The EQ Behind Clear Marketing with Josh Porter

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Welcome back to the show everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa, and we've got a special guest who we'll introduce in a moment. So, you know, a product may be brilliant, but if its message is confusing, buyers will hesitate. If the story is unclear, sales teams improvise, and if the team is misaligned, the market feels that confusion.
And this is especially true in those technical markets where companies can build powerful products that are difficult for customers to understand. And so we're going to dive into how EQ, emotional intelligence, plays a role in all this, especially in those technical markets. And Tullio, introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:59)
My pleasure. Our guest today is Josh Porter. He's the founder of Thunderwolf Consulting.
Josh brings 20 years of go-to-market experience across enterprise software and high growth startups with nearly a decade focused on AI and developer tools. He has led product marketing and growth at Google Cloud and multiple AI scale-ups. Through Thunderwolf Consulting, Josh helps AI and developer tooled companies clarify positioning, sharpen product narratives and build go-to-market strategies that accelerate adoption, shorten sales cycles, and turn technical products into categories customer can understand. Thunderwolf's work includes marketing strategy, fractional CMO leadership, narrative strategy, messaging frameworks, customer journey mapping, campaign planning, KPI management and systems that help marketing become a reliable asset to the company. Josh, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Josh Porter** (1:59)
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:02)
Josh, in your world where product marketing, go-to marketing, go-to-market strategy, where do you think emotional intelligence shows up most clearly?

**Josh Porter** (2:15)
It's so easy to create content as a marketer just using AI. Just tell, give it 10 words to create this, that, or the other.
That's very efficient, but not necessarily effective.
The ability to take some of that information and use it in your own experience, use stories, use your own pattern recognition, and events that have happened in your past really help, or your company's past, depending on who you're marketing for, whether it's for yourself or as a small business owner or a company, having that particular understanding of not just the logic behind, yes, does this argument make sense? Am I really showing, yes, you should use my product in a credible way, but then also, you're doing it in an emotional way? Because you can always give facts and figures that help convince somebody using their logic. But what's really going to help people understand and remember something about you or your brand is something that connects with them emotionally. And that usually can be through a story, through some humor or other means by being able to understand that. That's the emotional intelligence that I think is important in marketing, but also as you work within a company.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:10)
You know, for thousands of years, we've had that sort of storytelling, right?
Where we didn't have AI telling us, you know, can you imagine telling an AI story like a couple thousand years ago around the fire, the campfire, right? No one's going to remember that, right?

**Josh Porter** (4:28)
Yeah.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:29)
That's kind of the thing is there's no, you know, I can't even imagine, like, that scene of just people around this campfire trying to regurgitate something that, like, AI has right now, where it just, there's nothing, there's no emotional hooks there. There's no, right? There's no humanity to it, it seems like. And so I think that's really kind of, that emotional intelligence, you know, really does come into play is, you know, feeling out what the meaning of a story is, and being able to tell that and build a picture in people's minds, and then suddenly they get it, right?

**Tullio Siragusa** (5:08)
I mean, yeah, they had the ChatGPT back then too, Stephen. It was the Grand Puba Chief that you would ask, right? In the circle, that was who he went for.
So now, listen, Josh, I mean, you work with AI and developer tool companies, and these are very product, technically deep product type companies. And I spent three decades in technology companies, and the most difficult thing sometimes is telling engineers that nobody cares all the stuff. They just care about themselves, not what you can do. And so why do technically strong companies often struggle to explain what they do in a way that buyers actually understand from what matters to them?

**Josh Porter** (5:50)