AMA: Pomerium Head of Marketing, Nikhil Balaraman on Storytelling

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 ...Read More

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 tha ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 kno ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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, havi ...Read More

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 o ...Read More

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 m ...Read More

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 bu ...Read More

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 person ...Read More

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 ...Read More