“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
For two days this week, I brought a few members of the leadership team to Washington to focus on business development. The meetings were broad-ranging and very, very constructive. We really explored Tahzoo from the bottom up, discussing everything from the core promise we make to our customers to what differentiates Tahzoo from every other customer experience agency out there today.
I believe great brands are about finding and sticking to a few ultimate truths that drive every decision a company makes from what products and services to offer, to how those products and services are designed, to who you hire, and ultimately which clients you choose to work with. Such ultimate truths are not always stated so much as they are embodied, they are lived every day by the leaders and employees of the company.
The outcome for all employees of Tahzoo all of whom should consider themselves salespeople is a consistent, compelling, and unified story and the necessary tools to tell that story over and over with conviction and in the same way every time.
Sales is storytelling. It’s giving our clients the emotional capital they need to choose Tahzoo that goes along with all the very real practical (financial) and logical (capability) reasons they might choose any one of our competitors over us. This emotional connection is what sets us apart. If we get it right, no one can stop us.
While the team is distilling everything, there are certainly many highlights I can share from our discussion. We began with an exploration of The Tahzoo Promise. There are competitors out there who sell on creativity. There are others who sell on rock-solid technology. Others sell on value. These are all good things, but they aren’t ownable. No one company can lay claim to being the only creative-, the only tech-, the only value-driven provider out there. A brand promise has to set you apart as different.
For Tahzoo, I believe that our difference is the strength and quality of our relationships. So, any truthful Tahzoo Promise has to begin there. Again, however, that’s not enough. Plenty of companies talk about partnerships and relationships, but what sets Tahzoo apart is our people. We employ smart and happy people.
Our promise to our clients then is something along the lines of Tahzoo is the company with smart, happy people who are interested and invested in the marketplace of ideas. You’re going to enjoy working with them. They are going to enjoy working with you. We’re going to put you ahead of us. We’re going to take great care of you. Together, we are going to do great things.
Now, that’s just a paraphrase of some of the things we heard this week. A more formal Tahzoo Promise will be forthcoming, but I can pretty much assure you that you will recognize many of the attributes I just cited when we roll it out in the next few weeks. You should begin to think about how you fit in that promise. You were hired because you were smart and happy. Think about what that means to Tahzoo and to our clients and begin work with that perspective in mind.
We also discussed the Tahzoo Pitch as exemplified in our current sales decks. We realize that too often people aren’t working from the very latest materials, nor are they telling the same story. To our clients and potential clients, Tahzoo sometimes appears disjointed and amorphous. Our clients can‘t tell who we are. We need to tell the same story, in the same way, every single time we tell it.
Accordingly, there will be a new streamlined, highly visual Tahzoo Pitch deck coming out that focuses on the brand promise I described above and Tahzoo’s Differentiation along with six key facets of our business: Audience, Data, Business, Experience, Content, and Technology.
There will also be concise explanations of Tahzoo’s History as an alchemy of my experiences at Nordstrom and Microsoft to highlight how the mathematics of Tahzoo is great customer service + data insights + killer technology = changing the world. Hand in hand with that story is the story of the Tahzoo Name. Many of you are already familiar with my six principles of a great company name, but if you aren’t, you soon will be. Our name is every bit as important to who we are as a company as is how we came to be and even what we do. Every employee needs to know these stories and be able to tell them with conviction.
Last, of course, we will be developing a core group of six (or so) key Case Studies, including reference-able client testimonials complete with names and contact information, to tell both the story of what it’s like to work with Tahzoo, but also the business results we deliver to our clients through our innovative work.
Best of all, we are not just releasing a new pitch deck and some case studies upon the company, putting them on SharePoint and wiping our hands of it. We plan to train everyone in telling the Tahzoo Story. To that end, we will be producing a series of short videos of some of our best salespeople: me, Dave, John, Dom, Egbert, etc. giving the pitch as if to a multi-million-dollar client. You will learn not only The Tahzoo Story but how it should be told and how different salespeople can present the same material in different ways to achieve the same result a closed sale.
The goal here is not to create sales robots, but rather I hope it will allow you to see how you can adapt our story to your personal storytelling style and yet keep the brand consistency we need to succeed and grow across the globe. Being clear, being confident, and being consistent in telling The Tahzoo Story is the key to Tahzoo’s future. With everyone on the same page, we can’t help but go do great things.
Let’s go be great!
Brad