Exercise 2: Strategic narrative

Creating a strategic sales narrative is the focus of our second positioning exercise and, in some ways, this entire book! It’s one of the most crucial things you can do to work out your super position simply because it captures the life-changing magic of Writing. Things. Down.

The sooner you can get your ideas out of your head and onto the proverbial page, the easier it will be to stretch them, test them, and ultimately align your team around them.

Therefore, in this chapter, we’re going to get hands-on and start fleshing out a real, live strategic sales narrative that you can test with prospects.

Memos, narratives, and pitches

First, let’s tease out what we’re aiming for here. Why, for instance, are we focused on a strategic narrative here and not an internal strategic memo or a final sales deck for your sellers? (And what’s the difference, anyway?)

When it comes to positioning and strategy, there’s a spectrum from internal to external communication:

• Internal: A memo or document that can take a variety of forms (prose, bullets, slides, etc.) that exists to describe the strategy internally.
• Internal and external: A structured, repeatable story that exists to sell the strategy internally and externally to employees, investors, and relevant customers.
• External: A final, customer-centric sales pitch that’s designed specifically to meet the prospect where their attention is at.

For our purposes, the job we’re giving our narrative is articulating and selling the big ideas that animate your startup using our R/L/R pattern of context, specifics, whole.

Later in the chapter we’ll segue from the higher, more strategic level to something more akin to a sales pitch.

Before we do either, though, let’s take a brief look at one of the greatest internal strategy memos of all time.

“We don’t sell saddles here”

I’m going to walk you through a structured strategic narrative in a moment, but I consider my outline the floor for what a narrative can be, not the ceiling. You are — and absolutely should — run with it and make it yours. What we’re discussing here is just scaffolding.

To give you an idea of what the ceiling for internal strategic communication looks like, however, it’s worth touching on Slack founder Stewart Butterfield’s classic “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” memo from 2013 (!), sent out to the team before Slack launched.

Butterfield’s aim with his inimitable strategic story was to focus the team on the opportunity ahead of them — both on the product and market side of the product/market fit equation. Specifically:

Our position is different than the one many new companies find themselves in: we are not battling it out in a large, well-defined market with clear incumbents (which is why we can’t get away with “Other group chat products are poisonous. Slack is toasted.”). Despite the fact that there are a handful of direct competitors and a muddled history of superficially similar tools, we are setting out to define a new market. And that means we can’t limit ourselves to tweaking the product; we need to tweak the market too.

Tweak the market, indeed. Slack, of course, went on to build a super position (and poke the Microsoft bear), and that super position was evidenced by behavior change — lots of teams adopted group chat! Butterfield continues:

Sell the innovation, not the product The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.

Butterfield wanted to rally his team to sell the behavior and its outcomes, not “chat” per se:

That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation. The software just happens to be the part we’re able to build & ship (and the means for us to get our cut).

We’re selling a reduction in information overload, relief from stress, and a new ability to extract the enormous value of hitherto useless corporate archives. We’re selling better organizations, better teams. That’s a good thing for people to buy and it is a much better thing for us to sell in the long run. We will be successful to the extent that we create better teams.

Or, to use his metaphor of the hypothetical Acme Saddle Company, “They could just sell saddles […] Or, they could sell horseback riding.” (Emphasis in the original.)

That is, it was about the big idea — not just saddles, not just chat, not just features, and definitely not price. That’s what super positioning is about.

While Butterfield’s approach was an internal memo, and we’re going to look at something more akin to a sales narrative, the gist is the same. We’re primarily interested in the big, story 1 ideas that you’re putting on folks’ radars.

Consider how different those juicy outcomes Butterfield mentions are — less information overload, more value from past communication, better teams — from the chat features of Slack itself. Yes, they put great care into their UX and design (when they launched in 2014, it was something of a revelation!), but it was their story 1 focus that helped them transcend group chat as a category. Teams didn’t run on chat; they ran on Slack.

That’s the kind of big idea — and big outcomes — we want to capture here in your strategic narrative.

While Butterfield gave some suggestions for how the team would sell and promote Slack, he was setting parameters more than dictating a final deck or story. That’s the difference between an internal memo and the strategic narrative we’re looking at here. The memo can absolutely work, but we want something more structured.

Story 1 space

While we’re on Slack, it’s worth noting how Butterfield, as the founder, gave the team — and the tech press — room to stretch their thinking about what Slack could be in a story 1 sense beyond mere chat.

While Slack eventually became completely synonymous with chat, when it launched in 2014, it was a weird new thing. They had grand strategic ambitions of being the hub for all your business software. They dreamed of becoming the next Microsoft (ouch). And that dream of being that central hub never really died. In 2025, Salesforce attempted to relaunch Slack as an “Agentic OS” in the AI era and the “conversational interface for Salesforce.” A new narrative for a new age. Whether it sticks or not remains to be seen, but that story 1 space creates room for aspirations and experimentation in a way that a pure feature focus rarely does.

The strategy in your strategic narrative

What makes a narrative “strategic,” though?

The point of super positioning is to transcend your category with an idea that’s bigger than your product alone.

That requires making clear choices about how you’ll define and communicate the position you want to build, as Butterfield did above.

The strategic narrative, then, is where we capture those choices and sell the big idea using our R/L/R framework.

A strategic narrative, therefore, does two things:

• Your choices: It captures the choices you’re making as an organization — the context you see, the market you serve, the way you serve your customers, and the outcome you deliver for them.
• Their choices: It captures the choices your audience is facing as they confront some change in the world or a new way to manipulate the world.

As a leadership tool, then, it’s a convenient way of conveying your story (and your choices) to your own employees, your investors, and perhaps your broader market.

As a sales tool, however, the full strategic narrative is useful only to the extent that the audience is grappling with the choices you capture.

This is what separates your strategic narrative from a sales pitch at the other end of the spectrum.

The 4-ply pitch

If I’m going door to door pitching, let’s say, the latest in high-quality toilet paper to small businesses, I might have a tight sales pitch for my product. But there’s nothing especially strategic about it. I’m not pitching executives about the strategic relevance of adopting my soft, absorbent, velvety, 4-ply.

Contrast that with B2B enterprise sales where, at the high end, companies might be spending millions of dollars per year on contracts for your platform and considerable support services. In that case, you’d better believe there needs to be some strategic imperative for an enterprise to bet heavily on your company or startup.

As you can imagine, the latter case is story 1-driven (the change or new innovation that drives action), while the former toilet paper case is story 2-driven (why are you different from my current scratchy-but-cheap toilet paper?).

Escaping the laser beam

Most B2B sales conversations happen at the story 2 end, where the discussion quickly turns to “How are you different?” and “Can you solve my very specific problem?”

For example, Daniel Zarick, founder of sales rooms and onboarding SaaS company Arrows, posted on Twitter/X about how his prospects were showing up in sales calls:

Our sales calls these days are often super specific questions. “I watched a bunch of your YouTube videos… can I do X and Y via the integration?” We still do a structured sales demo, but it’s almost like solutions engineering half the time.

The fact that buyers do much of their own research and only show up very late in the sales process is a well-documented B2B phenomenon.

If you, as a founder, seller, or marketer, are constantly engaging with the prospect’s left-brain laser beam, it can be tempting to think that feature bingo or sales engineering is what sales and marketing (and indeed positioning itself!) are all about.

But what’s the big idea that brought the prospect to you in the first place?

What’s the big idea that you can put on their radar in that crucial first meeting (along with your superior feature set) such that it raises their aspirations for what they can achieve in their role at work?

What’s the sales judo flip you can pull to reorient the conversation around the new, high-level whole you see — the bigger outcomes, the more meaningful impact — rather than just the story 2 nitty-gritty of features and integrations?

That’s what we’re going to tackle in this chapter.

Pick your context

To pull this off, you have to pick your context. If you pluck a successful narrative that does a great job with the C-suite and drop it on inbound end-users, for example, it can still fail to resonate — and perhaps even annoy! — because of the story 1/story 2 mismatch.

If someone enters a sales call super late in the buying process in left-brain laser-beam mode and you hit them with “A change in the world we observed was…” they’re going to be irritated at you for wasting their time. That’s not very strategic.

If those end-user buyers already understand the context and just want to know if this will be useful for me, then pitching them on why it’s relevant in the first place is obviously a mistake. It’s like telling someone why Cheetos are a great snack when they’ve already opened the pack, and their fingers are covered in orange dust.

However!

You can still pull the conversation back up from a specific feature or integration to the bigger picture about what they’re trying to achieve.

You can still probe to see if they’re open to a more story 1-style conversation.

You can still use the story 1 driven approach with people in that mode of attention (execs and interested outbound folks, for example).

You can still sell.

You’re not just there as a human FAQ section. You can work with both modes of attention to have the kinds of mutually-beneficial conversations you want to be having.

Early adopter stampede

Likewise, in the midst of the AI supercycle, there are hordes of early adopters who have been told by their superiors to go out and adopt something — anything! — so we can see what all this AI fuss is about.

This can negate the foundation of Andy Raskin’s original strategic narrative, where he argued:

No matter what you’re selling, your most formidable obstacle is prospects’ adherence to the status quo. Your primary adversary, in other words, is a voice inside people’s heads that goes, We’ve gotten along just fine without it, and we’ll always be fine without it.

How do you overcome that? By demonstrating that the world has changed in such a fundamental way that prospects have to change, too.

That was true at the time — the point was to make the case for a change that was independent of your company in a mature SaaS world.

In the AI era, though, everyone is being hit over the head with the case for change. Top-down mandates are literally telling people ’the world has changed in a fundamental way, and you have to change [i.e., find an AI solution] too.'

In this case, it’s again not very strategic to pitch the buyer on the change itself (they’re well aware!). But it’s still incredibly important to have a story 1-style case for your big idea in light of that change — the one that helps you transcend your category, drives your perspective, hits the second-order effects prospects need to know, and underpins your theory of their success, both personally and for their organization as a whole.

The job of a strategic narrative

While we’re going to get your ideas down into a tight narrative, the strategic thing to do, however, is seed those ideas in the market so your audience can consume them before they come inbound to a sales call. Then, if you want customers to stick around, you have to close the loop between your big idea and the actual tangible success they achieve.

That’s what we’re trying to capture with our strategic narrative in super positioning — writing down your big ideas in a concise and catchy way (R), demonstrating how your product achieves that (L), and closing the loop with a new whole about the success your customer achieves (R).

Behavior change

At the heart of your narrative is behavior change.

That goes back to the origins of the strategic narrative, both as a concept and in business. Amy Zalman originally coined the term “strategic narrative” in the early 2000s in the context of international relations. In 2022, Zalman wrote that:

[It] has become clear to me that strategic foresight projects [i.e., vision-based projects] are almost always missing a critical element: building a strategic narrative that models new behaviors to help spread and scale your preferred future. Without a new story, people won’t behave in new ways, and they won’t rewrite conditions on the ground.

I love that idea: ‘Without a new story, people won’t behave in new ways.’ Behavior change — i.e., using your product and playbook, not just buying your thing — is ultimately what we’re after with super positioning. It’s what Stewart Butterfield observed with Slack (“The best […] real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour”). Plus, a focus on behavior change helps keep us grounded, especially when folks can get carried away with the strategic narrative concept.

The strategic business narrative

Sometimes people can get a little carried away with the possibilities of a strategic narrative.

For example, in March 2016, Mark Bonchek wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled “How to Build a Strategic Narrative” in which he said:

It’s not enough any more to say “we make widgets.” […] You want a story that inspires employees, excites partners, attracts customers, and engages influencers. A story that is concise but comprehensive. Specific but with room to grow. One that defines the company’s vision, communicates the strategy, and embodies the culture. […]

That’s a lot of jobs for a story to do! In fact, that’s too many jobs for a story to do.

Writing in September of the same year, Andy Raskin wrote a classic viral essay that formed the basis of the strategic narrative in tech circles, which was the very story 1-heavy approach we’ve looked at as the first prong of super positioning.

Raskin had the same broad ambitions as Bonchek — a single story that can inspire employees, attract customers, and generally act as a leadership tool — but gave it a very specific focus: a change story.

These days, in light of the AI era, as we touched on above, that’s too narrow.

But, again, there’s a deeper principle at play — and that’s having a big category-transcending story 1 idea at all.

The big idea in Raskin’s approach was the change story. It was based on Zuora’s high-level enterprise sales pitch, which revolved around the concept of the ‘subscription economy.’ That was the change story — there would be winners and losers, and Zuora’s features would take you to the ‘promised land’ as a winner on the other side of the big change. (Remember, this worked with executives because they were in right-brain story 1 mode.)

The big idea in category creation is supposedly the category, but really it’s the concept you’re bringing to the category.

Even sales classics like The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer talk about ‘commercial insight’ as the big idea you’re trying to put on the buyer’s radar, perhaps by breaking down their existing mental model and creating a new one.

And as we saw with Slack, their ability to carve out that more ambitious story 1 space helped create room for them to transcend “group chat” as a category, and opened up new ways for people to think about and succeed with the product.

Like the blind men and the elephant, everyone has their own particular take on it, but the underlying reality for these story 1 approaches is the same: it’s about having some new idea that’s bigger than your product that you can put on folks’ right-brain radar.

Adding your twist

What does that look like in practice? This can come in a variety of flavors, and we’ll explore a bunch of examples in our strategy section.

In terms of how you actually pitch, though, you have to think hard about what’s true for you.

Understanding vs. manipulating

Snowflake, for example, when they were one of the most formidable sales operations on the planet, had what Benn Stancil humorously described as “the dumbest and most effective sales pitch I’ve ever heard”:

We were told that [Snowflake] was the same as Redshift—and really, the same as Postgres—but big, fast, and stable. […] There were no forced mentions of digital transformations, distributed systems, or, God forbid, the blockchain. They never even told us what we could use Snowflake for. We were told to just keep doing what we’d been doing, except if we did it with Snowflake, they’d host the whole thing, back it with bottomless storage, and run our queries faster than ever before.

Here, Snowflake’s product innovation was significant enough that that’s all reps had to put on folks’ radars. That was what was true for them. The big idea was simply that the product was bigger and faster, and switching was easy because they didn’t have to do anything other than use Snowflake.

Contrast that with Zuora’s approach: one was a new way to understand the world (the economy is changing); one was a new way to manipulate the world (or your data, in this case).

The point isn’t that there’s one right — the point is that there are two modes of attention and you need to find the right story 1/story 2 framing that most makes sense for your audience and market. For example:

• Story 1: A cybersecurity product might talk much more about the emerging threat ‘out there’ (AI-enabled social engineering or prompt-injection exploits, for example). As a prospect, I need to understand what should be on my radar before any solution will make sense, so more of the narrative will be spent setting that context.
• Story 2: A developer-oriented product might get into the specifics of technical details, APIs, and integrations — and perhaps the challenge of build vs. buy — very quickly. Any change ‘out there’ apart from the innovation itself is less important than the specifics of how it works, so we might lean more on a story 2-style pitch in that case.

In doing research for this book, I found B2B SaaS CMOs had adapted the classic strategic narrative in a variety of ways. They gave it their own twist to suit their market and their needs at the time.

Concept-level differentiation

Ryan Yackel, a CMO who has worked across several successful startups, has had repeated success with the concept-driven differentiation a strategic narrative can encourage.

On the On Messaging Podcast, Yackel described one example where, at software testing company Tricentis, the category the company operated in — and Gartner et al. acknowledged — was “test automation.”

Tricentis had come up with a better, more holistic strategy for testing, so they called it “continuous testing” instead. That spoke to all the different kinds of testing they offer their customers.

The term itself wasn’t magic. The point wasn’t that this was a new category. The point was simply that it captured their concept, creating a differentiated narrative. That, in turn, helped the company transcend the typical test automation category comparison and shape conversations around Tricentis’ strengths and their suite of testing offerings.

Again: they could have the sales conversations they wanted to have because they could get back to the story 1, concept-level differentiation.

That’s often the recurring theme of strategic narrative work — a simple hook, idea, or catchy concept that helps folks transcend their category. Those memetic ‘information packets with attitude’ can be immensely valuable things!

Framing your narrative

Likewise, MJ Smith, CMO at CoLab, a collaboration platform in the manufacturing space that streamlines the design review process, gave the classic strategic narrative her own unique spin.

Inspired by Raskin’s approach, Smith and her team spent months doing the legwork of customer research, internal alignment, and sales call analysis. They got the bulk of their narrative down without too much trouble, and that covered the outcome, features, and evidence they could deliver.

In the super positioning world, we’d say they had a good handle on their story 2 pitch, but Smith struggled with the story 1 side. What made them relevant? What was the change and what was at stake? What did winners and losers look like? What were they putting on folks’ radars?

Ultimately, Smith came up with a novel framing device: Company A and Company B, “two manufacturers on different trajectories,” where she could show in a highly visual way the compounding advantages of using CoLab. The advantages started with speeding up design reviews (faster reviews → better decisions → better products → stronger brand) and the disadvantages of not using CoLab (errors slip through → launches are delayed → more warranty claims → lower customer trust.)

The reason this worked for their narrative is the story 1 focus. It’s about change over time for the customer. Smith literally puts these two paths on a diagram with the winning path curving up over time and the bad path curving down over time. Which would you rather be?

That approach neatly framed their story — they had a well-thought-through theory of customer success and the “Company A/Company B” approach became a part of their sales narrative and a part of their internal thinking. Smith wrote that:

Not only is Company A / Company B a key part of our sales narrative, it has become “a thing” internally at CoLab too. We talk about our own wins as “Company A” behavior. When a prospect is dragging their feet, we’re struggling to overcome “Company B” behavior.

Your turn

• Are you leaning more on story 1 or story 2?
• Are you presenting a new way to understand the world, or a new way to manipulate the world?
• What’s the primary mode of attention for your audience? Are they executives focused on macro trends (story 1) or end-users more focused on how the tool works (story 2)?

Strategic narratives in super positioning

We’ve covered strategic narratives in general — where they fit between memos and pitches, why you have to give them a specific job around behavior change, and why they’re a chance to start with your story 1, whatever that might be.

Now let’s start thinking about your strategic narrative.

We’ve established that story 1 and story 2 exist as different stories, targeting right and left-brain modes of attention, but here, with the strategic narrative, we bring these two modes of attention together using the R/L/R jump.

This is based on McGilchrist’s super useful insight about how our brains process information.

Remember that, even for very story 2-centric folks, you still have to put something on their radar in the first place, like the fact that your new product and innovation exists at all. Likewise, for story 1 folks, there’s still some getting into the details to prove your value really is there.

This gives us a pattern we can use for any strategic (or sales) narrative we might be putting together.

Broadly speaking, we go from global context → narrow specifics → new whole. That is, we go from:

• Right hemisphere: What’s new, what’s changed, what’s the fresh insight, what’s ‘out there’ on the radar.
• To the left hemisphere: Applying our narrow focus to drill down to the parts and pieces.
• Back to the right hemisphere: Coming back up with a new, integrated whole.

This is the R/L/R jump: context → specifics → whole.

Story 1-focused narratives spend more time on the first R; story 2-focused narratives spend more time on the middle L, and for both narratives, we should always bring it back to some new world that buyers will experience on the other side.

It’s thinking through that last part, in particular, that helps us shape our micro-pitch, our narrative, and ultimately the position we’re trying to build in the buyer’s mind. What will things look like for the buyer on the other side?

Your turn

• Does your current narrative or sales pitch map to this right/left/right, or context/specifics/whole approach?
• Where are you strong and where are you weak in terms of setting context, getting into specifics, and bringing it back to a new whole?
• Does that final step — the new, reintegrated ‘whole’ — reflect what you’ve learned from customers?
• How does your long-form content (articles, ebooks, webinars, demos, etc.) map to this approach? (Again, in a sense, a startup is just a nested set of R/L/R loops!)

Specifics and the value you propose

Before we get into the weeds of the actual slides, let’s remember that part of the job of your strategic narrative is to take those “strategic specifics” we teased out in the previous chapter and roll them into a coherent value proposition, to use the marketing term.

Your value proposition is the glue between your product and market that goes to the heart of the position you’re trying to build. Think of your value proposition like the power cord that connects product and market together, in a product/market fit sense. If that power cord doesn’t connect… well, not much value is going to be created.

That’s why your strategic narrative sits in-between your internal (company) and external (customer) worlds — we’re trying to find the story where they connect.

To do that in an interesting way, we need specifics that are highly contextual to you. Without them, we get generic fluff that sounds like everyone else. That’s why we spent so much time fleshing out your strategic specifics in the previous chapter — they’re the raw ingredients that help us articulate your value proposition and for whom that matters. That’s what buyers are ultimately going to buy, after all: the value you can start delivering. But to communicate that in an interesting way you must have the specific product or market insights that we can use.

So keep those strategic specifics handy, and then let’s run through:

1. Framing your narrative (story 1 & story 2).
2. Concept naming.
3. Your ~10-slide strategic narrative.
4. Your tailored sales pitch.
5. How you can create further value in your pitch.

1. Framing your narrative (story 1/story 2)

Hopefully you’ve been through the strategic specifics in chapter 8 and have a list of:

• Narrative specifics — what’s super relevant? (We covered tech, tool, and transformation.)
• Positioning specifics — what’s super useful? (We covered who/customers, when/triggers, how/alternatives, why/difference.)
• Brand specifics — what’s super memorable? (What’s the memory association you’re trying to build in the market?)

The big question, then, is whether you are fundamentally pitching:

• Story 1 — a new way to understand the world, with a right-brain, story 1 change pitch? That was the idea behind Zuroa’s pitch — the world had changed, the subscription economy was here, and they had the product to help you play this new game.
• Story 2 — a new way to manipulate the world, with a left-brain, tool-focused, story 2 positioning pitch, like Snowflake? Just want a better [your category of tool]? That’s us. Nothing has changed; this is just better technology for managing your data in the exact same way as you were doing it before.

Zuroa had a market insight; Snowflake had a product insight. What’s yours that helps you frame your narrative?

Remember, the best ideas — and the best framing devices — are often simple and catchy. CoLab had “Company A/Company B”; Tricentis had continuous testing vs. test automation; and the hooks we looked at earlier in chapter 3 could be expressed in just a few words. That included classics like “Use cloud software not on-prem” (Salesforce), replacing ‘interruptive’ marketing with ‘inbound’ marketing (HubSpot), or even just “payments for developers” (Stripe).

So, first up: What’s the simplest way you can frame your narrative?

2. Concept naming

While the core of your narrative universe is your hook, you don’t have to stop there.

Let’s try fleshing out your world a little bit by naming concepts where you have a compelling insight into your buyer’s world — a pain, a solution, a playbook — something that’s unique to your point of view.

If you’ve got your strategic specifics ready to go, great; if not, or if you need some more ideas, here are some more suggestions. (Again, get the pen and paper out and get writing!)

Context

• Problem: What’s your name for the burning pain or impending doom you’re tackling? Is there a specific trap, challenge, or hidden or missed opportunity you can name?
• Winners/losers: Can you frame winning and losing in a compelling way (like CoLab above)?
• Wave: What’s the name of the wave you’re riding? Are there other megatrends you can tap, perhaps from adjacent disciplines?
• Niche: What’s the name of the segment or vertical you’ll position around? What about the customer-innovator behavior you’ve seen or the attribute you want to own? (See the find it chapter for more.)
• Category: Do you have a unique category definition (like “continuous testing” within “automated testing”)? Are you trying to pioneer a particular sub-category? (Categories are still useful framing devices!) Do buyers share and understand that?

Specifics

• Solution: How do you describe your solution? Is it by metaphor or analogy (X for Y)? How would you ELI5 it (Explain it Like I’m 5)? What’s your name for the success? How do you describe it?
• Your playbook: Do you have a named playbook? (Like Qualtrics and “experience management”?)
• Product loop: Give your features some structure: Group ideas, name sections, split things into three, and find a coherent flow. Is there a name for this workflow or product loop you’ve built?
• Behavior: What do you call it when people do more (or less) of your desired behavior when they buy into your approach? What’s the old way/new way?
• Jobs to be Done: Can you name the top job(s)-to-be-done your customers use your product for, even if it’s just by verb? (Manage, automate, collaborate, protect, measure, verify, optimize, etc.)

Whole

• Your key value props: How do you describe the value of your core product pillars in a clear, crisp way? What specific value do people get? What’s the 10x outcome?
• User/team/company: What are the outcomes on an individual, management, and strategic level for your customer?
• “The promised land”: What does the buyer’s career or the company’s future look like on the other side of their challenge in the ‘promised land’? (And have you actually seen this?)
• Maturity: Can you describe a maturity path you take clients through that starts with baby steps and scales to solve their biggest challenges?

That’s me casting a big net for ideas, and you can see the overlap with the questions from the previous chapter. The point isn’t to rehash your answers here; it’s to name concepts and flesh out your narrative world. What are the core concepts that emerge?

In some ways, your job here is to be chief taxonomist — the one who names and classifies things. Ultimately that’s an old way vs. a new way, but it can be all kinds of things.

I try to walk the talk, too. I’ve tried to name super positioning, the hook test, radars and laser beams, story 1 & story 2, the four strategies (ride it, find it, own it, and combine it), and so on.

The point is to build a rich narrative universe that your buyers can see themselves in. Again, you have to be careful not to try and mash them all together into some unwieldy value blob (another named concept!) that sinks under its own weight — we want to bring things back to a hook — but that’s a lot easier to do when you’ve mapped the conceptual universe you and your buyers inhabit.

Your turn

• How do you describe your current narrative universe? How do you set the context? What are your unique specifics? What’s the new ‘whole’ you land on?
• What’s your current micro-pitch? If you had to get your new micro-pitch down to 4-6 words, what would it be?
• Write down a few variations, playing with some of the above (problem/solution, wave/value prop, old behavior/new behavior, new wave/new playbook, etc.).

3. Strategic narrative outlines

I’ve been teasing the actual deck outline, now let’s get into it. I’m going to give you a short version and a longer version. First, though, let’s establish some formatting rules.

Deck formatting

I suggest starting with a doc-based tool because this is a thinking exercise, not a production one. There’s no need to design anything beyond the absolute bare minimum for layout. All custom style is distraction. This is words, words, words.

I personally find Notion a great place to do this thinking and writing because there’s just enough formatting for structure and nothing else to fuss with when writing, but any other similar tool would work. You can use Google Docs, of course, or if you’re more comfortable in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Obsidian, VS Code, or your app of choice (I use Figma for decks occasionally, too), that’s fine, knock yourself out. The tool doesn’t matter much so long as it stays out of your way.

Putting together ‘slides’ in a document editor may sound weird, but that’s how I like to do it, given that’s what ‘slides’ at this stage are: just text broken up over a doc, perhaps with ‘speaker notes’ in callouts or comments. This makes it easy to scroll through, share, and otherwise take in as one end-to-end whole.

In terms of slide formatting, I suggest starting with something as simple as:

Slide header

A concise sentence or two that captures the idea and states your key value prop.

1. Bullet one: You can also use two or three bullets to make your point.
2. Bullet two: Consider arranging them side by side if that helps.
3. Bullet three: You want to avoid slabs of text — keep refining until it’s clear.

That’s it! Add speaker notes if appropriate, but that’s the barebones style we want to start with.

Short version: Narrative sketch

Now, let’s get writing, starting with something quick and dirty.

Here’s a five-point example narrative sketch for a fairly typical, insight-driven B2B narrative. (By sketch, I mean this is the easiest, roughest way to get some initial ideas down.)

This is the kind of outline I use with my clients that balances story 1 & story 2. Grab a notepad or your text editor of choice and give it a go:

1. BLUF: Bottom line up front (use your micro-pitch!) to introduce your story and product.
2. Context (macro or micro): Set up your story 1 — the broader context or your perspective on the market. What’s your unique market or product insight?
3. Tension: What’s the tension that brought the prospect here? What’s the obstacle stopping the prospect from moving forward? Why don’t alternatives work? And what does the positive opportunity for them to keep succeeding in their role look like?
4. Solution/specifics: Story 2 — the product reveal that addresses the tension we’ve set up from the story 1 change in the environment, perhaps with a brief overview of the major product pillars.
5. Resolution/the whole: The impact and results the solution delivers, and what the solution means for the broader team and organization. This is the outcome — the integrated whole — they can expect and others have achieved.

Pretty straightforward, right? We’ve got an introduction, the story 1 context (R), a transition, the story 2 specifics (L), and an outcome and resolution (R).

Your turn

• Think about what your narrative needs to do internally. Are you trying to articulate your ideas a founder to start with? Or are you trying to find common ground with the other leaders in your company?
• If you’re working out your own thinking, consider coming up with variations where you stretch your own thinking further out or further down. What’s the maximal story 1 approach you could take?
• If you’re working on alignment, and as a tip, an interesting alignment exercise might be to get your leadership team to write their own sketch individually and then bring it back to the group to compare. Or, consider what a narrative sketch might look like for a C-suite pitch vs. an inbound end-user pitch.

Long version: The 10-slide outline

Maybe the five-slide version is enough; maybe you want something a bit more substantial.

Below is my 10-slide narrative outline, and hopefully this gives you a few more ideas for fleshing out your strategic narrative. Remember, these are the ideas that power your entire startup, so don’t be afraid to put aside the time and really chew on them. And if you need more (or fewer) slides to fully capture you’re story, that’s fine! I use 23 slides on my homepage pitch, for example. 10 isn’t a magic number, it’s just a guide.

If you get stuck, drop this outline into a Google doc or Notion, feed it into an LLM, refer back to your strategic specifics from the last chapter, whatever you need to get started, and then think through each slide in more detail.

Open your doc editor of choice and get writing!

Slide 1: Intro & positioning

• Lead with your hook — what are the choice few words that capture your concept or product?
• Remember BLUF — bottom line up front, and don’t forget the basics. What category do you operate in? What’s the value you’re proposing?
• Nail your positioning — explain your positioning in a sentence or two. Your audience should immediately understand if it’s for them or not — don’t make them wait to figure it out.

This is, in a sense, the toughest slide to write because it captures the most challenging choices you have to make. Don’t get stuck here — you might find that fleshing out the rest of your narrative, or even reflecting on your homepage messaging (as we’ll cover in the next chapter) helps you find a catchy introduction that you can bring back to this slide.

Slide 2: Macro trends/pain

• Set up — now we can step back and set up our narrative. Consider slides titles like: Why {product}, Megatrends, Trends, Why now, What we see, {The name of your category concept}, etc.
• Story 1 context setting — If you’re leaning on your change story, introduce the wave, change, shift, or new reality you’ve observed.
• Story 2 context setting — If you’re leaning on your tight positioning or product, highlight the specific pains you’ve pinpointed.

This slide should hit on an ‘inciting incident’ (to use storytelling jargon) that will drive the prospect’s behavior change. Either that’s a new understanding of the world (story 1, à la Zuroa) that necessitates action from the prospect, or a new way to manipulate the world (story 2, à la Snowflake) that solves some existing pain point. Either way, what you’re putting on their radar sets the context for the behavior change you’re suggesting.

Slide 3: The need/insight

• Build a bridge — We’ve set some broader context, now we want to build a bridge to the prospect’s reality. Our insight only lands if it’s relatable!
• Locate the prospect — What tension does our insight create for the prospect in their day to day? Does it require a strategic shift on their part? Does it speak to a pain or need they feel acutely?
• Put the broader tension on their radar — Later we’ll look at what our solution means for them, their team, and their company; here you can consider extrapolating what the pain means for them, their team, and their company or broader progress. (This is what MJ Smith did with CoLab’s Company A/Company B — they extrapolated from a specific problem to entire trajectories for the prospect’s company.)
• “I hadn’t thought about it like that” — At a minimum you want them to feel like you’ve read their mind (“That’s exactly what we’re going through!”), and bonus points if you can get them thinking about their situation in a new way they hadn’t considered.

In an actual sales situation you’d create plenty of space for prospects to reflect on the ideas you’re putting to them. Perhaps they’ll agree, perhaps they’ll bring their own nuance, either way that’s ripe for further discovery and probing. The magic words are “Tell me more about that” and “Why is that a problem for you?”. Buyers want to feel heard, so while we’re focusing on the stuff you say here, listening carefully is just as important!

Slide 4: The challenge/reality

• Name the challenge — We’ve established the problem is there, and it’s there for them, but why is it there for them? What’s the reality that makes this such a common issue? Consider naming the challenge if you can (if it doesn’t sound too corny). Show you’ve thought hard about it. “We call this challenge the _____.” or “We often find that the reason that drives this is _____.”
• The decisive moment — In a way, this is the decisive point in the narrative — either they’re open to the reality you’re describing and they buy in, or they don’t. The strength of this slide depends on your customer vision — how well you’ve understood exactly where they struggle.
• Three pain examples — In practical terms, can you provide three reasons that flesh out why this challenge is so difficult, frequent, or otherwise painful for the prospect? We’re trying to build some tension before the full reveal of our solution — the more we can get them invested in and relating to the problem, the more of a relief or revelation our solution will be.

It’s important to note that we’re not trying to doom the prospect here. We’re trying to lay the conditions for building their confidence about our solution and what they can do to solve their problem in the best way possible.

There’s a big emotional component to selling, and there’s a big difference between hammering a prospect with scary YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG AND YOU’RE GOING TO BE A BIG LOSER vs. building confidence around a shared context you can move them out of.

The doom and gloom stuff is both a bad experience for the buyer and ineffective in helping them take confident action. B2B sales analysis of 2.5 million sales conversations suggests buyers are more scared of messing up (and buying the wrong thing) than missing out on your solution (to quote Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna in The JOLT Effect, the book that presents the research), and building buyer confidence not in your solution per se, but in the buyer themselves is crucial for the sale. Doomed people don’t decide (they procrastinate); confident people do.

Slide 5: The status quo

• Range of solutions — For any given change or pain the prospect faces there are a range of possible solutions. They can do nothing (stick with their status quo), use generic solutions (throw people at the problem, use spreadsheets, etc.), or choose a peer competitor. You need to…
• Goldilocks it — Your job is to show why the status quo and/or alternate solutions don’t really solve the core problem. I love using a Goldilocks slide here if I can, first framing alternate solutions as too hot, too cold, or too whatever (simplistic, expensive, time-consuming, cumbersome, etc.).
• “They’re this, we’re that” — Consider Ryan Yackel’s approach of bucketing the competition in a way that makes you stand alone as the unique solution. This is often a handy way of dealing with peer competitors without naming them. If you’re facing off against an incumbent, however, feel free to target them head on — your prospect absolutely will look at them (or have used them in the past).

Your explanation for why alternatives fail has to be believable. The classic B2B approach might be to highlight that spreadsheets are too brittle, manual processes aren’t good enough, generic solutions weren’t built for your specific needs/the big change that’s happening, and so on. Too hot, too cold, in preparation for what’s just right.

Slide 6: The opportunity/how they succeed

• Tease success — This is a strategic narrative, so we’re trying to keep things high level, and that includes success beyond merely buying the product. That means we want to put what success can look like on the buyer’s radar too, not just their pains or change they face, which any vendor can hit if they want to.

• “Wouldn’t it be great if…” — We want to make it clear we understand what their success is the outcome they get. Keep the framing around their success, their job-to-be-done (not your product!), and the relief of their pain — wouldn’t it be great if you could do A and B without worrying about C? Wouldn’t it be great if you never had to deal with D or E ever again?

• The promised land: Andy Raskin’s device of teasing a ‘promised land’ can be helpful here, too. Again, we want more confidence-building carrots (a clear vision of their success) rather than confidence-destroying sticks (if you don’t do this, you’re a big doomed loser!), so try and think about the top 3 bullets you can hit that describe that success.

Proof makes slides like this land. I won’t dwell on it here because your outcomes will be unique to you, but matching a ‘Wouldn’t it be great if…’ to ‘And that’s what we see, with X of our customers achieving Y in Z time’ can be a powerful way to deliver that proof.

Slide 7: The product

• The big reveal — Now we finally pull back the curtains and reveal our solution. We’ve hopefully established common ground and agreement with the prospect about what their pain and potential success looks like. If they’ve bought into our perspective and insight, they should now be invested in what our solution might mean for them.
• Answer the tension — This is where we relieve the tension we’ve been building in the narrative thus far — we’ve established we know their problems, we know their real challenges, we know their alternatives don’t work, we know ‘it would be great if…’, and now *drum roll* we’ve got the solution just for them. We can now get into the story 2, narrow-focus specifics.

This is the middle L in R/L/R, and in most typical sales calls, this is where you’d spend a considerable amount of time. Perhaps, like in the Arrows example above, this is where you’d spend all your time! But that’s the difference between a strategic narrative and a product demo pitch — the points we’ve hit in the slides leading up to this part might be points you hit in social media, in founder keynotes, in content marketing, or in other outreach. Or they might capture the positioning choices you’ve made internally so the buyers you sell to don’t need much context setting because you’ve tailored everything so precisely to their needs. (We’ll discuss tailoring your narrative for specific sales contexts further below.)

Slide 8: The product pillars

• Walking through the product — Again, this is a strategic narrative not a product demo, but you might still flesh out your own narrative with the product pillars (“Dashboards,” “Workflows,” “AI,” etc.) that make and differentiate your product.
• From ‘why’ and ‘what’ to ‘how’ — Now it’s time to show how the product does all these great things we’ve been discussing. Time to walk the talk. And remember to bring features back to the value and outcomes we’ve put on their radar earlier!

Be sure to hit objections as you go, too. Maybe folks always ask about a Foobot feature when you know they need your Whatsit automation. Knock objections on their head, and pre-emptively if you can, as that’s what high-performing sellers do.

Slide 9: The impact

• What it all means — What does your concept and solution mean for the team? How does it help them level up?
• Ladder up benefits — This slide is a great place to neatly articulate the benefits of your solution for end users, the team/function more broadly, and perhaps the company on the whole and the strategic challenge they were facing.
• Micro to macro — Consider going from micro to macro, from workflow improvements from those using the tool, to net business outcomes for management. Remember, your product isn’t an end in itself; it’s the outcome that matters, and complex B2B products often have different outcomes for folks up and down the org

This can be a handy place for ‘from → to’ descriptions, i.e., then → now, or current state → future state. E.g., front-line workers may go from ‘struggling with X’ to ‘confident with Y,’ and management might go from ‘lacking insight about A’ → ‘full visibility due thanks to B’ and so on.

Note: See the discussion below about business value vs. personal value — this is really where you want to drive home your understanding of the buyer’s personal value, i.e., what will make them look and feel good.

Slide 10: The result/outcome

• The integrated whole — We end on the final R of the R/L/R jump, focused on a new integrated whole with your product at the center.

• Full circle: This is where we bring things full circle and tie the narrative back to that initial hook or three-word value prop we opened with, elaborating on the glorious future that awaits the prospect.

• Value, value, value: Consider using very succinct bullet points to round out this slide that describe the new successful future that awaits your prospect enabled by your solution, hitting your major value themes and introducing them with a single word (productivity, efficiency, safety, speed, etc.).

Really spell things out for folks here. You could also consider using an A → B → C sequence that recaps (a) how your product solves the challenge we raised, (b) delivers meaningful quantitative or qualitative outcomes, and thus (c) achieves the original value proposition from the very first slide.

This is both a useful way to recap the narrative and a blueprint for what your Customer Success team should be helping your customers achieve. That success is what will inspire those customers to tell others, driving word of mouth and building your brand as a solution everyone just ‘knows’ about.

Slides >10: What comes next

• Elaborating on your narrative — For an actual sales deck, you might include more on your product, proof (testimonials, logos, metrics, customer stories), and next steps.
• Always suggest next steps — Your deck will naturally end with a focus on next steps for qualified buyers — that might mean further demos for other stakeholders, answering objections, pilots, trials, contracts, etc. That’s outside the scope of our narrative, but (for those new to sales) it’s incredibly important to end actual sales calls with clear next steps so the prospects can either evaluate further (e.g., getting hands-on) or otherwise make progress towards a decision. No “So… whatcha think?”

That’s the outline!

That was a lot to chew on, so let me remind you that all of this is built on your hook — that simple, unique idea that captures what you’re about. Hopefully this strategic narrative exercise has helped you land on a hook that’s extra sharp.

A few more things to note…

Polite agreement = no

Remember, a successful narrative isn’t one you’ve delivered; it’s one the prospect has truly heard. How do you know the prospect has really heard and internalized what you’ve discussed? Look at what they do, not just what they say. For early-stage folks, anything less than a ‘YES!’ is probably a ‘no’, even if they sound interested. Early-stage founders can struggle with this. You’ll get a lot of polite agreement and even half-hearted requests for getting hands-on (as sales pro Jen Abel notes) from folks who are actually unqualified to buy from you. Keep iterating and stretching your thinking until you see their eyes light up!

Hitting personal value in the sale

In 2013, CEB, now part of Gartner, did a study of B2B buyers (traditional B2B, i.e., across professional services, industrial supplies, printing, shipping, etc.) and found that personal value has 2x the impact of brand value in a sale.

First, brands need to convey business value, but that value was not differentiating at all (my bold):

Unfortunately, brands’ widespread success at demonstrating business value has limitations. Although each brand can claim impressive business outcomes, so too can that brand’s competitors. In fact, business value perceptions hardly vary at all between brands, either within an industry or even across industries (Fig. 5). The reality is that buyers perceive little difference between the business value various suppliers can offer.

Business value, they wrote, was “table stakes.” Or, as they put it, “It gets suppliers into a buyer’s consideration set but doesn’t make them stand out within that set of competitors.” Buyers then just pick the top, seemingly interchangeable vendors and make them compete on price.

CEB’s solution was to focus on personal value, which they describe as:

[E]motional appeals in areas such as professional benefits (e.g., being a better leader, simplifying my life), social benefits (e.g., fitting in with colleagues, admiration from others), emotional benefits (e.g., confidence, excitement, happiness), and self-image benefits (e.g., doing good for society, feeling of accomplishment).

CEB claimed that, in their data, they saw twice as much impact from a focus on personal value vs. business value. They frame this as a need to focus on “emotion” (personal benefits) vs. “logic” (rational business value). I don’t buy into that framing (it’s pretty logical to want better personal outcomes!), but I do find the results very interesting in terms of what we’re putting on folks’ radars.

It’s obvious when you think about it — we’re self-interested beings, so of course personal benefits for us as a buyer would be highly salient versus generic business value that every brand in the category offers. When we think about positioning about being as close to the customer as possible (i.e., ’there’s a murderer in your neighborhood’ vs. ’there’s a bad person in your city’), then of course you’re going to build a stronger position in the buyer’s mind if you can speak to their benefits directly.

And in the AI age, it’s important not to frame business value in a way that comes off as negative personal value for end-users or front-line staff if you expect them to adopt your platform. Pitching AI agents as a cost-cutting tool might resonate with an executive looking at the budget of their department, but if end-users think it’s going to take their jobs, they’re hardly likely to champion the tool’s adoption. Instead, it’s better to pitch the platform as something that turns them into hyper-productive badasses on a personal level while telling executives they can scale without adding headcount on a business level. That makes it a win-win-win for all involved.

Either way, how do you know what your buyers personally value? Ask them, then mirror it back to them!

Dialogues and discovery, not monologues and magic spells

Your strategic narrative is intended as a positioning and alignment tool, but remember that in a sales situation, Sales 101 would suggest several jumping-off points where you would engage with the prospect on their specific issues.

Leave some awkward silence and let the prospect agree or disagree — give them space to engage and relate what you’re saying back to their own situation. (If you’re early-stage, this is a great opportunity for customer development.)

Likewise, in any sales process, there will be some upfront discovery so you can weave the narrative into the prospect’s situation. The strategic narrative isn’t a spell you cast on unsuspecting prospects; it’s a framework for discussion around their issues that leads back to your product.

Tension, tension, tension

A boring story is a series of self-serving facts with no stakes and a predictable outcome. An interesting story has tension — a relatable character you’re invested in (i.e., the buyer, not the vendor!), real stakes, the plausible, real struggles they face to overcome a genuine problem, and a satisfying solution as a payoff (not fake ROI stats). That’s the narrative drive that makes an outline like the above work. If you’re unsure what that looks like in your context, feed your narrative to Claude and ask it to raise the stakes!

Alignment is the goal

Having a strategic narrative is one thing, building an actual position in the mind of the buyer is another.

To do that, your GTM operation needs to work together to deliver a sustained and consistent message over months and years, so don’t worry too much about exact word choice or other hair-splitting, but do worry a lot about whether the whole team is on board with the message you’re trying to deliver.

Think of your strategic narrative like a product that you need to develop along with your actual product. The same rules apply — prototyping, testing, and iterating before getting alignment and rolling it out more broadly. This is about the prototyping stage, but again, perfection isn’t necessarily the aim, it’s landing on something everyone can get behind and push out into the market.

Rolling out a finished deck

When you’re satisfied with your narrative and you’ve tested it, tailored it, and found a pitch format that works for your product and audience, then what?

Then the real work begins, especially if you’re in a large, late-stage company!

Ernesto Ongaro, Staff Product Marketing Manager at dbt Labs, provided some tips on what that looks like. Ernesto and his collaborators used the narrative outline above (sourced from my earlier book, Positioning Playbook) to craft dbt’s new first meeting deck. Their GTM team knew the product inside-out, but they wanted to put together a higher-level introduction and ensure sellers used it. That meant:

• Alignment: Getting input from sales folks and sales leadership, and fighting hard to keep things simple, especially when everyone had suggestions for additions, but never subtractions.
• Implementation: Once the deck was approved, Ernesto had all sales managers record themselves using the deck for their teams, with the managers encouraging their reports to use it, too.
• Promotion: Ernesto’s team captured and recirculated a lot of positive feedback from Sales that came from the new deck to encourage further adoption.
• Competition: Finally, they had a pitch competition where a rep from each team with the best introductory pitch was selected to win a prize.

Ernesto was kind enough to keep me updated on his progress, and as he says, getting the deck out there took “a lot of time — building it, defending it, and rolling it out.” But the positive reaction he received from his sales colleagues — and the real-world usage he could see in Gong — meant all the work paid off. That’s the benefit of genuine, end-to-end collaboration and follow-through.

4. Tailoring your narrative

The narrative outline we’ve looked at is just a starting point, not The Definitive Narrative Outline For Any Situation™, so as an optional next step, consider how you might tailor your narrative to fit specific sales jobs-to-be-done.

We’re working our way from a high-level narrative to a more practical, sales-focused pitch here. If you’re satisfied with your narrative, great! You can skip the rest of this chapter and head on to the next. If you want to turn your strategic narrative into a more effective sales tool, however, keep reading.

As mentioned earlier, the strategic narrative is usually pretty heavy on the story 1 side of things. We’re trying to think through all the great things we can put on folks’ radars. That’s fine in enterprise sales when you’re pitching execs (who are using right-brain radar attention), but it can flop when pitching end-users. Different contexts mean different modes of attention, and they require different narrative approaches.

Here are a few examples.

The SMB pitch

SMB pitches might be a simple “We’re X for Y” where you then get straight into the product. A little bit of story 1 — just a couple of slides, perhaps making it clear you really are for SMBs — before a lot of story 2 focus on how your features are super useful for your buyer, who will probably be the user. You can still put a killer idea on their radar, but the rest of your pitch is going to look very different from your strategic narrative.

SMB pitches usually mean something closer to a product-led GTM motion, and in this case, the R/L/R jump may be more of a case of:

• R: Putting the product on prospects’ radars through mass marketing.
• L: Getting prospects into the product itself, or showing a very hands-on demos, perhaps as a group webinar or as a recording.
• R: Saving the more strategic outcomes, like what the product or platform might mean for the whole department or company if it was adopted more broadly, until after users have become customers and have already gotten value out of the tool.

The same R/L/R pattern is still there, but the PLG vs. enterprise ends of the spectrum will look very different in practice.

The executive pitch

Executive pitches, on other hand, are much more narrative driven, given it’s unlikely these folks are getting hands-on with the product itself. Therefore, these pitches are more about what’s relevant, and are built around trends and change. This can mean they look much more like your strategic narrative.

How does this work, though? Why would an executive take a sales call, anyway? Don’t they have people for that? Sometimes! However, if you, as a seller, can share intel with them as someone who regularly hears from multiple other CxOs about what they’re struggling with, then you can operate from a position of trust. When pitching, then, you might take them deep into the darkness before offering a ray of light.

For example, one of the authorities on modern B2B selling is Matt Dixon, who I mentioned above. Dixon is one of the original authors of sales classic The Challenger Sale and has gone on to write other excellent B2B sales books like The JOLT Effect. Dixon is not just an expert in B2B selling, he’s an expert in selling sales insights to B2B sellers, a rare combination of both theory and practice.

In an interview for HubSpot, Dixon shared his framework for selling to CEOs and revenue department leaders — folks who lean pretty heavily on their right-brain radar. Dixon calls this approach “The Lift,” but I’m going to dub it the “ray of sunshine” pitch. You’ll see why in a moment.

The ray of sunshine

What would your strategic narrative look like as a C-suite tailored pitch?

Here’s my paraphrase of Dixon’s 8-slide framework as the ray of sunshine:

1. The secular change(s) happening in the world: Dixon starts with these ‘mega-trends’ and might rattle off several.
2. The impact for people like you: I.e., these trends are a wave, and it’s coming for, to quote Dixon, “business leaders like you,” with some specific implications.
3. The pain it’ll cause: This is where the painful second-order effects happen, and here we dial up the pain.
4. Stuck in the maze: Today, “most companies” are trying to find a way out.
5. The dead ends: But, as Dixon says, these folks are getting mediocre results, i.e., hitting dead ends.
6. Glimmer of hope: However, some folks are doing things differently.
7. Ray of sunshine: And getting far better results than the stuck-in-the-maze folks.
8. Blinding light: Here’s how it works, segueing into your solution.

You can think of this as a three-act narrative. In act one, darkness descends. In act two, everyone is lost and stuck. In act three, a ray of sunshine appears and turns to a blinding light as hope returns.

Now, to be clear, I made up those titles to describe Dixon’s slides, but it helps highlight the flow of the story for a right-brain story 1 pitch, and that deck outline is an excellent example of what a strong, right-brain, radar-attention pitch looks like. Big trends, big implications, big stakes.

The positioning headshot

For a mid-market pitch, I’d go for something I call “the positioning headshot”. This sits between the two extremes of C-suite story 1 insight selling and SMB story 2 show-me-the-solution-now selling, with a particular focus on tight positioning, i.e., the narrow-focus story 2 approach.

This format will, I imagine, suit most B2B SaaS & AI folks serving the mid-market. It’s a real-world spin on the initial outline we looked at above.

This outline is based on a client I worked with several years ago, with a slight twist.

Imagine you’re the seller here and your startup is a B2B SaaS with a search marketing solution for retailers with large catalogs.

Your prospects — retailers — know they need more organic traffic, they know SEO tools exist, but they don’t know about yours. Therefore, we’ve got to both get on their radar (story 1) and then pivot to why this very specific approach is a perfect fit for them (story 2).

What would a pitch here look like?

1. Name the problem: To get on their right-brain radar, we’ll lead with an insight into a problem and opportunity for this specific segment they haven’t paid much attention to. We might give it a name like ‘paid spend dependency’ as a framing device and then discuss our diagnosis of missing search traffic — search traffic that should find them but isn’t. (Note that this isn’t a broad observation about change in the world in general; it’s a relatable insight into their world right now, and the more specific, the better.)
2. The alternatives: Retailers could solve for this missing organic traffic in a variety of ways, but they’re all bad options for a variety of reasons, and we might discuss why this hasn’t been solved and why the pain persists. (Specifically, the pitch might be: Retailers can have massive catalogs; most SEO tools are targeted at manually created written content; retailers can’t create relevant pages manually at the scale; it’s therefore an unsolved problem.)
3. Agitate the pain: The traffic you should be getting is missing and significant money is being left on the table. (Ideally, the prospect can relate to the difficulties they’ve faced if they’ve tried to address this in the past.)
4. The tension: (This is the part most folks skip!) We might sprinkle these initial insights with slightly awkward or uncomfortable questions about the customer’s story to establish consensus on the problem, perhaps digging into whether they really need this solved and where they’ve struggled in the past. (Too many folks just accept buyer skepticism and plow on with the pitch without switching gears to take a genuine interest in the customer’s actual situation.)
5. The target: (Note how similar the first four slides are to the Ray of Sunshine pitch. Now we pivot to story 2.) We want to zero in on this very specific problem. We’re focused specifically on helping retailers with large catalogs who are missing out on search traffic, so what does this look like specifically for this prospect? We need the prospect to give us the target to aim for here, establishing consensus on the exact problem we’ve diagnosed, paving the way for…
6. The headshot: Now we go for the headshot at the target we’ve established, introducing our fits-like-a-glove solution for the prospect’s very specific challenge, resolving all that awkward tension from before.
7. Proof and pillars: You then might work through product pillars to demonstrate the ‘how’ of your solution and the outcomes you’ve achieved for others, knocking down objections as you go.
8. Next steps: The pilot, trial, live demo, whatever that might be — just keep it as low stakes as you can to minimize buyer fear, and take them step by step on the journey towards the deal.

The right-brain executive pitch was more about selling an approach or transformation that might necessitate a tool; the left-brain SMB approach was, after perhaps a couple of context-setting slides, almost pure product explanation with an offer to close.

In this case, however, we’re using our insight into the very specific challenges of a very specific group of prospects to get on folks’ right-brain radar, and then we lock onto their problem with a very tight positioning-driven story 2 approach to the product. That’s the proverbial headshot.

As an additional exercise, go back over your narrative and experiment with tailoring it more to an audience that makes sense for you.

5. Creating value in your pitch

If you’re a bit of a sales nerd, let me leave you with a couple more ideas. This can also be a final exercise to think about how your narrative (and resulting sales pitch) can be value-creating in and of itself.

Some folks use the old ‘show up and throw up’ approach to selling. I guess if your product really is that new or your prospect really is that unaware, then sure, you’re going to have to do a lot of explaining.

But selling can offer so much more value than that. Your pitch alone can create value for your prospect in the right circumstances. Think about who they’d rather buy from — someone who just talked at them for 45 minutes straight or someone who understood their problems, slowed down to dig in more when required, and gave them valuable insights from the get-go?

There are a couple of right and left-brain ways we can do this. McGilchrist suggests that our right brain tends to be good at pattern matching, while our left brain tends to be good at mapping things — like the market you operate in, so let’s run with that.

Customer expertise

On the right-brain pattern-matching side, I like the idea that pattern matching leads to customer expertise.

If your positioning is tight enough, you start seeing the same problems over and over. David C. Baker makes this point in his excellent book The Business of Expertise. If you see the same problems again and again, you can predict prospect reactions and potential outcomes again and again. Why? Because you’ve become an expert. You’ve seen the patterns play out dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times. This gives you the vision for (and insight into) what might work for a particular prospect, allowing you to start delivering value in your pitch beyond just talking about the product.

How can your startup demonstrate that kind of customer expertise?

If you can nail this, your prospect will ideally be more inclined to trust you to solve their problem over the competition. Your positioning has given you the insight, expertise, and vision your competitors lack.

This is the “repeatable case study” B2B folks often talk about.

Speaking of competitors, you’ll note that we didn’t spend much time on the competition (beyond the status quo) in our sales narrative above.

Ideally, you’re pitching something new and innovative and therefore don’t need to address the competition beyond framing them as the traditional, legacy, old-school, or early approach that your innovation obviates.

However, the reality of most B2B tech categories is that there’s usually one or more entrenched incumbents and dozens or hundreds of other challenger companies, and they get a say, too.

This can make things very confusing for prospects and results in a lot of ’no decision’ deal outcomes simply because buyers couldn’t reach a high-confidence decision they were happy with (as Dixon and his co-author Ted McKenna document in The JOLT Effect).

How do you create value for buyers in this predicament? This is where left-brain market mapping gives you market insight.

Market mapping (a.k.a. sensemaking)

As a final exercise, consider how you might bucket alternatives and give buyers a rough map of the whole market. If you can, you can resolve a great deal of their confusion (as April Dunford often talks about).

This can be especially helpful for early adopters who have been told to go out and buy one of several AI solutions that all sound the same and that they know very little about.

Here, I’m not talking about the corny 2x2 slide where you happen to occupy the sole upper-right ‘good’ quadrant and everyone else is in the bad/lame/expensive quadrants. Keep it believable and helpful — buyers know you’re already putting your spin on things, you don’t have to beat them over the head with it.

That said, if it is believable that you exist in a new box and the competition exists in an old box, then run with it!

Progress vs. choice

Again, notice the difference in hemispheric approaches. There are right-brain approaches that are more about putting something new on folks’ radars, perhaps born of the expertise you’ve developed seeing the same problems they’ve experienced over and over again, and framing your difference in a then-and-now sense. That’s the change-over-time approach. Here, you’re helping folks make progress.

Then there’s the left-brain approach of focusing down on narrow specifics and differences and analytically mapping out alternatives so you and your prospects know exactly where you fit relative to the competition. Here’s you’re helping folks make a choice.

Both approaches can create value for your prospects, so as you work on your narrative, consider to what extent you can do both.

Your turn

• Do you have specific customer expertise you can put on your prospects’ radar that speaks to where they’re at as they try to make progress towards their goal?
• Can you map the market in a meaningful way that speaks to the specific differences between solutions in your category?

Narrative-driven super positioning

The art of super positioning is using your collective vision as a team — being able to look out and down — to building a super position in your market.

It can take a whole team to get there, too, with insights from product, engineering, marketing (product marketing especially), and sales all contributing. That’s why exercises that tease out these insights and drive alignment around a strategic narrative can be so helpful.

But at the end of the day, someone has to pull the insights together and turn them into a coherent vision, positioning, and strategic narrative that drives the company forward.

If that’s you, hopefully the narrative tips and outlines help. If you want more help grounding your big idea, skip ahead to the strategy chapters on how you can ride it, find it, own it, or combine it. Remember, this is a choose-your-own-adventure book!

Next, however, we’ll look at the final positioning exercise focused on your strategic customer-facing messaging and homepage.