Should You Share Your Secret Sauce?

The Medium post that changed my life

A year ago, when I launched my strategic messaging practice, I wasn’t entirely sure about its long-term viability. After holding senior marketing roles at Skype, Mashery and 500friends (a loyalty startup acquired by Merkle), I decided to jump off a cliff and focus on what I love: helping leadership teams craft their core strategic stories — the high-level messages that power sales, fundraising, everything. I signed a decent batch of early clients through my personal network, but would the business grow?

Meanwhile, I was posting LinkedIn articles, roughly once a week, about my approach. Although I’m Wharton-trained, I find that business plans and sales/marketing messages benefit if you think about them more like movies — fleshing out the main character (customer), the central conflict, etc. — the way writers and filmmakers do. If the storytelling thing sounds touchy-feely, the LinkedIn articles were a channel for explaining how it worked. I never traced new business to these posts, but my clients told me they found them useful.

Why I shared some secret sauce

I first heard about Elon Musk’s keynote for his new battery, the Tesla Powerwall, back in May 2015, when a writer at the Verge called it “the best keynote I’ve ever seen.” Several publications weighed in on what made Musk’s talk so compelling, but most of their advice was worthless. (One of USA Today’s “five secrets” to replicating Musk’s success: “Be inspiring.”)

Replaying video of Musk’s pitch, I noticed that it exhibited the narrative approach to pitching and messaging I had been developing. In fact, Musk so expertly conveyed and ordered key story elements — antagonist, conflict, stakes, etc.— that his audience completely overlooked the lackluster presentation style that’s his trademark. They cheered — for a battery. I began sending the video to clients, along with my take on what he was doing right.

It occurred to me one day that I should publish those notes. I wrote up a draft on LinkedIn, but then dismissed the idea. Wouldn’t potential clients just read the article instead of hiring me? Might others copy what I was doing? The piece lingered in my LinkedIn drafts folder for over a month.

Then, one day, I was skimming through the blog of the marketing guru Seth Godin, and came across his discussion of gifts:

“A gift…changes everything. The imbalance creates motion, motion that pushes us to a new equilibrium, motion that creates connection.”

Somehow, reading this made me want to publish the LinkedIn piece about Elon Musk’s talk. As an afterthought, I also posted it on Medium, where I had fewer than 100 followers.

My worst fears realized, but finding my “tribe”

On LinkedIn, the piece received a few hundred views and a few dozen likes. But on Medium, despite the lack of followers, it somehow found a broader audience. (BTW, I have also had the opposite experience, where a piece gets larger readership on LinkedIn.) Readership hit 600 views the first day and grew to over 19,000 a few days later. I was teaching a business storytelling workshop one evening at General Assembly in SF, when an alert popped up on my phone saying the story had reached Medium’s top 10.

In the days that followed, hundreds of people got in touch to say the piece helped them fund their companies, win new customers, and persuade people to join their teams. In a way, my worst fears were realized: None of these people became my clients. Consultants contacted me to say they were going to incorporate my ideas in their work.

But Godin was right about a gift (if I can call it that) creating a kind of motion that leads to connection. For one thing, it was reassuring just to learn that there are people out there who are thinking about the things I’m thinking about. Godin calls these people — who care about what you care about — your “tribe.” It sounds cheesy, I know, but it felt good not only to connect with my tribe members, but also to help them.

How my professional life eventually changed

After a while, a bunch of people who read the piece did become clients. Most of them told me they had received it from a friend. Specifically, these things happened:

• Entrepreneurs from around the world began contacting me for help with strategic messaging and fundraising pitches. Teams traveled from as far away as Europe and Asia to run through my story definition and messaging process in San Francisco. Working with so many companies helped me learn more about what works and what doesn’t, so I could improve my approach and add more value.
• Large enterprises began flying me around the U.S. to lead storytelling workshops for their entire marketing, sales, recruiting and product teams. This was a new line of business that took off thanks to the Musk article. Readers clicked through to my website, where they learned about my business storytelling classes at General Assembly, and several asked if I could tailor custom storytelling workshops for their teams. I love doing these workshops, and the Musk piece created a broader audience for them.
• Prominent venture capitalists began referring me to portfolio companies who were struggling with messaging, sales pitches and/or fundraising pitches. I had always imagined that VCs would be an important growth channel for my practice, and thanks to the Musk piece, that’s happening.

So, should you share your secret sauce?

If you’re on the fence about revealing the key ingredients of your own process or product, should you do it? It’s hard to say the answer is always yes. But I’d encourage you to go for it. If your secret sauce is tasty, it seems, people want to connect with the chef.

Read the piece about Elon Musk’s talk: Want a Better Pitch? Watch This