CONTENTS
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"Ari Hoffman: That does not mean your story is just number, number, number. You do not want to do what we call a stat bomb, right? Because that, that just sounds way too self-indulgent. So you've gotta be able to mix the numbers in a way to telling that story. That's really important. So the way that we tell all of our stories, we tell the hero's journey, and that's it."
[00:00:26] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to the Peerbound podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is a customer marketing advocacy legend Ari Hoffman. Ari has worked at some of the best software companies over the last decade and a half, including Coveo, Influitive, and Amplitude among others, and I'm so privileged to have him join me today to talk about so many great topics, uh, around customer storytelling and really creating a culture at your company that maximize the impact of all the work that customer marketing advocacy professionals do.
So Ari, it's so great to have you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I love what you're doing. Thank you. Let me start by asking you about storytelling. You have spoken so eloquently about customer storytelling, and it's clear that you're so passionate about it. Why customer stories, even in this, you know, AI era.
What, why do you think stories resonate? Why do you think they work with prospects and buyers?
[00:01:17] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, I mean, the real story there is, if you back up a second, we are filled with noise, valuable noise right now, and I've talked about this for a decade probably, so it's only gotten worse in this time, but we all know, right, the right things to say.
About ourselves. When a company talks about themselves, we all know the right things. We know the right metrics to talk about. It's all valuable, but everybody is doing it, and we're hit on every single screen that we have. It went from being, you know, hit on our TVs. Now we're hitting the movie feeders with advertisements, right?
We're hit on the radio. But now it's not just that, it's our phones, right? We know that our watches are hitting us, right? It's everywhere. And so when you have that much noise, you start to turn off. The only thing that really connects is hearing human based stories from other humans, right? And so for me, and I talk about this a lot, which is, I, I can't connect to a brand, especially in B2B, right?
I'm not Nike, right. I'm not just do it right? When, when you work at Amplitude or Coveo or any of these companies. Nobody's gonna say, oh, I resonate with Amplitude, but you resonate with our people at that company. So if I'm trying to progress my career, I'm trying to do better and be more valuable for my organization, I don't go say, oh, what is Salesforce doing?
I go say, what is Timothy at Salesforce doing? Right? What is Sarah over at Genesis doing right now that is creating such a buzz? And I'm gonna look at the individuals and what they're doing, and how do they scale that? Guess what? The technology comes along for the ride in that. Right? And so how do you tell a story that puts the customer at the, the center is the champion of the story, not just because it's great for the customer and it, it's something that helps them grow their own personal brand and their career.
But because people resonate with that more, right? We wanna look for those things that are relevant to us and our own journeys, right? And so they have to be relevant. They have to be impactful, right? And they have to connect at a deeper level. And storytelling, I don't think I need to. Convince anyone who's listening to this that storytelling is important.
We all know how important this the power of story is. It's just how do you leverage that story in a way that is impactful, that actually helps move the needle, and doesn't just buy time and waste space, right? It's not about patting your own back. It's about helping expose a successful journey for others that they can get inspired by and go.
That is within my reach. Even if I had these blockers before, I can see now there is a path to success here. And so that's what we're really focused on in customer storytelling.
[00:03:41] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, I am a math major. I was an engineer by training and I've lived and breathed numbers for so many, um, so many years and I continue to do so.
But there is something about real stories with real people and. The impact that they make is just completely different. So thanks for sharing that. Yeah, absolutely.
I wanna ask you a little bit about the role of numbers. You know, we're talking about numbers. There clearly are metrics that matter in B2B and companies ultimately byproduct that deliver results, and we would like to quantify those results.
What makes for an effective story, in your view? How do you combine the qualitative human element of the story? With metrics and what, what is effective? You've seen this at so many great companies.
[00:04:26] Ari Hoffman: Yeah. So I mean, let's, let's jump back for a second and just look at what is the problem with storytelling right now In a lot of companies face, and maybe a lot of people resonate this.
One, finding net news stories can be very tricky, right? Because you're not get, your accounts aren't giving you enough of them. They're not referring enough customers, right? It's hard to search through the mess that's out there. Maybe your Salesforce, maybe your HubSpot, maybe your CRMs aren't tracking the right information.
So it's really hard to find these needles in a haystack of great stories. One. Then how do we tell a story that is captivating, that is impactful, that's gonna move the needle, that captures ROI and real business impact, right? So it's not just about the use case, but how is it moving their business forward, right?
Or whatever they're trying to solve for whatever that obstacle is, that objective is, right, or that opportunity, what is that that it's helping accomplish in a measurable way, not just in an anecdotal way. And then now that we've captured these stories, how do we use 'em? So they don't go sit in a content graveyard.
I know one of the worst things is you spend all of this time, you create this wonderful story. You go through their comms scene in PR and legal, and you get it approved finally, which by the way, is getting harder and harder. If anyone is wondering, it is getting harder and harder to prove these stories.
That is a real thing. Um, and it's not just, you know, that this is happening across the board. There's a lot of different reasons, but one of the major ones is security threats, right? You're opening up vulnerabilities. So now that you've created this wonderful content, you've gotten the sign off. And you, you want everyone to use it, and then nobody does, and it just sits there.
And then people ask you, Hey, can we get a case study on X? And you're like, I just did three of them. What do you mean? Why are you asking me this? Right? And it can become really frustrating and deflating. They actually burn out your team if you have people who are responsible for creating the stories on your team.
This is how churn happens, okay? When they're creating and creating and creating, and nobody's actually seeing them for the valuable content that they're producing. That's high churn rate. So we can talk about all those. And so one of the key things here to focus on is telling stories that matter. Right, and so one of the ways that you focus on this is if you have a business value team who who does business value assessments or realization.
Which is, what is the business impact of buying our product? What is the ROI, right? What are you getting outta this? Is it cost savings? Is it revenue generating, right? Is it hiring and firing? What, what are you looking to accomplish that is measurable and how do we measure it? So if you, if you align with your business value team, then you might have five, six different lines of business, right?
So each of those might have a different value proposition. So that's where you go and talk with your product and your product marketing teams, and you wanna look about two quarters ahead to say what's coming down the pipe that we should be focusing on. Because telling stories that are just cool, doesn't matter if they're not relevant.
Relevancy is everything. So you have to have the context, right. You need to know what it is that you're talking about and why you're talking about it. When you're talking about it, so ROI is all about, and every company is different, is what are the things that you can measure to show both from your leading indicators, right, your key performance indicators.
Those leading indicators, what are the things that we know that are telling us through our lagging metrics, which are, and you wanna focus on these as ROI, it's all about the lagging metrics, right? So are we saving money? Are we building new revenue? Are we speeding up? The velocities sales cycles. What are those big movers, right?
That you're really looking at business impact, and your company will talk about these at CKO. They'll talk about 'em at SKO, they'll talk about 'em about what are we trying to accomplish. So those are your key focal points. And then you want to backtrack everything in your story from that. That does not mean your story is just number, number, number.
You do not want to do what we call a stat bomb, right? Because that, that just sounds way too self, um, indulgent, right? So you've gotta be able to mix the numbers in a way to telling that story. That's really important.
So the way that we tell all of our stories with impact is this. We didn't invent this.
This has been since Greek mythology, the hero's journey. We tell the hero's journey and that's it. We make it very personal, right? Which is you start with a hook and intro. So your hook is the first 30 seconds of the story. What is that hook? That's generally where we, we do a stat bomb in a way that makes sense.
Like you just told me that you are having a hard time getting your data analytics team to produce real numbers. That doesn't take weeks. It's really interesting 'cause I was just talking to John over at Cyclone. They were able to convert their analytic cycle down from weeks to days. They now get it in minutes.
What if I told you that in minutes you could get the insights that you needed to literally change the way that you approach your sales conversions by about 50%. That's your hook, right? That was just done in under 30 seconds. So we start with hook and intro, then we go into the conflict, right? What is it?
What is the challenge that we're looking to accomplish? What is that real hurdle or chasm you have to cross? So that comes next. Then after the conflict is the turning point. What happened that came that, that you have this enlightenment, right? Of holy shit, we need to do something different here. What was that turning point and, and where did you go?
So then we tell the turning point. This is what they did next. This is how they set themselves up for success. And then we have the end and the resolution. This is where you tie it back, you book end that story back to that hook and that intro, those two ends are where you fill in the ROI. That is the business impact, right?
Because. Your first impression and your last impression in a story, just like meeting someone are critically important. So that's where you really double down on telling the numbers and those numbers remember, tie into what your customer success says they need for adoption, right? And moving forward. It's what your product marketing team says that we need in these new products that we're gonna be launching.
This is where we're going, and it's what your product and your business value teams are gonna say. This is what's inherently valuable about our product and what we're trying to turn the needle on.
[00:10:18] Sunny Manivannan: Masterclass. I have nothing. I have nothing to say to that. I'm still processing the, you just said just to even.
Go back to saying, Hey guys, the hero's journey works. I think that's a valuable lesson because too many people are trying to innovate on things that don't necessarily need innovation.
[00:10:37] Ari Hoffman: And whether you wanna tell it as first person, second person, third person, it doesn't matter as long as you're following a story that is personal, relevant and impactful.
So it's gotta be personal. So at CKO, this is what we did, and this is really important I think, for everyone on this call. This is. The three most important things to a story personal. There has to be a human involved. Again, I don't resonate with a brand, I resonate with Sarah over at Salesforce, right?
Sarah at Salesforce is doing something special. This is what she did with her team at Salesforce using this product. But at first, you know here, here's the quick way I say it. When you come outta Star Wars or Ninja Turtles or any movie, of course I'm, I'm a big dork, so I love all these movies, but when you come out, you don't say, I want to be the Millennium Falcon.
I wanna be a lightsaber. I want to be a blaster. Right? You come out and say, I wanna be on solo, I wanna be Luke, I wanna be Leia. I. If I say I wanna be Leia, I know I'm using a blaster, right? That's right. If anyone says on solo, you know you're flying the Millennium Falcon, your product, your company is the Millennium Falcon.
It's the tools and the technology that help them be successful, but they are the champion of the story. Why are they the champion of the story? They're the ones who are getting budget. They're sticking their neck out to buy your product. They have to get the internal adoption and do change management and all of the hard stuff.
You, your solution is not pixie dust. It doesn't just come in and solve the day. It requires buy-in from them, right? And so that is where you tell a story that is personal. It's gotta be about somebody and what they've done with their team, or how they've leveled themselves up to inspire others so they can see what good looks like.
And start to remove the blockers that have caused hesitation or analysis paralysis in the buying journey. Right. Or adoption journey. So I, uh, we're, we're gonna talk on customer stories, both pre and post-sale because they're both critically important.
[00:12:22] Sunny Manivannan: Love what you said about just, it's not about the tools, it's about the people.
And even in the first example that you used about, you said, Hey, I was talking to John from this company. Just that casual nature of it's a person to person conversation, and it's a real person's story that just happens to be your customer and then going into, okay, let me give you the hook and all of those things, but you've gotta, the, the draw is the human story.
[00:12:46] Ari Hoffman: Yeah. And, you wanna help your sales and success teams sound like they have a deep well of knowledge around your product.
And so the next phase that you and I'll talk about is how do we do that? How do we get the buy-in to make them really bought in on telling these stories that are personal, that are relevant and are impactful?
Right? So personal relevant means it, it, it has to, how many times have you gone on a sales call and I don't know, when you get to director level and up, you start to notice you get on a lot more sales calls. A lot tech companies. Yes. Tell you. Right? And so you'll hear someone when you're, they, they ask you the the normal standard question.
You know, what is your challenges? What outcomes are you looking for? You talk and it, you can tell the second they respond, they weren't actually listening to what you were saying. They had a story they wanted to tell you because it's a great story. It's got great ROI, it's got great impact, but it's not your story.
It's not your journey. And they just tell you something that you're like, I have. That means nothing to me. So it's not relevant. So you have to make sure the story correlates, which is why we have to tell a broad range of stories. 'cause not only do you have different use cases and different business lines, but you also have different personas you're talking to.
Are they a vp, are they a practitioner, are they a champion? Are they an individual contributor? You want to tell stories that help inspire that person, not just a general story. That is great to toot your own horn. Really a story that is impactful to them and relevant to them. And then impact is what we talked about already, which is on the ROI side.
[00:14:13] Sunny Manivannan: I love this when, um, at a previous company when I was leading a sales team and it was a global sales team and we had a lot of really great sales reps, but you know, they would prepare for a call with a prospect and they'd say, this is the story that I think I'm gonna tell. And no ability to release that agenda if the call goes a different way.
So they end up the exact situation that you highlighted. And I'm so happy you talked about this because it's just one of those thoughts that's inside everybody's head. We've all been on the receiving end of this call. By the way, everybody who's been around 30 plus years on this planet has been on the other side of this call where it's like, why are you telling me this?
It's like, oh, right, you prepared for that. And now you felt like you had to share the story 'cause you did the work. But it's not relevant to me. And now you actually got me farther away than we were at the beginning of this call.
[00:14:53] Ari Hoffman: Right? And I, and I can empathize with sales and success. They've got a million people they've gotta call.
They're just trying to scale themselves, right? And they're dealing with the unknown. They don't know what's gonna hit. They don't know what's not. And so to minimize effort, they come up with like a program that they like to stick to, right? And once they have, it's very hard to deviate because they don't have time to deviate.
That's why one of the big things is how do you train your sales to have six or seven of these stories in their back pocket that they can pull off? From memory, that is very easy. So if that happens and they need to pivot, they can pivot on the spot, right? They can make things much more relevant, but they have to know those.
They can't just try and pull it outta thin air, and that's our job. That's not their job. They are busy. Our job is to help remove the obstacles in the way of sales to absorb these stories. They've got enough going on, right? So we have to make it really easy for them to absorb these stories. We'll get into that and how we do that.
[00:15:51] Sunny Manivannan: I wanna talk to you about this point of how do you really empower sales and how do you, and maybe we can talk about how do you set that culture at your company a little bit later. But I wanna focus really on everything you just talked about, about having that empathy for the sales rep who's juggling so many things at the same time, but still, you know, needs to have a great call every single time.
How do you as a customer marketer really empower that rep? How do you make sure that they feel confident in being able to have these great calls and these being able to tell these great stories?
[00:16:19] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, so one, you, you have to lead by example, right? So one thing that I like to do is make sure if storytelling is important to your company, which it should be, should be critically important.
'cause not only is it using in all your marketing material down the sales funnel. Right from awareness all the way down to consideration and, and purchase. But it's using your, in your actual one-to-one pipeline. When your sales are talking and your successor talking, we know how critical. So if it's that critical, you should be doing a storytelling session right at every CKO on every sales enablement session.
There should be at least a story that you're talking about, at least one and every town hall you should be. So stories are front and center all the time. It's a great way also for company morale. Because your product teams and your engineers and all these people who might not get to see these end results, you wanna keep inspiring internally to show that this is actually changing lives for the better.
This is what our company and our product stands for, and this is the real world applications of it. So you're constantly getting in front of them. So that story now becomes a part of the company culture of sharing. Right. But the culture part, which you hit on is critically important here because it's not just about showing what good looks like, it's about recognizing the people who got you there.
And so one of the things that we change, any, any time I come into a program, I can instantly tell you what the, the challenges are gonna be. And one of the fastest ways to change that culture is you're not just celebrating the customer, you're celebrating the partnership. So one, you're not just celebrating yourself and the technology we want, we know we get away from that.
The story is about the customer, right? How are you helping them? How is that partnership critical? Because they don't win in a silo. They're not in an echo chamber all by themselves trying to do this. You've got your wonderful onboarding materials and your professional services that are helping, right?
You've got your customer success and your accounts teams, even your AEs come back in. So how are those people actually helping them be successful? Well tell that in this story as well. You're like, no, why? We don't want to talk about individuals. Because what if they leave our company?
Nobody's tracking the individuals.
What they're tracking is the humans at your company that are making business impact help, um, possible, right? And so when they know, because when I'm looking into a company, I wanna know what is onboarding gonna be like? Am I gonna have the support that I need to actually be successful doing this? I've got 18 other priorities as well.
So what kind of success is possible, right? With my limited bandwidth that I have with your company? And so all of these touch points help.
So now what you're doing is you're saying, Hey, let's celebrate both the customer and the individuals at our company that are helping them. And let's indoctrinate them into the story itself.
So we call this the Hall of Heroes and the Hall of Heroes. Is this, let, let me guess if a lot of listeners on this call, this is how they tell a story. They might go in, grab the story, maybe a sales person referred it, maybe a CS person referred it. They tell the story, then they're gonna launch it. They go into Slack or or Microsoft Teams and they announce, you know, this just went live.
The blog little. You know, posts comes up and, Hey y'all. The emojis. The emojis, and we wanna thank X, Y, and Z. Cool. They got a slack mention really quickly. Is that gonna move the needle? Right? With all of the other things and all of the other mentions everywhere. But if you put their name with a link to their LinkedIn profile in the story itself, you're making them more valuable.
You're showing that they're a professional at what they do. You're also touting the company saying, these are the people that we hire. And this is how much we care about our, our employees, that we are literally immortalizing them in the written word. That's one. Two, when you tell a customer story, generally right off the bat.
When you're interviewing a customer, if they go through that process with you, they're in a pretty good state and they feel special. You're telling their story, you're showing it off. If you frame it the right way, where it's not all about you, it's about them, then you've got them in a good place.
Right after that, I send them a link, and in the link it's got three prompts and it says, tell me one about a sales person that has been really impactful to you and why.
What have they done that was impactful. Two, tell me about your customer success manager, if you have one. If you're scaled, it's who on your journey? Is it from the product team? Is it from support? Who on your journey, record 30 seconds telling me why you like them and what they've done to help you on your journey.
Now you've got a little minute and a half clip from every customer story giving a personal shut up, and we store these on a page that the entire company has access to. Called the Hall of Heroes, where now you can go in and one CSM can now start to have 5, 6, 7, 8 different customers touting them. Who doesn't want to be celebrated like that?
They're gonna share this when they're looking for promotions, when they're having their quarterly or their, their annuals performance reviews. So this is great fodder to help boost people, and you're gonna start to see those people who really separate themselves and it creates fomo right from the others.
The others are going, wait, Susie is just like crushing it over you. I, I have customers that can tell like that. And so it helps start to take the blinders off of the art of the possible and telling these stories and what their customers they have that they can start to reach out to. Right? Because now you're creating something that's in it for them.
It's not just what's in it for you. It's not just what's in it for the company or the customer. It's all about it. It's holistic. It's helping the business grow. It's helping the employee grow, and it's helping the customer grow, and there's no downside to it. It's all goodness, everybody. Feel good about it.
Everybody gets to feel motivated by it. And guess what? When your customers spend a couple minutes talking about this person, it reinforces in their own mind the partnership that you have. So it's strengthening the business impact that you have.
[00:21:55] Sunny Manivannan: This is, I mean, you're blowing me away. This is brilliant stuff.
I'm being very honest with you. This is just attacking this problem on multiple good levels and getting to a great outcome for every party that's involved.
[00:22:05] Ari Hoffman: Well, and now we're not done. So I said, you've gotta have it in CKO, and we do a session. So in CKO, this is a really fun trick for everyone. We do a session about 30 to 45 minutes talking about the art of storytelling.
Then we bring up three of our biggest deals over the last year. We bring up the AE to tell that story. Okay. How did they close it and what story did they tell? When they close this major deal, right? That's inspiring a whole group of either new salespeople that are coming on, you know, uh, veterans that are there.
It's the biggest deals. Money matters to salespeople, right? So you inspire them. Then we do an hour long workshop after that where you break everybody in the SKO into groups, divided by, you know, you have one or two AEs in each group. One account person, depending on who you invite to your CKO or SKO, you break 'em into groups.
Whatever the size needs to be. Generally you wanna separate. So it's not all salespeople in one group, all because you need your salespeople to tell these stories. And you say, Hey, in this exercise we're gonna go over the storytelling format we just did in the presentation, and you're gonna tell two stories.
Your group can either have one person tell both stories, or you can have one person tell one story and one person tell. One is gonna be from the list of stories we've already captured. You're gonna go take one of the case studies we've already created and you're gonna tell a story, and we're gonna assign a case study to each group.
That way they're not going and you're not getting multiple people telling the same story. Okay? And two, you're gonna tell us a story that's not on this list, a net news story. So you're doing two things. One, all of the stories that you already have, you're capturing 62nd clip from the ae. You can now attach to your case study.
So a new AE who's coming into the company can watch this real quick and get the gist of how to tell the Cliff note story of it. So one, you're creating that two on the net news story. Well guess what? You've got your leads coming up. Now you have all these new customer stories that you haven't even thought about, right?
And then you do a competition around it. You say, we're gonna do the best three stories on old, and we're gonna do the best three stories on you. These are ones you can now show these people off at your next all hands, right? So you're reinforcing that you're turning internal champions, just like external champions into this program, right?
And so they're telling the story.
The next thing, remember I told you about that Slack I. You post and you say, Hey, it's not out to X, Y, and Z. Well, now every time we tell a case study, really quickly, we use chat GBT to make it quick. We take the case study and we say, Hey, tell us a 30, 62nd story following this prompt, which is, you know, the intro and hook the conflict, the turning point, and the resolution in this format.
Give us a script. We take the script and we go to the AE of that account, or the CSM and we say, Hey, we need you to record this. You can totally customize it. We just wanna make it easy for you if you want to tell the story different that follows this format. Different. Please do. But we wanna make it easy.
And then we set up a time within that week. It takes literally less than five minutes to record this with them. Right. And we set, we set the time. We don't, we don't wait for them to go do it, because that will take forever. They're so busy. You just set the time. You say, I'm gonna make this as easy as possible.
And you have them record the video with you. Now when you launch that blog and that case study comes out, you launch it with their face telling the story on Slack or Teams, because now guess what? You're also, you're reconnecting them to the value of that story. So you're still reinforcing their personal brand development within your organization, right?
And others get the FOMO from that as well. So every step, what you're trying to do is champion internal and external, right? Because now that culture is really around, this is all goodness. This is gonna help everybody. And you don't need spiffs when you do this. You don't need to pay $2,000 a story, right when you're doing this.
Because spiffs are like bandaids. They work upfront totally. And then best, best, and then they, they fade out. So this is a way totally, that you create a culture of goodness around storytelling. Being involved from the beginning to the end.
[00:25:56] Sunny Manivannan: That's brilliant. I love your point about spiffs too. It's just everybody, you know, just spends money like crazy on the stuff.
And then, you know, like you said, a quarter in the excitement is gone and then turns out 25, a hundred dollars, people will do it. But it's not the kind of story that you want, which is, you know, it should come out of love. Right. And a true passion for this customer story, not just, oh, I'm gonna get 50 bucks.
Thanks for no, thanks for my Amazon gift card.
One of the things that you have talked about without talking about it yet, but I would love to go here with you, but in everything you've said, there's an undercurrent of genius marketing, of marketing within your company, and that is one area where a lot of customer marketing organizations and teams don't do a great job is marketing their own impact within their company and then helping others see, here's what we do for the company.
And in everything that you've said, you know about great storytelling, setting that culture of storytelling, making salespeople, the heroes, it has this really wonderful side effect of helping A, B, C, oh, here's what customer marketing is capable of. Oh my goodness, they're actually impacting revenue. What advice do you have for customer marketers who are struggling with internal marketing?
You know, everything you've talked about. Honestly, I would just implement it exactly as you said it. Yeah. Is there more that you have to say on this topic? What? What have you learned?
[00:27:10] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, so one, when you make other people look good, they're indebted to you, right? So think of yourself like a sports agent, right?
You've got these amazing athletes out there that are doing phenomenal jobs. Your job is to show them off and make them more valuable. When you do that, those athletes love you, right? And so when you have collectively helped the sales teams be more successful at their jobs, at the individual level, and you have collectively done it with the CS team and the product marketing team, you are now gonna create this goodness where you become critical to your organization.
So. I think one of the key points that you've nailed on this is customer marketing. Though it's known that we need it right within our organizations, it is not looked at as critically valuable as, let's say, growth marketing, right? Yes. Demand gen, or when everything feeds off of customer marketing.
[00:28:00] Sunny Manivannan: Yes.
[00:28:00] Ari Hoffman: Growth, marketing, product marketing. Every type of marketing feeds off of customer marketing. There is no organizational group. That is more tied cross-functionally throughout the organization than customer marketing, right? Because you've gotta know product, you've gotta know what's going on there. You're helping with beta programs, you're helping with all this stuff.
So if we know we're, we're this critically important, why are we not as valuable as we should be? Right? Why are we not at the big kids table? And sometimes we are, but a lot of times we're not. And that's because we're so focused on churning. Let me just do case study after case study after case study.
Instead of looking at what are the things that matter for the company to move it forward, telling the right stories, showing off the right people, right? Empowering the right teams. When you do that, now you've got everybody's attention and you're gonna come in clean. Plus when you can tell this story, right, you should market yourself in the way.
When you do any, any new thing you're gonna do, you create a campaign around. So if you're gonna revamp how you're telling stories, brand that, don't just do it, brand it. We're coming out with, we called a Deep Impact, right? We're coming out with Deep Impact 2.0. This is how we're gonna tell story. You know, you set the whole premise.
Here's the intro and hook for telling Deep Impact. Here's the conflict that we have at our company right now, why it's getting harder to tell stories and how come it's getting harder to approve them. Here's where our turning point is. This is the realization that we've had coming out of it, and here's the resolution.
This is what we're gonna aim for. So make sure you brand these things so that you get more buy-in and then you've gotta go sell it, right? You've gotta tell those stories and you've gotta use, so when you start small, start with three stories. Don't, you don't need to go boil the ocean, re start small and call it a pilot.
Okay? So if you wanna pilot this, you've gotta have one, two, or three salespeople out there that you know you have a great relationship with. Maybe some of them are really hard. Maybe you have none. Start with one, two, or three. Use the case studies. Go and recreate 'em in this format. Show them off. Right?
Start small. You might not get into the CKO. You might not get into every, all hands. You might not get onto the sales enablement calls. We even do quarterly readiness trainings, right? And we put this into our onboarding materials. So telling the art of the story goes into our onboarding materials. So new people are coming on already introduced to this, right?
You might not get all of those at once. Start with one or two. Work with those teams. Build your inroads to showing them off and see how the results go. I would say one of the easiest ways to start here is making sure that you follow up with every case study and asking the customer to give shout outs, right?
Give us 32nd to a minute long shout out about why this person is important and what they did to be important to you. That what they did is critical. What did they just, it's not just, oh, I love working with John. He's a, he's a such a wonderful person. It's, I love working with John because he shows up to every meeting ahead of time.
He's got a plan for us. He shows us what's actually the art of the possible, and he's made us successful. Without John, I don't know where we'd be. That's a phenomenal shout out, right? That's telling us what they did. And you can even ask for impact if you want.
[00:31:07] Sunny Manivannan: You talked about. How sellers that use customer stories, well see a higher conversion rate.
I think this reinforces something that we all believe to be intuitively true, but what have you learned in your sort of journey into this, into this part of the world?
[00:31:21] Ari Hoffman: Well, you know, there there are two ways. There's the anecdotal side and there's the measurement side. Oh, the reporting side. So on the anecdotal side.
Go talk to your best salespeople and ask them when do they use customer stories? Do they use customer stories? Not everyone doesn't. So I, I was at, um, a previous company and we had about a year long sales cycle. It was a major enterprise company. You know, the a SP was was probably over 150 k doing multimillion dollar deals.
And so these are long sales process and I had a guy who was closing Microsoft and, and, and major brands. Without a customer referral. And I'm like, how are you? We're supposed to use customer referrals, and he is just like, I'm closing 'em without, and I said, I get it. I get it. Why? Why introduce something else into the mix that could cause potential friction when you've got this process that's working, but how long are you taking to close deals?
How about this? Let's, let's test on a couple of your smaller deals if we bring in the right customer at the right time to talk to them, if it helps you with that. Because one of the things that happens in reference programs, same with storytelling, is you bring in something that's not relevant. It's a, it's a tech person speaking to a business person.
It's a data person speaking to a people person. So. You've gotta have that apples to apples connection. And so what you can do is find those people, make sure that they are telling stories, and if they're not, work with a couple of them. 'cause now guess what? You just turned someone who is a detractor, right into a promoter.
So now I have this person who wasn't using 'em, who closes really big deals. Now it's critical. He does not close a deal without using a reference. Same thing as in storytelling. So find out from people when they tell those stories and what impact it had. The next thing is if you use, um, a content management system or something to report on these stories, how often they're being told, right?
You can start to get into the metrics that actually show this, and you can show when stories are used, we can compare. Here's all the, the deals that have closed without stories. Here are all the deals that close. Here's the average time to close, right? Here's how they've shortened the sales funnel for us.
So you can start to really show up. Measurable impact with our programs. We closed that de that delta by 17%. Right. So you think every sales person out there wouldn't want to close deals 17% faster, right? So the numbers speak for themselves and then you can use the data that's out there, right? Telling stories, you're 25% more likely to convert, right?
We know these things. These are Gartner studies over thousands and thousands and thousands of deals being closed. So these are all the things when you are. Campaigning for your own programs and branding it. You've gotta put the metrics in there just like you do when you're telling a case study.
[00:34:00] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome.
Listen, you've taught me so much in the last 30 minutes. Any parting thoughts for the audience, um, which is, you know, customer marketers around the world, what would you tell, tell customer marketers in March, 2025?
[00:34:10] Ari Hoffman: Customer marketing can be really stressful, right? We feel like we're always too busy chopping wood to sharpen our ax.
I'd love to do that, but I just don't have time. Start small. Make the time. Because otherwise you will burn yourself out and this is one of the best jobs on the planet. We get to show people off for a living. We get to make people feel good for a living. We get make friends for a living. That is our job as customer marketer and advocacy and community professionals, right?
So don't burn out. Don't burn out. I know it's hard. We've all gone through it. Job security can be really sketchy, so you think you just gotta do the job they're telling you, but you will not make yourself irreplaceable unless you do more than what they're asking of you, and you don't need to do it by losing yourself.
Right? You can do it in small chunks by being smart about it, finding out what are those things that matter to move the business forward. And to me, storytelling is one of the fastest, easiest ways to do it. Right. Storytelling in awards, but that's for another day.
[00:35:06] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome. Thank you, Ari. This was super wonderful and the insights that you shared. I can't wait to go spread these across the community. And, uh, yeah. Once again, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:35:15] Ari Hoffman: Absolutely. I love what you're doing.
[00:35:16]Sunny Manivannan: Good stuff. Thank you.
Tune in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
"Ari Hoffman: That does not mean your story is just number, number, number. You do not want to do what we call a stat bomb, right? Because that, that just sounds way too self-indulgent. So you've gotta be able to mix the numbers in a way to telling that story. That's really important. So the way that we tell all of our stories, we tell the hero's journey, and that's it."
[00:00:26] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to the Peerbound podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is a customer marketing advocacy legend Ari Hoffman. Ari has worked at some of the best software companies over the last decade and a half, including Coveo, Influitive, and Amplitude among others, and I'm so privileged to have him join me today to talk about so many great topics, uh, around customer storytelling and really creating a culture at your company that maximize the impact of all the work that customer marketing advocacy professionals do.
So Ari, it's so great to have you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I love what you're doing. Thank you. Let me start by asking you about storytelling. You have spoken so eloquently about customer storytelling, and it's clear that you're so passionate about it. Why customer stories, even in this, you know, AI era.
What, why do you think stories resonate? Why do you think they work with prospects and buyers?
[00:01:17] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, I mean, the real story there is, if you back up a second, we are filled with noise, valuable noise right now, and I've talked about this for a decade probably, so it's only gotten worse in this time, but we all know, right, the right things to say.
About ourselves. When a company talks about themselves, we all know the right things. We know the right metrics to talk about. It's all valuable, but everybody is doing it, and we're hit on every single screen that we have. It went from being, you know, hit on our TVs. Now we're hitting the movie feeders with advertisements, right?
We're hit on the radio. But now it's not just that, it's our phones, right? We know that our watches are hitting us, right? It's everywhere. And so when you have that much noise, you start to turn off. The only thing that really connects is hearing human based stories from other humans, right? And so for me, and I talk about this a lot, which is, I, I can't connect to a brand, especially in B2B, right?
I'm not Nike, right. I'm not just do it right? When, when you work at Amplitude or Coveo or any of these companies. Nobody's gonna say, oh, I resonate with Amplitude, but you resonate with our people at that company. So if I'm trying to progress my career, I'm trying to do better and be more valuable for my organization, I don't go say, oh, what is Salesforce doing?
I go say, what is Timothy at Salesforce doing? Right? What is Sarah over at Genesis doing right now that is creating such a buzz? And I'm gonna look at the individuals and what they're doing, and how do they scale that? Guess what? The technology comes along for the ride in that. Right? And so how do you tell a story that puts the customer at the, the center is the champion of the story, not just because it's great for the customer and it, it's something that helps them grow their own personal brand and their career.
But because people resonate with that more, right? We wanna look for those things that are relevant to us and our own journeys, right? And so they have to be relevant. They have to be impactful, right? And they have to connect at a deeper level. And storytelling, I don't think I need to. Convince anyone who's listening to this that storytelling is important.
We all know how important this the power of story is. It's just how do you leverage that story in a way that is impactful, that actually helps move the needle, and doesn't just buy time and waste space, right? It's not about patting your own back. It's about helping expose a successful journey for others that they can get inspired by and go.
That is within my reach. Even if I had these blockers before, I can see now there is a path to success here. And so that's what we're really focused on in customer storytelling.
[00:03:41] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, I am a math major. I was an engineer by training and I've lived and breathed numbers for so many, um, so many years and I continue to do so.
But there is something about real stories with real people and. The impact that they make is just completely different. So thanks for sharing that. Yeah, absolutely.
I wanna ask you a little bit about the role of numbers. You know, we're talking about numbers. There clearly are metrics that matter in B2B and companies ultimately byproduct that deliver results, and we would like to quantify those results.
What makes for an effective story, in your view? How do you combine the qualitative human element of the story? With metrics and what, what is effective? You've seen this at so many great companies.
[00:04:26] Ari Hoffman: Yeah. So I mean, let's, let's jump back for a second and just look at what is the problem with storytelling right now In a lot of companies face, and maybe a lot of people resonate this.
One, finding net news stories can be very tricky, right? Because you're not get, your accounts aren't giving you enough of them. They're not referring enough customers, right? It's hard to search through the mess that's out there. Maybe your Salesforce, maybe your HubSpot, maybe your CRMs aren't tracking the right information.
So it's really hard to find these needles in a haystack of great stories. One. Then how do we tell a story that is captivating, that is impactful, that's gonna move the needle, that captures ROI and real business impact, right? So it's not just about the use case, but how is it moving their business forward, right?
Or whatever they're trying to solve for whatever that obstacle is, that objective is, right, or that opportunity, what is that that it's helping accomplish in a measurable way, not just in an anecdotal way. And then now that we've captured these stories, how do we use 'em? So they don't go sit in a content graveyard.
I know one of the worst things is you spend all of this time, you create this wonderful story. You go through their comms scene in PR and legal, and you get it approved finally, which by the way, is getting harder and harder. If anyone is wondering, it is getting harder and harder to prove these stories.
That is a real thing. Um, and it's not just, you know, that this is happening across the board. There's a lot of different reasons, but one of the major ones is security threats, right? You're opening up vulnerabilities. So now that you've created this wonderful content, you've gotten the sign off. And you, you want everyone to use it, and then nobody does, and it just sits there.
And then people ask you, Hey, can we get a case study on X? And you're like, I just did three of them. What do you mean? Why are you asking me this? Right? And it can become really frustrating and deflating. They actually burn out your team if you have people who are responsible for creating the stories on your team.
This is how churn happens, okay? When they're creating and creating and creating, and nobody's actually seeing them for the valuable content that they're producing. That's high churn rate. So we can talk about all those. And so one of the key things here to focus on is telling stories that matter. Right, and so one of the ways that you focus on this is if you have a business value team who who does business value assessments or realization.
Which is, what is the business impact of buying our product? What is the ROI, right? What are you getting outta this? Is it cost savings? Is it revenue generating, right? Is it hiring and firing? What, what are you looking to accomplish that is measurable and how do we measure it? So if you, if you align with your business value team, then you might have five, six different lines of business, right?
So each of those might have a different value proposition. So that's where you go and talk with your product and your product marketing teams, and you wanna look about two quarters ahead to say what's coming down the pipe that we should be focusing on. Because telling stories that are just cool, doesn't matter if they're not relevant.
Relevancy is everything. So you have to have the context, right. You need to know what it is that you're talking about and why you're talking about it. When you're talking about it, so ROI is all about, and every company is different, is what are the things that you can measure to show both from your leading indicators, right, your key performance indicators.
Those leading indicators, what are the things that we know that are telling us through our lagging metrics, which are, and you wanna focus on these as ROI, it's all about the lagging metrics, right? So are we saving money? Are we building new revenue? Are we speeding up? The velocities sales cycles. What are those big movers, right?
That you're really looking at business impact, and your company will talk about these at CKO. They'll talk about 'em at SKO, they'll talk about 'em about what are we trying to accomplish. So those are your key focal points. And then you want to backtrack everything in your story from that. That does not mean your story is just number, number, number.
You do not want to do what we call a stat bomb, right? Because that, that just sounds way too self, um, indulgent, right? So you've gotta be able to mix the numbers in a way to telling that story. That's really important.
So the way that we tell all of our stories with impact is this. We didn't invent this.
This has been since Greek mythology, the hero's journey. We tell the hero's journey and that's it. We make it very personal, right? Which is you start with a hook and intro. So your hook is the first 30 seconds of the story. What is that hook? That's generally where we, we do a stat bomb in a way that makes sense.
Like you just told me that you are having a hard time getting your data analytics team to produce real numbers. That doesn't take weeks. It's really interesting 'cause I was just talking to John over at Cyclone. They were able to convert their analytic cycle down from weeks to days. They now get it in minutes.
What if I told you that in minutes you could get the insights that you needed to literally change the way that you approach your sales conversions by about 50%. That's your hook, right? That was just done in under 30 seconds. So we start with hook and intro, then we go into the conflict, right? What is it?
What is the challenge that we're looking to accomplish? What is that real hurdle or chasm you have to cross? So that comes next. Then after the conflict is the turning point. What happened that came that, that you have this enlightenment, right? Of holy shit, we need to do something different here. What was that turning point and, and where did you go?
So then we tell the turning point. This is what they did next. This is how they set themselves up for success. And then we have the end and the resolution. This is where you tie it back, you book end that story back to that hook and that intro, those two ends are where you fill in the ROI. That is the business impact, right?
Because. Your first impression and your last impression in a story, just like meeting someone are critically important. So that's where you really double down on telling the numbers and those numbers remember, tie into what your customer success says they need for adoption, right? And moving forward. It's what your product marketing team says that we need in these new products that we're gonna be launching.
This is where we're going, and it's what your product and your business value teams are gonna say. This is what's inherently valuable about our product and what we're trying to turn the needle on.
[00:10:18] Sunny Manivannan: Masterclass. I have nothing. I have nothing to say to that. I'm still processing the, you just said just to even.
Go back to saying, Hey guys, the hero's journey works. I think that's a valuable lesson because too many people are trying to innovate on things that don't necessarily need innovation.
[00:10:37] Ari Hoffman: And whether you wanna tell it as first person, second person, third person, it doesn't matter as long as you're following a story that is personal, relevant and impactful.
So it's gotta be personal. So at CKO, this is what we did, and this is really important I think, for everyone on this call. This is. The three most important things to a story personal. There has to be a human involved. Again, I don't resonate with a brand, I resonate with Sarah over at Salesforce, right?
Sarah at Salesforce is doing something special. This is what she did with her team at Salesforce using this product. But at first, you know here, here's the quick way I say it. When you come outta Star Wars or Ninja Turtles or any movie, of course I'm, I'm a big dork, so I love all these movies, but when you come out, you don't say, I want to be the Millennium Falcon.
I wanna be a lightsaber. I want to be a blaster. Right? You come out and say, I wanna be on solo, I wanna be Luke, I wanna be Leia. I. If I say I wanna be Leia, I know I'm using a blaster, right? That's right. If anyone says on solo, you know you're flying the Millennium Falcon, your product, your company is the Millennium Falcon.
It's the tools and the technology that help them be successful, but they are the champion of the story. Why are they the champion of the story? They're the ones who are getting budget. They're sticking their neck out to buy your product. They have to get the internal adoption and do change management and all of the hard stuff.
You, your solution is not pixie dust. It doesn't just come in and solve the day. It requires buy-in from them, right? And so that is where you tell a story that is personal. It's gotta be about somebody and what they've done with their team, or how they've leveled themselves up to inspire others so they can see what good looks like.
And start to remove the blockers that have caused hesitation or analysis paralysis in the buying journey. Right. Or adoption journey. So I, uh, we're, we're gonna talk on customer stories, both pre and post-sale because they're both critically important.
[00:12:22] Sunny Manivannan: Love what you said about just, it's not about the tools, it's about the people.
And even in the first example that you used about, you said, Hey, I was talking to John from this company. Just that casual nature of it's a person to person conversation, and it's a real person's story that just happens to be your customer and then going into, okay, let me give you the hook and all of those things, but you've gotta, the, the draw is the human story.
[00:12:46] Ari Hoffman: Yeah. And, you wanna help your sales and success teams sound like they have a deep well of knowledge around your product.
And so the next phase that you and I'll talk about is how do we do that? How do we get the buy-in to make them really bought in on telling these stories that are personal, that are relevant and are impactful?
Right? So personal relevant means it, it, it has to, how many times have you gone on a sales call and I don't know, when you get to director level and up, you start to notice you get on a lot more sales calls. A lot tech companies. Yes. Tell you. Right? And so you'll hear someone when you're, they, they ask you the the normal standard question.
You know, what is your challenges? What outcomes are you looking for? You talk and it, you can tell the second they respond, they weren't actually listening to what you were saying. They had a story they wanted to tell you because it's a great story. It's got great ROI, it's got great impact, but it's not your story.
It's not your journey. And they just tell you something that you're like, I have. That means nothing to me. So it's not relevant. So you have to make sure the story correlates, which is why we have to tell a broad range of stories. 'cause not only do you have different use cases and different business lines, but you also have different personas you're talking to.
Are they a vp, are they a practitioner, are they a champion? Are they an individual contributor? You want to tell stories that help inspire that person, not just a general story. That is great to toot your own horn. Really a story that is impactful to them and relevant to them. And then impact is what we talked about already, which is on the ROI side.
[00:14:13] Sunny Manivannan: I love this when, um, at a previous company when I was leading a sales team and it was a global sales team and we had a lot of really great sales reps, but you know, they would prepare for a call with a prospect and they'd say, this is the story that I think I'm gonna tell. And no ability to release that agenda if the call goes a different way.
So they end up the exact situation that you highlighted. And I'm so happy you talked about this because it's just one of those thoughts that's inside everybody's head. We've all been on the receiving end of this call. By the way, everybody who's been around 30 plus years on this planet has been on the other side of this call where it's like, why are you telling me this?
It's like, oh, right, you prepared for that. And now you felt like you had to share the story 'cause you did the work. But it's not relevant to me. And now you actually got me farther away than we were at the beginning of this call.
[00:14:53] Ari Hoffman: Right? And I, and I can empathize with sales and success. They've got a million people they've gotta call.
They're just trying to scale themselves, right? And they're dealing with the unknown. They don't know what's gonna hit. They don't know what's not. And so to minimize effort, they come up with like a program that they like to stick to, right? And once they have, it's very hard to deviate because they don't have time to deviate.
That's why one of the big things is how do you train your sales to have six or seven of these stories in their back pocket that they can pull off? From memory, that is very easy. So if that happens and they need to pivot, they can pivot on the spot, right? They can make things much more relevant, but they have to know those.
They can't just try and pull it outta thin air, and that's our job. That's not their job. They are busy. Our job is to help remove the obstacles in the way of sales to absorb these stories. They've got enough going on, right? So we have to make it really easy for them to absorb these stories. We'll get into that and how we do that.
[00:15:51] Sunny Manivannan: I wanna talk to you about this point of how do you really empower sales and how do you, and maybe we can talk about how do you set that culture at your company a little bit later. But I wanna focus really on everything you just talked about, about having that empathy for the sales rep who's juggling so many things at the same time, but still, you know, needs to have a great call every single time.
How do you as a customer marketer really empower that rep? How do you make sure that they feel confident in being able to have these great calls and these being able to tell these great stories?
[00:16:19] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, so one, you, you have to lead by example, right? So one thing that I like to do is make sure if storytelling is important to your company, which it should be, should be critically important.
'cause not only is it using in all your marketing material down the sales funnel. Right from awareness all the way down to consideration and, and purchase. But it's using your, in your actual one-to-one pipeline. When your sales are talking and your successor talking, we know how critical. So if it's that critical, you should be doing a storytelling session right at every CKO on every sales enablement session.
There should be at least a story that you're talking about, at least one and every town hall you should be. So stories are front and center all the time. It's a great way also for company morale. Because your product teams and your engineers and all these people who might not get to see these end results, you wanna keep inspiring internally to show that this is actually changing lives for the better.
This is what our company and our product stands for, and this is the real world applications of it. So you're constantly getting in front of them. So that story now becomes a part of the company culture of sharing. Right. But the culture part, which you hit on is critically important here because it's not just about showing what good looks like, it's about recognizing the people who got you there.
And so one of the things that we change, any, any time I come into a program, I can instantly tell you what the, the challenges are gonna be. And one of the fastest ways to change that culture is you're not just celebrating the customer, you're celebrating the partnership. So one, you're not just celebrating yourself and the technology we want, we know we get away from that.
The story is about the customer, right? How are you helping them? How is that partnership critical? Because they don't win in a silo. They're not in an echo chamber all by themselves trying to do this. You've got your wonderful onboarding materials and your professional services that are helping, right?
You've got your customer success and your accounts teams, even your AEs come back in. So how are those people actually helping them be successful? Well tell that in this story as well. You're like, no, why? We don't want to talk about individuals. Because what if they leave our company?
Nobody's tracking the individuals.
What they're tracking is the humans at your company that are making business impact help, um, possible, right? And so when they know, because when I'm looking into a company, I wanna know what is onboarding gonna be like? Am I gonna have the support that I need to actually be successful doing this? I've got 18 other priorities as well.
So what kind of success is possible, right? With my limited bandwidth that I have with your company? And so all of these touch points help.
So now what you're doing is you're saying, Hey, let's celebrate both the customer and the individuals at our company that are helping them. And let's indoctrinate them into the story itself.
So we call this the Hall of Heroes and the Hall of Heroes. Is this, let, let me guess if a lot of listeners on this call, this is how they tell a story. They might go in, grab the story, maybe a sales person referred it, maybe a CS person referred it. They tell the story, then they're gonna launch it. They go into Slack or or Microsoft Teams and they announce, you know, this just went live.
The blog little. You know, posts comes up and, Hey y'all. The emojis. The emojis, and we wanna thank X, Y, and Z. Cool. They got a slack mention really quickly. Is that gonna move the needle? Right? With all of the other things and all of the other mentions everywhere. But if you put their name with a link to their LinkedIn profile in the story itself, you're making them more valuable.
You're showing that they're a professional at what they do. You're also touting the company saying, these are the people that we hire. And this is how much we care about our, our employees, that we are literally immortalizing them in the written word. That's one. Two, when you tell a customer story, generally right off the bat.
When you're interviewing a customer, if they go through that process with you, they're in a pretty good state and they feel special. You're telling their story, you're showing it off. If you frame it the right way, where it's not all about you, it's about them, then you've got them in a good place.
Right after that, I send them a link, and in the link it's got three prompts and it says, tell me one about a sales person that has been really impactful to you and why.
What have they done that was impactful. Two, tell me about your customer success manager, if you have one. If you're scaled, it's who on your journey? Is it from the product team? Is it from support? Who on your journey, record 30 seconds telling me why you like them and what they've done to help you on your journey.
Now you've got a little minute and a half clip from every customer story giving a personal shut up, and we store these on a page that the entire company has access to. Called the Hall of Heroes, where now you can go in and one CSM can now start to have 5, 6, 7, 8 different customers touting them. Who doesn't want to be celebrated like that?
They're gonna share this when they're looking for promotions, when they're having their quarterly or their, their annuals performance reviews. So this is great fodder to help boost people, and you're gonna start to see those people who really separate themselves and it creates fomo right from the others.
The others are going, wait, Susie is just like crushing it over you. I, I have customers that can tell like that. And so it helps start to take the blinders off of the art of the possible and telling these stories and what their customers they have that they can start to reach out to. Right? Because now you're creating something that's in it for them.
It's not just what's in it for you. It's not just what's in it for the company or the customer. It's all about it. It's holistic. It's helping the business grow. It's helping the employee grow, and it's helping the customer grow, and there's no downside to it. It's all goodness, everybody. Feel good about it.
Everybody gets to feel motivated by it. And guess what? When your customers spend a couple minutes talking about this person, it reinforces in their own mind the partnership that you have. So it's strengthening the business impact that you have.
[00:21:55] Sunny Manivannan: This is, I mean, you're blowing me away. This is brilliant stuff.
I'm being very honest with you. This is just attacking this problem on multiple good levels and getting to a great outcome for every party that's involved.
[00:22:05] Ari Hoffman: Well, and now we're not done. So I said, you've gotta have it in CKO, and we do a session. So in CKO, this is a really fun trick for everyone. We do a session about 30 to 45 minutes talking about the art of storytelling.
Then we bring up three of our biggest deals over the last year. We bring up the AE to tell that story. Okay. How did they close it and what story did they tell? When they close this major deal, right? That's inspiring a whole group of either new salespeople that are coming on, you know, uh, veterans that are there.
It's the biggest deals. Money matters to salespeople, right? So you inspire them. Then we do an hour long workshop after that where you break everybody in the SKO into groups, divided by, you know, you have one or two AEs in each group. One account person, depending on who you invite to your CKO or SKO, you break 'em into groups.
Whatever the size needs to be. Generally you wanna separate. So it's not all salespeople in one group, all because you need your salespeople to tell these stories. And you say, Hey, in this exercise we're gonna go over the storytelling format we just did in the presentation, and you're gonna tell two stories.
Your group can either have one person tell both stories, or you can have one person tell one story and one person tell. One is gonna be from the list of stories we've already captured. You're gonna go take one of the case studies we've already created and you're gonna tell a story, and we're gonna assign a case study to each group.
That way they're not going and you're not getting multiple people telling the same story. Okay? And two, you're gonna tell us a story that's not on this list, a net news story. So you're doing two things. One, all of the stories that you already have, you're capturing 62nd clip from the ae. You can now attach to your case study.
So a new AE who's coming into the company can watch this real quick and get the gist of how to tell the Cliff note story of it. So one, you're creating that two on the net news story. Well guess what? You've got your leads coming up. Now you have all these new customer stories that you haven't even thought about, right?
And then you do a competition around it. You say, we're gonna do the best three stories on old, and we're gonna do the best three stories on you. These are ones you can now show these people off at your next all hands, right? So you're reinforcing that you're turning internal champions, just like external champions into this program, right?
And so they're telling the story.
The next thing, remember I told you about that Slack I. You post and you say, Hey, it's not out to X, Y, and Z. Well, now every time we tell a case study, really quickly, we use chat GBT to make it quick. We take the case study and we say, Hey, tell us a 30, 62nd story following this prompt, which is, you know, the intro and hook the conflict, the turning point, and the resolution in this format.
Give us a script. We take the script and we go to the AE of that account, or the CSM and we say, Hey, we need you to record this. You can totally customize it. We just wanna make it easy for you if you want to tell the story different that follows this format. Different. Please do. But we wanna make it easy.
And then we set up a time within that week. It takes literally less than five minutes to record this with them. Right. And we set, we set the time. We don't, we don't wait for them to go do it, because that will take forever. They're so busy. You just set the time. You say, I'm gonna make this as easy as possible.
And you have them record the video with you. Now when you launch that blog and that case study comes out, you launch it with their face telling the story on Slack or Teams, because now guess what? You're also, you're reconnecting them to the value of that story. So you're still reinforcing their personal brand development within your organization, right?
And others get the FOMO from that as well. So every step, what you're trying to do is champion internal and external, right? Because now that culture is really around, this is all goodness. This is gonna help everybody. And you don't need spiffs when you do this. You don't need to pay $2,000 a story, right when you're doing this.
Because spiffs are like bandaids. They work upfront totally. And then best, best, and then they, they fade out. So this is a way totally, that you create a culture of goodness around storytelling. Being involved from the beginning to the end.
[00:25:56] Sunny Manivannan: That's brilliant. I love your point about spiffs too. It's just everybody, you know, just spends money like crazy on the stuff.
And then, you know, like you said, a quarter in the excitement is gone and then turns out 25, a hundred dollars, people will do it. But it's not the kind of story that you want, which is, you know, it should come out of love. Right. And a true passion for this customer story, not just, oh, I'm gonna get 50 bucks.
Thanks for no, thanks for my Amazon gift card.
One of the things that you have talked about without talking about it yet, but I would love to go here with you, but in everything you've said, there's an undercurrent of genius marketing, of marketing within your company, and that is one area where a lot of customer marketing organizations and teams don't do a great job is marketing their own impact within their company and then helping others see, here's what we do for the company.
And in everything that you've said, you know about great storytelling, setting that culture of storytelling, making salespeople, the heroes, it has this really wonderful side effect of helping A, B, C, oh, here's what customer marketing is capable of. Oh my goodness, they're actually impacting revenue. What advice do you have for customer marketers who are struggling with internal marketing?
You know, everything you've talked about. Honestly, I would just implement it exactly as you said it. Yeah. Is there more that you have to say on this topic? What? What have you learned?
[00:27:10] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, so one, when you make other people look good, they're indebted to you, right? So think of yourself like a sports agent, right?
You've got these amazing athletes out there that are doing phenomenal jobs. Your job is to show them off and make them more valuable. When you do that, those athletes love you, right? And so when you have collectively helped the sales teams be more successful at their jobs, at the individual level, and you have collectively done it with the CS team and the product marketing team, you are now gonna create this goodness where you become critical to your organization.
So. I think one of the key points that you've nailed on this is customer marketing. Though it's known that we need it right within our organizations, it is not looked at as critically valuable as, let's say, growth marketing, right? Yes. Demand gen, or when everything feeds off of customer marketing.
[00:28:00] Sunny Manivannan: Yes.
[00:28:00] Ari Hoffman: Growth, marketing, product marketing. Every type of marketing feeds off of customer marketing. There is no organizational group. That is more tied cross-functionally throughout the organization than customer marketing, right? Because you've gotta know product, you've gotta know what's going on there. You're helping with beta programs, you're helping with all this stuff.
So if we know we're, we're this critically important, why are we not as valuable as we should be? Right? Why are we not at the big kids table? And sometimes we are, but a lot of times we're not. And that's because we're so focused on churning. Let me just do case study after case study after case study.
Instead of looking at what are the things that matter for the company to move it forward, telling the right stories, showing off the right people, right? Empowering the right teams. When you do that, now you've got everybody's attention and you're gonna come in clean. Plus when you can tell this story, right, you should market yourself in the way.
When you do any, any new thing you're gonna do, you create a campaign around. So if you're gonna revamp how you're telling stories, brand that, don't just do it, brand it. We're coming out with, we called a Deep Impact, right? We're coming out with Deep Impact 2.0. This is how we're gonna tell story. You know, you set the whole premise.
Here's the intro and hook for telling Deep Impact. Here's the conflict that we have at our company right now, why it's getting harder to tell stories and how come it's getting harder to approve them. Here's where our turning point is. This is the realization that we've had coming out of it, and here's the resolution.
This is what we're gonna aim for. So make sure you brand these things so that you get more buy-in and then you've gotta go sell it, right? You've gotta tell those stories and you've gotta use, so when you start small, start with three stories. Don't, you don't need to go boil the ocean, re start small and call it a pilot.
Okay? So if you wanna pilot this, you've gotta have one, two, or three salespeople out there that you know you have a great relationship with. Maybe some of them are really hard. Maybe you have none. Start with one, two, or three. Use the case studies. Go and recreate 'em in this format. Show them off. Right?
Start small. You might not get into the CKO. You might not get into every, all hands. You might not get onto the sales enablement calls. We even do quarterly readiness trainings, right? And we put this into our onboarding materials. So telling the art of the story goes into our onboarding materials. So new people are coming on already introduced to this, right?
You might not get all of those at once. Start with one or two. Work with those teams. Build your inroads to showing them off and see how the results go. I would say one of the easiest ways to start here is making sure that you follow up with every case study and asking the customer to give shout outs, right?
Give us 32nd to a minute long shout out about why this person is important and what they did to be important to you. That what they did is critical. What did they just, it's not just, oh, I love working with John. He's a, he's a such a wonderful person. It's, I love working with John because he shows up to every meeting ahead of time.
He's got a plan for us. He shows us what's actually the art of the possible, and he's made us successful. Without John, I don't know where we'd be. That's a phenomenal shout out, right? That's telling us what they did. And you can even ask for impact if you want.
[00:31:07] Sunny Manivannan: You talked about. How sellers that use customer stories, well see a higher conversion rate.
I think this reinforces something that we all believe to be intuitively true, but what have you learned in your sort of journey into this, into this part of the world?
[00:31:21] Ari Hoffman: Well, you know, there there are two ways. There's the anecdotal side and there's the measurement side. Oh, the reporting side. So on the anecdotal side.
Go talk to your best salespeople and ask them when do they use customer stories? Do they use customer stories? Not everyone doesn't. So I, I was at, um, a previous company and we had about a year long sales cycle. It was a major enterprise company. You know, the a SP was was probably over 150 k doing multimillion dollar deals.
And so these are long sales process and I had a guy who was closing Microsoft and, and, and major brands. Without a customer referral. And I'm like, how are you? We're supposed to use customer referrals, and he is just like, I'm closing 'em without, and I said, I get it. I get it. Why? Why introduce something else into the mix that could cause potential friction when you've got this process that's working, but how long are you taking to close deals?
How about this? Let's, let's test on a couple of your smaller deals if we bring in the right customer at the right time to talk to them, if it helps you with that. Because one of the things that happens in reference programs, same with storytelling, is you bring in something that's not relevant. It's a, it's a tech person speaking to a business person.
It's a data person speaking to a people person. So. You've gotta have that apples to apples connection. And so what you can do is find those people, make sure that they are telling stories, and if they're not, work with a couple of them. 'cause now guess what? You just turned someone who is a detractor, right into a promoter.
So now I have this person who wasn't using 'em, who closes really big deals. Now it's critical. He does not close a deal without using a reference. Same thing as in storytelling. So find out from people when they tell those stories and what impact it had. The next thing is if you use, um, a content management system or something to report on these stories, how often they're being told, right?
You can start to get into the metrics that actually show this, and you can show when stories are used, we can compare. Here's all the, the deals that have closed without stories. Here are all the deals that close. Here's the average time to close, right? Here's how they've shortened the sales funnel for us.
So you can start to really show up. Measurable impact with our programs. We closed that de that delta by 17%. Right. So you think every sales person out there wouldn't want to close deals 17% faster, right? So the numbers speak for themselves and then you can use the data that's out there, right? Telling stories, you're 25% more likely to convert, right?
We know these things. These are Gartner studies over thousands and thousands and thousands of deals being closed. So these are all the things when you are. Campaigning for your own programs and branding it. You've gotta put the metrics in there just like you do when you're telling a case study.
[00:34:00] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome.
Listen, you've taught me so much in the last 30 minutes. Any parting thoughts for the audience, um, which is, you know, customer marketers around the world, what would you tell, tell customer marketers in March, 2025?
[00:34:10] Ari Hoffman: Customer marketing can be really stressful, right? We feel like we're always too busy chopping wood to sharpen our ax.
I'd love to do that, but I just don't have time. Start small. Make the time. Because otherwise you will burn yourself out and this is one of the best jobs on the planet. We get to show people off for a living. We get to make people feel good for a living. We get make friends for a living. That is our job as customer marketer and advocacy and community professionals, right?
So don't burn out. Don't burn out. I know it's hard. We've all gone through it. Job security can be really sketchy, so you think you just gotta do the job they're telling you, but you will not make yourself irreplaceable unless you do more than what they're asking of you, and you don't need to do it by losing yourself.
Right? You can do it in small chunks by being smart about it, finding out what are those things that matter to move the business forward. And to me, storytelling is one of the fastest, easiest ways to do it. Right. Storytelling in awards, but that's for another day.
[00:35:06] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome. Thank you, Ari. This was super wonderful and the insights that you shared. I can't wait to go spread these across the community. And, uh, yeah. Once again, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:35:15] Ari Hoffman: Absolutely. I love what you're doing.
[00:35:16]Sunny Manivannan: Good stuff. Thank you.
Tune in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
"Ari Hoffman: That does not mean your story is just number, number, number. You do not want to do what we call a stat bomb, right? Because that, that just sounds way too self-indulgent. So you've gotta be able to mix the numbers in a way to telling that story. That's really important. So the way that we tell all of our stories, we tell the hero's journey, and that's it."
[00:00:26] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to the Peerbound podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is a customer marketing advocacy legend Ari Hoffman. Ari has worked at some of the best software companies over the last decade and a half, including Coveo, Influitive, and Amplitude among others, and I'm so privileged to have him join me today to talk about so many great topics, uh, around customer storytelling and really creating a culture at your company that maximize the impact of all the work that customer marketing advocacy professionals do.
So Ari, it's so great to have you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I love what you're doing. Thank you. Let me start by asking you about storytelling. You have spoken so eloquently about customer storytelling, and it's clear that you're so passionate about it. Why customer stories, even in this, you know, AI era.
What, why do you think stories resonate? Why do you think they work with prospects and buyers?
[00:01:17] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, I mean, the real story there is, if you back up a second, we are filled with noise, valuable noise right now, and I've talked about this for a decade probably, so it's only gotten worse in this time, but we all know, right, the right things to say.
About ourselves. When a company talks about themselves, we all know the right things. We know the right metrics to talk about. It's all valuable, but everybody is doing it, and we're hit on every single screen that we have. It went from being, you know, hit on our TVs. Now we're hitting the movie feeders with advertisements, right?
We're hit on the radio. But now it's not just that, it's our phones, right? We know that our watches are hitting us, right? It's everywhere. And so when you have that much noise, you start to turn off. The only thing that really connects is hearing human based stories from other humans, right? And so for me, and I talk about this a lot, which is, I, I can't connect to a brand, especially in B2B, right?
I'm not Nike, right. I'm not just do it right? When, when you work at Amplitude or Coveo or any of these companies. Nobody's gonna say, oh, I resonate with Amplitude, but you resonate with our people at that company. So if I'm trying to progress my career, I'm trying to do better and be more valuable for my organization, I don't go say, oh, what is Salesforce doing?
I go say, what is Timothy at Salesforce doing? Right? What is Sarah over at Genesis doing right now that is creating such a buzz? And I'm gonna look at the individuals and what they're doing, and how do they scale that? Guess what? The technology comes along for the ride in that. Right? And so how do you tell a story that puts the customer at the, the center is the champion of the story, not just because it's great for the customer and it, it's something that helps them grow their own personal brand and their career.
But because people resonate with that more, right? We wanna look for those things that are relevant to us and our own journeys, right? And so they have to be relevant. They have to be impactful, right? And they have to connect at a deeper level. And storytelling, I don't think I need to. Convince anyone who's listening to this that storytelling is important.
We all know how important this the power of story is. It's just how do you leverage that story in a way that is impactful, that actually helps move the needle, and doesn't just buy time and waste space, right? It's not about patting your own back. It's about helping expose a successful journey for others that they can get inspired by and go.
That is within my reach. Even if I had these blockers before, I can see now there is a path to success here. And so that's what we're really focused on in customer storytelling.
[00:03:41] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, I am a math major. I was an engineer by training and I've lived and breathed numbers for so many, um, so many years and I continue to do so.
But there is something about real stories with real people and. The impact that they make is just completely different. So thanks for sharing that. Yeah, absolutely.
I wanna ask you a little bit about the role of numbers. You know, we're talking about numbers. There clearly are metrics that matter in B2B and companies ultimately byproduct that deliver results, and we would like to quantify those results.
What makes for an effective story, in your view? How do you combine the qualitative human element of the story? With metrics and what, what is effective? You've seen this at so many great companies.
[00:04:26] Ari Hoffman: Yeah. So I mean, let's, let's jump back for a second and just look at what is the problem with storytelling right now In a lot of companies face, and maybe a lot of people resonate this.
One, finding net news stories can be very tricky, right? Because you're not get, your accounts aren't giving you enough of them. They're not referring enough customers, right? It's hard to search through the mess that's out there. Maybe your Salesforce, maybe your HubSpot, maybe your CRMs aren't tracking the right information.
So it's really hard to find these needles in a haystack of great stories. One. Then how do we tell a story that is captivating, that is impactful, that's gonna move the needle, that captures ROI and real business impact, right? So it's not just about the use case, but how is it moving their business forward, right?
Or whatever they're trying to solve for whatever that obstacle is, that objective is, right, or that opportunity, what is that that it's helping accomplish in a measurable way, not just in an anecdotal way. And then now that we've captured these stories, how do we use 'em? So they don't go sit in a content graveyard.
I know one of the worst things is you spend all of this time, you create this wonderful story. You go through their comms scene in PR and legal, and you get it approved finally, which by the way, is getting harder and harder. If anyone is wondering, it is getting harder and harder to prove these stories.
That is a real thing. Um, and it's not just, you know, that this is happening across the board. There's a lot of different reasons, but one of the major ones is security threats, right? You're opening up vulnerabilities. So now that you've created this wonderful content, you've gotten the sign off. And you, you want everyone to use it, and then nobody does, and it just sits there.
And then people ask you, Hey, can we get a case study on X? And you're like, I just did three of them. What do you mean? Why are you asking me this? Right? And it can become really frustrating and deflating. They actually burn out your team if you have people who are responsible for creating the stories on your team.
This is how churn happens, okay? When they're creating and creating and creating, and nobody's actually seeing them for the valuable content that they're producing. That's high churn rate. So we can talk about all those. And so one of the key things here to focus on is telling stories that matter. Right, and so one of the ways that you focus on this is if you have a business value team who who does business value assessments or realization.
Which is, what is the business impact of buying our product? What is the ROI, right? What are you getting outta this? Is it cost savings? Is it revenue generating, right? Is it hiring and firing? What, what are you looking to accomplish that is measurable and how do we measure it? So if you, if you align with your business value team, then you might have five, six different lines of business, right?
So each of those might have a different value proposition. So that's where you go and talk with your product and your product marketing teams, and you wanna look about two quarters ahead to say what's coming down the pipe that we should be focusing on. Because telling stories that are just cool, doesn't matter if they're not relevant.
Relevancy is everything. So you have to have the context, right. You need to know what it is that you're talking about and why you're talking about it. When you're talking about it, so ROI is all about, and every company is different, is what are the things that you can measure to show both from your leading indicators, right, your key performance indicators.
Those leading indicators, what are the things that we know that are telling us through our lagging metrics, which are, and you wanna focus on these as ROI, it's all about the lagging metrics, right? So are we saving money? Are we building new revenue? Are we speeding up? The velocities sales cycles. What are those big movers, right?
That you're really looking at business impact, and your company will talk about these at CKO. They'll talk about 'em at SKO, they'll talk about 'em about what are we trying to accomplish. So those are your key focal points. And then you want to backtrack everything in your story from that. That does not mean your story is just number, number, number.
You do not want to do what we call a stat bomb, right? Because that, that just sounds way too self, um, indulgent, right? So you've gotta be able to mix the numbers in a way to telling that story. That's really important.
So the way that we tell all of our stories with impact is this. We didn't invent this.
This has been since Greek mythology, the hero's journey. We tell the hero's journey and that's it. We make it very personal, right? Which is you start with a hook and intro. So your hook is the first 30 seconds of the story. What is that hook? That's generally where we, we do a stat bomb in a way that makes sense.
Like you just told me that you are having a hard time getting your data analytics team to produce real numbers. That doesn't take weeks. It's really interesting 'cause I was just talking to John over at Cyclone. They were able to convert their analytic cycle down from weeks to days. They now get it in minutes.
What if I told you that in minutes you could get the insights that you needed to literally change the way that you approach your sales conversions by about 50%. That's your hook, right? That was just done in under 30 seconds. So we start with hook and intro, then we go into the conflict, right? What is it?
What is the challenge that we're looking to accomplish? What is that real hurdle or chasm you have to cross? So that comes next. Then after the conflict is the turning point. What happened that came that, that you have this enlightenment, right? Of holy shit, we need to do something different here. What was that turning point and, and where did you go?
So then we tell the turning point. This is what they did next. This is how they set themselves up for success. And then we have the end and the resolution. This is where you tie it back, you book end that story back to that hook and that intro, those two ends are where you fill in the ROI. That is the business impact, right?
Because. Your first impression and your last impression in a story, just like meeting someone are critically important. So that's where you really double down on telling the numbers and those numbers remember, tie into what your customer success says they need for adoption, right? And moving forward. It's what your product marketing team says that we need in these new products that we're gonna be launching.
This is where we're going, and it's what your product and your business value teams are gonna say. This is what's inherently valuable about our product and what we're trying to turn the needle on.
[00:10:18] Sunny Manivannan: Masterclass. I have nothing. I have nothing to say to that. I'm still processing the, you just said just to even.
Go back to saying, Hey guys, the hero's journey works. I think that's a valuable lesson because too many people are trying to innovate on things that don't necessarily need innovation.
[00:10:37] Ari Hoffman: And whether you wanna tell it as first person, second person, third person, it doesn't matter as long as you're following a story that is personal, relevant and impactful.
So it's gotta be personal. So at CKO, this is what we did, and this is really important I think, for everyone on this call. This is. The three most important things to a story personal. There has to be a human involved. Again, I don't resonate with a brand, I resonate with Sarah over at Salesforce, right?
Sarah at Salesforce is doing something special. This is what she did with her team at Salesforce using this product. But at first, you know here, here's the quick way I say it. When you come outta Star Wars or Ninja Turtles or any movie, of course I'm, I'm a big dork, so I love all these movies, but when you come out, you don't say, I want to be the Millennium Falcon.
I wanna be a lightsaber. I want to be a blaster. Right? You come out and say, I wanna be on solo, I wanna be Luke, I wanna be Leia. I. If I say I wanna be Leia, I know I'm using a blaster, right? That's right. If anyone says on solo, you know you're flying the Millennium Falcon, your product, your company is the Millennium Falcon.
It's the tools and the technology that help them be successful, but they are the champion of the story. Why are they the champion of the story? They're the ones who are getting budget. They're sticking their neck out to buy your product. They have to get the internal adoption and do change management and all of the hard stuff.
You, your solution is not pixie dust. It doesn't just come in and solve the day. It requires buy-in from them, right? And so that is where you tell a story that is personal. It's gotta be about somebody and what they've done with their team, or how they've leveled themselves up to inspire others so they can see what good looks like.
And start to remove the blockers that have caused hesitation or analysis paralysis in the buying journey. Right. Or adoption journey. So I, uh, we're, we're gonna talk on customer stories, both pre and post-sale because they're both critically important.
[00:12:22] Sunny Manivannan: Love what you said about just, it's not about the tools, it's about the people.
And even in the first example that you used about, you said, Hey, I was talking to John from this company. Just that casual nature of it's a person to person conversation, and it's a real person's story that just happens to be your customer and then going into, okay, let me give you the hook and all of those things, but you've gotta, the, the draw is the human story.
[00:12:46] Ari Hoffman: Yeah. And, you wanna help your sales and success teams sound like they have a deep well of knowledge around your product.
And so the next phase that you and I'll talk about is how do we do that? How do we get the buy-in to make them really bought in on telling these stories that are personal, that are relevant and are impactful?
Right? So personal relevant means it, it, it has to, how many times have you gone on a sales call and I don't know, when you get to director level and up, you start to notice you get on a lot more sales calls. A lot tech companies. Yes. Tell you. Right? And so you'll hear someone when you're, they, they ask you the the normal standard question.
You know, what is your challenges? What outcomes are you looking for? You talk and it, you can tell the second they respond, they weren't actually listening to what you were saying. They had a story they wanted to tell you because it's a great story. It's got great ROI, it's got great impact, but it's not your story.
It's not your journey. And they just tell you something that you're like, I have. That means nothing to me. So it's not relevant. So you have to make sure the story correlates, which is why we have to tell a broad range of stories. 'cause not only do you have different use cases and different business lines, but you also have different personas you're talking to.
Are they a vp, are they a practitioner, are they a champion? Are they an individual contributor? You want to tell stories that help inspire that person, not just a general story. That is great to toot your own horn. Really a story that is impactful to them and relevant to them. And then impact is what we talked about already, which is on the ROI side.
[00:14:13] Sunny Manivannan: I love this when, um, at a previous company when I was leading a sales team and it was a global sales team and we had a lot of really great sales reps, but you know, they would prepare for a call with a prospect and they'd say, this is the story that I think I'm gonna tell. And no ability to release that agenda if the call goes a different way.
So they end up the exact situation that you highlighted. And I'm so happy you talked about this because it's just one of those thoughts that's inside everybody's head. We've all been on the receiving end of this call. By the way, everybody who's been around 30 plus years on this planet has been on the other side of this call where it's like, why are you telling me this?
It's like, oh, right, you prepared for that. And now you felt like you had to share the story 'cause you did the work. But it's not relevant to me. And now you actually got me farther away than we were at the beginning of this call.
[00:14:53] Ari Hoffman: Right? And I, and I can empathize with sales and success. They've got a million people they've gotta call.
They're just trying to scale themselves, right? And they're dealing with the unknown. They don't know what's gonna hit. They don't know what's not. And so to minimize effort, they come up with like a program that they like to stick to, right? And once they have, it's very hard to deviate because they don't have time to deviate.
That's why one of the big things is how do you train your sales to have six or seven of these stories in their back pocket that they can pull off? From memory, that is very easy. So if that happens and they need to pivot, they can pivot on the spot, right? They can make things much more relevant, but they have to know those.
They can't just try and pull it outta thin air, and that's our job. That's not their job. They are busy. Our job is to help remove the obstacles in the way of sales to absorb these stories. They've got enough going on, right? So we have to make it really easy for them to absorb these stories. We'll get into that and how we do that.
[00:15:51] Sunny Manivannan: I wanna talk to you about this point of how do you really empower sales and how do you, and maybe we can talk about how do you set that culture at your company a little bit later. But I wanna focus really on everything you just talked about, about having that empathy for the sales rep who's juggling so many things at the same time, but still, you know, needs to have a great call every single time.
How do you as a customer marketer really empower that rep? How do you make sure that they feel confident in being able to have these great calls and these being able to tell these great stories?
[00:16:19] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, so one, you, you have to lead by example, right? So one thing that I like to do is make sure if storytelling is important to your company, which it should be, should be critically important.
'cause not only is it using in all your marketing material down the sales funnel. Right from awareness all the way down to consideration and, and purchase. But it's using your, in your actual one-to-one pipeline. When your sales are talking and your successor talking, we know how critical. So if it's that critical, you should be doing a storytelling session right at every CKO on every sales enablement session.
There should be at least a story that you're talking about, at least one and every town hall you should be. So stories are front and center all the time. It's a great way also for company morale. Because your product teams and your engineers and all these people who might not get to see these end results, you wanna keep inspiring internally to show that this is actually changing lives for the better.
This is what our company and our product stands for, and this is the real world applications of it. So you're constantly getting in front of them. So that story now becomes a part of the company culture of sharing. Right. But the culture part, which you hit on is critically important here because it's not just about showing what good looks like, it's about recognizing the people who got you there.
And so one of the things that we change, any, any time I come into a program, I can instantly tell you what the, the challenges are gonna be. And one of the fastest ways to change that culture is you're not just celebrating the customer, you're celebrating the partnership. So one, you're not just celebrating yourself and the technology we want, we know we get away from that.
The story is about the customer, right? How are you helping them? How is that partnership critical? Because they don't win in a silo. They're not in an echo chamber all by themselves trying to do this. You've got your wonderful onboarding materials and your professional services that are helping, right?
You've got your customer success and your accounts teams, even your AEs come back in. So how are those people actually helping them be successful? Well tell that in this story as well. You're like, no, why? We don't want to talk about individuals. Because what if they leave our company?
Nobody's tracking the individuals.
What they're tracking is the humans at your company that are making business impact help, um, possible, right? And so when they know, because when I'm looking into a company, I wanna know what is onboarding gonna be like? Am I gonna have the support that I need to actually be successful doing this? I've got 18 other priorities as well.
So what kind of success is possible, right? With my limited bandwidth that I have with your company? And so all of these touch points help.
So now what you're doing is you're saying, Hey, let's celebrate both the customer and the individuals at our company that are helping them. And let's indoctrinate them into the story itself.
So we call this the Hall of Heroes and the Hall of Heroes. Is this, let, let me guess if a lot of listeners on this call, this is how they tell a story. They might go in, grab the story, maybe a sales person referred it, maybe a CS person referred it. They tell the story, then they're gonna launch it. They go into Slack or or Microsoft Teams and they announce, you know, this just went live.
The blog little. You know, posts comes up and, Hey y'all. The emojis. The emojis, and we wanna thank X, Y, and Z. Cool. They got a slack mention really quickly. Is that gonna move the needle? Right? With all of the other things and all of the other mentions everywhere. But if you put their name with a link to their LinkedIn profile in the story itself, you're making them more valuable.
You're showing that they're a professional at what they do. You're also touting the company saying, these are the people that we hire. And this is how much we care about our, our employees, that we are literally immortalizing them in the written word. That's one. Two, when you tell a customer story, generally right off the bat.
When you're interviewing a customer, if they go through that process with you, they're in a pretty good state and they feel special. You're telling their story, you're showing it off. If you frame it the right way, where it's not all about you, it's about them, then you've got them in a good place.
Right after that, I send them a link, and in the link it's got three prompts and it says, tell me one about a sales person that has been really impactful to you and why.
What have they done that was impactful. Two, tell me about your customer success manager, if you have one. If you're scaled, it's who on your journey? Is it from the product team? Is it from support? Who on your journey, record 30 seconds telling me why you like them and what they've done to help you on your journey.
Now you've got a little minute and a half clip from every customer story giving a personal shut up, and we store these on a page that the entire company has access to. Called the Hall of Heroes, where now you can go in and one CSM can now start to have 5, 6, 7, 8 different customers touting them. Who doesn't want to be celebrated like that?
They're gonna share this when they're looking for promotions, when they're having their quarterly or their, their annuals performance reviews. So this is great fodder to help boost people, and you're gonna start to see those people who really separate themselves and it creates fomo right from the others.
The others are going, wait, Susie is just like crushing it over you. I, I have customers that can tell like that. And so it helps start to take the blinders off of the art of the possible and telling these stories and what their customers they have that they can start to reach out to. Right? Because now you're creating something that's in it for them.
It's not just what's in it for you. It's not just what's in it for the company or the customer. It's all about it. It's holistic. It's helping the business grow. It's helping the employee grow, and it's helping the customer grow, and there's no downside to it. It's all goodness, everybody. Feel good about it.
Everybody gets to feel motivated by it. And guess what? When your customers spend a couple minutes talking about this person, it reinforces in their own mind the partnership that you have. So it's strengthening the business impact that you have.
[00:21:55] Sunny Manivannan: This is, I mean, you're blowing me away. This is brilliant stuff.
I'm being very honest with you. This is just attacking this problem on multiple good levels and getting to a great outcome for every party that's involved.
[00:22:05] Ari Hoffman: Well, and now we're not done. So I said, you've gotta have it in CKO, and we do a session. So in CKO, this is a really fun trick for everyone. We do a session about 30 to 45 minutes talking about the art of storytelling.
Then we bring up three of our biggest deals over the last year. We bring up the AE to tell that story. Okay. How did they close it and what story did they tell? When they close this major deal, right? That's inspiring a whole group of either new salespeople that are coming on, you know, uh, veterans that are there.
It's the biggest deals. Money matters to salespeople, right? So you inspire them. Then we do an hour long workshop after that where you break everybody in the SKO into groups, divided by, you know, you have one or two AEs in each group. One account person, depending on who you invite to your CKO or SKO, you break 'em into groups.
Whatever the size needs to be. Generally you wanna separate. So it's not all salespeople in one group, all because you need your salespeople to tell these stories. And you say, Hey, in this exercise we're gonna go over the storytelling format we just did in the presentation, and you're gonna tell two stories.
Your group can either have one person tell both stories, or you can have one person tell one story and one person tell. One is gonna be from the list of stories we've already captured. You're gonna go take one of the case studies we've already created and you're gonna tell a story, and we're gonna assign a case study to each group.
That way they're not going and you're not getting multiple people telling the same story. Okay? And two, you're gonna tell us a story that's not on this list, a net news story. So you're doing two things. One, all of the stories that you already have, you're capturing 62nd clip from the ae. You can now attach to your case study.
So a new AE who's coming into the company can watch this real quick and get the gist of how to tell the Cliff note story of it. So one, you're creating that two on the net news story. Well guess what? You've got your leads coming up. Now you have all these new customer stories that you haven't even thought about, right?
And then you do a competition around it. You say, we're gonna do the best three stories on old, and we're gonna do the best three stories on you. These are ones you can now show these people off at your next all hands, right? So you're reinforcing that you're turning internal champions, just like external champions into this program, right?
And so they're telling the story.
The next thing, remember I told you about that Slack I. You post and you say, Hey, it's not out to X, Y, and Z. Well, now every time we tell a case study, really quickly, we use chat GBT to make it quick. We take the case study and we say, Hey, tell us a 30, 62nd story following this prompt, which is, you know, the intro and hook the conflict, the turning point, and the resolution in this format.
Give us a script. We take the script and we go to the AE of that account, or the CSM and we say, Hey, we need you to record this. You can totally customize it. We just wanna make it easy for you if you want to tell the story different that follows this format. Different. Please do. But we wanna make it easy.
And then we set up a time within that week. It takes literally less than five minutes to record this with them. Right. And we set, we set the time. We don't, we don't wait for them to go do it, because that will take forever. They're so busy. You just set the time. You say, I'm gonna make this as easy as possible.
And you have them record the video with you. Now when you launch that blog and that case study comes out, you launch it with their face telling the story on Slack or Teams, because now guess what? You're also, you're reconnecting them to the value of that story. So you're still reinforcing their personal brand development within your organization, right?
And others get the FOMO from that as well. So every step, what you're trying to do is champion internal and external, right? Because now that culture is really around, this is all goodness. This is gonna help everybody. And you don't need spiffs when you do this. You don't need to pay $2,000 a story, right when you're doing this.
Because spiffs are like bandaids. They work upfront totally. And then best, best, and then they, they fade out. So this is a way totally, that you create a culture of goodness around storytelling. Being involved from the beginning to the end.
[00:25:56] Sunny Manivannan: That's brilliant. I love your point about spiffs too. It's just everybody, you know, just spends money like crazy on the stuff.
And then, you know, like you said, a quarter in the excitement is gone and then turns out 25, a hundred dollars, people will do it. But it's not the kind of story that you want, which is, you know, it should come out of love. Right. And a true passion for this customer story, not just, oh, I'm gonna get 50 bucks.
Thanks for no, thanks for my Amazon gift card.
One of the things that you have talked about without talking about it yet, but I would love to go here with you, but in everything you've said, there's an undercurrent of genius marketing, of marketing within your company, and that is one area where a lot of customer marketing organizations and teams don't do a great job is marketing their own impact within their company and then helping others see, here's what we do for the company.
And in everything that you've said, you know about great storytelling, setting that culture of storytelling, making salespeople, the heroes, it has this really wonderful side effect of helping A, B, C, oh, here's what customer marketing is capable of. Oh my goodness, they're actually impacting revenue. What advice do you have for customer marketers who are struggling with internal marketing?
You know, everything you've talked about. Honestly, I would just implement it exactly as you said it. Yeah. Is there more that you have to say on this topic? What? What have you learned?
[00:27:10] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, so one, when you make other people look good, they're indebted to you, right? So think of yourself like a sports agent, right?
You've got these amazing athletes out there that are doing phenomenal jobs. Your job is to show them off and make them more valuable. When you do that, those athletes love you, right? And so when you have collectively helped the sales teams be more successful at their jobs, at the individual level, and you have collectively done it with the CS team and the product marketing team, you are now gonna create this goodness where you become critical to your organization.
So. I think one of the key points that you've nailed on this is customer marketing. Though it's known that we need it right within our organizations, it is not looked at as critically valuable as, let's say, growth marketing, right? Yes. Demand gen, or when everything feeds off of customer marketing.
[00:28:00] Sunny Manivannan: Yes.
[00:28:00] Ari Hoffman: Growth, marketing, product marketing. Every type of marketing feeds off of customer marketing. There is no organizational group. That is more tied cross-functionally throughout the organization than customer marketing, right? Because you've gotta know product, you've gotta know what's going on there. You're helping with beta programs, you're helping with all this stuff.
So if we know we're, we're this critically important, why are we not as valuable as we should be? Right? Why are we not at the big kids table? And sometimes we are, but a lot of times we're not. And that's because we're so focused on churning. Let me just do case study after case study after case study.
Instead of looking at what are the things that matter for the company to move it forward, telling the right stories, showing off the right people, right? Empowering the right teams. When you do that, now you've got everybody's attention and you're gonna come in clean. Plus when you can tell this story, right, you should market yourself in the way.
When you do any, any new thing you're gonna do, you create a campaign around. So if you're gonna revamp how you're telling stories, brand that, don't just do it, brand it. We're coming out with, we called a Deep Impact, right? We're coming out with Deep Impact 2.0. This is how we're gonna tell story. You know, you set the whole premise.
Here's the intro and hook for telling Deep Impact. Here's the conflict that we have at our company right now, why it's getting harder to tell stories and how come it's getting harder to approve them. Here's where our turning point is. This is the realization that we've had coming out of it, and here's the resolution.
This is what we're gonna aim for. So make sure you brand these things so that you get more buy-in and then you've gotta go sell it, right? You've gotta tell those stories and you've gotta use, so when you start small, start with three stories. Don't, you don't need to go boil the ocean, re start small and call it a pilot.
Okay? So if you wanna pilot this, you've gotta have one, two, or three salespeople out there that you know you have a great relationship with. Maybe some of them are really hard. Maybe you have none. Start with one, two, or three. Use the case studies. Go and recreate 'em in this format. Show them off. Right?
Start small. You might not get into the CKO. You might not get into every, all hands. You might not get onto the sales enablement calls. We even do quarterly readiness trainings, right? And we put this into our onboarding materials. So telling the art of the story goes into our onboarding materials. So new people are coming on already introduced to this, right?
You might not get all of those at once. Start with one or two. Work with those teams. Build your inroads to showing them off and see how the results go. I would say one of the easiest ways to start here is making sure that you follow up with every case study and asking the customer to give shout outs, right?
Give us 32nd to a minute long shout out about why this person is important and what they did to be important to you. That what they did is critical. What did they just, it's not just, oh, I love working with John. He's a, he's a such a wonderful person. It's, I love working with John because he shows up to every meeting ahead of time.
He's got a plan for us. He shows us what's actually the art of the possible, and he's made us successful. Without John, I don't know where we'd be. That's a phenomenal shout out, right? That's telling us what they did. And you can even ask for impact if you want.
[00:31:07] Sunny Manivannan: You talked about. How sellers that use customer stories, well see a higher conversion rate.
I think this reinforces something that we all believe to be intuitively true, but what have you learned in your sort of journey into this, into this part of the world?
[00:31:21] Ari Hoffman: Well, you know, there there are two ways. There's the anecdotal side and there's the measurement side. Oh, the reporting side. So on the anecdotal side.
Go talk to your best salespeople and ask them when do they use customer stories? Do they use customer stories? Not everyone doesn't. So I, I was at, um, a previous company and we had about a year long sales cycle. It was a major enterprise company. You know, the a SP was was probably over 150 k doing multimillion dollar deals.
And so these are long sales process and I had a guy who was closing Microsoft and, and, and major brands. Without a customer referral. And I'm like, how are you? We're supposed to use customer referrals, and he is just like, I'm closing 'em without, and I said, I get it. I get it. Why? Why introduce something else into the mix that could cause potential friction when you've got this process that's working, but how long are you taking to close deals?
How about this? Let's, let's test on a couple of your smaller deals if we bring in the right customer at the right time to talk to them, if it helps you with that. Because one of the things that happens in reference programs, same with storytelling, is you bring in something that's not relevant. It's a, it's a tech person speaking to a business person.
It's a data person speaking to a people person. So. You've gotta have that apples to apples connection. And so what you can do is find those people, make sure that they are telling stories, and if they're not, work with a couple of them. 'cause now guess what? You just turned someone who is a detractor, right into a promoter.
So now I have this person who wasn't using 'em, who closes really big deals. Now it's critical. He does not close a deal without using a reference. Same thing as in storytelling. So find out from people when they tell those stories and what impact it had. The next thing is if you use, um, a content management system or something to report on these stories, how often they're being told, right?
You can start to get into the metrics that actually show this, and you can show when stories are used, we can compare. Here's all the, the deals that have closed without stories. Here are all the deals that close. Here's the average time to close, right? Here's how they've shortened the sales funnel for us.
So you can start to really show up. Measurable impact with our programs. We closed that de that delta by 17%. Right. So you think every sales person out there wouldn't want to close deals 17% faster, right? So the numbers speak for themselves and then you can use the data that's out there, right? Telling stories, you're 25% more likely to convert, right?
We know these things. These are Gartner studies over thousands and thousands and thousands of deals being closed. So these are all the things when you are. Campaigning for your own programs and branding it. You've gotta put the metrics in there just like you do when you're telling a case study.
[00:34:00] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome.
Listen, you've taught me so much in the last 30 minutes. Any parting thoughts for the audience, um, which is, you know, customer marketers around the world, what would you tell, tell customer marketers in March, 2025?
[00:34:10] Ari Hoffman: Customer marketing can be really stressful, right? We feel like we're always too busy chopping wood to sharpen our ax.
I'd love to do that, but I just don't have time. Start small. Make the time. Because otherwise you will burn yourself out and this is one of the best jobs on the planet. We get to show people off for a living. We get to make people feel good for a living. We get make friends for a living. That is our job as customer marketer and advocacy and community professionals, right?
So don't burn out. Don't burn out. I know it's hard. We've all gone through it. Job security can be really sketchy, so you think you just gotta do the job they're telling you, but you will not make yourself irreplaceable unless you do more than what they're asking of you, and you don't need to do it by losing yourself.
Right? You can do it in small chunks by being smart about it, finding out what are those things that matter to move the business forward. And to me, storytelling is one of the fastest, easiest ways to do it. Right. Storytelling in awards, but that's for another day.
[00:35:06] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome. Thank you, Ari. This was super wonderful and the insights that you shared. I can't wait to go spread these across the community. And, uh, yeah. Once again, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:35:15] Ari Hoffman: Absolutely. I love what you're doing.
[00:35:16]Sunny Manivannan: Good stuff. Thank you.
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"Ari Hoffman: That does not mean your story is just number, number, number. You do not want to do what we call a stat bomb, right? Because that, that just sounds way too self-indulgent. So you've gotta be able to mix the numbers in a way to telling that story. That's really important. So the way that we tell all of our stories, we tell the hero's journey, and that's it."
[00:00:26] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to the Peerbound podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is a customer marketing advocacy legend Ari Hoffman. Ari has worked at some of the best software companies over the last decade and a half, including Coveo, Influitive, and Amplitude among others, and I'm so privileged to have him join me today to talk about so many great topics, uh, around customer storytelling and really creating a culture at your company that maximize the impact of all the work that customer marketing advocacy professionals do.
So Ari, it's so great to have you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I love what you're doing. Thank you. Let me start by asking you about storytelling. You have spoken so eloquently about customer storytelling, and it's clear that you're so passionate about it. Why customer stories, even in this, you know, AI era.
What, why do you think stories resonate? Why do you think they work with prospects and buyers?
[00:01:17] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, I mean, the real story there is, if you back up a second, we are filled with noise, valuable noise right now, and I've talked about this for a decade probably, so it's only gotten worse in this time, but we all know, right, the right things to say.
About ourselves. When a company talks about themselves, we all know the right things. We know the right metrics to talk about. It's all valuable, but everybody is doing it, and we're hit on every single screen that we have. It went from being, you know, hit on our TVs. Now we're hitting the movie feeders with advertisements, right?
We're hit on the radio. But now it's not just that, it's our phones, right? We know that our watches are hitting us, right? It's everywhere. And so when you have that much noise, you start to turn off. The only thing that really connects is hearing human based stories from other humans, right? And so for me, and I talk about this a lot, which is, I, I can't connect to a brand, especially in B2B, right?
I'm not Nike, right. I'm not just do it right? When, when you work at Amplitude or Coveo or any of these companies. Nobody's gonna say, oh, I resonate with Amplitude, but you resonate with our people at that company. So if I'm trying to progress my career, I'm trying to do better and be more valuable for my organization, I don't go say, oh, what is Salesforce doing?
I go say, what is Timothy at Salesforce doing? Right? What is Sarah over at Genesis doing right now that is creating such a buzz? And I'm gonna look at the individuals and what they're doing, and how do they scale that? Guess what? The technology comes along for the ride in that. Right? And so how do you tell a story that puts the customer at the, the center is the champion of the story, not just because it's great for the customer and it, it's something that helps them grow their own personal brand and their career.
But because people resonate with that more, right? We wanna look for those things that are relevant to us and our own journeys, right? And so they have to be relevant. They have to be impactful, right? And they have to connect at a deeper level. And storytelling, I don't think I need to. Convince anyone who's listening to this that storytelling is important.
We all know how important this the power of story is. It's just how do you leverage that story in a way that is impactful, that actually helps move the needle, and doesn't just buy time and waste space, right? It's not about patting your own back. It's about helping expose a successful journey for others that they can get inspired by and go.
That is within my reach. Even if I had these blockers before, I can see now there is a path to success here. And so that's what we're really focused on in customer storytelling.
[00:03:41] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, I am a math major. I was an engineer by training and I've lived and breathed numbers for so many, um, so many years and I continue to do so.
But there is something about real stories with real people and. The impact that they make is just completely different. So thanks for sharing that. Yeah, absolutely.
I wanna ask you a little bit about the role of numbers. You know, we're talking about numbers. There clearly are metrics that matter in B2B and companies ultimately byproduct that deliver results, and we would like to quantify those results.
What makes for an effective story, in your view? How do you combine the qualitative human element of the story? With metrics and what, what is effective? You've seen this at so many great companies.
[00:04:26] Ari Hoffman: Yeah. So I mean, let's, let's jump back for a second and just look at what is the problem with storytelling right now In a lot of companies face, and maybe a lot of people resonate this.
One, finding net news stories can be very tricky, right? Because you're not get, your accounts aren't giving you enough of them. They're not referring enough customers, right? It's hard to search through the mess that's out there. Maybe your Salesforce, maybe your HubSpot, maybe your CRMs aren't tracking the right information.
So it's really hard to find these needles in a haystack of great stories. One. Then how do we tell a story that is captivating, that is impactful, that's gonna move the needle, that captures ROI and real business impact, right? So it's not just about the use case, but how is it moving their business forward, right?
Or whatever they're trying to solve for whatever that obstacle is, that objective is, right, or that opportunity, what is that that it's helping accomplish in a measurable way, not just in an anecdotal way. And then now that we've captured these stories, how do we use 'em? So they don't go sit in a content graveyard.
I know one of the worst things is you spend all of this time, you create this wonderful story. You go through their comms scene in PR and legal, and you get it approved finally, which by the way, is getting harder and harder. If anyone is wondering, it is getting harder and harder to prove these stories.
That is a real thing. Um, and it's not just, you know, that this is happening across the board. There's a lot of different reasons, but one of the major ones is security threats, right? You're opening up vulnerabilities. So now that you've created this wonderful content, you've gotten the sign off. And you, you want everyone to use it, and then nobody does, and it just sits there.
And then people ask you, Hey, can we get a case study on X? And you're like, I just did three of them. What do you mean? Why are you asking me this? Right? And it can become really frustrating and deflating. They actually burn out your team if you have people who are responsible for creating the stories on your team.
This is how churn happens, okay? When they're creating and creating and creating, and nobody's actually seeing them for the valuable content that they're producing. That's high churn rate. So we can talk about all those. And so one of the key things here to focus on is telling stories that matter. Right, and so one of the ways that you focus on this is if you have a business value team who who does business value assessments or realization.
Which is, what is the business impact of buying our product? What is the ROI, right? What are you getting outta this? Is it cost savings? Is it revenue generating, right? Is it hiring and firing? What, what are you looking to accomplish that is measurable and how do we measure it? So if you, if you align with your business value team, then you might have five, six different lines of business, right?
So each of those might have a different value proposition. So that's where you go and talk with your product and your product marketing teams, and you wanna look about two quarters ahead to say what's coming down the pipe that we should be focusing on. Because telling stories that are just cool, doesn't matter if they're not relevant.
Relevancy is everything. So you have to have the context, right. You need to know what it is that you're talking about and why you're talking about it. When you're talking about it, so ROI is all about, and every company is different, is what are the things that you can measure to show both from your leading indicators, right, your key performance indicators.
Those leading indicators, what are the things that we know that are telling us through our lagging metrics, which are, and you wanna focus on these as ROI, it's all about the lagging metrics, right? So are we saving money? Are we building new revenue? Are we speeding up? The velocities sales cycles. What are those big movers, right?
That you're really looking at business impact, and your company will talk about these at CKO. They'll talk about 'em at SKO, they'll talk about 'em about what are we trying to accomplish. So those are your key focal points. And then you want to backtrack everything in your story from that. That does not mean your story is just number, number, number.
You do not want to do what we call a stat bomb, right? Because that, that just sounds way too self, um, indulgent, right? So you've gotta be able to mix the numbers in a way to telling that story. That's really important.
So the way that we tell all of our stories with impact is this. We didn't invent this.
This has been since Greek mythology, the hero's journey. We tell the hero's journey and that's it. We make it very personal, right? Which is you start with a hook and intro. So your hook is the first 30 seconds of the story. What is that hook? That's generally where we, we do a stat bomb in a way that makes sense.
Like you just told me that you are having a hard time getting your data analytics team to produce real numbers. That doesn't take weeks. It's really interesting 'cause I was just talking to John over at Cyclone. They were able to convert their analytic cycle down from weeks to days. They now get it in minutes.
What if I told you that in minutes you could get the insights that you needed to literally change the way that you approach your sales conversions by about 50%. That's your hook, right? That was just done in under 30 seconds. So we start with hook and intro, then we go into the conflict, right? What is it?
What is the challenge that we're looking to accomplish? What is that real hurdle or chasm you have to cross? So that comes next. Then after the conflict is the turning point. What happened that came that, that you have this enlightenment, right? Of holy shit, we need to do something different here. What was that turning point and, and where did you go?
So then we tell the turning point. This is what they did next. This is how they set themselves up for success. And then we have the end and the resolution. This is where you tie it back, you book end that story back to that hook and that intro, those two ends are where you fill in the ROI. That is the business impact, right?
Because. Your first impression and your last impression in a story, just like meeting someone are critically important. So that's where you really double down on telling the numbers and those numbers remember, tie into what your customer success says they need for adoption, right? And moving forward. It's what your product marketing team says that we need in these new products that we're gonna be launching.
This is where we're going, and it's what your product and your business value teams are gonna say. This is what's inherently valuable about our product and what we're trying to turn the needle on.
[00:10:18] Sunny Manivannan: Masterclass. I have nothing. I have nothing to say to that. I'm still processing the, you just said just to even.
Go back to saying, Hey guys, the hero's journey works. I think that's a valuable lesson because too many people are trying to innovate on things that don't necessarily need innovation.
[00:10:37] Ari Hoffman: And whether you wanna tell it as first person, second person, third person, it doesn't matter as long as you're following a story that is personal, relevant and impactful.
So it's gotta be personal. So at CKO, this is what we did, and this is really important I think, for everyone on this call. This is. The three most important things to a story personal. There has to be a human involved. Again, I don't resonate with a brand, I resonate with Sarah over at Salesforce, right?
Sarah at Salesforce is doing something special. This is what she did with her team at Salesforce using this product. But at first, you know here, here's the quick way I say it. When you come outta Star Wars or Ninja Turtles or any movie, of course I'm, I'm a big dork, so I love all these movies, but when you come out, you don't say, I want to be the Millennium Falcon.
I wanna be a lightsaber. I want to be a blaster. Right? You come out and say, I wanna be on solo, I wanna be Luke, I wanna be Leia. I. If I say I wanna be Leia, I know I'm using a blaster, right? That's right. If anyone says on solo, you know you're flying the Millennium Falcon, your product, your company is the Millennium Falcon.
It's the tools and the technology that help them be successful, but they are the champion of the story. Why are they the champion of the story? They're the ones who are getting budget. They're sticking their neck out to buy your product. They have to get the internal adoption and do change management and all of the hard stuff.
You, your solution is not pixie dust. It doesn't just come in and solve the day. It requires buy-in from them, right? And so that is where you tell a story that is personal. It's gotta be about somebody and what they've done with their team, or how they've leveled themselves up to inspire others so they can see what good looks like.
And start to remove the blockers that have caused hesitation or analysis paralysis in the buying journey. Right. Or adoption journey. So I, uh, we're, we're gonna talk on customer stories, both pre and post-sale because they're both critically important.
[00:12:22] Sunny Manivannan: Love what you said about just, it's not about the tools, it's about the people.
And even in the first example that you used about, you said, Hey, I was talking to John from this company. Just that casual nature of it's a person to person conversation, and it's a real person's story that just happens to be your customer and then going into, okay, let me give you the hook and all of those things, but you've gotta, the, the draw is the human story.
[00:12:46] Ari Hoffman: Yeah. And, you wanna help your sales and success teams sound like they have a deep well of knowledge around your product.
And so the next phase that you and I'll talk about is how do we do that? How do we get the buy-in to make them really bought in on telling these stories that are personal, that are relevant and are impactful?
Right? So personal relevant means it, it, it has to, how many times have you gone on a sales call and I don't know, when you get to director level and up, you start to notice you get on a lot more sales calls. A lot tech companies. Yes. Tell you. Right? And so you'll hear someone when you're, they, they ask you the the normal standard question.
You know, what is your challenges? What outcomes are you looking for? You talk and it, you can tell the second they respond, they weren't actually listening to what you were saying. They had a story they wanted to tell you because it's a great story. It's got great ROI, it's got great impact, but it's not your story.
It's not your journey. And they just tell you something that you're like, I have. That means nothing to me. So it's not relevant. So you have to make sure the story correlates, which is why we have to tell a broad range of stories. 'cause not only do you have different use cases and different business lines, but you also have different personas you're talking to.
Are they a vp, are they a practitioner, are they a champion? Are they an individual contributor? You want to tell stories that help inspire that person, not just a general story. That is great to toot your own horn. Really a story that is impactful to them and relevant to them. And then impact is what we talked about already, which is on the ROI side.
[00:14:13] Sunny Manivannan: I love this when, um, at a previous company when I was leading a sales team and it was a global sales team and we had a lot of really great sales reps, but you know, they would prepare for a call with a prospect and they'd say, this is the story that I think I'm gonna tell. And no ability to release that agenda if the call goes a different way.
So they end up the exact situation that you highlighted. And I'm so happy you talked about this because it's just one of those thoughts that's inside everybody's head. We've all been on the receiving end of this call. By the way, everybody who's been around 30 plus years on this planet has been on the other side of this call where it's like, why are you telling me this?
It's like, oh, right, you prepared for that. And now you felt like you had to share the story 'cause you did the work. But it's not relevant to me. And now you actually got me farther away than we were at the beginning of this call.
[00:14:53] Ari Hoffman: Right? And I, and I can empathize with sales and success. They've got a million people they've gotta call.
They're just trying to scale themselves, right? And they're dealing with the unknown. They don't know what's gonna hit. They don't know what's not. And so to minimize effort, they come up with like a program that they like to stick to, right? And once they have, it's very hard to deviate because they don't have time to deviate.
That's why one of the big things is how do you train your sales to have six or seven of these stories in their back pocket that they can pull off? From memory, that is very easy. So if that happens and they need to pivot, they can pivot on the spot, right? They can make things much more relevant, but they have to know those.
They can't just try and pull it outta thin air, and that's our job. That's not their job. They are busy. Our job is to help remove the obstacles in the way of sales to absorb these stories. They've got enough going on, right? So we have to make it really easy for them to absorb these stories. We'll get into that and how we do that.
[00:15:51] Sunny Manivannan: I wanna talk to you about this point of how do you really empower sales and how do you, and maybe we can talk about how do you set that culture at your company a little bit later. But I wanna focus really on everything you just talked about, about having that empathy for the sales rep who's juggling so many things at the same time, but still, you know, needs to have a great call every single time.
How do you as a customer marketer really empower that rep? How do you make sure that they feel confident in being able to have these great calls and these being able to tell these great stories?
[00:16:19] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, so one, you, you have to lead by example, right? So one thing that I like to do is make sure if storytelling is important to your company, which it should be, should be critically important.
'cause not only is it using in all your marketing material down the sales funnel. Right from awareness all the way down to consideration and, and purchase. But it's using your, in your actual one-to-one pipeline. When your sales are talking and your successor talking, we know how critical. So if it's that critical, you should be doing a storytelling session right at every CKO on every sales enablement session.
There should be at least a story that you're talking about, at least one and every town hall you should be. So stories are front and center all the time. It's a great way also for company morale. Because your product teams and your engineers and all these people who might not get to see these end results, you wanna keep inspiring internally to show that this is actually changing lives for the better.
This is what our company and our product stands for, and this is the real world applications of it. So you're constantly getting in front of them. So that story now becomes a part of the company culture of sharing. Right. But the culture part, which you hit on is critically important here because it's not just about showing what good looks like, it's about recognizing the people who got you there.
And so one of the things that we change, any, any time I come into a program, I can instantly tell you what the, the challenges are gonna be. And one of the fastest ways to change that culture is you're not just celebrating the customer, you're celebrating the partnership. So one, you're not just celebrating yourself and the technology we want, we know we get away from that.
The story is about the customer, right? How are you helping them? How is that partnership critical? Because they don't win in a silo. They're not in an echo chamber all by themselves trying to do this. You've got your wonderful onboarding materials and your professional services that are helping, right?
You've got your customer success and your accounts teams, even your AEs come back in. So how are those people actually helping them be successful? Well tell that in this story as well. You're like, no, why? We don't want to talk about individuals. Because what if they leave our company?
Nobody's tracking the individuals.
What they're tracking is the humans at your company that are making business impact help, um, possible, right? And so when they know, because when I'm looking into a company, I wanna know what is onboarding gonna be like? Am I gonna have the support that I need to actually be successful doing this? I've got 18 other priorities as well.
So what kind of success is possible, right? With my limited bandwidth that I have with your company? And so all of these touch points help.
So now what you're doing is you're saying, Hey, let's celebrate both the customer and the individuals at our company that are helping them. And let's indoctrinate them into the story itself.
So we call this the Hall of Heroes and the Hall of Heroes. Is this, let, let me guess if a lot of listeners on this call, this is how they tell a story. They might go in, grab the story, maybe a sales person referred it, maybe a CS person referred it. They tell the story, then they're gonna launch it. They go into Slack or or Microsoft Teams and they announce, you know, this just went live.
The blog little. You know, posts comes up and, Hey y'all. The emojis. The emojis, and we wanna thank X, Y, and Z. Cool. They got a slack mention really quickly. Is that gonna move the needle? Right? With all of the other things and all of the other mentions everywhere. But if you put their name with a link to their LinkedIn profile in the story itself, you're making them more valuable.
You're showing that they're a professional at what they do. You're also touting the company saying, these are the people that we hire. And this is how much we care about our, our employees, that we are literally immortalizing them in the written word. That's one. Two, when you tell a customer story, generally right off the bat.
When you're interviewing a customer, if they go through that process with you, they're in a pretty good state and they feel special. You're telling their story, you're showing it off. If you frame it the right way, where it's not all about you, it's about them, then you've got them in a good place.
Right after that, I send them a link, and in the link it's got three prompts and it says, tell me one about a sales person that has been really impactful to you and why.
What have they done that was impactful. Two, tell me about your customer success manager, if you have one. If you're scaled, it's who on your journey? Is it from the product team? Is it from support? Who on your journey, record 30 seconds telling me why you like them and what they've done to help you on your journey.
Now you've got a little minute and a half clip from every customer story giving a personal shut up, and we store these on a page that the entire company has access to. Called the Hall of Heroes, where now you can go in and one CSM can now start to have 5, 6, 7, 8 different customers touting them. Who doesn't want to be celebrated like that?
They're gonna share this when they're looking for promotions, when they're having their quarterly or their, their annuals performance reviews. So this is great fodder to help boost people, and you're gonna start to see those people who really separate themselves and it creates fomo right from the others.
The others are going, wait, Susie is just like crushing it over you. I, I have customers that can tell like that. And so it helps start to take the blinders off of the art of the possible and telling these stories and what their customers they have that they can start to reach out to. Right? Because now you're creating something that's in it for them.
It's not just what's in it for you. It's not just what's in it for the company or the customer. It's all about it. It's holistic. It's helping the business grow. It's helping the employee grow, and it's helping the customer grow, and there's no downside to it. It's all goodness, everybody. Feel good about it.
Everybody gets to feel motivated by it. And guess what? When your customers spend a couple minutes talking about this person, it reinforces in their own mind the partnership that you have. So it's strengthening the business impact that you have.
[00:21:55] Sunny Manivannan: This is, I mean, you're blowing me away. This is brilliant stuff.
I'm being very honest with you. This is just attacking this problem on multiple good levels and getting to a great outcome for every party that's involved.
[00:22:05] Ari Hoffman: Well, and now we're not done. So I said, you've gotta have it in CKO, and we do a session. So in CKO, this is a really fun trick for everyone. We do a session about 30 to 45 minutes talking about the art of storytelling.
Then we bring up three of our biggest deals over the last year. We bring up the AE to tell that story. Okay. How did they close it and what story did they tell? When they close this major deal, right? That's inspiring a whole group of either new salespeople that are coming on, you know, uh, veterans that are there.
It's the biggest deals. Money matters to salespeople, right? So you inspire them. Then we do an hour long workshop after that where you break everybody in the SKO into groups, divided by, you know, you have one or two AEs in each group. One account person, depending on who you invite to your CKO or SKO, you break 'em into groups.
Whatever the size needs to be. Generally you wanna separate. So it's not all salespeople in one group, all because you need your salespeople to tell these stories. And you say, Hey, in this exercise we're gonna go over the storytelling format we just did in the presentation, and you're gonna tell two stories.
Your group can either have one person tell both stories, or you can have one person tell one story and one person tell. One is gonna be from the list of stories we've already captured. You're gonna go take one of the case studies we've already created and you're gonna tell a story, and we're gonna assign a case study to each group.
That way they're not going and you're not getting multiple people telling the same story. Okay? And two, you're gonna tell us a story that's not on this list, a net news story. So you're doing two things. One, all of the stories that you already have, you're capturing 62nd clip from the ae. You can now attach to your case study.
So a new AE who's coming into the company can watch this real quick and get the gist of how to tell the Cliff note story of it. So one, you're creating that two on the net news story. Well guess what? You've got your leads coming up. Now you have all these new customer stories that you haven't even thought about, right?
And then you do a competition around it. You say, we're gonna do the best three stories on old, and we're gonna do the best three stories on you. These are ones you can now show these people off at your next all hands, right? So you're reinforcing that you're turning internal champions, just like external champions into this program, right?
And so they're telling the story.
The next thing, remember I told you about that Slack I. You post and you say, Hey, it's not out to X, Y, and Z. Well, now every time we tell a case study, really quickly, we use chat GBT to make it quick. We take the case study and we say, Hey, tell us a 30, 62nd story following this prompt, which is, you know, the intro and hook the conflict, the turning point, and the resolution in this format.
Give us a script. We take the script and we go to the AE of that account, or the CSM and we say, Hey, we need you to record this. You can totally customize it. We just wanna make it easy for you if you want to tell the story different that follows this format. Different. Please do. But we wanna make it easy.
And then we set up a time within that week. It takes literally less than five minutes to record this with them. Right. And we set, we set the time. We don't, we don't wait for them to go do it, because that will take forever. They're so busy. You just set the time. You say, I'm gonna make this as easy as possible.
And you have them record the video with you. Now when you launch that blog and that case study comes out, you launch it with their face telling the story on Slack or Teams, because now guess what? You're also, you're reconnecting them to the value of that story. So you're still reinforcing their personal brand development within your organization, right?
And others get the FOMO from that as well. So every step, what you're trying to do is champion internal and external, right? Because now that culture is really around, this is all goodness. This is gonna help everybody. And you don't need spiffs when you do this. You don't need to pay $2,000 a story, right when you're doing this.
Because spiffs are like bandaids. They work upfront totally. And then best, best, and then they, they fade out. So this is a way totally, that you create a culture of goodness around storytelling. Being involved from the beginning to the end.
[00:25:56] Sunny Manivannan: That's brilliant. I love your point about spiffs too. It's just everybody, you know, just spends money like crazy on the stuff.
And then, you know, like you said, a quarter in the excitement is gone and then turns out 25, a hundred dollars, people will do it. But it's not the kind of story that you want, which is, you know, it should come out of love. Right. And a true passion for this customer story, not just, oh, I'm gonna get 50 bucks.
Thanks for no, thanks for my Amazon gift card.
One of the things that you have talked about without talking about it yet, but I would love to go here with you, but in everything you've said, there's an undercurrent of genius marketing, of marketing within your company, and that is one area where a lot of customer marketing organizations and teams don't do a great job is marketing their own impact within their company and then helping others see, here's what we do for the company.
And in everything that you've said, you know about great storytelling, setting that culture of storytelling, making salespeople, the heroes, it has this really wonderful side effect of helping A, B, C, oh, here's what customer marketing is capable of. Oh my goodness, they're actually impacting revenue. What advice do you have for customer marketers who are struggling with internal marketing?
You know, everything you've talked about. Honestly, I would just implement it exactly as you said it. Yeah. Is there more that you have to say on this topic? What? What have you learned?
[00:27:10] Ari Hoffman: Yeah, so one, when you make other people look good, they're indebted to you, right? So think of yourself like a sports agent, right?
You've got these amazing athletes out there that are doing phenomenal jobs. Your job is to show them off and make them more valuable. When you do that, those athletes love you, right? And so when you have collectively helped the sales teams be more successful at their jobs, at the individual level, and you have collectively done it with the CS team and the product marketing team, you are now gonna create this goodness where you become critical to your organization.
So. I think one of the key points that you've nailed on this is customer marketing. Though it's known that we need it right within our organizations, it is not looked at as critically valuable as, let's say, growth marketing, right? Yes. Demand gen, or when everything feeds off of customer marketing.
[00:28:00] Sunny Manivannan: Yes.
[00:28:00] Ari Hoffman: Growth, marketing, product marketing. Every type of marketing feeds off of customer marketing. There is no organizational group. That is more tied cross-functionally throughout the organization than customer marketing, right? Because you've gotta know product, you've gotta know what's going on there. You're helping with beta programs, you're helping with all this stuff.
So if we know we're, we're this critically important, why are we not as valuable as we should be? Right? Why are we not at the big kids table? And sometimes we are, but a lot of times we're not. And that's because we're so focused on churning. Let me just do case study after case study after case study.
Instead of looking at what are the things that matter for the company to move it forward, telling the right stories, showing off the right people, right? Empowering the right teams. When you do that, now you've got everybody's attention and you're gonna come in clean. Plus when you can tell this story, right, you should market yourself in the way.
When you do any, any new thing you're gonna do, you create a campaign around. So if you're gonna revamp how you're telling stories, brand that, don't just do it, brand it. We're coming out with, we called a Deep Impact, right? We're coming out with Deep Impact 2.0. This is how we're gonna tell story. You know, you set the whole premise.
Here's the intro and hook for telling Deep Impact. Here's the conflict that we have at our company right now, why it's getting harder to tell stories and how come it's getting harder to approve them. Here's where our turning point is. This is the realization that we've had coming out of it, and here's the resolution.
This is what we're gonna aim for. So make sure you brand these things so that you get more buy-in and then you've gotta go sell it, right? You've gotta tell those stories and you've gotta use, so when you start small, start with three stories. Don't, you don't need to go boil the ocean, re start small and call it a pilot.
Okay? So if you wanna pilot this, you've gotta have one, two, or three salespeople out there that you know you have a great relationship with. Maybe some of them are really hard. Maybe you have none. Start with one, two, or three. Use the case studies. Go and recreate 'em in this format. Show them off. Right?
Start small. You might not get into the CKO. You might not get into every, all hands. You might not get onto the sales enablement calls. We even do quarterly readiness trainings, right? And we put this into our onboarding materials. So telling the art of the story goes into our onboarding materials. So new people are coming on already introduced to this, right?
You might not get all of those at once. Start with one or two. Work with those teams. Build your inroads to showing them off and see how the results go. I would say one of the easiest ways to start here is making sure that you follow up with every case study and asking the customer to give shout outs, right?
Give us 32nd to a minute long shout out about why this person is important and what they did to be important to you. That what they did is critical. What did they just, it's not just, oh, I love working with John. He's a, he's a such a wonderful person. It's, I love working with John because he shows up to every meeting ahead of time.
He's got a plan for us. He shows us what's actually the art of the possible, and he's made us successful. Without John, I don't know where we'd be. That's a phenomenal shout out, right? That's telling us what they did. And you can even ask for impact if you want.
[00:31:07] Sunny Manivannan: You talked about. How sellers that use customer stories, well see a higher conversion rate.
I think this reinforces something that we all believe to be intuitively true, but what have you learned in your sort of journey into this, into this part of the world?
[00:31:21] Ari Hoffman: Well, you know, there there are two ways. There's the anecdotal side and there's the measurement side. Oh, the reporting side. So on the anecdotal side.
Go talk to your best salespeople and ask them when do they use customer stories? Do they use customer stories? Not everyone doesn't. So I, I was at, um, a previous company and we had about a year long sales cycle. It was a major enterprise company. You know, the a SP was was probably over 150 k doing multimillion dollar deals.
And so these are long sales process and I had a guy who was closing Microsoft and, and, and major brands. Without a customer referral. And I'm like, how are you? We're supposed to use customer referrals, and he is just like, I'm closing 'em without, and I said, I get it. I get it. Why? Why introduce something else into the mix that could cause potential friction when you've got this process that's working, but how long are you taking to close deals?
How about this? Let's, let's test on a couple of your smaller deals if we bring in the right customer at the right time to talk to them, if it helps you with that. Because one of the things that happens in reference programs, same with storytelling, is you bring in something that's not relevant. It's a, it's a tech person speaking to a business person.
It's a data person speaking to a people person. So. You've gotta have that apples to apples connection. And so what you can do is find those people, make sure that they are telling stories, and if they're not, work with a couple of them. 'cause now guess what? You just turned someone who is a detractor, right into a promoter.
So now I have this person who wasn't using 'em, who closes really big deals. Now it's critical. He does not close a deal without using a reference. Same thing as in storytelling. So find out from people when they tell those stories and what impact it had. The next thing is if you use, um, a content management system or something to report on these stories, how often they're being told, right?
You can start to get into the metrics that actually show this, and you can show when stories are used, we can compare. Here's all the, the deals that have closed without stories. Here are all the deals that close. Here's the average time to close, right? Here's how they've shortened the sales funnel for us.
So you can start to really show up. Measurable impact with our programs. We closed that de that delta by 17%. Right. So you think every sales person out there wouldn't want to close deals 17% faster, right? So the numbers speak for themselves and then you can use the data that's out there, right? Telling stories, you're 25% more likely to convert, right?
We know these things. These are Gartner studies over thousands and thousands and thousands of deals being closed. So these are all the things when you are. Campaigning for your own programs and branding it. You've gotta put the metrics in there just like you do when you're telling a case study.
[00:34:00] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome.
Listen, you've taught me so much in the last 30 minutes. Any parting thoughts for the audience, um, which is, you know, customer marketers around the world, what would you tell, tell customer marketers in March, 2025?
[00:34:10] Ari Hoffman: Customer marketing can be really stressful, right? We feel like we're always too busy chopping wood to sharpen our ax.
I'd love to do that, but I just don't have time. Start small. Make the time. Because otherwise you will burn yourself out and this is one of the best jobs on the planet. We get to show people off for a living. We get to make people feel good for a living. We get make friends for a living. That is our job as customer marketer and advocacy and community professionals, right?
So don't burn out. Don't burn out. I know it's hard. We've all gone through it. Job security can be really sketchy, so you think you just gotta do the job they're telling you, but you will not make yourself irreplaceable unless you do more than what they're asking of you, and you don't need to do it by losing yourself.
Right? You can do it in small chunks by being smart about it, finding out what are those things that matter to move the business forward. And to me, storytelling is one of the fastest, easiest ways to do it. Right. Storytelling in awards, but that's for another day.
[00:35:06] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome. Thank you, Ari. This was super wonderful and the insights that you shared. I can't wait to go spread these across the community. And, uh, yeah. Once again, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:35:15] Ari Hoffman: Absolutely. I love what you're doing.
[00:35:16]Sunny Manivannan: Good stuff. Thank you.
