Show Notes:
Spenser Meeks is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Apex Presentations, where he’s helped more than 1000 clean energy leaders get everything they can out of their speaking engagements.
Going to be at RE+ on September 8th? He’s moderating a panel on storytelling. Pack the seats.
If you like today’s episode, DM him on LinkedIn.
Expect to learn:
* Why storytelling (not statistics) moves audiences, especially in B2B.
* How technical founders and engineers can break the “curse of knowledge” and make their ideas emotionally engaging to a wide audience.
* Why we should stay optimistic post Inflation Reduction Act.
You can listen to this episode here, or on:
* YouTube
* Spotify
Transcript:
Aaron Nichols:Hello everyone and welcome back to this week in solar. I'm your host Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And before we get to today's guests, I wanted to say that today's episode is brought to you by solar in a really interesting way.I'm actually on a road trip and I'm recording this from the back of my truck. And none of this would be possible without solar energy.I have a 200 watt solar panel sitting out in the field that's powering a battery bank that is powering a starlink.And because of that, I'm able to work on the road. So it really is. And let me lead in a little bit with today's guest.My friend, Spencer Meeks, who I'm very excited to have as one of the first people I'm interviewing on this week in solar, has trained more than 1,000 clean energy speakers.And we have similar opinions and we've commiserated together a lot on how we think that the industry leans way too hard on technical information and not hard enough on storytelling.And I'll let you tell him more or I'll let him tell you more about himself as we go on, but I guess the first question I want to ask you Spencer is the reason that we decided to do this series is because we're obviously going to be moving forward in a post-inflation reduction act world.And as someone who has worked with more than a thousand leaders in this space, What do you think clean energy needs as we move forward?
Spenser Meeks:Well, first off, thanks for having me. I'm really excited for the conversation in general today. But I think that there's a lot of room for optimism still.What the clean energy industry needs to realize more than anything else is that we were growing and thriving before the IRA was a thing.Now, that doesn't mean that it's not a bad thing the significant portions of it are under attack and getting repealed or otherwise being impacted.But what does buoy me here is that this industry is populated largely by grizzled veterans that have been up and down the solar coaster a couple of times.And this might be the first time for some people to run into this amount of antagonism from the federal level.But it is not unprecedented. Right? Yeah. So there there are reasons to be optimistic and there are reasons to double down and really boo yourself by the fact that there are a large number of people that are in a similar context as you are and there's every reason to continue to push into fight and to grow this industry because it is a necessity not a nice to have right there's economics driving this more than anything else, it's not just an environmental argument that's to be had.And that's really been shown through the fact that some of these portions, these repeals have been softened significantly compared to what they originally proposed to be.I know that that's, you know, maybe a little bit too much cup half full for some people to say that, but it can always be worse.And there are provisions that are still going to be able to support this industry and ways to fight back in a more meaningful way.So when it comes to application, just leaning off of my own subject matter expertise, I think messaging has a lot to do with how we recover from this and continue to grow the impact and influence of this industry.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah, man, it's really, it's been so amazing to me since I joined the solar industry just a little under two years ago, seriously, just how many veterans I've met that are basically like, they've been in it for more than 10 years, they're all best friends, their godparents to each other's children and I think that's kind of that closeness forged in the fires of war.
Spenser Meeks:Yes, that is very much it. What is it? A trauma bonding, right? Yeah, definitely. So it doesn't mean that what we're going through right now isn't terrible. It doesn't mean that it's not, it's completely unjustified.It's going to impact consumers, you know, expenses in a very concrete way on in the very individualistic way, especially in red counties and states, more than anywhere else.It's on, I think, a lot of the policy leaders to really continue to highlight those realities, so that when we're electing officials on where we're advocating for what our needs are as a community, federally, state-wise, locally, that we stay closely tied to, like, what are those impacts, you know, on an individual level.Sometimes, and this is maybe pralling into a later portion of the conversation here, but oftentimes, what I think trips us off more than anything else is focusing on being right and focusing on high level stats that show an aggregate how everything thing is correct and that we need to do what our recommendations are.Frequently, studies have shown that the most important impactful thing that you can do when talking about an initiative that you care about is find a case study, a specific instance where something went particularly well, perhaps in an unexpected way, and making it human scale.What happens to an individual? What happened to a single family? What happened to a single company? How many jobs were affected, how many families were affected, and what do that mean for them?Because of course we all experience our lives as individuals. So it's not surprising to find that stories about individuals are a lot easier to put ourselves into that context and relate to them.
Aaron Nichols:Absolutely, and that's something that a lot of nonprofits will talk about as well. They'll show that they get higher donations if they show one suffering child rather than five.It's really interesting how as humans we want to help, we want to help solve a small problem. And as soon as the problem starts to feel bigger and bigger and bigger, we either start to feel helpless or we spin off a conspiracy on why it is the way it is.Sure. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Well, yeah, I'm particularly interested in how a lot of people who are into clean energy are also very into data and logic and science, which makes a lot of sense, but you can't fight emotion in with data.It just doesn't seem to be the way things work, but you do see a lot of discourse online, on social media, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, where people who are into clean energy are fighting people who say, windmills cause cancer by saying, well, here's a graph that shows that that's not true.And obviously that never works. So I'm interested in, with you as a messaging expert, and someone who's worked to help people who are technically minded, refine their messaging, ground them in emotion, do all of those things, what do we need to do as companies, as leaders, as we're moving forward?
Spenser Meeks:Well, I want to come back to something, you just said that it was kind of interesting with like, hey, you know, windmills cause cancer, here's a graph.I want to say I agree it is ineffective with that individual who says windmills cause cancer to show them a graph.Could be that like your audience really isn't trying to convince that individual as much as maybe the other people that are watching or reading that discourse that it can help to kind of dismiss that approach as kind of inane.Now that has a place and I'm not going to be here to give you a 401 on how to deal with internet trolls.The best way to deal with internet trolls is typically like just don't feed trolls and they typically die. Ignore them or block them or otherwise just say like okay, that's kind of interesting.Here's a graph to interact, then like make your point and then bail because the reason that they're there is primarily to try your energy as much as possible and to distract from the initiatives that you're trying to highlight the import of.So I just wanted to make that quick aside before we came back to the information overload, perhaps, that we tend to use in the industry.
And I guess to spin off on that a little bit before I let you go again, I think there is.There is obviously benefit to taking the high road and sometimes just letting someone show you how crazy they are and then you just being calm and rational by comparison can also be very powerful.So I do want to make sure that I-
Aaron Nichols:100 percent.
Spenser Meeks:Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. As soon as you start frothing at the mouth and getting agitated and angry, they've already won.Right. So the best thing that we can do is keep our heads as best as we can and to not engage when we're getting a little too activated in that way.
Aaron Nichols:Absolutely. Yeah, the technical piece is really fascinating, right? Cause I think a lot of people are drawn towards using facts and figures and data to make their points in this industry.And part because the history of how this industry has grown. This, you know, credit where credit’s due. Most of the companies existed, existed in the past like 23 years on the backs of very technical founders.These are typically engineer-minded individuals that have a pension for tech to either make panels more efficient or more effective or whatever, like moving the needle incrementally is really important.We spend a lot of money on R&D and it's critical to develop technologies that do what they say they do.We can't build an industry on the back of something that doesn't work. That said, you have to tell a story that emotionally engages people to get them to buy in.Right. And that works if you're playing the numbers game of consumer sales because, hey, you have tens of thousands of customers.The renewable energy industry is primarily a B2B context where we're trying to sell to utilities and like, or maybe if you're a manufacturer to install to installers, who are then selling to residential homeowners.We're talking about Rezzy Solar, for instance. So most of my experience is in the B2B context, like how do we get people to care and how do we get them to participate, especially in the B2B context where the tendency is to lean again on heavy facts because we expect that people are making their decisions based on like what's the ROI, what's the return on investment, or how does this actually move the needle for us in a meaningful way?It even more tends to pull people towards this kind of dry, data-driven decision-making and conversation.
Spenser Meeks:15 different scientific disciplines, all unanimously agree that storytelling is the single most important and impactful tool that you can use to increase people's memory and retention and motivate them to act in accordance with your recommendations.
Aaron Nichols:Right, and I know you and I have talked a lot about storytelling and grounding things in emotion before, and I think there's a lot of people who, when I talk about how powerful stories are, kind of roll their eyes and say, yeah, yeah, whatever.And I'm sure you've gotten the same kind of thing, especially technical people. But how do you put together a compelling emotional story?
Spenser Meeks:Sure. So where do we start with these kind of things? The introduction is super important. Grounding and extreme relevance for your audience is critical.So the first thing that I would share with anybody considering doing this is make sure if you're talking in a presentation as a panelist or other discussion yourself to make sure that you start with the good stuff.Yeah. Don't start with "Hi, I'm Spenser Meeks, I'm the founder and principal consultant at Apex Presentations where I've worked with over a thousand of you," but like making it all about you and yours and like all of this stuff that has—like, people won't typically are drawn towards wanting to do credibility building at the very beginning so the people will then be like, okay, this person sounds serious, they sound well informed, I should listen to them.That doesn't really happen. So the right way to do that is by starting out with what's relevant to them, what the benefit is to the audience that you're speaking to and what's at stake if they don't act.Right. So little poke the bear at the end. So like most people that don't do this, guess what—they're exposed to extreme risk due to Attorneys General suing them for poor consumer support practices, or what have you.Right, like what's the like, oh damn, like I didn't realize that that was a potential issue. That causes them to lean forward.Right. Then you can go, hi, my name's Spencer Meeks. I am an authority to speak on this subject. I'm so excited to share this message with you today.Yeah. So that's—I like to start with that piece because I'm happy to talk to you about how to build emotional engagement but people aren't willing to go on that journey with you unless you can show them in the first minute and a half that what you're sharing is relevant and pertains to their situation.And sometimes in like a sales conversation or that kind of environment, what can be helpful is literally ask them, like tell me what's going on.It seems like we're having this conversation because of X—is that true? Like do a little bit more discovery there before you launch into what's important—what you think is important to them.
Aaron Nichols:And you have kind of an interesting superhero origin story that propelled you along that path and made you want to kind of make technical people sound more interesting and more engaging.If you'd like to, if you'd be willing to share a little bit about that, about the presentation of the starfish versus the poison gas.
Spenser Meeks:Yeah, so thanks a lot. For those that aren't familiar with me, I am actually a recovering engineer, right? So I used to do process and quality engineering work for solar panel manufacturing.I wouldn't be talking about storytelling if it wasn't extremely pragmatically focused. Like I talk about this stuff because it has impact.The way that this clicked in my mind and when I'm talking to people about this to help them understand like why does this actually work or why should we actually care about this is—I had an experience early on in my academic career where I went to a conference and I'm sure many of you have had a similar experience here where there were two different speakers.One of them was talking on the population dynamics of starfish—just where do starfish like to live in the Puget Sound, which, if you're not familiar, is off the west coast of Washington here.This is like rocks, cobbled sand, where they like to live and eat, et cetera.The next one was on a safe, environmentally friendly way of degrading and getting rid of VX nerve toxin, which is the most powerful chemical weapon known to man.For those of you that were around in the 90s, if you've seen the movie The Rock with Sean Connery, this is the chemical weapon that they had stockpiled on Alcatraz that they were threatening to kill the entire population of the San Francisco with.It is heinous stuff and it's real. If you get a droplet on the tip of your finger, you will die within minutes.And of course, like any weapon, the US has enough stockpiled to kill the entire population of the planet a few times over.They're leaking in barrels from the Cold War. It's not a great scene.Anyway, so that's a context, right? Speaker A, Speaker B: starfish and chemical weapons that will murder you in a second.So Speaker A gets up and she shares beautiful underwater photography, talks about a couple experiences that she had doing these dives, pictures of starfish traversing the rocks, the cobbles, the sand, reiterates her key points, shows a scanning electron microscope image of these latching mechanisms they use to anchor themselves to rocks, ends with a smile on her face and a song in her heart.Second person gets up. He shares a couple chemical formula and then reads bullet point status for 10 minutes. And when he's done speaking, he asks for questions.It's dead silent. Not because everybody completely understood what was happening and going on and everything was perfectly clear. It's because they all checked out, right?When I was walking out of that room, thinking about starfish, I knew that something was wrong. And it's fundamentally—facts do not speak for themselves.
And we've all had the experience, right, of going to a conference session that sounds great on paper. And then about five to ten minutes in, you start looking at your phone, maybe you're trying to figure out if you could download a slide deck instead of sitting for the entire session.You realize you need to prep for the next conversation you're about to have. You want to figure out where the session is that you're going to next.You start to check out. And once that happens, it's really hard to get back involved again.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah. Yeah, and I think that there's—obviously not universally across the clean energy industry—but in the public persona, there's a lot of talks about solar and gas that are just bullet points, and we're getting better at it.I think we've gotten a lot better in the last couple of years, but I think we have a long way to go getting better at storytelling.And some of the places that I really like to look at, as an example, are some companies in residential solar. Not everyone's great at it, but some are pretty good.And the off-grid solar market, which—holy god—are they great at just showing how awesome their products are and what the impact is.It kind of just goes up from there. And it's interesting how the people who are more beholden to B2C—like you have off-grid completely beholden to B2C, residential, a lot of them do commercial as well, so they're half-half—and then further up you go up the chain, it seems to me like the worse they are at talking to the public.And I don't know if that's because of where I am in the industry, but we've had some really incredible things happen when we've leaned on our best stories—like leaning on the commercial system that we installed on five Habitat for Humanity homes at once, or the system that we built that's off-grid that powers a greenhouse that grows organic produce in a food desert really close to the infamous Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia.When we've leaned on those things, we've gotten either tons of local coverage—or in the case of the greenhouse, we got a lot of local coverage that got us a relationship with an NPR reporter that then led to a story about people rushing to install solar panels before Trump became president, where the president of our company got a picture and we got a backlink and it got picked up all over the country.And so it's just, it's so important to think about why people should listen to things. And it's often not the reason why you like things.
Spenser Meeks:Yes.
Aaron Nichols:It's not the reason why you think things are cool. The more you can lean on emotion and the less on logic, it seems to me like the more success you'll have.And you actually made me think of this phrase that I've been saying a lot, which is: if you want to be heard, be worth listening to.
Spenser Meeks:Yes. And that—everyone should have that tattooed to the inside of their eyelids that are trying to do this kind of thing.Right. It has to pertain to them, because we live in an environment now that is extraordinarily noisy. If you spend any time on social media—If you are online, it's just—everything is trying to grab your attention. And so we have really strong filters now, all of us, to try and make sure that we're going to preserve what we actually spend our energy and our time on.And so there is a substantial, in a lot of cases, BS filter that you need to surpass in order to reach people.And this is why—especially in the advent of AI here—that it's quality, not quantity, that is going to win the day, especially in a B2B context.So when you're working in a B2C context, that storytelling is monumental. It’s the whole thing.The reason it gets so frequently missed also in B2B context or you're talking about the people that are even more technically minded—frequently struggling with it, right?That happens in part because it is a necessary part of the conversation to get to the technical details. To the ROI, to all of this.But the argument—the hill that I'm going to die on for the rest of my life—really is: don't skip the first step.Do a quality intro. Make sure that people have the context and care—what the core conflict is—before you get to bring up your product, your service, the nuts and bolts of how these things work, which you can then spend a lot of time on because you're probably talking to an executive, you're probably talking to an engineer.We do need to validate the emotional buy-in that we're creating on the front side. It's just that you have to do that emotional buy-in piece first.And emotional buy-in is, I would argue, probably largely what you're talking about there.The thing that most people—sounds like—is that it actually provides a significant service.It's not the exact kilowatt-hours of the system that's being installed. It's not the nuances of how the inverter interconnects with all the other bits and pieces of technology that are involved.
Aaron Nichols:Well, like that piece is called the curse of knowledge, right? The things that us as subject matter experts get excited about probably are not going to be the things that get other people excited.It’s our area of comfort. And so in times of stress—like if you're giving a presentation or you're part of an interview—to fall back on what you know as an authority can feel more comfortable.It's just not as effective.A little bit of prepping, a little bit of awareness to know, like, what are the stories that demonstrate this? What’s the emotional impact and individualized sizing of this that will get people engaged and involved?
Spenser Meeks:Yeah.
Aaron Nichols:Heard you say that to someone who doesn't understand what gigawatts are, when you say five gigawatts, you might as well say six billion widgets or, you know, five hundred million nonsense words—floor muggins.
Spenser Meeks:Yeah, exactly. Doesn't matter. Yep.And then this is something you talked about earlier that I think is really good to keep in mind—is people's intuitive connection to the scale of things is really important to keep track of.And this is why it's important also to talk about individuals instead of like tens of thousands of people.Our ability to actually hold in our mind a number of people or a number of something taps out at about like 15—15 max.Which is why a lot of languages evolved to have, like: one, two, three, many.
Aaron Nichols:Right?
Spenser Meeks:There’s just more than that—it’s just like: a lot.Right. And a quick way of this is trying to think about the difference between a million and a billion.It doesn't feel like that big of a difference, right? A million seconds is about three days.Can you guess how long a billion seconds is?
Aaron Nichols:A lot of years.
Spenser Meeks:32 years.
Aaron Nichols:Right.
Spenser Meeks:Yeah. Okay, these differences in scale are really hard to internalize.They're really hard to internalize even if you're a person that's already working in the industry.The difference between a hundred megawatt project and a 2.5 gigawatt project is insane.But only if you can do something like visualize it—like actually show a picture of what a few hundred panels looks like versus like many thousands of panels covering an entire hillside.Right. So it's a call toward: how much more concrete, how much more clear can we make this level of impact, this level of scale to people and make it relevant to them—keeping a really strong eye towards who your audience is, what their level of experience and exposure is—will always mean that your messaging will land tighter.And if you don't know who your audience is—ask them. Like when you're starting a conversation with someone:"Hey, how’s it going? What's your background? What's your level of experience with this? Do you want me to air about this thing that I'm about to rant to you about?"
Aaron Nichols:Really? So this is a classic in sales:“So what got you to schedule the call with us today?”
Spenser Meeks:Yeah.
Aaron Nichols:Right. And then shut the front door—and listen.Well, man, I could talk to you for hours and I have. You've helped me so much. But we're running short on time here.And so when I was thinking about putting this short little interview series together, post–Inflation Reduction Act, I thought that the last question I want to end with is going to take a little bit of explaining.But a couple weeks ago I got to give a speech at my grandma's 80th birthday party—which, thanks to the things that you taught me for my clean energy speech, I absolutely nailed.And just like everything you've taught me—like I made a LinkedIn post about how the stuff you taught me helped me teach a friend in England how to give a better best man speech.And like, you've made such an impact in my life. And so I'm very grateful for that.But I was thinking about it afterwards—my grandma just turning 80 was born into a world where we didn’t have renewable energy.We didn't have clean energy. That didn’t even exist. Oil companies were still putting lead in gasoline when she was born. It was a completely different world.The first solar cell—the first PV cell—was created in 1954.So this is just a fun, moonshot question. But the reason I wanted to ask it is to kind of ground the scale of thinking about how far clean energy has come in my grandma's lifetime.And just imagining where we'll be in 80 years compared to that.Because I think the next three years under this administration are going to be an inconvenience.Clean energy obviously isn’t going to go anywhere. It’s going to be annoying, but we’re going to get through it.But if you’re just spitballing for fun—in whatever sci-fi context you want to do, don’t worry, we’ll both be dead, no one’s going to hold us to this prediction—Where is clean energy in 80 years?
Spenser Meeks:Oh, in 80 years? I mean—more than the dominant supply and capacity resource, absolutely.Like I am very firmly long on climate technology and solar—it’s already happening.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah.
Spenser Meeks:To your point—I mean, right now you can’t get a new natural gas turbine in five years.Like, we’re still gonna be building solar at breakneck paces, it’s just gonna be more expensive than it needs to be.So, like, where is energy in 80 years?I think it’s geothermal, solar, and wind, and hydro.I think that the days will be long gone of wanting to be dependent on the eccentricities of the international oil and gas markets.We’ll move towards transportation being completely de-hydrocarbonized.I’m hopeful that when I’m, you know, my parents’ age, that I’ll just be bopping around in an EV that’s auto-driving itself from point A to point B.I’m not going to have to worry about air pollution concerns at all.
Aaron Nichols:Totally.
Spenser Meeks:Yeah. I mean—yeah. And self-driving cars.I think we’re going to be in a great spot, man.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah.
Spenser Meeks:Yeah. No—politics is still going to be, you know, a factor for sure—making sure that we’re getting the kind of minerals that we need and where things are being produced and the jobs that are there to support all of that industry? Fantastic.But I will die happy if I know that we just decarbonized our energy system.I want people to not have to think about this stuff at all—to not have to worry about keeping their lights on or cooling their homes or any of that—because it shouldn’t ultimately lead to our air being polluted and our water being poisoned, right?
Aaron Nichols:Yeah. Like, that’s just a fundamental that should be a given that is not today.So people will be in a great spot.It just means that there’s going to be a lot of work from plenty of point.And there’s nothing new.Well, you and I got 40 years of work left in us. So let’s make it happen. It’ll be good.Thank you so much for doing this today.It’s been a pleasure. I’m happy to call you a friend and I’m always just excited to talk to you.
Spenser Meeks:Yeah, it’s a pleasure. And thanks for inviting me on.
