How do you measure the effectiveness of the story that you craft for your product?

Here are a few ways I would think about it --

Customer and stakeholder feedback: Collect feedback from customers, sales teams, and internal stakeholders to understand how well the story resonates. Do customers understand the value proposition? Are sales teams confidently using the messaging to win deals?

Sales impact: Track key sales metrics—conversion rates, deal velocity, and win/loss ratios—before and after launching the story. These can indicate how well the story is influencing buyer decisions.

Marketing engagement metrics: Monitor engagement with marketing assets tied to the story, such as website visits, content downloads, webinar participation, and email click-through rates. Higher engagement can signal that the message is resonating.

Competitive positioning: Evaluate how your product is perceived in the market relative to competitors. If the story effectively differentiates the product, you should see positive shifts in market perception or win rates against competitors.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of the story is seen in its ability to resonate with the audience, influence decisions, and drive both short-term and long-term business outcomes.

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.

This depends on the channel and format you are using to tell your story. What you are looking for is data on resonance and persuasiveness, which can be either quantitative our qualitative. When I look at this measurement question, here are the supporting questions I’m asking to drill in and assess:

• Does the story ‘land’ with my audience? How can I be sure that the right audience has heard my message?

• Through which touchpoints are we telling the story today? What asset(s) are doing this - website, sales pitch deck, explainer videos, etc.?

• Does the story persuade my audience to take the next step in their journey (starting a trial, taking a next sales conversation)?

So first assess - what purpose does your story serve? Where/when in the customer journey are you telling it? Then focus on measuring the efficacy of those touchpoints using your already-defined performance metrics (sales funnel conversion, opportunity size, close rate would be good measures for a narrative you’ve shaped into a sales pitch deck).

You can also get qualitative feedback on your message - this can be from many forms of message testing (with your stakeholders, customers, industry analysts) or in an instrumented survey or message testing platform. Just make sure, if you conduct a larger volume survey for messaging feedback, that you are surveying an audience that is made up of your customers or target customer persona(s).

To measure the effectiveness of a story, start with clear objectives. Below are a few common scenarios that require storytelling and associated objectives and metrics.

• Messaging Alignment

  • Objective: Ensure consistency in messaging across sales, marketing, and the executive team.

  • Metrics: Rep adoption (% certified on narrative, # of deck downloads), company adoption.

• Product Launch

  • Objective: Accelerate sales of a product or package.

  • Metrics: Total pipeline, win rate, # of deals closed

• Repositioning: From point solution --> platform, from x buyer to y buyer.

  • Objective: Engage new audiences and increase total deal size

  • Metrics: Opportunity types (are you attracting the right companies or engaging the right level within a company?), ACV, win rate.

Of course, tying deal metrics to a specific narrative is tricky, especially if you don't have tools to ensure a specific narrative or positioning message was used as part of the deal cycle. Still, it's helpful to establish a baseline and assess whether a new story, positioning, or package moves the needle. It will help you make the argument for increased usage or enablement... or trying something different. Storytelling is iterative, so figure out how to reinforce what's working and quickly move on from what's not.

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. 

I think the first checkbox is if it resonates internally. Does your sales team buy it? Do they think they can put this in front of customers, or are they more skeptical than they usually are? At Algolia, along with the sales enablement lead, I identified a core team of sales reps representing folks across all geographies and segments (about 5 people) that the two of us would develop new pitch decks and messaging with. Once that core group was bought in, we knew we could roll it out to the rest of the teams as those folks tended to have the respect of their peers – and also be a bit reluctant to change their pitch. If it resonates internally and you can get your reps bought in, then that’s great. But Mike Tyson said something along the lines of “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” (said in a very high voice). So you will need to continue to refine that story once it gets in the field until you find what the true hook is.

It's difficult. I don't think it's something you can solve for differentiation immediately and in one go. Certainly there's a lot you can do around making sure you distill the value prop and message in a story into its core emotional and practical impact - but differentiation comes over time, with consistency and should also be supported by the realized promise of the actual product / solution.

A couple key things based on examples from a previous company:

• Focus on a key value that resonates immediately with your audience, such as speed, ease, or savings. Think of Visa’s “Tap to Pay” stories and campaigns —simple, fast, and focused on the convenience of contactless payment in a way that people instantly understand.

• Consistency matters. Visa's brand speaks to access, inclusion, ubiquity. Every story Visa tells ladders up to that from their product campaigns to overarching brand campaigns. It's part of the reason why to this day the audience continues to believe Visa has greater levels of payment acceptance when in reality Mastercard is essentially at parity.

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.

Test the story with your customers during case study conversations. The tone is informal during a case study interview, and you are already in a good place to ask for feedback. In my view, if the story is already built from the ground up based on customer/competitor research, you have already won the battle.

I have also used Wynter and provided feedback on specific concepts. That is one more approach you can possibly try.

The effectiveness of storytelling can be measured through both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Look at engagement rates, message recall in customer surveys, and conversion metrics. Sales and customer feedback are critical—ask if they can retell the story in their own words and if it resonates. Tools like A/B testing for messaging variations can provide real-time feedback on what’s working.