Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise sellers were pitching 460 products and the market was confused. We named the problem "moving too slow," made the outcome the Dynamic Enterprise, and organized 460 products 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. It won CEB's B2B Marketing Campaign of the Year and held for close to a decade.
Understanding is the whole job.
The CEO hated it
Unisys's new narrative, People Computing, tested well with buyers and sellers. Then the CEO saw it and said so, loudly. Our champion called me, crushed. I asked three questions. Had he shown the CEO the buyer validation? The seller excitement? The analyst reaction? No, no, and no. He went back with the evidence and one line: this wasn't designed with you in mind, because you're not the buyer. The CEO fell in love with it and used it to position the whole company.
“Bruce and his team seriously delivered the goods with our new message strategy and story. Their work was instrumental in helping us launch and grow new service lines across multiple verticals.”
Laura Osburnsen, VP Marketing, Unisys
Testing is how a narrative survives the most senior skeptic in the building.
THE PROBLEM: A BIG NEW BET
One conference to make an impression
McKesson was launching a managed services bet with a new leadership team and a fixed deadline: HIMSS. They launched with a message that landed with hospital CIOs, their target buyer.
“We had people both internally and externally to McKesson that really understood what we were trying to say, and it made so much sense.”
Paula Cobb, Marketing Leader
You can't afford to go to market twice. Especially when the market is in one building for three days.
The founder was reading the reviews
Infosys was standing up cloud services and needed the strategy, the playbook, and the visual narrative. Post-workshop reviews ran long, and I read it as drift. Years later I learned the founder had returned as CEO mid-project and was reviewing the work personally. Read the delay against the stakes.
THE PROBLEM: SCATTERED CONTENT AND CONVERSATIONS
Thirty-three people and one narrative
Tableau was scaling fast and the story wasn't. We ran a design workshop with thirty-three people in it, and the CPO, CMO, head of enterprise sales, commercial sales leader, and head of enablement all put their fingerprints on the narrative. It became the company's onboarding, then its ever-boarding. The CEO came to the rollout and came back for the tune-up.
Communications and Collaboration Made Easy
CSC (now DXC) had practice areas across several business units, each saying something different. We found the customer challenge that cut across all of them and landed one big idea: easy to use, easy to manage, easy to innovate. Sales got a bigger conversation than any single practice could hold.
“Our work together resulted in a simple, impactful ‘big idea’ that helped us align our sales and marketing efforts for greater impact.”
Lisa Giles, Business Partner Executive, Global Business Services, CSC
THE PROBLEM: A TOUGH INDUSTRY GORILLA
The CEO used the tool himself
Brocade was up against the eight-hundred-pound gorilla with a newer technology and needed sellers who could quantify the automation value. We built a value-selling tool reps actually adopted, including the number one seller in the building: the CEO.
“We had a compelling business value proposition, and Bruce and his team helped us communicate and quantify it with a first rate demand gen tool, sales enablement tool, and adoption support that aligned sales and marketing for go to market success. They did a fantastic job.”
Gautam Roy, Senior Manager, Product Management and Marketing, Brocade
A business case nobody can operate is not a business case.
THE PROBLEM: THE PRODUCT IS RIGHT AND THE STORY IS NOT
The deal that closed in a room I wasn't in
CoreConnex, a Seattle startup, had a good product and a story that wasn't landing. We tested the new narrative with real buyers on a Tuesday afternoon. One of them went to his CEO the next morning and signed. He'd heard the old version weeks before and passed. Same product, same buyer, two conversations. The company was later acquired by ConnectWise.
ALIGNING 25 EXECUTIVES ON THEIR DIFFERENTIATED VALUE PROPOSITION
Could we just do this ourselves?
IXIA (later acquired by Keysight) had twenty-five senior GTM executives who couldn't agree on one story, and a CMO tired of paying for help. He sent his VP of Marketing to learn the method and bring it in-house. She watched twenty-five people converge on three differentiating attributes in one session and told him it couldn't be replicated without the room. The framework is in the book. The room is the work.
NOT FOR PROFIT WORK
Community Impact
Ambassadors of Compassion: one story, three audiences
Norm Schulz was telling donors one version of why AOC mattered, principals a second, and volunteer coaches a third, and only he could tell any of them. The program worked: a resiliency curriculum for at-risk students, more than 6,700 kids through it across eight states plus Canada and Australia. The story was the gap. Jim Karrh and I spent two days with his team building one narrative each of them could defend in their own words.
“Bruce gladly offered his services pro bono to a group called Ambassadors of Compassion... Together we created a go-to-market narrative for growth, including very practical steps such as data to present, questions to ask, and stories to share... Our team found a renewed energy and confidence because we now had a common conversation.”
Norm Schulz, Executive Director, Ambassadors of Compassion
Journeymen: a story a volunteer can draw on a napkin
Journeymen exists to raise wholehearted men. Easy to feel, hard to say in a five-minute donor conversation. We built them a narrative they could draw: the question every parent recognizes (what kind of men are we raising?), the maze boys are actually in, and the way through. Boys who complete the program report an 88% increase in self-confidence (Journeymen program data). The whole story fits on one page, meant to be sketched with the donor, not presented at them.
Vashon HouseHold: making an invisible crisis visible
Vashon Island is losing its teachers, first responders, and tradespeople to housing costs. Vashon HouseHold needed a story a volunteer could tell over coffee in ninety seconds without triggering guilt fatigue. We built it on APROPOS, starting with what someone loves about the island, then showing how it's disappearing, then what restores it: an island in balance, built on permanently affordable housing. VHH stewards 166 homes today and aims to double that by 2035.
This isn’t sales technique. It’s how humans move humans.
