Mike Birbiglia: B2B Marketing Lessons from the Prolific and Award-Winning Comedian with the Host of How Stories Happen, Jay Acunzo

Before comedians ever get a Netflix special, they have to run the gauntlet. 

Night after night, they’re putting themselves out there in front of judgmental crowds and trying to win them over.

Sometimes they bomb, sometimes they face hecklers, and what may be even worse: silence. 

Kathy Griffin once bombed so badly at a show in Montreal she said, “The audience was talking so much that they didn’t know my set ended.” Ouch.

But even after bombing the worst, comedians 👏 keep 👏 practicing 👏. And all the while they’re gathering data. What works? What doesn’t work? 

Because that data helps them get better and better. And that grit and resilience is one of the things we as marketers need to have too. 

So in this episode, we’re taking marketing lessons from comedian Mike Bigbiglia.

With the help of our special guest, Host of How Stories Happen, Jay Acunzo, we’re talking about developing your premise, aiming for resonance over reach, and practicing your material in front of your audience.

About our guest, Jay Acunzo

Jay Acunzo is consultant, author and speaker at Unthinkable Media. He helps his clients learn to differentiate easier and resonate deeper on the impact of their ideas, not the volume of their content. He helps them develop their premise, their storytelling, and their pillar projects in order to own an idea in their minds and influence the market.

After starting his career in media and marketing roles at Google and HubSpot, a tiny startup and a VC firm, he authored the book about questioning best practices, Break the Wheel, toured as a professional speaker (giving keynotes in 25 states and 3 countries), launched two celebrated business shows (the podcast Unthinkable and the docuseries Against the Grain), and co-founded the mastermind for business storytellers, the Creator Kitchen.

As an advisor, he has worked with more than 200 individuals and teams to help them differentiate through substance and stories, not stunts. Past brand clients include Salesforce, GoDaddy, Wistia, Drift, Podia, InVision, Zillow, Blackbaud, Dometic, James Hardie, and Help Scout, as well as hundreds of individual thought leaders and experts, including the author behind Google’s employee training program and the performance coach who helped develop Kobe Bryant’s Black Mamba persona.

He is a New England resident, a Knicks fan, and an obsessive grilled pizza chef. His grandest aspiration (though genuinely, it’s my biggest delusion) is to be the Anthony Bourdain of business storytelling.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From Mike Birbiglia:

• Develop your premise. Define your overarching theme or premise. If you were to give your campaign a title, what would it be? What message do you want your audience to get? Jay says, “The premise is an assertion you're making from which everything else follows. And that's true in comedy. It's also true in how you position a brand and every project that you or your brand might create. You know, a podcast has a premise, a video series, a book, a speech. We all need to better develop our premises the way a comedian does.” Mike Birbiglia has a premise to each show and a story arc. Like how The Old Man & The Pool is about getting older and swimming as a means of getting healthier. It gives the show shape and it also gives his audience an idea of what his show will be about. 
• Resonance>reach. Aim to make content that resonates with your target persona instead of aiming to reach a lot of people. This sometimes means decreasing your reach to be true to your brand values. But hitting home with your niche is better than falling flat with a bunch of people. Jay says, “You should care more about resonance than reach to grow your busin