Graham Hogg

Blog

First released on April 20, 1987, Microsoft PowerPoint was used to produce transparencies and then 35mm slides. Within three years, PowerPoint was released for both Mac and Windows.  I have no idea how many presentations are made with this software daily; however, with over 500 million Microsoft Office users worldwide, it must be a very high number!

From its birth to the release of Microsoft Office 2016, every year new features would be released enabling the user with more functionality.  However, you were still working ON the software to create something from scratch.  It’s great that you had access to new shapes, colors, text styles, etc., but it still required 100% input from the user. 

Then came the release of Office 2016 and the software was smarter!  Microsoft 365 users now had access to two new tools – Designer and Morph.  The software used artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically create professionally designed slides based on limited user input (e.g. adding an image to the slide).  The user still predominantly worked ON the software, but you could see a glimpse of the future.    

In 2021 PowerPoint included three new features that moved the user from working ON the software to working WITH the software.  

Converting a Word document to PowerPoint – an AI driven tool that enables the user to create a new product from an existing one.

Immersive Reader – an AI powered feature that reviews your presentation to make it more inclusive to those who might be visually impaired, dyslexic, or a non-native speaker. 

Presenter Coach: Body Language Feedback – this is an upgrade to the 2019 Presenter Coach feature that uses AI to help the presenter correct bad habits.
  

These three features enable the user to work WITH the software.  They all use AI to improve or create something for the user.  It’s no longer a person sitting at a keyboard doing all the work!

It’s nearly impossible to turn on the news, scan the web, or listen to the radio without hearing about how generative AI is changing our ways of working.  While this can be scary for some people, it does not need to be. 

As David Toberkin said in his January 2019 article, The Automation Revolution, “Automation tends to advance not by eliminating jobs but by eliminating particular job functions at which humans are inefficient or inconsistent or are exposed to risk.”

There are many benefits to the advancements that come from working WITH software:

Efficiency – Time is a valuable asset, so why waste it on tedious tasks?  Unlock the potential of technology to take care of those mundane duties and reserve your precious energy for situations that still call upon human ingenuity.  Let AI help you find more time in your day! 

Flexibility – Using AI to stay ahead of the curve can help you build more meaningful relationships with your audience. Real-time tracking and response capabilities enable increased responsiveness and agility, so it's easier than ever for organizations to shift course and keep up with even the most rapidly changing markets—and consumer preferences!

Competitive Edge – Wouldn’t it be great to have an additional team member that took care of all of the tedious things on your to do list?  AI provides you the ability to work WITH software and do just that.  Technology enables you to move faster and gain a competitive advantage in your business.  

At see6, we know that our users work WITH our software to create impactful, insight-led stories more quickly and overcome the cognitive hurdles and writer's block that sales teams face everyday.  We power our platform with AI technology to “add another member to your team,” one that you can work WITH that provides relevant insights about consumer and shopper behavior and a comprehensive understanding of customer and buyer profiles at the push of a button.   

No need to search through PDFs, PPTs, and emails to get the right information.  No more stressing over how to structure your sales story.  Working WITH the see6 platform, you gain the competitive edge in insight-led storytelling.

see6 is an AI enabled platform that helps sales teams transform their insights into compelling stories to grow sales.

As advancements in technology grow exponentially, the way you use software is evolving too

Working WITH Software, not ON Software

Crafting a story that resonates with your audience is an art form. It’s a balance between understanding your audience and creating something that is engaging and entertaining. But, how do you know what customers want? That’s where customer intelligence comes in. By leveraging customer intelligence, you can design stories that will be successful with your target audience and lead to action.

The first step in leveraging customer intelligence for storytelling is data collection, starting with your customer’s priorities. This means observing and understanding how your customer behaves and gathering the necessary data to make informed decisions about your story designs. This could include anything from understanding your customer’s level of engagement with your company and the category, to identifying where decisions are made within their company.  By understanding your customer’s behavior (customer intelligence) you can identify the best way to tell your story.  By gathering customer intelligence and analyzing it, you can identify what type of story template is most likely to resonate with your customer and ensure that they will be engaged with your content. 

The next step is to take all of the insights that you have available to you and use them  to develop a unique perspective on storytelling. To create an effective story, you need to look at the data from different angles and draw connections between various points of view.  How can you make the story more impactful to your customer?  For example, if you are trying to craft a story about a new product, consider what emotions people may feel when using certain products or services, as well as how those products or services have changed their lives in some way. By considering these perspectives and drawing connections between them, you can create an engaging narrative that speaks directly to your target audience. 

Finally, once you have developed a unique perspective on storytelling based on customer intelligence, it’s time to choose the right story template.  Think about how each element of your story fits together—what information should come first? What should follow? What characters should be introduced first? What emotional journey should they go through? All of these questions help create a cohesive narrative structure that ensures maximum engagement from readers or viewers alike.  At see6, we have designed story templates for a multitude of situations, making it easy to craft a tailored story for each customer.    

Leveraging customer intelligence is an essential part of any successful storytelling strategy because it allows designers to craft stories that will resonate with their intended audience more effectively than ever before and lead to action.  By collecting relevant data, developing unique perspectives based on that data, and structuring an engaging narrative around them, designers can ensure their stories are as impactful as possible for their intended audiences. So don’t forget—customer intelligence isn’t just valuable for marketing purposes; it has its place in storytelling too!

Using Customer Intelligence to design an Impactful Story

Are you looking for a way to further differentiate yourself and your sales team in the marketplace? Do you need an edge that can help build credibility with potential customers and demonstrate the value of what you have to offer? If so, thought leadership and insights and your ability to position this with customers could be your winning advantage.

Thought leadership is increasingly becoming recognized as one of the most powerful tools in the modern sales team’s arsenal, helping them gain prospects’ trust, establish their reputation as experts within their industry, and educate current/potential customers on how they can succeed through their offerings.

Thought leadership is an approach that emphasizes the idea of becoming an expert in your field. It’s about educating your potential customers by providing them with useful information that helps them make informed decisions. This can include topics such as industry trends, thought-provoking questions and insights into consumer behaviour.  This is simply about positioning yourself as a Category advisor to your customers - looking forward with them and providing them with insights about their business.  

Your brand has entered the alcohol category to revolutionize how we think about wine-based ready to drink beverages. For your wine buyer, it's not just a matter of different types of Malbec anymore - now there is a new dimension to the wine consumer… your Cherry Explosion in a can! 

To ensure your customers understand and take advantage of this potential opportunity with their shoppers, you must equip them with insights that will turn their heads and capture their hearts. Help buyers embrace change by enlightening them on what younger consumers are looking for in occasions like never before - perhaps disrupting the way that they think about a traditional form of product.

It helps you establish yourself as an authority in your category and demonstrates that you are knowledgeable about the consumer and shopper.  Remember, the average retail buyer is a mile wide and an inch deep on a lot of things so your role here is to educate and help them! This builds credibility and trust with your customers, which makes them more likely to purchase from you in the future. 

Remember - insights are not your competitive advantage - anyone can commission market research!  But the way that you deliver your insights will differentiate your sales teams from other competitors who may be hoping from powerpoint slide to powerpoint slide. 

In order for thought leadership driven selling to be successful, there are a few key points that need to be taken into consideration when designing stories for customers: 

• Keep your story up-to-date – Make sure that the insights you share are current and relevant so that retailers feel like they are getting valuable advice that they can use right away; 

• Make sure it adds value – Always make sure the story adds value by focusing on solving customer challenges;  

• Be consistent – sharing new stories regularly establishes consistency and builds trust with potential customers - don’t wait for the next JBP;  

• Measure success – Track metrics such as how the insights are landing so you know what’s working (and what isn’t).  

Thought leadership through storytelling can be a powerful tool for sales teams when done correctly. By educating potential customers through high-quality research that focuses on solving their challenges, you can build credibility and trust—which will ultimately lead to increased sales down the road. 

With these tips in mind, your sales team will soon find themselves reaping the rewards of thoughtful thought leadership!

Insights are not your competitive advantage - anyone can commission market research - but the way that you deliver this insight can help differentiate your sales teams from other competitors.

Turn the heads and the capture hearts of your customers through insight led stories

Selling is no longer a one-way street. Today, salespeople need to focus on building relationships, gathering insights, and leveraging them to create compelling stories that will resonate with the target audience. A story is far more interesting to your audience than a 50-slide deck with standalone insights about the product. Incorporating insights into your sales story isn’t always easy, but it can be done. Read on to learn how to integrate insights into your sales story so you can make your pitch stand out from the crowd. 

The first step in creating an effective sales story is to gather as much insight about your audience and their needs as possible. This includes researching the company, understanding the current industry trends, and identifying any potential pain points they may have. All of this should be done in advance of meeting with the prospect so that you can use this information to tailor your pitch accordingly. 

Once you’ve gathered the necessary information about your prospect, it’s time to start creating a narrative for your sales story. You understand the right tone and approach to ensure your story resonates with your audience.  The best way to do this is by taking all of the insights you’ve collected and crafting them into a cohesive narrative that speaks directly to your prospect’s needs. This narrative should include real-world examples of how other people or businesses have succeeded using similar solutions and explain why yours is particularly well-suited for their unique situation.  

Once you’ve crafted a compelling narrative for your sales story, it’s time to deliver it in such a way that resonates with your audience. Make sure that you practice before delivering it so that you come across as confident and knowledgeable about what you’re offering. Additionally, try to make eye contact whenever possible and use body language cues such as nodding or leaning forward when appropriate. Doing these things will help show that you are engaged with what they are saying and are genuinely interested in helping them solve their problems.  								

Incorporating insights into a sales story isn't easy, but it can be incredibly powerful if done correctly. Start by gathering as much information about your prospects as possible so that you can develop a tailored narrative that speaks directly to their needs and interests. From there, practice delivering it in such a manner that shows confidence and knowledge while engaging with the prospect through body language cues like nodding or leaning forward when appropriate. Doing all these things will help ensure an effective sales story that resonates with prospects every single time!

A story is far more interesting to your audience than a 50-slide deck with standalone insights about the product. Incorporating insights into your sales story isn’t always easy, but it can be done.

Strengthen Your Sales Story with Insights

ChatGPT Response: Using insights to tell a better sales story involves understanding your target audience, identifying their pain points, and demonstrating how your product or service can address their needs. Here are some steps to follow:

Identify your audience: Before you start telling your sales story, you need to understand who you're talking to. This will help you tailor your message to their needs and interests.

Gather insights: Collect data and insights about your target audience, such as their demographics, interests, and buying habits. This will help you understand their pain points and what they're looking for in a product or service.

Identify pain points: Once you have a good understanding of your target audience, you can identify their pain points. What are the problems they're trying to solve? What challenges do they face in their daily lives? Knowing this information will help you tailor your sales story to resonate with your audience.

Highlight benefits: Use the insights you've gathered to highlight the benefits of your product or service. Show your audience how your product can solve their problems and make their lives easier.

Use stories and examples: Stories are a powerful way to engage your audience and make your sales pitch more memorable. Use examples and case studies to show how your product has helped others with similar pain points.

Address objections: Be prepared to address any objections or concerns your audience may have about your product or service. Use the insights you've gathered to anticipate objections and provide answers that will alleviate their concerns.

Follow up: After your sales pitch, follow up with your audience to answer any additional questions they may have and provide more information about your product or service.

Overall, using insights to tell a better sales story involves understanding your audience, identifying their pain points, and showing how your product or service can help. By tailoring your message to your audience and using stories and examples, you can create a compelling sales pitch that resonates with your target market.

ChatGPT: how do I use insights to tell a better sales story?

Experts in the CPG world are all too familiar with how storytelling can help drive sales.  However, being a successful salesperson requires more than just delivering an impressive, data-filled presentation.  There is an art to creating content that is tailored to a specific buyer that inspires them to action and keeps them engaged.  

At see6 we see on a daily basis how passionate CPG salespeople are about their customers.  It's clear that they understand the value of having an intimate knowledge about buyers in order to develop meaningful relationships and craft effective sales stories.  However, this must go beyond more than just basic biographical details like educational background or communication style. The secret to success lies within truly understanding specific areas of buyer intelligence which remain effectively unexplored by many, but not those who are truly successful!

Don’t misread this; basic biographical information is very useful in cultivating a strong relationship with your buyer and as a start to personalizing your sales narrative.  As the author of the story, you must build a comprehensive understanding of the whole person.  For example, here are a few areas that salespeople do not frequently consider:

Accessibility - how confident are you that your buyer will pick up the phone when you call?

Knowledge Base - is the buyer an expert in the category or are they new to their role?

Pain Points - can you make the category buyer’s job easier?

Need for Data - does this individual truly value numbers backing facts up or is brevity enough to persuade them?     

Decision Making Authority - how much sway do they have to say yes?

This is just a small sample of things to keep in mind as you draft a sales story.  Each one of the areas in the list above should inform HOW you tailor your message to a specific buyer.  For instance, if the buyer is new to the category, your story should focus on educating them about particular opportunities and challenges that they need to be aware of in their current position.  If you have low accessibility to the buyer, your story should inspire them to pick up the phone next time you call because your ideas showcase your company as a thought-leader in the category.   

Through buyer intelligence, you can effectively personalize your sales narrative for your customer, leading to improved sales and fewer objections. Buyer intelligence is paramount to any successful sales story. Taking into account a variety of elements can help build trust with your customer and prove your relevance in the market. Consider these mindfully when forming your sales narrative.

What areas of buyer intelligence inform your sales narrative? 

Leveraging Buyer Intelligence to Tailor Your Message

The Power of Personalization

Giving your customers a glimpse into the future can be one of the most powerful advantages in today's complex retail environment. By showing them foresight through insight-led story telling, you provide incredible value and make it easier for shoppers to make educated decisions about their businesses. It’s an invaluable skill that will differentiate you from other CPG sales teams – so don't miss out on this unique opportunity to inspire those who matter most!

What are my customers’ future needs, pains and pinch points?

It makes sense to start every story with the audience in mind - yet so often we start with the insights and our own agenda.  

Getting better at customer foresight gives the business a means of evaluating past actions, a better grasp on current activities and trends, and the foundation for creating effective plans to meet future challenges as well. But to improve customer foresight, teams within the organization must have the mindset and the skills to keep a focus on the future of the customer experience. To help your team achieve this, consider:

Build an environment where any member can question the status quo, by ensuring that employees asking these questions are heard, responded to, and rewarded. Challenge your team to start to look forward in the way that they tackle everyday problems. Too often, a leader will ask for reports that support decisions that have already passed, reinforcing a focus on the past. An inquisitive environment rewards employees for thinking about tomorrow — finding the real value of analytics by identifying and filling the gaps in our understanding.

Using the 0:20:80 principle, a team’s focus should be:

• 80% on what is going to happen tomorrow

The average team wastes seven hours per week dealing with siloed information — a productivity loss of 350 work hours per year. This was echoed in a McKinsey Global Institute Report which highlighted the barrier that siloed information creates to the advancement of data analytics within companies. Time and again we see huge value locked with the walls of organizational project teams; and while technology may contribute to lack of collaboration and information-sharing, the core problem is a cultural one.

Maintain your team’s enthusiasm to share insights where they can add value elsewhere. This involves both actively encouraging information sharing with other departments, and actively seeking data from outside sources. Leveraging alternative perspectives from outside your projects can have a multiplier effect — adding context to everyday activities, and pushing the team’s desire to understand more about the team, the organization, and the business environment.

The idea that “information is power” — and behaviors that contribute to withholding data — must not be modeled, tolerated or supported by leadership for companies that are looking to unlock the value of data analytics, and support a future-focused customer experience.

Transform your customers' story into a riveting narrative! Uncover their biggest ambitions and delve deep into the issues that currently challenge them. By skilfully crafting tales which demonstrate knowledge and expertise, you can gain trust as an authority in the industry - inspiring business success for all involved.

Using stories can help you craft the futrure with your customers.  Building lasting trust and advisorship status.

Storytelling to the future

As a business leader, how do you ensure your story resonates with customers and prospects? The answer is simple: fuse together insights, knowledge and experience to capture attention and create an emotional connection. But while it sounds easy in theory, implementing this strategy can be tricky. With that in mind, let’s explore how stories can bring insights to life – enabling you to emotionally engage with the people you’re trying to reach.

Retail channels have never been more complex and competitive.

Recent research shows that, in 1965, the average tenure of companies on the American stock market index, Standard & Poor’s 500 (S&P 500), was 33 years. By 1990, it was 20 years. It’s forecast to shrink to 14 years by 2026, according to Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. And, about 50% of the S&P 500 are expected to be replaced over the next 10 years.

Air BnB and insight-driven story telling	

Airbnb has leveraged the power of data and insight-driven storytelling to create a revolutionary business that is now valued at over $30 billion. This success comes from their commitment to listening closely to customer needs and using what they hear in combination with powerful growth strategies, enabling them to become world leaders!

Enabling sales teams to tell winning stories

With the ever-changing business landscape, it's paramount that companies stay ahead of their competitors by predicting customer needs and understanding client pains. To do this successfully, sales teams must tell powerful stories to paint a vivid picture of success - enabling them to cultivate winnings for all involved!

In an age of near-instant access to information, all organizations have the tools and technology at their fingertips to become data savvy. Companies like Kodak and Nokia demonstrate that this is key for success as understanding what’s happening in the market will often outshine execution every time. To be successful, unlock your potential by equipping sales teams with insights which can help you tell a story people won't forget!

see6 is an AI enabled platform that helps sales teams transform their insights into compelling stories to grow sales

Collecting insights and connecting that knowledge to sales teams is the great opportunity companies have to succeed today, but it is also their biggest challenge.

Fusing insights to stories

Is it just us, or does it seem like information can often get trapped behind walls these days? It’s an age-old problem for organizations—those pesky information silos. Not only is this arrangement inconvenient, but it can make business processes slower and less efficient. That’s why we wanted to share with you three ways that businesses can break down the barriers of those inflexible organizational structures and create a more collaborative environment. So gather round while we take a stab at demystifying the issue of info bunkers once and for all!

When information is held within a single department or team, rather than being shared, we say that it exists in a silo. Silos are created when teams are too focused on their individual goals, metrics, and challenges rather than on their larger organizational goals.

People have been conditioned over time to focus on productivity and efficiency- managing their own work, inside their own functional area- as their primary objective. The effect of their efforts on the rest of the organization becomes a secondary consideration.

It’s understandable how information silos arise and knowledge becomes atomized — broken down into small, digestible parts. However, the cost of trapped knowledge and organizational silos is deep and multifaceted. Silos stifle innovation, conceal risk, absorb time, and burn energy.

Execution is still critical to organizational success, but teams that focus too closely on their own goals and rewards at the expense of big-picture thinking are prone to create and reinforce silos. It takes active strategizing and management to break down organizational silos and promote big picture thinking across a company.

Three things that can have an immediate impact are:

Employees have been trained that best practices for a meeting involve a clear aim and a well-constructed agenda. While this might have been suitable to meet the needs of the business environments of 20 years ago, this kind of thinking doesn’t effectively meet the needs of modern, agile, rapidly-changing businesses. In fact, inflexible aims and strict agendas only reinforce silos.

Instead of highly-structured, agenda-driven meetings of employees, leaders should consider creating “alternative thinking” teams. These teams are tasked to join meetings and planning sessions for other departments and groups, and enable them to look at their own goals and objectives differently: challenging their assumptions, breaking groupthink, and driving new perspectives in decision-making.

While creating a strategy to support information sharing is a great first step, the key to breaking silos long-term is to stage effective feedback cycles. This helps to break the habit of siloed information, teaching teams how to maintain relevant knowledge and share data in a timely manner. Relevance and timeliness help teams across different projects meet localized team challenges while at the same time supporting larger organizational goals. There are three key parts to this:

1. Decode. Translating knowledge into the correct format or terminology so that others can understand and benefit from it.

2. Transmit. Share intelligence effectively with other members of the team, and maintain a shared understanding of business priorities.

3. Interact. Use targeted communication to remove frustration and improve productivity in day-to-day interactions.

With an effective feedback cycle, team leaders build a deep situational understanding — and can tie team and departmental efforts to organization-wide goals and objectives.

Setting the stage with a sharing culture and creating feedback cycles will get an organization started on breaking down information silos, but without a strategy to maintain communications and sharing, people tend to fall into old habits — including keeping information to themselves.

Help employees maintain their enthusiasm to share by thinking in cycle rather than in linear fashion. Breaking down silos isn’t about one person sharing information with another- it’s about entire departments and teams sharing data with the entire organization: communicating information that can be helpful in reaching both localized, functional goals, and large organizational goals.

Leaders that hold on to insights and knowledge for political power have limited impact — those that can tie a task to a larger objective are the ones that will create a competitive advantage for their teams and their companies.

A continuous analysis and feedback cycle helps ensure that intelligence questions and information collection efforts are relevant, timely, and tied to the team’s decision-making.

What is a recent example of this cycle in your work. Was there a breakdown somewhere in the process, and if so, what was the impact?

Traditional top-down business structures create and reinforce data silos and are reinforced by traditional, agenda-driven meetings. Consider new meeting rituals, or creating an ‘alternative thinking’ team, to help break down silos and promote information sharing between individuals and teams.

Breaking down information silos is not a technology challenge: the best collaboration and communication tech in the world can’t solve the silo problem. Instead, address information sharing as a cultural challenge: and create a strategy to promote it, a framework to support it, and a plan to maintain it.

Silos stifle innovation, conceal risk, absorb time, and burn energy.

The Atomization of Knowledge: Three Ways to Break Down Information Silos

Despite being major players in the CPG industry, large food and beverage companies have seen mediocre growth over the last four years. According to research from McKinsey, these big firms lagged far behind medium-sized (3.8%/year) and small manufacturers (10.2%) who flourished during that same period with more than double their sales numbers!

Insights can save large CPG companies from SMB disruptors - if used correctly.

Consumer package goods executives face a daunting challenge: developing sustainable and profitable growth amidst the growing number of SMBs who continue to quickly steal away their market share. To stay competitive, it's critical these legacy brands recognize that size no longer does all the talking as today’s crowdfunding platforms helps small-scale businesses disrupt even the world’s largest corporations in record time.

Size doesn't matter the same way it used to. Crowdfunding for high-demand, small-scale businesses is allowing SMBs to disrupt large legacy brands more than ever.

How are these small but quickly-growing businesses achieving this level of growth? They understand their consumers. Ultimately, consumer demand is the force that is driving this changing CPG landscape. Today’s consumer is: 

If you compare this to the picture of how a traditional CPG enterprise is being run, you may see a stark difference: silos, command and control, bureaucratic planning processes, politics and lack of sharing, disconnection from the front line, etc. How can this type of company adapt effectively to today’s consumer needs?

The winning advantage is to discover what the future looks like using both insight and experience.

To stay ahead in the competition, organizations must recognize that their success will be determined by how effectively they can link insights and knowledge to impactful narratives. Doing so ensures those stories are brought to life at retail which is critical for survival in today's consumer-driven economy - relying only on operational efficiency won't cut it anymore.

Insights are key in helping businesses remain competitive. Companies must learn to leverage their internal networks and create engaging stories that seamlessly move customers through multiple brands for maximum value.

CPG sales leaders have the same pressing problem: wading through an overwhelming amount of data to identify what's valid and relevant. While it can be a daunting task, having knowledge about their consumers' past behaviors gives them insight into accurately predicting future trends so they can stay ahead as competition intensifies. By honing in on pertinent success stories, these organizations will better equip themselves with the tools needed for success long-term.

“When you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack, don’t add more hay”

When you have so much data to sift through, where do you start? Start with the business objective and connect your data discovery to it. Coupling business context with analytics expertise is the starting point for success. For example: 

What is future consumer spending going to look like in our markets?

What brand and marketing strategies are working and why?

How do we optimize trade marketing performance amongst retailers?

What categories are performing best right now and why?

Where can we save costs across our supply chain?

For example, if we know that consumer profiling across channels is going to add the most value, we can deploy data towards that business goal. Or, if we want to understand the consumer through an omni-channel lens or understand their brand choices, then we can stage that discussion in a much more focused and deliberate way. 

To build a sales culture that is driven by meaningful insights, team-wide collaboration and the right tools are essential. Without these components in place, organizations will struggle to democratize analytics and create stories with true impact. For maximum effect, executives must empower frontline teams so they are connected to the larger center of data insight - something which has been proven time after time to be far more effective than 'top-down' solutions alone.“If you want to empower the frontline, don’t tell them how to interpret their data” 

CPG leaders have the chance to tap into a wealth of insights and incorporate them directly in their everyday business decisions - creating tangible value. This is often easier said than done; although data governance, structure, and talent are essential factors for success here, there also needs to be an effort put forth on the frontline of businesses across departments to bridge experience with analytics. By doing so companies can create sustainable ROI from big data investments as well as unlock one its greatest potential opportunities by sharing stories that capture consumer demand amongst functional silos within organizations.

Growth is becoming more allusive for large CPG companies.  Insights are the competative advantage - if you use them.

The fast moving world of CPG

Sales teams, it's time to start thinking outside the box when it comes to boosting sales. Yes, we all know the tried and true methods of reaching potential customers and marketing products...but what if there was a way to take your insights further with storytelling? By utilizing this unique technique you can let consumers know that they're more than just purchasing an item - they are joining a journey. A journey where you create deeper connections with each customer individually by leveraging the power of storytelling! Read on to learn how tapping into people's emotions can help drive sales up in stunning fashion.

In order to keep up with rapid shifts in the market, companies must be agile and employ their scale efficiently. By combining accurate data-driven insights from diverse teams into actionable strategies, organizations can achieve true success that was once considered unattainable. Embracing this approach is key to unlocking a bright future!

67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution

The ability to balance the vast insights that we can generate with the action we can drive inside the organization- when and where it matters most- is how we can shift towards value creation and optimal business performance.

To do this you need to achieve the following:

Transformative moments abound in business. When meetings, projects and status updates lock into place they suddenly become powerful anchors of insight that can be used to confidently drive sales teams forward. These are the vital spark-points where knowledge fuses with stories!

As you enter each of these moments, your brain triggers a mindset that offers a pre-held belief or thought — a natural frailty of the human condition. But this mindset significantly influences our behaviors in these moments when they are presented to us. In other words, our mindsets directly influence these moments that matter and how we close the gap between insights and action.

Shockingly, recent studies have reported that 71% of managers cannot pick their own strategy out of a multiple-choice selection of six strategies.

So what? We must continuously ask ourselves;

Which mindset will unlock the collective intelligence of the team and break silos of insights and experience?

Which mindset will allow us to challenge our assumptions and strongly-held beliefs about this business topic?

Which mindset will push us to think about not what happened yesterday but what is going to happen tomorrow?

To change how you show up in key moments, it’s critical to raise self-awareness and look out for when we exhibit constructive behaviors and behaviors that are holding us back.

3. Create a risk free environment for your team

In so many walks of life — weddings, sport, theater, even military operations- we rehearse. This provides a risk-free environment for us to learn and practice. Yet in business we revert to a content-first approach which rarely triggers action.

Can you remember the last time you actually did something after reading an insight?

The best way to engage customers to a path where they shift from insights to sales is through stories. Here, we can take our customers on a journey through change, tension connection, value... and customers can make the shift from insights to action and gain clarity as to what they need to do next.

Engaging storytelling can be the key to sparking creativity and inspiring customers into action. Insight-driven stories provide a connection that helps turn potential buyers into loyal fans of your brand!

Using stories to go from Insights to Sales

In an increasingly complex and rapidly changing modern business environment, companies are facing immense pressures that have the potential to threaten their success. Adapting quickly is essential for businesses to not just survive but thrive in this new era of disruption - where blue-chip giants can become penny stock overnight if they do not act fast enough. To succeed long-term, organizations must unlock their people's creative power by investing in insights and sharing intelligent stories with customers while innovating faster than ever before. Making adaptive capability a team priority at scale may be the key to building resiliency against any future obstacles ahead .

Organizations that want to become strategic partners must bridge the often-separate sales and insights teams in order to craft compelling stories fueled by meaningful data. By moving customers towards you as a trusted advisor, your team can leverage unique insights with maximum impact.

Closing the gap between business and insights teams - inject business value into the story!

In my book Seeing Around Corners I share experiences of working in a highly complex environment on Military operations in Afghanistan.  Here, surfacing relevant information to front line teams to support decision making and inspire action was of critical importance.  

This is not about dashboards and data visualization!  Rather, providing analytics teams with the context of the business challenge and allowing them to explore and find the best solution.  What decision needs to be made, when and against a clearly defined value comes from the quality of interaction between business and insights teams.  

Clarifying the context behind the story and the growth opportunity, builds trust between domain and insights teams.

This isn’t about hiring a room full of MBAs and asking them to come up with the next great idea or question that we need answered.  Nor is it about staging an innovation offsite where we all get together and ask ourselves what we need to know or death by a thousand post-it-notes.  Rather, this is about writing stories where teams are formulating the right business themes to explore against and are then supported  with the right skills and technology to uncover the gaps in their understanding against this theme.  Here, teams move from “what do we need to do?” towards “what do we need to know?”. Then we go to insights.

Unleash the power of cognitive diversity to uncover insights, drive creativity and maximize business potential. By inviting varying perspectives from members with different backgrounds and expertise into teams - it is possible to formulate stories that extend beyond 'what do we need to do?'. This helps establish a balance between analytical thinking and creative ideas which will become essential for success in any sales scenario.

Leaders need to foster an environment of collaboration where teams can share their insights and stories, unlocking the valuable potential within those ideas. With cutting edge AI technology, this process is now easier than ever before - allowing organizations across various areas to reap the rewards!

IBy embracing the power of teamwork and data-driven insights, you'll be able to capitalize on fresh opportunities. Rather than being held back by outdated command and control approaches, develop a discovery-oriented mindset that will lead your enterprise into new realms of innovation. Collaborating with those teams within your network creates an ecosystem for sharing valuable knowledge - enabling enhanced storytelling capabilities in customer selling scenarios!

Closing the gap between sales and insight teams - inject business value into the story!

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Blog

Working WITH Software, not ON Software

Using Customer Intelligence to design an Impactful Story

Turn the heads and the capture hearts of your customers through insight led stories

Strengthen Your Sales Story with Insights

ChatGPT: how do I use insights to tell a better sales story?

The Power of Personalization

Storytelling to the future

Fusing insights to stories

The Atomization of Knowledge: Three Ways to Break Down Information Silos

ChatGPT: how do I use insights to tell a better sales story?

The Power of Personalization

Storytelling to the future

Fusing insights to stories

The Atomization of Knowledge: Three Ways to Break Down Information Silos

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