Use a Problem-Solution Narrative Structure

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

While there are a variety of ways to construct your customer-facing narrative, for early-stage, new-technology sales organizations, I’m a fan of the problem-solution-specifics narrative framing.

Identify the problem, who has it, how it is currently solved (or not), and why that’s unsatisfactory. Follow on with what has changed to make this problem solvable in a new way, what that means for the problem in question, how your new solution works to solve this problem, and what the quantitative and qualitative proof points are that validate this line of argumentation. Those will be the core components of a sales narrative, along with potential additions, like competitive messaging (why is your proposed approach better than other proposed approaches?) and all manner of embellishments (like digging into the specifics and features of your solution).

If this sounds like a fundraising pitch, you shouldn’t be surprised. A funding pitch typically has all of the same trappings, plus macroeconomic rollups of certain parts. For example, “How many people have the proposed problem and what are they willing to pay to solve it?” would be a market-sizing exercise, which isn’t relevant to a customer-facing sales pitch but requires the same precursory information.

Framing your narrative in this way will also be helpful as you develop your marketing collateral, in that each part builds on the part before. Think of it as an inductive approach: If someone disagrees with your framing of the problem, great, it’s the first thing you’ve discussed—you can focus on that (or end the interaction) rather than rehearsing other parts of your pitch that are not relevant. Or if the person you’re talking to agrees that this problem exists, but not that he has it, again, great—you can save time by not pitching someone who doesn’t care. Narrative framing nicely complements the efficiency mindset that should pervade sales, as covered previously in the chapter on sales mindset changes.