Speaker 1: from these one-on-one coaching sessions that I've been having with people, a lot of senior people telling a lot of senior stories and a lot of senior stories require you to articulate how you would build out, do, build, design, implement things. Start up a new group. You're the chief revenue officer. How are you going to build out the sales team? We are making a shift in our product and service offering to the world. How would you go about designing the blueprint for us to do this? How would we bring ourselves to market? How would we rebrand ourselves? How would we then recalibrate the team and so on? We want you to build out a marketing engine. We want you to design a new product for us that entails. These are the kind of things. Your story can be anything, but this is going to be especially critical the more senior you are and the more freedom you have in creating the blueprint. There is a, and by the way, even if you were a technologist and you were telling a story like this, this technique is really helpful. I've talked to you about when you are talking about how you would do something. This is already a futuristic question, so my keys to storytelling when you're in an interview is you want to protect yourself from the interviewer not getting everything that they need in order to know that they should hire you and also making it as easy on them as possible to imagine you in the role. The more you're talking about your past and how you did things, the more difficult it is for them to see exactly how you would operate within their environment. There's one thing that I want you to think about as you're telling your stories. If you are asked to make a presentation or tell me how you would do this or any of that stuff and you have to give them a step-by-step approach that requires multiple stages that you're going to go through. Well, the first thing is I would look at the customer segmentation. I would see who our primary customers are, who's contributing to 80% of the revenue, that small group, where they're located, what they're buying, what their problems are. Then what I would do is I would reach out to the new markets. I would look at this, where geographically is our possibility. Then I would build a team. It's that kind of stuff, the multi-step process. One of the things that is incredibly attention grabbing, it will also help the other person know that you are a strategic thinker. It will also help them understand that you have experience in what you're telling them you're going to do or that you have enough experience to be able to handle something that you have not yet done. Here's what you need to do. At each stage, wherever it's critical, you need to tell them the problem they are going to encounter that they have not yet encountered. It is a phenomenal sales technique for all you salespeople with your customers, but it's equally as effective in a job interview. What do I mean by this? We had a situation, I don't know if she's here, but she is in with a startup. This is a classic story. She's in with a startup. It's an artificial intelligence technology company. They have an open source product. They're looking to her to potentially be the chief revenue officer. They have basically this free software that a lot of their customers use. They're looking to now try to break into the higher paying, more enterprise, and all this other good stuff layer. Well, it's not like you just build a product, you go out and you sell it, because you already have an established brand that you've already created, and the people you're going to target are going to be the people that are already using your product, as an example. When she's asked, how are you actually going to go about generating X amount of revenue in the next X number of months or years when this is our current situation, because they're trying to hire her to create the solution, she could just go in and say, well, all right, well the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to look at the customer segments. The second thing we're going to do is then we're going to put the team together and we're going to start pushing this out into the world and blah, blah, blah. Then we're going to build our channel partners. Then we're going to do this. Then we're going to do that. Then we're going to do that, as if nothing will ever go wrong. That is how a lot of people tell stories, right? First you do this, then you do this, then you do this. Even when they go back into their past and they say, well, here's the first thing that I did and here's the second thing that I did and here's the third thing that I did. Smooth sailing, right? But it was never smooth sailing, ever. I don't know anything in my life that's smooth sailing. But when we tend to tell stories, that's what we do. When we tend to tell stories about something that's going to happen in the future, it sounds idealistic when we do it that way. But it's wholly different when you say, well, first thing that I would do is I would actually look at the customer segments and I would figure out based on what our current buyers look like, what that avatar, whatever you call it, customer profile, whatever you want to call it, looks like. We will segment them and we will pilot them to go after them this way. Now when we get to the second layer, and so it shouldn't be too difficult that they've already engaged, they've already started buying our services, now we're going to be providing them some additional services, so that's about showing them the additional value that they're going to get. But there's a real opportunity in this middle layer where people are using this for free. Now whenever you encounter something like that, you're going to have an education problem because in a rebranding problem and you're going to have to actually explain to them why they now need to pay for a product that they've been using for free. Okay, so you insert the problem and then you say, this is naturally what's going to occur. So the first thing that we need to do in order to augment our portfolio and sell to that market is we would likely need to hold some rebranding efforts. Things like virtual summits, educational webinars, this and that and the other thing, and this and this and this and this. Because that's a problem we're going to have. I'm assuming that you recognize that, but if not, we're going to encounter that. So we may as well start putting efforts into doing that now. And what I would do is, so as you go through this process, think about how smart you're going to sound when you insert that problem and recognize that I'm already thinking about the challenges. Now, the interviewer may or may not have thought about that already. It depends on who you're speaking to. But if they haven't thought about it, you're a genius. If they have thought about it already, you're still super smart and get equal number of points, positive points, let's call them, because you knew that, you thought of that. Now, you could say, if you did do this, well, this is just ... And the reason I know we're going to encounter that is because when I was implementing this other thing where we were breaking into a new market based on a service we provided for free initially, here's what happened. Or if you don't have that experience to draw on, if you do, I would say it. If you don't, it's okay. You'd say, well, naturally you're going to have that because they've been using it for free. You can't overexplain something that should be that obvious, right? So of course that I would expect that to happen. Either way, we need to be ready for that kind of thing. So you want to make sure that you are inserting the problem that they are going to have in the future. And we call it in sales, we call that surfacing latent pain. But in interviewing speak, I call that just being a badass and making sure that you are actually going to get some points by telling your story that way because it never happens So when they see that you recognize that there are going to be challenges and you've already anticipated them and you're already talking to them about what their solutions are going to be, you're going to be way ahead of the game. You will, because no one does this. They just don't. The only time they answer problems is when I ask you, well, what problems do you anticipate when we get to that stage? And most of the time the interviewer will not ask you that until you go through the process in the story. You want to intercept that question. You want to proactively answer that stuff, especially when you're telling a build out story or a design story, or even if you're a technologist, like I said, hey, when we build this environment, you know, these are the top five problems we're going to have at these stages. So I'm going to share with you how we're going to implement it smoothly and how we're going to eradicate all those issues that I'm going to anticipate that we're going to have that I know we're going to have. You know, that kind of stuff. But inserting that problem is a great thing to do. You do not, it doesn't need to be huge. It just needs to be recognized, surfaced and squashed. Okay. So, so, so, so try, try that out. I think, I think that that will get you lots of points. I know a lot of you guys are senior out there. I've been reading your stories, but you, I talked to, uh, you know, uh, in the, in the, in the zoom sessions and all that. So I, I, I think, I think that will really help you as you go through your stories. Just don't forget that those, those problems need to be part of your storytelling.