Why does strategic narrative matter?

First of all, welcome back, everyone! I’ve been working less in August and gave the regular emails a break. Now that fall is upon us and sprint to the end of 2021 is about to start, it’s time to start sharing more wisdom, on a more regular basis.

Today I wanted to address something that I haven’t talked about enough: strategic narrative and how it follows from positioning.

When you finish a positioning exercise, either with a consultant like me or on your own, you should be able to succintly answer the question, “What is your product?” You should also be crystal clear about who your product is for, what pain points you’re solving and what your point of view on the market is.

But in most sales conversations, interviews with analysts or journalists, VC pitches or websites, being able to clearly answer that questions is necessary but not sufficient. You will lose people if you can’t tell them clearly what your product is, but they expect that you will have more to say than just that.

In most cases, changing or refining your positioning will change nearly everything you want to say about your product and your company, at least until you get to the demo. It would be a mistake to stop thinking critically about the entire story after finishing the first, most important part.

Strategic narrative is about fleshing out the entire story you want to tell about your product, your company and yourself, as a founder. It has to reinforce your positioning and reinforce the point of view you’ve taken on the industry. Building a narrative also involves taking your readers or listeners on a journey — illustrating that you understand the pain your target market is struggling with and showing them a path away from that pain, with your project.

If you just refine your positioning, you will almost certainly find that people understand your product’s value much faster — it’s not uncommon for founders I work with to say they went from spending 20 minutes describing their product in a sales call before getting nods of comprehension to having prospects excitedly asking for a demo after just two minutes. But the magic really starts to happen when you use your positioning to tell a complete and consistent story about the company and its products.

When you have solid, clear positioning paired with a fleshed-out strategic narrative, companies start to see conversion rates increasing throughout the entire funnel, from more inbound leads from the website to more responses to outbound marketing.

A solid strategic narrative should include a core story — a narrative, in other words — that makes the connection between the pain that your target market experiences, how your product will help them and what life will be like once they use your product. Once that narrative is established, it has to be translated into copy for the website, especially the homepage and the about page. It has to be translated into a sales deck that can be used as a template for anyone who is having sales conversations. It should be used to inform the messaging document, which gets into the nitty gritty of what vocabulary to use and what pictures to paint in readers minds in your marketing material. Perhaps most importantly, anyone who speaks publicly about the company or the product, whether it is the founder or the PR representative, should review the strategic narrative before having any kind of conversation.

Stories sell products. Sometimes the stories that sell products are the stories told by the company selling the product, sometimes it’s what potential buyers and users tell themselves. Getting your positioning right is the first step to making sure that users and buyers are telling themselves the right story about your product from the get-go. Having a fully fleshed out, consistent narrative about your product, your company and how it will help users and buyers get the outcome they want puts you in control of the story.

And that makes it more likely that they will take the actions you want them to, whether it’s to become part of your open source community or buying your product.