Brilliant category narratives evangelize a new discipline for winning—while positioning the old one as obsolete. — In the 1990s, I ran the New York City Marathon three times. Each year, the night before the race, I would attend a carbo-load party at a popular running club. …

Because billions of dollars in valuation are at stake. — The weapons are words. The stakes? Billions of dollars in valuation. The combatants? Chorus.ai and Gong.io, two companies that have raised over $50M to build and dominate a category known as — well, that depends on how this plays out. Both companies were founded in 2015. Both promised to make…

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…

5 lessons from helping CEOs align their teams around a 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…

The greatest sales deck isn’t—until your sales team buys in. — 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…

Lessons in crafting—and rolling out—the company story from younger leaders — 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? …

I thought she was too touristy. I was an idiot. — We’d been dating for nearly a year. Everything was going great, when Emily said, “I have always wanted to ride in a gondola in Venice.” I winced. “What?” “It would be romantic,” she said. Some people refrain from touristy activities because they look down on them. In my case, it’s…

How to structure your story to resonate with different personas — 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…

Drift thrives by acting less like a software company and more like a reality TV show. Here’s how to follow their lead. — Embarrassing, but true: I know more about the daily lives, hopes and dreams of some employees at Drift—the Boston-based sales and marketing software company that’s raised over $107 million in VC cash—than those of some of my closest family members. Of course, I’ve barely spent time with anyone at Drift…