Shana Iles

This is a classic PMM challenge. You have to get a bit creative in your you source social proof. Here are a few options: 1. See if you can get the customer to agree to an anonymized case study, but still specify company size, vertical, geo, and role. You can still tell an illustrative (and specific) story this way, but it may lack some of the gravitas of a big logo. 2. Source opinionated metrics via a survey. You can use tools like TechValidate for this, or develop and run your own survey across your customers. You can get stats like "XX% of customers agree or strongly agree that their process is more efficient after using X product." This can also offset a case study where a customer won't agree to sharing quantifiable stats as part of their story. 3. Borrow stats from reputable sources - Gartner, Forrester, HBR, McKinsey, and others (depending on your industry) to frame up your problem statements. 4. Tell your dogfooding story. Customers and prospects want to know you've figured out how to use your products to their fullest potential. Focus on developing your internal use cases into externally shareable stories that have all of the detail you wish your customer stories did. 5. See if customers would be open to different formats for customer stories. Customers may not be open to a written case study that goes on the website, but they may be open to speaking on a webinar or at an event, being interviewed in a Q&A format for a blog post, or to being used as a reference in non-competitive customer conversations. And of course, if this becomes a chronic issue for your storytelling - don't hesitate to write up the business case for more investment in customer marketing and/or seller incentives to get customer stories written into sales contracts!

Having a very technical and proprietary differentiator is great! To craft a message around this, the key is understanding for whom you are telling the story around this differentiator. * For a more technical audience, you may not need to change much about how you describe the differentiator - just work with your technical subject matter experts to ensure it’s described as accurately as possible. * For a less technical audience, you’ll need to lift out why this algorithm is differentiated, minimizing what it contains or how it works exactly. To do this, you’ll still want to partner with your technical subject matter experts, but have them help you validate that your descriptors - this algorithm is faster, more accurate, more personalized - are not getting watered down as you simplify your language. And of course, you’ll probably need to do both if you have multiple personas to serve in a B2B buyer journey. In a prior role, we had to do exactly this - we had a proprietary statistical model that calculated experiment results, which we developed with two Stanford PhD students, who both developed the model and submitted the research to academic journals and conferences. We did a launch around it and leaned into it as a differentiator. For our technical buyer personas, we shared the academic paper without changes with any statistics or data science teams for credibility. We also created a “statistics for marketers” guide, where we streamlined our description of the model into what it was and why it mattered to their needs (a faster and more accurate, trustworthy result from our product). We focused on how to interpret results and communicate them internally in this guide.

This is a great question because it’s actually combining two different topics - brand archetypes and storytelling. Brand marketing absolutely involves storytelling - but be careful making your brand the center of the story when it comes to presenting your product. Remember that your customer is the protagonist of your storytelling, and your product and brand are the supporting cast, the ‘magic gift’ that makes change and overcoming adversity possible for them. For brand archetypes - think about what type of brand you want to become (examples here.) Are you a Sage, a Maverick, an Explorer? As you develop your brand archetype and personality - infuse that into your messaging, but remember that you need to keep your customer at the center of the story. Your brand is a sidekick character at most, someone that your customer interacts with and reacts to as they move through their journey. Incorporate the brand personality into headlines, copywriting, and ad creative, but remember to anchor your product description in the unique differentiators and benefits that it unlocks for your customer.

Great question! Most of the storytelling frameworks I go back to repeatedly are focused on: * Identifying audience challenges and needs * Structuring your ideas clearly - the before → after, from → to states * Laying out your audience’s problem, your solution, and the benefit in a clear and easy to follow way * Pressure testing the story to see if you can add more excitement, interest, or suspense to keep the audience engaged To that end, here are some frameworks I use: * Duarte’s storytelling resources - look for their Story Map and sparkline pattern. This blog has a few good references. * A storytelling canvas to map out the message for a big launch, keynote, or presentation * Andy Raskin’s framework for developing a strategic narrative (shoutout to Tom McMahon on my team for recommending this one!)

You’ll need to do two things: 1. To gain internal alignment, identify who your stakeholders are and how you want to bring them along in your process. Do you need to involve them in workshops and brainstorming? Or brief them at regular intervals to get their feedback before you finalize your recommendations? I’d recommend, at a minimum, collecting their input on what ‘good’ looks like to them. This could be competitors' positioning, prior examples of work that they think hits the mark. 2. Lead an exercise to sort your differentiators and table-stakes capabilities. This can be a simple as a table or a whiteboarding exercise, but should be collaborative. That’s because there will be differences of opinion on what constitutes a differentiator - price, features, services, etc. - and it’s important to hash out what is a true differentiator internally before building messaging or a story around it. In identifying differentiators, focus on categories of value - features, pricing & packaging, onboarding or services offerings - and then sort them into the “table stakes”, “differentiators” and “emergent differentiators” categories. Then, lead a discussion with your stakeholders about: * Which differentiators do we have today? How defensible are these against the competition? * Which emergent differentiators are we investing in that we could lean further into? * Where are we getting feedback that we are meeting or missing table stakes that we need to be mindful of in both our roadmap and our messaging?

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).

You’re right that attention spans are low, which makes communicating a breakthrough message and grabbing your audience’s attention challenge. This means your message must be very sharp and differentiated - but this takes discipline and focus! * Focus on identifying, and then aligning internally, on your table stakes vs differentiators. Hone in on just 1-2 over a laundry list. * Validate your differentiators - with customers, analysts, etc - to ensure they resonate with your intended audience. * Then find ways to creatively package that differentiation in your messaging through storytelling devices - whether it’s data, metaphors, or punchy language. I personally love using both metaphor and data storytelling to break through in messaging, whether it’s a headline for a blog, email subject line, or a social post. Metaphors are proven to be bite-sized stories that can connect with your audience. Challenge yourself to identify the from → to (life without vs. with your product) and then wrap it in a metaphor. What does it feel like to get work done faster? What does the peace of mind of a security solution feel like when you’re offline at the end of the day? One of my favorite storytelling workshops teaches you how to identify these from → to statements and then ‘put it in a world.’ Which means taking a before/after description and then choosing whether you want to use a metaphor from space, sports, nature, or a different theme to illustrate it and evoke a more emotional connection. And of course, data in your messaging can also break through noise to help catch your audience’s attention. Borrow or develop a compelling stat to help quantify the problem or the solution you’re proposing. These stats can also be broken down into more accessible stories - for example, if your product automates 1,000 5-minute processes an hour across all of your customers - what is that comparable to in time savings? Watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy 9 times? (5,000 minutes / 558 minutes to watch all 3 movies). Remember that storytelling is meant to create connection and establish resonance with your audience - have fun with it, even as you try to be concise! Brevity does not mean bland.