AMA: Pomerium Head of Marketing, Nikhil Balaraman on Storytelling

I think the best way to gain consensus and alignment on how you’re differentiated from the competition is to first start by soliciting input from all stakeholders (sales, product, customer success, marketing, engineering if a technical product). From there, I typically look for customer stories, calls or interviews that mention competitors (we’ve been using Fathom to flag these during calls and alert in real-time). Once you have raw internal and external notes, it’s also good to fill in your knowledge with how those competitors talk about themselves through their webinars, product marketing, customer case studies, and social channels. From there, it’s time to build a battle card for sales on a per competitor basis with guidance on which traps to set, traps they might set, how to deposition their traps, and key points of differentiation.

For this, it has to be about the output/what you get. Do you know what the latest spec of an iPhone’s camera lens is? But do you feel and believe that an iPhone has a better camera than its competitors? If your audience is super technical and specs matter, however, then you have to include them. But focus on how it improves their workflow and their experience with using your product vs a competitor. For example, at Pomerium, we provide a clientless experience that we think is better than legacy VPN software. Why does this matter? Because there’s no software on your machine needing to be updated at inopportune times, and we’re not routing data back through a central node causing bottlenecks and high latency. This means our customers are able to have full zero trust security that is truly frictionless from their end users perspective.

The important thing here is making your brand consistent. In order to build a brand, and as the question asks, personify it, you need to really invest in understanding who your audience is and what you and your products represent to them. You can search for the brand archetype wheel (or more likely these days ask an AI) to get an understanding of what the core archetypes are. That’s a good place to start in shaping your brand identity. Once the team (typically the marketing team leading with the founders/executive team approving) agrees on the brand vision and tone, then building a brand strategy document that you link to from every brief is the best way to ensure consistency. I don’t actually know if you want to make your brand the protagonist in your storytelling, however, as the protagonist should be your target audience. They are the hero, you are the enabler, leading them on the path of enlightenment.

Visuals. We’re visual creatures, and we live in a world of visual media competing for our attention. I’ve worked mostly in B2B software, so large budget brand campaigns and repeated messaging across every single channel is not something that I’ve typically had access to in my career. However, creating visually appealing experiences (whether digital or physical) that draw your audience in – think your website or booth at a tradeshow – is the best way to stand out. Then when you draw them in, having clear messaging (think 5 or 6 words that places you in a reference box for them) that gets them to pause for an extra 10 seconds or 15 seconds. For example, at Instacart, we set up a large booth at a tradeshow with all our new in-store technology that we had developed. However, for this audience (mostly grocers) we were not known for in-store technology, we were more known as a fulfillment partner. So building a “grocery store” concept at our booth, with the messaging “Connected Stores” helped to 1) get them to stop and say hey look at that grocery store, and 2) create a new spot for us in the store technology box in their head. From there, they were able to come and touch all the hardware, get guided demos, talk with product experts, and hopefully walk away with a bit of a new lens of what we could provide.

I think the first checkbox is if it resonates internally. Does your sales team buy it? Do they think they can put this in front of customers, or are they more skeptical than they usually are? At Algolia, along with the sales enablement lead, I identified a core team of sales reps representing folks across all geographies and segments (about 5 people) that the two of us would develop new pitch decks and messaging with. Once that core group was bought in, we knew we could roll it out to the rest of the teams as those folks tended to have the respect of their peers – and also be a bit reluctant to change their pitch. If it resonates internally and you can get your reps bought in, then that’s great. But Mike Tyson said something along the lines of “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” (said in a very high voice). So you will need to continue to refine that story once it gets in the field until you find what the true hook is.

There was a book (probably 15+ years old now) by Nancy Duarte about storytelling. In it she uses the example of Steve Jobs’ iPhone release presentation. The framework she highlights in that is the Before/After framework, where you keep shifting the story between “what is” and “what could be”...this rectangle in my hand is a phone…but it can also play music. This rectangle in my hand is a way to send SMS…but it can also browse the internet in (at the time) blazing fast 3G speeds, etc etc. At the end of the story, you leave the audience with the vision of the utopia where they can have it all…if only they choose your product. For B2B product marketing, I find that Problem/Solution/Benefit or Challenge/Solution/Benefit storytelling works very well for customer case studies. Typically, prospects can see themselves in this framing especially if the customer you’re highlighting is an organization they respect or might even be a direct competitor.

I shared a template that I’ve used in past roles that I think is helpful here. It really starts from the top, and goes down from there. Simply put, what’s your overall vision, how does this product support that vision, why should your customers/the market care about this product now? From there you refine the core messages and reasons to believe to map back up to how they will help advance that goal and help achieve the vision. I think the rule of 3 is the only principle of product marketing that needs to be remembered. If you forget everything else, just remember 3 is the right number for whatever you’re doing. So 3 value props, mapped downwards to specific evidence and features, and mapped back up to your vision and product aspiration, and you should be fine.

Many years ago at Infer we attempted to build a product which seems to be all the rage nowadays. What we built was a sales enablement tool that let you sync all your various systems, append data, and then build segments of personas that you could then push back out to your systems to run campaigns against. What I’d say I learned from that experience is that we were trying to shape a narrative for a very small/niche set of revenue ops/marketing ops people who didn’t really exist outside of maybe 5 or 10 companies. In fact, many of our first customers, such as at Zendesk, were the first people we had ever met who had titles like “Revenue Ops”. The learning here was really that it would have probably been better start by defining the user and potentially even building a community to help define this new function. As our second product, we thought this new persona profiler could be a simple bolt on, but really we didn’t do a good enough job planting the seeds to build the market for our solution. Anyways, 10+ years later, tools like Clay, Common Room, Apollo, etc are all taking off which is great to see, even if it does cause a bit of sadness inside. 

Find your niche. Every product does what it does slightly differently. At Algolia, we had a search as a service product. Our niche was that we made really amazing e-commerce front end experiences possible. Yeah there were other verticals that benefited from Algolia, but most of them didn’t care about what made us special – super fast, amazing uptime, crazy extensibility. Build your brand/product love within the niche and spread out. That niche might be a vertical or it might be a specific persona within an organization (for example, do you sell to DevOps – a huge market – or do you focus on Cloud Security Architects – a potentially much smaller audience…but one you can target/focus your messaging and product features on much more easily.

If there were a question that I too would love the answer to... I go back and forth on whether or not it makes sense to do generic “case studies” on the website. I am mostly of the opinion that it doesn’t. What I’ve seen other companies do is quote individuals with their permission and link to their LinkedIn…so it doesn’t say that Apple loves our product. It says that Tim Cook does…and here’s a link to Tim’s bio. I think if you can’t use a customer logo in a case study, however, there’s likely more work that needs to be done to make sure that customer is willing to go on record talking about their experience using your product. So I would say, focus on that, get them on the record, and you’ll have found it was worth it because the logo (especially large, respected ones) carry tons of weight in the right communities.

Knowing success is easy. It’s when you go to a conference and you see and hear your sales reps, prospects, and customers repeating the messaging. It’s when your leadership is on stage delivering the narrative that you’ve spent months working with the comms team, sales team and others crafting. You know what that feels like. Failure is harder to pin down. We tend to want everything instantaneously, so if it feels like a message didn’t resonate the first time you tried it out, you might be tempted to call it a failure and start over. But some things need repetition to stick and all of us need practice and more reps to get better at delivering the message. So I’d say the failure stories are typically part of the eventual path to success. It’s never binary, one or zero. It’s part of the process of getting the messaging perfected.

I think I’ve mentioned this a few times, but qualitatively it’s in the organic uptake by the sales teams, and positive reception from the community. I think from a quantitative view, you know when the messaging is right when you’re seeing engagement (whether that’s webinar signups, trial starts, contact us leads, etc.) on your various product marketing surfaces. Nailing the persona and ICP and iterating obsessively on the message that you deliver to them and seeing that pay off in the funnel is a great feeling as well. 

Typically as proof points for the product benefits. Yeah we make you faster, but how much faster? Well (for example) at both Pomerium and Algolia, we could quantify latency reductions…so use that. I also think data and insights about where people are naturally going on your website can be helpful too. For example, I’ve been surprised to see where a lot of our organic search traffic ends up. Our blog and glossary pages at Pomerium are highly technical and not necessarily focused on our product but on adjacent products. So how can we do webinars or build better guides to capture more user intent around those search terms? Same with our docs search itself. We’re actually using insights from Algolia’s backend to help us understand what users are searching for, and making sure that we eliminating any no results pages that might come up.