How you structure your sales pitch depends on how you model your buyer’s mind.

The Arrogant Doctor

In our personal lives, we buy by rounding up alternatives, calculating a “bestness” score for each, and choosing the winner. In his book Tempo, the blogger/philosopher Venkatesh Rao calls this “calculative rationality.”

No accident that traditional pitch structure — what I call the Arrogant Doctor — assumes that buyers are calculative rationalists:

• You have a problem (pain).
• I have the solution (treatment)
• Here’s why my solution is better for your specific needs than others (claims about why you should score my product higher)

When I started out as a founder and marketer in B2B SaaS, that’s how I pitched. After all, rounding up alternatives, ranking them, and choosing a winner seemed to be what B2B buyers did! But I ran into some big problems:

1. Even if my claims were true and our competitors’ claims weren’t, the products we were selling were sprawling, complex platforms with thousands of features (that evolved constantly), making it difficult for buyers to suss out whose claims truly held water
2. Unlike in the consumer world, many people were involved in the enterprise buying decision, and trying to address each persona’s bestness criteria got unwieldy — for me as the seller, but also for buyers when championing my product to their internal colleagues, especially their senior leader (c-suite) sponsors
3. Buyers would often make bestness calculations based on old notions about what mattered

Indeed, Rao argues that when decisions get complex — because ranking gets complicated, or because the world has changed such that old ranking models don’t apply — calculative rationality breaks down, and we switch to an entirely different decision-making mode that Rao calls “Narrative rationality.” As he defines it:

“Narrative rationality is the ability to think, make decisions, and act [based on] the most compelling and elegant story that you can improvise about a developing enactment.”

In plainer language, we observe the world, we tease out a simple story about how people are winning now, and we use that story to guide our actions.

That’s the best description I’ve ever seen of the buyer decision-making model behind the strategic narrative framework I use with CEOs and their teams to craft sales (and other) pitches.

You’re not telling the buyer “old way bad, new way good,” or about a “trend.” Instead, you’re giving them a compelling (high stakes) and elegant (short) story about how their world has changed such that an old mindset is now a road to ruin, and there’s a new mindset for winning — one that defines a new goal state that I call the “buyer mission.” Some examples:

GONG

STORY: Successful sales leaders relied on their teams’ opinions => They rely on a view of reality.

NEW BUYER MISSION: Unlock reality.

GRIN

STORY: People tune into media companies => People follow people

NEW BUYER MISSION: Treat creators as if your brand revolves around them, because now it does. (Note: This is differentiating from most of Grin’s important competitors, who essentially offer arms-length ad marketplaces.)

360LEARNING

STORY: Top-down training => Collaborative learning

NEW BUYER MISSION: Upskill from within.

FOXGLOVE

STORY: Winning robotics companies built prototypes in labs => Now they deploy autonomous production fleets of robots around the world

NEW BUYER MISSION: Understand how your (potentially millions of autonomous production) robots sense, think and act.

The Movement Champion

If the Arrogant Doctor was the selling metaphor that arose from calculative rationality, the one that emerges from narrative rationality is what I call the “Movement Champion.” The Movement Champion conveys differentiation not by saying our product is “better,” but by articulating a different goal state, born of a new take (story) about what’s happening in the buyer’s world, and building product to help buyers get there. Here’s my new favorite definition of a strategic narrative: A story that transforms the act of buying into the act of joining a movement.

Of course, even as a Movement Champion, you can (must!) present product features and address competitors. But you get to do it in a totally different, and, in my experience, more powerful, way. Having set context, instead of spouting claims of relative superiority, you can instead, even before saying anything at all about your product, explain why alternatives “weren’t built for this” movement (i.e. for helping you achieve the differentiated buyer mission you’ve laid out).

For sure, relying on product claims without a narrative (Arrogant Doctor) is a reasonable approach if you’re selling a relatively straightforward, static product in a relatively uncrowded market, where the evaluation criteria are well understood and you’re resigned to battling it out in a feature war. But when things get complex, I’ll die on the Movement Champion (narrative) hill. A few other reasons of many:

• If you structure the narrative (shift from old mindset to new mindset that has life-and-death stakes for buyers) well, when you present it in a first call, buyers open up about how it’s playing out in their companies and the challenges they’re facing. Yes, this is discovery gold (and so much more fruitful than just asking “What are you pain points?”), which is why the sales guru Chris Orlob (who I worked with at Gong) presents this shift as the first slide in his “discovery deck” template. But it’s also trust-building gold, because you’re the one who boiled down for the buyer a simple story about how they can win (a la Chris Voss’s “labeling”)
• You can make your pitch relevant (urgent) for many different personas (roles, verticals), by quickly (in a single slide) showing how the narrative has life-and-death (winning/losing) consequences for each. In other words, the movement becomes a rallying cry that unites the buying group around a model for choosing a solution (and urgency)
• In the same way, CEOs consistently tell me the narrative becomes a uniting rallying cry internally, powering success as North Star not only for sales and marketing, but also product, recruiting, fundraising, and HR/culture. The story is, as Ben Horowitz says, quite literally the strategy.

I presented examples of these 3 points, and of using the narrative to disqualify competitors as “not built for this,” from sales decks I worked on with CEOs and leadership teams in my recent Pavilion talk — video coming soon.

5 that went beyond “We’re a ___ platform that does x, y, z.”

Two weeks ago, I found myself with a ticket to SaaStr Annual, so I roamed the sponsor area, listening to pitches from SaaS startups large and small.

Conference booths are a great place to gauge how deeply a company’s pitch (a.k.a. strategic narrative) has permeated its ranks because they’re usually staffed by a mix of sales, marketing and product people. Or haven’t permeated those ranks: One sales rep told me if I wanted to hear a really good version of the pitch, it was too bad because his CEO, who would be back shortly, was really good at that.

As you might expect, I mostly heard product-centered descriptions: “We’re a __ platform that does x, y and z.” But as Drift’s David Cancel is fond of saying, markets are so crowded now that you can no longer differentiate on product and features. Instead, differentiation is about building a connection to customers. And it’s certainly easier to do that if everything everyone does at your company is in service of a strategic narrative—that is, a story about getting customers to a desirable, difficult-to-reach Promised Land.

While I didn’t make it to every SaaStr sponsor’s booth, these are the folks from whom I heard solid strategic stories:

#1. Geoff White, CRE Lead, Blameless

As I’ve often said, a great pitch starts not with your company, your product, or anything about you. Rather, it starts with a change in the customer’s world that is creating opportunity and risk.

Geoff followed that recipe by kicking off his pitch with a question:

Do you know about the blameless post mortem?

I didn’t, so Geoff elaborated:

It’s an approach to site-reliability engineering that Google has championed over the last few years and that more teams are adopting. Basically, when something goes wrong, they recover and learn more effectively if they do the post mortem without pointing fingers, without assigning blame.

By starting with the change—and connecting it to stakes—Geoff divided the world into winning site-reliability engineers (who, like Google, don’t assign blame during a post mortem) and losing ones (who do).

Having accomplished that, Geoff is no longer pitching a product. Instead, he’s pitching belonging to a club of winners. Likewise, Blameless’s features are no longer disembodied capabilities, but weapons for slaying monsters standing in the way of any site-reliability engineer who wants to join that club. (I wrote more about the benefits of starting pitches with change here.)

#2. Mallory Surpless, Director of Customer Success, DataGrail

Mallory similarly started with a question about a change in the customer’s world:

Are you dealing with GDPR?

Mallory delivered the question with exactly the right amount of pained anguish— just enough to convey empathy for anyone dealing with the unwieldy new privacy regulations.

I liked Mallory’s opener (and her way of asking it) for two reasons. It’s a qualification screen for real leads, of course, but it also invites prospects to open up about the challenges they’re facing. That’s really what we’re aiming for when we start with a change in the customer’s world—having them interrupt us and start talking about how that change is playing out for them.

#3. Tarmo Van der Goot, Sr. Business Developer, Cleverbridge

How do you pitch against a competitor who has already nailed the category story? That’s a challenge for Cleverbridge and others that play in the subscription billing space alongside Zuora, which went public last year thanks, in no small way, to a simple, powerful story. (I broke down why Zuora’s story works in The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen.)

When Tarmo pitched me, I told him his story sounded similar to Zuora’s, and he agreed. So I asked him point blank: How do you differentiate from them?

“I like to say that if the two of us are pitching to the same client, one of us doesn’t belong,” Tarmo replied. “We’re going to be much lighter weight, with a faster implementation that’s better suited to e-commerce customers.”

I’m not in a position to evaluate whether that’s true, but I like that Cleverbridge has identified a target audience for whom it believes it shines at making good on the subscription economy Promised Land.

(I wonder if Cleverbridge might do even better with a newer change that uniquely impacts its target — for example, “now, the subscription economy has come to e-commerce.”)

#4. Kasey Byrne, VP Marketing, Postman

Having once run product marketing at Mashery, the API management platform now owned by TIBCO, I appreciate how hard it is to build a story in this category. (At least now people know what an API is — in my Mashery days, when I explained what I did at cocktail parties, most just walked away.)

Kasey started with the story of Postman’s founder, who got tired of executing curl commands to retrieve web pages, and who then added more functionality for developers building APIs. The founder’s story isn’t always effective in a pitch, but I thought Kasey used it nicely to gain trust and build empathy.

#5. Brian Chan, Account Executive, Boast.ai

Brian’s pitch started out with pure product description — how Boast.ai helps companies reap tax credits for research and development, which often requires complex documentation.

It got more interesting, though, once he mentioned a change in his customers’ world.

“The IRS recently added R&D tax deductions to its ‘dirty dozen’ list of audit triggers,” Brian said.

Now I get why Boast.ai is suddenly relevant. By the way, starting with change works for fundraising pitches, too. Investors will be thinking, “How come no one’s done this before?” When you start with change, they’re more likely to smell an opportunity.

HONORABLE MENTION: Tom Scopazzi, Sales Director, Lohika

Tom garners honorable mention here for an approach to pitching that, while following none of my advice, nevertheless helped Lohika stand out from others in its category, who typically try to sound like something they’re not.

“I’m not going to dress it up,” Tom said. “We’re a dev shop.”

Still, Tom, I bet we could do better with change, stakes and Promised Land.

About Andy Raskin:
I help CEOs align their leadership teams around a strategic story — to power success in sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. Clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling training at Salesforce, Square, IBM, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit http://andyraskin.com.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +426,678 people. Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

5 Standout Pitches from SaaStr Annual 2019 was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The most Japanese of Japanese proverbs, to my mind, is “Three years, even on a rock” (石の上にも三年). The literal meaning is that even a stone is worth sitting on for a long time because it will eventually heat up. In other words, persistence begets rewards.

A little over three years ago, I perched myself atop a rock called “Helping CEOs align their teams around a strategic story,” and there are still plenty of chilly moments. Every time I kick off a new engagement with a CEO and leadership team, I feel nervous: Will I really be able to align these smart, driven people around a simple, powerful story?

But overall, the rock has gotten a bit toastier. Now, hardly a day passes when a CEO doesn’t reach out to me saying, “I’ve realized that a huge factor in our success will be how we tell the story” or some version of that. I’ve worked with leadership teams around the globe, learning from all of them what works and what doesn’t.

A few weeks ago, my database of consulting clients (mostly VC-backed startups) hit 100 companies, so it feels like a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned so far. Here are the five biggies:

#1. Conversations about messaging are really conversations about strategy.

If you’ve been following me from the beginning, you might recall I made exactly the same point, two years ago, in What I Learned Crafting Messaging for 15 Startups. But it’s still my biggest learning, so I’m calling it out again.

Think about it: how is strategy communicated? You can write up complex plans or sketch out diagrams of Porter’s famous five forces, but those things can’t be conveyed throughout a large organization. Ultimately, the only way to get strategic alignment is with a simple story. I still think Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, put it best:

“The company story IS the company strategy”

— Ben Horowitz

#2. The sales narrative is the core narrative.

Early in my career, I was on the receiving end of a lot of messaging and positioning work that sat on a shelf once the consultant left the building. It was usually delivered as either a positioning statement (“For customer with problem X, our product Y is a …”) or a generic positioning presentation. Those positioning assets were supposed to guide the messaging everything else—in CEO keynotes, sales decks, website copy, content, etc.—but it never worked that way: the positioning assets were just too different from what we had to build.

A little over a year ago, I decided to abandon positioning assets and make the sales deck the primary instrument of my strategic narrative engagements. It was a risky move: not every CEO believes he or she should be bothered with authoring the sales presentation. (And, of course, many salespeople hate using them.)

But it’s turned to be a great decision. The sales narrative (as I defined it in The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen) has all the “pieces” of the story. When you get it right (after testing and refining it in actual sales calls), your website messaging, content themes— even your investor deck—practically flow right from it. Even salespeople who never use the deck can learn its narrative flow to better create urgency and engagement.

And when a team tells me their CEO doesn’t have the time to take the lead in drafting the sales narrative—even with handholding from me and support of their leadership team—I politely decline to get involved.

#3. Aligning is the hard part.

Three years ago, I thought my most valuable skill I brought to the table was a knack for boiling down complex ideas into simple narratives. While that’s important, I’ve learned that what CEOs value even more is getting their teams bought in. As the CEO of a San Francisco tech company that’s raised over $56 million in VC cash told me last month:

I realized we needed a narrative, so I wrote one I thought was pretty good. But my VP of sales didn’t like it, so I changed it a little for him. But then my VP of marketing didn’t like it, so I had to change it for her. What I realized is that the hard part is the aligning, not the crafting. That’s why I called you.

I’ve heard that sentiment from so many CEOs over the past year that I changed how I describe my engagements in proposals:

#4. Customer input is SO not optional.

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was making customer interviews optional. After all, teams I work with boast millions of dollars in revenue. Aren’t their leaders a reliable enough proxy for customers?

I’ve learned that the answer is often no. Even when teams have already done customer interviews, they’ve usually been asking what customers think of the company and/or its products. To build a story that truly drives urgency, we have to shift the focus to what’s happening in customers’ lives: What is changing that gives rise to stakes?

Earlier this year, in the following post, I shared the questions I ask customers to build the narrative:

Why Great Pitches Come From Customers

#5. A strategic narrative can be a powerful execution tool.

In the last few months, several CEOs have asked if we could extend our work together beyond narrative crafting and alignment. As one put it:

Now that we’ve aligned around the story, can you help us make it come true?

It follows that if “the story is the strategy,” it should be a guide for execution. Next year, I’ll be working with these CEOs to see how I can support them as they deliver on the story, not only in sales and marketing but also through product, recruiting and fundraising. As the rock heats up around that stuff, I’ll report back,

About Andy Raskin:
I help CEOs align their leadership teams around a strategic story — to power success in sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. Clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling training at Salesforce, Square, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit http://andyraskin.com.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +393,714 people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

What I Learned Crafting Strategic Narratives for 100+ Companies was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bellies full of beignets, my parents and I were exiting San Francisco’s Just for You Cafe when when a middle-aged man called my name.

“Andy, it’s Christoph!” he shouted. “Do you have time for a quick question about messaging?”

(Later, my mom asked, “People stalk you for messaging advice?”)

It was fun having my parents think I was some kind of messaging celebrity, but I recognized Christoph as the CEO of an early-stage tech company who had recently attended one of my workshops. He was waiting for a table, but didn’t wait to tell me what was going on.

“Listen,” he said, “I restructured our sales pitch using your Greatest Sales Deck framework and the results have been awesome. I’ve used it with a few prospects, and they engage at a deeper level, they get what we’re about faster, and they’re all moving to next steps.”

“That’s great,” I said. “What’s the question?”

“Well, it’s my VP of sales. He won’t even look at the new deck. Says he already has a deck, and that buyers don’t have time for a story, they just want to know how we solve their problem.” Christoph was digging his heels into the pavement, one after the other, as a metaphor for his VP’s resistance. “How do I bring him on board?”

With so many B2B teams gearing up for next year’s sales kickoff events, I’m guessing Christoph isn’t the only one worried about his sales team embracing a new version of the pitch. So I’ll share an expanded version of my response to him here:

(These 5 points are particularly relevant to the Greatest Sales Deck framework, but should apply to any kind of sales pitch.)

#1. Make sure your new deck facilitates discovery

Christoph’s VP’s complaint echoes the most common pushback I hear from salespeople about flashy new sales decks in general—they encourage salespeople to blabber on instead of listening to prospects. In other words, they inhibit what salespeople call discovery.

One of my biggest “aha” moments was when several sales teams I worked with began using their “change in the world” slides to get prospects talking and opening up. For example, Switzerland-based SpotMe, which delivers custom apps for events and training, begins pitches by sharing a change that we heard about from SpotMe’s customers—namely that they now see events not as self-contained shindigs, but as episodes in some greater journey:

When unveiling the new deck, SpotMe CEO Pierre Metrailler trained his sales team not just to present these slides, but to stop and ask, “How is this shift playing out for you and your team?” According to Pierre, the information his team gets from these exchanges is gold. As he told me:

Buyers open up and share what’s really going on, so much more than when we used to just ask direct questions about their challenges. Once, with a group of IT buyers, we decided not to show these “change” slides, thinking they would be irrelevant for a technical person, but the buyers were practically silent. Then we went back and showed those slides, and it was like magic—the IT buyers let down their guard and began sharing all kinds of valuable information.

#2. Nurture advocates for the new deck inside your sales team—before rolling it out

If your marketing team, or even your CEO, builds the new pitch without your sales team’s close cooperation, don’t be surprised when your salespeople shun it like a body rejecting foreign tissue. Besides, with salespeople being so close to buyers, why wouldn’t you involve them?

At Boston-based Zaius, which has raised over $50 million for its B2C marketing platform, CEO Mark Gally invited one of his sales leaders, Michael Angoff, to be part of the group that would build the new deck. When Mark asked Michael to rate the group’s first draft on a scale of 1 to 5, Michael gave it a 2. “That’s pretty good for him,” Mark said, but I knew we’d have to do better if we wanted Michael to evangelize the deck to the rest of his team.

One of Michael’s biggest objections was—surprise—he didn’t see how the new deck would facilitate discovery. So just like at SpotMe, we saw how the “change in the world” slide could be used for that. In Zaius’s case, it looked like this:

We also asked Michael and one of his colleagues try out the deck on live calls for a couple of weeks, and we made modifications as they reported back on what worked and what didn’t. By the time Zaius rolled out the new deck to its entire sales team, Michael’s rating was up to 4.5, and he was actively evangelizing it. As Michael told me recently, it’s been especially valuable for getting new reps up to speed:

The last two reps that came on board used the deck…both ramped quicker and crushed their goals in their first quota-carrying month.

#3. Have customers speak at the unveiling

A critical part of strategic messaging, and certainly any sales deck, is what I call the “Promised Land message”—a simple articulation of the future you commit to making real for buyers. At SkySlope, a SaaS platform for real estate brokers and agents headquartered in Sacramento, when CEO Tyler Smith first shared the Promised Land message below, some folks on his leadership team felt it wasn’t emotional enough:

Of course, Tyler didn’t come up with that message out of nowhere; he had heard it—over and over—from the brokers and agents who were SkySlope’s customers.

Before unveiling the deck to the rest of his team, Tyler invited a respected broker (who’s also a SkySlope board member) to speak about how being a broker today means your relationships with home buyers and sellers are under constant attack by new players like Zillow, Rocket Homes, and Opendoor. After that, everyone understood why the Promised Land above was an emotional vision for SkySlope’s customers.

#4. Tell the new deck’s story everywhere

I’m on the record saying this:

Andy Raskin on Twitter

Th greatest sales deck I've ever seen isn't worth shit unless everyone on your team tells that same story all the time

What make Zuora’s sales deck truly great is not simply that it’s structured around a compelling “change in the world”…

…but the fact that everyone from CEO Tien Tzuo on down tells the same story of that change. Most recently, Tzuo told it in a book:

When you unveil a new deck, make sure you’re supporting it with other new assets that tell the same story—new website, new content, whatever—so that sales teams know you’re committed to providing the air cover they’ll need to sell on the ground. Like Zuora, treat the sales deck (in particular, the change in the world you’ve highlighted) not as something separate from other communications, but as a strategic blueprint for all of them.

#5. Ask what your sales team wants

I recently posted this question on Modern Sales Pros, a popular online forum for salespeople:

What’s the #1 thing that leadership (sales leadership, marketing, CEO, etc.) can do to more successfully gain sales team buy-in on a new deck?

Many of the responses reflected a deep cynicism of sales decks, born of years of having them thrown over the fence from marketing. As Damian Wisniewski, head of sales at Got It, told me:

In my experience, the default scenario is (1) marketing unveils a 50-slide deck with great fanfare; (2) the worst reps struggle through it, while the best ones take the six useful slides; (3) everyone moves on with their lives.

Still, don’t let that healthy skepticism stop you from asking what your team wants out of a deck unveiling. From Damian and other Modern Sales Pro members, I heard the following:

• Train us on how to use the new deck, including video of an ideal call (I would add: Even if reps loathe decks and never show one to buyers, train them on how memorizing the deck’s story flow can help them with discovery, guide conversations to their advantage, etc.)
• Make sure the story your deck tells is based on what’s really happening in the customer’s world, not just pulled out of marketing’s ass. As one Modern Sales Pro commented, make sure it’s “real.” (Having customers speak to it, as I mentioned above, can help.)
• Keep the deck as short as possible

If you try any of these, I’d love it if you share how it went—either in a response below, or the next time we run into each other at a restaurant.

About Andy Raskin:
I help CEOs align their leadership teams around a strategic story — to power success in sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. Clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling training at Salesforce, Square, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit http://andyraskin.com.

Selling Your New Sales Deck to Sales was originally published in Firm Narrative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Millennials are popularly defined by their tech-savviness, but in that sense I’ve never felt I had much to learn from them. By the time they reached their 2000 coming-of-age, I had been coding for 21 years and editing digital video for six. Texting? My friends and I started doing that back in 1983—on IBM 370 mainframes over BITNET via the VM/CMS “tell” command, but still.

Yet when it comes to strategic narratives for positioning your company, some of my most valuable lessons have come from millennial leaders. In some cases they outright schooled me. In others, they posed new challenges that we worked through together.

Here are the top 5 things I’ve learned about aligning your team around a strategic narrative — the story that powers sales, marketing, fundraising, recruiting, and everything — in my engagements with millennial CEOs:

#1. DEEPA SUBRAMANIAN, CEO, WOOTRIC: Craft a narrative for what your company is—and what it will become

HQ: San Francisco, CA; Investors: Cloud Apps Capital Partners, Array Ventures

When I first met Deepa Subramanian, back in 2015, Wootric’s platform was in its infancy. Business customers could use it to run Net Promoter Score surveys — those “how likely would you be to recommend this to a friend?” questionnaires — but Deepa’s vision was grander. Her challenge to me: Can we craft a story that expresses not only what Wootric actually is, but also what it could become?

Particularly challenging was nailing down what I call the Promised Land message — the future state you commit to making real for customers.¹ We considered lines like “make customers love you” or “boost retention,” but none were bold or inspiring enough. Then, one day, we noticed what a Wootric customer had written on his Linkedin profile: “My mission is to win customers for life.” That message still works today, even though Wootric has since added not only only surveys for customer effort score (to gauge onboarding) and customer satisfaction (to evaluate support support), but also AI-driven sentiment analysis for understanding large volumes of customer feedback data:

Working with Deepa and her team, I learned not only how a story could bridge both the current state of a product and the future vision, but also how often great messaging comes from customers’ mouths.

#2: YAN-DAVID ERLICH, FORMER CEO, PARSABLE: To align your team on the story, aim for “that’s right”

HQ: San Francisco, CA; Investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital, Saudi Aramco, Schlumberger

If I’ve gotten better at aligning leadership teams around a new strategic narrative, it’s in no small part thanks to Yan-David “Yanda” Erlich.

After Yanda and his team at Parsable had settled on the bones of their strategic narrative, one of his salespeople caught wind of it—then sent out a mass email about why he hated it. At Yanda’s request, I met with the man to see if we could make changes that would bring him in line, but he only dug in further. Just as I was losing hope, Yanda stepped into the room and began asking the man a series of questions. And in a shift that seemed almost magical, the man came around. He agreed to fully support the new messaging, and I could tell he meant it.

Beyond impressed—more in awe—I asked Yanda what he had just done. He told me it was a technique he had learned about in a negotiation book called “Never Split the Difference” (by former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss). The idea was to try and summarize the other side’s position until they said some version of “That’s right.” That signaled the other side felt understood, and would be more open to working with you.²

Today I use variations that approach whenever I encounter resistance to a new way of telling the company story (what I call “story backlash”). Working with Yanda also taught me how important it was to involve key sales leaders in the story’s development and initial rollout, rather than having the CEO —or, god forbid, marketing—foist it on them fully formed.

#3: MATT TALBOT, CEO, GOSPOTCHECK: Get customers to help you roll out the new story

HQ: Denver, CO; Investors: Insight Venture Partners, Hinge Capital, Techstars

Speaking of rolling out the story, GoSpotCheck CEO Matt Talbot came up with an idea for doing that that worked so well, I’ve been advising every team I work with to copy him.

After Matt and his senior team aligned on a new strategic narrative for GoSpotCheck’s real-time field operations platform, he first trained his sales and marketing teams on it. Then, to convey it to all of his 150 employees, we sketched out an agenda for an all-hands session. As in similar sessions I’d supported other CEOs to lead, we would have salespeople talk about how the new story was helping them in deals, and we would have marketing people unveil new content—web pages and other collateral—that told the new story.

Matt had another idea: What if we invited a customer to speak at the all-hands?

The customer Matt invited was a man we had interviewed while building GoSpotCheck’s story, a field support engineer at one of the world’s biggest healthcare companies. In our interview, he told us that a single naysaying doctor could scuttle a multi-million-dollar contract at a hospital, so it was crucial for his field reps to have real-time intelligence about which doctors had been briefed on new offerings, as well as which might harbor less-than-favorable views (i.e., who might be targets for follow-up briefings). At the all-hands, the customer said he had data to prove that his company saw larger revenue gains at hospitals where his field reps used GoSpotCheck to manage their doctor briefings than at those where they didn’t.

Matt didn’t coach the customer at all on what to say, but because we had crafted the GoSpotCheck narrative based on his and other customers’ input (all about how “the field” has become a real-time battleground), his talk was brilliantly on the mark. In a survey afterwards, GoSpotCheck employees rated the event a huge success, singling out the customer’s talk as the highlight.

Now, every CEO I work with gets an earful from me about why they should invite customers to help roll out the new story.

#4: TYLER SMITH, CEO, SKYSLOPE: Position inside your parent company

HQ: Sacramento, CA; Parent company: Fidelity National Financial

Tyler Smith first contacted me two years ago about crafting a strategic narrative for SkySlope, a SaaS platform he founded for real estate brokers and agents. Scheduling prevented us from working together back then, but Tyler obviously knew how to tell a great story: last October he sold a majority stake in SkySlope to Fidelity National Financial, the country’s largest title processing company.

Last month, Tyler reached out again. Now that SkySlope was part of a larger organization, he said, it was even more critical to get the story right. As he told me:

“We have to make the case for why we matter in this bigger company and why they should invest in growing our part of the business. If we’re successful, our story could become a big part of the story our parent tells to customers and to the world.”

I had never thought about Tyler’s application of strategic narrative before —positioning a subsidiary to its owners. While Tyler and I are just getting started, I’m learning a lot about how to craft a story that plays to them, as well as to his customers and his 150 employees.

#5: JUSTIN YOSHIMURA, FORMER CEO, 500FRIENDS: Helping CEOs get the strategic story straight could be a thing

HQ: San Francisco, CA; Investors: Intel Capital, Crosslink Capital, Fung Capital, Y Combinator

Justin Yoshimura once told me he had dropped out of every educational institution he ever attended—including preschool. Which made it all the more fun to watch him wow gray-haired leaders of global retail giants by schooling them on the finer points of customer acquisition and retention.

I met Justin five years ago, when he hired me as interim VP of marketing at 500friends, the retail loyalty platform he founded through Y Combinator. Nine months later, as 500friends was being acquired by Merkle (which was in turn bought by Dentsu Aegis), I asked if he felt the combination of money and stock he paid me had been worth it. He said yes, so I asked him why.

“You got our story straight,” Justin said.

Justin’s answer pleased me because I had been thinking about starting a consulting business to help CEOs and their leadership teams get the strategic story straight. Still, I doubted whether leaders would allocate a line item in their budget for that. So I asked Justin:

“If nine months ago I had told you that I would charge you what you’ve paid me to get your story straight, would you have hired me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

A week later, Justin sent an note to the Y Combinator founders’ email list about our work together. The overwhelming response from CEOs led to my first full-time strategic narrative engagements—and the dawning realization that, well, maybe this could be a thing.

Footnotes

¹For more on the “Promised Land message” and how it fits into my strategic messaging framework, check out “The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen” and “Founders: Pitch the Promised Land.”

² I wrote in detail about Yanda Erlich and how he introduced me to Chris Voss’s negotiation techniques in “To Be a Better Leader, Learn This FBI Hostage Negotiation Tactic.” In that post I concealed Yanda’s identity, but he granted me permission to reveal it here.

About Andy Raskin: I help CEOs align their leadership teams around a strategic story — to power success in sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. Clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling training at Salesforce, Square, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit http://andyraskin.com.

What I Learned About Strategic Messaging From 5 Millennial CEOs was originally published in Mission.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In helping CEOs align their teams around a strategic story, there’s one question I hear more than any other. Recently, I heard it from a marketing leader at a public tech company valued at over $1 billion:

“We’re in an unusually complex situation in that we have to speak to multiple target audiences —multiple industries, multiple buyer roles (CEOs on down to field reps). Can we do that with one story, or should we be telling many stories?

When answering, I always reassure the questioner that his or her “situation” is totally normal. In other words, I try, as nicely as possible, to call bullshit: all of us have to speak to multiple audience segments.

What not to do: Separate stories for each audience

The point of tailoring your pitch for different segments is to help a diverse range of buyer types “see themselves” in your story. This might suggest you should craft multiple stories, one for each segment:

But if that’s all you’re doing, there are huge drawbacks. For example, what if you’re addressing a conference audience consisting of buyers from different segments (industries, roles, etc.)? Furthermore, if your story is geared to one segment—say, users—you’re missing the opportunity to arm those people with the narrative ammunition they’ll need to engage colleagues who actually write checks, such as their C-level budget owners.

Worst of all, the “tell me who I’m talking to and I’ll give you the pitch” approach leaves you lacking a “front door” message for customers, employees — everyone. A striking example (one that I found heartbreaking, given that I hoped she would become President) was Hillary Clinton’s campaign website:

A better approach, clearly, is to have a simple, powerful, high-level story that connects the low-lever ones together:

But what does that actually look like, and how do you build it? Specifically, what remains consistent in the story you tell to everyone, and what varies by audience?

Change is the glue

In The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen, I laid out a framework for structuring a high-level strategic narrative by dissecting Zuora’s. (Zuora, which recently celebrated a successful IPO, sells a platform for running subscription businesses).

The cornerstone of Zuora’s pitch is an undeniable, relevant change in the world. (In fact, every great pitch starts by naming this kind of change.) Zuora kicks off every sales conversation, website visit, and CEO keynote with some version of this slide:

Of course, Zuora sells to buyers in multiple industries. To make its “change” story relevant for each of them, Zuora shows that the change is playing out across industries. No accident that the industries portrayed here are the ones Zuora targets:

Every CEO I work with has found that a slide like the one above—I call it the “it’s playing out across segments” slide—is key for telling their story across audience types. If you’re speaking to a heterogeneous crowd (people from different segments), you can use this slide to invite viewers to ponder how the change is playing out in their own corner of the universe. (In sales discovery conversations, literally asking that question yields gold.) If it’s a homogeneous audience, you can still make the powerful point that the trend is playing out globally (across audiences) before diving into what the Promised Land looks like locally. For example, if Zuora were speaking to a music industry audience, it might show a slide like this one next:

Zuora also has to speak to multiple buyer roles, since closing a deal can require buy-in from client leaders in IT, product, finance, and marketing. Just as Zuora shows the subscription trend playing out across industries, they show it impacting these leaders in how they approach their jobs:

The metaphor here is evolution: if the subscription economy is a global environmental shift, Zuora shows how each “species” must adapt. The “from-to” messages, in other words, present a persona-tailored Promised Land. At its most recent conference, Zuora even presented a Promised Land message for tailored to consumers:

In other words, the “change” part of your story (subscription economy, etc.) is the “glue” that binds together tailored sub-stories; it’s how you start the conversation when you’re talking to anyone. Then, if you know your audience is of a certain type, you can present a tailored Promised Land message:

In order to reach an audience-specific Promised Land, members of that audience segment will face obstacles (if they don’t, they don’t need your help). Enumerating these audience-specific obstacles in conversations with prospects has turned out to be one of the most fruitful means of sales discovery for teams I’ve worked with.

Special cases

The structure above covers most multi-audience messaging challenges, but there are a few special challenges I’ve come across that I’d like to address.

Pivots

If you’re doing a complete 180, you can just tell a new story. But many pivots are less radical. For example, a leadership team that has achieved some level of success may deem its current product area unsustainable or spot a larger opportunity. These “light” pivots present a special multi-audience storytelling challenge: How do you tell the new, more promising story without abandoning old audiences?

Ideally, you define a new high-level story (change, Promised Land) that serves as an umbrella for both old and new audiences, exactly as above. Sometimes, though, the pivot is just too extreme. In those cases, teams make the hard decision to “cut loose” the old story—still telling it if they know they’re speaking to that audience, but leaving it disconnected from the new “front door”:

Marketplaces

Marketplaces— businesses that bring together buyers and sellers—have a critical choice to make about their “front door” message: Should it target the buyers or the sellers?

Mercari, which lets people buy and sell possessions, tries to address both (“sell or buy”) but puts a stake in the ground in speaking first to sellers:

Airbnb, meanwhile, speaks first to buyers:

I’ve tried to identify a rule of thumb about when it’s best to choose buyers and when sellers, but keep finding exceptions. I suspect it has to do with which side is more in demand and/or which is more likely to attract the other. For example, in 2016 Uber’s home page showed a Promised Land message (“Get there. Your day belongs to you”) and a image that spoke to both drivers and passengers, but the primary call to action was for passengers:

Today, while the message remains unchanged, the image and call-to-action more clearly target drivers, most likely because passengers get Uber on their phones (not uber.com), and Uber needs drivers to fuel its expansion into new services and territories:

Investors

Crafting the story for investors will be the subject of some future post, but the short version is that they really are just another audience for which you can tailor your high-level story of “undeniable, relevant change in the world.” Here’s a slide from Amplitude’s Series C deck that describes a new world in which a product analytics platform like theirs is so valuable:

Investors’ Promised Land, of course, is profiting in the new world, and your job is to help get them over the obstacles: believing the market is large enough, finding the business model sound, and trusting your team.

About Andy Raskin:
I help CEOs align their leadership teams around a strategic story — to power success in sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. Clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, KPCB, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling training at Salesforce, Square, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit http://andyraskin.com.

Tailoring Your Pitch for Multiple Audiences was originally published in Firm Narrative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.