Please share an example of a failure when trying to shape a new narrative. What did you learn?
A common mistake I see when shaping a new narrative is failing to involve sales or other customer-facing teams in the process. The best narratives I've developed across my career have been directly influenced by top sellers and account managers within the company. And while deep customer insight is core to product marketing, there's simply no way we can replicate the experience of our colleagues that talk -- and pitch -- to buyers daily. The risk of not including sales is that you will spend a ton of time building an amazing story, and no one will use it.
The process of building a narrative is likely to look different depending on your timeline and use case, but at a minimum, I recommend the following:
Build a tiger team of top performing reps. Start by understanding what's working today and where they get stuck. Align on what you believe your company should be saying that is either new (upcoming launches!), different (new positioning), and better (more resonate) than what's used today.
Identify a sales champion. Ideally this individual is Director+ or a widely respected sales rep and can therefore bring credibility to the narrative when you're ready to share it. This person can help you shape the story, but their key role is creating buy-in with reps.
Test and iterate. Invite the tiger team to test the narrative with customers and prospects. Make their job easy by asking them to provide specific feedback on the concepts that resonate, talk track that feels awkward, and likelihood of using the narrative again. Also, get out there and try it yourself. Set up calls with friendly customers, share the narrative, try out different versions, and learn more about what resonates or feels truly authentic to your company or product.
Where possible, use data to drive adoption. This is easier said than done, but do spend time to identify clear goals for the narrative. If the objective is to get everyone in the company speaking the same language, assess how many times the new narrative is used or % of reps downloading the deck. If the objective is to improve win rates or funnel conversions at critical junctures, set a baseline before the narrative is released, so you can determine impact. Coming forward with data like 80% of our top performers use this talk track or reps that use this narrative have a x% higher win rate is really powerful.
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.
Many years ago at Infer we attempted to build a product which seems to be all the rage nowadays. What we built was a sales enablement tool that let you sync all your various systems, append data, and then build segments of personas that you could then push back out to your systems to run campaigns against. What I’d say I learned from that experience is that we were trying to shape a narrative for a very small/niche set of revenue ops/marketing ops people who didn’t really exist outside of maybe 5 or 10 companies. In fact, many of our first customers, such as at Zendesk, were the first people we had ever met who had titles like “Revenue Ops”. The learning here was really that it would have probably been better start by defining the user and potentially even building a community to help define this new function. As our second product, we thought this new persona profiler could be a simple bolt on, but really we didn’t do a good enough job planting the seeds to build the market for our solution. Anyways, 10+ years later, tools like Clay, Common Room, Apollo, etc are all taking off which is great to see, even if it does cause a bit of sadness inside.
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.
One example of failure in shaping a new narrative was when we leaned too heavily into technical superiority and didn’t connect enough with the customer's pain points. As a result, the messaging didn’t resonate because it was too abstract and inaccessible. What I learned is that no matter how innovative the product, the story must always be anchored in real, relatable outcomes for the customer. A balance between technical and emotional connection is essential.
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