# Strategic Narrative (Old Game / New Game)

> Narrative structure by Andy Raskin: the strongest sales story is not a product pitch but a market shift, with winners and losers, a desirable end state (the "promised land"), and product capabilities as the tools to get there.

- Canonical URL: https://www.convios.com/en/methods/strategic-narrative
- Language version: https://www.convios.com/de/methodik/strategic-narrative
- Status: Externally proven
- Method library: https://www.convios.com/en/methods — Markdown: https://www.convios.com/en/methods.md

## Problem

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

1. Name a big, relevant change in the world, not your product.
2. Show the winners and losers of that change: the threat of losing creates the urgency.
3. Describe the promised land, the customer's desirable end state, explicitly not a feature.
4. Introduce your capabilities as "magic gifts", the tools that make the journey possible.
5. Close with evidence that the journey to the promised land actually succeeds.

## Example

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

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.

## Metric

Watch whether prospects and multipliers pick up and retell your shift thesis and whether losses to "no decision" decline.

## Sources

- Beyond Forecasting: Creating New Strategic Narratives — MIT Sloan Management Review (Sarah Kaplan, Wanda Orlikowski), 2014 · academic and scholarly literature · supports the underlying mechanism. Draws on an ethnographic case study inside a technology company to show that, in uncertain markets, leaders arrive at a shared reading of the future through strategic narratives rather than forecasts. The finding concerns internal strategy work in a single organization and is one case, not general evidence for how sales narratives work on customers. (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/beyond-forecasting-creating-new-strategic-narratives/)
- The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen — Andy Raskin (Medium, The Mission), 2016 · practitioner source · describes the method. Carries the five building blocks of the narrative structure, namely market shift, winners and losers, a target state worth reaching, capabilities as tools, and evidence. (https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-ever-seen-4f4ef3391ba0)
- Primary source: Beyond Forecasting: Creating New Strategic Narratives (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/beyond-forecasting-creating-new-strategic-narratives/)

## Related

- Method: [Insight-Led Sales Pitch](https://www.convios.com/en/methods/insight-led-sales-pitch)
- Method: [5-Component Positioning](https://www.convios.com/en/methods/5-component-positioning)
- Method: [Four Forces of Progress (Jobs to be Done)](https://www.convios.com/en/methods/four-forces-of-progress)