You should be able to do the things you claim you’re capable of doing. Without question, that’s the bare minimum. If false advertising is not your game, like some zombie-infected mobile games, the storyline should seamlessly continue from where you grab your users’ attention with your messaging. What you put on billboards must be within reach of your abilities.

Watch a skilled street merchant selling a potato peeler. First, they make a bold promise: ‘Five seconds to peel a potato!’ Then they demonstrate, peeling multiple potatoes with miraculous speed. Promise is actualized. Maybe it’s a carefully organised demo, but you see it with your eyes. And then, they handle specific questions while making sales: ‘Yes, it works on carrots too.’ This perfect harmony between promise, demonstration, sales, and support is what every product company should aspire to—but rarely achieves.

From your brand identity to highlighting a minuscule feature you’ve just launched, product marketing runs deep and works at so many levels. Yet, in every interaction, what you say to your users is basically a promise, a preview of the things you’re adept at. Each promise, especially the unsolicited ones, triggers an expectation on the users’ end that would affect your trust score. In the minds of users, no matter which vertical you’re in, you essentially are in a game to score trust points. The more trustworthy you are, the deeper your moat goes and the more scores you earn. Every promise you make, every feature you ship, and every support ticket you handle either adds or subtracts points. These trust points become your moat. They determine whether you’re top-of-mind when users need you. You can spend this trust capital quickly for short-term gains, or save it for bigger moves later.

In playing this trust game, your marketing activities are the protagonist. No matter what you create, particularly in these times, a more vital aspect is how you put it. They tell a story, they reveal how different you are —directly or implicitly— they, one way or another, make a promise. If all this effort comes to fruition and catches your would-be users’ attention, you may say your marketing is doing its job. Yet, indisputably, it’s more than that for product-led companies. Simply making a promise or making some noise to turn heads your way does not cut it.

Like how in a good restaurant, the quality of service is always at a certain level regardless of the department you’re interacting with, users intrinsically expect to see the same level of consistency from your organisation. What constitutes your organisation is actually the departments within, and with time, it only gets harder to keep the same fabric, the same texture representing your organisation.

So, from founder-only startups to incumbents, the trio that should be putting a harmonised show in servicing users are essentially marketing, product, and customer success departments. The first one is the teller, trying to entice your users with a compelling narrative. The second is the doer, convincing users by doing the exact things that the teller put forward. And the last one is the hand-holder, giving your users a hand at the right time in the right context to help them to see how your product is different as it’s promoted by the teller. The level of consistency between the trio in making their cases demonstrates how coherent your organisation, is and how homogenous the building blocks of your company are, and essentially determines your trust score.

What is sometimes seen in siloed organisations, especially with B2B offerings, is the sheer contrast amongst the trio’s narratives and actions, which is the pitfall we all want to avoid. The things said to allure users are not actualised in the product, and the hand-holder seems lost when asked about the things that have been said by the teller. Once a user feels deceived, there is almost nothing for you to turn the tables. This is the worst-case scenario that fuels churn and damages your trust score down the line. The former is bad for the immediate present, the latter is the ultimate killer. Churning users can be gained back, maybe, unless you prove them right in their decision to leave by promising them things that do not exist or showing incompetence when they need help. However, losing your trust score would mean you’re giving up on a very valuable place in users’ minds, which will haunt you for a long time.

Therefore, the links among the trio should be strong and coherent. Each must know what the other two doing, better thinking. The teller must know the product and the competition inside out to pinpoint what would resonate with would-be users. The doer must be fully aware of what’s out there, who’s suffering, and what can be the panacea. Plus, it must be in a constant feedback loop with the teller back and forth to tailor both, the product and the messaging. And finally, the hand-holder must know the product -what it can and can not do- and the narrative the teller puts out to manage incoming queries reasonably. This cohesion can only be achieved by constant communication obviously among the trio, like a defence line checking each other’s position at every chance. Brilliant defenders may concede a goal if not acting as a team, but a good team defence may prove formidable if they act as a unit. Here the same analogy works, one miscommunication may lead users to be taken with wrong assumptions and eventually leave your product behind just because the information flow is damaged between the trio.

At different scales, depending on the resource allocation, the need for taking coherent actions falls upon different actors. While going from 0 to 1, the doer is on the stage. The sole purpose is to have a product that does something as expected. Following that, once big enough, the teller takes the stage and tries to show how the doer stands out in the competition, making bold claims, sometimes slightly controversial to make enough noise to convince users to give it a try. At this point, the hand-holder may not be a separate actor. The doer may logically try to be the hand-holder, building while responding to users. Once scaled enough, the hand-holder grabs a big chunk from the resource pie and becomes the essential part of the operation as now there are myriad requests coming your way; users complaining, asking, demanding certain things. Here, at this level, the game gets multilayered: gaining new users while keeping the regulars happy. So, the things you say must be met with reality in your product, and everything you claim must be known by everyone in your organisation. The hand-holder must know, even anticipate, what the teller says, what the doer does, and how the directed inquiries can be resolved within the limits of what’s known.

Aside from the obvious, directing teams to talk to each other, there are a few underlying issues that are holding teams back and not working in tandem. One is having people onboard who innately undervalue customer success function and leave CS teams in the dark regarding product discussions. Not keeping CS in the loop actually takes a greater toll, doubling the communication effort afterwards. Cut from the information flow, CS teams cannot help users’ inquiries, which affects the trust score. Plus, in their effort to keep up, CS members contact product teams untimely, which takes up valuable resources that otherwise would have been spent on building solutions. In the long run, it also creates a rift between these teams, not communicating with each other promptly and then going back and forth when there is a fire. This dynamic leads to the formation of siloes, people trying to solve problems within their functions.

Another issue may sometimes be shipping velocity. If product teams are known for not delivering on deadlines, the teller tends to craft its own solutions: twisting the narrative and repeating the same points in campaigns, which ultimately has the potential to give users a feeling of stall. If your users feel you’re stalling them by not shipping fast enough and inventing alternative narratives to buy time, their perception starts to shift and you spend more resources to regain their trust. Plus, this issue affects the links between teams, who end up resenting each other and choosing to play their own game, ultimately forming contending narratives within the company, damaging the cohesion needed.

Lastly, an obvious but common issue is having not-so-product-savvy teams in place, unable to comprehend the vitality of the cohesion among the trio. Product people, who seem to be not realising that the trust score is actually bringing results down the line, may disrupt the centre of gravity, causing a strong pull towards themselves where every other element of an organisation is around. This results in reheating old narratives and tactics over and over to attract users and keep them engaged. In fact, neither teller nor doer can survive on its own. They might live for a certain amount of time, but their fate depends on each other to have some longevity.

Being on the watch to monitor how seamless the connection between the trio should sit somewhere in your agenda if you aim to have a stint. Remind yourself an image of the street merchant selling a potato peeler. Product success comes down to a simple formula: promise what you can deliver, deliver what you promise, and support what you’ve delivered. Perfect harmony between narratives and actions as if all coming from the same source. In digital products, this alignment isn’t just good practice—it’s survival.