What's Your Narrative?

There’s an old fable about a prince who decided to walk the streets of his kingdom and meet his people. Along the way he passed a construction site and stopped to ask a laborer, “What are you doing?”

“I’m laying bricks,” the man said.

The prince considered this and walked on. He came to a second worker and asked the same question. The man wiped the sweat from his brow and looked up. “I’m building a wall.”

The prince studied the work for a moment and moved on. Farther along he found a third man, humming to himself, smiling as he stacked his bricks. “And what are you doing?” the prince asked.

The man answered without breaking his rhythm, and there was something like joy in it. “I’m building a house where the people will meet with God.”

The prince stepped back to take in the work, and only then did he see it: the rising spires of what would become a cathedral, reaching toward the sky.

Three men. Same bricks. Same wall. Three completely different stories.

Everything you do is a story you’re telling. You tell it to yourself, to the people who report to you, to your boss, to your buyer. You’re always telling a story, whether you mean to or not.

A story is a narrative: a protagonist, an obstacle, a few turns in the road, and a resolution. You can be intentional about the one you’re telling or you can be oblivious to it, but it exists either way. And people read it whether they want to or not. Your story crosses into theirs the moment you show up, the way a character walks into someone else’s movie. Even a brief appearance leaves a mark.

So in sales, what are the stories you’re telling?

Do you tell the kind of story that has people dreaming about their own lives differently? Does it say, My time is valuable. Your time is valuable. What I’m holding is worth your attention?

Or does your story read more like the folded instructions that came in the box with the IKEA shelf, the ones nobody needed and everybody threw away? Does it quietly tell the buyer, I don’t think I have much to offer beyond this product, and I’m not sure the product is anything special either?

Is your story “I sell shelves”?

Or is it “I organize a room”?

Or is it “I help you clear out the clutter so you can get back to the life you’d rather be living”?

Same shelf. Different cathedral.

The story you tell your buyer

Every story needs a character who wants something and has to make real decisions to get it. The resolution is the moment the obstacle finally gives way. In your story, the buyer is both the character and the audience. They’re living the plot and watching it at the same time. You’re the narrator helping them tell their own story, and you’re also a supporting character who nudges the plot forward. Everything you know how to do in sales is a tool for telling that story well.

Take negotiation. Underneath the tactics, negotiation is the story that both of you are valuable. It says the buyer’s problem is real and worth solving, that your solution is worth having, and that in the end you’ll arrive somewhere fair.

Think about what you’re really doing when you decide whether to see a movie. You’re negotiating. How much of your money will you part with? Will you bring your family? Will you tell your friends to spend their money once you’ve spent yours? That negotiation starts long before the theater, in the trailer, the buzz, the echo of everyone who saw it first. But it doesn’t stop when the lights go down. The moment a movie starts wasting your time, the moment it asks you to give up more than it’s giving back, you check out. At best you don’t recommend it. At worst you walk out and write the review that keeps others away. Your first outreach is the trailer. It has one job: to earn the two hours.

Then there’s discovery, which is really the art of the question. Questions are the fuel that moves a story forward. Think about a good mystery. Something happens. The investigator arrives and starts asking questions on the audience’s behalf, and for a long while the answers don’t come; they only breed more questions. Then, near the end, the answers arrive fast, and the whole thing lands. Here’s the part worth sitting with: the writer knew the ending the entire time. Every question was chosen. Ask them too fast and it’s boring. Ask the wrong ones and you leave loose threads that make the audience feel cheated. Ask questions that don’t add up to the ending and the whole story collapses. Good discovery is the same discipline. Open, two-sided questions that actually lead somewhere. A sense of pacing, so the answers arrive when they’ll mean the most. And enough of the right questions that by the end you’ve uncovered the real characters and the real stakes. Skip that and you’re not telling a story. You’re writing an instruction manual.

Presentation is how the story gets told. You can have a story that would stop a room cold, but if it isn’t told in a way that room can follow, it doesn’t matter. It has to be in their language. It needs a flow they can ride, and a few familiar footholds so they always know where they are. It should spare their brains the hard problem-solving while still catching their imagination, because imagination is play, and play is where people lean in. Done well, presentation is the difference between handing someone a math worksheet and pulling them into a novel as one of its characters.

A whiteboard sketch is the version you can tell anywhere, no laptop required. A deck lets you slow down and walk through a single scene in detail. A demo is the training montage, Rocky on the steps before the fight he isn’t supposed to win, letting the buyer glimpse the version of themselves who comes out on top. A good email is one of the small connecting scenes between the big ones, the beat that tells you a little more about the hero, or gives you one more reason to root against the villain. And when a deal stretches across weeks, the shared space where the buyer catches up on where you left off is the “previously, on…” at the top of the episode. It keeps the returning viewer oriented and lets a newcomer join midway without feeling lost.

The story you tell yourself

Then there’s the harder story. The one you tell yourself.

In this one you’re not the narrator. You’re the producer, the director, and the writer all at once, and you’re running a whole crew: the people who build the sets, the ones who light the scene, the ones who keep everyone fed. You pull it all together to make something. And not one story a year. Many stories, for many different audiences, all at the same time.

So do you know which of them will actually matter? Which will keep the lights on in your little studio? Are you pouring months into a production that will cost you everything and return almost nothing? Do you have enough stories in the works to survive if one falls through? Do you know which of them is ready for a sequel, and whether the audience that loved the first one is even in the same place anymore?

Do you know where your own storytelling needs to get better? Where your direction is soft? Where the crew needs you to step in?

Or are you just winging it and hoping it works out?

This is what planning is for. Mapping your territory is the wide shot: every audience you could reach, every resource you can call on, how you’ll get the work in front of people. It also drops you into the frame as the protagonist. What will you have to overcome to reach the climax you’re after? How do you set up a sequel that’s bigger than the first?

Managing your pipeline is the accounting side of the business, the unglamorous math that tells you whether the lights stay on or the crowd drifts to a louder theater down the street. And planning an account is how you build a franchise instead of a one-off: the John Wick story, the one with a second and third and fourth chapter already living inside it. Miss that planning when you’ve stumbled onto something with real franchise potential, and you can kill the sequel before it’s funded, the way an overreaching adaptation can bury a beloved series in a single disappointing film.

You also have more help than you think. There’s the craft itself, the scripts, the sets already built, the training that sharpens the stories you tell. There are tools that will play your own calls back to you and show you which scenes you nail and which ones fall flat, where you missed a clue about your audience, where the plot needs to turn to reach a satisfying end. Use them.

The product is a prop

Which leaves the product. All that product knowledge, all that training on the thing you actually sell.

Here’s the truth: your product is a prop.

Compelling stories are about people overcoming problems and learning something on the way. Products aren’t the story. They’re the props. They might be critical props, but they’re props all the same. Think about the A-Team. Every episode they welded together some ridiculous contraption to catch the bad guy. The contraption wasn’t the story. The story was that these people had the wit and the nerve to build a way out. MacGyver was the same. He’d rig a smoke bomb from a toothpick and an old potato to get the drop on someone, and then he’d leap on the guy at the end of every single episode. Go back and watch. Every time. Nobody remembers how the smoke bomb worked. It was fun to wonder whether it really would, but that was never the point. The point was that he caught the bad guy. The same story, over and over, and we watched it over and over.

But here’s the one thing the prop has to do: it has to be believable. For as long as we were watching, we had to buy that the contraption would work, that it really would help the hero win. The moment we stopped believing the prop, we stopped believing the story.

So bring the props. Know them cold. Just don’t mistake them for the tale you’re telling.

Because in the end, the buyer isn’t buying the shelf.

They’re building the cathedral.