AMA: Seismic Vice President, Product Marketing, Eve Alexander on Storytelling

Whenever I'm working a project that involves many people's opinions, I look for ways to bring objective data and a variety of stakeholder viewpoints into the conversation through win-loss interviews, x-functional brainstorms, and digging into differentiated value. * Win-loss interviews: This is the objective data that tell us exactly what the market views as our differentiators. It's hard to argue with! At Seismic, we interview approximately 25 recent buyers or would-be-buyers per quarter and ask them why they chose us or didn't. We make sure to dig into non-product related topics like services or customer success. * Cross-functional brainstorms: Whenever we're working on a narrative or other initiative that requires alignment on our differentiators, I seek to include a wide variety of stakeholders in a brainstorming session. We start with crafting a laundry list of what we believe our differentiators are. We look at that against data from win-loss interviews. We offer complementary perspectives from different parts of the business--and have a healthy debate. I like to include Sales, CS, Product, our Value team, and Marketing. * Differentiated value: April Dunford uses this term to describe the "what's in it for me" aspect of differentiation. A capability may be unique, but if the customer doesn't care, then it's not worth highlighting. For any differentiator to make it to the top of the list, you need to be able to articulate the customer value. Part of the healthy debate we have in our x-functional brainstorms is around exactly this.

It can be challenging to navigate articulating differentiation when a capability is highly technical and your audience is not. As I mentioned in another response, focusing on differentiated value can be really helpful here. Rather than try to do a lot of messaging or education around the algorithm/technical capability itself, focus on what it uniquely delivers in terms of the outcome for the customer. For example, at Seismic, our product includes a unique architecture for organizing sales content. Rather than get into the technical weeds of how, our messaging focuses on the value to the customer. Continuing with the example, we talk about how our approach allows organizations of all sizes to maintain content quality, prevent sprawl and scale as needed. We emphasize the benefits for organizations now, as well as how it future-proofs and de-risks their investment because they won't outgrow it like we often see with alternative solutions. We then highlight win-loss interviews and case studies to back this up. You'll still need the technical information, and you'll need at least your technical GTM team members (e.g., SEs) enabled to speak to it later in the sales cycle.

I'll start with the premise that our brands (or companies, or products) should be the protagonists of our stories. I'm a huge fan of "Building a Storybrand"--a book by Donald Miller. His framework emphasizes that our company or product is best positioned as the guide that helps the hero (our customer) achieve success. E.g., make your brand the Yoda to your customer's Luke Skywalker. So, my first two pieces of advice are to consider taking your brand out of the protagonist role and make it the supporting role--and to read that book if you haven't! In terms of personifying your brand, the best bet is to simplify the language you're using, remove the jargon, and write like a human. I haven't read it yet, but the book "Make it Punchy" is on my to-read list and is all about this. It's an area I still have room to be better at, myself!

As is the case for most of the work we do as PMM, I often try to think about metrics across three altitudes: outcomes, behaviors, and inputs. For a new narrative (e.g., evolving the company pitch) I often look at: * Outcomes: Some of the measurements I have looked at include win rate, increase in market share (e.g., if you're entering a new market), increase in deal size, and increase in multi-SKU deals (e.g., if the narrative is designed to help move from single product to multi-product sale). It's always valuable to align on what (business) success looks like for a new narrative. * Behaviors: Is your sales team using it? Are buyers engaging with it? Ideally, you want to have the technology in place to measure this objectively (e.g., a revenue enablement platform, conversational intelligence, etc). Worst case, you can shadow reps or interview them. * Inputs: How many customers/prospects did you test it with? Across which segments/buyer groups? How many sellers did you test it with? What kind of market research fed into it (e.g., analyst research). What kind of feedback did you get? I wouldn't typically report on this kind of thing back to my exec team--but it can be helpful when it comes to selling it internally to drive adoption.

I'm a huge fan of Donald Miller's Storybrand framework. I typically like to use a simplified version of it, as I find that the full framework can be onerous and heavier than we need it to be in our fast-moving company: * Define your hero (your customer) and what they are trying to accomplish. For example, at Seismic our hero is an enablement leader, and she wants to improve her ability to impact business outcomes--and demonstrate that her team directly contributed to those outcomes. * Articulate the problem, or what's getting in the way of them achieving their goal. Historically, enablement leaders have had to wade through multiple systems and disconnected data to understand what is going on with their initiatives, like a new product launch. This is manual and time-consuming--making it nearly impossible to quantify impact, or course correct along the way. * Highlight the guide (your company or product) and how the guide can help. With Seismic's new Programs product, for the first time ever, enablement teams have a centralized command center to launch, run and optimize their initiatives--and connect their work to business outcomes like revenue. This is where you can pull in additional information about your product or company, such as key capabilities. * Demonstrate how the hero achieves success. This is where you articulate the business outcomes your product provides. Seismic Programs allows enablement to operate more strategically, drive GTM team behavior change, prove impact, and increase company agility. I like to bring in customer evidence -- case studies, data points, etc.

My biggest failures have typically come down to unsuccessfully driving behavior change with the field. Even the best stories, which are grounded in research and validated with customers, aren't always adopted by the field. I've learned that working closely with enablement and sales leadership is crucial to driving success. A few specifics: * Include well-respected members of the field in crafting your story. Ask for their help and support not just in developing the narrative, but in lending their voice & influence when it comes to launching it to their peers. For example, I like to feature sellers delivering the pitch, rather than product marketing in our training materials & sessions. * Pilot it with a few sellers, customer friendlies, and if you can swing it even pitch it yourself to prospects. Share the results with the field when you roll it out--demonstrating that you've done your homework AND that it resonates goes a long way. * Work closely with front-line managers. Make sure expectations are clear and that you are either reporting back regularly on progress, or they have access to dashboards to measure themselves. * Partner with Enablement to build a multi-faceted enablement program. Doing one live session at SKO isn't going to cut it. We have found that doing pre-work (in the form of a lesson), followed by a live session that includes practice, followed by some sort of a competition or certification that involves additional practice and grading by sales managers works well. Then make sure you have an on-going drumbeat to reinforce, which may include sharing recordings of particularly strong calls that use the narrative. I have also seen good success with doing roadshows with each segment to talk about strategies for tailoring. E.g., how do you tailor the story for SMB vs. Enterprise? For your EMEA market? Etc.

Check out my answer to the question "What strategy do you use to ensure everyone internally agrees on what differentiates you from competition?" for some practical tips at how to go about identifying your top differentiators. I'd start with doing some win-loss interviews to understand what your customers perceive sets you apart from your competitors.

Customer evidence is so valuable to provide proof that your product/service/solution drives the outcomes you claim! A few techniques I've used when I can't use a customer name/logo: * Aggregate results. For example, do you have a dozen customers in a given sector that are all measuring the same outcome (e.g., faster sales cycle times). Then use that to say "on average, customers in X segment achieve Y improvement in sales cycle times". * Genericize the company. You can still use quotes, testimonials or even build out case studies without citing the specific company. Instead, you can genericize to represent their industry, size or region--so long as it does, in fact, veil who the customer is. E.g., "A mid-size life sciences company in Germany." You can do this manually. I've also recently been checking out a product, UserEvidence, that is a great tool that can help support this exact kind of scenario in a scalable way.