AMA: Salesforce Senior Director, Product Marketing, Aurelia Solomon on Storytelling

This is a great question and it's really hard to do. First, I would always remain true to your brand voice. If everyone is using the same word, you may need to use it in various pieces of content for SEO, but it doesn't have to be the word that you use to define how your business solves the problem. I think what starts to differentiate your story from others is explaining how to solve the problem. And be specific - starting from high-level down into use cases and specific features. This will hel ...Read More

I think messaging always has to be personalized and humanized. And AI starts to make that easier because it can help us craft (or edit existing content) for various audiences. It can access copy and content data (images, videos etc) and deliver a tailored experience for each audience. To keep this human tone, I never use what the LLM initially gives me. And I don't just take its immediate feedback. I use it as an aid to help me produce what I want. So the prompts you give it are critical. They a ...Read More

This is difficult since there are rarely hard numbers associated with messaging. We may start seeing pipeline and bookings increase, and can attribute our story to helping drive it, but it's never a 1-1 causation. As a result, I focus on the softer metrics. Sales excitement and confidence. Customer validation. Analyst validation. If your sales team is excited about your story and confident to go evangelize it with customers -- and your customers understand your value and believe in your vision a ...Read More

Practice, practice, practice :) What this looks like to me / how I've coached my team Understand your audience. Who are they? What do they care about? What do you want to convey to them? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to think? Ask for feedback on your storytelling (maybe it's a one-pager, a deck, a longer narrative). Get feedback from your manager and other PMMs or stakeholders that you admire for storytelling. Frame your ask around your development goal -- people are almos ...Read More

In my opinion, product marketing owns the story. Brand marketing helps evangelize it and growth marketing helps activate it via cross-channel campaigns. Brand Marketing -- They own the brand voice. The tone. How we speak, how we write. This is something that product marketing must follow. Product Marketing -- They own the story. They understand customer pain points & goals, and how the products work. Their job is to position the company/product as the solution to that pain and explain how th ...Read More

There are messaging frameworks and then storytelling frameworks. For storytelling, start with your goal (what do you want the audience e feeling and thinking) and then break it into chapters / episode. Align on the goal of each chapter, bullet out the main points you need to make, and list out how you solve it (product) and uniquely. After you do this for each chapter, you'll start to see a little skeleton of how things fit together / flows or not. You'll notice if transitions feel forced or are ...Read More