Rediscovering the human art of storytelling

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Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech. Welcome to the XTech Podcast, where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Foerster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry. I’m delighted to be working with Fox Agency as the host for the XTech podcast and as a curator for the XTech community. Now, today, I am delighted to be joined by Abs Hassanali. He’s the Global Head of PR and Communications. Abs, thanks so much for joining.

Abs Hassanali:
Hi, Debbie. Really looking forward to this. Great to be here.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So, Abs, I really like to get to know my guests as humans before I get to know about them in the world of technology. Some people born with a laptop in hand coding from their first words, others of us wake up one day and realize, oh, goodness, I think I’m in the world of tech. How did you get into the world of tech?

Abs Hassanali:
Well, that’s an interesting story, Debbie. I wasn’t dreaming about working in B2B SaaS 20 years ago. I’ve always been someone who’s so very handy, fixed all those sort of Dell computers at the beginning. But my real passion in technology actually comes from storytelling. I think we’re sort of, as humans, we’ve always been storytellers at heart, but it’s just that tech probably hasn’t done a very good job in telling stories as well. I stumbled into the world of tech as many people have their sort of career journeys. I studied philosophy, went into politics and only sort of did so because it was like the subject that catered for my agenda at the time in college. So who knows where I could and would have ended up. But here we are and I really think. I think we can do a lot better in terms of storytelling and technology. But that gives me great excitement as well.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So I was doing a little searching around about you before we had our discussion and I came across a really interesting quote. I see that you said that the press release is dead. Now why do you think this and how have you helped Basware evolve in this, particularly in communicating those complex topics?

Abs Hassanali:
I think you’ve got your headline, so there we go. Look. I think press releases are probably one of two things. They’re either an ad or a story. And you’ve hit the nail on the head that this will be a common theme throughout. You get a lot of those we’re proud to announce types, and they’re very much advertisements. And I don’t know about you, but I never bought furniture or coffee based on a press release. Right. But what has stayed true and through the test of time has been, I think, good storytelling. Think about news, think about the way you consume information, whether that’s through a newspaper, now through sort of digital media, or even sort of anchor news in the evening. It has like the main headline, it has sort of the why is this important subheading.

And then it sort of zooms into like a case study or what does it mean for the actual people? What’s the impact? Some, maybe professional expert opinion. And that stayed true. It’s just that the format isn’t dead of press releases, but the execution definitely needs evolving and won’t survive much longer. Maybe in the current way that it’s happening. We’ve always had things like, I don’t know if you remember the days of Yellow Pages.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I’m that old. Yes, probably. And probably my yellow pages were etched in stone. But yeah, no, absolutely. To the babies in the audience, that’s the thing that you had to look through to find an advert, a big old book with all the businesses and phone numbers. Carry on for the rest of us old fogies.

Abs Hassanali:
Imagine we had to put a bit of effort in those days. And then sort of you got, then you had Google, then you had like social media, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit. Now we have like ChatGPT. Right. And I was probably seeing when would AI come up in this conversation? Didn’t take long. Right. But the art has been there and I think we’re moving from a phase of now okay, if the press release is dead, it’s more about visual storytelling and that’s really important.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And is there a way? Because I would imagine it’s been a hard journey. Because you said yourself tech’s not always great at telling stories much less visual stories. How have you taken Basware on that journey to telling stories, particularly visual stories?

Abs Hassanali:
I always remember this quote, you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your habits. At Basware now, we don’t do announcement, a PR campaign without some form of video element attached to that. And it’s about creating the right environments when those habits become inevitable. If you think about now, when we sort of consume news or digital media, we straight away go to the comments. And that’s to affirm or deny what we think. We’re having sort of AI tools almost think for us. And we live in a crazy world right now where people use AI to post and then people use AI to comment. So it’s my AI tool, talking to your AI tool. How we cut through that is I think through the human storytelling aspect, the visual, the video.

So one example is we had a Gartner Magic Quadrant recognition at Basware last year. A huge deal for us. Not sure about the rest of the industry. It’s like a, think of it like a Michelin star for tech.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s a great honor actually in the space to do that. So congratulations.

Abs Hassanali:
Yeah, but there’s still a lot of companies that are recognized as well. Right. So how do we cut through that noise? So we thought, okay, there is sort of we could go down the press release advertisement route, but why don’t we think about what’s maybe not as much thought about, or where there’s less noise, where we could make an impact. So social and there’s less guidelines there. So went early, were quick, were first. We did like 10, 12 videos for all our exec team and they were prepped and they were ready to go and they just had sort of hit publish the moment things happen. And we took out a billboard in Times Square because who does that for something like Gartner? But it was cool and it worked and it gained us sort of a lot of leverage across the industry as well in a space that’s very competitive, in a space where we’re all trying to sort of get away from all that noise and avoid more news.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I like that you had each of the execs do something because again, moving from a single corporate voice to more human voices through your execs also probably got some cut through as well.

Abs Hassanali:
Yeah, definitely. And that’s like behind every company, behind every brand is a person. And we connect more with people than we do with logos, believe it or not. I think there’s a lot to say about that and there’s a lot to say about those companies that are willing to put faces behind names and really push their own personalities out there as well. And that only helps with marketing, with sales.

Debbie Forster MBE:
All right, well, let’s look, because the marketing game continues to change. And I came across a statistic. It said that 83% of marketing leaders consider demonstrating ROI their top priority. And that’s up because last year that was only 68%, but only 36% of marketers can accurately measure their ROI and 47% struggle with multi touch attributions. How do you tackle that? How do you measure ROI for your PR and comms, particularly for stakeholders like your CFO?

Abs Hassanali:
That’s the age old challenge, right, of communications and brand development, right. How do you put value to that? I think it was Jeff Bezos that said your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Two ways I would say, and my sort of advice would be first accepting that not everything that has value can be measured.

Debbie, I don’t know if you know about the doorman fallacy, right, but there was a period in, I think it was sort of the 90s, late 90s, where you get, you had all these sort of high tech consulting firms, your McKinsey types, that would go to every sort of hotel and retail outlet and tell them in terms of a cost based decision, they should get rid of the doorman at the front of every hotel. So you had all these fancy hotels in London getting rid of their doormans because the doorman didn’t bring any lead generation, they didn’t bring people through the door, right? But what came as a result of that, there was a study like 18 months later, satisfaction from customer feedback or people walking through the door went down, right? And the doorman does way more than just open a door. And the doorman, his or her value isn’t just measured by what could be replaced by electric doors, right? They, they sort of the tidy of the place, they give it some sort of prestige and recognition. So I think in that sense PR brand faces like that doorman recognition as well. You can’t like point somewhere on a spreadsheet if you’re a CFO – that doorman generated me £50,000 or dollars in bookings.

So I think number one is accepting that not everything that has value can be measured. Number two is also fighting for the belief that one piece of the puzzle doesn’t make the entire picture. By that I mean, and I’ve done a lot of study and work into the Barcelona Framework principles and the Amex and there’s so much like. And it’s hard for me to avoid someone in PR myself, but bringing together all these different pieces of a puzzle that make the overall picture, one piece itself wouldn’t give you clarity, but all of them put together do. So at Basware, when I sort of came in, I really sort of set out a system where we measure and track 12 different metrics.

So we look at everything from quantity, quality, leads and by that means things like number of hits, coverage pieces, impressions, share of voice, how much it’s engaging and then so more towards the leads, like in target publications with backlinks and like attrition and web traffic. All of that gives you a much better picture on where your brand has value, where what’s been spoken about and where you’re sort of really impacting and targeting your key audiences.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it sounds like, I mean, the key here is lean into the complexity. And complexity is not the same as complicated, but by having those 12 different KPIs, you can start showing that complexity. And I like the idea of don’t shy away from measuring, but don’t pretend a single measure is the be all, end all. It is, it is more complex than that. It’s a useful thing to start considering, but you still have to gather the numbers to talk to the CFO. But you can shape those numbers and be able to look at it in a more nuanced way. It’s a good piece of advice.

Now, carrying on with what’s changing in your space, I think a lot of companies are seeing this. The professionalization and systemization of communications unfortunately has led to a really template driven. Your infamous press releases, which we have accepted are dead, but it’s creating content that no one reads, that we’re focusing just on the SEO, the algorithms, the number. And I think a lot in the space are worried that we’re losing craft and storytelling. And then that’s before we look at technology, automation. But there is still that growing recognition, isn’t there, that compelling storytelling matters. How do you balance that? That’s a really difficult balancing act of the art of the communication versus that data driven world we’ve been talking about.

Abs Hassanali:
That’s a bit of a loaded question, Debbie. How long do we have? No, look, I think it’s a bit like what matters to business leaders and what matters to CEOs of large companies and small companies. Growth. How do you sort of provide the link between brand, between PR into sales, revenue and ultimately growth? And it’s a bit like for brand and for PR, you’ve got to almost become of the belief that you’ll create a cool party and you will host and you’ll invite people and you hope they will come, but you’ve never got an invite and thought, what’s the ROI of going to this dinner or lunch, right? But do enough of them and it has a snowball effect. I think that’s the same implication for a brand.

Let me tell you this. Imagine if like take a famous building like the Sistine Chapel. Imagine if that was built by data scientists, right? Someone really ROI driven who thought, okay, every nook and cranny needs to be like this. And in sort of hundreds of years we’ll have this number of people walk on this pathway to come see it. We’d probably have a building that sort of had probably sort of less issues with leakages and reconstruction. But would it be as beautiful? Right. Would it be a building that would attract and make people see? So I think it’s ultimately about marrying those two worlds. You’re right. Half art, half science. Anyone who says they’ve got the magic wand is lying to you.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Or wants to sell you something. Yes.

Abs Hassanali:
So bear that in mind. But the one way that I think we’ve made progress is looking at what’s called the power of voice, perhaps, or the value of voice. So you get like share of voice, which looks at where you show up. How is your brand, your company name, being recognized across competitors? But then that’s very much. vanity in the sense that get one sort of recognition mention in the front page of the FT is equivalent to one little note at the end of my mother’s friend’s blog. So how do you sort of bring some equilibrium to the two and maybe sort of this value of voice, power voice, where you put actual system behind that. So when you said about the complexity, if complexity allows you to make things a bit more simple, then I think it’s worth it at times.

So looking at what sentiment is, looking at what brand equity is, looking at what tone of voice is, and looking at how many times you show up in a certain target publication as well, if you’re looking purely at public relations. So I think add all of that together and you get a bit more art into the science as well.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I like the way, you know that golden thread, I think now is not just storytelling, but it’s that human voice. And that becomes more of a challenge the more AI walks into all of our spaces. But I think it adds value, doesn’t it? If as you say, AI bots are talking to AI bots and AI posted content is being answered by AI responses, that human voice becomes actually twice as powerful and resonant because of its uniqueness.

Abs Hassanali:
No. And I’m going to tell you this, I’m a very sort of advocate of AI. I see it as a helper, 100%. I almost think like ignoring AI today is like ignoring the Internet 30 years ago. And I’ve been told there were anti Internet people who were scared about data and security. But imagine now if someone said, okay, if someone sent a customer an email or send a press release out to someone, you would never get a response. Why did you use a computer to type this? Or why didn’t you post this via the letterbox? And that’s going to be the case about AI. It’s going to become common that people send things to AI and people then interact, engage through AI themselves. And I think that’s sort of the world we live in. But that doesn’t mean that within that there is still creativity, within that there still is authenticity. And I think that’s the part that people who are anti AI forget and people who are pro AI perhaps do as well when they utilize it or rely on it too much.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I think that is the quintessential problem. Every new tool that arrives in tech, there’s the huge excitement, then the huge pushback, and then we always have to go back to, it’s just a tool and it’s how we use the tool and the skill of the person who’s using the tool that the power comes from. It’s not magic for good or bad, it is a tool and it’s how we use that. So on the back of that, you have to build your team, you have to hire for your comms team. How is the skill set that you look for in professionals evolved? What are you looking for when you’re trying to hire for your team?

Abs Hassanali:
One thing beyond anything else – mindset over skill set. The job I’m doing today was very different five, 10 years ago and will be very different in five, 10 years.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Probably five or 10 minutes from now, at the rate of change. Yes, carry on.

Abs Hassanali:
And I’ll be different. Right? But what I hope will take me through that time is my mindset, not necessarily my skill set, because I’m going to have to develop, I’m going to have to still show value and I’m not going to be able to do the same thing that I’m doing. So having that mindset, and by that I mean sort of having the attitude and the willingness to learn, to be obsessed, to believe in something sort of better and part of the greater good. I remember there was that. There was that story of Obama visiting NASA many years ago and he stopped by a janitor and he asked the janitor, so what is it that you do at NASA? And he said, the janitor replied, well, sir, I help send people up to the moon, right?

And everyone has a sort of a part to play in the bigger picture. So understanding that bigger picture and having that sort of attitude and mindset. I remember a very long time ago, in sort of the early days of my career, one of the interviews I was taken for and did eventually get the job, I was taken to lunch, I was taken into sort of a. drinks bar in a hotel because the interviewer wanted to really know me as a person, right? I was asked to buy a sandwich or whatever I did on that day. But it was to get to know me, not just me on a paper in terms of skill set. And I’ve always taken that learning for anyone I meet or anyone I work with, collaborate with or hire as well. And I think that’s really important, having that attitude, having that mindset.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And what do you do with your existing team in, you know, we’ve agreed, a very fast changing world. How do you keep them upskilled? How do you keep building on that skill set for them?

Abs Hassanali:
You should probably do two things in every job or career. Learn and earn. And you know this, right? If you’re. If you’re not doing one, probably question yourself. If you’re not doing both, then definitely do so. So I think that’s important and I think a lot of people have to take ownership of their own careers. The path will always be set for you. But I’ve always been taught you’ve got to earn it right. No one’s going to care about your career as much as you do. So always look out for. Don’t just look out for the next promotion or the next level up, but take on the task no one else wants to take or raise your hands to things that are really a pain point. Build like systems and frameworks that help you and help your function elevate itself as well. So I think that learning a mentality is very important to upskill any team.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Now that we’ve looked at, I think we’ve done quite a good deep dive of what’s happening in front of you and what’s happening at Basware. I love hearing from my guests of what they’re keeping an eye on the horizon. What is happening on the horizon that either gets you excited or has you worried?

Abs Hassanali:
We spoke a bit about AI, Debbie. I think that’s really exciting. There’s a lot happening. We didn’t know what ChatGPT was two years ago, maybe three years ago and now it’s embedded as part of our daily lives. So I think just how things are evolving, how we’re going back to old school marketing, old school PR, because like you said, there’s always these cycles of tech and there’s a resurgence of email marketing now because people thought email marketing was dead for a certain period of time, so they went through all this sort of fancy retargeting digital ads, now everyone’s now trying to sort of watch TV for a good commercial instead of going online because of the way the world is moving. So I think there’s always those cyclical areas where things sort of have peaks and troughs.

But yeah, no, AI is a real sort of, I think, influencer for anyone in tech. I think businesses are starting to really embrace it, putting sort of ethics, putting guidelines and putting processes where people can thrive in those environments. So that I’m really passionate about. And I can’t not give a mention to storytelling and the visual, creative storytelling as well. So those two things really sort of excite me.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think interestingly about the storytelling, if we go back to what you said at the start of our discussion, you know, tech hasn’t always been good at storytelling and our execs don’t always think in that way. So I think roles like yours, getting people back in touch with telling the story, not the features, not just the specifications, but telling those stories and bringing that human voice you’ve been talking about brings it to life for customers or users, but I think also for the people in the organization.

Abs Hassanali:
You’re right. It’s a journey. Right. And sometimes you don’t build trust overnight. But any good communication needs to do three things in that order, which is help people understand and once they understand, help them believe, and once they believe, make them act. Now, any good marketing should do that. But until people don’t understand you or believe you, they’re not going to sort of act on your behalf or purchase from you. And I think that’s. That’s really important and that’s what we shouldn’t forget in whether you use a. Whether whatever your marketing strategy is.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah. However great your AI is, again, if you lose track of the basic principles, you’re not going to get anywhere because the tool can’t fix the product. You’ve got to be able to use it. All right, well, then, you know, we began with you as a human. I love finishing with our guests as human – Abs, tell me what’s happening. What are you reading or listening to or watching that I should keep an eye on.

Abs Hassanali:
Probably watching a lot of cooking videos that are not as valuable and maybe you don’t need to know too much about them. So that’s one, I’m sort of trying to get sort of more hands on there. I like to think I’m doing a good job. So we’ll leave evaluation of that based on my own benchmark. But a really sort of good book that I recently read and also adapted into a movie is called Unbroken. I’d recommend that, Debbie, for you and also the viewers as well. It’s the story of someone called Louis Zamperini. He was an American Italian during World War II, so in the 30s in America, and he actually broke the record in the Olympics in the 30s. But that’s where his story starts and real story, of course. And then he fought as an air fighter for the U.S. army. Plane was shot down during the war. He survived with a couple of his friends at sea for over 40 days with limited food and drink. However, one would survive at 40 days at sea, captured by the Japanese army, held and tortured for over two years until the war ended by the Japanese army. And then his sort of story comes full circle in the sense that he eventually then flew the Olympic torch a number of years ago and actually wrote a letter to forgive his captors. So there’s a really endearing story there about resilience, persistence, lived until the age of 97. And one thing that one quote I always remember from that book is a moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Wow. Definitely put that on my list. Well, listen, Abs, thanks so much for joining me on this episode of XTech.

Abs Hassanali:
I really enjoyed that. Thank you.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And thank you to all of you for joining us on this episode of XTech. If you’d like to appear as a guest on the show, don’t waste a minute. Email us now at [email protected]. I’d like to thank our whole team of tech experts at Fox Agency for making this podcast possible. I’m Debbie Foerster and you’ve been listening to XTech.

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