Offerings · Strategy · Strategic Narrative Development
Your first customers did the translating. The next ones will not.
Your leadership team writes down the story you already tell in the room: about three pages, in your words, that somebody else can tell.
The longer version of thatClose
One short account of why you exist, how you deliver and why anyone should believe you, written for buyers who need the problem framed before they will look at a product. Days rather than weeks, in a small room, with the people who own the point of view.
FOUNDER
Every month the light bulb stays off is burn against a finite runway.
- You own
- The product's survival.
- It rides on
- Buyers seeing their problem in it.
What it is
Strategic Narrative Development · What it is
Who your story was built on, and who is left
Read it left to right. The first two panels are a fact about your market. The third is a fact about you.
Innovators and early adopters
They did the translating
You showed them a capability and they did the rest in their own heads: what it would replace, what it would be worth, what it would cost to put in. They already had your vision. That is why your first customers loved you, and why your pitch was never asked to do that job.
The early majority
They will not, and never will
They need the problem framed, the solution framed, and the risk taken off the table before they move. There are far more of them than there are of the first group, and they are the market you have left.
The story you are holding
Was learned from the first group
It works on the people who were going to buy anyway, which is what makes it so hard to see. The demo goes well, because it is genuinely interesting. Then nothing happens, and the meeting gets logged as a good one.
Why this oneClose
The first two panels describe your market and neither is anybody's fault. This one describes your company, and it is why the page exists: a story built by watching people who self-translate has never been asked to do the job you now need it to do.
This work is for the moment before scale. The offering is ready, a handful of customers love it, and the story has never had to carry a buyer who does not already share your assumptions. Every month it stays unbuilt is burn against a finite clock.
The fix is an inversion. The problem comes first. The solution, and what it takes to put it in without getting hurt, comes second. The product comes third. Almost every pitch at this stage runs in exactly the opposite order.
The rest of what it isClose
Adoption readiness is rarely written into an ICP and it is the dimension that decides whether the pitch lands. It is also close to impossible to operationalize as a psychographic: nobody can look across a table and reliably place a person in an adopter category, which is why the model gets taught, admired and left in the deck it arrived in. So the useful version is a behavior rather than a taxonomy. Watch what a buyer does with your product in front of them and you know which of the two you are talking to.
Strategic Narrative Development · What it is
What you are actually building
Read it from the bottom. At scale these three carriers have three owners and the work is keeping them consistent. Before scale they have one owner and none of them is written down yet.
OWNER: PRODUCT
Product and services
Product interactions defend the message.
OWNER: FIELD
Conversational messaging
Personalized, two-way conversations.
This offer
OWNER: MARKETING
Marketing content
Emotion-evoking, one-way conversations.
This offer
THE CONVERSATIONAL METHODOLOGY
The structure that turns the foundation into compelling, consistent conversations
One Message Foundation
OWNER: THE CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM
Your strategy only exists where a buyer meets it. Until somebody says it out loud to a person who can say no it is a document, and it reaches that person through exactly three routes: the product you build, the one-way conversations your marketing runs, and the two-way conversations your people have. Underneath all three sits one thing, which is what your strategy sounds like out loud.
At scale those three routes have three owners, and the expensive problem is that the versions drift until the board is being told something the market has never heard. Before scale they have one owner, which is you, and the expensive problem is the opposite one: none of them has been written down, so each gets improvised fresh in whichever room it is needed in.
So this work builds the foundation first and then both conversations out of it. The one-way version a stranger meets on your site, and the two-way version a person can run in a room, written together rather than authored separately and reconciled later. That is the difference between this and the workshop next door, and it is the whole difference.
- Once you have a field, several segments and enough people that the same story has to survive being told by all of them, the two-way half becomes a workshop of its own, with your leadership team and the reps your field already trusts in the room for two to three days. Conversational Messaging →
STRATEGIC NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT · WHAT IT IS
The instrument
The strategic narrative
About three pages in a finished guide, one of them a customer story
- Why you exist
- A point of view about your market that your leadership team actually agrees on.
- How you deliver
- An account a stranger can follow the first time, in your voice rather than mine, short enough to say out loud.
- Why anyone should believe you
- The customer stories that defend the position when somebody pushes back, written beside it rather than hunted for afterwards.
- When it is said
- Once the buyer has described their own problem and agreed which capabilities will fix it. Delivered before that, a point of view is a pitch nobody asked for. Delivered after, the same paragraph reads as confirmation that you were listening.
Why this oneClose
The three rows above are what the narrative contains. This one is not a part of it, it is when it fires, and it is set apart so nobody reads it as a fourth section to write.
What you end up holding is short: why you exist, how you deliver, and why anyone should believe you, in about three pages, one of which is a customer story defending it.
It is short because it is the pitch, and the pitch comes last. Nearly everything ahead of it in a conversation is a question. This is the part written as a statement, and it is the only part of the conversation where you get to talk.
It is in your voice rather than mine, and it is owned by the people whose point of view it is. Your product leader is one of them: the how you deliver half is a claim about what you have actually built, and a narrative your product leader did not help write is one they will correct in their own meetings without telling anybody.
Two directions, and only one of them is this
There are two directions in a customer conversation and they are not the same piece of writing. Discovery is written in your customer's terminology and its output is questions. This is written in yours and its output is a claim.
The sequence is not a stylistic preference. Delivered before the buyer has said what they need, a point of view is a pitch nobody asked for. Delivered after they have named the capabilities that would get them where they want to be, the same paragraph reads as confirmation that you were listening.
Which is exactly what a buyer who will not translate for you needs, and exactly what they almost never get.
What it has to hold up to
STRATEGIC NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT · WHAT IT IS
What it has to hold up to
In a board meeting
It has to work here and on a first call with a stranger, without being rewritten in between. Most companies have a version for each, and the two drift.
In the mouth of the first person you hire
You are hiring your first seller and you cannot yet write down what they are supposed to say. Whatever they are handed is what your market hears from you from then on.
To a person who has never heard of you
Followed the first time, without a second run at it, a diagram, or you on the call to make it land.
On a buyer who will not do the translating
Said to somebody who needs the problem framed, the solution framed and the risk taken off the table, and who will fill in none of it for you.
Why this oneClose
This is the hardest of the four and it is the one the whole stage turns on. A narrative that survives a board meeting can still collapse in front of the first buyer who does not already share your assumptions, and those are the only buyers you have left.
Being said by someone who was not in the room when it was written. Being said to a person who has never heard of you. And being said to a buyer who needs the problem framed before they will look at a product, which means it cannot start at the product.
The shape that survives all of that is small: a handful of verbs, with everything you sell filed underneath them, so whoever is in the conversation can connect what the buyer just asked for to something you have.
- The long version of that question, and how to run it this afternoon on ten deals you have already closed. The Self-Translation Test →
Why it matters
What changes
A stranger hears it once and describes it back correctly.
What you say in a first meeting stops needing a second run at it, a diagram, or you on the call to make it land.
Buyers name the problem before you name the product.
The story starts where they are rather than where your roadmap is, which is the inversion this whole stage turns on.
Someone other than you can run the conversation.
It is written down and owned by the people whose point of view it is, so the first seller you hire is handed a story instead of being asked to invent one.
You find out quickly which buyers will never get it, and stop spending on them.
Cycles compress, so the same runway buys more shots.
The story is the same on the site, in the deck and in the room.
One foundation means a bad meeting can be diagnosed rather than argued about: it was the content or it was the wrong buyer, because there is only one thing to test.
The position holds when somebody pushes on it.
The customer stories that defend it are written beside it rather than hunted for afterwards, so pressure in a meeting meets evidence instead of conviction.
Who it is for
What I usually hear before this starts
- I have great discovery notes, but I don't know how to turn them into something customer-facing.
- I summarized my notes but not the “why now.” It was more like a transcript than a story.
- Everyone who gets it loves it, and getting them to get it is the problem.
- The people who bought fastest already knew they had the problem.
- I can have this conversation. I cannot explain to anyone else how I have it.
This is the problem this offer is bought against. The full page →
If you are the person having every one of those conversations today, there is a version of this work shaped around that. For Founders
How it runs
- The one thing I have to say first
- If the product does not solve a problem someone will pay to have solved, messaging cannot fix it and neither can I. Establishing which of those two you are looking at is the first job here, and sometimes it is the only honest deliverable.
- How it is bought
- On its own, and short. Days rather than weeks, in a small room. That is the usual shape at this stage. It is also bought inside the conversational messaging workshop, as a working session on the second morning with the same leadership team in the same building, and that is how it appears in my contracts with companies that already have a field to roll it out to. Before scale it does not need the workshop around it.
- Who is in the room
- Very few people, and at this size that often means three. This is your leadership team's point of view about your market, so the people who own that view have to be the ones writing it. Your product leader is one of them, because the how you deliver half is a claim about what you have actually built.
- What you supply
- Whatever you already believe, written down badly. Any customer discovery you have done. And two deals: the last one that closed fast, and the last one that went quiet after a good demo. What the first one already believed, and where exactly the second one stopped, is most of the diagnosis.
- What it is not
- A tagline, a brand campaign, or a message on a page. The why, what and how exercise, and the messaging house that comes out of it, are the step after this one. They belong to marketing, they are derived from this work rather than authored beside it, and plenty of companies at this stage do not need them yet.
Two reasons this works
One foundation, before there are three teams to reconcile
Your strategy and your message are one thing, and three carriers draw from them: the product, the one-way conversation, and the two-way one. At scale the expensive problem is that three teams own them and the versions drift. Before scale it is the opposite problem, and it is cheaper to fix: nobody has written any of them down, so there is nothing to reconcile yet.
Why that mattersClose
Building all three off one foundation now costs one short piece of writing. Building them one at a time as each is needed costs a website story, a deck story and a room story, plus the later meeting where somebody has to decide which of the three was right.
It is also the cheapest contradiction test available to you. Read it beside the home page of your website, and beside what you actually say in a first meeting. If the three do not agree you have found the place where the foundation was never really agreed, and you found it in an afternoon rather than in a lost deal.
It has to survive a board meeting and a cold first call unchanged
This is the one artifact that has to work in both rooms without being rewritten in between. Most companies end up with a version for each, and the two drift until the board is being told something the market has never heard.
Why that mattersClose
I have written the version an executive team debates, and I have sat on the call where somebody tried to use it. Those are different jobs with the same words, and the second is where you find out that a sentence the leadership team loved has a clause nobody can say aloud.
At your size that is not a convenience, it is the only way the language survives the trip from the whiteboard to a buyer. The same person sits with you on the positioning and then sits in the actual calls, so it gets corrected by real conversations in weeks rather than by a churned quarter. Risk: the story is tested live before it is printed anywhere. Cost: one person on both ends, with nothing lost in the handoff.
What it is like to work with me
“I had the privilege to work with Russell 3 times. After many years of selling and sales leadership where I have been trained at Solution Selling twice, Customer Centric Selling 3 times, Sandler once, Force Management 3 times, I can easily say that Russell is one of the best facilitators of sales training I have met. His ability to lead a room with 2, 3 or 400 people is absolutely incredible. Russell has this gift of feeling the energy of the people he interacts with and can instantly adapt his speech to them; Russell has an extremely strong psychology and can really lead and inspire others through a shared objective. Last point that really inspired me when I was working with him is that Russell enjoyed so much what he does that it is contagious with everyone and make them enjoying learning.”
“Russell, I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate your efforts this week! I’ve been through many sales trainings and this was the best I’ve ever attended, much due to you. My team is pumped!”
“Russell, I teared up at the end of your session b/c you reminded me of why I loved sales strategy so much. Thank you for your warmth, the kindness you exuded, and the passion you shared.”
“I was not exaggerating when I told you, and several others, that I have been in many training classes over the years, and this will absolutely stand out as the best one, bar none.”
“Russell’s ability to break down complex concepts into simple, actionable strategies made an immediate impact. Since then, I’ve brought him back multiple times. Russell has a unique talent for making sophisticated sales principles easy to understand and, more importantly, easy to apply in day-to-day selling. Russell immediately elevates any GTM teams efforts.”
Questions people ask
Is this the same as conversational messaging?
No, and the difference is which stage you are at. Conversational messaging is a workshop: twelve to sixteen people, cross functional and cross level, taking a point of view your leadership team already holds and making it survive being told by a whole field across several segments. It assumes there is a field.
This is the work of building the story in the first place, with the three or four people who own the point of view, before there is anybody to roll it out to. If you have a field, you probably want the workshop. If every deal still runs through you, you want this.
Is this the same as our positioning?
No, and the distinction is worth thirty seconds. Messaging is what you say. You control it. Positioning is the space you occupy in your target's mind. You do not control it. This work produces the first in order to influence the second. Anyone selling you the second one directly is selling you something they cannot deliver.
We are pre-revenue. Is it too early for this?
Sometimes, and I will tell you. The hard boundary is above: if the product does not solve a problem someone will pay to have solved, messaging cannot fix it. But if the buyers who understand it want it, and the problem is that too few of them get there, then this is exactly the moment.
Can't we just hire a salesperson?
You can, and it is usually the expensive version of this experiment. A salesperson who arrives before there is a story that works on a stranger has to invent one. The question I would ask first is who on your team could run the whole conversation today, start to finish. If the answer is nobody, a hire does not fix that. It adds a second person who also cannot, and now you are paying for the discovery twice.
We are a small team and we cannot afford a consultant. What does this look like commercially?
This is typically a few days of narrative work rather than a program. On the commercial side I am flexible with companies at this stage and prepared to be: mixed fees that combine fixed, performance or variable elements, and equity where the mission and the people are right.
Do we get the why, what and how out of this?
Not from this. That is the step after, it is optional in my scope, and it belongs to marketing once it starts. What matters is the order: it is derived from this work rather than written independently of it, which is the part most brand exercises get backwards.
This is the Align part of the work and the smallest piece of it, and before scale it is usually the first piece: the story itself, agreed by the people who own it, built for the buyers who will not build it for you. Your goal rather than my service line.
Run it on your last ten deals and tell me who did the translating.
If the answer is your buyers, you have something rare and you do not need me yet. If the answer is you, one conversation at a time, that is a solvable problem and it is most of what this work is for.
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