I Let a Storytelling Expert Destroy Everything I Thought I Knew About Marketing (And She Did It With a Tomato)

Can we talk about this? Most of your content is boring as hell.

There. I said it.

You're out here posting feature updates like they're the second coming, dropping "thought leadership" that reads like a ChatGPT fever dream, and wondering why your engagement looks like a ghost town.

Meanwhile, your customer success team is sitting on a goldmine of stories that could make your prospects weep with joy, and you're ignoring them to argue with marketing about button colors.

This is why I brought Renee Lynn Frojo on the pod.

The Tomato That Changed Everything

Renee literally got hired by telling a story about a tomato. Not her credentials. Not her portfolio. A. Freaking. Tomato.

She pitched following a tomato's journey from field to food truck to final plate—bringing in every stakeholder in the ecosystem—and the founder said "you're hired" on the spot.

Then she took Off the Grid's newsletter open rates from a tragic 6% to nearly 40% in six months. Got 10,000 people to show up post-pandemic. Grew their social by 10K.

How? She stopped posting food porn and started telling human stories.

The immigrant-owned businesses. The family recipes. The why behind the what.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth your board doesn't want to hear: Nobody cares about your product until they care about your people.

You're Interviewing The Wrong People (In The Wrong Order)

This is where Renee absolutely nuked my assumptions.

When she works with a company, she talks to:

1. Customer support FIRST

2. Sales team SECOND

3. Marketing and leadership LAST

Read that again.

Your frontline people are dealing with objections, FAQs, and the messy reality of what your customers actually struggle with. They know which stories need to be told because they're living in the trenches.

But you? You're in the boardroom thinking you know what matters.

You don't. (Sorry not sorry.)

Stories Are 22X More Memorable Than Your Feature List

Your prospects make decisions based on emotion, then justify with logic.

Which means your perfectly rational feature comparison chart is doing exactly jack shaet until they feel something.

Stories create that feeling. They activate mirror neurons. They make brains think fiction is reality—that's why you're sweating in a movie theater when someone's being chased by a monster you know isn't real.

But what stories should you tell?

Start here:

• Founder origin story (the messy parts, not the LinkedIn version)

• Customer transformation stories (talk to your BEST clients, not all of them)

• Employee "why I'm here" stories (yes, your people have personal brands worth building)

Interview 2-3 people in customer support. Ask them what customers are hesitant about. What objections keep coming up. What questions repeat.

Then talk to your best customers. Ask them what actually made them choose you. I guarantee it wasn't the feature you think it was.

The Uncomfortable Reality For Health Tech Leaders

You're in an industry built on trust, dealing with sensitive data, regulatory nightmares, and stakeholders who need to believe you give a damn about outcomes, not just exits.

And you're still out here posting like you're a generic SaaS company selling project management tools.

Your authentic client connections aren't a nice-to-have. They're your moat.

In medtech stakeholder engagement, in health tech client success strategies, in any B2B relationship building tactics that actually work—the human connection is the entire game.

It's not B2B. It's not even B2C.

It's H2H. Human to human.

And if you're not telling stories that prove you understand that, you're just noise in an already deafening market.

Stop Making It Complicated

You don't need a massive content team. You need to:

1. Mine your organization for stories (they're already there)

2. Talk to the people who actually talk to your customers

3. Get out of your own head about what you think matters

4. Tell stories that make people feel something

5. Stop chasing trends and start building relationships

That's it. That's the strategy.

Will it take longer than hopping on the latest LinkedIn trend? Yes.

Will it actually work? Also yes.

Listen To The Full Episode (Seriously)

Look, I can't fit everything Renee dropped into one blog post. The full conversation has more gold on building trust and authority, reducing client churn in startups, and creating relationship-driven revenue growth.

Plus she tells the complete tomato story, which is chef's kiss.

[Link to episode in show notes]

Because at the end of the day, your business success depends on relationships. With customers. With employees. With stakeholders.

And all of them? They're human.

So maybe start treating them like it.

P.S. If you're sitting there thinking "but our product is too technical for storytelling" or "our industry is too serious for this approach," congratulations—you're exactly the person who needs to hear this most. Your competitors are making the same excuse, which means the door is wide open for you to actually connect with your market. Or keep posting feature updates to the void. Your call.

Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H—human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.