One of the tools that Product Sales People use to sell a product is called Product Matrix. Lets say my product is Office 2010 suites.It looks something like the table below
This is a bad example of product storytelling but we think we have it all covered in this table
Why is this a bad example of product storytelling ?
By showing this matrix to the customer I am showing a bunch of features to the customer, but the customer has to know what features are important to them.
Your customers will have an idea of what they want but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know about everything in that product that can make their lives better.
Say for example, I know I want powerpoint to do presentations, you as a Product Sales person should be able to tell me a story like this about an existing customer called Maria who uses Office 2010.
” Just like you, Maria does a lot presentations and when she works on the content of the presentation she often needs a “Me Area ( this is a feature of Communicator in Office ) which would tell her team where she is and that she needs 2 hours to do this work. After the presentation is ready she wanted to share it with the team so she used the in built Skype feature and had a discussion about the presentation.”
Now, you are telling me a story which fits with how I might work and what goes on in my mind. Mind you, I did not even know there was a Me Area and Skype in Office. I started with only wanting something for presentations, but you introduced me to something i did not even know I could benefit from.
A Product Matrix makes it hard for a customer to understand what to do with your product, how to use it, why it’s so great and the features that would benefit them that they don’t know about. It’s like describing a story by separately introducing each character and you are left wondering how to connect them. Stories however, present and draw lines between all the dots and leads your customer to a stage where they say, ” I get how this product makes my life better.”
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