Quick Take: Innovating through storytelling

Can B2B leaders create an innovation culture that dispels surface-level needs and trends in favor of strategies that help customers tell their stories?

Trends and needs are false flags for innovators

Trends are the enemy of innovation. So are customer needs. Working with hundreds of B2B companies, I have noticed that the best innovations start with an idea born of experience. By best, I mean innovations that create behavior-shifting value. It is not enough that innovations create measurable value for customers. I have seen many innovations that fail to gain traction, even if a provable return on investment exists. B2B buyers are a skeptical lot. They understand that data can be manipulated to sell a product and they will resist temptations to investigate, buy, or use even the shiniest innovation.

The problem with trends is that they hinder the search for truth. It’s not enough to point to shifting customer buying preferences or advancing product technologies as input for identifying innovations. Trends are an output metric and an observation that something is happening. But they say nothing about WHY that something is happening. Most reports backfill trends to offer plausible explanations, but these explanations are a myth. It is much better to start with an objective truth defined as a better future state for customers, one that is beyond debate. (Click here for a discussion of truth as essential for human-centric leadership and innovation.)

The problem with needs is that they come without insights that point to a secret truth, one that an innovator may act on as others miss the opportunity to create game-changing value. Two approaches for gathering customer needs come to mind, each with a fatal flaw. One approach, need-based segmentation, offers a comforting foundation of certainty based on an aggregation of customers with similar needs. However, understanding needs through interviews and surveys is complex, and declaring that a segment is discovered can gloss over a lack of deep knowledge or actionable insights. A more direct approach is to ask customers to identify their needs, one at a time, followed by offering solutions. This approach is flawed because, in most cases, customers want earnest innovators to go away. Customers offer the first supposed need that comes to mind. Both methods skip the hard work of understanding customers to find scalable solutions.

Needs-based innovations may be acceptable for tweaking features and benefits or perhaps offering a product line extension. Still, they do not help innovators jump into the great unknown: insights that can lead to revolutionary changes. These are innovations for which customers are willing to change in order to gain their benefits or that will substantially impact how we do our work and live our lives.

Trends and needs are false flags for innovators; they hold promise and attract attention but ultimately distract innovators from the hard work of looking for breakthrough innovations.

Stories move customers to change behaviors 

Storytelling is an unmatched tool for B2B innovators. Stories begin as innovators use their experience to pull together a plot, identify a hero and villain, explain challenges with empathy, and communicate solutions with joy. By sharing stories with customers, innovators become proactive listeners. By adjusting the story with customer feedback, innovators demonstrate empathy. By publishing refined and approved stories, innovators build new relationships that are about collaborating for the customer’s benefit.

Relationships built through storytelling overcome the problems of innovating around trends and needs. By telling customer stories, relationships deepen and yield insights rich with experience and data. Relationship-based innovations have the power to change customer behaviors around shopping, buying, and using new products or services. Stories draw customers in, connect in a very human way, and paint a path forward. Stories invite value chain partners—distributors, manufacturers, and vendors—to join in and to make the story accurate and better over time in sequel after sequel.

Stories cut through the noise created by trends and needs. Storytelling is a strategic innovation capability that, once embedded in processes and culture, creates a virtual cycle of innovation based on a committed bond, or unbreakable loyalty, between innovator and customer.

Your take?

I am working on five B2B plots innovators may use to work with customers and tell their stories. Please reach out if you would like to hear my early drafts. Or comment below to tell your own stories or storytelling methodology. As always, I am available at mark.dancer@n4bi.com.