AMA: Shopify Senior Product Marketing Lead, Robin Fontaine on Storytelling

First, you need to become an expert in your competitive landscape. Do the research, do the analysis, then do the storytelling and debate with your team. Involve stakeholders from other disciplines in your research projects if possible so they are invested from the beginning, and will champion your conclusions. Bring your team along for the journey. This works much better than waiting til the end to bring people in. There are many research approaches you can use here. I find it helpful to use multiple, but do what you have the bandwidth and resources for. Qualitative Research If you can do some customer and prospect interviews, you should! Your target customers will know better than anyone what they need, and how they perceive your product’s strengths and weaknesses vs. competitors. If you have a sales team, they can help you identify customers/prospects to interview. Develop a discussion guide where you craft the key questions you want to ask and what topics you want to dig deeper on. You’ll be asking customers which features made them choose you over others, what they wish you offered, etc. Record the interviews (with your subject’s permission) so you have clips to share with your team later. Market Research: Feature Comparison I like to create a feature comparison grid where you list your key competitors on one axis, and then list all or most of the features you and competitors offer along the other axis. Then you check off the features that your product, and each competitive product, offers. At the end you should see a clear picture of where you or your competitors might have gaps, or competitive advantages, in terms of feature set. You can also apply a scoring mechanism to take into account how important each feature is to your audience (which you hopefully learned from your interviews!) Market Research: Messaging Comparison Gather your competitors’ messaging and see what they are each emphasizing as their competitive advantages. You can find this on their websites, video ads, billboards, you name it! Collect key messages into a doc, and put them side by side with your own. See what insight you can gain by looking at how they are positioning themselves against your product and each other. Internal Research Talk to internal stakeholders including sales, customer success, customer service, etc. Gather their insights on what customers are saying they love about your product or where it may be lacking. Listen to sales calls. Look at win/loss reports. Review support tickets. You’re looking for insights on where your product excels and where it falls short. Do the Analysis This is critical: do not simply share your mountains of raw research with your team and expect them to make sense of it all. Do the deep thinking to narrow it down to just 1 to 3 (no more) competitive advantages you can win with. Then put it all together in a deck or doc, with excerpts from your research to help you tell the story. Tell the story, have the debate Now you set up a meeting, or even better a roadshow with several teams, to share your analysis and findings. Tell a good story, backed by all of your research. Video clips from your interviews will be very powerful here. And don’t just expect everyone to agree with you. Have a healthy debate with your team. Listen to opposing points of view. Do your best to arrive at a conclusion that most can agree with, and incorporate feedback to make your competitive positioning stronger. To recap: Do the research. Include your team from the start and bring people along for the journey. Be willing to debate and incorporate other points of view. Keep socializing your results and show them in action in your messaging and positioning. 

If it is truly a differentiator, then it will have benefits, and that is what you should focus on. What does that proprietary algorithm allow your product to do that others products can’t, and how does that benefit your customer? Does it make your product faster? Does it make your product or its output more accurate, or more efficient? And how does that added capability benefit your customer? Does it save them time, make them more money, etc.? Even the most technical business buyer wants to know what’s in it for them. So lead with the benefits, and of course explain what you must about the “how” behind it, but don’t put the focus there. 

Almost always, a better approach is to make your target customer the protagonist of the story. No one really cares about your product. They care about how it will help them or their business. They care about how it might make them a hero in the eyes of their colleagues or friends if it delivers on its promise. Imagine your target persona realizing they have a problem that your product can solve. What’s the pain like —the time wasted, the frustration, the lost revenue—all because they don’t have your product working for them? When your target persona finds your product and it solves their or their company's problem, they become the hero. 

This is truly the art and the craft of marketing. To do this well you need to have a crystal clear idea of what sets your product apart, what matters most to your audience, and how those things intersect. Then you need to use your creativity to distill this down to its essence. If you have a strong stat that fits the bill, that can work wonders when you need to be pithy. For example, Shopify partnered with one of the big three global management consulting companies on an independent study of checkout conversion rates. After months of sifting through Shopify’s and competitors' data, they found that Shopify's overall conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36% and by an average of 15%. Having a powerful stat like that allowed Shopify to say short and attention grabbing things like “Find out why Shopify’s checkout converts up to 36% better.” or even “Do you want to make 15% less money?”

You should be able to see the results of an effective product story in the channels where it is used. If your company runs ads, and they start using your revamped product story or key messages in the ads, you should see improved ROAS if your story is effective. If your product story becomes the basis of a new pitch deck for your sales team, you should see improved win/loss rates. If you’re crafting a story for a new product and don’t have previous results to compare to, I recommend doing some message testing before you launch, leaving time to iterate based on what you learn, and test again. You can do this via focus groups, or scrappy 1:1 interviews. 

There are many tried and true frameworks or this. Here are some I use: STAR Method There’s one you’ve likely been told to use in interviews: The STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. You can apply this same framework to product storytelling. For example, what Situation is your prospect in? What are they Tasked with doing (and what are the obstacles)? What Action were they able to accomplish with the help of your product? And what was the positive Result? Duarte Method Nancy Duarte, CEO and author of six best-selling books, created a framework for storytelling that unfolds in 3 acts: 1. “what is”: describe the current (less than ideal) state of things. 2. “what could be”: describe what is possible if only we had a better solution, system, etc. 3. “the new bliss”: describe the world as it will be when everyone adopts your product, idea, etc. Pixar Story Framework This legendary framework that describes the way all Pixar movies unfold can also help you tell the story of your target customer: Once upon a time there was ____________ Every day ____________ Then one day ____________ Because of that, ____________ And because of that, ____________ Until finally, ____________

When I was hired at Patreon to build and lead the product marketing function, my first big project was a repricing and packaging exercise. Among other things, we wanted to move from a one-size-fits-all pricing model to a 3-tiered “good, better, best” model. I started out thinking that it would be a terrible outcome if we ended up calling the three pricing tiers something generic like “Basic, Pro, and Premium”. Our customers were artists and creators! As creative people, surely they would prefer plan names that fit their creative identities, right?? Most of my colleagues at Patreon felt this way too. I had lots of them coming forward with ideas for creative plan names we could use, like “Seedling, Sprout, and Oak Tree” or “Novice, Artist, Rock Star”. There were some better ones too, but you get the idea! Well, I tested a bunch of these plan names with actual Patreon creators and prospects, and guess what they liked best? Basic, Pro, and Premium! To them, this was clear and understandable. The creative names were highly subjective, and even worse, cute! They were using Patreon to be professionals at their craft and get paid for it. So having a plan called “Pro” fit that aspiration better than any creative name. These people were already creative. We didn’t need to tell them that with a cute name. What did I learn? Don’t assume your customer has the same frame of reference you do. Ask them! And look toward what it is they hope to accomplish by using your product, the benefits, and anchor your storytelling there.