AMA: SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing, Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann on Storytelling

To help you consistently tell better stories internally and externally at work, here are the top three storytelling frameworks I’d recommend: * SCQA: Great for logical, clear problem-solution stories, ideal for both internal strategy presentations and external product messaging. I learned this one in my earlier consulting days & still use it all the time! * Pixar Storytelling: Evokes emotional engagement through transformation, making it relatable and memorable in product narratives. Great for customer stories! * AIDA: Drives action through a structured attention-grabbing process, perfect for campaigns, product launches, and customer conversion. SCQA (SITUATION, COMPLICATION, QUESTION, ANSWER) Framework: * Situation: Describe the current scenario. * Complication: Highlight the problem or challenge that arises. * Question: Pose a question or introduce uncertainty. * Answer: Provide the solution. Application for product positioning: * Situation: “Today’s HR professionals are tasked with managing employee engagement and well-being.” * Complication: “But they lack the real-time data needed to address these issues effectively.” * Question: “How can HR leaders track and improve employee sentiment in a way that’s both scalable and insightful, without a research or analytics background?” * Answer: “With our powerful yet intuitive feedback platform, you can send out pulse surveys and instantly gain actionable insights from your employees.” This method is highly effective for framing the customer's problem and positioning your product as the clear solution. PIXAR STORYTELLING FRAMEWORK (ONCE UPON A TIME) Framework: * Once upon a time… * Every day… * One day… * Because of that… * Because of that… * Until finally… Application in customer stories: Use this structure to craft a narrative about the customer’s experience before and after using your product: * Once upon a time… customers struggled with a common pain point. * Every day… they tried various solutions but found no success. * One day… they discovered your product. * Because of that… they began seeing improvements. * Until finally… the problem was solved, and their experience was transformed. For example, if marketing a project management tool, you could tell a story about how teams used to struggle with communication and deadlines, until they found your tool, which led to smoother collaboration and even beating deadlines, leaving room for more creativity. THE AIDA MODEL (ATTENTION, INTEREST, DESIRE, ACTION) Framework: * Attention: Capture the audience's attention. * Interest: Spark interest with compelling information. * Desire: Build desire by showing benefits. * Action: Encourage the audience to take the next step. Application in product campaign messaging: * Attention: "What if you could understand employee sentiment in real-time?" * Interest: "Our platform allows you to collect feedback instantly from across your organization." * Desire: "With advanced analytics and reports sliced by department, you can take actionable steps to improve employee well-being." * Action: "Sign up for a free demo today!" The AIDA model helps guide potential customers through a linear process that begins with awareness and ends with conversion.

Note: I give a much more detailed answer on how we recently approached this at SurveyMonkey here: https://sharebird.com/h/product-marketing/q/what-strategy-do-you-use-to-ensure-everyone-internally-agrees-on-what-differentiates-you-from-competition?answer=ynNZUqMNnX&utm_source=questionanswer&utm_medium=share Here are my tips for getting alignment on your product messaging: * Have a single driver: This is likely the head of PMM or even head of marketing. But it can't be a shared ownership (e.g. with product) or else you may get stuck in a stand-still. We believe in a "disagree and commit" philosophy that gives drivers autonomy to make the final decisions so we can all move forward as an organization. * Get executive sponsorship and buy-in from the start: Make sure there is agreement that product messaging needs to be updated. There could be many reasons for this (has it not been revisited in years? new company priorities? did you recently sunset a product? new market pressure?). And if that's the case, make sure you have tops-down support so that executives can push their team to weigh in or support wherever needed. * Involve all of the right stakeholders: Make sure you get approval of your DACI early on so you aren't stuck about to roll-out and someone goes "wait, has So-and-so seen this??". That * Save time for refinement: You'll find that once you start working on this, everyone will have an opinion :) . So, it's inevitable that you'll need to bake in time in your project plan for 1-2 rounds of feedback. * Nail your roll-out: Typically, for something so central as your main product messaging, you probably need to start at the top and work your way down/out. We got executive alignment first, then rolled out to VP+, Directors+, and then a full company-wide roll-out.

You can measure the effectiveness of product messaging in a few ways: * Survey-based message testing * In-market A/B testing * Sales adoption, confidence, and win-rates I'll go into a couple tips/recommendations for each below: 1. Survey-based message testing * Before you launch a campaign with fresh messaging/copy, you can test options with your target audience to see what resonates most. * SurveyMonkey has a solution for this that can work for a variety of mediums (including if you want to test the text only), and Wynter is great for homepage message testing. Both have built-in panels so you can target who you want to reach with your research. 2. In-market A/B testing * If you have a couple options you're trying to decide between, an in-market test would also work. * My recommendation here is to test ONLY the messaging, not the surrounding design or layout or anything else that could be a confounding variable. 3. Sales adoption, confidence, and win-rates * Part of the success of any new narrative is whether the sales team adopts it. So that means you have to get your enablement right, of course, but also the story needs to be memorable and repeatable in an authentic way. If you roll out an elevator pitch that sounds too robotic or is too complicated, sales won't use it. * At SurveyMonkey we measure sales confidence with -- surprise -- a survey! Quarterly, we're asking sales about their confidence with various types of positioning (for specific buyers, against competition, etc.) * And win-rates are a great north start metrics to be influencing! It's just harder to tie the results directly back to your efforts since they're more qualitative by nature.

I think marketers get too hung up about being perfectly unique snowflakes when it comes to messaging. If you think about a category with multiple competitors, there will always be several competing for the same slice of the market, and when it really comes down to it, the products probably aren't all that different. Differentiation is simply about knowing * who you're for * what those people care about most * being in the right place at the right time. We just went through an exercise to craft a single UVP message at SurveyMonkey, and this was the rough template we used: * [Product] combines [value prop 1] with [value prop 2] to help [target customers] achieve [ultimate outcome]. And if those value props & ultimate outcomes REALLY resonate with your target customer, they will take notice. The next step is making sure that your messaging across ALL touch points reinforces the top things you want to be known for-- that's ads, webpages, emails, sales outreach & materials, etc. So no matter where your prospect encounters your messaging, they are seeing something consistent that will reinforce those differentiators.

There is a difference between having alignment on "what's different" between you and your competition and "what differentiates" you from your competition. The latter is really about getting strategic alignment on 1) what your ideal customer profile (ICP) is, 2) who your real competitive threats are, and 3) which value props / feature sets are the ones you'll lean into developing and messaging to the market. Because this work is all about making sure your ICP chooses you. And they will choose you because you're good at conveying you're the best at the things they care about most. So, you need to align on those 3 things: 1. The ICP * Who are they? Demographics, firmographics * What do they care about? Top challenges, top benefits they're looking for, outcomes they're trying to drive 2. The real competitive threats * Are you playing for the high-end of the market? The low-end? Somewhere in between? * Who are the competitors in your ICP's consideration set? 3. Value props you'll lean into 1. What are the top things your ICP cares about most that you do better (or aspire to do better) than your competitive threats? We actually just went through a corporate messaging alignment exercise at SurveyMonkey, and these are the steps we took: 1. We did an internal survey with leadership to gauge alignment on some critical elements of our corporate strategy: who our ICP is, the top challenges we solve for, why we win, where we fall short for customers, etc. We found out we weren't as aligned as we thought we were. 2. We did some extensive ICP analysis: * Where are we currently seeing success? We looked at revenue, retention, LTV, AOV, win rate, etc. cut by department, level, industry, company size, use case, and more 3. We first got exec alignment on the ICP (this took a few rounds of debate) 4. Once we were aligned on the ICP, we did research on what the ICP cares about * We ran a product value prop MaxDiff study with our ICP to get a stack ranked order of importance, and we also validated things like top challenges, benefits, and ultimate outcomes 5. We crafted corporate messaging that went through a few rounds of executive-level feedback 6. We rolled it out to leadership first, then the entire company 7. We ensured the go-forward strategy was embedded in the company-wide approach to annual planning Some learnings & tips if you want to do something similar: * Get executive-level buy-in. In this case, our global head of marketing drove the effort with PMM & Brand, with CEO sponsorship. * Make sure your recommendations are backed by data. It will be easier to get alignment across functions if you can point to data showing that these are the things our customer cares the most about * Don't rush it. You can move fast, but you'll want to save room for feedback & iteration before company-wide roll out.

We went through a similar exercise when messaging our AI capabilities for SurveyMonkey (what we call SurveyMonkey Genius). Similarly, we have a lot of proprietary/technical differentiation, but AI is noisy and everyone's doing it now. Here are a couple bits of advice you can consider: Know what your ICP cares about most when it comes to your technology: * Sometimes the best way to craft messaging is to see your product through your customer's eyes. Interview existing customers to understand how they'd describe your tech & what they get from it. * You can conduct message testing with your ICP to see what resonates. Produce claims that are more relatable: * Instead of stats around processing power or complexity of your algorithm, try something like: * Outperforms [alternative] 99% of the time * Saves you XX hours a week * Improves [annoying process] by YY% * I even like what you wrote in your question: Has been tweaked over decades by PhDs Consider naming or branding your unique capability: * This creates a tangible entity that becomes a differentiator. * Here are some examples: Nike Flyknit fabric, Apple Retina Display, Tesla Autopilot

Not being able to use named logos is SUCH a common struggle with PMM & customer advocacy teams. There are some ways to still tell compelling stories & claims without named logos: lean into anonymity, leverage public sources of stories, and run customer research to collect claims. Lean into the anonymity to build trust. * Sometimes it's a benefit not to share the logo because what they're doing with your product gives them SUCH an edge, they don't want to share. We see this when trying to tell our market research customer stories at Survey Monkey - doing research is part of their competitive advantage! * In some industries, like financial services, the clients wouldn't want you sharing their story either, so they are used to & just as accepting of masked stories. Leverage review sites or other public sources. * At SurveyMonkey, we publish badges, review scores, and review quotes on our site even though they aren't named. * We also mine PR mentions to find stories from customers or publications that mention us themselves. We have slack channel called #surveymonkey-in-the-wild where PR shares examples of customers either publicly sharing their surveys or even publishing the results of their studies. Run customer research to collect claims. * Sometime stats can resonate just as much as individual stories. * We run research with our customer to refresh claims that validate our value props. E.g.: XX% of customers say they are up and running the same day.