YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Raskin

lines on the record: 77
first: 2023-05-28
most recent: 2023-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But either one, I mean, I think they're saying very similar things. Hey, there's this new world where you can, you know, You don't have to live in hotels. You can stay in people's game to belong anywhere, to live there, right?”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, it was. So you're right. It was belonging anywhere, and then it switched to live there. I may have the chronology wrong, but it was the two of those things. You know better than I do, right?”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Naming the object of the new game. I used to call it the promised land message, but I've changed it to this because I think I've found that it's sort of a little more fruitful. This subscription economy transactions, it can get a little high fallutin and sort of like big, right? But like on the website, when we just have to boil it down to a couple of words that's going to be clear like right away. What can we say? And I find that what's the object of the new game really boils it down is kind of the rallying cry of the movement. So the example with Zwora, the object for a while was turn customers into subscribers. Very simple just sort of flows from it. Airbnb for a while had this one live anywhere. If you think about anything.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there is this other path that Obi-Wan holds out for him. And whenever I work with teams and I talk about this, so they're like, okay, I guess we got to then kill the prospect's aunt and uncle. And basically, yes, I mean, like figuratively, we got to show them that the future is not going to just be sort of okay, that it's probably people talk about like making it emotional. And I've always wondered what does that mean? Literally, what is the definition? And this is for me the definition is that the prospect doesn't see the future as sort of okay. They see it as split between a very negative outcome and a potentially very positive outcome. The third piece is what I call.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He basically kills the aunt and uncle. Sorry, spoilers, it's been 40 years though, but if you haven't seen it, you're probably not going to see it. Kills the aunt and uncle now, it's pretty clear they're coming for Luke. Now the stakes are life and death. Probably he's going to be dead.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, to the extent we can, we want to make this life and death just like a movie, right? And this is again, I'll make the parallel to Star Wars. So Luke spends like the first 15 minutes of the movie belly aching. Like he wants to be a pilot. He wants to go out and have adventures in space. So Obi-Wan comes. He says, hey, we got this mission, this princess. And all this stuff. Let's go and let's go. I'll teach you to be a pilot. We'll go have adventures in space. Luke say he says, ooh, you know what? Can't really get involved. They got to go home. It's late. Who does this sound like? The reluctant buyer. So, yeah, I want to be innovative and all. Oh, you know what? I don't have budget this quarter. So, how does George Lucas change Luke's mind?”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the first piece. The second piece is what I call naming the stakes. And there's a few ways to do this, but one that's really great if we can do it is to name the winners, to show that winners are already playing this new game. So for instance, with Zora, they're saying, hey, look, look at all the new winners. Like, this is like 2015. So Airbnb, Box, you know, all these companies, they're already doing this subscription thing. And by the way, overall, like they show this scary stat about the longevity of Fortune 500 companies. It's getting smaller. A little disingenuous, but basically they make this case that hey companies are dying, the ones that are winning are doing this.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes the world is changing, and there'll be used to be, and there's a long list of things, and then now it is a long list of bullet points, right? What's really, I think, key is naming it, like naming that old game. The examples you saw, software, cloud, transactions, subscription, opinions, reality. This very, very concise naming is really key and it's hard because in making it compact, you're losing completeness. So, you know, you can imagine you're in a meeting. Someone says like, hey, how about we do transactions and subscriptions? And so it says, well, I don't know. There's a lot of things I don't really subscribe to. Subscription economy really? So we're always kind of overstating it in a way, but it's not a problem. I don't think people say like, oh, you know, that's wrong subscription economy because I still go to the grocery store and buy things, right?”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And well, one very common thing, at least earlier, was they would basically just take the Zwara deck. They'd get a hold of it and just put their logo on it. And so that's not going to work. One thing is, you know, we're not just saying, hey, the world is changing.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll also say, sorry, because I worked in a magazine I haven't done a newsletter because that idea of having a deadline all the time and constantly having to, we used to call the magazine Feed the Beast. I feel so free not to have that. So for now, at least, I haven't done that.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like you said earlier, it seems like boom, but really. So I had that was probably the 30th or 40th And they were gradually getting more and more traction. There was one I wrote before that about kind of dissecting Elon Musk's pitch for the powerwall, the battery that they sell. And that one got maybe like few hundred thousand views. And also was a big jump. And then, you know, the next one got some paltry number. So there was what I find is, yeah, there's this a while where you're writing and it feels like you're talking to nobody. And then sort of gradually it grows. And you'll have these peaks. But then, you know, over time is where the magic is.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But one thing that was always a downer for me was always this editor, you know, sort of like deciding what's going to be out there. And, you know, when you work with a great editor, it's great. They make yourself better and they're priceless. But still, there's this intermediary. And what started to happen, I think, around when I started writing around 2013, 14, you start to see these platforms like Medium, even LinkedIn, where you can just write and have this audience. And I think no way I could do the work I do if that development hadn't happened first.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. I mean, I had a little mini career as a journalist, as a freelance writer. And I really love that. I actually took a class in New York called How to Write a Magazine article. Sort of mid-career, I was sort of curious. And the class wound up being more about like how to sell a magazine article. And I found I really loved that, like pitching articles.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had written some other posts on Medium in particular. Medium has changed quite a bit. But back then, I found that I could write stuff there and get really like a lot of people who are interested in what I was interested in would sort of come in and create some noise about it. So I was already doing this kind of work for a couple of years, but that post immediately got something like 2 million views around the world. And I started getting inquiries from teams all over the world. And it was I think what really allowed me to sit, know, okay, I could do this work that CEOs would budget align item for this, because I think if you really understand that post, it's not really about a sales deck. It's really about this story that TN and the CEO is telling everywhere and that is showing up in the sales deck and structuring it that way.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was really interesting was one thing I don't think they'd be upset if I shared, and maybe it's known. Initially they were seen as a tool for like sales operations, you know, for someone who's going to record the calls. And what this narrative did for them, I think it was already starting to happen, but what it really coalesced was this is a tool for sales leadership.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's kind of what they were doing when they started out. And I'm not saying that that didn't work totally. I mean, already by the time they started doing this, they were already starting to become a big company. I remember Amit Bendoff said to me, listen, Andy, they were around series B. I think this was around 2018. We're going to be a huge company. The question is how huge? And I think that this narrative like along the lines of like Azwara, Salesforce, if we get this right, this is going to be a multiplier on our growth. So I don't remember exactly the pitch beforehand, but it was very much like, hey, we're going to record your calls. We're going to get insights from them. They're better than the insights you could get from Salesforce. There wasn't this kind of unifying kind of movement ideology that put it all in context.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is quite different from just Elise. And they're starting out with this. This is the big shift. Another one team I worked with early on, and I think they'd agree their story came out of this work, was Gong. So Gong, everyone probably knows by now, like they take the video recordings of all your sales calls and they stick AI onto it and come out with all these insights. And that story is, hey, goodbye opinions used to be a world where sales is running opinions. Hello reality that now all the winners are going to are adopting this new mindset where we really have to see what's really going on.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, another great example, and no coincidence is Zora is the company I wrote about in this post called The Greatest Sales Like I've Ever Seen. The CEO of Zora, Tian Suo, was employee number 11 at Salesforce. So he learns this from Beniop. And he's pitching, you know, hey, in the old world, businesses operated on transactions. You sold things to people outright in this new world. He calls it the subscription economy where people want the benefits of those things without necessarily having to pay for them. And of course, gives all these examples of all the winners, you know, in this look at all the winning companies. They're all basically going to this new model. And so he's pitching someone like Ford. And you can imagine they're going to Ford and pitching a subscription for car service.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This story about this fundamental paradigm shift and are you in or you not in? And what they did was instead of just saying like, hey, we're better than they said, hey, all those others, those siebels, they're part of that old game. You want to play that software game? Be my guess. Go buy. And, you know, of course, we know how it played out.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they would have just come out and said, Oh, you know, hey, I mean, CRM, by the way, was already a category. I mean, they're already, you know, Siebel was the huge giant of that space. There were already even companies doing it online, doing it through the web. And so they would have come and said, oh, we're easier to install than faster to get up and running than CBOL. Or we have this much functionality compared to, I think it was it NetSuite or some early Salesforce-like thing that was out there. They would have done these sort of comparison things. And, you know, Benny, I mean, he's a pretty proud guy. I think he did still say like, hey, where are the number ones here? But that wasn't what they led with. They led with this.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maintain it. And there's this new world called the Cloud, a new game, like new rules. Everything has changed. And that's the new way to win. And we're going to help you if you're in there. This structure really is about defining a movement. And that's very different from, hey, I'm going to solve your problem.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The arrogant doctor. So you have a problem, a pain, I have a solution, you know, a treatment, and I'm going to tell you why it's better than all the other treatment. Not to say it's not better, but just this is the structure of it. And it kind of sets you up for bragging. Let me tell you why it's so great. The structure that I read about in these movies was different. The movies, every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, in the characters world, right? And I call this shift, the shift from the old game to the new game. And the archetypal example of this, I think in the business world is what Benioff did with Salesforce. So he comes in and he says, hey, software is over. Like, meaning software in the sense that we're going to own it.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you'd think like I've been doing this for like 10 years. I'd have a very snappy definition of it. And I don't know if I'm really happy with I've ever found one that totally gets at it yet. The one thing I say is like, it's this one story that the CEO uses to drive success in marketing sales, but also product that it becomes like a North Star, strategic North Star for product roadmap for fundraising, for recruiting really everything. And what I think is really interesting is a kind of qualifier is that this story has a certain structure. Kind of like I said, when I found those screenwriting books, I sort of shifted the structure. And the traditional structure, the way I learned how to pitch in business school, I think the way most people did is what I call”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, these are questions I think I'm still asking, but I did my best to kind of take some of the learnings of how the movie was structured. It was very different from how my pitch was structured and kind of restructure it. And we did that and we sent the pitch out and we start getting more interest. It's really clear. Then we had a term sheet, I think, a few months later. I'm like, what is this story thing that we didn't change the product? It was basically the same business, just sort of how we talked about it. That was really interesting to me. And I mean, over the next like 10, 15 years, I thought about like, hey, maybe I could do consulting with this, like CEOs who heard about this would like ask me about it. But I still was like, no, no CEO is going to like budget a line item for the story. That's not a thing. So I just didn't do it for a really long time.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then lower down. So, this was back when they would like you'd send the hard copy of the plan and they might mail it back with comments written in. And he had written in not a compelling story. And a few weeks later, I'm walking by this Barnes& Noble, and there's a sign in the window, and it says, for anyone who wants to tell a compelling story. Okay, that's me. And there's an arrow that's pointing to these books. And they turn out to be screenwriting books. I didn't know anything about this. So I started reading these books. It strikes me like a movie is a pitch. Like, you know, what is Star Wars a pitch for? It's a pitch for be good, like care about people, trust the force, you know, in their terms. But I don't have a couple hours. You know, I'm pitching a business. It's very different. I'm not writing a 3x screenplay. So what applies? What doesn't apply?”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I started as a coder. I was a computer science major undergrad. A friend and I had an idea for an app. So this was like during the dot-com years, so Windows app. And we coded a little prototype and we started, we put it out there. We started getting some users. And we thought, oh, okay, maybe we can get some investment. So of the two of us, I spoke English fluently. So we decided, okay, I'll write the investor pitch. So I wrote the pitch, sent it out, and the reaction was really bad. And one BC wrote back and said, listen, I rate every plan I get on a scale of one to 10 and yours is a one. And next to the one he wrote in parentheses, worst, in case we thought like maybe that was the top of his rating scale, yeah, brutal.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way I learned how to pitch in business school, I think most people did is what I call the arrogant doctor. So you have a problem, a pain. I have a solution, you know, a treatment. And I'm going to tell you why it's better than all the other treatments. And the structure that I read about in these movies was different. Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world. And I call this shift the shift from the old game to new game. And the archetypal example of this, I think, in the business world is what Benioff did with Salesforce. So he comes in and he says, hey, software is over. And there's this new world called the cloud, a new game, new rules. That's the new way to win. And we're going to help you if you're in there. This structure really is about defining a movement. And that's very different from, hey, I'm going to solve your problem.”
2023-05-28 · Lenny's Podcast · The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source