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. …

Video: Crafting a strategic narrative that powers B2B… —

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…

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…