In this episode of Getting to Aha!, Darshan Mehta is joined by Leslie Talbot, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Corporate Visions. They delve into whether writers and marketers feel imprisoned by SEO, rendering them unable to tell a story, how you can beat your imposter syndrome, and why storytelling is such a scientific, vital part of working with customers.

Leslie is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Corporate Visions, the leading provider of science-backed sales and marketing training and consulting services. Prior to this, she was the Founder and Principal of G2G Sales Communications, the Director of Content Services at Pragmatech Software (now Qvidian), and a Partner/Senior Writer at Inkable! She’s also written an article titled “Marketing is Moving Further Down the Sales Funnel” - an excellent read!

👉 We talk a lot about Aha! moments here and the external factors of what led to them, but Leslie argues that it’s the way you respond to situations that create the Aha! moments. You have to ask yourself if where you are right now is where you want to be. She says that once she realized she could make money from writing, an Aha! moment went off in her head: she could combine her love and passion for writing with her sales knowledge to start a whole new career!

👉 If you’re not careful, your imposter syndrome will be your downfall; you need to trust yourself and your work. When people are telling you that you’re good at something, listen to them and, more importantly, trust what they’re saying is true. Leslie believed that her dreams of writing were a childish pipedream and that she should’ve been focusing on business and sales, but the world and the people around her just kept pushing her to do more!

👉 Leslie says that, at Corporate Visions, there is a massive focus on storytelling because it’s our stories that drive the world; our brains operate through stories. If you don’t understand something, your brain will think up a story to fill in the blanks. If you can tell a story to your customers and make them the hero of their own stories, then you’ll have sold them on your product or service. 

👉 Business people tend to shy away from telling stories, instead choosing to lead with facts and figures. But all business decisions actually come from emotional places. It comes from thinking about what drives a customer to make a certain point, and looking into insights into how they think along with their values. Build your story around where the customer is, rather than just throwing data at them.

👉 The wisdom of conventional marketers isn’t necessarily wrong, but it is limited. There is such a focus on automation and digital marketing recently, but the reason most marketers get into marketing is that they don’t like math and science, and yet those two things are thrown onto them and it can become overwhelming and disheartening. Sometimes the story can get lost because of ‘SEO’. A lot of marketers feel imprisoned by that.

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