AMA: BILL Head of Product Marketing - Platform Products, Charles Tsang on Storytelling

[Insert shameless plug for the my template that is being shared for this AMA]. :-) Kidding aside - the template does reflect my thinking on the framework for good storytelling: 1. Intentional focus on crystalizing core "story inputs" --> e.g., personas, function and emotional pain points, market / industry / competitive context, etc. 2. Using this to fill out core story components such as: * Every story needs a protagonist and antagonist, so mapping the persona and pain points to these elements helps * Outlining the core impact of the conflict in the story on the protagonist is important to highlight the stakes at play * Defining how the conflict is resolved and how the hero "wins" helps showcase the solution and promote the power of offering

It's difficult. I don't think it's something you can solve for differentiation immediately and in one go. Certainly there's a lot you can do around making sure you distill the value prop and message in a story into its core emotional and practical impact - but differentiation comes over time, with consistency and should also be supported by the realized promise of the actual product / solution. A couple key things based on examples from a previous company: * Focus on a key value that resonates immediately with your audience, such as speed, ease, or savings. Think of Visa’s “Tap to Pay” stories and campaigns —simple, fast, and focused on the convenience of contactless payment in a way that people instantly understand. * Consistency matters. Visa's brand speaks to access, inclusion, ubiquity. Every story Visa tells ladders up to that from their product campaigns to overarching brand campaigns. It's part of the reason why to this day the audience continues to believe Visa has greater levels of payment acceptance when in reality Mastercard is essentially at parity.

I think about my strategy in three steps: * Objective Facts * Product: Collaborate closely with the product team to conduct feature-by-feature comparisons. Dive into the technology to identify what’s truly unique. Sometimes, depending on the product area or space, you might be lucky enough to be able to test out your competitor's product yourself through freemium accounts or trials to gain firsthand experience! * Sales Insights: If you work in a space with a meaningful sales motion, leverage win/loss analyses with your sales team to identify key themes from customer conversations. In my experience, my sales counterparts were an incredibly rich repository of insights. They could typically zero in on the "top 3" reasons why we win (and lose) in 1 or 2 short conversations. * Customer Insights: Customer interviews can provide invaluable feedback, revealing what tipped decisions in your favor. Hearing customers articulate value directly helps cut through internal disagreements. While it could be somewhat duplicative with sales insights, there is significant power in customer story vignettes. Sometimes if you want to fast track things you could even check out customer review sites (e.g., G2). * Analyst Insights: Engage with industry analysts for their market perspectives. Analysts offer broad visibility and unique insights that complement these other buckets. Just note that there may not always be analyst coverage in the sector you play in. * Triangulation and Synthesis: Look for common denominators, incongruencies, and patterns across all insights to zero in on the key differentiators that matter most. * Internal Alignment: If you truly built up a solid fact base from the first two steps, alignment becomes way easier. I recommend workshops or competitive positioning sessions where stakeholders review findings and can more easily align on the core differentiators. In general I've found that you can typically walk away with alignment on 80%+ of things which tends to be sufficient in my view.

I haven't worked in a space where the differentiators were algorithms or what I would describe as extremely technical or proprietary. BUT - I think my experiences and perspective still apply. The short story is to anchor on value (not the specifics of the secret sauce) and use analogies. So here's my thinking (mostly drawing from my experiences around API platforms and developer tools/technologies): * Anchor in Value, Not Just Tech: Ultimately the differentiator should result in something concrete for the customer. Define what that is - is it speed, cost, precision, conversion, etc., and focus on that in your messaging. Customers care about how a product helps them, not just the bells and whistles. A great way to drive this home is by showing real-world examples. If you can back it up with metrics—like how another business used your product to save 20% on costs—it’ll resonate more. An example from my experience was about how our company's API platform had a unique feature that could drive massive improvements in conversion for clients. We didn't focus as much on the secret sauce and focused much more on the messaging around the core outcome. * Use Analogies: At a previous company and role - I was focused on scaling a recently launched API platform. The challenge was the sales team was traditional and not really familiar with APIs. This was further challenged by the fact that our "buyers" and traditional points of contact for our sales team were equally unfamiliar. So analogies helped a lot (e.g., APIs are ways for applications to talk with each other, or showing real world examples of how APIs power their everyday experiences). Weaving these types of analogies into the messaging helped quite a bit in breaking through the initial challenges of audience (and sales team) comprehension.

The short answer is yes, it can become a differentiator but it has to be intentional, aligned with the audience's needs, and relevant to the company / brand. But it's extraordinarily difficult to do and most companies aren't able to break through. I think most people would point to Apple's "Think Different" campaign as the most obvious example of a company that did this effectively. The story effectively transformed and framed the company / brand as a champion of creativity and nonconformity and resonated with an audience who wanted to innovate. This differentiator endures to this day, and is obviously anchored with the concrete proof points of their product innovation. During my time at Visa, the brand and sponsorship team did a phenomenal job with our Rio 2016 Olympics "Carpool" campaign. It was a fun narrative featuring over 20 Team Visa athletes across different countries and sports and featured Visa’s innovative payment technologies like Visa Checkout, while reinforcing themes of acceptance, diversity, and unity—all values integral to the Olympic spirit and Visa's core brand promise ("everywhere you want to be") of inclusion, access, and ubiquity.