Storytelling for Success: How to Design a Convincing Product Narrative (5 Steps)

Beyond Competitor-Based Positioning: The Narrative Approach

Andy Raskin: It’s really about how you’re creating urgency in the buyer’s mind to change. So the normal way I think we look at positioning is it’s how do we position ourselves against competitors? And in fact, this is really the. The view. Starting in around the 80s, you see some of the big authors about positioning, namely recent Trout, who wrote the kind of seminal book on positioning, talk a lot about how positioning is. Is basically war. They use this. This guiding metaphor of war and that war. And it’s a war of you against your competitors, the alternatives. And I think what that has led us to is a place where, you know, marketing becomes essentially claim spouting, like, why are we the best? And what I’ve found is that, you know, the teams that are really winning, the ones who are creating categories, who are leading categories, are doing something different. And it’s really about a war against the status quo or status quo kind of thinking and approach. And so I really see positioning first and foremost, not as, of course, first and foremost, not as a how are we different from them, our competitors, but how is the game you have to play different from the game you used to have to play?

Louis: Right. And I think that’s something that comes up a lot.

Andy Raskin: Right.

Louis: And I see that to be the biggest mistake companies make when they try to think of positioning or messaging is that they straightaway come to their competitors and direct competitors who they think are the main threat to their business. When in fact, as you said, status quo is usually the biggest threat. It’s actually people not knowing anything about your product or company. It’s usually people who’ve never heard from you, who’ve never considered you. And if you really want to make a shift in the market, what you want to do is tell them a story that encouraged them to make a change. Right. And move away from the status quo. Right?

Andy Raskin: Absolutely. Like, I lead workshops all the time, and I’ll always ask the salespeople in the room, you know, what’s the number one reason you lose a deal? It’s not competitors. It’s not that we lost to someone else. It’s just that the prospect didn’t decided not to act at all or is just sort of dragging their feet. This really gets back to the book that I think really framed all of modern marketing, which is Crossing the Chasm. And, you know, Crossing the Chasm is all about how we have to talk differently to the mainstream folks, how the early folks are. They’re almost going to buy without no matter what you say. And you know, unfortunately, I think even in that book, the prescription for how we talk is very much that kind of descriptive, hey, here’s how we’re different from the alternatives. Whereas I think what’s really what I see as effective is what has changed in the world such that there’s kind of a new approach to winning.

Louis: So can you give us one example of each? So one example of a company that does what we would call narrative positioning properly and another one that does descriptive positioning briefly. So we can see the difference between the two.

Drift vs Traditional Chat: A Case Study in Narrative Positioning

Andy Raskin: Well, you know, one that stands out for me. I probably talk and write about them too much these days, but is certainly Drift, you know, and I think we could do both examples here. You know, Drift came into a very crowded market. You know, if you look at sort of what their product was when they started, I don’t know, I don’t know exactly. But I’m guessing there were probably dozens of other companies who were doing chat on your website and you know, those other companies, if you looked at, I’m not going to name names, but if you looked at their positioning and their messaging, it’s all about, hey, why we’re better at this, why our features are great, all this stuff. And Drift did something very different. They stepped back and said, hey, the way you’re playing the game is no longer viable. They saying, hey, now people expect you to be there immediately. Now they expect a conversation type interface rather than a fill out a form and wait interface. And so they structured the whole thing from a kind of change on the demand side in what people are expecting and very specific about it. Not just, hey, things are changing, expectations are changing, but very specifically about how. And their whole conversational marketing category that they’ve built is all based on this narrative. It’s not a narrative about Drift’s product. I’m sure that they certainly have a lot of stuff where they’re touting their product. I’m not saying that that’s not part of it, but the overall framing is not that. The overall framing is this, this what I call the new game, that conversational marketing is the way to win.

Louis: And do you have an example of a company that doesn’t use that and use more descriptive positioning? We don’t have to necessarily criticize them or anything, but maybe describing another way, another company does it, descriptive way.

Andy Raskin: I’m not thinking of one offhand and I think I would feel uncomfortable, kind of like calling somebody out. But like I said, virtually all of the competitors in that, in Drift space who were there before them, I think we’re taking that approach, which is, hey, you have a problem. So it’s the problem solution approach. You have a problem which is something like, you know, you want to connect to someone on your website, and here’s our solution, and here’s why that is a better solution than others for doing that. What Drift did was start from a completely different place, which. Which was not a problem really, but a shift in the world.

Louis: Right. And another company that comes to mind that did that really well in the past is Salesforce with. There are no software, I think. No, no. What was it? I’m gonna fuck it up.

Andy Raskin: Yeah, no software. No software. Yeah, exactly. And that is, I think, Salesforce, I think, is the modern example of this. Benioff comes and says, hey, this game, this software game you’re playing, that’s over. And this new cloud game is the way that the winners are winning. It’s no accident that I think, you know, the leaders at Zora, which is another example and one that I wrote about, all came from Salesforce. So they, they, they inherited that kind of narrative positioning DNA.

Louis: Right. And so together today, what I want to really do is kind of go through a step by step and using the framework you use with your clients to help people listening right now to actually come up with narrative positioning. But before that, I want to touch on one last thing. So I’ve developed positioning for companies before. Right. And what I found to be the most difficult part is the time it takes to measure success. Right. And I want to ask you about that because what I feel is successful sometimes in the positioning work that you do is the clarity it brings firsthand inside the company, right? From the CEO to the CMO to the people. But then it takes a while to actually be used in marketing materials and everywhere else. So how do you measure success for an activity like that that could take months or even years sometimes to materialize?

Measuring Success: Why Sales Deck Testing Beats AB Testing

Andy Raskin: Well, this is a great question, and I’ve written before, my stance about that sort of measurement of this is, is that we’re not in the domain of kind of AB testing. You know, this is a strategic narrative that is going to take years to play out. That said, there I think are a few things about sort of a few things I’ve learned about how to kind of keep it on the track to success and also to measure it. So one of the things that I started doing in my career, I’d been on the receiving end of a lot of positioning work, often it would come like the deliverable would be some chart of messages, would be a positioning statement, or it would be like, okay, here’s the problem we solve, here’s how we solve it, here’s why we’re better than the others. Basically, it was an asset that customers never saw. The idea was going to be a foundational story thing that when we did things that customers see, like a sales deck, like a website, we were supposed to kind of refer back to it and then build those things so that they’d have that DNA in there. And what I found was that never happened. We’d, the leadership team would get excited about some positioning, some framework, some brand new. So there’s all these different shapes, like pyramid or house or whatever it is. And then we’d sort of feel like we’d starting from scratch when we actually built the things that customers see. So I decided in my work to go straight to something that customers see as the instrument of building the messaging. And usually not always, but usually that’s the sales deck, which is a weird thing. Cause this is a podcast for marketers. And you know, most people think of this work as marketing work. I think of it as leadership work that the CEO has to lead this. And so I’m asking in my engagements the CEO with the leadership team support, of course, sales and marketing as well, to build this narrative, build the sales deck, basically. Sometimes it’s not the sales deck, but sometimes it’s another asset, but usually it’s that. And you know, you said like, how do we get it to spread around? I think this sales first approach is really important. Like the normal approach is marketing builds it and then kind of pushes it on sales, like at the sales kickoff or something. And what I found to be really valuable is to, before we kind of roll it out before we commit to it, is to start testing it in sales. And by testing, I mean are we getting engagement in sales that we weren’t getting before? Are we getting the head nods? Are we getting, you know, is the sales cycle kind of feel like it’s shrinking or can we measure that? Usually that’s the lowest hanging fruit, right? If we can, then let’s start telling that story everywhere rather than the other way around.

Louis: Yeah. Okay, so lowest hanging fruit is like updating the sales presentation and straight away showing that to clients or to prospect and making sure that it connects with them. You mentioned a few metrics, such as is it easier to close the deal? Is the time to close the deal, is it shorter than before? And then what if you don’t have a sales team. Would you say, for example, you use the homepage of the website and do an A B test there? How do you do it when there is no sales team? Sales team, and it’s a different model?

Andy Raskin: I’ve definitely done it in that case where we use the homepage. But the homepage is tricky because. Or the website is tricky because the website has other missions that it has to accomplish. It has to get kind of clicked through and may even have other kind of missions that it needs to be successful at, aside from kind of like telling this broad story. So it’s not always the best. Sometimes we use like a CEO keynote as the structure and then try and distill the points from that into the website. But I have done all of those things, use all of those assets as the asset for building the story. I think the most important thing, though, is that it’s a narrative asset rather than a descriptive asset. And it’s something that customers see that that is, that doubles as the messaging structure. Some people would say, like, hey, if you’re just building the sales deck, or just then that means you’re not doing work around talking to customers, or you’re not doing some like, specific, like, important work around crafting the messaging. No, we could do all that work. It’s just that when we get the story, we’re forcing ourselves to see, can we lay it out in a way that makes sense in a narrative format. And that’s going to work in sales, right?

Louis: So let’s say you work with a client for like three months, and then at the end you deliver this narrative. Everyone is happy. So how do you know you’ve been successful? Is there one metric where, you know, I’ve been successful? Is it the qualitative metric whereby everyone is behind this narrative? Is it because the sales deck enables you to shorten the sales cycle? Do you have one core metric that you go back to all the time to feel you’ve done a good job?

Andy Raskin: Well, first of all, three months I think would be way too long because that’s. By the time we get to the end of three months, things have changed. So I usually try to, like, by the end of around six weeks, we’ve actually done a bunch of iterations and we’ve taken it out into the field and done iterations in the field. So I like to work about twice as fast as that speed you’re talking about. I think, you know, the CEO of Pantheon, his name is Zach Rosen, I think put it best, he said, you know, Getting the story was, was really valuable. But what was more valuable in the work we did together was a process for keeping our team aligned on what the story is. So, you know, yes, hopefully we can keep get to a story that that’s going to last us for years, that’s going to power all that stuff. But a lot of times it’s going to have to change. And for me, what I see as success is not only that the team is using those messages that we’re starting to see those messages picked up in media. One team I just worked with, the CEO just sent me a link to article where the headline of the article was essentially exactly the messaging we had built. And this came from that reporter talking to them, but also that the team is. So I asked the team to create a strategic narrative team led by the CEO. So it’s usually CEO, head of sales, marketing, usually a few others and that they continue meeting and continue iterating on this thing even after I’m gone. Sometimes I come back and kind of help if they get to a rough spot, but that they have a structure for improving it once they feel good about it.

Louis: So now let’s talk about this six weeks period. I like the fact that you said three months is too long. I agree it might be too long. So let’s consider the fact for the next few minutes that you are starting with a new client, right? They struggle with their positioning their messaging and you come in. So let’s go about it step by step in a way that listeners right now listening to this can take advice from you and apply that to their business. So you come into a new business. What is the first step? What is the first thing you do for them?

The Five-Part Strategic Narrative Framework

Andy Raskin: In a bunch of posts, I’ve laid out a framework that I use for aligning the team on the narrative. And in that framework there’s, there’s kind of five pieces. And the whole work to me is identifying what those pieces are. It happens differently. I do it that my process is kind of different and depending on the size of the company and kind of few other factors. For instance, like right now I’m working with a team that’s a series, like a large series a they, they’ve raised like 15 million and then also a public household Internet company, CEO so and that person’s leadership team. So different kind of process. But we’re looking to identify these five pieces. And the first piece is what is this change and specifically what is the old game and what is the new game that your audience is going to have to Play to win. Great example of this comes from the post I wrote about Zuora. It’s called the greatest sales deck I’ve ever seen. Zuora says, hey, that thing where you sell one off products to people and have a kind of a transactional relationship with them. The idea you’re going to sell them DVDs, one off, that’s over. The new game is Subscription Spotify. You’re going to sell them, you know, always on access to whatever they want and they’re going to pay for that kind of the use of things without the hassle of the ownership of things. Defining that old game, new game I think is really the frame for the whole thing. And sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes more, but we spend a lot of time on that.

Louis: Okay, so that’s the first one. What are the four others?

Andy Raskin: Yeah, so there’s this great moment. There’s a lot of talk about how the company’s story should be like a movie. And I think you can go overboard in that. We are not building a three act screenplay here. That said, there’s something really interesting we can learn from the beginning of movies and particularly, you know, so there’s this thing that happens in a lot of movies at the beginning where I’ll use Star wars as an example only because a lot of people have seen it. Luke has been bellyaching, complaining about he wants to have adventure, all this stuff. And Obi Wan comes to him and says, hey, let’s go have an adventure. Come with me to this planet called Alderaan. I’ll teach you how to be a pilot, the Force, the whole thing. And what does Luke say? Luke says, oh, you know what, it’s getting late, I have to go home. He basically says no. And in workshops I always say, who does this remind you of? And of course everyone, especially salespeople will raise their hand and say, oh, the reluctant buyer. And I think there’s something very similar going on in both cases where the person, whether it’s Luke or the people we’re meeting in sales, they’re actually, for all their complaining, they’re actually kind of okay. They’re not actually in pain. We talk about what are their pain points or selling to pain that most of these people are not in pain, otherwise they really would have bought already. And so what happens in. And they see that the future too is probably everything. They’re probably always going to be okay. Like why change? Why rock the boat? I mean, this is what the economists call loss aversion. Why risk? Even though there might be some upside that I’m potentially seeing. Why risk that if there’s going to be a potential downside? And so what we have to do is get them to see their world and the future differently. You know, in Star wars, how does George Lucas do that? He has the Empire bomb Luke’s parents or his foster parents and kill them. And now Luke sees the future very differently. And we as the audience see too. Of course, you know, probably he’s going to be dead because he’s like a sort of, like, bratty kid. But then, you know, there’s this other game that he’s being invited to play. Play, you could call it the, the Grown Up Game. You know, he’s been sort of playing the kid game and Obi Wan, you know, invites him to that. So what do we have to do? We have to kill the parents of the, of the prospects. And, you know, of course, figuratively, what, what do we mean by that is we have to show them that there are indeed stakes, that, that this new game is the one that the winners are playing and that not playing it and not playing it well is a road to ruin, that you’re going to lose.

Creating Urgency: Killing the Parents (Figuratively)

Louis: Right, so it’s about urgency, right? It’s really about defining the game, the old game versus the new game, and then giving reasons to shake your boat and like, actually seek discomfort or actually changing the status quo. Giving reasons enough to track this, do something to challenge the status quo.

Andy Raskin: Yeah, yeah, there’s, there’s a great, you know, FOMO element here. You know, it’s not always possible, but one of the things we like to do is show, hey, look at all the people. Look at all the companies or people are, who are winning. And, you know, for, in Zuora’s case, they say, hey, look at all the new companies that are, you know, thriving and creating, disrupting and creating the value. They’re all, you know, subscription or, you know, what they call usership, companies versus ownership. They’re, they’re selling you the services rather than the asset ownership.

Louis: Right.

Andy Raskin: Look at the companies who are not doing that. Oh, they’re going out of business, so they’re getting disrupted. So, you know, it really is, in a way, a kind of life and death portrayal. We don’t have to always be that. That extreme, but close, as close as we can get without it still feeling credible.

Louis: And here we are naturally leveraging a few psychological principles about the way we are built internally. The urgency, as you said, the storytelling elements. There’s a lot there that is really rooted in people’s psychology and Behavior.

Andy Raskin: Absolutely. And if you just do the sort of problem solution, you know, what’s the problem? Here’s our solution. You miss out on all that. You know, you only get that for the people who kind of very, very directly experience the problem. And those people, you know, those are the people who really are in pain, who are, you know, running to the emergency room for treatment. It’s the others who we need to get. And so, yeah, absolutely.

Louis: And then the three other. What are the three other parameters? So I’m guessing one of them is probably down to what you mentioned before about starting from the CEO all the way down.

Andy Raskin: Well, that’s more of a process thing about how I run it. Yeah, I do. As an aside. Yeah, I do always ask the CEO to lead this. And that’s not always a popular ask, that not every CEO is up for doing this. I used to say, okay, I’ll work with whoever you want to appoint. And I stopped doing that. I found that when I did that, the results were not as good and the team didn’t seem to own it as much. And when it went really well, the CEO was sort of like really running it and really taking it on. But the next piece, the third piece of it of the framework, since sounded like you wanted to hear those pieces is for every game, there’s a kind of object of the game, a goal, and the next piece is really stating that. And that goal can really act, in my opinion, as the mission statement, not the mission statement in company centric terms, but in customer centric terms. So for. For Zuora, they, I think, and often this works really nicely as the top line on the website. What some people call the tagline, although I really don’t like that phrase. But the, you know, they, hey, turn your customers into subscribers. You know, turn all them into subscribers. And it’s a kind of asymptotically achievable. You know, you never really quite get their goal state. For a while, Airbnb had this message live there. You know what? If you know, that is the goal state that I think for their customers, that drives really everything that Airbnb does.

The Object of the Game: Customer-Centric Mission Statements

Louis: So if everyone was playing the game, this would be the results kind of.

Andy Raskin: Well, it’s. If you are playing. If your customer, you’re asking your customer to play the game, and you’re saying, hey, if you know to win at this game, this is where you have to get. This is where you want to get living there. And if you want to play another game where you’re just staying there, that’s not going to be as. That’s going to be a losing game now.

Louis: Okay, so what is the change? What is the reason for the change to make people go and change from the status quo to this? What is the object of the game, the ultimate goal? What is the number four?

Andy Raskin: The fourth one is now, we haven’t talked about really the product yet, and us and our role. Here’s where we can start to come in. In every game, there are rules and constraints and obstacles. If your customer could just sort of win that game without any help, well, there’s no reason for you, so I’m sure. So I know already that there are obstacles to the goal, to the finish line, hurdles that they’ll have to jump over to get there. And we want to name these. So, hey, what’s so hard about living there? What’s so hard about turning customers into subscribers and really kind of flesh that out? And then we can now talk about how our product helps us get over those. Those. Each of those hurdles, you know, this is really in some ways the problem solution that we start with in the traditional framework. But now, you know, hurdles and getting over them, or what I sometimes say is monsters and. And tools for slaying them, is a different. Has much more meaning because now these problems aren’t just sort of disembodied. They’re. They’re stopping us from getting to some goal state, some promised land.

Louis: Right?

Andy Raskin: And now, you know, the product has. Or the service or whatever has emotional resonance. It’s like the lightsaber. You know, when Luke first sees the lightsaber, it’s kind of cool, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t really have any emotional resonance. But then when he starts, you know, using it to start getting to the places where he wants to get, then it’s. It’s. It’s a very. It becomes a very dear thing to him and to us in the audience.

Louis: Okay, so that’s really interesting. Those four, like, criteria or four parameters or whatever you want to call them so far. What is the last one?

Andy Raskin: Last one is just simply proof. So even if we’ve laid out those other four really well, we’re still going to have skepticism, and hopefully we do, because this object of the game that we’re talking about, what I sometimes call this promised land, should be really desirable, obviously, but also should be really hard to reach. There should be like, really, I’m going to live there. You can imagine people thinking that back when they first started hearing about that game, really, somebody’s going to come pick me up, I’m going to just tap a button. I’m going to ride from somebody who doesn’t have a taxi license, and that’s all going to work out. Still some fear, I think, about that obstacle. We need to show stories, customer success stories of people who have won the game or at least are on their way to winning.

Louis: Right.

Andy Raskin: And so this is the people who will. Who will talk about how we’ve helped them, how we’ve helped them get to play that new game.

Louis: So thanks for going through that with me. So, to summarize, what is the old game? What is the new game? What are the reasons to act now? What is the ultimate goal of this game? What is the object of the game, as you mentioned, what are the hurdles and obstacles? And how does your product overcome, help you overcome those? And finally, what’s the proof? Right, so that’s kind of your system, that’s your checklist that you like to tick with every client?

Andy Raskin: Yep, pretty much. Yep.

Louis: So now let’s go back to this exercise. Right. You mentioned that you do work with different type of clients and whatever. But for the purpose of this exercise, let’s try to pick a typical client, the typical size of company or status or nature of the company where you can actually give me a process or some sort of pointers that show this is how I go about it. I’m pretty sure you have some similarities between clients that you can flesh out in this podcast. So if you go back to the first step that you would take, is it to meet the CEO and the leadership? Is it to straightaway talk to customers? Is it to talk to sales? How do you go about fleshing out those five items you just explained there?

Six-Week Process: From CEO Workshop to Field Testing

Andy Raskin: Yeah, so I’m always kind of polishing this process, and it really does change quite a bit as I learn new stuff. Some things that I’d say are I’ll try to pick out the things that are common. So one of the things is I like to start with the leadership team as a group and hear from them. What are the pieces of this story? What is this old game, new game? What are all these different pieces that we’re talking about? And you can imagine that in a group, once you get a certain number of people, we come out of this with a lot of notes, like a lot of board notes. Even if there’s alignment on the general idea, people have different words for expressing things or different words will mean different things to different people. So we come out with a lot of ideas. And then the next thing I like to do is work with the CEO. So two things next one is to work with the CEO on narrowing all this down to a draft to a draft flow, usually of the sales deck. And at the same time, I asked the team to start asking essentially the same questions. Those five pieces, or the four ones, because the fifth one is really about customer stories, is start having them ask those to customers and seeing what they say. Because often the customers will give us literally the exact words that we want to use. And at a minimum, they’ll kind of give us some validation of what we were thinking about. I’ll give you an example. Like, so there’s a team called Boutrich in San Francisco that they help other teams do customer survey and you know, like NPS type surveys, like from within their apps. And we were trying to think of this kind of what I’d now call the object of the game statement for the. That’s going to appear at the top of their website and in their sales stuff. And we couldn’t think of one that, that didn’t seem really trite, like retain your customers or something. And so we were interviewing one of their customers and just before the interview, we looked at his LinkedIn profile and his bio line said, my mission is to win customers for life. And that win customers for life basically became that object of the game statement. And it does totally fit into that whole change around, around subscription relationships that now, you know, instead of selling someone, you know, a car, you actually are selling them a relationship if, you know, subscriptions, as they start to take on a relationship for their entire life about car ownership or car services.

Louis: Right, right.

Andy Raskin: So we work on that and then we get all that stuff. And I’m. And I work with the CEO to kind of take all this information and boil it down to a draft. And then I have the CEO present that draft to the team. This is usually like a week after that first session and the team gets to sort of say for. See it for the first time and say what’s working and not working. And by the way, this is always the low point of every engagement I do because everyone had all these amazing ideas and now they’ve been. We’ve thrown out 98% of them by necessity to get to something clean. And there’s a lot of feelings about that. And the good news is the team is always right. The. The threat, not about every little single thing, but the thrust of their requests for, for kind of a course correction always makes it a lot better. And so CEO and I, by design, go back to the drawing board and try to incorporate some of that stuff as we get closer. We then design it so that we can actually go out on, like, take it out on if it’s a sales deck, sales calls, if it’s a CEO keynote, some, you know, talks, and then we get some feedback about how it’s playing in the wild and, and start tweaking it.

Louis: All right. Okay. So thanks for going through that. Let me. I know you might have a bit more steps, but I’m going to come back to the first one to start with, so.

Andy Raskin: Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

Louis: For people who are in, like, listening to that right now and want to go through this exercise, you would recommend them to put in the same room the CEO and leadership. Right. And you try to have customer success, sales, marketing, ops, support. I mean, any. All departments represented in this meeting, or is it a selected few?

Andy Raskin: I usually leave it up to the CEO who the CEO wants there, but I do limit it to usually around five or six people total. I find that if it gets more than that, then we’re going to really have a problem aligning everybody.

Louis: Right.

Andy Raskin: So we need to, you know, not to say that those people aren’t important too, beyond that circle, but we’ll have to kind of go in successive waves, kind of ripple out from that middle group, get them aligned, and then kind of take the next group, kind of get them aligned, and bring it out like that.

Louis: So if you had to select one question that you really love asking during this phase, like, what is it? Like, what is the exact question you like to ask that seems to bring the most discussions and the most heated debates?

The Most Important Question That Sparks Heated Debates

Andy Raskin: I think it really is this question about what is the new game? And I think the reason that it’s so. The discussion around it is so interesting is there’s a lot of ways you could sort of name it. You could pick something very, very broad. It’s almost like a journalistic exercise. So if we pick something too broad, too high, then we’re going to lose interest of the people, you know, the audiences we’re talking to. And if it’s too narrow, it’s just sort of not. Not relevant to enough folks. So finding that sweet spot is, is really, really important. And often it comes. It’s. It’s less about a certain question that I ask, but it’s more about me listening as the discussion starts to unfold for what I kind of think of like as the nugget. Like, there’s usually the team will have some sort of first answers to this thing, and it won’t Be very satisfying. And then there will be a discussion. Often it’s a discussion about kind of how. How do we think differently about the world than our competitors? You know, it’s. It’s about me trying to level them up from hey, our design is better, or our this is better, to what’s our kind of fundamental philosophical difference from them about how we see the future in the world. And often it’s just sort of said by. It won’t even seem that important in the discussion. And I’ve learned that I think developing an ear for, for this and pulling it out and building some discussion around it is super, super valuable. Yeah.

Louis: From experience, what happens. Right. Is it’s like whenever you interview customers or you talk to sales, the first few minutes are going to be a lot of bullshit, a lot of surface level thing. And then once things are being said and reset and said again, people tend to lose a bit of the barriers and they start to, to speak like they would normally speak, Right?

Andy Raskin: Yeah.

Louis: And then they start using the words that they would normally use and like their customer would normally use. And sometimes, as you said, it’s just one or two, three words maybe together that just say, aha. That’s really interesting.

Andy Raskin: That’s powerful. Yeah. Sometimes it comes also, you know, like I said, I’ll have the CEO present back to the team and someone will be like, I hate this. And it takes some, you know, it’s, it’s. Of course, you. Even though I say like, oh, this is going to be the low point and sort of set everybody up for that, it’s still like emotionally very difficult. Everybody still was thinking like, yeah, yeah, Andy’s saying that, but, you know, I think we’ll get a really good one from what we said last week, from all the, all the great ideas we, we put on the table last week. And often the way the CEO first goes to it is they don’t like it. And being able to have that conversation about why they don’t like it, what’s missing often also will lead to a better place.

Louis: Right. And then you mentioned you go after you start to create a first draft, instead of creating guidelines, documents and whatnot, you try to use like a sales deck or the homepage, as you said. But usually you start, you use a sales deck. I know it might be a difficult question to answer, but what are the typical, like three or four slides that you always put? Is it always the same structure? Is it like the old game, new game? What’s the goal of this? What’s the ultimate goal? How do you structure it?

Andy Raskin: Yeah, it’s really hard to, I think have a template for it. It’s kind of like, you know, if you read a lot of the books on screenwriting, it’s kind of this. There’s a bunch of books that are really popular in Hollywood that like everybody has and reads at the same time. I think there’s also this belief that hey, if you just follow that and do exactly what they say, it’s going to be a horrible movie. And I find there are kind of principles and things that sort of touchstones that I look for. But always we’re having to modify it for the specific company, the story, the team. There’s always just something different. But the pieces are the pieces that I laid out. This old game, new game, shift, the winners, the object of the game, the obstacles to the game obstacles and then how we overcome them is the basic structure that we use.

Louis: So then you mentioned you presented to the team like the CEO would then present it to the team. You get feedback. Right. And this feedback is usually super useful. Then you would update your draft again. But then you also mentioned something interesting. You also said that you tend to talk to customers directly, to interview customers. So I’m curious, when does it enter into the mix? Is it after you got feedback from the team and you have a solid draft or do you tend also to try to take talk to customers before that?

Andy Raskin: Often talking with customers is hard. Not every team has customers that are able to talk, willing to talk, have time to talk. So it really has been different in different cases. But I would say in general, as soon as we get the feedback, the CEO and I are discussing it and how we have to modify, do we want to modify and then we’re sharing it with the team and kind of regular check ins that I institute with the team, sharing kind of the highlights of what we’ve learned, what we’ve heard and how we’ve changed it based on kind of what we got from them.

Louis: Okay, so you seem to rely almost exclusively on internal, kind of internal data, in a sense, internal source. Right. Is there any other sources that you use to build this draft and to build this story, and if so, which ones?

Andy Raskin: Well, the customers are a big one. Customers are not an internal source. They’re a big input and maybe the most important input into where this is going. But yeah, very often there may be analyst stuff that the team brings to it. There may be analyst calls as we’re taking it out. So when we’re taking it out, the important thing is like let’s get something and then bring it out and see how is that playing. And so there’s many different audiences that we can start gathering input from and start making a call as a group. Does this mean if an analyst says this, does this mean we change our whole story or do we just consider that analyst one data point and we’re going to stick with it? And a lot of decisions to be made there.

Louis: Yeah. What I like very much about your approach is the speed at which you tend to put a draft out there and get feedback. Right. I think that’s great. Critically important, it could take years sometimes for companies to settle on positioning. And as you said, things move so quickly that it might be a massive mistake. And actually it is a massive mistake. Right. One last question that I know you get asked a lot, right. Is about what if I have three different type of customers that are quite different from one another? Should I change and have one positioning for each? What do you say to that?

Handling Multiple Audiences Without Going Schizophrenic

Andy Raskin: You’re hitting on? The general form of this question is, hey, we have different audiences. We have to speak to those audiences might be different verticals, they might be different Personas, like seniorities or roles within a company, especially in B2B world. And you really have two choices. You can create an individual story for each of these audiences. The problem with that is you kind of become very schizophrenic and you don’t really have any identity. And, you know, it’s like, hey, tell me who you are and then I’ll tell you who I am. And so you’re, you’re kind of relying on that. It’s also a lot of a lot to remember for your team, like, oh, what do I tell this person? The other approach is to find some way to glue, to start with a common story that you kind of tailor out for the different audiences. I think this is really one of the huge strengths of this narrative approach. I mean, the narrative about Subscription economy or whatever this new game is, is not a role specific story. It is a story that is playing out and affecting each of the industries and roles and Personas and audiences that you’re talking to, if we’ve designed it properly. And so I actually wrote a post about this answering this exact question. It’s called tailoring your pitch for multiple audiences. And the approach is to start with that change and then for each of the audiences, talk about how it’s playing out for them. So Zuora does this really well. They say, hey, in subscription economy. Hey, what does that mean in music? It means we’ve shifted from DVDs to Spotify in autos. It means this. So there’s an industry vertical tailoring that goes on and then there’s a role tailoring. So I saw the slides they did for a big conference where they had like one section. One audience or session was for VPs of product. One session was for, say, CIOs. And so they’ll say, hey, subscription economy, VP of product. In this world, your role changes from, hey, you used to be in the old world of transactions, you were like a feature manager and now you’re a relationship builder. And they would kind of do this from two of your role and what how the game shifts for you personally, for this audience personally, based on the high level, you know, new game that’s that everyone is having to play. That approach, I think has been really successful for the teams that I’ve worked with. And it’s, it’s nice to also, if you, especially if you go on a sales call and you might have a mixed audience of people in different Personas or different industries, then you can even have a slide where you’re calling out kind of how this change, this new game changes the game for the specific Personas and kind of, you know, that creates a discussion around that.

Louis: So, Andy, thanks so much for going through your process in detail. To summarize it briefly, as you said, the five things you want is what is the change? What is the old game? What is the new one? What is the urgency? Why should people take action to actually

Andy Raskin: challenge it, which is specifically about winners and losers? How is this creating winners and losers urgency?

Louis: What makes people challenge their status quo to take action? What is the object of the game, like the end goal? What, what are the obstacles and how does your product overcome them? And then what is the proof? Right. So I always ask a few questions before the end of the podcast, and the first one being, what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?

Story Structure as Marketing’s Secret Weapon

Andy Raskin: Oh, I think every marketer, really, everyone in business, but particularly marketers, can study story structure. I think it’s a really. It’s kind of like the Brain’s API, how humans are wired to take stuff, to take in information and believe things. This is not about telling cute anecdotes in your speech. It’s about structuring the messages that you’re giving in a kind of story narrative framework.

Louis: Right. What are the top three resources you’d recommend listeners today? So it could be anything from podcasts to conferences to books, moves to anything.

Andy Raskin: One book that I love is. It’s not typically considered a marketing book, but it’s called Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss. It’s a negotiating book, as. I’m not sure if, you know, like, Chris Voss was the FBI’s lead hostage negotiator for some time. And he talks about an approach to negotiation where he’s not using the same words like narrative positioning, but he’s essentially doing that. He’s talking about how basically in all of his negotiations, and he’s successful virtually every time in negotiating the safe release of hostages is all about telling the captor’s story back to them and getting acknowledgement from the captor that we’ve got it. And that usually that comes in the form of what he calls. That’s right. So instead of getting to. Yes, getting to. That’s right, getting to. And if we can get to. That’s right. Then we’re building trust. This is really the whole idea behind narrative positioning is, you know, instead of aiming for, yes, you are the best we’re aiming for. That’s right. You understand my story. And if we can get to there, then. Then there’s this other thing that happens, I think, where people just assume you must have the best product or you’ll be the best person to go with.

Louis: I think that reminds me. Sorry to cut you, but it reminds me quickly of this, I think, in Japanese camps during Second World War where they were using very, very similar tactics to indoctrinate Americans by making them say, that’s admit a small fault in America’s politic and saying that, yeah, that’s right. And then they move on to something bigger and bigger. And then after five years, they start the right propaganda for Japan without being asked.

Andy Raskin: Well, hopefully we’re not doing this coercively, where, you know, the whole point of the. That’s right. When we. When we really get. And it’s valuable, is that it’s a signal that kind of on their own accord without being put in any kind of coercive situation, they’ve said, hey, yes, you really understand me, right?

Louis: So what are the two other resources you’d recommend?

Andy Raskin: If you’re interested in story structure? Two things I can recommend. One is just any book on screenwriting. There are a bunch of really good ones. Story by Robert McKee is kind of the classic one, you know, not written for marketers, but a lot of the echoes of what I’m talking about and the origins of it really are there. And then also, I think our America’s treasure Storyteller Our most treasured asset in this world is Ira Glass, who’s the producer of this American Life radio show and podcast. And Ira has he published what he called his manifesto on how to structure a story? And what’s interesting there too is a lot of it really is about stakes. What we talked about in the second point of the five that I mentioned around he hears a lot of story ideas that kind of sound good but aren’t going to work because they haven’t laid out the stakes. As you said, the why does it matter? What’s the winning, what’s the losing, and why do we care? So I think those three are what

Louis: I’d recommend really good recommendations for Shadow of those are not marketing books and I appreciate those type of resources because usually they lead to a lot of insights. So Andy, once again, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for going through your process with me, for being patient about all the steps you’re taking with your clients, and for sharing that many examples. Where can listeners connect with you and learn more from you?

Andy Raskin: Best place is on LinkedIn. You can just reach out on LinkedIn Connect. That’s always a really good place. That’s where I do a lot of writing about this stuff, post organization and also my website is andyraskin.com awesome.

Louis: Once again Andy, thanks so much.

Andy Raskin: Great, great talking with you Louis.

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Andy Raskin: Sam.