Christian Klepp, Matt Wolfe

Matt Wolfe  00:00

I call the marketing that most of us do when we talk about ourselves first. We’ve been in this 35 years. We have these credentials. We’ve served all these people. I call it “I’m good at this. I promise, pick me marketing. Because people can’t literally cannot hear or really understand your reason for being and your mission and purpose until they understand how it applies to them. And I don’t care who it is. I haven’t. I meet so many people who think they are in boring industries where they’re the same as everyone else. But if you dig in with that founder, right, that person who started that thing and cared enough to do it, they had something specific vibrating inside of them that is unique and a different way they wanted to contribute to the industry.

Christian Klepp  00:41

Most businesses invest in marketing before they have a strategy for telling the right story to the right people, and that’s why their campaigns fail. Just like building a house, you need to start with the right plan and architectural blueprint. So, how can B2B companies start with the right brand strategy for long term growth? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Matt Wolfe, who will be answering this question. He’s a partner and director of brand strategy at Brand3, helping B2B leaders scale beyond referrals by making marketing more human, so it earns the trust of ideal clients. Let’s dive in, and away we go, Mr. Matt Wolfe. Welcome to the show.

Matt Wolfe  01:05

Thank you, Christian. It’s great to be here.

Christian Klepp  01:23

Matt. I, you know, I gotta come clean. I, I feel like I’ve known you for like 100 years now, right?

Matt Wolfe  01:30

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  01:30

We, you know, we we we got on the pre-interview call and you know, just as we were jumping on this call before I hit record, I’m like, gosh, I get on with this guy like a house on fire.

Matt Wolfe  01:40

Yeah, it’s so many years. Yeah, it’s just been great. Really enjoyed it so far.

Christian Klepp  01:45

Yeah, and and and for those of you that are listening to the audio version of this episode, I just want you to know that Matt’s got a really sweet, like vintage-looking microphone, and I’m and I’m all here for it, right? Like, if anything else, but um, I’m you know, really glad to have you on the show, Matt, and I’m really looking forward to diving into this topic, which is not just near and dear to my heart as a fellow brand strategist, but something that I think is so important in the world of B2B and unfortunately, it tends to get overlooked, it tends to get ignored, and it tends to get neglected, and it’s really to the detriment of the organization. And what am I talking about? Like, let’s keep the audience in suspense a little while longer while I like set the tone. All right.

Matt Wolfe  02:35

Okay. Fair enough.

 

Christian Klepp  02:36

Okay. All right. So, first question. So, Matt, you’re on a mission to help businesses connect with the people they’re meant to serve and grow, which sounds simple enough, but we know in reality that can be a challenge, right? So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic, and we’re definitely going to unpack it from there. So that’s how to develop the right brand strategy that paves the way for long-term business growth. So, I’d like to kick off this conversation with the following question. So, many B2B companies, especially those that are founder led, and we’ve all worked with them, right? They’ve built their business through referrals or word of mouth. But in your experience, this is a two pronged question. In your experience, why is this approach not sustainable, and why is it so difficult for founders to shift their mindset?

Matt Wolfe  03:27

Yeah. So, why is it not sustainable long term, or why does it not work? The the the simplest answer is a lot of these folks just have not had the opportunity or had the guidance to figure out how to tell the right story to the right people, and that’s to to us. That’s brand strategy. That’s the easiest way I can describe brand strategy. It is the thing you do before marketing, and it is the work of figuring out what that story is. So if you don’t have that strategy in place, and if you aren’t telling the right story to the right people, nothing will be sustainable. That’s the reason why so many people have had bad experiences with marketing, why they feel like they’ve wasted so much time and money on it, especially in the B2B space. The absence of that well crafted strategy and the messaging that goes along with it is what’s missing. Nothing will work, and so a lot of B2B services have been sold packages of marketing services that are tactical. You know, taking the tools that we have, which are important-the email, the social, the the  SEO (Search Engine Optimization), whatever-but they’ve been told that this tool, this tactic, will solve your problem, and it simply cannot do it until the human side of things, because all B2B is about human relationships. Until we have a good story to tell about that relationship, nothing’s going to work. The reason I think it’s hard for people to change their mindset about that there’s a few reasons. One is that people don’t like to wait. To get going on a marketing campaign, and it does take a second to step back, at least a few weeks. It’s going to take some time to step back and figure out that story, to do the discovery work and the hard work of building a foundation for your brand strategy. And different agencies have different approaches to that. I think the best approach will help people hop into action on some sort of, you know, test campaign or an isolated campaign while the whole foundation is being built. You know that you you do need to show the business owner some action. So there’s just that there’s just that sense, and and the reason why they don’t want to wait is because they don’t trust, right? They’ve already had bad experiences and are like, just get to it and show me whether or not this is going to work. Well, they just they don’t know why it didn’t work in the past. The other reason why I think it’s hard for people to change their mindset is because they’ve been living in a paradigm of business and marketing storytelling, which is counterproductive. And and I’ll tell you real specifically what I mean by that. So most of us lead in our marketing messaging. We start talking about ourselves, just out of anxiety and a pressure we feel to prove to people that we are trustworthy, credentialed, that we know what we’re talking about. So we just leap in and we start throwing all this stuff at people. This is why we’re good at what we do. This is why you can trust us. Well, that actually short circuits the conversation. What we actually have to do and need to do is to really take the time to understand how to tell someone else’s story-the story of the people who we are meant to serve, our ideal client. We need to really focus on telling their story and making them feel seen and heard. And if we do that first, then we’ll get the chance to make our case for why we’re the best people to solve their problem. But that’s a mode of storytelling that is unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable, uncomfortable for people at first. But that’s that’s a that’s a high level look at story brand, which is a thing that I’m certified in, in terms of narrative marketing, that helps address that issue.

Christian Klepp  07:04

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. It’s you know, it it blows my mind. You know how many times I’ve audited companies’ websites or just their assets and collateral, and it blows my mind how they never talk about the customer.

Matt Wolfe  07:19

Never. Yeah.

Christian Klepp  07:20

Yeah or and and to your point, right? I I did this audit like a few months ago, and you see the website, and it only talks about them, how you know how they’re globally distributed, and how many you know how many how many people they have on staff, and how many awards they’ve won, and how many certifications they have, and you just get buried in the me, me, me, me, me, and then yeah, and then you stop to think like, okay, hang on a second, what is your reason for being? Like, what purpose does your organization serve, and who who do you serve? Right?

Matt Wolfe  07:57

Yeah, because people can’t literally cannot hear or really understand your reason for being and your mission and purpose until they understand how it applies to them,

Christian Klepp  08:06

right?

Matt Wolfe  08:06

You know, and so I one example I always like to give is here’s something that always breaks my heart, and I see it on a lot of websites. We worked with a managed services provider who the header of their website said, “We go further. That’s all it said. He didn’t know where they were coming from, or where they’re going, or why they’re going anywhere. But I know that someone sat around a table and they said, “That’s who we are. We go further for our clients. We should say that. And then in the next section, it said, “And we’ve been serving clients with their technical needs for 35 years,

Christian Klepp  08:37

right?

Matt Wolfe  08:37

And nobody cares because we don’t know why to care yet, we don’t know what it has to do with us. But what breaks my heart about it is they have spent 35 years serving people and doing it really well. And I would love for people to hear that in a way they can understand. And in that specific example, what we learned about them in Discovery is that what they were really doing as a business, is they were the champions of nonprofits in their city. Their passion was doing IT support, managed services provider, cybersecurity stuff for nonprofits, and they talked about it nowhere. So now the header on their website talks about how how they understand that nonprofits have unique needs and don’t work the same way as everyone else, and need someone who understands them. That and they’re able to speak to the specific problems that nonprofits have that they don’t have the money to hire an internal IT team. If they go to most MSPs (Managed Service Providers), the MSPs don’t actually understand. They’re generalists, and they don’t really understand what the nonprofits really need. They just they the at the end of the day the story is they can’t find people who understand them and really know how to support them and it’s a really simple story but it’s the right story to the right people and now they’ve got some traction.

Christian Klepp  09:53

I might be jumping ahead here a little bit, but why is there such a resistance to telling the story from the Customer standpoint?

Matt Wolfe  10:02

I think it comes from the anxiety that we feel to make our case. I I call the marketing that most of us do when we talk about ourselves first. We’ve been in this 35 years. We have these credentials. We’ve served all these people. I call it. I’m good at this. I promise, pick me marketing. And and in the absence of another framework, that’s all we know. That’s all we’ve known how to do all our life. We had to make resumes to prove to people we know what we’re doing. We had to interview for jobs. We had you had to apply for colleges. We’ve been doing that our whole lives until someone teaches us something else.

Christian Klepp  10:36

Yeah,

Matt Wolfe  10:36

and I think it’s hard to trust that a little bit of empathy goes a long way, and if your messaging just starts with the idea of, “Hey, man, I I really see where you’re going. I see what you’re trying to accomplish. I really understand at this specific level why it’s hard for you. The reason I understand that is because I have been there, and I do know a pathway through this problem, and I would love to go on this journey with you. That’s coming alongside somebody, right? In an in in an empathetic relational way, instead of. I mean, let’s be honest. If you say to anybody, “I promise you can trust me, what are they gonna? What are they gonna do? They’re gonna run.

Christian Klepp  11:16

Run. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. You’ve you’ve you’ve kind of brought it up already, but like, what what do you think? What do you think? A lot of businesses that are very reliant on word of mouth, what why do you think they have a marketing problem? Is it because they’re just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Matt Wolfe  11:42

Yeah, I think it’s two things, and that’s so you know we work with B2B service providers at Brand Three. We’ve built a program for them called Scale Beyond Referrals, which is designed to address that exact problem. A lot of people in the B2B space gave up on marketing. They’re trying to survive on referrals and word of mouth, just like you said. One thing that’s probably gone wrong is no one ever gave them the strategy they needed to tell the right story to the right people. Another thing that goes right in tandem with that is someone might have given them a strategy, but they’re trying to be all things to all people, and that’s rampant in the B2B space, right? So it’s same anxiety. I want to keep doors open. I want to make sure people like us understand us. Everyone can come in the door who wants to. And so, a tech firm will say we’re great at IT support. Who needs help? A finance team will say we’re so good at handling a small business’s finance. Who needs help? And and that question, right? You don’t say that on the website, but the the implication is we’re good at all these things for all industries. Anyone who needs help, come on in. It begs the question to people who needs help, and they will not answer that question for you. They will not do the homework and the extra thinking and the extra legwork to apply their context to what you do. So unless you really start telling a specific story to specific people, you’re you’re gonna you’re gonna not make the connections you want to make. So it it is right story to right people, but it is a specific story to a very specific audience is going to give people traction as well.

Christian Klepp  13:19

Yeah, that fear of like maybe you can call it niching down, but that that that that fear of like having to focus and narrow down your scope instead of spreading yourself too thin, that that fear is real. Like I’ve experienced that several times myself with clients I’ve worked with over the years, right? Where they’re like, no, but why why would we do that, right? Then there’s going to be missed opportunities here and there, and you know, so

Matt Wolfe  13:43

yeah, the the safety valve that we give people is so sometimes it’s going to be the best thing for you to niche your whole brand at the top global brand level to a really specific thing, and that was the case with that nonprofit focused managed services provider I told you about. There are others who will benefit from having campaigns to specific. So maybe you’re running two or three campaigns, and you’ve got some landing pages assigned to specific audiences to support that. So you’ve got a sort of more general message on your home page, which which is okay because you do know that there are two or three audiences that you really connect with, and that’s where you need to be. But you know, notice I said two or three because I’m still seeing MSPs out there who are like, we can talk to 10 people at once, and you can try, but you’re you’re going to get a lot more traction and a lot more growth by narrowing things down. And and the truth is, you’re not good at serving all 10 of those audiences, that’s not your wheelhouse. You have a wheelhouse from your lived experience. You know that there are certain people in certain industries that you just fly and excel in serving. And if you can just have the courage to focus on them, you’re going to do so well. And and that really is another. That that people deal with too is a marketing firm will come along and say we’ve created an ideal client persona for you, and it’s all theory instead of starting from the place of if you’ve been doing this for 35 years, talk to me about real humans in real roles at companies that you know these were our best favorite clients because we did our best work. We connected with them as people and as humans, and let’s find more of those. Let’s not create a fictional new human. Let’s start with real, real life.

Christian Klepp  15:32

Yeah, that’s a really good way to like talk about it because you know I’ve dealt with clients that have said like, look, we don’t need all this brand strategy stuff. We know who our clients are. We know who our customers are, and not that I’m trying to be cheeky, as the British would say, but like you know, if you if you start digging a little bit further, what you actually find out is that they have a very it’s a very fragmented view of who who their customers are. So in fact, maybe like you know to your point, they have a certain person in mind, and it’s in a certain role. But then that those that person might be across different industries, right? So then that therein lies the I guess the complexity, especially especially if the company wants to wants to grow and scale. Then like okay, so what do you focus on, right?

Matt Wolfe  16:22

Yeah, and I I think you you get to that general understanding in a few different ways. One is that it’s really hard to have the patience to sit down and do the discovery work that it takes to get detailed when you run a business, unless someone is really sitting with you, right? And you’ve agreed to have someone kind of force you to sit down for a few hours and really work it out, then you know you probably haven’t gone as deep as you need to. Another thing is that, and this is, I’m, I’m, I tell people, and I hope they believe me. This, this is an unbeatable law of physics of marketing that we are all too close to our own stuff. We are all too close to our own story, and there’s just stuff we can’t see until someone comes alongside and gives us an outside perspective on on who we serve. So there’s a there’s a lot of things going on there that make it hard to do it internally and to get the other piece of it too is that that’s great if you think you understand who you serve. Do you understand who you are as a character, as a business? Because B2B storytelling is a story of a relationship between a business and its ideal clients, and there’s two characters who have to be understood. And and does everyone on your team agree on who you are as a character? Because it’s been three to five years since anyone’s talked about any of this. You’ve changed the services you offer. Changed the the circumstances around you have changed. Your goals have changed. How do we catch all of that and really understand who you are? Because we, until we do that, and it’s on paper, and and agreed upon, you can’t even begin to figure out who the right person is to serve for that business.

Christian Klepp  18:06

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, I’m going to move us on to the next question. So, in our previous conversation, we talked about the necessity of building a company’s core identity, and that’s through a brand strategy before driving a marketing message. So I’m gonna let’s clear the air here, right? Because you’ve probably heard this more times than you care to count. Matt, we don’t need a brand strategy. You know, we’ve got a logo on a website. We’re good, right? And you’re like, okay, well, there therein lies the problem, right? Because they don’t understand what it actually is, right? So, question one is, what is a brand strategy, and number two is why is it so important to start with that before implementing any marketing initiatives? And I know you you brought up some of it earlier on this conversation.

Matt Wolfe  18:48

Yeah, again, I come back to the idea that this is what happens first. You know, there’s an example I use when I talk about this that I think people can can latch onto that you know I think people are frustrated because they have really tried to build a machine a marketing machine that would work and they took all the tools that we had at our disposal and they tried to smush the SEO and the social and the and the website and all these things together in in a pattern and a combination that everyone’s told them will make sense, and it failed. And to me, it’s like they-it’s like when they tried to build the machine, it turned out like one of those claw machines at the arcade. It’s that stupid claw machine. And what’s so frustrating about that claw machine is that it looks like it ought to work. There’s a plan that makes sense. You know, move claw, aim claw, lower claw, collect price, easy peasy, done. And that’s how a lot of marketing strategies get sold

Christian Klepp  19:49

until you actually do it, right?

Matt Wolfe  19:50

Like until you actually do it, and then you realize, boy, this thing has terrible aim. Yeah, it has a really weak ass grip, and sometimes it tries to get a hold of something and makes it. Then it loses it all together, and we never enough talk to the person. You know, sometimes it works, which is worse because we keep investing in it. So these machines that get built are clunky; they don’t perform because that was marketing strategy. What comes first is brand strategy, which again is telling the right story to the right people, but the way you build that, which might shine a little more clarity on that, is you spend several hours with someone competent to lead you through these conversations. That several hours talking about who are we as a business today and where are we going, find that clarity of who you are as a character, and then we we begin to explore who is the ideal client for your business, and and we start making some choices that feel scary at first, but are going to really empower you. Like, are we trying to be all things to all people? Is there someone who we should really be speaking to specifically because you know, again, you do your best work with them, and the outcome of all of that homework needs to be a great narrative, a story that you can tell, which is that other person’s story, which again makes them feel heard. And in story brand terms, you make the potential client the protagonist, the hero of the story. You tell their story, and your webs your website begins with what they what their goals are, not how good you are at what you do, but what are they trying to accomplish, the next section of the website is what’s up. What are they up against? What problems are they facing? And if you can just nail those two things, people know that you’re telling their story and they’re locked in. And the next thing you’re going to do is start talking about who you are as their guide to overcome that problem on to take them on a journey where they’re going to really triumph over the problems in front of them, because now that they know you’re telling their story, they’re curious to know more about how you do what you do, and you’re going to lead with what makes you unique, right? Not with the certifications and the degrees and all the things that sure they need to see that or the whatever, the statistics, all of that. It’s all important, but the first thing they need to know is that you care about them and you have a unique way that you serve them. And I don’t care who it is. I haven’t. I meet so many people who think they are in boring industries where they’re the same as everyone else. But if you dig in with that founder, right, that person who started that thing and cared enough to do it, they had something specific vibrating inside of them that is unique and a different way they wanted to contribute to the industry.

Christian Klepp  22:28

I love how you brought up that that hero’s journey, and I think I’ve mentioned it on this show like more times than I than I care to remember. But it’s you know it’s it’s the whole story about the the hero, right, and how the hero goes on the you know on a journey, or yeah, they they have a problem, they go on a journey, they meet a guide, right, who who has a plan and you know encourages them to take action, and then they have success and they avoid failure, right. And I I I used that one in a in an event where I was you know invited to speak in June, and I said, “When you see this this diagram of the hero’s journey, and you apply it to in the context of your own businesses, who’s the hero of the story? And it was it was refreshing to hear them say, “Customer,

Matt Wolfe  23:17

yeah.

Christian Klepp  23:18

And like, here you go,

Matt Wolfe  23:20

yeah,

Christian Klepp  23:21

here you go. If they would have said, “Well, it’s us, I would have been like, “Oh, like. Okay, so we talked about this a little bit earlier, but like getting founders, especially those who have either invested little or nothing in marketing, right? To commit to a brand strategy is-it kind of feels like you’re climbing a steep mountain, right? So, how do you how do you deal with that pushback, especially from you know, especially with those founders who think that a brand strategy is a complete waste of time and money?

Matt Wolfe  23:56

Yeah, the the first thing you’re going to do is redefine what brand is, right? So, a lot of people think brand is logos and colors, or it’s it’s all like visual design work, and and and just think about it from their perspective. If you already feel like you’ve wasted time and money on marketing in the past, the thing you really probably feel like you wasted time and money on was a logo and some visual stuff that you could never see the ROI from. Well, that’s not what we’re doing. So you have to reframe what brand is and reframe it as no. First of all, nothing will work until you do this work. It simply will not work. You will be driving a car without an engine. You know, flying a plane without wings. This is the foundation of everything to figure out this this story that you need to tell and to have a strategy for success, and this is how you will know your money is well invested. So you know that that that gets people’s attention.

Christian Klepp  24:51

Yeah,

Matt Wolfe  24:52

but there’s added value to it, and maybe that’s another piece I think that gets missed a lot. So even if someone is successful in saying, okay, you’ve got to do. If you want your marketing to work, which is true, but again, in a B2B space, right, and all we we work with B2B service providers who are in high trust, high stakes industries, where you’re you’re handling someone’s finances, their technology, their growth strategy, you’re essentially saying to them, “Hey, let me let me hold part of your future in my hands. Wouldn’t that be great, and they have to learn how to trust you. Well, that’s a very human story, and we have to tell that story of that relationship and that trust and why it’s why that is worthy to be formed and claimed between two people. Why it’s worthy to partner together. Well, if you do all that hard work, you didn’t just fix marketing; you just made it possible for sales and marketing to tell the same story. You made it possible for marketing to earn more trust and relationships sooner than usual, so that the sales conversations begin from a very different standpoint than usual. You’re not starting cold at that first sales call. You have just got information and a story that can drive a total transformation of your client experience and upgrade that to be something that truly feels customized to your ideal client and makes them feel cared for. And on the far end of that, you win more advocates and raving fans for your brand who are going to refer you. So you’re you’re investing in in upgrading your ability to deliver on all of your promises throughout the whole relationship and the client journey by doing this work.

Christian Klepp  26:29

You brought one really important point, and I want to go back to it again. It’s about the the trust factor, and and I don’t think that this is a something unique to B2B I think this goes across the board, but when when people think about branding and marketing, there is a bit of a trust gap, right? Because simply because you know, to to your earlier point, founders or companies have spent money on marketing tactics or initiatives in the past that didn’t work, and they they they they they spent a lot of money on it, and and now here comes this here here comes this new agency that’s saying that their approach is better, and they’re kind of like I don’t know they might be they might be the same as the last guys, right? So how does how does having that right brand strategy build that trust?

 

Matt Wolfe  27:20

Well, I would say, I would argue that, and I think my business partner would say the same thing. We are all starving for human connection right now. That was already true before AI. It’s amplified and magnified now because of AI, and and it is hyper magnified when you talk about the kind of B2B services I’m talking about. You know, we we got really happy with ourselves in the marketing world, thinking that we were doing a great job putting information out in the world. Boy, if we put out these blogs and these social posts and these emails, and and we position these people as thought leaders, and we convince people that they know what they’re doing. That boy, we’ve really won the day, and we’re really going to win trust. And that’s just information. And we know anyone who’s in one of these spaces. If you’re a CPA, if you’re a wealth wealth advisor, if you’re a managed service provider, cybersecurity consultant, any of these things, we all know that our deals don’t go forward until a human meets a human, until someone meets someone and says, “I not only believe that you know what you’re doing, I believe you give a damn, I believe you care, I believe there’s something authentic, right? You as a human. So, so you do that brand story about the relationship, but the next piece is the application. And so, what I would say to people is, if you’re going to market in this space, it is not going to be marketing as usual. It is not going to be a transactional marketing, what we would call almost traditional marketing at this point, where you’re just putting information out in the world. Our focus is going to be how do we put the human out in the world? Because ultimately, if you’re a founder-led small business, people are still buying you. They’re not buying the business. They are buying you and trust in you. Even if you have a team, eventually they want to know who started this thing and who am I really trusting to move me forward. Well, we’ve got to get you out in the world so that you know most B2B founders are mired in the sales side of things, trying to create those human connections on the far end of a long, torturous journey to get a lead through the forum on the website. What if we move you into the marketing space, where we get you in front of moments like this on podcast? We get you into workshops, into keynotes, into any sort of venue where you can talk to many of your ideal clients at one time, they can experience you as a human who has great information, but also say, “I trust and I like this human, and that’s for us is what the scale beyond referrals thing starts to mean. You’re you are scaling beyond referrals. Because you’re no longer one to one, you are one to many, but to the right people. And in a, you are showing up as a real human that they figure out they can trust. It changes everything.

Christian Klepp  30:12

Absolutely, absolutely. I I love the way that you deliver that because you make it sound so simple, but it is it is rooted in some kind of simplicity, right? Because it’s this this building the human connection, and and I think you were right to bring that up. And I know that it’s sometimes maybe you know this being at the time of the recording, 2026, everybody’s talking about AI, but you’re absolutely right. It’s AI has just commoditized so much, and yeah, it’s deprived of deprived us of these human connections, and the human connection goes back to this trust factor, right? Like building that trust, filling that trust gap, right?

 

Matt Wolfe  30:53

Yeah, it it is simple, and I I think you ask why people aren’t comfortable with this kind of storytelling. A lot of times, it’s a really simple story you’re trying to tell, and I, I think I learned that from my background. I, you know, we talked about. I was in theater for 25 years. I was an actor, director. I was a storyteller with scripts and words, trying to figure out why people do what they do for 25 years of my life, and I learned after years and years of analyzing scripts that a lot of scenes, if you and watch watch a movie next time and see if that scene isn’t at the end of the day really just about two people trying to say, see this my way. I want you to agree with me. I want you to see what I see. I want you to validate that my perspective is right and and and that I’m not crazy, or that I haven’t been heard, or whatever. So much of it comes down to that. In marketing, we preempt that, and we make people understand that we have seen them, and that we understand there’s a really simple story at play. And a lot of great marketing stories come down to. You could probably boil them down to, you know, what we get it. We see you, and we get it. We’ve got a a client. Actually, he’s moved on because he didn’t need us anymore. But there was a client, a managed services provider, who focused in on healthcare IT, and he was able to say to the healthcare people, “I get it. I get that technology is not to you what it used to be. It is. It is not productivity. It’s not a bonus. It’s not an extra thing. It is the thing without which you cannot heal people. You cannot treat your patients if your technology doesn’t work. And let’s talk about that. And no one else was talking to them about that from a technology perspective. All that is is I see you and I get it. And that guy leveraged that message recently to. And this sounds insane, but he leveraged it to a more than 20x exit, a more than a 20x evaluation on his EBITDA in an exit where he sold his company.

Christian Klepp  30:53

Wow, yeah, wow,

Matt Wolfe  30:53

because he said, “I get it, in it to in a specific way to a specific audience.

Christian Klepp  32:14

Specific audience. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So Matt, as we are approaching the end of this interview, just to wrap things up, if there were three things that you would want people to walk away with, you know, in terms of everything that we’ve been discussing in this conversation, what would they be?

Matt Wolfe  32:51

Yep, I would say your brand comes first before marketing. Your brand comes first, otherwise you’re going to waste a whole lot more time and money. I would say in the B2B space, having the courage to stop being all things to all people in your messaging and telling specific stories to specific people is going to make all the difference in your success, and you don’t have to do the scary thing that that changes the whole brand. You can do it at a campaign level, but if you do not tell a specific story to specific people, you will also keep wasting money and time on your marketing. And then I would say that the best thing you can do to optimize your marketing, and and make the most of your investment, is to figure out how you show up as a human, and and to understand that your brand. Okay, so a lot of these B2B small businesses, founder led, we’re told founder you should hide in the background, and create this big name and logo that feels like this big thing, and it’s all an illusion. You are a founder-led small business B2B and people want to meet you. So figure out how you can be present in your marketing in a way that’s comfortable for you. We don’t all have all the gifts. We don’t all. We’re not all the good interview subjects, the good public speaker, all the things, but we’ve got somewhere we can plug in and show up as a human that’s going to work for us. So, so brand first, specific storytelling, and and celebrating the human behind the scenes is how you’re going to win the day.

Christian Klepp  35:00

Love it! I love it, Matt. This was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. Please, quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Matt Wolfe  35:13

Yeah, again, I’m I’m Matt Wolfe. I’m a partner at Brand3 and Brand3.net. But if you want to know about these strategies I’m talking about, we have an introductory workshop called Scale Beyond Referrals, and that’s scalebeyondreferrals.com. That will get you there to register for one of our workshops to learn more. We also have a podcast called The CEO’s Heart for Service, where we talk about the challenges of growing B2B businesses and still serving your people well, and that’s I host that. It’s brand3, and it’s on all the all the things, all the platforms.

Christian Klepp  35:47

Fantastic, fantastic, and we’ll be sure to include those links in the in the show notes once this episode comes out. Right,

Matt Wolfe  35:53

thank you.

Christian Klepp  35:54

So, Matt, once again, thanks so much for coming on. Take care, stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Matt Wolfe  36:00

Thanks, Christian. This is great. I hope it’s not the last time that we get. Oh yeah, yeah.

Christian Klepp  36:03

It definitely won’t be the last time. There’s a part two coming up. All right. Nice.

Matt Wolfe  36:06

Okay.

Christian Klepp  36:08

All right. Bye for now.