What The First Twelve Narrative Assessments Taught Me About B2B Storytelling

From pre-funding teams to public companies, the patterns are the same.

After completing the first twelve narrative assessments, here are the five truths I keep seeing … and how to use them to build a narrative that actually moves revenue.

1) Your Origin Story Is Your Competitive Moat

The strongest differentiation isn’t a feature list. It’s the specific struggle that forced you to invent a better way. Competitors can clone products quickly; they can’t clone why you had to build yours.

What we find: teams bury the “oh-no” moments (near-failures, hard pivots, breakthrough realizations).

Do this: document three moments you’d tell a friend over coffee — the risk, the turn, the lesson — and make them the spine of your About page, sales deck, and founder videos.

2) Stop Being the Hero of Your Own Story

Most B2B content casts the company as Luke Skywalker. Your buyers don’t need Luke; they need Yoda.

What we find: pages filled with “we, we, we,” while customers are offstage.

Do this: rewrite one core asset using a guide frame:

• Hero: your customer

• Villain: the status quo risk they can’t ignore

• Gift: your method, not just your product

• Path: the smallest next step to progress

3) Raw Material Beats Polished Fiction

AI can accelerate; it can’t substitute for source material.

What we find: teams skip interviews and jump to manufactured copy that sounds like everyone else.

Do this: run 3–5 customer interviews before writing a word. Ask, “What changed after we started working together?” and “What almost made this fail?” Transcribe, highlight verbs, build your message map from the phrases customers actually use.

4) Measure More Than Vanity

Likes aren’t a strategy. Tie story to revenue through four levels:

• Awareness (remembered): aided/unaided recall, branded search, direct traffic lift

• Engagement (held attention): time on page, scroll depth, reply rate on outreach

• Conversion (moved revenue): demo requests per asset, pipeline sourced, win rate lift for deals exposed to narrative assets

• Advocacy (others tell it): testimonial volume, case-study reuse in sales, referrals

Do this: pick one metric per level, baseline it this month, and review it with sales every two weeks.

5) Small Teams Can Build Systems That Scale

You don’t need an army; you need an operating system.

What we find: “random acts of content” produced by 3–5 overstretched people.

Do this: install a light narrative OS:

• Pillars: 3 themes you’ll own for 12 months

• Story Arcs: repeatable outlines (Problem → Stakes → Shift → Proof → Path)

• Characters: founder, customer, practitioner—each with distinct POV

• Cadence: a simple waterfall (anchor post → sales enablement → social threads → email) that ships weekly without breaking the team

Start This Week (90 minutes)

1. Origin sprint (30 min): founders list the three “oh-no to aha” moments that founded the company.

2. Interview sprint (30 min): schedule 3 customer calls; lock in the questions; set a transcript template.

3. Measurement sprint (30 min): choose one metric per level; add to a shared dashboard with sales.

The Bottom Line

Most companies try to win with volume. More posts, more pages, more noise. The teams who grow faster install a narrative operating system: clear origin, customer-as-hero framing, real raw material, revenue-linked metrics, and a small-team cadence that compounds. It’s not about publishing more. It’s about knowing exactly what story you’re telling, why it matters to this audience, and how every asset advances that story toward measurable outcomes.

If you want a pragmatic, 12-month roadmap built for a 3–5 person team, Sightline’s Narrative Assessment maps your origin, reframes your story around your customer, and installs the operating system to scale it.

When You’re Ready: To replace “random acts of content” with a narrative that sells, let’s talk!

Is Attention To Detail Your Competitive Edge?

We are moving so fast we aren’t noticing the cracks forming under their feet.

Projects are launching half-baked. Content is flooding inboxes. On the surface, this all looks like momentum. Underneath, however, the cost of missed details starts compounding, having very real impacts via errors, rework, and reputational hits. What looks like “speed” today becomes tomorrow’s mess.

The problem isn’t that we’re not doing enough. It’s that we’re doing too much, too fast, with too little care.

The Psychology of “More, Faster”

Our brains aren’t wired for this volume.

• Cognitive load theory shows humans can only juggle a limited amount of new information before performance collapses (Sweller, 1988).

• Stanford research on multitasking found heavy multitaskers are actually worse at switching tasks and filtering distractions than people who focus (Stanford, 2009).

• University of California research on attention span shows the average person now pays attention to a single screen for only about 47 seconds, compared to ~2.5 minutes in earlier eras (University of California, 2024).

Pile on AI and automation, and the problem only accelerates. We start trusting machine outputs without scrutiny, diving further into a bias called automation bias (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997). That’s how small errors slip through and snowball into expensive failures and it dates all the way back before the turn of the century … what’s old is, sadly, new, again.

The New Scarcity: Quality

The irony of the AI era is this: as output explodes, quality collapses.

Which means the rarest thing in the market is no longer speed. It’s precision. It’s trust.

Consumers and businesses are already reflecting this shift:

• Edelman’s Trust Barometer reports people reward brands they believe are consistent and reliable over those that just move fast (Edelman Trust Barometer 2024).

• McKinsey’s 2024 survey found that while 75% of companies adopted AI since 2020, only 23% reported actual quality improvements, most cite inconsistency and rework (McKinsey, 2024)

• And while younger generations (Gen Z, Millennials) value flexibility and digital-first experiences, they are fierce judges of quality. A brand that feels careless or sloppy loses them instantly (Deloitte Global Gen Z & Millennial Survey 2024).

In other words: the market is drowning in “good enough.” What people will pay for, what they will return for, is what’s done exceptionally well.

Doing Less, Better

This isn’t a call to abandon progress. It’s a call to cut ruthlessly. Do fewer things, but with deeper attention.

Because in a world where AI can generate 10,000 words in a blink, the human edge won’t be speed—it will be the judgment to know what matters, and the craft to deliver it without compromise.

The companies, teams, and individuals who thrive won’t be the ones producing more. They’ll be the ones whose work people actually trust, remember, and return to.

So here’s the challenge: What could you strip away this week, so the work you do actually lasts?

My First Step

For me, it’s meetings. Specifically, meetings without a clear agenda and defined outcomes. They’re speed disguised as progress. By stripping them away, I’m freeing time and focus to do fewer things, but with the depth and quality that actually move the needle.

Why Your B2B Stories Need Rounded Edges

You know how rounded buttons just feel friendlier than sharp-cornered ones? How certain websites feel instantly trustworthy while others make you want to click away?

(Dive much deeper on rounded v. sharp design here: Journal of Consumer Research)

The same principle applies to B2B brand narratives. Stories have sharp edges are more likely to make buyers pull back. Stories that have rounded edges are more likely to make them lean in.

…and most of us are telling stories with way too many sharp edges.

Stories Have Edges Too

Think about the last sales deck you saw. Was it packed with "cutting-edge solutions" and "best-in-class platforms" and enough acronyms to fill a dictionary? Every one of those phrases is a sharp edge. They poke. They prod. They create distance.

It’s quite ironic. B2B loves to talk about "cutting-edge" when people instinctively prefer rounded edges.

Now, think about the time someone told you a story about Sarah who used to spend her Sundays catching up on work but doesn't anymore. Something different happened, right? You relaxed. You pictured Sarah, maybe you saw a bit of yourself in her story. No poking. No prodding. Just curiosity about what changed for Sarah.

That's the difference between sharp and rounded narratives. One makes your brain work. The other makes your brain care.

Sharp vs. Rounded: A Tale of Two Pitches

Here's what sharp looks like: "Our AI-powered solution delivers operational excellence through advanced automation capabilities."

Did you feel that? That's your brain working overtime to decode what this actually means for you. It's all edges and they are abstract, aggressive, and alienating.

Now here's rounded: "Remember when your team had to manually process every invoice? That's gone now."

You had a different feeling, right? It's a question, not an assault. It’s an invitation to see yourself in the story.

That’s the power of smooth edges. They draw you in rather than sharp ones, that push you away.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

You're not selling to spreadsheets. You're selling to humans who happen to use spreadsheets. And humans, whether they're CFOs or interns, are drawn to what feels safe, approachable, and familiar.

When you round your narrative edges, something measurable happens.

• People actually finish reading

• They move through your sales process faster

• They share your story with colleagues because stories travel while specifications are archived in your inbox

The companies winning complex B2B sales aren't the ones with the sharpest edges. They're the ones who figured out that "cutting-edge" is exactly the wrong metaphor when you want someone to come closer.

The Rounded Revolution

So how do you know if your narratives have too many sharp edges?

Here's a simple test: Would your customer say it that way? If not, you've found a sharp edge.

"We're leveraging synergies" is sharp. "We're working better together" is rounded.

"Best-in-class solution" is sharp. "The thing that actually works" is rounded.

"Digital transformation initiative" is sharp. "Finally fixing that annoying manual process" is rounded.

The beautiful thing about rounded narratives is they're actually easier to create.

You don't need a thesaurus or an MBA. You need to listen to how your happiest customers describe what you did for them.

They never say "operational excellence." They say "I get home on time now."

The Question That Changes Everything

Every piece of content you create, every deck you design, every email you send has edges. The question isn't whether you're telling your story. The question is whether you're telling it in a way that invites people in or keeps them at arm's length.

The reality is sharp narratives feel like work. They require decoding, translating, and processing … and no one has time for more work.

They exhaust buyers before you even get to the value.

Rounded narratives feel like conversation. They flow naturally from problem to solution to transformation. They create connection instead of distance.

So, What?

Take a look at your latest sales narrative. Count the sharp edges. Get a notepad and put a tally down for each piece of jargon, each abstractions, each aggressive claims. Then ask yourself: Would Sarah tell it this way?

In the end, nobody wants to grab onto something with sharp edges. Not buttons, not brands, and definitely not B2B solutions.

Companies that understand this aren't trying to be cutting-edge anymore.

They're too busy closing deals with their well defined rounded stories.