726 Ginger Zumaeta:

No one ever made a sale making anyone feel stupid, confused by charts or overwhelmed by a deluge of information. The best pitches are all about great storytelling, and my guest today – Ginger Zumaeta [zoometa] is an expert in all things storytelling and communicating big ideas that sell. So today we dig deep into the art of the pitch and how to take your messaging and positioning to the next level.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock, and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and founder-CEO of the social podcast app Podopolo, and I know only too well from my own struggles raising investment for my businesses, including Podopolo, how hard it is for women to get venture capital. If you’re new to Wings, we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … on every business topic across every industry across more than 660 episodes now … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. Wings is all about women lifting as we climb, so share the love by sharing Wings and our big catalogue of back episodes with an entrepreneurial friend so they can accelerate their dreams! And join the conversation over on Podopolo where my guests and I are on hand to answer questions, offer advice and much more!

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who was won 3 Emmy Awards for her writing and producing for network television and moved on to work with major brands like Coca Cola and Verizon.

Ginger Zumaeta is the Founder and CEO of Motive3, a positioning and messaging strategy firm, and she’s got a new book coming out soon called Deckonomics: Design Presentations that Spread Ideas, Drive Decisions and Close Deals. So today we talk about how to best communicate your vision, mission and value proposition and much more.

 Ginger will be here in a moment, and first:

We all know the Hero’s Journey, right? Maybe for this podcast the Shero’s Journey. It’s embedded in every Disney movie you’ve ever seen, in every long form sales letter, and in all the best pitches. The Shero answers the call to adventure, ok starts a business, and then suffers many setbacks, challenges and perils along the way, until a mentor appears, a lesson is learned, a solution is found, and our shero emerges victoriously transformed – stronger, smarter and successful.

So bottom line, if you ever want to sell something well, craft your message as one of transformation with a powerful and simple story line.

Ginger Zumaeta is the founder and CEO of Motiv3, the positioning and messaging agency who has worked with some of the world’s largest brands, such as Coca Cola, Verizon, Union Bank, Amgen, Anthem, Infinity Insurance and many others. You can often catch her insights in

Business Insider, TheNextWeb, Better Marketing, Storius, and Marketing Profs. She’s won 3 Emmy Awards, 12 Muse awards and a Gracie Award for her work in television, and

Ginger uses her experience in storytelling and persuasion to train corporate teams in telling better business stories to move high stakes work forward with clear and succinct

presentations grounded in story structure and backed by brain science.

I can’t wait to dig into the transformational power of storytelling in sales and marketing, so et’s put on our wings with the inspiring Ginger Zumaeta.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ginger, welcome to Wings.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m excited about this.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I am too. I’m all things storytelling. I think it’s the way that we connect on an emotional level and it becomes so important because everyone, no matter who they are, these days, needs to stand out and find signal in all that noise. So talk to me about storytelling.

Ginger Zumaeta:

I’ve basically been a career marketer for a very long time. That it’s a little bit embarrassing that the epiphany of storytelling didn’t actually come to me until about halfway through when I became an entrepreneur. When I became an entrepreneur, I started to realize that I was pitching a lot, and pitching isn’t storytelling. Pitching is trying to justify. So the more I started getting into storytelling, and I think the reason everybody needs their signature story and to be able to just put a tiny story together, which really is not difficult, is that when we’re telling stories and we tell stories in a classic narrative structure like there’s a main character, something happens that creates an issue. You’ve got to kind of beat down that issue and come to a good resolve.

But when we do that, things happen both scientifically, like we start to click into each other’s brain and actually kind of start to mind meld, the person starts to take a journey with you. I think even more importantly than that, as you get past the whole idea of just trying to give logical facts that will persuade someone, which I think we all know is not the entire recipe. You need to ignite people’s imagination. They need to kind of feel something emotionally. People actually can’t make a decision unless they feel an emotion and stories are just the fast track to that.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think the emotional connection is something that people often miss and so let’s get into that. What kind of emotional connection are we really going for? What’s the feeling, I suppose it differs depending on the brand. A lot of marketers use scarcity, this kind of like fear based marketing and others use more inspirational. In your mind, kind of what works or is it a combination of both?

Ginger Zumaeta:

It really is a combination of both. I mean, the reality is that it’s pain and scarcity and the kind of negative side that always ignites a story. There’s a struggle that we have to go through and when someone recognizes you say, gosh, I’m really having a hard time. I’m trying to think of a good example. I’m really having a hard time getting myself to be able to make a speech because I’m nervous about that. Someone goes internally, I have that same problem. You instantly have relatedness and then they’re with you on the journey of how you overcome that or how you manage it or whatever it is. The classic story structure is share a common challenge. The people that have that same common challenge are going to relate to that and then have an interest with you on like, okay, well, how did you overcome that challenge? That’s where you get to the aspirational part, but it’s really both in my book.

Melinda Wittstock:

What you’re describing is the hero’s journey or what we like to call the shero’s journey on this podcast. You see it everywhere. That arc you’re describing, you see it in every movie, in almost every commercial and almost every long form sales letter and just about everything.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. I mean, Melinda, we can nerd out on this for a really long time. Joseph Campbell is a personal hero and you’re exactly right. We have this universal story, what he would call the mono myth, that we’re all trying to get past the challenge that’s in front of us and then the next challenge, and then the next challenge, and it goes on and on, but all of these stories have something in common very much so. It’s so built into our DNA that when we start to tell stories, folks just click in with us. So I think the value of learning how to tell a story and I don’t want to make it more complicated than it is, but the value of just learning how to tell a story and how to communicate in story structure, I think is the kind of magic wand to being able to get things done in entrepreneurship and beyond.

Melinda Wittstock:

So it means though, too, that you have to, beyond the story, you have to know a lot about who you’re talking to and what their pain points actually are, but what’s the best way to go find that out? So many entrepreneurs that I’ve mentored, especially in the early stages, think they’re products for everybody and they don’t really necessarily have that deep understanding unless they’ve lived it themselves. When you’re working with people, what’s the process? How do you get them to that real understanding of what’s the kind of three o’clock in the morning, real problem, real fear that marketing copy or advertising copy has to address to be able to really make that connection?

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. I’ll tell you there’s lots of ways to do it, but then there’s, I think the way that works the best in terms of it giving you actual words you can use. A lot of the common ways are you Google a lot of things. You do a lot of market research and you try to validate that the pain actually exists and you can do that by looking at search terms and all sorts of technical things. That’s one way. I like the other way, which is a more human way, which is talk to people. Talk to people that have the problem that you think that you’re solving. So when we work with customers, I mean, one of the first things that we do when we’re going to try to do like a positioning or a messaging strategy, say, can we talk to a few of your customers?

It’s surprising how some companies really don’t want you to do that, but the ones that do we’re able to bring back goal to them, because one of the things that we ask usually is well, what sent you on that search to go find X company that you’re working with? They’ll say, well, I needed to solve this, or I had this problem, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, how did you think about going and solving that problem? Well, we knew we needed somebody that did X, Y, and Z. Okay. Well, what led you to choose this company in particular? Well, this company had this and then right there, when you get that, since we write a lot of messaging is sometimes the best way of summarizing the value prop of a company. Words that wouldn’t even come to our minds just tumble out of customers’ mouths because they’ve shorthanded it all. They know exactly what they were trying to get done. I don’t think you can underestimate the power of talking to prospects and talking to customers.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s really important to know what questions though, to ask them to elicit these things.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah, absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

I really learned the power of consultative selling, where essentially you are eliciting information and showing the gap between where they are now and where they could be and asking along the way, can you see how that would be helpful to you? In a culture and attention seeking economy where we’ve got so much extraneous information or what I like to call infobesity, there’s not necessarily the time to really go through that process in a marketing funnel or on a social media post or a social media. So how do you grab attention and really show or get into that gap where you can really get people to like, oh, I see this is the solution for me?

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. You talked about the consultative selling and I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I would recommend to your listeners. There’s three questions that we always ask that are sort of like our holy Trinity, that give us the answer to what you’re asking, which is well, what’s going on? Why now? Why are we talking right now? They’ll usually give you a host of reasons. Okay. Well, what is it that you want? What’s at the end of the rainbow that they’re trying to get to? Then the third question is, well, if you know what it is that you want and you know where you are right now, why aren’t you there yet? Then comes the, well, I don’t have enough capacity or we don’t have this particular type of expertise or we’re having a hard time getting funding. Then you start to really zero in on what that problem is and then you can move on from there in terms of like, okay, well, here’s a couple of ways that we might be able to close that gap.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. You really need to involve them in the process. I think sometimes the best sales and marketing people are actually introverts. They’re great listeners.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. They’re great at asking questions. I mean, depending on the age of your listeners, I play Colombo a lot. First of all, I’m just naturally curious. So I really want to know the answers to these questions, but I think one thing that I find with entrepreneurs sometimes is they think they have to have the answers and I don’t think they do. I think you have to have really good questions and there’s a fine line between being an expert and then kind of like being an expert consultant, if you will, and a consultant is ultimately a mentor, a helper. You’re trying to help somebody solve their problem.

You’ve got to ask the questions. I used to try to always act smart and I really think it got in my way, to be honest. Then I was like, you know what? I’m not even going to try to do that anymore. If I have a question, no matter how dumb I might think it is, I’m just going to ask it. Sometimes you get the most fascinating insights from asking those what you would normally call dumb questions.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love the dumb question. I’m a recovering journalist before I became an entrepreneur and I’m a five time serial entrepreneur in all things media tech. Before that I was a journalist and the dumb question was the way I broke major exclusive stories.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Love it. Love it.

Melinda Wittstock:

It was usually like the courage to ask a dumb question in front of other people.

Ginger Zumaeta:

I couldn’t agree with you more. I mean, I think that sometimes folks are holding back and I’m a 100% with you. I will ask that dumb question and I don’t mind saying, this might be a dumb question, but I don’t know the answer to it. So I’m going to go ahead and ask, what does this mean? You keep saying this one word over and over again like I’m supposed to know what it means, but what is that word? They’ll explain it or sometimes you’ll be surprised they don’t even know what it means. I just go for it and I would give that piece of advice to anyone.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. I got that lesson really early on in my career. I was a correspondent on The Times of London writing about business and mergers and acquisitions. There was some sort of really complicated financial instrument being banded around in a news conference and I didn’t understand what it meant, right? I’m surrounded, I’m the only woman in the room. I’m 22 and I think, oh my God, I should know this. All the shame of not knowing it and then I finally put my hand up because I thought, I can’t write this story without understanding what I’m writing. I asked the question, it was a dumb question. Then much to my surprise, I saw every single other journalist, all these like 40, 50 something, men all writing down the answer because they didn’t know either.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yep.

Melinda Wittstock:

It was hilarious. I was kind of grateful for learning that lesson early.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Absolutely. I think that’s an edge that maybe we as women have, which is that willingness to be a little bit more vulnerable that gives us, I think, if we’re able to insights that we just couldn’t get to otherwise.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. You have to not be worried about being underestimated or accepting that goes back to that Colombo thing, right? His genius was being underestimated all the time.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

Entrepreneurship to me is about alchemy. It’s like you see a problem and you’re creating a solution and innovating something often at a whole cloth and co-creating with your customers along the way. You mentioned curiosity before, I think that’s an absolute 100% necessary ingredient for any entrepreneur because it’s just constant change and constant learning.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. I think that curiosity is an interesting thing because I think everybody has it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Actually no. A lot of people don’t. We have this joke in our company, you can be right or you can be rich and often there’s a gap there because there’s certain people who just really want to be right and even at the expense of not knowing something or not being able to seize an opportunity.

Ginger Zumaeta:

I have a feeling that maybe some of that is just learned and it’s a habit. I would just encourage people to try to build a habit of curiosity because I think once you have it, it sort of blooms, but I think a lot of the times we are… I started my career originally in the corporate environment and I think that you’re sort of trained and expected to just show up with answers and to have that level of confidence and certainty about what you say and you stop being curious. It’s a good question. I don’t know if it’s one of those things that you either have it, or you don’t, or if you just kind of suppress it. I mean, I think that even Google is fascinating. I mean, our need to kind of have the answers so quickly if any question comes to our mind, we’re no longer comfortable sitting in that uncertainty of not knowing the answer, we have to go and Google it right away. Sometimes I’m like, I’m okay not finding it right away.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Yeah. 100%. Ginger, you started out really working in corporate America. I mean, some of the brands that you have used your talents on include Coca-Cola. So what did you learn there? What were some of the learnings or even fail moments along the way there that really inform what you’re doing with your own business as an entrepreneur now and all the work you do for others?

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. I think one of the really interesting lessons that I learned… So I worked for NBC for a long time as the kind of head of advertising and promotion, which is effectively the in-house ad agency. My job was to try to get you to watch more television. Along the way… We were a big successful company and one of the interesting things that happened is along the way in NBC and our parent company purchased Telemundo. Now we had another company that was mostly a different culture, mostly a different language that we’re trying to do business with. One of the things that helped me see, that I think was invaluable was how different cultures and tribes work differently, come to the table with different assumptions, have different back stories that are leading them to their kind of worldview.

That sort of sent me on a journey, I think to try to do a lot more. For a while I did a lot more stuff in the multicultural world. So when I worked with Coca-Cola, it was my very first sort of consulting client, I was actually helping them understand the Asian American audience that they hadn’t taken a really hard look at that segment specifically. We discovered all sorts of interesting things in terms of how they have different kind of buying habits at the grocery store, the type of flavor profiles that… This has been a little while, but there were kind of popping up in the fringes that Coca-Cola could start to look at. Is this something that we want to investigate a little bit more, put into our portfolio?

I think that sort of jarring yourself out of your kind of silo in a way. I mean, the great thing about corporate America is there’s a lot of predictability and stability. The not so great thing is even though I worked at NBC, in a highly enviable job, when I left, I realized how siloed I’d been. Then being able to kind of have that experience of having, when we purchased Telemundo, having to work with different people, different styles, different culture, different ideas, I think really helped me in the entrepreneurial world, be much more adaptable to different types of companies. Where they might be coming from? What is forming their worldview, et cetera. I think that difference and variety is something that folks should embrace because I think it’ll help them have kind of a more expansive and agile view of things. Ultimately that’s great for entrepreneurship because it means you can help more people

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s interesting what you were saying about the multicultural aspect of the United States and I think even marketing to the Hispanic community, for instance, depending on the cultural origin, like folks who’ve come from Cuba, as opposed to Puerto Rico, as opposed to Mexico, wildly different. I’ve seen so many companies make horrendous mistakes by not understanding that.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. 100%. I mean, people tend to think Hispanic or Latinx or whatever the phrase-

Melinda Wittstock:

Is, right?

Ginger Zumaeta:

Is one thing. In the [crosstalk 00:21:39].

Melinda Wittstock:

I imagine that would be true for Asian Americans. I mean, there’s so many differences, so many cultural differences.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. It’s so funny. One of the first jobs I had, so Kaiser Permanente, big healthcare company on the west coast. I started working with them right when the affordable care act took place and I was helping them understand our Hispanics. A potential opportunity for them and long story short. Yes, obviously. But one of the most interesting things I worked with them on is they needed to build a practice then to be able to take calls from predominantly Spanish speaking folks who were seeking healthcare insurance and one of their metrics, I remember someone was talking to me and say, well we’re not really being very successful with Hispanics. If you look at these call times, the calls are just taking longer, we’re not necessarily closing the sale.

These are very, very smart people, but they just didn’t understand and so there was a little piece of cultural knowledge I knew because I also am a Latina. I said, well, with Hispanics, generally, you need to be relational before transactional. So of course the call is going to take longer. You can’t jump right into, let me give you all the features and benefits of this package. They’re going to want to tell you about their family, what they’re dealing with and you relate to them. A longer call in that sense is a better call and then you can kind of jump into the, okay, well, let me present you with some options. It was interesting because there was a tiny little moment that ended up being a real eye opener that helped them really think differently about how they were serving that audience.

Long story short, they got a lion share of the Hispanic audience when ACA went into place, but being able to have some of that cultural competency and ask the questions like why is this different? Again, back to curiosity. I think that was really invaluable for me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ginger, what you say makes perfect sense and I want to pivot a little bit, because I want to make sure we have time to talk about your book, Deckonomics. I’m familiar with the PowerPoint presentation in the context of being a media tech entrepreneur, who’s raised money for my various companies along the way, and the deck, and trying to tell a story in a PowerPoint, and it’s easier said than done. So what are the kind of key takeaways from your book? Where do people go wrong and what should people be doing to close that loop? Again, back to great storytelling.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Yeah. Thanks for asking. I mean, this is such a passion of mine that I stumbled into accidentally. At some point we all have to put sort of the presentation of our lives or our high stakes presentation together where we’re trying to sometimes get hundreds of millions of dollars. I’ve worked with some companies where literally it’s like this deck, if we do it right, will give us $200 million and how do you do it? I’ll give you the biggest pitfall that most people make. The biggest pitfall that most people make is that they have the curse of knowledge. They know so much about a topic and they want somebody else to know about that topic so that they can make a decision. So they put it all in there.

They’re trying to, in a way, replicate all of the knowledge that they have to give to somebody else so that, that somebody else can come to the same conclusion that they’ve already gotten to. That’s just dead wrong, right? When you get to the presentation, your job is to simplify like eighth grader level, right? To massively simplify the story of what you’re trying to tell. Much like the hero’s journey and what Deckonomics does is it basically takes people through the steps of how to build a journey with your pitch, but what you’re trying to get to exactly like telling a story is you have to really understand who you’re talking to. What is the thing that they’re trying to accomplish? What’s getting in the way of them accomplishing that thing right now? How do you express that you’ve got the authority, qualifications, et cetera, to help them bridge the gap that they have? Then how do you prove it, right?

What’s the path and how do you prove this is how I’m going to help you? Going through a basic story, you’re going to end up with, honestly, not a lot. Eight to 10 pages that are very, very clear, that have a good amount of white space that aren’t full of mind boggling charts, et cetera. I think a lot of people try to turn their audience into analysts, which is not the point. If you tell the story well with the handful of proof points that you actually need, but they most importantly just understand your story, that’s all they really want. If they understand the story, they’ll have enough of a basis to be able to make a decision. If you try to throw a bunch of stuff at them and they don’t understand, they’re going to think one of two things, you’re stupid or I’m stupid. Neither of those is good for a decision. I think the biggest thing that folks can do is really simplify what they’re trying to explain.

Use very simple graphics. If you use good images, the influence of those pages goes up like by 43%. People would be able to make a positive decision on your behalf and just boil it down. Don’t try to put it all in there. That’s the worst thing that you can possibly do.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so true. You want them wanting more and you certainly don’t want them confused.

Ginger Zumaeta:

That’s right. I mean, confusion is the enemy of decision, so you’ve got to make sure-

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, because you end up at the end of a call saying, hey, we’ll go away and think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Now you don’t want that.

Ginger Zumaeta:

Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so, so important. So say you have this amazing deck and there you are doing the presentation and there are decks that you send to people and there are decks that you speak to. How do you speak to something without competing with it? How do the two interplay?

Ginger Zumaeta:

There’s different altitudes or really distances from the screen, right? There’s going to be the presentations that you’re literally giving around a table and they have the benefit of your voiceover and on those, the pages should be pretty clean because you don’t want them reading your deck or if they don’t even have it, you want them to benefit from your voiceover. If you’re in the room or on the Zoom, you are the main character in the storytelling, not the pages. So you don’t want too much there. Now, when you get a little bit further away, say you have to email a deck, right? Someone says, just send me the deck. Well, now you need a completely different density of information.

I think a lot of people are afraid of paragraphs in decks. Now, while I don’t like wall to wall bullet points, which are the worst. If you need someone that is going to have to be consumed without the benefit of your voiceover, you’re going to have to put more on the page and they’re going to have to understand incomplete thoughts. I think the power of complete sentences is kind of magic and you need to put it in there. Then of course there’s a completely different altitude. If you’re giving a presentation to a large room or you’re on a stage, then you want virtually no words on the screen.

One of the things that we talk about when we do a lot of workshops with companies on these decks is, have all of your support copy that you would have to give, if you don’t have the benefit of a voiceover, just throw that in your notes and give your presentation in the kind of more austere format, but then if you have to follow it up with the leave behind, or you have to email it to someone, give them the version with all of that extra explanation.

Melinda Wittstock:

So along the way, you must have learned some of these things, Ginger, sort of the hard way. Are there any kind of big mistakes that you made or little failures, micro or large that you’re willing to share? Because one of the things we try and do is to demystify or de-stigmatize rather, failure in an entrepreneurial context, because it’s part of the program and take away the shame of it because it’s really an opportunity for learning. What were some of yours?

Ginger Zumaeta: (32:42):

I think that some of my biggest takeaways, one of them, we’ve talked about a little bit, which is just don’t try to act smart. You can demonstrate your intelligence much more through questions than you can through trying to have all the answers. That’s something that I think is going to be true, no matter how experienced you are. Another big one that I have, particularly for women to be honest, is don’t complain and don’t explain. A lot of times we feel like we need to over-explain our reasons for making a decision or not making a decision or it taking longer than we thought it was going to take or whatever it was. We just need to kind of say, this took longer than I thought it was going to take, but here it is and move on. We don’t need all of that filler. Trying to justify our-

Melinda Wittstock: (33:45):

And the apology. Like how many times women say, I’m sorry.

Ginger Zumaeta: (33:50):

Exactly. That’s hard. I tell myself, when I feel myself starting to try to give the reasons or the justification for one thing or another, I kind of turn back to that mantra of don’t complain, don’t explain. I think the other one that I’m embarrassed it’s taken me a lot longer to learn than it should have, is I have a habit of trying to be self-sufficient. I have done so many things the hard way, Melinda, because I am trying to DIY my butt into a better position or whatever it is and it really has taken me some time and reflection to realize that it’s okay to ask for help and in fact kind of reaching out and staying in communication, not trying to do it all yourself, just really holds you down and holds you back.

That’s something that for me personally, was something I actually had to work on. Would you be able to help me with this? Or I’m looking for someone who knows more about that, or I don’t know how to get this thing done, do you know anyone that has information about that? Versus trying to go, just learn it all myself. That took me a bit to kind of figure out, but it’s a game changer.

Melinda Wittstock: (35:36):

Yeah. We often think we have to do it all to have it all, and it’s not true. Things that you don’t particularly like to do, or you’re not particularly good at, hire that.

Ginger Zumaeta: (35:46):

100%.

Melinda Wittstock: (35:49):

So speaking of that, who are your ideal clients? Who are the type of people that you’re working with now and you like to work with?

Ginger Zumaeta: (35:56):

Yeah. What we do best is we work with companies who are struggling to stand out in a sea of sameness. We’re really about, we believe that different is better than better, and we help companies find their difference that actually gives them an advantage. We work really with two size clients and we work with some very, very large kind of Fortune 500 level clients on big projects with strategy and we love those. Then there’s the next tier, which are kind of like the SMBs or the mid-size companies that don’t always have kind of a CMO level person in their business, but they don’t necessarily need the CMO full time. We work with them a lot in terms of kind of helping them tease out what really is going to help them pull themselves out of the pack. It’s a lot harder for mid-size clients. It’s a lot more crowded there and so in reality, those mid-size clients need that kind of positioning, that brand messaging, that is going to help differentiate them a lot more than even the larger guys.

Melinda Wittstock: (37:19):

So true. Do you do any work with startups? I mean, startups is a whole other thing because you’re… Depending on the type of startup, often you’re creating a whole new market.

Ginger Zumaeta: (37:29):

We have worked with startups and for a long time, I was actually kind of fluttering around the startup world and have advised many startups and had one or two failures myself, but I’ll tell you with startups that what’s super interesting to me about startups is they’re so highly innovative. With startup founders, what you tend to get a lot, especially in technical fields or science based fields is that they really, really know their product or whatever or service or whatever they’re trying to bring to the market, but they don’t sometimes have that emotional intelligence of kind of bringing it back to normal human scale words, so people can relate to them. Well, I don’t-

Melinda Wittstock: (38:26):

You’re talking about me. Well, actually not, but [crosstalk 00:38:29]. Yeah. I recognize that because you’re so attached to your thing and you’ve been living and breathing it and you know all the intricacies and detail that you can easily lose perspective in terms of how it translates to just a regular person. Yeah.

Ginger Zumaeta: (38:46):

Yeah, absolutely. I think startups need to know that story because here’s the reality, when start to get bigger, they start to understand that your brand is an operating system, right? There’s all the feature set and the specs of the product and stuff and then there’s the team and all of these things, those create value internally, but if you can’t express that value to your prospects, you’re dead in the water and vice versa, by the way. You can have great marketing and a really crappy product. When you start thinking about brand, those two things are like flywheels that have to work together. So it’s really important for a startup or a young company to get their story straight because that story is going to drive product development, is going to drive the customer service experience, et cetera, cetera. You’ve got to figure out what your story is as soon as possible and I think startups could actually go a lot further once…

They’ve got to get product market fit, so you’ve got to try a bunch of different things first, but once you start to dial it in I would say, get your five second story. Your 52nd elevator speech and your five minute story as quickly as you can.

Melinda Wittstock: (40:11):

So true. Ginger, I want to make sure everybody who’s listened to this knows how to find you and work with you and get your book. What’s the best way.

Ginger Zumaeta: (40:26):

So I am on LinkedIn. I’ve got a pretty unique name. So find Ginger Zumaeta on LinkedIn. My company is motive3.com. Motive, the numeral three.com and my book, which God, I wrote it in four months and it’s taken… It’s a very visual book. It’s taken almost two years to get through layout. We’re getting closer. Should be out, I’m hoping in a few months and you can find out more about that on my personal website, gingerzumaeta.com.

Melinda Wittstock: (40:59):

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Ginger Zumaeta: (41:04):

Thank you, Melinda. This was great.