How to: Create a sales narrative
How to: Create a sales narrative
A crash course in turning your positioning into a micro-pitch & sales narrative, with an example deck outline to work from.
When I work with clients under my Positioning Science banner, my unofficial tagline is ‘The science of positioning and the art of messaging.’ Here, we’re going to move from discussing science-based positioning in theory to how to turn your positioning into a message, specifically a value proposition in the form of a sales narrative.
What follows is the sales narrative chapter from Positioning Science — Blueprint.
I’ll give you a basic outline for a typical B2B SaaS sales narrative below, but first, let’s think about what we’re trying to do here.
Hopefully, you’ve got a sense of which of the four strategies you’re pursuing — prove it, find it, own it, ride it, or a combination that makes sense for you.
Those choices — and what you’ve discovered along the way — reflect the case you’re trying to make to persuade prospects to choose you. That case is ultimately the position you’re trying to build in the prospect’s mind.
The core of your sales narrative, then, is a pitch based on the fact that you have:
Proven there’s new value generated by a new wave.
Found unique value that’s highly relevant to the prospect.
Owned the value they associate with you.
Succeeded in helping other prospects achieve this value as you ride the position you’ve established, as reflected in your references and logos.
The two choices that matter most here are whether you’re leaning into proven value on a wave or unique value for a segment. This brings us back to our story 1/story 2 distinction, which we’ll look at below.
Before we get into the contents of your narrative, though, let’s briefly touch on the point of a sales narrative as an output or deliverable. What’s the one thing we’re trying to deliver here?
Positioning vs. messaging
Your sales narrative is a means of delivering a message, and at the core of that message is your value proposition.
In sales and marketing, we sometimes get into a bit of a jumble about what a value proposition is. Is it our positioning? Is it our messaging? Is it our copywriting? Is it the headline on our homepage?
In a sense, your value proposition is the core of your business. It’s the reason you exist. No value, no business. We’ll look at how you can articulate your value proposition in a sales narrative in a moment, but first, let’s get clear about some definitions as we wade into the messaging world.
Typically, in B2B:
Positioning is identifying the ‘position’ you want to occupy in the buyer’s or the market’s collective mind. That means knowing who you’re selling to and the type of value you offer (new, unique, associated) as we’ve discussed.
Messaging tends to be the expression of that value in simple language as a value proposition — literally the message you want to convey about the value you propose. It’s usually a set of statements (i.e., key messages) that articulate the position you’re trying to create.
Copywriting is the finished product, i.e., the headline on your homepage, the subject of your email, the bullet points on your product page, and so on. They should all convey much the same message but might express that message in very different ways depending on the medium and context.
This often gets broken down in a division-of-labor sense — executives work on positioning the product, leadership decides on key messages, and IC marketers, product marketers, and copywriters write the final copy.
There’s a certain logic to this, but if you take the sausage factory approach, you’re going to get, well, sausages. To me, the strategy and the execution — the research and the writing — are often two sides of the same coin.
In B2B, where marketing and selling are so message driven, to me it can make more sense to divide this work by stakes rather than labor. High-stakes messaging needs strategic andcreative input, whereas low-stakes messaging (the subject lines of this month’s email campaign, for example) doesn’t.
Positioning is ultimately an act of creation — you’re trying to create a position in folks’ minds, and that’s why the strategy and writing go hand-in-hand. The alternative is positioning without messaging, which results in uninspired output, or messaging without positioning, which results in wheel-spinning wordsmithing.
PositioningAndMessaging
To me, positioning, messaging, and even copywriting are all part of a creative whole. I think most folks get this intuitively. For example, have you ever noticed that people tend to talk about positioning and messaging in the same breath, for example, literally as positioningandmessaging? Like:
“We need to fix our positioningandmessaging.”
“We studied our customers and got great insights for our positioningandmessaging.”
“We’re about to launch our new sales narrative/homepage with our updated positioningandmessaging.”
This drives some positioning folks ‘round the bend because it tends to focus on the outputs and neglect the inputs. Positioning is your input, and messaging is the output they (quite reasonably!) insist.
While I do think they need to be considered together as a whole, I understand the frustration of having folks myopically fixated on the output and forgetting the inputs, too. I’m a big believer in meaningful inputs — that’s the whole point of science-based positioning, after all.
Outputs require inputs
In the marketing world in particular, we tend to think in terms of outputs first — we need to update our homepage, or our sales deck, or our collateral, and so on.
These outputs and deliverables then become proxies for a deeper itch we’re trying to scratch — the value proposition we’re trying to articulate and the position we’re trying to create in the buyer’s mind.
To really scratch that itch, you have to tackle it head on, not by proxy. You have to be clear about your positioning inputs — the wave you’re riding, the niche you’ve found, or the memory association you want to build.
And you have to be clear about the outcome you’re trying to create, in so far as we can create a unique position in the buyer’s mind.
Between those inputs and that desired outcome is a message delivered using the deliverables and assets that drive sales and marketing.
And the core of your message that sits between input and outcome is your value proposition.
There is, as you might imagine, a lot riding on that value proposition!
The value you propose
Your value proposition is the glue between product and market that goes to the heart of product/market fit. Think of your value proposition like the power cord that connects product and market together, so the two can generate value. It’s high-stakes stuff, and if that power cord doesn’t connect… well, not much is going to happen.
This is also, incidentally, why it’s helpful to have an output like a narrative in mind when reading about the theory of science-based positioning. Yes, having these new fundamentals is super helpful, and yes, thinking about the position you want to create in people’s minds and in the market is vital, but between those inputs and that outcome, you need something tangible to work with to help make abstract ideas concrete.
And that’s where your sales narrative comes in.
Why a sales narrative?
On the one hand, marketing teams might have a generic, fill-in-the-blanks positioning statement that’s supposed to be used for messaging, but it’s often too dry and detail-free to be much help.
That’s too cold.
Or, on the other hand, there’s the founder’s bold vision — the bright future of what might be. That’s great, but it’s usually too far in the future and too speculative to be much use in deals here and now.
That’s too hot.
We need something that’s just right, something where you can be more expressive than a positioning statement while still being grounded in the here and now for buyers today, because that’s what they’re buying: what you’ve got today.
Therefore, the best place to work out your value proposition is in a sales narrative, where you can flesh out ’the value you propose’ in story 1 and/or story 2 terms.
(You might use the Goldilocks pattern of ’too hot, too cold, just right’ like I just did, too!)
I discuss sales narratives at length in Positioning Science — Playbook and it’s the main thing I do with clients in my consulting work, because it gives you the freedom to:
Tell the whole story, from beginning to end, whereas a homepage (for example) is just about getting folks to take a next step.
Tell a rich story, as opposed to a usually details-free positioning statement, especially because in a sales context you have more time and more of the prospect’s attention.
Tell a custom story, which you can tailor to your audience and their role (e.g., end user vs. C-suite).
I also tend to distinguish between your sales narrative as the high-level positioning piece and your specific sales decks which might be tailored to different situations.
You can have a sales narrative without a sales deck at all if you’re product-led and don’t do sales per se; just call it your positioning narrative (or master narrative, or strategic narrative, or whatever you like). What you call it doesn’t matter; what matters is how you express your value proposition.
With that in mind, here’s a super quick, high-level guide to creating a sales narrative that captures your value proposition. Let’s briefly look at:
Micro-pitches.
Story 1 & story 2
Sales narratives (including a 10-slide deck outline).
1. Micro-pitch
The best pitches — and the best value propositions — spread. They’re memetic. They stick. They get repeated and they get shared, which is great for owning an association in the buyer’s mind.
To do that, they have to be small and catchy. They have to capture a big idea in a precious few words.
I call this kind of micro-pitch your “Hemingway story.”
Ernest Hemingway, legend has it, once crafted a short story to win a bet with his drinking buddies. The bet? That he could make them cry with a story of just six words. The story?
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Your Hemingway story doesn’t need to make anyone cry (or roll their eyes, for that matter), but it does need to explain what you do with absolute clarity.
Consider these classic micro-pitches:
Use cloud software not on-prem. (Salesforce’s “End of Software” campaign at the turn of the millennium, before either ‘the cloud’ or ‘SaaS’ had been coined.)
Use chat not email. (Slack.)
Use chat not forms. (Drift and “conversational marketing.”)
Do ‘inbound’ marketing. (HubSpot, riding the digital marketing wave.)
Use agile not waterfall. (Jira riding the agile wave.)
Use Linear not Jira. (Linear riding a classic anti-incumbent wave.)
Mine sales calls for insights. (Gong, riding the Zoom call recording wave.)
Design collaboratively in the browser. (Figma.)
Build your own workspace. (Notion.)
Payments for developers. (Stripe.)
This approach is particularly relevant in B2B, where it’s often more about the change or the ‘from/to’ transformation that your product enables that matters. It’s that transformation you’re often pitching after all.
Note that these aren’t necessarily taglines. You might never express it this bluntly to customers. Drift, for example, used “conversational marketing” to convey what you did with their chat tool in particular. That was their playbook; their position they could own relative to other chat providers.
Nevertheless, as an exercise in clarity, it’s worth understanding what your pitch fundamentally boils down to. For Drift, it was taking on the old forms-and-email approach as the enemy and coming up with a micro-pitch that captured their playbook — what they wanted buyers to actually do with their software.
What’s your playbook — what do you want buyers to actually do with your software?
Your turn
What’s your current micro-pitch?
What playbook does it capture?
Which of our positioning strategies does it reflect the most?
If you had to get it down to 4-6 words, what would it be?
2. Story 1 & story 2
The narrative approach also gives us a chance to address both modes of attention.
Remember, as we discussed in the three areas of science, that the foundation of science-based positioning is the hierarchy of attention:
‘Story 1’ change stories for right-brain ‘radar’ attention — proving there’s new value from a new wave.
‘Story 2’ focused stories for left-brain ’laser-beam’ attention — finding unique value for a specific segment.
In practice, how much of story 1 and story 2 story types you use will vary based on your product and prospect. For example:
A cybersecurity product might talk much more about the emerging threat ‘out there’ (GenAI-enabled hacking and 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.
A developer-oriented product might get into the specifics of technical details, APIs and integrations, and the challenge of build vs. buy very quickly. What’s ‘out there’ is far less important than the specifics of how it works, so we might lean more on story 2-style pitches in that case.
A C-suite pitch (or end users when going outbound) might spend more time on a story 1, change-over-time narrative about megatrends that are likely to impact their organization, setting up the new value that comes from these new waves.
A similar pitch to end users about their organizational transformation as a whole, however, would be well above their pay grade — they’re more interested in how the tool works and how it affects their day-to-day, so we’d lean more on the story 2 pitch.
That’s how you meet the two fundamental types of prospect attention.
But consider how you use your own attention, too.
For example, McGilchrist suggests that your right brain tends to be good at pattern matching, while your left brain tends to be good at mapping things — like the market you operate in. This means:
Pattern matching leads to customer expertise: If your positioning is tight enough, you start seeing the same problems again and again (as David C. Baker makes clear in his excellent book The Business of Expertise). And 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. And that’s why prospects will trust you to solve their problem over the competition — your positioning has given you the insight and expertise other folks lack.
Market mapping gives you market insight: Positioning was a breakthrough in the 1970s and 1980s because it was a novel strategy — a way to stand out from other competitors trying to sell to everyone. In tech, however, there might be many competitors and alternatives touting their unique position, which creates a great deal of confusion for buyers. Helping folks map their options helps build trust, and sensemaking may be a necessary part of your broader clarity strategy.
Combined, this means:
You can use story 1/story 2 approaches to meet a prospect where their attention is at.
You can use your own right-brain/left-brain attention to develop customer expertise and market insight that’s gold for sales discussions, i.e., to keep their attention.
All of this helps make sales more productive, particularly as it helps you develop a narrative that’s not just great at expressing your position, but also creates value for the prospect through your unique insight.
Sales doesn’t have to be something prospects slog through, hearing boring pitch after boring pitch — it can be insightful and value-creating instead!
Going right/left/right
It’s critical you use the right story type to match the equivalent mode of attention. But you’ll notice that, even for story 2 folks, you still have to put something on their radar, like the fact that your new product exists. Likewise for story 1 folks, there’s still some getting into the details to prove your value really is there.
This suggests a pattern we can use for any sales narrative we might be putting together.
The right-brain/left-brain hierarchy of attention came from, if you recall, Dr. Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist has another powerful insight we can use in a sales context, and that has to do with how our brains process information.
Broadly speaking, we go from broad context → narrow specifics → new whole. That is, we go from:
Right hemisphere: What’s new, what’s changed, what’s ‘out there’ on the radar.
To the left hemisphere: Applying our narrow focus to drilling 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. Story 1-focused narratives spend more time on the first R, story 2-focused narratives spend more time on the middle L. That is:
We always need to put something on a prospect’s radar to engage them in the first place.
We always need to get down to some specifics to demonstrate a solution.
And we always should (but don’t always do!) bring that 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 genuinely look like for the buyer on the other side? That’s the basis of your N=1 experiment, too — the more expertise you get at delivering that final value, the stronger your positioning ultimately becomes.
Ultimately, the mix of story 1 and story 2 you use will be highly contextual based on your positioning strategy, motion (inbound or outbound), and prospect (high awareness late in the sale, low awareness early in their journey).
But simply knowing the story 1/story 2 dynamic exists — and the R/L/R jump is how we process information — gives us tremendous flexibility in tailoring our narratives to meet folks where they’re at.
Your turn
Does your current pitch map to this right/left/right, or context/specifics/whole approach?
Does that final step — the new, reintegrated ‘whole’ — reflect what you’ve learned from customers?
Does your long-form content (articles, ebooks, webinars, demos) map to this approach?
Could your broader clarity strategy use this approach across your customer journey, too?
3. Sales narratives
Let’s now look at a typical outline for a narrative and then see how we might break it down into slides.
First, here’s a five-point example narrative sketch for a fairly typical, insight-driven B2B pitch. (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:
BLUF: Bottom line up front to introduce your story and product.
Context (macro/micro): Set up your story 1 — the broader context and/or your perspective on the market. What’s your unique insight into their broader (or specific) context?
Tension: What’s the tension that brought the prospect here? What’s stopping the prospect from moving forward? What’s wrong with the alternatives? And what does the positive opportunity for them to keep succeeding in their role look like?
Solution: Switch to story 2 — the product reveal that addresses the tension we’ve set up from the story 1 change in the environment, perhaps with a look at major product pillars.
Resolution: 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?
A 10-slide deck outline
We’ve covered:
The two story types.
The R/L/R jump.
A rough narrative sketch of context, tension, solution, and resolution.
Now, let’s turn that into a deck outline.
Below is my example from Clarity (sans details), and this might give you a starting point — or at least a few ideas — for fleshing out your own narrative.
Slide 1: Intro (or Meet [Product], or lead with a catchy take on your Hemingway story).
Slide 2: Macro trends — context setting (either the wave, change, shift, or new reality for story 1 pitches or specific pains you’ve pinpointed for story 2 pitches).
Slide 3: The need — connecting how this problem or insight relates to the prospect, creating tension.
Slide 4: The challenge — why and how they in particular struggle with this tension, describing and agitating their pain (which should have them nodding along).
Slide 5: The status quo — alternative solutions people typically try but are flawed because they’re too hot/too cold.
Slide 6: The opportunity — a tease of a new way where the prospect is winning and/or the pain is solved.
Slide 7: The product — the big reveal of the hand-in-glove obvious solution to the problem you’ve outlined.
Slide 8: The product pillars — join the dots for the prospect, connecting core features to value.
Slide 9: The impact — what it means for the user, managers, and company, resolving the tension of the problems you set up earlier.
Slide 10: The result or outcome — the new integrated whole with your product.
Slides >10: Product, proof, and next steps — always suggest next steps.
That’s the outline! A few things to note here:
Sales discussions are dialogues, not monologues: Sales 101, but while I describe this as a narrative, in practice, there would be several jumping-off points where you would engage with the prospect on their specific issues.
Discovery comes first: This is Sales 101 as well, but in any sales process, there will be some upfront discovery so you can weave the narrative into the prospect’s situation. The 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!), 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.
Your narrative must match your marketing: Your current narrative — especially as the founder tells it — might already roughly fit this approach, but it may not be reflected in the rest of your GTM messaging. If so, consider rolling out a clarity strategy along with a refreshed narrative.
This outline is also just a starting point, not The Definitive Sales Outline For Any Situation™, so consider how you might tailor it to fit. SMB pitches might be “We’re X for Y” and then get straight into the product; enterprise pitches might be the start of what looks suspiciously like a consulting engagement as you iron out all the details.
Simplicity in complexity
There are a lot of moving parts in sales, especially at the enterprise end, and I’m not suggesting that your sales narrative is a panacea for all the challenges sales teams face.
But as deal complexity grows, simplicity in your core value proposition and sales narrative only becomes more important. It’s that value that’s going to pull people together in the first place, and it’s the narrative that’s going to pull the deal through all the obstacles that will inevitably appear so that it actually gets done.
And the way to help simplify complex topics is to name things.
Naming insight
One last tip for your narrative and broader messaging: name things.
There’s another reason why it’s not just the quality of your thinking but the clarity of your ideas that’s so important in B2B sales. Sure, the prospect has to understand it — clarity obviously helps there. But chances are, the prospect has to go and explain it to other people too.
Most B2B sales are, especially at the enterprise end, managed by increasingly large buying committees. There’s usually a champion on the buyer’s side driving the deal, and you need to equip them with the insight they can take to their team and drive consensus so that a deal can happen at all.
As we’ve learned from sales classics like The Challenger Customer, high-quality deals happen not when the deal is tailored individually to every stakeholder, but when the stakeholders can reach consensus on a common goal and approach, usually driven by your unique insight delivered by your champion on the buying side.
This means they need a simple vocabulary to discuss their situation and their options. And, if you are indeed an expert on their problem, who better to give them that than you?
This is why clarity is so important, especially when it comes to naming things. Name your playbook. Name the problem. Name the challenge. Name the competing approaches and how to make sense of them. Map the market for your buyer, and leave them with that simple micro-pitch that describes the transformation — the from/to — that you can deliver.
This is great for your narrative internally, too. Being able to tell your story in a catchy, insightful way is vital for leadership so that your team gets it and runs with it, and future hires and investors see the value and want in.
In a small way, that’s what I’ve tried to do with science-based positioning.
I’ve tried to:
Make sense of competing options (waves and niches).
Add fresh insight (split-brain attention, story 1/story 2).
Name the verbs, i.e., what folks should actually do (prove it, find it, own it, ride it).
Boil it down to a simple 1-2-3-4 framework.
And give it a name: science-based positioning.
And to get a little meta, I’m spelling out this process explicitly for you, dear reader, so you associate me with this approach. You can tell me whether I’ve succeeded or not, but either way, unique insight with some well-chosen names is what drives great communication because it’s both interesting and easy to understand. It’s not easy to do, however — it took me a lot of time to land here, despite it literally being my job — but if you keep shooting for clarity, sooner or later you’ll get there.