Webinar:
Harnessing the power of brain science

Welcome

My name is Piet Saegeman, and I help founders, CEOs, and sales and marketing leaders drive business and get results with strategic messaging. I specialise only in strategic messaging, which is a very specific part of the marketing mix.

This webinar is a collaboration between Yamazoni, my own company, and Ambassify. Ambassify was one of my first customers, and we have had an ongoing relationship across multiple projects.

Competing in the attention economy

We live in an attention economy, and that makes life difficult for marketers, because you are competing on three levels at once.

You compete on a solution level with other vendors. You also compete on a budget level, which is less obvious. When I was at Showpad we were not only up against other sales enablement solutions; we were competing with Salesforce for the same available budget.

But the hardest one is attention. There, you are not competing with other products or vendors at all. You are competing with kittens. You are competing with puppies.

TikTok exists because Facebook abandoned short, addictive video on the grounds that it was too damaging, and TikTok picked it up. That is the calibre of attention you are fighting for, and plenty of other companies are fighting for the same attention with the intent of selling something.

So the job is to cut through the noise. If you want to succeed as a company or as a marketer, that is the requirement.

Where I learned first principles thinking

I discovered the power of the narrative in presales, but my career started in a technical role calibrating printing presses for colour management worldwide. If you ask me, that is the best possible way to spend your twenties and early thirties. You travel, you see places, you experience a lot. Though if you think business travel is glamorous, I have a photograph of myself warming my hands on a trash fire in Saudi Arabia.

More importantly, press calibration teaches you first principles thinking. When you diagnose what has gone wrong with a printing press, you are looking at chemistry and physics. Someone says their press is off colour, and you work through it: which inks, which batch of inks, what paper, what humidity, what temperature changes. You map every moving part that influences the result.

There is an excellent video of Elon Musk explaining the same principle, looking at the base operating components of something. Ask me and I will share the link.

What actually made some salespeople sell more

Presales was the best classroom I ever had. I worked with a lot of highly experienced salespeople around the world.

And I noticed that some of them sold far more than others, while selling an identical product to very similar customers. So, first principles again: what are the moving parts that influence sales results?

Professionalism is a baseline. Be on time, honour your commitments, be polite. Fail at that and you will not sell. But doing all of it does not mean you will sell more.

Relationship and rapport seemed obvious, but the data was strange. Some salespeople were genuinely rude to customers and still had strong records.

So what made the difference? When you replace someone in a territory, sales suddenly climb, or suddenly drop, even though everyone involved is professional and has decent client relationships.

The difference was the narrative. It was what they said, and how they articulated value to that customer.

From presales I moved into sales, which is fun because that is where the real money is, and also where you do not eat if you do not sell. So I knew the narrative had to be good. I had a good run, including a couple of years in business development at Apple.

Then I got into marketing, and first principles went out of the window

Marketing is a heavily quantitative discipline, full of measurement and numbers. But when it came to the narrative, it was still an opinion game.

Let us do what others do. Let us do what makes us look smart. I have a big title, so here is what goes in our sales deck.

What surprised me most was that in many cases nobody was talking to their own customers, or to their own customer-facing staff. Sales and customer success were not being consulted when marketing narratives and content were created.

So I decided to specialise in messaging.

What messaging actually is

Messaging is the sum total of everything you say about yourself, and it is a core component of your brand. Your brand has three components, and they are not equally well managed.

The visual component is the most noticeable. It has a deliverable, the brand identity guideline, and it has clear ownership: designers. This is what we recognise instantly.

Tone of voice has a deliverable too, the style guide, owned by copywriters. Not how you look, but how you sound.

Messaging is what you say about yourself. And in a lot of organisations there is no deliverable and no clear ownership at all.

Which is why the process of creating messaging is usually messy, and why there is so much room for improvement. As I like to put it: copy-pasting is not a strategy. You have to be more specific than that and go back to first principles.

The three failure points

Messaging misses the mark in three ways.

Incomplete. You are not answering everything your clients want answered, so they go looking for information through channels you do not control.

Inconsistent. Sales says one thing, marketing says another, customer success asks what on earth they were sold. And you cannot really blame anyone, because when messaging is incomplete people fill the gaps with their own ideas and roll their own content.

Ineffective. You are saying the wrong things. You are not saying what the customer wants to hear.

Enter brain science

Brain science focuses on how the brain interprets information. Everything you do, say, share or publish as a company will be observed and interpreted by a human brain. Everybody has one. You may have evidence to the contrary, but I guarantee it.

It is really a collection of disciplines. Sometimes it is called neuroscience. Parts of it are cognitive science and cognitive psychology. Some of it comes from economics. Put briefly, brain science looks at how we think, how we remember, and how we decide, three things any marketer, salesperson or communicator wants to influence.

The wiring is largely the same in all of us. The basic structures are consistent across cultures, because of where we came from: an environment full of threats. See a movement in the undergrowth and the first job is to assess it. Is this dangerous, can it eat me? Or is it rewarding, can I eat it, can I mate with it? That is the structure our brains evolved to keep us alive.

Instincts, heuristics and biases

Three categories came out of the box.

Instincts are inborn complex behaviour patterns that keep us alive without ever being taught.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts. To conserve energy the brain does some lazy thinking and jumps to a conclusion. Many of these are highly predictable.

Biases are simply bad thinking: deviations from logic that produce a wrong interpretation of information.

There is a large and surprisingly old body of research here. Some concepts date to the 1800s, big jumps were made in the Freudian era and again in the behavioural era in the 1960s, and now functional MRI lets us see inside a working brain.

It does not have to be complex

That all sounds intimidating, and it need not be. I do not have a PhD in neurology and I do not need one. You do not have to be a nuclear physicist to switch on a light bulb.

Deep down I am still a salesperson. Deeper down, I am still the awkward kid trying to figure things out.

The buyer journey as an idea adoption journey

Sales and marketing are fundamentally about changing minds: moving someone from situation A to situation B. Situation A is I do not know you, I am not interested, I do not need your product. Situation B is this is fantastic, where do I sign?

You cannot move anyone from A to B in one step. If I could do that I would not be here; I would be in an underground lair enjoying my world domination.

So you take people along a journey. We call it the buyer journey, but you could equally call it the idea adoption journey, and along it you answer the questions they actually have while nudging them forward.

Why should I care? What is it? Why this one? Can I trust it? Why now? There are dozens more. The better you answer them, the faster people move from A to B.

The 5 Intents model

5 Intents is the model I developed for taking people along that journey.

Whenever you share information there is an intent behind it, something you are trying to do:

1. Fascinate: attract attention.
2. Educate: explain what you do in clear terms.
3. Differentiate: create a preference.
4. Validate: establish trust.
5. Motivate: inspire action.

You formulate answers and story points for each intent, and the result functions as a menu. That is your messaging architecture, the template underneath all your communication, and it lets you pick the right message at the right time.

Intent one, fascinate

If you work in marketing, I have bad news. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about you or your product until you make them.

People are so self-absorbed that they do not want to hear how many gigaflops are in your processors. They are looking for context. So I tell clients that in fascination content they are never allowed to talk about themselves. You talk about them, their context, their world.

Fascinate is about getting noticed and earning the right to a basic conversation. At its most basic, when someone is scrolling their feed, you want to stop that scroll for a few seconds and earn a brief conversation.

What you are really doing is destabilising their preferences and challenging the status quo, because most deals in business are not lost to a competitor. They are lost to no decision. So you trigger curiosity by talking about pains, gains and risks.

Though I think pain has been overused in marketing. Porsche does not market its cars to people who are habitually late. Rolex does not market its watches to people who need to know the time. It is not all about pain.

Story archetypes

I use archetypes to build fascination stories.

Hair on fire. I know the problem, I am in pain, please help. That is an easy sell.

Iceberg. I know the problem, but most of it is still underwater. I do not yet know its impact. Your job is to make that impact tangible.

So far so good. Someone jumps out of an aircraft without a parachute, and asked halfway down how it is going, says "so far so good". Something is going to kill you and you do not know it yet.

Everest. What is your long-term strategic goal? I want to cut my CO2 emissions by 50% by 2030. That is Everest, that is the summit. We are the Sherpas. We can help you, because we do this every Thursday and we have done it with customers just like you.

Intent two, educate

Educate answers what is this? There is a moment in Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas where the character lands in a world of lights and singing and people being kind to each other and simply asks: what's this? What are these lights? What does this do?

Educate is explaining what you do, how it works, how the API is structured, what the outcomes are for them, how the offering fits together, the documentation, and what is in it for them, phrased as outcome-based statements.

Three properties matter, and the third is the one people miss:

Easy to understand. The brain is conserving energy constantly. If you make me burn calories to work out what you do, you have already lost me.

Easy to remember. This is why visuals and infographics earn their place. The more someone remembers, the more top of mind you are.

Easy to reproduce. This is critical in B2B, where the decision team is dispersed and you may never meet some of its members. You have an internal champion who has to defend your offering in a room you are not in, so they need to reproduce what you said accurately. Instead of sales enablement, you are doing champion enablement.

Intent three, differentiate

Differentiate answers why you? Because the alternatives include doing nothing, continuing to use Excel as a database as they have for years, building something on SAP, or buying from a competitor.

So you are comparing yourself to the status quo, to alternative approaches, and to direct competitors. Differentiate is about showing how you are different and better than anything else available, and it becomes essential in a saturated category where rivals have the same budget or more, selling a similar product at a similar price.

You can differentiate on more than the product:

Your offering, including technical differences.

Your organisation. At Showpad we noticed people from large enterprises wanted to align with our corporate culture. We were a hip, genuinely cool startup, and people bought into the tribe as much as the product. We ended up hiring a number of them.

Your existing customers. Mine are ambitious, well-funded startups. Saying so creates an aspirational group people want to belong to. This is the Porsche and Rolex point again: who wears a Rolex and drives a Porsche? People with a certain status. If you want that status, this is the product.

Intent four, validate

Validate answers is this safe? Will this kill me?

In enterprise sales especially, people are highly risk averse, and the better you are at supplying trust triggers, the better you sell. So validate is about proving your claims, eliminating risk, and demonstrating how success will be measured and seen.

It is also about showing you are a stable company. If you are a startup with eighteen months of runway, an enterprise client may not want to invest, because they are not confident you will exist in two years.

The trust triggers include ROI calculations, total cost of ownership, how easy it is to terminate, what opinion leaders say about you, and analyst reports. We build a full list of these into every messaging architecture.

Intent five, motivate

This is my home turf, because deep down I am still a salesperson. Motivate answers what now, and why now?

Calls to action come in sizes. An XXL CTA is buy the product. An L is start a trial. An M is book a demo or make an appointment. An S is give us your email address. We list everything we want people to do, size them, and then we know exactly what we are pushing towards.

Show the process. On more complex projects it matters enormously to show what happens next, because insecurity is the biggest hindrance to progress in a sales process. Without clarity, people will not take the next step. Sometimes the client has it mapped out for you: get on the approved vendor list, go through these people, then procurement. Often they do not, and then you drive the bus and run your process.

Lower the starting barriers. Eliminate friction and doubt. Sometimes that is as small as rewriting the microcopy on your demo signup.

And always drive the bus. Keep things moving forward, because you are the guide and you know the way.

Creating urgency

The complaint I hear most from founders and sales leaders is that things are not moving fast enough. The conversations are good, the demos happen, and then nothing. No urgency.

Urgency is a function of scarcity. As a salesperson I learned never to walk into a sales conversation without a limited supply of something.

Sometimes that is easy: while stocks last. With B2B software it is harder, because there is no scarcity. It is just another licence. But there are ways to create it, such as bundling external training so there is a genuine reason to act before the limited thing runs out.

These are classic sales tactics, and we list them out. We also check which tactics you are actually comfortable with, because there is an ethical dimension here and people react badly to the archetypal sales trick.

What makes 5 Intents different

Compared with other messaging approaches, or with doing it yourself, a few things stand out.

By the way, on Start With Why: it is largely another excuse to talk about yourself for twenty more minutes. Start with why they should care is usually the better instruction.

It drives measurable results. I have numbers I will not share here, but the bounce rates on Ambassify's landing pages were quite spectacular.

It enables people. The goal is to make everyone in the organisation a better communicator, not to keep this locked inside marketing or sales.

It transforms thinking, because it creates a common language everyone refers to. Once everybody is on board, you see junior salespeople who have been in the job under six months pitching like seasoned veterans, because they have that shared language to work from.

It makes brain science accessible, letting you use it without studying it for years.

The results

Complete messaging. You have enough story to answer every question a client might have, and a coherent way to guide them through the journey.

Consistent messaging. Marketing, sales and customer success all say the same thing, so instead of hearing three different stories before their first renewal, the client hears one. The company speaks with a single voice.

Effective messaging, because it is built on how people actually process information.

It also improves things beyond messaging itself. It becomes the basis for content strategy, copywriting and campaigns. Pitches get better and sales enablement improves, because good information reaches salespeople earlier and they pitch more confidently. The organisation aligns around a common narrative.

And often the most interesting effect: a messaging project helps founders and leadership clarify their own vision. Once they can articulate it, it feeds back to product level, and priorities for what gets built change based on the message being sold.

Practising what I preach

Let me analyse this presentation using the 5 Intents.

We covered the attention economy, the power of the narrative, what messaging is, what brain science is, the 5 Intents model, what makes it different, and the results.

But something is missing. There is no motivational content here. No next steps, no clear call to action. That is a failure I see constantly in marketing: really good content, no CTA. So let me fix it.

The large CTA: reach out to your Ambassify customer success contact to discuss an in-company workshop, a virtual workshop, or a bespoke messaging project. Messaging can serve marketing, sales, external communication through the Ambassify platform, or driving internal adoption of the platform itself.

The medium CTA: connect with me on LinkedIn for regular updates and the occasional puppy photograph.

Q&A, isn't this manipulative?

Yes, it can be. We have an ethical responsibility as marketers to make sure this does not become a problem.

I work with a handful of companies a year and I am very careful about what those clients are doing, how their salespeople sell, and how they follow up. In some cases I have had to say: sorry, you are overselling, your messaging outperforms your product, and it is not a good idea to proceed.

So be careful with this, precisely because it is effective.

Q&A, how does this relate to Google's See-Think-Do model?

I would love to answer that once I have looked into See-Think-Do properly. It is new to me, so thank you for the introduction.

My intuition, from knowing Google a little, is that they have a mountain of behavioural data behind it. A close friend spent a long time in people analytics at Google, and his point was that they did not need to interview people or run annual reviews, because they build the tools people work in every day and therefore have the analytics on actual behaviour.

So I would guess See-Think-Do rests on a far larger dataset than a couple of decades in sales and a years-long fascination with brain science.

Q&A, is this only useful for marketing and sales?

I am hesitant to say it is only for marketing and sales, because it is universal. This works for dating.

Remember Start With Why. A lot of companies applying it behave like a bad first date, talking about themselves for the first twenty minutes.

So it underlies a great deal of human communication, and I use it everywhere: talking to vendors, buying things, ordinary daily life. The model changes your communication DNA and it changes how you see the world.

Which brings us back to first principles. Once you understand how something works and know all its moving parts, it becomes easy to see the world through that lens and engage with it differently.

Key takeaways

The company with the better story usually wins. Sadly it is not always the one with the better product, service or team. It is the one best at articulating value, best at inspiring action, best at telling the story.

Your story is the engine that drives you to finishing first.

And finally, in the wise words of Walter White: trust the science.