STRATEGIC POSITIONING & GO-TO-MARKET NARRATIVE SPECIALIST
Thirty years building go-to-market narratives for companies betting on something new. Author of Inspire Your Buyers®. Five industry awards. And one conviction underneath all of it: the story is the product before the product is.
I don't invent your strategy in a vacuum, and I don't just write down what you already believe. The work looks outward and inward. Outward is the market your buyers already live in, and what they do instead of buying from anyone, which is the alternative that wins most often. Inward is the language sitting in the heads of the people who built the thing and the people who sell it. Most organizations do the inward look and skip the outward one. My job is to work both, find the seam where they meet, give it words, and make it repeatable.
Six people who agreed on nothing an hour earlier, arguing their way down to eleven words they can all defend. That's why the work happens in a room with your leadership team in it, and why what comes out of that room survives after I've left.
A revenue leader under pressure does not have four quarters to wait for a positioning project to pay off. AI is the reason they no longer have to.
The outside-in research that used to take six weeks of interviews now starts with AI working the material your buyers already live in: the market context, the alternatives they compare you against, and the language your competitors have trained the market to expect. We reach a sharper first draft of the position in days, which means the room time goes to arguing about the hard part instead of assembling the easy part.
Then we pressure-test the narrative before it ever meets a real buyer. Synthetic buyer personas, built from your actual target segments, let us run the story past a CFO, a head of security, and a skeptical champion and watch where it falls apart. Cheaper than finding out in a live deal, and far cheaper than finding out in a lost one.
When it is time to quantify, AI helps your seller build a personalized business case with the buyer in the room rather than promising to send something over later.
One guardrail, and I hold it firmly. People for insight, people for alignment, people for execution. AI is a partner in this work and not a proxy for it. It cannot sit with six leaders who disagree and get them down to eleven words they will all defend. What it can do is get you there faster and prove the story holds before you bet a launch on it. And once your narrative is set, it becomes the instruction set your AI infrastructure inherits, so every agent you deploy starts saying the same true thing.
Thirty years enabling the largest revenue organizations on the planet: HP, Microsoft, Tableau, and Fastly, among others, watching how the biggest sales teams in the world win and lose deals, one narrative at a time. During the pandemic I was coached through Amazon's narrative process on a global sales productivity initiative at AWS. Amazon bans PowerPoint from senior meetings because bullet points hide incoherent thinking and prose exposes it. Ten leaders can nod at the same bullet deck while carrying ten different stories in their heads. A written narrative forces one into the open where it can be tested.
Earned on client engagements I worked on directly, across prior roles and companies.
CEB, now Gartner
Alcatel-Lucent Virtual Hotel
Sellers were pitching 460 products to a confused market. We organized them into four categories a seller could hold in one hand. After launch, 97% of surveyed buyers said they clearly understood the solutions and 86% understood the value.
Read the story →Hewlett-Packard
Microsoft + HP Frontline Partnership
An executive briefing program across eight joint solution areas. It aligned the value messaging, the joint business case, and the field activation of two global technology leaders, and it produced a deal connect rate above 50%.
ITSMA
SITA Sales Excellence
Sales enablement that gave field teams across airlines and airports worldwide a repeatable value selling system. Deal velocity and win rates improved with it.
SPRING Singapore
Citibank Asia Pacific Technology
As a senior consultant, I supported Citibank Asia Pacific Technology in earning Singapore's highest recognition for business excellence.
Puget Sound Business Journal
FutureSight Consulting, three consecutive years
FutureSight Consulting, which I founded and was later joined by Darrin Fleming and David Svigel, made the list three years running.
I don't chase awards. I chase outcomes. The recognition follows.
My father and my oldest brother were chiropractors. My mother spent her career straightening out schools and was recognized by President Reagan as one of the nation's top administrators. I grew up around people who fixed what was structurally wrong, then taught the people around them to keep it fixed. I joined the family business anyway. Mine works on organizations instead of literal spines.
So I call myself a corporate chiropractor. It gets a head tilt, which is the point, because people ask what it means instead of assuming they already know. What it means is that I don't start with your words. I start with what is out of alignment between your revenue team and the buyers they are trying to reach, and the words come after that. I joke that I have never worked a day in my life. In that time I have helped thousands of marketers and sellers go to market with a more compelling story.
My reason for doing this, in five words:
Inspire others to inspire others.
Messaging frameworks clarify what a company says. Brand agencies clarify how it looks. Sales training builds skill in the seller. This work sits upstream of all three.
Get it right, and the same narrative spine aligns every seller, every page, every partner, and every AI agent, including in the rooms you will never enter.
Inspire Your Buyers® is a positioning and go-to-market narrative consultancy. We help you find, communicate, and quantify your differentiated value. What we offer: Positioning and GTM Narrative Development, our core engagement, plus Business Case Enablement with our partner ValueNavigator, an optional addition also available on its own.
Inspire Your Buyers is a strategic partner to, and investor in, ValueNavigator. The platform is built by the team I have worked with for 25 years, starting with my college roommate and our first hire.
Copy problems get a canvas. Value Dissonance™ gets a spine.
Seventeen questions on how clearly your value carries. You get a score and the specific places your narrative is leaking.