The Right Story

Why teams without a well-built sales narrative always struggle

Feb 09, 2024

A simple black and white cartoon style drawing of a hand holding a fountain pen, writing on an index card. In this variation, there should be fewer lines and the script-like marks should be minimized to just a couple of lines to convey a sense of brief, concise writing. The hand and pen should remain in a similar style to the previous images, with a focus on the delicate action of writing. The scene should continue to be minimalistic, with clean lines and no background details, emphasizing the hand, pen, and the sparsely written-on index card.

One of the reasons I love working with software companies: The products are literally magic. Technology has given humans the ability to do things automatically that used to take us days or weeks - or, in some cases, weren't even possible to do on our own.

But that same magic is also what makes selling technology hard. People don't buy things they don't understand. And if you try to explain the specifics of how a piece of software works to someone who's never seen it before, it won't be long until you lose them. Pulling people out of that "here's how it works" story and building them a story that sells might just be my favorite part of my job. It's about distilling the magic hidden inside your product. It's about isolating the small, most valuable piece of what you've built, framing it in a context that people can understand, and helping them imagine what their lives could look like if they just gave it a shot.

I’ll warn you: Getting to this level of clarity is damn frustrating. It's unavoidably iterative. And, more than anything else, it takes a lot of listening. You have to spend hours interviewing the people who know the product best - sometimes only to grab a single usable nugget you can test out the next time you're in front of a customer. But if you keep at it, if you accumulate enough of those nuggets and find a way to string them together, you'll notice that your story starts to resonate. People start paying more attention, asking more questions, and revealing that they aren't just tolerating your sales pitch - they're internalizing it, and, as a result, thinking differently about how they do their work.

That's the story you want. A story grounded in the specific quality that's most valuable about what you've built. A story that actually makes sense to the person that you're trying to connect with. A story that helps people get it, ensures they remember it, and nudges them towards calling you first when they're ready to try things another way.

Everything gets easier once you nail that story.

Not before.

Hello Operator

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