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 c ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 th ...Read More

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 singl ...Read More

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: 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 on ...Read More

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 t ...Read More