At Woden, we work with organizations across the world. In the past year alone, our team has had conversations with more than 400 CEOs on four continents, spanning dozens of industries and ranging from recently funded startups to storied brands with hundreds of employees. While you know your company is unique, the challenges you face and the opportunities you’re pursuing are reflected in the consistent patterns we’ve seen across every one of these organizations.
Underneath all of the dialogue about go-to-market strategy, raising the next funding round, or how to best lever social media, there were four threads that remained consistent in every situation. For each business, they felt success would boil down to solving four problems:
- Attracting new customers
- Retaining current customers
- Finding the right people for their team
- Improving their products or offerings
Even the most tactical challenge faced by these businesses was driven by the need to solve one of those four, core problems.
1. WinNING new Business opportunities
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt reminds us: “Revenue solves all known problems.” Younger businesses in search of significant growth are always trying to figure out how to increase new user acquisition — even if they’re not ready to monetize them. One the best marketing blogs on the Internet, Kiss Metrics, has a great summary of ways seven different companies increased sales by over 400 percent, almost entirely using digital marketing. New customer growth isn’t limited to the world of marketers, traditional sales organizations are also rapidly evolving their approaches to increase revenue, shorten sales cycles, and leverage data to improve processes.
2. ExceedING Your client’s expectations
Retention boils down to exceeding the expectations of your customers, and few companies do it better than Amazon. Salesforce assembled seven of Jeff Bezos’ most valuable customer service lessons, and they’re all practices that should be implemented in any business. Even companies that struggle with this challenge are aggressively looking to solve it: Comcast has added more than 5,500 jobs and aggressively managing process to improve customer experience.
3. AttractING the right talent
Coursera is in the unenviable position of competing against Google and Facebook to attract talent, yet Chief Product Officer John Ciancutti has managed to grow his team three-fold in less than two years. The key for him is a process he’s refined over time, and is entirely focused on closing the deal from the minute he engages a potential hire. Once they’re in the door, you need to retain great hires, too. Entrepreneur magazine identified five companies with excellent retention, and identified the perks they offer, like working remotely, that keep people on board.
4. RefinING your offerings
Why Your Company Needs More Than a Playbook
Great leaders maintain a laser-like focus on solving whichever of these items is most pressing in their business at any time. No matter which challenge is most pressing in your business, the linked articles above provide invaluable advice on practices that can be put into place to improve performance and deliver results.
But none of them will lead to lasting change if you don’t address the underling problem first.
You can build the best interviewing process you want, and shower your employees with free lunches. But they’d still probably rather work for Zappos. Competitors could implement all the loyalty programs they want, but it’s unlikely Apple users will ever switch. Dillard’s has exceptional focus on sales processes, yet revenue is flat and employees are miserable. And just ask the Microsoft Zune team about what happens when you launch new product offerings as also-rans.
The Foundation of Every Successful Organization Is a Unified Story
Organizations need to understand their story before they can create durable solutions to any of the great four problems. The story of an organization is its DNA. It explains why the organization exists, and why people should care. Well-constructed stories define the audience the brand seeks to serve, and positions it as the hero of the company’s efforts.
Woden calls this process the StoryKernel. It’s a short document (300-500 words) that defines the organization’s narrative using a strategic narrative. When everyone in the organization understands the StoryKernel, it empowers solutions to problems that move the brand forward while increasing customer and team loyalty.
Align Your Positioning and Processes for Long-Term Success
Effective process matters, but story (or positioning, if you prefer) needs to come first. Great process can deliver the success of the iPod or the failure of the Zune. The difference is whether you’re working to advance the organization’s narrative — in Apple’s case, to make beautiful products that are easy to use — or chasing market share.
Great companies like Zappos or Amazon are propelled forward by their story, but they implement it in every company process from sales to customer service to recruiting to product development. Their company cultures aren’t about Nerf guns and free lunch — they’re committed to bringing their brand story to life.
Woden’s StoryGuide projects are designed to align positioning and process. The StoryGuide maps out exactly how brands can apply their StoryKernel to each facet of their business, ensuring that all functions are working toward the same, shared vision of success.
Process is all about “what” the organization is doing, and how it’s going to improve. But, before you dive into creating solutions to the four challenges above, ask if you know why your customers are specifically relying on you to solve them. Devote the time to defining why your brand exists in the first place, and you will discover these problems are solved more consistently and by a broader cross-section of your team than ever before.
Frequently Asked Questions
Balancing technology and human interaction starts with identifying which parts of the customer experience genuinely benefit from automation and which parts require a human being to do them well. Repeatable, data-intensive, and logistical tasks, inventory management, routing customer inquiries, monitoring store shelves, are where technology creates the most value with the least cost to the customer relationship. High-empathy moments, resolving a complaint, explaining a complex product, responding to a difficult situation, are where human judgment, warmth, and authenticity are irreplaceable. T-Mobile’s Team of Experts program is the clearest case study of this balance working at scale. Machine learning models analyzed hundreds of thousands of customer requests daily and surfaced the most relevant information to human service agents before every call. The agents brought the empathy. The technology brought the context. Customer satisfaction skyrocketed 60 percent in the months after launch. The lesson is that technology and human interaction are not competing investments. They are complementary ones, and the brands that treat them that way consistently outperform the ones that try to replace one with the other.
A B2B storytelling framework gives a brand a structured way to organize its value, connect with buyers emotionally, and ensure every person in the organization communicates the same story.
Without a framework, teams default to features-and-benefits language that buyers cannot connect to their own world. With a framework, complex ideas become simple, understandable, and actionable. When a prospect can easily retell a brand’s story, the story becomes their own.
Brands who build around a defined storytelling framework gain more than best-fit buyers, and they create evangelists. The right framework depends on the size of the organization, the complexity of the product, and whether the primary need is homepage clarity, leadership alignment, organizational consistency, or a full go-to-market narrative.
The Hero’s Journey is the oldest and most universal storytelling structure in existence, identified by mythologist Joseph Campbell in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It follows a protagonist who departs from their ordinary world, faces significant trials, and returns transformed with a new perspective to share with their community.
In business storytelling, brands apply the Hero’s Journey by positioning the customer as the hero navigating a market shift, with the brand playing the role of mentor or guide. The framework builds emotional resonance and makes a brand’s value feel earned rather than asserted. Its limitation in a direct B2B application is that it operates at a high, archetypal level and lacks the tactical structure required to align a sales team, differentiate from competitors within the story, or produce the precise language every team member needs to carry the narrative into daily buyer conversations.
