Transcript: Roee Froman | Taboola | Building Storytelling That Sells, and Making Product Decisions With Less Risk

Meeting Roee and his background in Product, Pre-Sales and Product Marketing

Roee Froman: [00:00] We see things are good, how’s it going? Great, we did it, we did it. It took time, but in the end we did it. I want you to introduce yourself in a few words. Go ahead, Roi, Product Marketing Director at Taboola. Noda Sharon, father of three daughters, comes from a background of 10+ years in the world of product, before that years of pre-sales. Before that, sports. Not the classic ocean background, open, fed up, became a product person, and basically I’ve always been in these worlds around the area that combines business, customers, and technology. First and foremost, meaning if we’re now going to do something, for example, in this company that wants to break into the market quickly. It’s not going to invest now in some feature that’s super beautiful, AI and, like, amazing and flashy, because that would slow it down; it’ll give it up, and that happens all the time. Sometimes you need to think in terms of dev to cash, meaning I’m building something today, that’s fine, but when will we see the money from it? If I’m developing a product. Its sales cycle is six months and I’m already in Q3. If my goal is to increase revenue for this year, I’m not relevant; I’m relevant for next year, which is fine, but that’s a different goal. Things like that are basically part of.

The most important skills for product people: breaking down problems, and people

Start from the end: what the company goal really demands of the product

A startup example: automating a manual financial process

Does the feature serve the company's goals?

Eyal David: [06:50] These stones, or the weights, we’ll soon categorize them together, and we’ll also share some cute Excel file you prepared, so okay, come on, take us there, and as you say, I can limit it really with a big company.

Who must be part of the discussion before you build

Roee Froman: [07:04] Absolutely, a big company has, of course, departments and things like that; try to think for a moment—I call it idea inception, meaning from the moment of an idea. Through development, go-to-market, sales, support, until in the end the product is closed—think for a moment about who is involved in those processes. That will give you some order for a moment. If you had to go talk, for example, we talked about finance—finance is almost always synonymous with regulation. So go talk to the league, I don’t know how many of our listeners have ever talked to a league, not lately talked to a league. But maybe you have an amazing idea. For example, putting your users’ email inside the hero of the web page will probably protect you from all directions; you’re violating about 200 privacy laws in 300 countries. One example, things about sports in this financial system—we talked about that, one of the topics we referred to. If every system you fix for a customer brings with it between 3 and 5 different IPs, we all know what an IP is. It works, that’s true, but sometimes it also doesn’t work, and then you need to debug it, and then you need to do troubleshooting and find the story and find the problem and what’s happening. So that’s also some input to take from talking, of course, with our friends in development; there’s also a lot to talk about there.

Eyal David: [08:32] Like, it’s a product, it’s enough, but I discovered that talking to the story is super important. Right, because there you can find significant bottlenecks or even opportunities you didn’t think about. What else would you do? You also update the story in every conversation like that, absolutely, absolutely, if you’re going now, for example, you said to talk to the story.

Roee Froman: [08:54] Definitely the customer story, but also the company story. Talk to them; they live the world of the problem. If we look at the enterprise world, also in B2C worlds, meaning in the end we’re all in C and in the B2B worlds, so often it’s the same function that will be a customer of ours in our company. Talk, understand what the problem is, understand, listen to how, let’s say, the same story speaks about his difficulty; bring that into your story, because in the end people buy. Not because there’s some shiny logo or because it looked super sharp, but because they understand you’re coming to solve their problem for them, really. But— And from that connection, in the end, we’re human beings and we’re driven by a very large mix of things, so if you know how to tell the story according to those pains, according to those areas that matter to them. Then the chance of success, let’s say, will go up and up—great, so small tips.

Improve the story without falling in love with it

Eyal David: [09:54] 1 Here, at this point, it’s important, on the one hand, to improve the story; on the other hand, not to fall in love with the story too much. I always like, like, I don’t have a story. In the second thing, if you’re not people’s promotion yet, then use Zoom, and that was a no-brainer, and after that, look back at yourself, how you told it, what feedback you got; this reflection also causes a lot of signs to fall, right? You can also later cross-check between data—that’s true. You can do a whole episode on discovery conversations and the art around this thing, because really it’s some kind of.

Roee Froman: [10:31] Art behind the scenes, like the point is that you haven’t brought out the problem, and there are also all kinds of other, let’s call them, artistic points. In our worlds, in the matter of running fast, this has a very high weight, because it can take you very much from mistake to precision—absolutely, meaning go do the conversations, do the iterations, sit with the customer, and really try to get as accurate as possible. For the real need, so what can be run with, run with it and ship. So that at the beginning we won’t do a sunk cost percentage and get entangled and discover that we’re 200 kilometers away from the hand; all the time, these adaptations.

Eyal David: [11:13] Super important, and we also ran a bit fast; I’m kind of thinking we started from the company’s hand, so there are ways to get there. Basically, I can put my chips on something existing, or I can go for something completely new—the question is what will get me to the hand more likely.

Roee Froman: [11:32] With less risk, as you— I really liked your metric, and your dev to cash, that’s very right. Planetox, for example, because there’s also my time, right, right, right, you can expand that completely. Planetox, so I think you really touched on an important point. In the end, we’ll collect all kinds of metrics. We’ll score them, give them a rating, gather them all into our Excel spreadsheet, and whoever this Spain group is—today it doesn’t matter, Gemini—your requests, all the data, tell it what you want, it’ll do it by itself. But in the end, there is here some kind of calibration, basically, meaning the fact that there are just five attributes that we’re comparing the different options by. That’s fine, but the weight of each one is ultimately your decision; there’s no absolute truth here, and that weight actually reflects. The bet you’re making, meaning where you’re putting your chips now. I mean, like, rig the Excel so it comes out exactly, exactly what you want—don’t look at what comes out. And think for a second whether it fits what you have in your head, and what can you do—you have to make bets in the end, meaning... So for example, to give one example from Taboola, we saw some gap in the world of ad formats that we knew we could bring to our clients. We understood that it wasn’t a huge investment now—not to completely close the gap, but to move forward in it. But it didn’t fit the leads we had at that time when we examined it. So we decided to go with something else. It’s a bet; maybe we should have done that and we would have reached the same result, or maybe a different one. But in the end, that’s the draft and the spreadsheet’s role—Excel’s purpose in the end is to give structure to the discussion. It says, let me help you group all the areas you examined into something more quantitative that helps us get a sense of whether this is... a winning gap in points, as they sometimes say, and then our decision really carries more weight, because there’s some enormous gap here that when you look at it point by point you don’t see it, but suddenly you aggregate these things.

How a spreadsheet helps frame bets, not replace a decision

Eyal David: [13:58] You understand that there’s really no debate here, we didn’t just go and get lost there in processing already; let’s dive into Excel itself—do you have any tips on how to get to the truth as much as possible or reduce the percentage of risk as much as possible?

Strong opinions, loosely held — how to approach prioritization

Roee Froman: [14:12] So first of all, we have a sentence at Taboola that we like to say: strong opinion, loosely held—no, I coined it, of course, and there are many versions of this sentence; meaning, fall in love with the idea, all these things, so really approach the problem with... This comparison process with an open mind—just because you really, really like some feature doesn’t mean anything; it means something, but it’s not the decisive factor. Second, really do some kind of orderly and relatively uniform process. For all those features, meaning don’t do full work on one feature and a third of the work on another feature and then try to compare—it won’t work. Try to reach some standardization, and here, for example, the spreadsheet... comes to try to help, and it’s not just the spreadsheet; it’s all the methods, basically, of prioritization—their goal is ultimately to take layer by layer... Okay, for example, are we leveraging the company’s industries well? On a scale from 1 to 5, decide what is 1 and what is 5 in the practical sense of the thing I brought to the product—are the development resources even available? Maybe the minimum is six months, and then there’s some other factor because in the end it also affected our time to market. The potential—is it some feature that’s huge? Or is it something that is now going to go out as an upsell to all the company’s customers and drive the company’s revenues up, because every company has its own metrics. Quantifying these things really helps make the discussion concrete, and then it’s no longer a discussion of... I think A is preferable to A, and you think B is preferable to B, but let’s talk for a moment about why I think... our churn rate will go up by 10% and why you say it will go up by 2%—exactly. I think that’s very strong; that’s also what I do.

Eyal David: [16:07] I hear opinions, like when I go and tell the story, and I try—depending very much on whom I tell it to, how advanced they are and how much they can also absorb, because in the end you... try to speak as little as possible in the end, at least I do, but I try to hear after that, like... once this whole process of the pitch happens, that he understood the story, she understood the story, and okay, we ran with it and we’re aligned, or... even if it went in a different direction, but both of us are already after a certain level of maturity, so yes, then I can expose my considerations only at that point, because before that it’s too early. And then I also gather—I look at weightings, basically I look not only at my own opinion, in short, because Excel eats everything, just like I eat everything, and you can steer it to output what you want.

Roee Froman: [16:51] But the idea is really that they guide it, so you guide it consistently across everything, and then if I shift right on one thing, I’ll shift everything right, and vice versa. At certain points, with the consideration and two options within the same solution. Talking about the power—again, not in the debate—you may need to do an internal round first to understand the alternative cost of each solution, and that’s where the power is. Tell him, listen, we’re considering A, considering B... A will lead us like this and like that and like that, and we expect it to be ready... I don’t know, another half a year. B will lead us like this and like that and like that, and it’ll be ready in another three months—what do you say? What do you think? Open up, meaning often the answer is not obvious, as we say, the power wants it tomorrow morning. Give him something; not always, let’s say, wow, I’ll wait the half year and I want the solution, like, perfectly polished all the way through.

Ask customers about alternatives, not just wants

Eyal David: [17:53] I’ll add something completely separate, because we talked about complexity, about where I also gauged, like, the level of team involvement—how many teams are involved in the event, I prefer... features or initiatives with as few risks as possible, meaning as few teams involved as possible. Another thing I look at, and maybe features that are higher up actually win because that level of complexity is low. There’s complexity here too, and we talked about it end to end, and I love that because there are also tests that can be very complicated, say if there’s some model involved now or something that will take me a lot of time. So I would add that, and also when you tell us the story, it may be very clear. I’m really trying to think about the persona I’m talking to, and we’ll get to that later, but like, what moves them? What’s your thing that’s right? So, so.

Understanding what motivates each stakeholder

Roee Froman: [18:42] In the end, part of the outcome of that round we’re doing is really to distill from every such interaction. What drives what motivates the other side. Maybe when you talk to that same sport, to understand for a moment the implications of what you want to develop on their work. Understand for a moment what motivates them. Maybe I’m a company, I don’t care about the number of glitches, it’s terrible for me, everything is fine. If we need to expand, we’ll expand the team and everything’s fine, no problem, but. I’m not willing to accept downtime for the customer, not willing, because I know how it affects them. Okay, maybe that’s the read, and then you’ll say, okay, wow. Interesting angle, like we didn’t think about it, we didn’t think about, you know, 5 calls today, 6 calls, all kinds of things like that, we didn’t think about this angle, it’s a factor. A factor to take into account in complex solutions, not complex, teams. So, so absolutely, like, that’s one angle, and then from that thing, from that conversation, see how you take. Things that are there, important to you later for the story you go to market with.

Eyal David: [19:58] Which is the really important story in the end, that’s what we’re building here, basically. I also like to take the parts that are hard to understand, that I can put my finger on, so I understand I need to simplify them. So I also understand that probably part of this either doesn’t go down well because it’s not interesting or it’s just too complicated, and maybe we’ll get to it later if I can, if it has, if it has a very big impact, for example. It probably isn’t important enough. You also talked about how you really like talking about challenges. If we go back to that same CPO, for example, then maybe he really has challenges that are not exactly what we’re talking about now, and how do we fish them out there.

Roee Froman: [20:37] Absolutely, absolutely. Those conversations are exactly for distilling the problem, the challenge, and the gaps he has versus his KPIs. They’re exactly the place, and what comes up there will also of course go into the solution, but then also into the story, meaning. It could be that same manual process. It’s actually fine, and we’re talking, just as an example, about 2% errors in annual turnover, and he can live with that just fine. And if you reach some kind of solution where in the end you’ll have no choice and you’ll have to price it as, for comparison. 4% of his annual turnover, then it’s not certain that it’ll interest him, because that’s not the challenge anymore; the challenge will be something else, a financial challenge, so, so. Take from all these conversations how you how you distill, and how you—I really connect with what you said if. And we’re talking, we said yes, like there was an initial conversation two weeks ago, we talked about this and that capability. Says yes, and I said okay, and what else, like. They went, yes, knew and didn’t know, and I said, and tell me. Let’s send them an SMS with the information you just said they don’t know. His eyes opened wide like I’ve never seen before; I knew it could exist, and the tailoring of it into the solution, I had nothing at all. In the end it brought in the biggest deal the company had ever had, certainly in the five years before that. In a short time, a relatively fast deal closure, because there was a very, very, very clear need, and I’m spot on, not even close.

How to build a story around a real problem

The Roaming-world example: how clear pain led to a big deal

Eyal David: [25:17] I definitely took two things from it, I’ll say: 1. What you said about coming and putting it together with him was super right, because nobody wants to feel like they’re being sold to. So that, in my opinion, is an iron rule, and the second thing. Like, this is very successful in my eyes; I do this, I ask what, in your eyes, is success in a year. After talking about it, what is success in three months, because I know what I can talk about in a quarter, and if we’re more, it’s easier for me to actually approach something we both agreed on, which is more distilled and logical for both of us. So I very much agree, I’ll just say one more thing I took from what you said and thought about: I take your quotes and then you can put them into the copy, you can put them into whatever ad you want, and also into your presentation that you then take to management.

Roee Froman: [26:03] That is absolutely the thing, we really, really love data, all of us; it’s like it’s become this trend because data is all around us. I’m completely with you, anyone I go talk to and work with a bit in processes, I tell you, the numbers are important and that’s the foundation. But the quotes are sometimes better than any number you can bring. It’s a world where, in the end, there’s a person saying something like, I want such and such. Five, seven, whatever, that’s what they go by and that’s what they use, and I’m completely with you: integrate that later, and it really helps.

How to weight metrics differently by context

Eyal David: [26:38] I want to go back to Excel now; maybe we’ll also put some kind of link to a template like that that you can look at afterward. The weighted thing that really interests me is how you approach it; we talked about it briefly, but. There’s a difference between putting it at 1 versus 5, the context changes, how do you treat it, so so.

Roee Froman: [26:57] Here it’s a matter of this, and I’m just taking King Bits a bit, because in the end you’ll look at the different columns, you’ll see it in the market dev talk. How much is this the company’s vision and titles and all kinds of other columns, and you come and say. What in my opinion is more important; I’m not discounting anything, but what is more important. At home, what’s more dangerous if in the end we understand that we’re ultra short on development resources. Really, like, every half day of a developer counts and is measured, so okay, then let’s put weight on that. Against this weight there needs to be something else that is compelling in order to neutralize this cost, okay. So so, quality, giving more weight to development on one hand and visibility on the other. It could be that we’re currently in some orientation according to company goals. That day talk time-to-market, like that’s what determines it. Okay, great, so we’ll weight areas that affect time-to-market; resource availability, operations, sales cycle, things like that will get more weight.

Eyal David: [28:21] That’s the art; in my opinion it’s a good rule of thumb because usually that’s what matters in recent years, right, and then you can do maybe an optimistic and pessimistic scenario and then we’re out of it, right, that. Cool, let’s go back for a second to storytelling. So we did all the empowering, all this crazy run, let’s say, taking the company from the story as an example we gave. They went through it, they talked, they went colder, talked to everyone, maybe different arrivals too, I don’t know how many presidents and pros they talked to, and their story is getting sharper. Now actually they get to why we didn’t talk before continuing. There’s also a channel, like we talked about all the context: who I’m talking to, what their role is, what moves them, what’s important to them, maybe also where there is frustration; we didn’t talk about the content that changes because of that, but there’s also a channel, right. It could be that with one person I’ll go on Zoom, with another we’ll just talk by email, face-to-face conversation with a presentation, without a presentation, so I.

Communication channels: face-to-face, Zoom, email and what each enables

Roee Froman: [29:26] A big fan of human evolution. In the end, we are social creatures. Some of us are a little less social, but in general we are social creatures, meaning the signals we pick up in what is not said. And it’s not me saying that studies on this thing are much bigger than what was just said — Zoom is nice. It’s a great tool, like the whole world uses it, especially after the coronavirus, but. Usually you’ll see a frame that starts somewhere around the upper chest and includes the head; you don’t see the whole person. Second, the ability to do auto-zoom in conversations like this and lift the phone out of frame or check emails while you’re, like, talking — some people are more skilled at that and some less. It makes it very difficult. It’s hard to pull you in and read how the person across from you responds to all kinds of your questions, all kinds of your statements, so I’m a big believer in face-to-face. Of course, that’s not always possible; right now they want to talk through a chain of conversations from Australia to San Francisco. So there are physical limitations here, and sometimes you need to prioritize: where you can do in-person, do in-person; where you can do Zoom, do Zoom. At the end of the day, if you don’t find anything, like, the chance that someone will write you about their problems. Zoom is great, available immediately.

Eyal David: [31:11] It has its drawbacks; I think there’s, look, there’s an email here, I think, and I didn’t say that for nothing, because communication doesn’t end and begin, in my view, only in the meeting. You have the beginning, then you have a summary that you send, and maybe afterward you’ll want to continue the thing, and all of that needs to follow the same, like, continuation of the melody that was actually created in the conversation itself, and that’s what I’m talking about. It could be that if you’re now with some stakeholder, there’s maybe some cadence you want to keep them in the loop on.

Roee Froman: [31:42] You might want it to be that way; that has meaning — no, I agree — the reference was really to the conversation itself, where you dig, as they say, deep. As you said, there’s a huge amount of meaning to continuity of the relationship and not some kind of. Well, he needed me, or he needed something, and then he disappeared and I’m in the dark and I don’t know what’s going on; people like to hear themselves speak, people also like to know what’s going on, especially if it’s an area that still interests them — obviously, I invested my time, like, what, keep me in the loop? Maybe the person is, just as an example, in legal. Not interesting, okay, the product gave you the proposal because because it knows that if it doesn’t give you the proposal now, it will meet you later in some contract with the power, and that’s okay, like, but still. Keep it in mind; say, Helen, wow, we got what you said, we took it into account, we counted it as this and that, thank you very much, be kind — like, come on, sometimes we, it sounds obvious, but be kind, say thank you; people invest their time.

Books and tools that helped Roee in storytelling and negotiation

Eyal David: [32:43] It’s not trivial even if they work with you in the company, yes, that’s also at the end of the day, and I have to ask: are there any books, podcasts, something you can think of that actually helped you in the sales process, in the storytelling process?

Roee Froman: [32:58] Of course there’s the one and only Simon Sinek; if there’s someone who somehow still hasn’t heard the Start with Why talk of his, and of course beyond that there are the books he wrote. There’s one by my manager from Taboola, the former manager, about brain-side defense. About negotiation itself — now you can read it not in terms of, okay, I’m going to negotiate for an apartment or for this, but rather. About the interaction, about how to bring the other person to some point that you want to bring them to. There are a lot of tools there that can be used; I really connected with it, an intriguing book in my opinion. There are plenty more; I mean, just listen, and the truth is, at the end of the day, the best way. Is to practice it, do it; if you’re afraid to go to a client alone for the first time. Chances are you won’t meet with the client, the sales rep won’t let you, but it doesn’t matter — go with the sales rep, say, listen, I want to join you for the meeting. Okay, wallflower, I promise no one will beat me up, I’m not talking. Because there are people, animals, who are very, very protective about letting, like, someone in. Into this intimate relationship between the sales rep and their client, so lower it, understand their need and their defenses, lower them gradually. And see how it happens after you’ve been the wallflower once; then say, okay, if there’s anything I’ll be happy to, like, say — by the way, there are a lot of times salespeople who are skilled enough. And experienced enough will bring you into the conversation whether you want to or not, because that’s the best thing, because look, look who I brought — I brought the company’s number 1 expert on the product for you, dear customer. What is this, so make use of it, just join conversations gradually, not straight into the deep water.

The best way to improve: join sales calls

Eyal David: [35:10] I also really connect with that, I connect with it that it’s an incentive, that’s right. What great advice; I’ll add one more thing about negotiation: one of the first episodes I did on the podcast was with Neta Mishtrom from real estate. She does, you know, negotiations on $200 million properties; it’s a great episode for anyone who wants to get into that, and it’s really part of the sales process that we’re covering here, actually.

Negotiation as a meeting of needs, constraints and capabilities

Roee Froman: [35:35] Right, right, because in the end you come with your knowledge about the company. About the product, about the reasons for the development, about the text for you, about the time and space constraints, as they say. The client on the other side with their problems, their needs, and in the end you’re trying to reach some solution that will bring these two worlds together, meaning some agreement that says, okay. That stop has a lot of needs, but. This is the need we’re talking about, this is the need we’re addressing, and there are claims we can make around that need in order to solve it fully. Ideally, but if you couldn’t, then you’d knowingly say, okay, we can answer half of the need because that’s what there is.

Why this episode is relevant for founders too, not only product people

Eyal David: [36:22] So this is really an episode that’s not just for product managers or product people, but also for founders: don’t go and build some palace that you didn’t really work out; try to assess your risk and basically take safe paths.

Roee Froman: [36:38] Listen, Roy, I’m glad we waited so long with this episode because I think it’s a great suggestion. How nice that you came, it’s a pleasure to have you on, really. Yes, we waited a long time and now it’s out, so let’s say thank you again to Al Finko.

Eyal David: [36:52] Yes, they made his episode for me, so we’ll also put a link to the spreadsheet, and if people want to get in touch with you, how do they do that? So in the spreadsheet there’ll be email and phone, you’re welcome to, let’s put a link in the show notes, a Tinck link, all the best, thanks a lot.