Strategic Narrative (Old Game / New Game)
When you need this method
You need to move a buying committee or a market away from a status-quo paradigm, for a vision, a pitch deck, or an article hook. A pure feature comparison creates no urgency: as long as the buyer sees no shift, doing nothing remains the most comfortable option.
Approach
- 1Name a big, relevant change in the world, not your product.
- 2Show the winners and losers of that change: the threat of losing creates the urgency.
- 3Describe the promised land, the customer's desirable end state, explicitly not a feature.
- 4Introduce your capabilities as "magic gifts", the tools that make the journey possible.
- 5Close with evidence that the journey to the promised land actually succeeds.
Typical application
A typical case: an established B2B software firm has been selling a modernization platform via feature lists and keeps losing deals to "maybe later". The team rebuilds the narrative: the starting point is a structural shift in its customers' market that makes the old way of working unprofitable. The story shows which companies win in that shift, describes the end state, and introduces the product late, as a tool. Decision-makers then debate their own future viability instead of license prices.
Limits and counter-indications
The narrative only holds if the shift is real and verifiable, a manufactured shift reads as manipulative and damages credibility. April Dunford counters that opening with your own insight is often stronger than opening with the general change. For transactional products with short buying cycles, the grand narrative is usually oversized.
How to measure impact
Watch whether prospects and multipliers pick up and retell your shift thesis and whether losses to "no decision" decline.
Related methods
Sources
- 1.Beyond Forecasting: Creating New Strategic Narratives (opens in a new tab) · MIT Sloan Management Review (Sarah Kaplan, Wanda Orlikowski) · 2014 · academic and scholarly literatureBelegt, dass Organisationen in unsicheren Märkten nicht über Prognosen, sondern über strategische Erzählungen zusammenfinden, die Vergangenheit und Gegenwart neu deuten und einen gemeinsamen Zielzustand entwerfen.
- 2.The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen (opens in a new tab) · Andy Raskin (Medium, The Mission) · 2016 · practitioner sourceTrägt die fünf Bausteine der Erzählstruktur, also Marktveränderung, Gewinner und Verlierer, erstrebenswerter Zielzustand, Fähigkeiten als Werkzeuge und Beleg.
Origin: Raskin
Last reviewed: 2026-07-25 by Dr. Oliver Gausmann