Storytelling Techniques and Operationalizing Commercial Insight

Last week I reviewed how switching from the AIDA model to the Hero’s Journey could help you build better nurturing and content. Today, I’ll discuss how the famous Zuora Deck works using the Hero’s Journey. A secondary framework that leverages the Hero’s Journey is called Commercial Insight, which is detailed in CEB’s The Challenger Customer. A careful review of the two frameworks demonstrates the two methods are the same: using the same persuasive steps to help an audience take their journey with you.

Before we go further, there’s a reason I’m discussing storytelling techniques with you. Putting content into a nurturing stream is the easy part. Having something interesting to say is not as easy. Most companies (yours included), spend a lot of time blasting out messages across different channels. Those messages almost always say, without any proof, “My company is the greatest at X, you need X, so click here so we can sell you X.” I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it.

Even some of the great content marketers are prone to this promotion type. And there is a time to say you are the greatest. It’s almost never at the top or middle of the funnel. It’s just not. There is a better way to share your good news more effectively. If you are ready to listen, let’s take a look.

The Zuora Deck

The recent Zuora Deck post by Andy Raskin made the rounds this quarter. Mr. Raskin analyzed it, but only to a point. I went deeper, discovering the deck combines the powerful Hero’s Journey with Commercial Insight while embedding psychological influence triggers. The deck is so well constructed that the message is clear without a live narrator. Here’s my expanded storytelling analysis from the slides Mr. Raskin provided. (You can look at others here and here).

There’s a shift from the world we were in, to this new world.

This opening teases that there is a promised land for the audience, something more than what we do now. If you’re interested, perhaps it’s time to step beyond the Threshold of your current world.

There are winners and losers in this new world.

The people who stay behind will be losers. You don’t want to lose, do you? This is a deep loss aversion psychological trigger. It fits into the Hero’s Journey to get the lead to the Threshold of stepping outside of the old world.

What happened to the losers?

The losers are the companies of yesteryear who stayed behind. Still staying behind? Now this fear of missing out hits loss aversion again, attempting to make the pain of change seem less than the pain of losing.

Will you be a winner by joining us?

The mentor now reaches out her hand to pull you across the Threshold. What’s holding you back?

Others have taken the journey, shouldn’t you?

Oh, by the way, firms like yours, people like you, have already taken this journey with us. We can help you do this successfully, so don’t be afraid. The promised land awaits, and others are already there.

There is a path to winning, and it involves Zuora.

Stepping across the Threshold means you have us and our special tools to help you. Once you use us, you will make it to the promised land.

When done well, the prospect is prone to say something like, “Great, when can we begin work?” The conversation about money becomes secondary. There may be a competitor involved, often as a formality to say all options were examined.

What is Commercial Insight?

The commercial insight in the Zuora Deck is “the subscription economy is here and the successful firms made that change.” It sparks interest and can break an existing mindset in the audience, allowing them to question if they are competing in an old, or new, way. Lead nurturing is about helping tell this story, equipping buyers with this understanding so Sales can complete the journey in person.

“A Commercial Insight teaches the customer something new that reframes how they think about their own business, and leads uniquely back to you as a supplier.” –Pat Spenner, CEB.

Another way to think about it is if you were in a one-on-one conversation where you have to convince the buyer of your point of view. The way you do this is to lead them to this new conclusion by breaking their old reality. How you do this follows a consistent process. This is essentially what happens at military bootcamps and religious conversions. Of course, it won’t work on everyone all of the time.

One way to think about the Commercial Insight is it is the critical mission your firm is on. Perhaps it is the “Why” of Simon Sinek fame. Perhaps it is helping marketers tell a revenue based story (Marketo, Eloqua). If it exists at all, the insight is a fundamentally new understanding of a business. As the quote explains, that new understanding means requiring a new supplier, which is your firm.

Former salespeople may see a connection between Commercial Insight and the questioning techniques in SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham. The Challenger Customer offers one method of digging into what your commercial insight is, however, I offer two other methods.

SPIN Selling Questioning

The summary is that proper research and questioning methods allow a salesperson to lead a prospect to the realization that they have a serious problem that wasn’t fully understood before. If  you are still working on what your commercial insight is, I highly recommend this technique as part of your customer development process. Here’s an example that could have been part of Marketo’s early customer calls:

• Situation: how do you manage your email list now? How do you track success?
• Problem: what’s the biggest problem you have when explaining results? Was it hard to train the team to use this?
• Implication: if training marketers is hard and time consuming, what does that mean for your campaigns? If your CEO wants more leads, but you are having problems tying your efforts to spend, what does that mean?
• Need-Payoff: why is having a clear email to lead conversion ratio important to you? If you could see how marketing impacts the pipeline, how would that help you achieve revenue targets?

Try this out to see how the lead will make the sale for you.

Five Whys/Fishbone Diagram

The Five Whys with a Fishbone diagram can help work back from the problem statement the customer has. If the customer is concerned with high costs, you can ask “Why” until you have several variations on why and how costs impact their business. You may uncover a new understanding of how your unique value can solve the cost problem in ways that were not explained earlier. The book discusses how Xerox wanted to sell color copiers to K-12 schools that were under budget cuts. Color’s nice, but why do we really need it? It turns out that school administrators care deeply about student outcomes and that color materials were proven to engage students better and improve those outcomes. There’s always money to improve outcomes, right?

Consider your experience with any martech vendor. There’s rarely budget for new tools. What happens when the vendor discusses your need to be at the revenue table? What if you could demonstrate your marketing spend is driving revenue, and isn’t a cost? Wouldn’t that be worth something to you?

Embedding commercial insight into lead nurturing stories

Once you have articulated, and tested, the commercial insight, your nurturing programs and sales tools will fall into place more easily. When using commercial insight, the plan is to show the lead the path from their Current Beliefs, to a new set of Beliefs. Persuasion experts know this can only be done with some sort of shock that breaks the person out of their frame. Once a person is ready to accept the new reality, it becomes easy to share the Commercial Insight and offer to help them realize it.

And it is very interesting to see these steps align perfectly to the Hero’s Journey, which takes someone out of their current world and into a new one, full of adventure and success.

There is much, much more to this process that this blog post and deck can reasonably share with you. The rest is in the hard work to build out the details. Let me know how it goes!

You are nurturing your leads wrong.

It’s ok. Everyone is.

The “traditional” way Lead Nurturing is taught is that we should use a content grid to provide relevant information to the prospect at each Buying Stage. The Buying Stage is largely determined by the marketer, not the buyer. Nurturing is then viewed as a series of “drip” emails semi-customized to the buyer persona. The reality is most content is cobbled together from whatever you have. The order of the content is often not considered deeply. And even if the order of the content is decided, it is not tested and never leveraged to keep the audience coming back for more.

A content grid often looks like this, as suggested by Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing.

The next step is to find matching content, then draft emails and landing pages. Then, decide in which order each asset is sent out. Sometimes the order of content is done by buying Stage or in staggered offers, alternating between free, gated, and free trial push. In my experience working with 40+ firms, almost no one gives thought to the order of emails within a Stream vs. between Streams. Many firms default to the AIDA: Attention, Interest, Decision, Action model of content use.

And then, you plug all of this content into the marketing automation platform (MAP). The MAP helps track response metrics as well as lead data. While a MAP can shift leads to different Stages of content (AIDA or Lifecycle), these are all guesses, and poor ones.

The reality is that AIDA or a Lifecycle stage doesn’t reflect the true nature of the buyers’ journey, nor can it in a logic driven MAP. More importantly, however, your content is not setup as a story which leverages innate human desires for stories and deep psychological triggers available to all marketers.

Wait, isn’t that a lot of work? I just need to get content out into the channels.

Said every marketer.

What if you took the time to organize current and future content like a book? What if you told a heroic story the reader (lead) could use to picture themselves as the hero bringing in new ideas and vendors (you) to further their career? Further the success of their business? What if you could tell that story at the right time, with the right emphasis, to the right person, at scale, and automatically?

(No, you don’t need machine learning yet!)

It is possible, with some work. Here’s how.

Nurturing is a Serialized Novel

Think of Nurturing as a serialized novel from the 1800s. Authors like Dickens would be paid to publish a chapter every week in a newspaper. The feedback was, for the time, fast. The characters and narrative would adjust a bit each week. And at the end, a book was made which they already knew would be successful so the readers could…”binge read” the serial novel. (Sound familiar Netflix users?).

At a tactical level, each email, each landing page, each paper is a chapter in the story. Rather than give it all away, each content piece that is shared uses plot elements and storytelling components to keep leads engaged. Calls-to-action are about continuing the story to find out what happened. Emails or papers might end abruptly, creating cliff-hangers that demand the lead find out the next part of the story. What if a demo were demanded and accessible instead of withheld in exchange for a chat with sales? What if a lead asked you instead of you pestering a lead into a demo?

Storytelling Format is Crucial to Success: AIDA is dead

At the 2016 Marketo Summit, I suggested the AIDA model doesn’t work for lead nurturing. The reason is it is too logical, which places a lot of reliance on non-logical humans; and it also places the marketer at the center (you) instead of the buyer. Another reason is that AIDA is rooted in advertising culture, looking to interrupt and attract attention for the company.

As a storytelling format, AIDA falls flat because it assumes too much rationality on the part of the reader.

The Hero’s Journey is the Narrative Structure for Nurturing

Many of us are familiar with the basics of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, or Hero’s Journey, because George Lucas used it as a deliberate framework for Star Wars. This journey should be the basis for all nurturing and content creation because it taps into the natural human desire to be at the center of a story. It also allows for a natural use of influence techniques in each chapter.

When content is serialized in the Hero’s Journey framework, it will more naturally lead someone along to the conclusion you desire as a marketer: “not just consider us, but use us to be the hero of your firm.”

Telling a story also lets you, as the marketer, feel like you are sharing something important, rather than pushing propaganda. Instead of content that’s about your firm and your needs, you will naturally begin to write more about your audience’s needs, which will be more attractive to them.

Stages and Relation to the Funnel

Each part of the narrative also corresponds to the sales funnel stages, or the Buyers’ Stage. I mention The Challenger Customer here, and we’ll talk more about that another day.

Use the Journey Stages to Determine Readiness for Next Steps

Of course, this assumes you have done this expertly. Not everyone is ready to take the threshold step or is interested in the Challengers every day. Timing is a critical component of any lead nurturing and MQL system. The use of Threshold Content and Ask for Help Content is a natural part of the Hero’s Journey here. If a Lead is actively seeking to go beyond the Threshold, perhaps it is time to accelerate content related to the new world they are trying to reach. Perhaps a chat with a “mentor” (salesperson) might help move the person forward in their journey.

With all things in Marketing, it is best to carefully test responses to each chapter in your story. Are you losing people between chapters? Do certain chapters work in a particular order? Try it!

How Should I Use Storytelling with…

• Marketing Automation: figure out key lifecycle and storytelling junctions to trigger MQLs or story pace.
• Nurturing: content drip should work like a serialized novel: in order and designed to keep leads reading.
• Content: each content piece is a chapter in a novel in which the Hero is your Lead or Account. Don’t just slice it up willy-nilly; write like a novelist, use intrigue, conflict, and cliff-hangers.
• Account Based Marketing: leverage the nurture waterfall to move leads to the right parts of the story told by email or humans.
• ABM Play: if a lead appears to be on the threshold, a mentoring chat with an SDR/BDR might help. The challenge is how to approach this chat so it’s not condescending or sales oriented. A solution consultant or message from a non salesperson may work best.

Interested in building out more? Here’s a worksheet from CampCreative.

Next time I’ll share more on how to reach deep into your audience’s mind with CEB’s Commercial Insight.