POSITIONING AND GO-TO-MARKET NARRATIVE
Make your value unmistakable.
Inspire Your Buyers® is a positioning and go-to-market narrative consultancy. We help revenue leaders launching something new find, communicate, and quantify their differentiated value, so product, marketing, sales, success, and your AI tools all tell one story a buyer can repeat.
Only 4% of companies surveyed believe they have a clear, consistently understood value proposition (Bain & Company, 2026). When value isn’t clear, marketing says one thing, sales says another, and AI repeats all of it at machine speed. We call it Value Dissonance™.
Seventeen questions. Five minutes. No email required.
PROBLEM
Value Dissonance™.
The clash a buyer feels when everyone representing you tells a different story about your value. It costs you stalled deals, slow ramp, and an AI layer that repeats the confusion on every surface.
A few years back, we worked with Workfront, shortly before Adobe acquired it. We asked ten leaders what made the company worth choosing and got ten different answers. Good company. Great product. Ten stories.
That confusion makes buyers hesitate, pushes the conversation toward price, and gives them another reason to do nothing.
It shows up again at the deal level. When sellers can't put your value in a buyer's own numbers, the champion has nothing to defend in the meetings you're not invited to.
Most teams misread it
The pain shows up in the words, so leadership goes and buys better words. A new agency, a fresh messaging framework, a writer with a good portfolio. Six weeks later the deck is sharper and the deals sit exactly where they were.
Nearly half of companies, 49%, say their biggest value proposition problem is core product or service differentiation, which Bain calls an existential issue rather than a communications one (Bain & Company, 2026). You don’t have a messaging problem. You have a positioning problem.
OUTCOME
Unmistakable impact.
Picture every conversation, human or digital, sending the same clear signal about why a buyer should choose you. Marketing’s page, the seller’s first call, the AI agent answering at midnight, all saying one thing. Your champion carries that clarity into rooms you’ll never enter. And every buyer gets a business case they helped shape.
Companies with a clear, consistently understood value proposition reported 19% revenue growth in 2025, compared with 12% for companies with limited or inconsistently communicated value propositions. That’s about 1.6 times as fast (Bain & Company, 2026).
When you need this most
It matters at a moment, not at a size. A new offering. A new company. A new market. A new partnership. Each one is a launch, and you can’t afford to go to market twice.
PATH
Find it. Communicate it. Quantify it.
Find. We help you find the value your buyers can’t get anywhere else: what you’re worth to a specific buyer, and why you beat their current situation and every competitive alternative.
Communicate. Then we build one narrative around it that your whole revenue team tells the same way. Four beats: Problem, Outcome, Path, Steps. We call it POPS. Not a script, a skeleton, so marketing, sales, and success can improvise in front of real buyers and stay on message. Because it’s written down once, in the buyer’s words, it also becomes the instruction set your AI tools and agents work from.
Quantify. A narrative moves the buyer. A number gets it approved. With our partner ValueNavigator, sellers get a prospect-specific first draft of the business case in minutes, then refine and validate it with the buyer.
We usually develop positioning and narrative together. Business cases can come with them, later, or first.
Does it work?
A STARTUP
CoreConnex, a Seattle software startup later acquired by ConnectWise, tested its new narrative with real buyers on a Tuesday. One of them had heard the old version weeks before and passed. He went to his CEO the next morning and signed. Same product, same buyer, only the story changed.
AN ENTERPRISE
Tableau was scaling fast and the story wasn't. Five senior leaders, the CPO and CMO among them, built the narrative in one design workshop. It became the company's onboarding, outlasted the people who wrote it, and the CEO came back for the tune-up.
A NONPROFIT
Vashon HouseHold, a nonprofit that builds affordable homes on Vashon Island, asks neighbors to fund them with the same four beats. This isn't sales technique. It's how humans move humans.
“Our efforts together resulted in over a 50% deal connect rate and us winning the HP Circle Award for Marketing Excellence.”
Inspire Your Buyers®, the Amazon bestseller, 125 ratings and a five-star average.
Work delivered for HP, Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Oracle, Dell, Citibank, McKesson, Infosys, Unisys, Alcatel-Lucent, Tableau, and Fastly.
WORK WITH US
Four ways to work with Bruce.
WITH YOUR LEADERSHIP TEAM
Positioning and narrative engagement
For CEOs, founders, CROs, CMOs and product marketing leaders. We look outward at the market your buyers already live in, inward at what only you can do, and then get senior leaders with strong opinions to argue their way down to one answer they'll all defend. Then we turn it into one narrative your whole team tells. That middle part takes thirty years of standing with executives. It's the part most firms can't do.
WITH YOUR SELLERS
Business cases with ValueNavigator
Give ValueNavigator a target prospect and the solution you want to sell. In minutes it researches the prospect and drafts a customized value narrative, business case, and financial analysis, which your seller and buyer refine together. Add it to the engagement or start with it on its own.
Inspire Your Buyers is a strategic partner to, and investor in, ValueNavigator.
ON YOUR STAGE
Keynotes and workshops
A keynote that gives your event one sentence to run on, and breakout sessions where every attendee builds something before they leave. Winner of the 2025 NSA Northwest Speaker Showcase.
ON THE ROAD
The Enterprise Edge masterclass
A half day for revenue leaders and founders selling into large organizations. Twenty-five seats a city, by application, so the people beside you are your peers.
STEPS
What happens next.
- Take the free assessment. See where your story is drifting and what it's costing.
- Talk with Bruce Scheer, the author. Thirty minutes on your results. No obligation.
- Run the process with your leadership team. You leave with six finished deliverables, from a one-page positioning canvas to an AI practice partner your reps rehearse with. Add ValueNavigator so every seller can draft a business case for every buyer.
- Get aligned for impact. Product, marketing, sales, and success on the same four beats, and your managers and reps trained to deliver them.
Questions we get.
What is Inspire Your Buyers®?
A positioning and go-to-market narrative consultancy. We help you find, communicate, and quantify your differentiated value. Our core engagement develops your positioning and narrative together, so every conversation, human or digital, tells the same story. Business case enablement with our partner ValueNavigator is an optional addition, also available on its own.
Do I have to buy everything?
No. We recommend developing positioning and narrative together, because a narrative is only as strong as the position under it. When you already have a strong foundation in one, we can focus on the other. ValueNavigator works with either, or on its own; many teams start there.
What is ValueNavigator?
An AI-powered business case tool from our partner ValueNavigator. A seller enters a target prospect and the solution they want to sell, and it researches the prospect and drafts a customized value narrative, business case, and financial analysis in minutes. The seller and buyer then refine and validate it together, so the buyer can defend the number internally. Paired with your narrative spine, every draft tells the same differentiated story. Inspire Your Buyers is a strategic partner to, and investor in, ValueNavigator.
What is Value Dissonance™?
The clash a buyer feels when everyone representing a company tells a different story about its value.
Who is this for, and when?
Revenue leaders facing something new: a new offering, a new market, a new partnership, or a newly funded company. Those are the moments when the story you have stops matching the company you are becoming. It's a big bet either way, and you can't afford to go to market twice.
What is a go-to-market narrative?
The one story your whole revenue team tells about the value you create, built so anyone can tell it the same way. Ours runs on four beats: the Problem your buyer is in, the Outcome when it is solved, the Path through, and the Steps to get there. It is a skeleton rather than a script, which is why it survives contact with a real conversation, and why product, marketing, sales, and success stop sounding like three different companies.
What is the difference between positioning and messaging?
Positioning is what you are worth to a specific buyer and why you beat every alternative, including the one that wins most often: no decision. Buyers buried in contradictory information are 153% more likely to settle for something smaller and safer than they planned (Gartner). Messaging is how you say it. Most teams try to fix a positioning problem with better words, which is why the words keep changing and nothing improves.
How do you build a value proposition your whole revenue team can use?
It starts outside, not inside. The positioning framework runs on six ingredients, and the first two look out: the market problem, which is the verifiable customer need, known or unknown, you aim to address, and the alternatives, which is what customers do without you. Only then do we look in at your unique capabilities. The last three put it back in the buyer's terms: meaningful value in their own dollars, the target customers who feel it most, and the category you occupy in their mind. Five of the six are about them. That is why what comes out is differentiated instead of just internally satisfying.
How is this different from a messaging framework or a brand agency?
Two ways. First, we start upstream, at positioning: what you're worth to a specific buyer and why you beat the alternative. An agency starts at the words. Second, positioning is decided by senior leaders who each arrive with their own answer and a strong opinion about it. Getting them to one answer takes a facilitator with the experience and standing to hold that tension and work it through. Bruce has done that for thirty years, with executives at HP, Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, and Tableau. Nobody defends language they were handed. Everybody defends language they helped find.