doing it for. We just signed out a new client and a new.

The industry, one of the standards in the industry is there are companies that do their ride-out companies. They send people to do ride-outs with reps and they've probably made a gajillion dollars over the years sending people on ride-outs with reps.

What I would say back to this organization is, who do you do that for? You don't do that for your reps.

You don't do that to make your reps better. You don't do that to serve them better. You do that to check a box.

You do it to audit them. You do it so you can confirm some of your hunches. You don't do it for them.

When you think about how organizations can embrace this and really get the most out of it, I think that those efforts have to be about and they have to be in a way.

We talk about ride-outs. You have to deliver the. We need the feedback from you for you, not for us.

This is so we can serve you better. We can understand you better. We can put you in position to succeed.

All anybody that deals directly with customers wants is Happy customers. That's all they want. They just want to be put in position to serve their customers and make them happy.

And we look at it as if you frame it up the right way and you put out a mechanism that allows for that feedback to happen, people are going to, it's going to flow.

They're going to, it's going to build trust. going to want to provide that feedback. Hiring a company send them out to do write-outs is about you.

So before you do anything, ask yourself, who am I doing this for? I'm a few more reps or my front line teams.

If it's about you, you're better off skipping it.

 

Matt Zaun 

That is so good. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you for everything you shared in this conversation.

I really appreciate it. know, I got a lot out of it, but there's three takeaways in particular that I want to focus on that I appreciate you saying.

I really appreciate you setting the expectation regarding marketing teams. I think a lot of C-suite leaders miss this, right?

They think marketing can create the perfect message. They're not able to do that. is the peak interest. So I appreciate you setting that expectation.

It's really important for leaders to hear. The second piece is I really appreciate the verbiage of structured listening. And you had mentioned it doesn't take long.

This is a way to connect the dots based on structured listening. think that's fascinating. And then the third and final piece is I appreciate the words you mentioned, belief, confidence, and pride.

And when confidence is wrong, high confidence, but it's wrong, it could spell disaster. So I appreciate you mentioning the importance of asking those questions, tying it together.

So Chris, if someone wants to get more information on you or what you do and they want to reach out to you for your services, where's the best place they can go to get that information?

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

Well, I'll start with me. best place is very active on LinkedIn, I know you are, Matt. Chris Wallace, not an uncommon name.

So you might have to dig a little bit, but like Matt, I'm in the greater Philadelphia area. So look for Chris Wallace and the greater Philadelphia area where

With interview. And then otherwise, when we talk about the structured listening, our structured listening tool is in front. So in frontinsights.com is the website for that.

Based on our conversation today, that'd be the, I think the best place for people to go and check out.

We do have an e-book that talks about how you can set up a frontline insights program to get that structured listening going.

 

Matt Zaun

Perfect. I will put your LinkedIn in the show notes as well as that site. People can just click and go.

Chris, thank you so much for your time today.

 

Chris Wallace (InnerView Group)

I really appreciate it. Matt, it's really been a great conversation. Thank you.