Below I've summarised Andy Raskin's posts to understand how he helps build narratives for companies including examples and key points. They work because they use stakes, not problems, they make the client the hero and they begin with change rather than pain. Strategic sales narratives are stories that compel customers to understand why they need a product. They didn’t see it as urgent.Everyone says to focus on the customer "pain" or "problem" but what if most people are not experiencing much pain? They just get on with things. Talk to salespeople, or even early-stage founders, when they lose deals, what’s the biggest reason? It’s not competitors. That I think is the more important focus. The bigger focus is why is the status quo narrative a road to ruin, and that’s really the focus. In fact, that’s usually not my focus because I think people are kind of skeptical about claims like that. And also by positioning, we’re not only talking about why and how we’re better than competitors. What I would say is strategic narrative is positioning and I think it’s the ideal format (again sales deck more specifically) to express your positioning decisions. The strategic narrative, if we built it properly is the best way to express your decisions about the things you mentioned, like who the customer is, all this stuff. My view is that great, do all this market research, pricing research, get to know who your customer is, all this stuff, and boil that all down into the strategic narrative. So I guess I have two issues with that traditional thing. It’s not always so clear if it’s just sort of, here’s what happened to me as a founder. If the leader can do that, then it should be pretty clear for whether it’s the brand manager, the product team, or whoever to then apply this as their north star. Of course, I think this is the job of the leader to do first for the team, not to place that burden on the team. It’s about the customer and their world and I think that’s really the first step – to first pull that out. When we’re talking about the broader context, the founder’s story and the strategic narrative are not necessarily the same, or at least the strategic narrative has to be sometimes teased out of that founder’s story so that it’s something where it’s not really about the founder anymore. Often that is related to the strategic narrative because they probably experienced the shift in the world themselves and they can talk to it personally. So when the team is small, it makes a lot of sense that the founder is in all the sales calls and telling that story about how they founded the company. They hadn’t even built out much of the product yet, but he wanted to do this because he was like, “Yes, this is how we’re going to know what to build and that kind of stuff.” I just find it really gratifying and really interesting.Īgain, like the founder’s story, it often makes sense if the founder is telling it. At first, he was like, “Why am I participating in this exercise? This seems like a sales and marketing thing.” By the end of it, he was like, “Andy, this story is now how I manage the prioritization of my backlog, which features we’re going to build first.” He then became a CEO of a company and then I worked with their team and with them, it was like pretty early on. I first had that experience with a team where the Head of Product had come from Google. The big one is product evolution that we just started with thinking this was going to be about sales and it became really clear as we’re building this narrative, this is actually creating a roadmap for us. Sales is a little different because I think you can have a structure that can work over lots and lots of people you’ll be talking to over the years.īut I think the bigger thing that I hear from CEOs is that it just becomes this north star for everything. And then the investors, “No, I hate that way”. I don’t want to be responsible for telling somebody, “You should structure it this way”. I’ve been a little to dive too much into giving advice for investor pitches for the reason that investors can be really picky about how exactly they want it. So this shift is really creating the case that there’s just this huge market now for their stuff. And so Amplitude sells software for measuring how users are using software. The shift they mentioned is now every product is digital or every product is software. It’s a company called Amplitude, where they pitched their series-C deck and they put it out there. It has an example of how this change is used in an investor deck. Yeah, I did write a post called ‘ Great Pitches Start With Chang e‘, and that post goes a little more into this change.
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