Surface Storytelling

Customer stories bring digital transformation to life. They help potential customers understand their peers’ journeys and visualize the possibilities for themselves. According to HBS, case studies are the single most read pieces of content that companies produce. Case studies are also some of the most complex content to create.

My focus on the Commercial Surface GTM team was to design and scale a product marketing strategy to consistently create compelling stories across industries and regions. Beyond crafting great stories with awesome customers, I also built the platforms, dashboards, and processes to improve the way our internal and external content impacts sales, marketing and engineering.

When I joined the Surface team, my first objective was to rethink what sales and marketing enablement meant from a case study perspective: How can stories provide more value?

To understand stakeholder needs, in my first quarter I held listening sessions across different teams, product groups, and time zones. After connecting with dozens of sellers, marketers, and leadership, I crafted an end-to-end process and focused on three strategic priorities.

• Storytelling engine: Make it easy for teams to nominate customers for storytelling, and use creative approaches to maximize story impact. Through developing a smooth, efficient process to get as much life out of each customer relationship, and scaling by collaborating with product and regional teams, we increased story output 225% yr/yr while creating new content types.

• Empowering the field: Increase awareness and use of content through improving the program’s user experience. To do so I launched an internal portal for asset discovery and created new content types.

• Strategic co-marketing: Invest in largest storytelling opportunities in One-Microsoft fashion and align with key moments (messaging, launches, campaigns) and platforms/media.

Before my joining, Surface storytelling focused on a few case studies over a fiscal year. We now tell a broad range of global stories that align to strategic use case scenarios and internal needs. This new portfolio of content not only influences Surface's messaging, positioning, and helps sellers win more deals, but also strengthens relationships with customers.

It’s the job of the PM to be an advocate for the end user and to figure out what should be built to serve their needs.

Within my first two quarters on the Surface team, I assisted a user research project surveying over 100 sellers, marketers, and engineers to ID key needs. One major pain point was that there was no consistent way to find stories. Understanding this, I worked with a developer and designer to ceate a customer evidence portal to effectively manage all internal and external content. Using Scrum methodologies, I oversaw the product backlog, sprint management, and iterative UX and UI improvements.

Post-launch, I continually advocated the tool to internal teams to ensure all team members were aware of existing stories, and encouraged sellers to use the assets in the field. I also continuously gathered feedback to inform new features, improvements, and backlog prioritization. Today, the platform hosts over 1000 assets, and is now a staple for sellers, marketers, and engineers to find customer story assets and insights.

A key pillar to any go-to-market strategy is ensuring sellers have what they need to successfully engage a potential customer during the buying process.

Through analyzing 100+ sellers’ quantitative and qualitative feedback, we found, and solved for 3 key pain points:

• Improving knowledge-sharing: A vast majority requested internal sales best practice ‘win reports’. I worked with a developer to scale a ‘win report’ process where sellers submit deal details and insights, and I share them via a monthly newsletter. The newsletter has been called "a diamond mine” by senior leadership and sellers, and the Win reports are now our 2nd most-viewed content.

• Increasing usability: 92% of sellers responded that single PowerPoint slide summaries of customer stories as “critical” or “important” as sellers mostly use stories during customer presentations. To solve for this, I began updating a Surface Customer Story deck filled with single summary slides of all recently launched stories on a quarterly basis.

• Increasing discoverability: Many respondents confirmed that it takes too long to identify relevant stories to specific customer use case scenarios. To solve for this, I crafted a new “use case scenario” metadata tag for all of our content. This ambitious process made our internal portal the largest, most detailed repository of Surface use cases company-wide, and the use case scenario filter feature drastically improved our portal engagement rate.

Today, there are now over 300 internal Win reports used for seller training and readiness, new content types and features that empower Surface sellers to more effectively close deals.