What’s Your Story? Is Your Approach To Storytelling Standing In The Way Of Your Organisations Success?

The Back Story

Throughout my career I have had the good fortune to work with many amazing innovators in the tech industry and along the way we have enjoyed some great successes. In between these successes we also experienced many failures, but the key in these situations is to learning from this and move on quickly.??

In my own journey, working in customer facing roles, I quickly learned the importance of being armed with the right storyline. Two organisations with the same or similar offerings can look very different to the outside world depending on how they tell their stories.?

The consequences of a poor storyline can include lower rates of engagement & conversion throughout the sales process, because your content is less productive. It also impacts the productivity of the folks that work in customer facing roles, because they have a much harder job on their hands to convince customers of your relevance. It may also impact your ability to raise money, how much you can raise and, the valuation that is placed on your company. ?

Today many companies compete in environments where there are many options for customers to choose from, including one of the toughest competitors out there - “the status quo/do nothing”. Having a storyline for your company that is relatable to customers most important challenges, motivates engagement, differentiates you from your competitors and provides the evidence to back up your claims is a critical element in the foundation of your go to market strategy.???

In this article I want to explore some of the reasons why organisations fail to get this right and provide some important clues on how to build a repeatable process to facilitate the creation of an effective storyline. A foundation that can also be refined over time as you learn and your companies offerings evolve.??

Commons Reasons For Failure?

There are a bunch of reasons why innovator story telling fails to hit the mark. Here are some common issues;

Prioritisation - innovators are typically focused on developing and launching their product or service, and may not prioritise crafting a compelling narrative to communicate their vision and mission to potential customers and investors.

Failure To Look At Things Through The Lens Of Customers - innovators may not have a clear understanding of their target audience, what are their most important priorities, and how their product or service can address those needs. Without this understanding, it can be difficult to create a story that resonates and effectively communicates the value proposition.

Ignoring The Bigger Picture - very often innovators do not fully explore the bigger picture of the cause and effect/impact that their solution can have on the broader universe of customers processes and systems. This means that golden nuggets of value get overlooked in the storyline they create.??

Differentiation - they may also struggle with standing out in a crowded market, where there may be many other companies offering similar products or services. In order to differentiate themselves and capture the attention of potential customers and investors, innovators need to have a unique and compelling story that sets them apart from the competition.

Communication Disconnects - in some situations the communication between innovators and the folks tasked with bringing the companies storyline to life is broken. As a consequence the story that gets told to the outside world does not articulate the full value that product and services can bring to their audience. Innovators may also fail to capture critical customer needs that are important to address in their products & services in order to remain competitive and/or create a competitive advantage.?

Limited Resources - innovators often have limited resources, skills gaps and may not have a dedicated marketing or communications team, which can make it challenging to develop and execute a cohesive and effective storytelling strategy.

Any of this sound familiar? If so read on to explore how you might address these challenges.?

Key Pillars For Success ?

Based on my own experience, I would strongly recommend that you take onboard the following points as a collective, versus adopting one or two tactics, in order to maximise your chances of success. ?

Prioritisation - The answer here is simple. Make storytelling a priority. It will have a profound impact on your organisations results. ?

Collaboration - Organisations often have all of the answers they need to build their storyline but the folks with different pieces of the knowledge don’t collaborate effectively. Get the experts in your organisation working together on the challenge, including engineers, product management, marketing and sales. Formalise the process by creating a team and have them meet on a regular basis to work on “The Project”.?

Align What You Do With The Initiatives That Are Of The Highest Importance To Customers - What are the initiatives that are top of mind for organisations in your target market, where your solution can have a material impact on achieving the desired outcome? Because of their importance these initiatives typically command the most attention and investment so clearly aligning your story with these is important.

Examples might include improving customer experiences, increasing revenue, improving productivity, saving money, retaining & developing staff, meeting regulatory requirements….

Spend time as a group to establish what is important to your target audience. Once you have the answers that you believe are relevant come up with a headline statement that captures the essence of the initiatives along with your relevance. These statement are often referred to as value drivers.

It’s important you establish more than one to avoid being dismissed, but no more than 4-5 value drivers. Any more than that and it becomes more difficult for customers and your own customer facing staff to understand and retain. These will become the anchors in your story telling.?

Before & After - In the context of each value driver describing the before and after picture is a powerful way to illustrate why the current mode of operation is not optimal, along side a vision of how the future can be improved by working with your organisation. In this context exploring the consequences of the before and after scenarios is important to highlight the negative effects of continuing as is versus the benefits that can be realised through working with your organisation. ?

Required Capabilities - by laying out the capabilities that are required to achieve the benefits in?the “After Picture” we define a baseline that can be used by customers to compare our offering against alternative approaches. This can also be used as a means to illustrate to customers what is required to deliver the better outcome, as well as provide a benchmark to help customers?differentiate your organisation from alternative approaches to achieve the outcomes outlined in the picture you created for the vision of the future. ??

Measuring The Impact - having explored how your products and services address the value drivers, you have picked, it is also important to explore the impact that your offering will have on KPIs in the customers world. Ultimately someone somewhere in the customers organisation will need to sign off on an investment, so helping stakeholders to quantity the impact of your solution using empirical data is critical to streamline and remove uncertainty from this process.??

Proof - Gather as much proof as possible so that prospective customers have verifiable evidence to support the case for investing in your products and services. Don’t be shy in asking every customer that signs up to participate in PR to support this process and offer incentives to each one, to support this process on an ongoing basis.?

Get Some Help - If a lack of experience or resource constraints are holding you back, get some help from the outside to augment your capabilities to facilitate the process first time round. It is also often helpful to have someone from the outside involved who is not involved in your day to day business to challenge your thinking ??

Out of this process you will create a foundation of content that can be used consistently across the different channels you use to communicate your story with customers, partners and investors. ?

The Net Effect?

Getting your organisations storyline right is critical to maximise your success. If you get it right you can;?

• Increase the probability of being discovered by attaching your offerings to customer initiatives that command the greatest attention and investment?
• Differentiate your company from your competitors
• Improve the productivity of your team so they have to do less work to convince prospective customers to take the next steps
• Increase conversion ratios from initial interest, to qualified opportunities, to proof of concepts, to business case creation & approval, to closed business and repeat business?
• Increase the value that customers perceive laying the ground so that you can negotiate from a position of strength and end up giving away less when you get to procurement?

If you have any questions on this topic or need help feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.?