Nathan Gold

Rahul Abhyankar [00:00] Nathan, welcome to Product Leaders Journey. I'm so happy to see you again.

Nathan Gold Well, thank you, Rahul. I'm grateful for your time and being here. I think we've known each other nearly 10 years, if I'm not mistaken.

Rahul Abhyankar Absolutely. So let's jump into it. You go by Nathan Gold, the demo coach. Tell me about demo coach and what was the genesis of that?

Nathan Gold There was a conference at one time in Silicon Valley called Demo. They used to invite 50 to 60, sometimes 70 companies to come up on stage, present a demo of their product. Normally those products were in very early stage, not even out and about. The whole idea was you had to do a live demo on stage and you had exactly five minutes. That was it. Five minutes and you were off. No smoke and mirrors. You couldn't fake anything.

I worked at two companies in my career that went to that conference. In both cases, I don't like to brag, but our company won the demogod award. So that leads me to how did I become the demo coach? In April of 2008 I got laid off of SanDisk. I decided to just never let that happen again. So I thought, what can I do? Well, I can go coach those companies that demo twice a year. If I could get five or 10 or 15 of those companies, maybe there's a business there, which there was for about three years.

I even wrote a book called Giving Memorable Product Demos just to back up myself, not as a writer, but as an author. So when people looked me up, aside from Demo, nobody knew who I was. When they looked me up on Amazon, if you have a book published, you're somebody instantly. My book is really just an articulation of everything I was coaching people to help them with their demos. And then I ran into my first startup who asked me, can you help me pitch to investors? That's what kicked off my second huge phase of my business.

Rahul Abhyankar I want to stay on this topic of demos for a little bit. We see a lot of demos. They tend to start with some kind of a dashboard that has a ton of data on that dashboard. And all the demos typically go through just a sequential list of things to cover in the demo, almost as how the pages are laid out in the dashboard on the screen. And those are boring.

Nathan Gold No kidding.

Rahul Abhyankar So what really separates a great demo from a good demo?

Nathan Gold The purpose of a demo is the key. Most people don't realize what the demo is for. They think they're there to show the features and functions of the product. And it is so far from the bullseye. I was lucky that the first demo I did with this new sales guy, he said, Nathan, I got this really important possible customer I want you to come out and demo to. And I went in and he did the opening and said, and now ladies and gentlemen, I have my great sales engineer here, give you a beautiful demo of how our product works. And I start going through feature, function, feature, function, and when you press this, and feature, function, feature, function, just like I would normally.

And boy did I get my head handed to me in the car afterwards. My god, I felt I was gonna be fired even though I knew he couldn't fire me. But this guy laid into me and made me realize that I could have completely blown the meeting because the purpose wasn't to demo features and functions. The purpose was to convince the audience that this product can solve their problem. And I didn't even bother with asking them anything. I didn't ask them, so I'm just curious, what kind of data do you have right now? How do you use the data? I didn't ask anything. I was just a dumb, stupid demo donkey, basically. And I did what everybody does. Features. Look at all this great stuff.

But after that dress down in the car, he finally made me realize it's very easy to do a persuasive product demo, especially for business to business. Because the businesses, they need to know the value of what you're doing. Features and functions are not the value. Here's the formula he gave me in the car and I'll never forget it. And I'll pass it right onto you and everybody listening.

F, B, R. He said, Nathan, whenever you talk about a feature, F, make sure that before you go on to the next feature or set of features, that you explain or remind the audience about the benefits. B. Benefits can also be called outcome, value. And then the R. R is, now the reason we have these features in the product is because, and now you have your chance to share a reference story. So that's how you tie stories into doing demos. You give a feature, you tell the benefit, and then you say, and one of our customers, as an example, very much like all of you here, they blah, blah, blah before you came, blah, blah, blah, and you give a little short story about one of your references. Reference selling 101 is the other thing he made me realize is so important. FBR.

Rahul Abhyankar FBR. Feature, Benefit, Reason. That's a great acronym to remember.

Nathan Gold It worked. It still works today. It's timeless.

Rahul Abhyankar It's timeless. Nathan, when we think about complex tech products, how do we reduce that complexity, especially when you have to do a demo?

Nathan Gold I would put the answer to that question primarily on the salesperson that you're working with in the business, because they're the ones that should know what the main value is for the customer. And then you go in there as the person doing the demo, I would validate that. I would say, just to make sure I don't waste everybody's time, in the short minutes that I have, the most important thing I could do for you in your demo today is show you this. Is that true to everybody? Is that everybody's understanding? Yes? Okay, great. So there you go. That's one way you validate it right on the spot. If you don't know your audience, ask. If you still don't know your audience, maybe you shouldn't even demo, or you come up with such a flyover and then stop and say, of what you've just seen, what can I go deeper on?

Rahul Abhyankar There is the aspect of actually doing the demo. But when it comes to creating the demo, what can you share in terms of what or how we should go about thinking about how to create the demo?

Nathan Gold Whenever I've done a demo, I take the FBR and I start with the B. What are the benefits that this company can get? What are the outcomes that they'll get by using this product or service? And I'm going to pick the features or functions that will illustrate those values quickly to generate conversation. Because when we go into demo, in most cases, that first demo, it's just to prove that the thing works. You might have to come back again for a deep dive with the technical crew, but that's a different kind of demo.

When you're demoing, you have to look at the level of the person or the people you're demoing. And I'm going to concentrate just for the moment on, we're still in the sales process. Once they say, yeah, this looks great. Let's get back here and I'll get my 10 IT guys to sit down with you and make sure this all works with our own data. I'm out of the picture at that point. You need somebody who's much more technical to come in and perhaps even show them how those features would work. I could, but they'd rather keep me on the front lines doing that demo that gets us to the second level of demo.

So I work with value, outcome, benefits, and I try to pick out what I think will resonate with the customer. Or I go to the salesperson and I say, listen, what's the biggest value for them? Are they looking to cut costs? Are they looking to increase efficiencies? Are they looking to reduce head count, but they don't want to lose the head count they have, so we got to talk about how that head count can be again using some, so I get that from the salesperson as best I can or the business development person. And then I just pick the features I feel will work best. Usually the salespeople trust me when I pick the features and the functions and they will either help me with the stories they want me to share, or they trust that the stories I will share in the R, in the reason part of the FBR, that will bring more meaning to the whole set of features we've just demoed.

Now, I do want to clear up one thing. I don't use the R on everything. Feature benefit always. I never let those two go separate.

Rahul Abhyankar So Nathan, when we talk about products, obviously a big component of that is communicating the value proposition. Number of different personas to cater to. So how do we distill all the information that we have about the value proposition and what the product does for specific people, make some sense of this information?

Nathan Gold Excellent question. You said the magic word that value comes in many different forms. So it's going to have to be adjusted based on the audience. It's amazing in the startup world, when I ask people what their value propositions are, they tell me the what. That's why I changed how I was helping entrepreneurs communicate their value proposition by making it so simple. And I generally coach my clients to say this:

We [fill in the blank] do [this] so that [this] happens. We do this so that this happens. Or we do this so that these things happen. Cut costs, increase efficiencies, and everybody sleeps better at night.

Rahul Abhyankar Oh wow.

Nathan Gold That's the value. The value is on the opposite side of that statement because people in general want to know what you do. So you say, this is what we do so that, and then mention the benefits.

Rahul Abhyankar Do you have an example?

Nathan Gold I'll give you me as an example. I help people prepare for high stakes presentations so that they raise their money, win awards, or get a standing ovation.

Rahul Abhyankar So that's very clear.

Nathan Gold What do you do and what is the outcome for people? That's it. And all you have to do is vary what you say on the right side of that based on the audience. If I'm not talking to a startupper, let's say I'm talking to somebody going for interviews. That's high stakes. I can say, I help people prepare for high stakes interviews so that, and then I'd have to fill in something on the side there. The hiring manager cannot wait to hire that person. That's enough, right? It doesn't have to be literal like I did with the cut costs, increase efficiencies, things like that. Standing ovation is an intangible, obviously, although that's kind of tangible, I would say. Raising money.

Rahul Abhyankar I think what you're doing there is really creating enough curiosity and interest to want to know more.

Nathan Gold Bingo. You just nailed it, Rahul. That's the whole purpose of these pitches, these demos. And it's just so people get a confidence level in you, your company, and what you're showing them so that they want more. The problem is most people that do demos think they only get one shot at a demo, so they have to do everything. That's such a mistake.

Rahul Abhyankar So you mentioned high stakes presentations. You coach a lot of TED speakers, people on Shark Tank, but a lot of us in companies, we are in high stakes situations presenting to internal executives, customers' executives, and those are not in front of a hundred or thousand people. 10 to 20 people, we're doing a QBR, we're asking for funding for something.

Nathan Gold High stakes presentations. When you say high stakes, what do you mean by that? Career defining moments potentially is one of those high stakes situations. When you walk up on a TED stage, which is the once a year in Vancouver, Canada now, and in the front row off to the side is Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Al Gore. That's high stakes. Actually, any TED stage is high stakes. Simon Sinek's most popular TED talk was done as a TEDx in a side room with a flip chart. What were you going to say?

Rahul Abhyankar I was going to say, so there is a life cycle of a presentation. So let's sort of break that down. There is the putting together the material. We get so busy with creating the slides and getting the data to put on the slides. So much of our time goes in that, that we don't leave ourselves enough time for preparing or having a script. So talk about the importance of preparing, rehearsals, even for presentations that we are doing at work to a small group of leaders inside our company, for example. And what should that preparation look like?

Nathan Gold The preparation is always dependent on how competent and confident you are with whatever you're demoing or whatever you're talking about. But even if you have a photographic memory, you still need time to prepare the words to come out of your mouth. The Achilles heel of my business is getting people to practice out loud. Because they think they can sit down with their computer, bring up their PowerPoint deck or their Google slides and sit there and just go through it in their heads. And they think they have it. Believe me, they think they have it. And I say, okay, great. I'm not one to judge. I'm surprised every single day. I start every new client with, hey listen, why don't you just show me where you're at today? And they end up spending eight minutes instead of five. And they're not very well rehearsed. They sound like they're struggling for the words. And they all admit, yeah, it went better in my head. They say something like, it sounded better in my head than it did coming out of my mouth.

Rahul Abhyankar In order to make sure that we are not searching for words in the moment, we should have a script. But then we don't want to sound too scripted.

Nathan Gold Well, I take exception with that word script because scripts are not for the faint at heart. It takes one week per minute. One week per minute. That's my rule of thumb. And the preparation, you need to start as early as possible. And it has to be taken so seriously that you need somebody to keep your feet to the fire. You need a Nathan Gold, who you're going to meet every Thursday at 10 o'clock for 15 minutes just to do a check-in. Because every week there's always things that come up. And if you don't have somebody like Nathan or Rahul, your consultant to check in with and at least say, I didn't make much progress this week, but here's what I'm going to do before I meet with you next week. Okay, great. That happens.

Now, if you write your own script, you don't have to come to the exact word. I've learned that people like to improvise. They like to wing it. And I say, okay, fine, wing it. But if you're going to wing it, make sure that when you're winging it, that if slide one has two sentences on it, you stick to two sentences. If slide three has four, you do four or less and no more, because you still have a clock. The minute you add another sentence and another sentence, you're adding too much time.

Rahul Abhyankar But when you think about product managers, engineering leaders, and people in the course of their jobs where they're putting together presentations and getting ready to deliver them, they don't have one week per minute, do they?

Nathan Gold No. So then we have to go with what the situation is, Rahul. If you have control over your time and you know something like a QBR is coming, don't wait. Don't wait, start preparing when you know that you're done with this QBR and going into the next QBR. What do I want to do there? What am I going to do different? Get your deck set up. And so in the weeks leading up to the QBR, you can start to prepare more easily.

Let's say you don't have, you have 12 days, maybe one minute a day or 12 hours. You got to go up there with some notes so that when you do it, you're doing it with both sides of your brain. And when you're saying the words, you're kind of looking at the audience saying, I wonder what the audience is thinking right now with what I just said. And you've got these conversations going on in your head because the words are so natural.

And the way you make your words natural, whether you have 12 weeks, 12 days, or 12 hours, is you need to practice out loud, but not by yourself. Here's the key to amping up your ability to be more persuasive in the corporate world. Find a friend in your company or a friend outside your company that would be your audience and role play. Practice in front of that one person and get them to push back. Just don't say, that was great. Okay, see you next week. What did you like? What do you think I could do differently? When we practice and role play, it makes such a huge difference. That's why people use me because I force them to role play.

Rahul Abhyankar The next step from having put together the material, having rehearsed, done the role play, is now you are in the room, whether it's a real room or a virtual room. There is an element of reading the room before you get started with your delivery. So talk about, in a corporate setting, real rooms or virtual rooms, how do you read a room?

Nathan Gold In person, I often try to chat with one or two or three of the people coming in before everybody arrives. I don't jump on them, but I quickly get over to the people who are coming in. I try to ask them a question or two related to what they hope to get out of this meeting they're coming to right now. What's your goal? If you walk out, there's so many ways you can ask, unless you know. If you can ask this stuff beforehand too, you don't have to wait until that minute. So if you can ask before, then it gets easy because they show up to the meeting and you simply say, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. In the sharp 10 minutes I have, I've already gotten input from all of you that the top three things you want to hear about is A, B, and C. That's where I'm going to start unless something's changed. Anybody got an input? Okay, great.

So if you do your homework, you can address your audience with that kind of confidence and meaning that they know you're not going to waste their time. So the key there is not just to say in the sharp 10 minutes that we have, I said that on purpose because I want the audience to know that I know I only have 10 minutes. And if you have five, I'll say something like in these five minutes, as soon as that clock starts, I plan to do this, this and this. Is there anyone here that needs me to do something other than that?

Rahul Abhyankar Isn't there a power dynamic here? Because let's say I'm a product manager in a room full of executives. Do I really have that liberty to have the conversation that you just said?

Nathan Gold Why not? We should already know why we are here. Then in that case, you just start off with, in these brief minutes I have, we're here to do this, this and this. Is there anyone here who disagrees? Just to get a buy-in and they'll nod their heads. Something to let them know you know why we're there. And if you state that upfront, Rahul, the boss in the room is probably going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second here. I thought I was getting this. Now you just said that. What's up with that? So if you don't give them that verbal agenda, and it's just a verbal agenda, you don't have to put a slide up. It's more friendly if it's a verbal this, this and this. Is that okay with everybody? And then deal with it. Think on your feet. Improvise. If somebody jumps in like that and they're the boss or they make a valid reason why you're off base, take a lead. Be a little vulnerable with them. They're your bosses. They're your execs.

Rahul Abhyankar Now, a lot of times we have to send the deck in advance. So while we are on slide three, the executives are already thinking about what's on slide eight. They even have these slides printed out in front of them. They're flipping through the slides while you're talking to something. So how do you address that situation? What do you do in that situation?

Nathan Gold Yeah, that's a tough one. I have worked for corporations that make you give your deck out so that people can look at it before they show up in the room. And it definitely takes a lot of the wind out of the sails for what you do when you're in front of them. One thing that you can do that isn't necessarily the best solution, but I believe that you need two decks. You need the deck that you send out that has all of the 8-pt, 9-pt, 10-pt fonts on it. And people can use their magnifiers or the glasses to find everything they need without you there. But when you're up in front of people, the first thing I would do is create a slide deck that just zoomed into the areas of that slide that I want to draw their attention to. Since the deck's in front of them, they can see what's around it, but it makes it easy for you to draw their attention. And that's the hard part. If you just use the slide as is, you can't keep their attention using a pointer and all that stuff. You're wasting everybody's time. But zooming in—this is what I want to talk about here. This group of numbers or this pie chart or this bar chart. So that way anybody in the room can see what you're talking about and then they can look down and go, there it is. Okay. I'll look there.

Rahul Abhyankar Because typically slides end up being busy. We've got on one half of the slide, we've got five bullet points; on the second half of the slide we've got two bar charts, one below the other. And so that's your typical business presentation. How do you tell a story when you have a slide like that?

Nathan Gold Now you might say, don't have a slide like that. But they force you to. The corporations force you to put dense slides together because, whatever their reasons.

Rahul Abhyankar Obviously on the TED stage, you're not getting a lot of Q&A there.

Nathan Gold None.

Rahul Abhyankar But in presentations in front of your executives or your customers' executives, the more interactive the better. But you are likely to get a lot of curve balls, questions that you can anticipate as much as possible ahead of time, but then you'll get some difficult questions. What's your advice? How do you recommend people deal with questions?

Nathan Gold Most of the time, the questions we get, we can handle okay. It's that small percentage of questions that we worry about, we hope we don't get, or the ones where we don't know the answer. I think people fear not knowing the answer more than anything in a situation like that. And I'm here to tell you that at my age, I wish I knew this when I was in my twenties. I didn't learn this until I was in my thirties. You're never going to know all the answers. So get over it. Stop thinking you will. And when you don't, learn some strategies that make you still come across as honest, authentic, believable, credible, fun, likable, lovable, and everything else that goes with who you are when you get to a question where you don't know the answer.

Do you know saying you don't know actually makes you human. It avoids that perfection. It avoids that, my God, that guy answered every single question like boom, boom, boom. I don't know if I trust him so much kind of thing. If you don't know the answer, there's several things you can immediately do. Hey, Rahul, thank you for that question. I don't know exactly the answer, but how about I get with Jane tomorrow? After we're done with this meeting, I'll get with Jane and I'll give you the answer right away. Or next week when we meet, I'll come back with the answer.

Come on folks, you don't know, it's okay. If you don't know something you should know, somebody calls you out on something that you really should know. Okay. You've been with the company six months and you ask this question about your product feature and somebody says, come on, really? You don't know that? You should know. Go find out the answer yourself. But in most cases, when you don't know something that you should know, that's your time to show humility. We all end up sometimes, if I had just spent one more—sorry for the little four-letter word there—but if I had just spent the last 12 weeks working on a pitch or a presentation and I get a question, or the last couple of days and I get a question, I knew I should have spent that extra hour. I just tossed.

Think about being a little bit honest with your audience, but not making excuses. Don't make excuses. Don't BS. Don't try to sound like, but if you should have known, admit it. I would literally almost not physically cry, but I would say Rahul, I'd look at the floor for a minute. I'd pause. I'd shake my head and I'd say, I'm sorry. You're right. This is something I should have known and this will never happen again with this particular topic because it shouldn't have happened. Normally it's, okay, the guy admitted it, he's going to fix it and we won't see that error again in that situation. It's okay to admit failure.

Rahul Abhyankar Managing anxiety and just your own emotions in that moment. Getting in front of a room full of executives, dealing with these difficult situations and questions. There's a lot of emotion there.

Nathan Gold No kidding.

Rahul Abhyankar What do you recommend? What is your advice when you coach people?

Nathan Gold Well, you're on display. So this is a very serious, high-stakes situation for most people. They don't go on display like that. They don't go up in front of a group of 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 people. So anxiety, you know what? We all have it. First, I want to begin by letting you know that there is nothing you can do to get over the anxiety. You cannot get over it. You can manage it. But if you have speaking anxiety, that comes in a couple different flavors. There's a spectrum. I have childlike anticipation nervousness. Like for this meeting showing up to you, I was like a little kid. I couldn't wait, but I'm nervous. Is he going to ask me a question I don't have an answer for? We all go through that.

And I hope you do because it's okay for me to say, gee, Rahul, no one's ever asked me that question before. I'm going to need a minute to think about that. And I think about it and then I either say, you know what? I don't have an answer for you right now. Maybe the next episode, or I give you my answer. But the point is we all have anxiety, but normally that anxiety falls on the other side of the spectrum, which is, my God, what are they thinking about me? Do they like my glasses? Do they think I'm confident? Are they going to believe what I have to say? And all that monkey mind talk that a good friend of mine calls it, where it's negative internal speak. So we all have it.

Here's how we deal with it. I'll help you deal with it. It all starts with breathing. You need to remind yourself that when you're feeling these nerves, you're probably not breathing properly. So it all begins with a physiological reaction to those speaking nerves. So the first thing to do is to remind yourself to start relaxing your stomach and your abdominal cavity so that you can take deeper breaths because you're not breathing properly. In most cases, when people are really nervous, they do what they call clavicle breathing, just enough breath to get into the higher upper part. And then you get onto the, I'm exaggerating it, but that's what people do. Or they stop breathing. Let's say they just caught you. You should have known something and the boss says, hey Nathan, you should have known this. What's up with that? They call you out like that in front of everybody. You really need to take control of your breathing or nothing else I can tell you will work.

The analogy I like to give people is you have this beautiful black, strong stallion inside you. And when a black stallion—if you don't like black stallions, have a white one or a painted, I don't care, but think of these beautiful animals out in the field running free, carefree, strong. That's your nerves. Now, how do we manage that horse? We harness the horse. We teach it to do what we want. And if we do it right, it will perform to perfection or to excellence. The minute you take the harness off, it can go any which way it wants. So the breathing is part of the first harnessing your anxiety. You need to take control of your breathing.

Second, take control of your posture because the minute you start not breathing properly, your posture starts to collapse. So make sure you open up that cavity so that the air can get down there. Everybody gets in these situations and sometimes you can see people going, okay, I got to get my senses back here. That's basically what's going on.

And then the third thing that I would do, depending on the situation, if you kind of know what you want to say, but you still need to gather your senses, is to turn some music on in your head that calms you down or that lights you up. I use the Rocky theme. Whenever I get nervous, I turn on the Rocky theme from the first film in my head. And if I'm really nervous, like one time I walked out in front of about 750 people and I was unusually nervous. I was playing that music in my head and I turned it up louder and louder and louder until it drowned out all my monkey mind games that were going on. And when I finally got to my mark on the stage, it was me at the top of the stairs with my arms in the air, ready to go into the ring as opposed to being at the bottom of the stairs running up. I don't need time to warm up in front of an audience. And I think that's an excuse. You can warm up backstage and use the breathing, the posture and the music as a way to get you into the zone that you want to be in.

And I do want to offer you, Rahul, and all of your guests a free copy of the book I wrote on this topic. Harness Your Speaking Anxiety. I wrote it, I put it out in 2019. It's got 18 little chapters on how do you harness your speaking anxiety that people can have for free. You can download it off of my website for free. You don't even have to give me your name. It's not a lead gen. It's free. I wrote it to give it away. It is in Amazon, but I wrote it to give it away. I have an ask though. If you get value from the book, I ask, give it away to two more people.

Rahul Abhyankar Beautiful. We'll make sure that we'll get the URL and all the information and we'll post it as part of the show notes, so people will have access to that. But that's so generous. That's so kind of you.

Nathan Gold You're welcome.

Rahul Abhyankar When we come to stories, we all, working in companies for 5, 10, 15, whatever, however many years, we accumulate a lot of stories, but we forget them, because we don't have a good way to keep track of stories. And then when we are in a job interview, you get the question, well, tell me about a time when blah, blah, blah. So we don't have a good way to remember our stories. So what is your advice on how do we do that?

Nathan Gold That's a fun question for me to answer because in 2009, I read a book called What's Your Story? It was about a year into my consulting in doing this that I'm doing now. And Craig Wortmann, the author of that book, had a chapter on something called the story matrix. We have our stories, they're up here. But how are you going to get to them when you need them? Very hard sometimes, or remember those cool things that happened two years ago, three years ago.

So a story matrix is a very simple way to keep track of your stories. And you can start right now. You just need a Word document or a Google document and put a table on it. And a basic story matrix has four columns according to Craig. Success, failure, fun, and legend. Those four basic kinds of stories. You can change if you want, but we all have success stories. If you don't like the word failure, change it to challenges. It doesn't really matter. Fun stories and then legend stories. The legend story column are stories that are told so often that they become legendary. Like how you got your CTO to leave one major big Fortune 100 to join your company. It becomes a legendary story.

Now that's the column labels. The row labels, those are up to you. So if you're a startupper or you're a founder or co-founder, you're going to have stories like investor stories, pitching stories, sales stories, me stories, QBR stories. And then you have a successful QBR story. You go into the success column over to the QBR, you make a note. In my story matrix, and I have multiple because they get very dense, I put the date. I like to know the date of the story. And a couple of words, the person's name, the situation, maybe the title of the story, because then I can look back on it and immediately know what that story is.

And I can tell you without hesitation that there are stories I tell today that are only because of my story matrix. I wouldn't remember them if I didn't go back and look at something that happened five or 10 or even more years ago. There are so many wonderful stories that we all hear, but maybe they're not just stories about I, me and my. Your story matrix can have stories that you heard today on this show. I heard a story about this guy, blah, blah. That can be on your story matrix. Third party stories, second party, any of these second person stories.

So if you're in startup land, I would have your entire management team keep their own story matrix. And then once a quarter, you come together and you say, hey, all right, everybody has to share one fun story today with everybody so that we all have more stories on our story matrix. Nathan, you go first. Tell me a fun thing that happened over the last three months. And I just look down this fun column and I say, I haven't shared this fun story with you. And you tell that story and everybody goes, okay, maybe I'll use that in the future.

Rahul Abhyankar Or even people who are in a cross-functional product team can keep their own sort of story matrix about their product.

Nathan Gold Exactly. The story matrix can be used for a whole lot of things, not just stories I'm telling, but stories that are used in marketing, stories that are used in internal training and internal selling and all of that. The story matrix is a really brilliant way to keep track of them and it's free. You just need to actually put your notes up there.

Rahul Abhyankar A great discipline to build because it takes effort.

Nathan Gold Yes. Once you get it set up and going, normally you don't have more than a couple of stories in one day that you want to keep track of. These days, I probably have two or three stories a week that I enter into my story matrix. In the beginning, I was trying to enter in as many as I could to fill it up. It's not the point though, to fill it up. The point is to put stories in there you want to remember in the future. And you can dig as far back into your past as you can get, and just keep thinking, what happened when I first started? Because we forget. And the matrix will make it so you don't forget.

Rahul Abhyankar Beautiful. That's great advice. I know that you love quotes. Any particular quotes that have stayed with you longer?

Nathan Gold Probably one of my favorite quotes is from Bernard Assuncion. And I use this one because people don't like to practice as much. They don't treat practice and rehearsal seriously enough. And so, it goes like this. Practice like you've never won. Perform as if you've never lost.

Rahul Abhyankar Wow.

Nathan Gold If those words rattle around your head a little bit, you'll realize that practice has more meaning than we've ever been giving it before. You practice as if you've never won.

Rahul Abhyankar So there's that hunger.

Nathan Gold Exactly. And then of course, perform as if you've never lost, which creates that whole body language of confidence.

Rahul Abhyankar And control.

Nathan Gold My other second favorite quote is from Maya Angelou. We've all heard it more than likely, but I wanted to say it because when people say, what's the real goal of a presentation? What's the real goal of a pitch? Why am I going up there on the TED stage to present? What's the purpose? What's the real goal? And Maya Angelou hit it right out of the park when she said, people will forget what you say, people will forget what you do, but people will never forget how you make them feel.

That's true. Go for the feelings. Go for the heart. You'll get to the mind instead of going for the mind and trying to get to the heart.

Rahul Abhyankar And that can apply even in case of business presentations, product presentations. It's how you connect and create that feeling.

Nathan Gold That's right. And it's not a love feeling necessarily. It might just be a feeling of confidence that you've generated in your executive team because they didn't really know you before that day. They heard your name. They've seen you around. Maybe it's the first time you present and you come in there and you really knock the ball out of the park and they go, the feeling you left them with was, wow, that Nathan Gold guy, he is a pretty confident dude. I want to have him in more meetings. Or I can trust him. I can trust that guy. Whatever that feeling is you want them to have, start with that as your goal for the meeting in the background.

Rahul Abhyankar So Nathan, when we come to job interviews and you talked about the story matrix and how we can document the stories that we've experienced with respect to our products and our work that we do in companies, how do we tell those stories in job interviews? Is there a way that we can weave those stories in?

Nathan Gold Most definitely. In fact, your interview answers need to almost all be short stories because that's an immediate way to engage with the hiring manager who's sitting in front of, or with the HR person. People love stories. And one of those stories you're going to share with them is something they're probably going to share with somebody at lunch that day. Say, boy, we had a candidate in here. He told me the story about blah, blah, blah. Wow. That was so impressive.

Stories are the way to engage in an interview. It's not about, I did this and then I did this and I did this and I did this. That's wasteful time. So here are the secrets to interviewing in a way that you will never ever be forgotten. You may not get the job, but you won't be forgotten.

So there are two main things that interviewers, that hiring managers are looking for when it comes to bringing a person on. Two, and only two, mainly. One, how are you going to make my job easier? So you need a lot of stories about things you've done in the past that made your boss, your team, your company, the people you worked with, more efficient, better. That's number one. Number two, how are you going to make me look good to my boss and my executive, what are you going to do for my team that's going to make me look good?

When you share a story about either something you did in a previous job that made your boss's job easier or your team's job easier, or made everybody look good, what are you doing? You're saying I'm a team player. I'm here for you and I'm here for the team and I'm here for the right reasons. But your stories need to lead to outcomes. You did this. So what? What does it mean? It's back to the value proposition. I created this report. So what? I took 10 reports and I made them into one report. So what? What did it do? So that the team could get their data in one minute instead of a whole day. Now I get it. So if you use that kind of a story, you don't have to be obvious in saying, you just made our jobs easier.

Rahul Abhyankar And I think an important point that you made, what I'm taking away is who's the hero of the story?

Nathan Gold Who is the hero of the story? Not you. Them. You're the Yoda.

Rahul Abhyankar Beautiful.

Nathan Gold So there you go, Rahul. Those are the two main things. And if you just walk in prepared with stories that will illustrate those two things, everything else should be fine because you're illustrating that you can produce and you're there for the right reasons.

Rahul Abhyankar Awesome. Well, Nathan, thank you so much. This has been a fun conversation. It's so great to connect with you after so many years. Thank you so much.

Nathan Gold You're welcome. Anytime.