Back in the summer of 2017, I experienced the power of storytelling.

We had just raised a few million in VC money and executed our growth plan by hiring several new sales reps. We onboarded them, gave them extensive product training, and shared our ideal customers profile, and a target list, and off they went, called target customers to book meetings but then nothing...

Only a couple were closing as forecast, while we took all the costs. So we were failing, completely missing our targets...

I remember sitting in a board meeting, frustrated and embarrassed, unable to explain what was wrong. Did we already reach the total market? Did we hire the wrong salespeople?

So I decided to go on the road with some of the sales guys to sit in their meetings. Unfortunately, I sat in probably the most boring sales meetings, and it was all my fault.

I quickly realized most of them were going straight into "demo mode"; 

Clicking here and clicking there, they showed all the features our product had and how great our product was.

They were leaving it up to the customer to "guess" what problem we solved and how we were different from our competitors.

They were confusing our prospects, and thus we were losing.

I realized it was my fault I didn't provide them with a simple narrative.

So during that summer, we created a simple "narrative". The narrative explained in simple language what type of problems our clients turned to us for and how we solved these issues.

In the end, this narrative was known by everyone in the commercial team (and beyond), and it significantly helped hand-overs between Marketing - Sales - Customer Success.

I even remember, @OlivierGillin, our Chief Product explaining to developers how some features fit in our roadmap using this narrative.

Important in the narrative is that it talks about the customers first and the customer's pains in very colored language so it resonates with them and wants to give you more of their time to know more.

In the end, we had to adjust our plan and and quickly saw who were the great storytellers and

So, if you are a founder or an executive and want to grow, it is your job to provide your teams with a customer-centric narrative.