STRATEGIC POSITIONING AND NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT
Only 4% of executives say their company has a value proposition everyone understands the same way.
Bain surveyed more than 1,100 B2B executives in 2026. The other 96% are running on value dissonance. Marketing says one thing, sales says the next, success says a third, and AI spins every version at light speed. And here is the part that stings: the faster you grow, the worse it gets.
Sixteen questions. About five minutes. No email required.
What is value dissonance?
Value dissonance is the clash a buyer experiences when the people and systems representing a company each tell a different story about the value it delivers.
It starts when value is never made clear at the source. That leaves every seller, every page, every partner, and every AI agent to improvise a version. Unclear value invites improvisation. Improvisation produces inconsistency. Inconsistency, heard all at once, is dissonance.
It does not sound like silence. It sounds like noise. Ask three people on your team why a buyer should choose you, right now, and play the answers back to back. Ten leaders, ten answers.
What does it cost?
Deals stall. The buying committee cannot assemble one case they can defend, so the decision gets deferred rather than lost.
Ramp stretches. New sellers have no story to ramp to, so they invent one, and every new hire adds another version.
Content goes unused. Marketing builds against one story while sales tells another.
AI repeats the confusion. Your agents, your chatbot, and the buyer's own assistant summarize whatever they find. At machine speed.
THE OUTCOME
Unmistakable impact.
One signal across every surface, digital and human, so buyers cannot confuse you with anyone else. In the market, in the room, and in the AI summary your buyer reads before you ever show up.
In a noisy category, the buyer's brain locks onto one coherent stream and tunes out the rest. Consistency is not branding polish. It is the admission ticket to attention.
Then something better happens. You get invited into the house, into the rooms you will never enter, carried by a champion retelling your story to a skeptic on a day you are not there. The only version of you in that room is the version they can repeat.
1.6x faster growth for companies with a clear, consistent value proposition. 19% against 12%. (Bain & Company, 2026 B2B Growth Agenda)
If there is no impact, we didn't do our job.
What is a narrative spine?
A narrative spine is one story your whole revenue team can repeat. Four beats. We call it POPS, and a narrative that POPS is one your buyers can carry without you.
Problem. The one worth solving, named in the buyer's words.
Outcome. What their world looks like when it is solved.
Path. How you get them there, and why you.
Steps. What happens next. Never leave a buyer at the ten-yard line.
It is not a script. It is a skeleton. Consistency of bone, flexibility of motion. Product, marketing, sales, and success all build on the same four beats, and every AI agent inherits them.
Does this actually work?
Same product. Same buyer. Only the story changed. At CoreConnects, a focus group heard the new narrative on a Tuesday afternoon. One participant walked into the CEO's office the next morning and signed. The deal closed on a story Bruce was not in the room to tell.
Thirty-three people, one narrative. At Tableau, the chief product officer, the CMO, the head of enterprise sales, the commercial sales leader, and the head of field enablement all put their fingerprints on the story in one design workshop. It became the company's onboarding, and then its ever-boarding. The CEO adopted it later, and came back for the mid-term tune-up.
No product. No sales team. An island. Vashon HouseHold is an affordable-housing nonprofit. Same four beats, and the interim CMO of OpenAI sat through the workshop. This is not sales technique. It is how humans move humans.
Inspire Your Buyers, the Amazon bestseller. 125 ratings, all five stars.
Work delivered for HP, Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, Oracle, Dell, Citibank, McKesson, Infosys, Unisys, Alcatel-Lucent, Tableau, and Fastly.
When do you need this most?
Not at a particular company size. At a particular moment. Value dissonance is born when something is new, because every leader is carrying a private version of what the new thing means, and launch hardens those versions into decks, hires, and comp plans.
A new offering. You are launching something the market has no category for yet.
A new company. Early is the cheapest time to fix this. It hardens as you hire.
A new market. The story that got you here was written for a different buyer.
A new partnership. A joint motion doubles the people telling your story, and half of them do not work for you.
You can't afford to go to market twice.
You just read a narrative spine. Problem, outcome, path, and now steps. That is the point. It works even when you know it is happening.
What happens next
1. Take the Narrative Assessment. Sixteen questions, about five minutes. You will see where your story is drifting and what it is costing.
2. Bring your leadership team to a workshop. One room, one spine, the right fingerprints on it.
3. Read the book on the flight there.
What is Inspire Your Buyers?
Inspire Your Buyers is a strategic go-to-market positioning and narrative development firm for scale-up organizations, founded by Bruce Scheer, author of the Amazon bestseller Inspire Your Buyers. The firm helps leadership teams build one narrative spine that their entire revenue team, human and AI, can carry.
What is value dissonance?
Value dissonance is the clash a buyer experiences when the people and systems representing a company each tell a different story about the value it delivers. It compounds as a company scales, because every new hire, channel, partner, and AI agent adds another version.
What does POPS stand for?
Problem, Outcome, Path, Steps. It is the four-beat structure of a narrative spine. The order matters: the buyer's outcome comes before your solution, so the destination is sold before the vehicle.
Who is Bruce Scheer?
Bruce Scheer is a go-to-market narrative strategist, keynote speaker, and author. He has built narratives for enterprise technology companies including Tableau, Fastly, HP, Microsoft, and Infosys, and was coached through Amazon's narrative process during a global sales productivity initiative at AWS.
Who is this for?
Scale-up organizations with high-consideration solutions, where the buying decision involves multiple stakeholders and a business case. Typically the CEO, founder, or CRO brings us in. The whole revenue team uses the result: product, marketing, sales, and success.
How is this different from a messaging framework or a brand agency?
Messaging frameworks clarify what a company says. Brand agencies clarify how it looks. We align whether everyone says the same thing: every seller, every page, every partner, and every AI agent, in a sale where the story has to survive rooms we are not in.
Does Bruce speak at events?
Yes. The keynote is Inspire Your Buyers, and it includes a live narrative diagnosis performed on the audience's own industry.