Alexandra Sasha Blumenfeld

It depends on the audience, medium, and the main goal of the story you’re telling, but a very basic framework I use—and one that I’ve found to be the most effective for business storytelling—looks like this: State the pain/challenge – What’s the core problem or need? This draws the audience in by addressing something relatable. Present the solution – How are you solving it, and what makes your solution different from others? This is the heart of the story where the value is communicated. Highlig ...Read More

To align storytelling with key business objectives in a way that feels authentic to your target audience, the first step is making sure your KBOs are aligned with broader business goals. In my experience, this only works when the whole business is focused on the same priorities and knows how to weave the story into their own content and conversations. Next, it’s helpful to know exactly which audience segment the story applies to. This is where shared messaging guides come in handy—they help keep ...Read More

As the "GM" of your product area, it's incredibly valuable to cultivate a culture of ownership among all your cross-functional partners. When the entire product pod feels a strong sense of responsibility for the product's success – viewing all feedback, good and bad, as chances to learn and improve – that's when you'll drive greater product adoption and reduce friction between teams. But going back to this specific question - my first step is always to process and understand the feedback myself. ...Read More

I think the skills are analogous: 1) Customer storytelling Have a compelling customer story to lean on makes my job infinitely easier 😅Especially if you have a technical product or solution and may not be a technical product marketer, having the customer tell that story themselves can help engage your audience with the language/visuals they expect. Plus, it's great social proof and gives sales and customer success collateral to help close deals and give current customers ideas on how they can br ...Read More

I typically see the partner marketing team tracked on pipeline numbers and opportunities. That said, I think it depends on your partner marketing strategy and your marketing/BD team goals as well. Ideally, we try to balance activities that will influence in-quarter impact where we will see an immediate impact on pipeline (eg digital events, gated content) with activities that are more strategic/longer-term that will see an outsized impact a few quarters (or years) out. eg working with larger par ...Read More

Great question! At my former company Segment, there were two categories of partners:  Technology (ISV) partners  Solution (SI/agency) partners  The go-to-market is slightly different for those two categories, but a few lessons learned that are relevant to both are: 1) Incorporate the voice of your customer in everything you do. Building a compelling joint narrative is key to successfully going to market with partners. The best way to do this is through mutual customers. Anecdotally, our most suc ...Read More

It depends on the type of launch, but here’s some additional ways I have measured "success" in the past beyond just sign-ups and revenue: Product Engagement: We track how often and deeply users interact with the product, using a tiered engagement score. Tier 1 captures basic interactions, while Tier 3 reflects advanced usage or stickiness. Our goal is to move users from awareness to deeper adoption, and we start measuring this during open beta as we gear up for GA. Content Engagement: With more ...Read More

Build joint customer stories and clearly showcase the value you + partner deliver. It might seem basic, but the way we've found to get buy-in and attention from the partner's sales team is by 1) Driving joint wins (this is typically done in partnership with the BD team) 2) Documenting those wins in the form of case studies or customer webinars where you highlight the joint solution and how it unlocked business impact for the customer 3) Providing enablement via one-pagers or lunch and learns on ...Read More

It depends on what the campaign or asset is. As a platform, we try to be as tool agnostic as possible. That said, there are certain times where adding a partner adds value/context to the narrative or campaign.  Things to consider:  Can the partner provide subject-matter expertise and enhance the narrative? By positioning your brand alongside this partner can it provide credibility to your campaign? Will the partner unlock additional reach with the target audience? An example where it made sense ...Read More