What Celeste Lustosa Sells Before the Features Matter

0:00 · Building a B2B agency for heavy industry

Jordan Lally:0:24
Welcome back to the High Ticket AI Systems Podcast. Everyone, please welcome one and only Mrs. Celeste Lustaso. Celeste, welcome to the show. How are you doing today, my friend?

Celeste:0:35
Thank you. I'm doing really well. How are you going?

Jordan Lally:0:38
Fantastic, fantastic. really happy to have you. It's honestly our pleasure. please, I I I would love if I did mispronounce your name. What is the full name for the audience?

Celeste:0:50
good, Celeste Lustosa.

Jordan Lally:0:52
Amazing. Great name. For the context for everyone listening, either at the gym, while they're driving or just at home, can you give us some context as to what the company does and who you guys serve best?

Celeste:1:05
Yes, so not very original, but I founded Lustosa Marketing. As you can see, I was very inspired creating the name. and Lostosa Marketing has been operating for about seven years. We've evolved since the the start of it and really migrated to a B2B advisory agency where we help like the heavy industry get their head around branding, messaging.

And really stay away from what used to be marketing for B2B back in the day, just features of machines and and you know, what what do you do to something that is more humanized. So we help with messaging, branding, collateral websites, things like that.

Jordan Lally:1:57
It's very interesting because you work in a very I mean, maybe the maybe my world is not too well versed in really B2B super high ticket, kinda longer sales cycles. like that world. Did you choose that world or did that world choose you?

Celeste:2:16
I think in the beginning I didn't choose it, but I started getting fascinated by some of the findings that I had by working with some of them when I was assigned by a different agency to do comms strategy. So my background, I'm a journalist, my background is in social communications, and I was assigned to kind of come and do some comms plans for a different advisory firm.

And they were business who are very B2B, like and like mining, oil and gas, defense, government. So really you know, B2B industrial manufacturing. And I started discovering more and more how they just didn't focus on branding, they didn't understand branding, they did think for a minute that marketing's job was just lead generation. and What I could see is that their sales team was were heavily invested in features. You know, this machine does this in this many seconds, and that's why you need to hire us. And then just coming in and saying, look, there's a better way, you know. even though we keep saying B2B, these are people on the other end as well, just like B2C. So we think B2B and you think of a building, right? You know, business to business, you think brick and mortar, you think like a corporation, there's no face to it. There's no but at the other end of that email, that sales speech or that meeting is another human being who behaves like a human being. So I've got a few, you know, eye rolls and like here comes marketing, just make the brochures pretty and go your way. but then I started showing them, okay, let's try this.

Let's try this messaging, let's change that with amazing results. Then I was like, I think I'm into something here. And I think that marketing has been coming to these guys. Like they come in and they say, Do this brochure. And they're just getting on with the briefing without really saying, Hey, have you considered this? And it just grew from there. you know, one person tell the other, and you get a case study, a success story, and then obviously.

I'm pretty good at marketing. I started marketing it in a way that kept attracting new clients in that that space. And it's been really proven to work. God figured. Like we have humans that we have to deal with.

3:35 · Humanizing B2B sales messages beyond feature lists

Jordan Lally:4:48
I love what you said about the person behind the email. Like when you think about B2B, you think brick and mortar or fancy larger corporations. But to take it one step further, it's a person making that decision to either respond to your email, to say yes to your sales pitch, to say yes to your marketing opinion or your marketing advice. One thing that I I've I've owned my own agency for the last six years and every year I feel like I learn more and more. The podcast I learn every day. But as a consumer, when I'm watching my favorite sports team, the Chicago Cubs baseball, right? I view marketing entirely differently. Or entirely different. The messages that that that work for me are the ones that kind of make me laugh or they they they they make it nothing about the product.

Nothing about the product, but it's like they found a way to resonate with the audience. And it's because I was able to laugh, because it created a visceral feeling for me. I'm like, I don't know what the hell you're selling, dude, but like I'll listen to you. Because you maybe like you maybe feel some type of way.

And

Celeste:5:55
Yes.

Jordan Lally:5:56
yes, bit B larger corporations tend to use more logic in the decision-making process, but they're humans.

More than anything,

Celeste:6:07
Yes.

Jordan Lally:6:07
they're they're humans and they will absolutely have emotions. So when we think about that in our marketing message, I feel like you do a pretty good job at trying to humanize the marketing approach and not just rely on Chat GPT or Claude to make a very dry marketing message. And I will I would love to hear your thoughts on.

6:27 · Using AI as a colleague instead of an employee

Celeste:6:27
Absolutely. And I think, you know, I love AI. I use it at my agency every day. I am not in a place where I say AI is a bad thing for business. But I think what where lots of people are getting it wrong is that they're using AI as an employee that they're just gonna delegate something to and forget it, turn their back and consider it's done. And not as a work colleague where You have conversations and it helps you through your line of thinking, helps you through your strategy, what you bring to the table. So my clients hire me for my IP. What AI brings to the table to me is that it accelerates my thinking because it helps me analyze data quicker. It helps me analyze, you know, summarize things. It helps me go through a a large amount of data and research there's available out there quicker and with more you know precision but i think you know it still has to come from me it still has to i still have to tap into being a human and like you said tapping back into feelings of how do we feel when we do x y and z and just if i may just one of the things that broke my first B2B industrial client was when when we talk about branding with that world there's that eye row right and there's that lack of understanding what branding actually stands for and what it what it does for a business and they think of the logos and they think of the colors and they say we've already got our logo we've already got our colors and our phones and I went back to them and I say you know you're holding an iPhone You don't mind if I tell brand names, do you, on on the podcast, just as as the case that and I

Jordan Lally:8:26
Go for it. Go for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

8:28 · The iPhone lesson on branding for data leaders

Celeste:8:28
said you have an iPhone. Before you chose to to buy this iPhone, did you do some research into features between an iPhone and a Samsung and what other the Google phone to actually understand what features suit you better? what kind of technology they had, which one was better, which one was quicker. Because I I have a feeling, and I'm no IT expert, that if we actually went through that process, which is the process you're considering your clients are going through, we wouldn't see as many iPhones out there as we do now. Because we do know that there's technology that is compatible or better.

Than iPhone technology. You chose the brand. You chose an iPhone because an iPhone meant that you belong to a group and you felt that group was right for you. So if you tell me that you chose this iPhone because you went through its features and you made a rational decision that the technology of that iPhone was superior than the technology of the Samsung.

I'll pack my laptop and I'll do as I'm told.

And that was that. And that's when I started doing comms plans for for these people. Because it's like you are a rational being, like you claim your clients are, yet you paid a lot for a technology that you didn't worry about the features or the tech or the you know an iPhone doesn't give us a brochure with the the functionalities because it knows. that it might not win the sale all the time. If they put it next to you know sensor and technology, the galaxies. So they rely on brand and we buy into it. I'm an iPhone person, like I'm not I'm not criticizing. We buy into it. So you know I think what AI brings is speed. I love AI automations. I think people should really Business owners should really stop focusing so much on those little write me this caption rubbish. You know, write twelve captions for September for my LinkedIn and sound like a bot on LinkedIn and worry more about the automations, the behind the scenes of the business that it can improve for me. You know, the repetitive tasks that don't really rely on my IP that much. They're the day-to-day stuff.

Yeah, sorry if I digress. But I thought that that analogy was really important. And I think we forget to think like that. And you know, the guy was very like, I am a data guy, I am a numbers guy. I don't care about brinding and emotion. This this is rubbish. This is B2B. And he was like, Yet here you are with an iPhone. I bet you bought your wife a beautiful Louis Vuitton that cost f ten times more than a a regular bag.

That is built in the same manufacturer.

Jordan Lally:11:56
I

Celeste:11:56
But brand twin doesn't matter.

Jordan Lally:12:00
You are absolutely correct. So so true. I'm smiling ear to ear because you you make such a great point. You make such such a great point that it it really is like that human feel, that human connection element to something. Whether that's Mac and Apple, whether that is Louis Vuitton or whatever designer clothes brand or a car that you might be into. Like we associate either status or just connection. We'll keep it simple. It's just connection with that. So when you think about marketing for these really B2B companies, how do you take those same principles and apply it to their world?

12:39 · Tailoring B2B messaging across CEOs and CFOs

Celeste:12:39
Yeah, so there's a a level of complexity with the world compared to the B2B, which is we actually still dealing with humans, but the difference is that we're dealing with multiple humans in one transaction, right? So when we do marketing

Jordan Lally:12:55
Mm.

Celeste:12:56
for B2C, and it's a simple transaction, you know, I put an ad for this t-shirt, you like the t-shirt, you press buy and it's twenty bucks. you don't have to overthink it. You don't have to consult with multiple people, right? You would think that with the online shopping, if you see a t shirt or you know, your partner sees a t shirt that costs twenty, thirty, fifty bucks, they'll just make a purchase. They won't need to go through like a a level like go consult with two, three people. This is my decision. Should I really buy this? The purchase happened. It's a transaction.

With the B2B world, we're obviously dealing with less volume and more people within the same transaction. So the comms needs to address the what that human that sits on the CEO seat needs and wants. The person that sits on the CFO seat needs and wants.

The general manager, the sales guy, the you know, so you're dealing with multiple people, or you hardly ever for a contract, you know, my clients, our clients, they're not selling $20 t-shirts. They're selling like big numbers for big other organizations. So their pitch

Jordan Lally:14:22
Two hundred thousand.

Celeste:14:26
is not gonna sit on one desk, right? so it is important to, and the challenge here, and it's important that.

The messaging needs to be fragmented for the different people there are within that transaction. So again, still human beings. A CEO is a human being. And shockingly so, a CFO is a human being too. Even though they're driven by the numbers, there's something that they want out of that transaction. There's some there are needs and wants in every human interaction.

You know, and they will be different. So I think it's just tapping into that. And I think that's when you know very few people have the the skill to write a prompt that's going to deliver that at the level that we need on that in that world. You know, and again, it's not one prompt.

It's like conversations with your good old Claude employee number one. it's multiple, it's like people start treating that as projects, not the quick fix. Help me write a sales pitch, you know, for this company. It's not going to work. Help me write the email for the sales director, then help me write a pitch that addresses.

What they need to show their CEO, what are the questions their CEO is gonna ask them when they say, Let's choose this contractor versus that one, and and then tap into that. So it's it's still, but I think that's when people thought it's easier to just treat it as a company. Because then we can be lazy about it. It's one company here.

Jordan Lally:16:23
Exactly.

Celeste:16:25
Here's your pitch.

And not break down into the layers of all the humans within that company that are gonna be actually dealing with you. And I think that's when we like to take the time. Like I I use it in my my lots of my pitches to these people is that impressions don't impress me much. You know, marketing agencies are showing up with those amazing big numbers. We our impressions are Two million people. It means absolutely nothing to me.

Who are the people that we need to speak to, tapping to connect with, trigger a reaction? And I'm in a world where my clients are happy with five impressions if they are the five people they need to speak to. So I don't know if it's it makes my job easier or harder.

Jordan Lally:17:22
On that note of having to have congruency in your messaging across different personality types, whether that's the CFO, CEO, founder, C O O, CMO, I'll be really transparent with you. I am not a big fan of enterprise sales because of that, right there. Maybe my upbringing, maybe like my high energy, like I don't want to say I'm transactional, but I don't like 12-month sales cycles. I'll just I'll just say that.

Okay.

Celeste:17:52
Nobody does.

Jordan Lally:17:54
Right, right, right, right. That being said, though, I think the level of skill that it takes to sell to one individual and get that message congruency down versus having to get five different messages to try to articulate the pain of each title and the benefit to each title individually is like masteries of levels of skill.

If you can do that in high-ticket B2B, you can make buco bucks, as I like to say. You can make some pretty serious change. I think AI cannot do that for you. That takes years in the trenches. That takes a human brain like yourself to really think about what are their day-to-day challenges in this manufacturing company, in this example. What is the ultimate benefit for the CFO versus the CMO, right? Right? And I think.

Maybe you can speak more about this than I, but let's let's get lazy and let's just send the entire marketing message out versus let's take some actual time with this and and provide the best marketing material we can to actually land this client and obviously get them the result that they actually want, right? Like goods and services both both value here. I I feel like it's there's there's so much it's a disproportionate amount of like work versus reward when you take the extra time to actually do that. What do you feel like most companies get wrong about this? Like I think maybe logically we know that answer, but like what do you feel like other companies are just shlacking off?

19:39 · How mid-sized firms win 20 million dollar contracts

Celeste:19:39
You know, as business owners, and look, I'm a business owner too. I hate long cycles. We all want to wake up, have that one wonderful meeting, and say, Yep, I'll send you the invoice tomorrow. it's not a a bad thing, it's just a human thing. We love to win. But I think what we're dealing with here is understanding like the reward after that, right? So, I have clients that so when we do that work, when we go that extra mile, we're talking about life-changing business deals. You're not talking about change. So I think again, when you paint the scenario, like what would this client mean to your business? So obviously, I can't name names. Most of my clients are quite private about their business dealings, but We recently worked on with a client that that one deal meant twenty million dollars in the pot for them.

Jordan Lally:20:44
Yeah.

Celeste:20:45
So then you think about it and you're like, well, six months not that long, is it? Because it is

Jordan Lally:20:50
Ha ha ha.

Celeste:20:52
like like it is life changing. And and I am talking about a business who was a median sized business.

So we're teaching

Jordan Lally:21:03
A lot of tagline.

Celeste:21:04
the little guy, which is not that little, I get it, but for that world, to show up and have a valid chance against, you know, big corporations have been doing business with big corporations for forever. Because it's safe.

So what we're working with here is that median guy saying, actually, you could have a chance here. But that's gonna be some extra work. And that's gonna take time. Because we're gonna have to make your brand show up in a way that those guys are thinking, is this the next Louis Vuitton? If I give this back to my wife, maybe she's starting something here, and maybe she'll be happier.

So it's putting, it's almost like, you know, putting your brand next to these other ones that everybody goes to the Louis Vuitton because it's a safe bed. Give one of those to your wife, she'll be happy. You know there's no going wrong there. What if these guys up to something and these bags gonna become the most desirable thing in the market and my wife's gonna be the first one to have it?

That's the thinking we're building inside their other CEO's brain. That they feel that they're up to something. It's magical, it's calms. It's calms. It's beautiful.

Jordan Lally:22:35
No, that is not when you phrase it like that, I actually see how powerful this type of marketing can be. And it's not just a a quick transaction like you said, it's life changing. To sp to have to s essentially set inspiration into an entire organization. Are you familiar with account based marketing? Celeste, I feel like that's essentially what you're doing here.

Celeste:22:58
Yeah, I mean and it it's funny, right? Like I'm just going back to AI a little bit.

Jordan Lally:23:05
Go for it.

Celeste:23:07
AI's changed a lot between the distance, like it shortened the distance between a question and the data, right? But it didn't short the this the the distance between the question and the decision. The decisions are still human-based. They're still when I look at what I did twenty-five years ago, the channels were different. Like I don't I'm really gonna give away my age, but you know, we started no social media. You put an ad in the newspaper and you pray to the gods that people are seeing it and are gonna make a call, right? You just had no data, no, no guarantees, nothing. But you're still like that. How am I gonna make that other person feel? Still there, still there. And The way people are misusing AI, AI is amazing, but we're not really taking the time to understand it and use it the best way possible. And you know, it's actually giving a lot of space for people like me, who's like the old-fashioned way, how about we're just talking like we're just talking like a human and connect with someone and then trigger that reaction that ends up in a sale.

It's giving us a lot of space because the amount of agencies that are losing clients to people like me because they're chat GDP in the way through marketing. And what people are not really showing, they're showing here's how to you know do this faster. What they're not showing is here's how our numbers increased because we did that.

They're saying w I'm saving time, they're saying I'm doing more.

But not that many are saying because I did that, I got more sales out of it.

Jordan Lally:25:15
Sorry, were you gonna say something?

Celeste:25:18
No. I'm I'm interested in your thoughts on that.

'Cause I was reading a research, I think

Jordan Lally:25:21
I've never

25:22 · Why most AI adoption fails to move revenue numbers

Celeste:25:22
I'll just read it here. It's McKen McKinsey State of AI twenty twenty six.

Jordan Lally:25:27
Mackenzie.

Celeste:25:28
Yeah. And that research said that six percent of companies can point AI actually moving the numbers that matter. Only six percent.

But we're all adopting it. That's not a lot.

Jordan Lally:25:41
Not a lot.

Celeste:25:44
So six percent of the companies using AI can point AI is actually moving the numbers that matter to them.

Jordan Lally:25:51
I do think it comes down to speed. for me, in the way that I use AI is definitely idea to like implementation, like fantastic, like responsiveness

Celeste:26:01
Perfect.

Jordan Lally:26:03
to potential leads or even clients for certain situations. Like r being that speed is everything. People like responsiveness.

Celeste:26:12
Under percent.

Jordan Lally:26:14
I've never actually heard it explained the way that you just did. And I really want to tip my hat to you, because fuck yeah.

You said we can have idea to real reality with the help of AI, but we are still dealing with human with reality to like decision. And that is so, so freaking true. And I I don't really know how to say this, but like don't rely on AI to do your thinking for you in certain situations. And I'm not gonna lie, I I'm like, this AI thing is so much smarter than me. Let me ask it. I'm like, sometimes this thing is stupid as hell, dude. I'm like, You're dumb, AI. Like you're supposed to be smart, you're freaking stupid, you know? And like I ha I had to retrain myself to not rely so heavily on it and just trust my human brain, you know?

Celeste:27:06
something that connects to what you were saying about AI not being as smart as us and I think there's two things like if you're listening to these, you obviously are familiar with AI, I think your audience kind of uses it in some sort of level. How many like how

Jordan Lally:27:23
For sure.

Celeste:27:23
many of you actually never had a fight with AI and actually say, Are you dumb? This is not what I asked you to do.

Or I've showed you this, like we all kind of catch ourselves at at a point in our work with AI that we're just like, that's not what I asked. Are you dumb? and if you haven't done that, it's because you're not using enough of it. and we gotta

Jordan Lally:27:50
Yeah.

Celeste:27:51
remember, it's a machine, it doesn't have emotional intelligence, it cannot put itself in The audience's place, like we can. We lived human experiences. We live it. We feel it. We crave it. I know what it feels like to have a certain interaction when it comes to customer experience. I know what it feels like to sit at a table and get bad service. I know what it made me feel. when a waiter was rude to me or didn't take my order, took forever. Like, I know that feeling that you know, and that can dictate my strategy to help that restaurant. I'm saying we don't want people to feel that way because they're not coming back, which means less sale to you, which means, you know, that's what we bring to the table that, you know, we can talk about these machines all we want. They're not sitting at restaurants going to shopping centers or Signing $20 million deals with mining companies. The person that signs it, I dare say that from my clients, the CEOs and CFOs or board meetings, sitting and making those decisions, do we go with this contractor or this one? They're not chatting to GDP their way through it. They're not going say, hang on.

I'm the CEO of this multi-million dollar, multi-billion dollar company. I'm about to sign off this 20 million contract. Let me just ask Chat TP what they think about it. Never happened.

It's not gonna happen.

Jordan Lally:29:42
Absolutely. One thing it came back to me. Where we talk about it, are you familiar with this term, like the pendulum swing in marketing? Like

Celeste:29:53
No tell

Jordan Lally:29:54
a AI came out. Okay, cool. this brand new thing came out. Do we have to use AI? AI is the coolest thing ever. Like it's great. And then I think some of us, like if you use it like a lot like we do, you're starting to realize, I don't know about this AI shit, man.

Like AI kind of sounds cool, but like it's kind of dumb at the same time. Like maybe we maybe we should rely less on that. And eventually the pendulum will swing all the way over here to where businesses actually don't want to use AI at all. Or potential clients will ask businesses how how much is AI involved with your product, with your service? Because sometimes it hallucinates. And if you guys are not careful.

And you build entire products and services on the back of a farce, on the back of a lie, everything is like down the drain. Right? I think it'll take a few years to get to that point, but do you know what I you you know what I mean when I say that? Like do you feel that that sense in

Celeste:30:55
Absolutely.

Jordan Lally:30:56
the world?

Celeste:30:57
Yeah, absolutely. You're spot on. And I think and I think, you know, I I would credit it like the the failing comes to us not taking the time to understand how we can use it well and where is it that the the juice is that we gotta leverage from and I think i it's And again, like I like the terminology of saying like we're treating it as an employee that we're just gonna delegate something instead of treating this as a work colleague where we have conversations with and saying, hey, I'm doing this strategy. While I'm doing this thinking here, can you go in and track from these reports where is this topic? So I'm not sitting here reading, you know, love good data and and research. I think research is is the way to go. But like when I've talked about, you know, the the state of AI 2026, I don't have to sit here and read 120 pages of it to build my strategy. I can leverage on like, hey go, hang on, I'll be doing this. Can you grab these reports and extract the areas where talks about this topic this way, pa. So they're colleagues and they'll get it wrong.

And you need it's our job to question it. It's our job to be critical of it. It's our job to finish the work, to polish the work. We're not polishing it. We're copying pasting it.

Jordan Lally:32:35
Celest, I absolutely had a time with you on this podcast. I love your s your philosophy on AI. I love how you broke down account based marketing and why it is so important to make a human connection in high ticket B2B businesses or B2B marketing. Where can they find you if they want to talk to you directly or Lisa find your website?

Celeste:32:57
Yeah, really yeah, so we have the website, but I think if you want to connect with me, LinkedIn is a is a good way to go. I'm very active and I usually speak a lot of about these things on my LinkedIn page and have genuine conversations with people. so yeah, follow me on LinkedIn and let's connect. And again, I love LinkedIn because the word is connect. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Let's share some thoughts, ideas, and collaborate if if there's scope for it.

Jordan Lally:33:32
I love it. So Les, thanks again one more time for joining us. It was a pleasure.