Why Story Is the CEO's Job

Three weeks ago, I received a call from the VP of marketing at a well-known Series B tech company funded by prominent Silicon Valley venture investors.

“We need strategic messaging and positioning help,” he said. “Are you available?”

I visited the company’s website, and sure enough, crucial elements of the narrative were unclear or missing. The marketing VP concurred with that assessment, describing how a lack of alignment around the company story was making life difficult for him and his team.

“It’s hard to build great content and run great campaigns,” he told me, “when there’s no real consensus about who you’re targeting and how to describe what you’re offering.”

I suspected the lack of a clear story was causing pain in other departments as well. How can the product team prioritize features if the story is unclear? How can HR recruit great people? How can salespeople sell?

There’s nothing I love more than helping leadership teams get clear on the strategic story, so I asked my standard bunch of qualification questions. Everything seemed OK, until this one:

Will your CEO participate in all of our weekly sessions?

“Well,” the marketing VP said, “he’s heads-down in fundraising mode right now, so he’ll be in and out. But he asked me to keep him posted on what we come up with.”

I asked the marketing VP if there was anything he could do to gain his CEO’s full, committed participation.

“Not likely,” he said. “I’ve tried to nail him down on this story stuff before, but it’s just not his thing. He’s really busy.”

With that, I told him I would not be able to take on the project.

Why I only accept strategic messaging work if the CEO leads it or actively participates

Strategic messaging involves words, so perhaps that’s why some CEOs delegate it to their marketing departments. And there’s nothing wrong with marketing leaders running the process, since they’re often a company’s storytelling center-of-excellence.

But as I’ve noted before, conversations about messaging are really conversations about strategy. As Ben Horowitz, co-founder and partner at Andreessen Horowtiz, says:

The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make your story better, you make the strategy better.
—Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz

That truth alone, borne out by my experience, suggests that strategic messaging projects are doomed to fail unless the CEO leads them or participates fully.

However, after I turned down the work, the marketing VP asked why. So to fully explain myself, I sent him the Horowitz quote, as well as an abridged version of the following 7 points:

#1. Only a CEO has the authority to define a company’s high-level strategic story.

In order for a story to truly function as a strategic asset, it has to guide everything that everyone at the company does. That includes sales and marketing, of course, but also fundraising, recruiting and product backlog prioritization. No one besides the CEO (or whatever the organizational leader is called) has the cross-functional authority to tell everyone, “This is how we want to change the world.” Effective strategic messaging and positioning must lay that out.

#2. Only a CEO can empower a team to make the big, hairy choices that great strategic messaging requires.

In the course of building effective strategic messaging, your leadership team will have to make difficult and potentially controversial decisions. Who, exactly, is your primary target customer (and who is not)? What, above all, is the change in those people’s lives you’re committed to bringing about? Only the CEO can nurture an environment in which it’s OK to take a clear stand on those questions. With the CEO in the room, odds increase dramatically that you’ll arrive at a powerful, streamlined story that guides everyone towards a common definition of success. Without the CEO, you’re more likely to wind up with a vague, bloated mess that’s designed to please everyone but actually helps no one.

#3. Only a CEO can bring product and engineering resources to bear that make the story credible.

As a leadership team coalesces around a promising strategic story, the team may gradually come to the realization that its product lacks capabilities necessary for the story to be credible. (For example, a pillar of the story may be access through third-party platforms that the product doesn’t yet support.) At this point, many teams hesitate, wondering if they’ve just been deluding themselves: Is the story they’ve created nothing but pure fantasy until those product improvements arrive? Over and over, I’ve seen CEOs step in at this critical juncture and move things along by challenging product and engineering leaders with a question that marketing VPs, alone, can’t ask: “Folks, how can we make these product changes happen by the time we introduce this new strategic messaging?”

#4. Only a CEO can manage “story backlash.”

When you roll out new, well-crafted strategic messaging to an entire company, most people will love you for it because you’ll be helping them succeed in their roles. But others may react angrily or defensively. That’s because the story, by definition, makes strategic choices clear, laying them bare for everyone to see, and it’s possible that not everyone will agree with those choices. I call the resulting resistance “story backlash.” The CEO can usually get everyone past the backlash by saying, “This is our best shot at the strategic story for the next X months, and we’ll hone it after that as we learn more.” However, in extreme cases, the CEO may be forced to say something to the effect of, “If you can’t embrace the story essentially as we’ve defined it, maybe this isn’t the right place for you.”

#5. The CEO’s input is crucial for building great strategic messaging.

In my work with more than 40 companies on strategic messaging and positioning, I’ve discovered that the best messaging components?—?the ones that win deals, get teams excited, and spur growth?—?almost always come from the mouths of either customers or CEOs. In the case of CEOs, that’s because they’ve had to tell some version company story hundreds of times, and consciously or not, they’ve A/B-tested dozens of variations to learn which words and ideas resonate best with prospects, investors, reporters, and job candidates. Crafting new strategic messaging without your CEO in the room is like gathering data on website visitors and then throwing it out when you do a redesign?—?you miss out on all kinds of valuable lessons. When I lead a strategic messaging and positioning project, I want direct access to the CEO’s experience, judgement and learning around the story.

#6. As the company’s primary spokesperson, marketer, and salesperson, a CEO has to be fluent in the story, and the best way to achieve that is by owning its creation.

As de facto chief salesperson, chief marketer, and chief spokesperson, the CEO has to be totally comfortable telling the company story with customers, prospects, investors, the press, and every other audience that matters. The CEO is far more likely to achieve that if he/she plays an active role in the story’s creation. Simply handing him or her a script to approve and memorize won’t cut it.

#7. Now investors, too, want CEOs to own the story (and tell it well).

It used to be a matter of opinion that investors preferred to fund CEOs who could tell a consistent, compelling story that powers everything from fundraising to business development. But now, prominent venture investors like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley are explicitly saying that's what they're looking for:

…[To grow your company,] you will need to tell your company’s story in high-stakes situations over and over again. Because of this, venture capitalists place huge positive weight on how good you are at this skill. The great storytellers…are going to recruit better, they will be darlings in the press, they are going to raise money more easily and at higher prices, they are going to close amazing business developer partnerships, and they are going to have a strong and cohesive corporate culture. Perhaps more to the point, they are more likely to deliver a positive investment return.
—Bill Gurley, Benchmark

What do you do if your CEO (still) isn’t interested in getting the strategic story straight?

Over the course of my career, I’ve held senior product management and marketing roles at several fast-growing companies (Skype, Mashery, etc.), where I developed an appreciation for how valuable it is when the CEO leads the definition and dissemination of the strategic story.

At other companies where I worked, the CEO was not interested in clarifying the strategic story or didn’t naturally do a good job of it. In some cases, colleagues and I were able to use some version of the points above to get the CEO to either take it on or bring in help.

“What if our CEO still doesn’t buy into that,” the VP of marketing asked.

“Keep trying,” I said. "Or quit and find one who does."

About Andy Raskin:
I help leaders craft strategic stories that improve fundraising, sales, marketing, product, and recruiting. My clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling workshops at Uber, General Assembly, HourlyNerd, Heavybit Industries and Stanford. To learn more and get in touch, visit https://andyraskin.com.