🔆 Waking your ideal customers up

To me, the most important component in demand creation is Narrative design. And here’s why: the leverage of storytelling.

It’s a perfect framework to sell the idea, not the product (see chapter #9 in my book, The Remarkable Effect). 

1. It wakes people up by evoking an emotional response in your audience.
2. It influences the perceptions and actions of your ideal customers.
3. It makes them realize they’re on a dead-end road 
4. It inspires them to act

Let me illustrate this by sharing the 5-step narrative design from one of my customers: CISOteria, a patented platform for CISOs/CIOs who want to guarantee no business disruption.

Step 1: What’s the undeniable change in the market?

We believe that the current CyberSecurity industry is ridiculous. 

Security spending has skyrocketed from 1% to 15% of IT budgets in less than ten years, and cyber risk is just getting worse.

Note: You want to open people’s eyes

 

Step 2: How is this negatively impacting your ideal audience (the old game)?

What’s happening here is what we call Operational CyberSecurity. 

Security teams just buy more technology tools thinking that this will solve their problems and with that, 

• budgets will never be high enough
• failure in executing effective cyber controls just increase
• resulting in more breaches, to the benefit of attackers
• security becoming an uncontrolled business risk

It’s a vicious cycle that feels impossible to break. 

Note: You want to connect the dots for your audience

 

Step 3: What’s required to escape? Adapting to the new game

Getting out of this trap requires changing the game: Strategic CyberSecurity.

That’s about acknowledging that.

• Cyber security is, first and foremost, an executive management issue.
• It is about focusing on what matters and fixing the root cause, i.e., the lack of enforced cyber processes.
• And that cyber risk (not just cyber threat) should be tracked 24/7

Note: This is about changing perception

 

Step 4: Articulate why it is so hard to adapt. 

Making this shift is hard for many Cybersecurity professionals

• It’s easier to fix the security symptoms and install new tech than to change people’s behavior in processes that cause security issues.
• Decisions are hard to make because there’s no data on how business risk is connected to tech threats.
• They haven’t been trained to speak the language of business executives who often don’t understand or even want to understand

Note: This is about showing empathy

 

Step 5: Explain what you’ve built to embrace the New Game

To play the new game, we’ve created a solution that enables our customers to pull three patented levers:

1. 1. Connect the business impact dots. The effect: Focus on what matters
   2. Establish a cyber strategy. The effect: take out the root cause and execute with precision
   3. Oversee your strategy 24/7: The effect: control & reduce risk

The result: Move from chaos to clarity, and make cybersecurity a non-issue

Note: This is about inspiring them to action

 

As you can see, the key to effective narrative design is authenticity. The best narrative are :

1. rooted in truth
2. customer-centric, 
3. focused on the needs, interests, and aspirations of your target audience. 

 

Question for you to reflect upon:

How would you describe the old game in the market you’re addressing with your SaaS solution? How’s that holding your ideal customers back?

 

Be Remarkable

 

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