The 5-step framework for commercial storytelling

 

Sitting in both sides of the room, as an aspiring executive and as a VP, taught me the fastest way to lose an executive audience is to start by explaining the work.   “We’ve spent the last quarter redesigning the process…” “We interviewed 20 customers…” “We’ve been working with Product and Operations…” “We created a new framework…”   You are confident this information is useful, but the truth is none of it answers the question senior leaders are secretly asking: Why should I care?   At Director level, you often know more about your work than anyone else in the room. You understand the history, the complexity, the dependencies, the research, the effort it took to get here.   So when it’s time to present an idea, you naturally explain all of that. But executives don’t need a guided tour of your work. They need the business story.   What is happening? Why does it matter? What do you think it means? What should we do? What changes if we act?   That’s commercial storytelling in a nutshell. And no, I don’t mean turning your strategy presentation into a TED Talk.   I mean taking everything you know and translating it into a story about the business, not the work.   The same idea can sound tactical or strategic depending on how you frame it.   You can walk someone through six months of excellent work and get a polite: “Thanks for the update.”   Or you can take the exact same work, connect it to a meaningful business problem and show leaders what decision needs to be made. Suddenly, the room wants to talk.   The quality of the work didn’t change. The story did.   The Difference a Commercial Story Can Make I saw this firsthand while coaching a product marketer who needed to present her sales enablement strategy for the next quarter to the executive team.   Her first deck was thorough. Very thorough. It explained product marketing. It explained sales enablement. It included a lot of information, ideas, and possibilities.   There was just one problem: It wasn’t really about the business.   Sales enablement had become clunky. Sales wasn’t happy. And leadership wasn’t asking for a lesson on what Product Marketing could theoretically do.   They already knew there was a problem. They wanted to know what was wrong, what we were going to do about it, and what would change as a result.   So we rebuilt the story.   We started by acknowledging the problem: our current sales enablement wasn’t giving Sales what they needed, and that was making it harder for them to move deals forward quickly.   Then, instead of guessing at the cause, we surveyed the Sales team anonymously. That gave us real evidence about what was working, what wasn’t, and where the biggest gaps were.   From there, we recommended five priorities we could realistically deliver that quarter, plus three additional opportunities if time and resources allowed.   And we tied the plan back to the outcome that mattered: stronger adoption of marketing materials and better support for Sales to close more deals, faster.   Same function. Same quarter. Same strategist. Completely different presentation.   And the executive conversation went very well because we stopped explaining sales enablement and started telling the business story.

The 5-Part Commercial Story Framework Here’s the framework I want you to use the next time you need executive buy-in: Problem → Stakes → Insight → Recommendation → Outcome   1. Problem: What is happening in the business? Don’t start with your project. Start with the reason the project deserves to exist.   In our example, the weak version was essentially: “We need a new sales enablement strategy for next quarter.”   Technically true. Commercially weak. It describes the work, not the business problem.   The stronger version was: “Sales isn’t getting the support it needs from our current enablement approach, and that’s creating friction in how quickly and effectively they can move deals forward.”   Now I know why we’re having the conversation.   Before you prepare your next presentation, make sure you answer: What is happening in the business that makes this conversation necessary?   If your first answer is about what your team has been doing, you haven’t found it yet.   Side note: This part can be painful because you need to admit there is a problem and it likely happened on your watch. Do it anyway. It’s how you put the business above your pride and show executive maturity.   2. Stakes: Why does it matter? A problem becomes commercially important when you connect it to consequences.   Revenue. Growth. Customer retention. Cost. Speed. Risk. Productivity. Market position.   This is where many smart leaders stop too early.   “Sales isn’t happy with the materials.” “Our process is manual.” “Customers are confused.” “Employees are frustrated.”   These are all true, but senior leaders still need to know: So what?   For our sales enablement example, the real stakes were bigger than whether Sales liked the materials. If sellers couldn’t easily find or use what Marketing created, we were making it harder for them to move deals forward and close business efficiently.   You don’t always need a perfect dollar amount. But you do need to connect the issue to something the business values.   Use this question: If we do nothing, what does this cost, delay, threaten, or prevent?   That is where the commercial story starts getting weight.   3. Insight: What do you think is really going on? This is the piece that separates reporting from executive thinking. Anyone can surface information, but senior leaders add value by interpreting it.   What pattern do you see? What do you believe is causing the problem? What are people misdiagnosing? What does the evidence actually tell you?   In our case, we decided not to guess.   We sent an anonymous survey to the Sales team and asked what they actually needed, what was missing, what was working, and what wasn’t.   That mattered because an insight isn’t your opinion dressed up in executive language. It’s your interpretation of what the evidence means.   The survey helped us separate what was already working from the three gaps that actually mattered.   Now we weren’t presenting a wishlist. We had a point of view grounded in what the business needed.   Before you present, ask: What do I interpert that isn’t obvious from the data alone?   That answer is often where your executive value lives.   4. Recommendation: What should we do? If I had to put a number on it, I would say this is where a surprising amount of executive communication falls apart.   You do the first 3 steps well enough and then end with: “What does everyone think?”   Usually because you want to be collaborative and make sure you listen to other people’s opinions. And sometimes that is exactly the right question. But if you’ve been asked to lead the work, senior leaders usually expect you to have a point of view. So give them one.   In our case, we recommended five priorities we believed we could realistically deliver that quarter, plus three additional opportunities if time, headcount, and speed allowed.   That prioritization piece was important.   We weren’t showing leadership everything Product Marketing could do. We were telling them what we believed mattered most now, with the resources we had, and in line with what Sales needed most.   We named the tradeoff (what we won’t be able to deliver) and explained why we were choosing these initiatives over others. Strong recommendations don’t pretend there is no downside. They show that you’ve considered it.   Use this question: If the decision were mine, what would I do and why?   You can still invite discussion. But give people something worth reacting to first.   5. Outcome: What changes if we act? The last step is closing the loop. This is an underrated executive skill that I teach my executive clients and the entrepreneurs I work with.   Show them the promised land. If leadership says yes, what happens?   Not: “We’ll have a much better sales enablement program.”   That tells me what you’re building. It still doesn’t tell me why the business should care.   In our case, the goal was better adoption and use of marketing materials so Sales had stronger support to move more deals forward, faster. Where possible, we also estimated the expected business impact.   Your ending should answer: What business outcome becomes possible if we do this?   That is where an initiative becomes an investment and earns it’s place.   Explaining The Work vs. Telling a Business Story Most executive communication problems are not solved by using bigger words or swapping “sorry” with “thank you”. They are solved by changing your thinking, and using communication to translate your ideas into executive language.   Here’s a side by side example to make it easy to compare:   Explaining the work “We’ve spent the last quarter reviewing our sales enablement approach, gathering feedback, evaluating our existing materials, and identifying opportunities to improve how Product Marketing supports Sales.”   This is a great way to explain the work, but it is missing the commercial relevancy that makes it interesting for the leadership team. And it it is not showing your strategic thinking.   Telling the business story “Our current sales enablement approach is making it harder for Sales to quickly find and use the support they need to move deals forward. Feedback from the team showed three clear gaps in what we provide today. I recommend we focus on five priorities this quarter that address those gaps, with the goal of increasing adoption of our materials and helping Sales close more deals, faster. We’ll know this was a success by [desired result/metric]”.   Same work. Completely different conversation. That’s commercial storytelling.   The Skill Isn’t Just Storytelling. It’s Translation. This is why I think “communication skills” undersells what’s happening here. You don’t necessarily need prettier slides. You don’t need to become more charismatic. And you certainly don’t need to turn every presentation into a dramatic narrative arc.   You need to translate: Activity → Impact Information → Implication Functional problem → Business problem Idea → Decision   Your expertise lives in the details. Your executive value comes from knowing which details matter and what they mean for the business.

Your Next Steps The next time you have an important presentation, proposal, update, or email, give yourself ten minutes before you start building slides. Use this as your 10-Minute Commercial Storytelling Prep:   1. PROBLEM: Why are we having this conversation now? 2. STAKES: What does this cost, delay, threaten, or prevent? 3. INSIGHT: What does the evidence tell me that isn’t immediately obvious? 4. RECOMMENDATION: What specifically am I asking us to do, and what am I choosing not to do? 5. OUTCOME: What measurable business result should improve?   Then write your story based on these. Do not open the deck yet.   Because once you start inside PowerPoint, it is incredibly easy to fall back into chronology: Here’s what we did. Here’s what we learned. Here’s everything you might possibly need to know.   Build the business story first. Then use the work, data, and details to support it.   And before you walk into the room, run one final test: If I had only 60 seconds with the CEO, could I explain why this matters, what I believe, what I recommend, and what changes if we act?   If not, you probably haven’t found the story yet. Stop explaining the work. Tell the business story.