A $2.6 billion business, 460 products, and no idea what to say
Problem: The business unit leader for Alcatel-Lucent’s $2.6 billion enterprise business needed a market message. The market was confused and so were the sellers. Communications focused on products and technologies, and reps were trying to sell 460 of them.
Outcome: After adopting the new narrative in the hospitality sector, a brand survey showed an 81% increase in brand perception. 97% of respondents said they clearly understood Alcatel-Lucent’s solutions. 86% said they clearly understood the value of those solutions. 59% said they were more likely to consider Alcatel-Lucent. More than 400 sales tool apps were installed by Alcatel-Lucent and partner reps, and the work won the Corporate Executive Board’s B2B Marketing Campaign of the Year, specifically for how the narrative was tailored to hospitality. The theme held for close to a decade, through multiple acquisitions.
Solution: We started with market perception and the competitive sphere, then worked with internal experts to find the unifying picture already inside the business. The Big Problem was named “moving too slow.” The Desired Outcome became the Dynamic Enterprise. Then we made 460 products sellable by organizing them into four categories: people, processes, knowledge, and network. The narrative tailored by vertical, becoming dynamic government for public sector and dynamic hospitality for hospitality. Industry analysts picked up the language and amplified it.
97% clearly understood the solutions. 86% clearly understood the value. Understanding is the whole job.
The CEO hated it
Problem: A new VP of Marketing joined Unisys wanting to relaunch the managed services business against tremendous global competition.
What happened: In 2008 we developed a Big Solution theme called People Computing. It tested well inside and outside the organization. Our champion, the VP of Marketing, took it to the CEO for his blessing. The CEO disliked it at first glance and made his disapproval known in uncomfortable terms. Our champion was crushed, and he called me. I asked him three questions. Had he shared the target client validation results with the CEO? No. Had he mentioned how excited the sellers were? No. Had he mentioned that analysts and third-party advisors found the idea fresh and differentiated? No. So we went back, with the evidence, and with one line: this narrative went through a rigorous process, and it was not designed with you in mind, because you are not the target buyer.
Outcome: The CEO agreed, then fell in love with the concept. He promoted it to the leadership team and encouraged investment. It started in one division, and he later elevated it to position the entire organization. The trade press headline said it plainly: Unisys wins 48,000-user Merck “people computing” deal.
“Bruce and his team seriously delivered the goods with our new message strategy and story. Their work was instrumental in helping us launch and grow new service lines across multiple verticals.”
Laura Osburnsen, VP Marketing, Unisys
Testing is not quality control. It is how a narrative survives contact with the most senior skeptic in the building.
THE PROBLEM: A BIG NEW BET
A new business, a new leadership team, and one conference to make an impression
Problem: McKesson was launching a big bet around managed services and needed a market message. A brand new executive and senior leadership team meant the timing was right, and the deadline was fixed: the HIMSS conference.
Outcome: They launched at HIMSS with a message that was provocative and landed, particularly with their target buyers, the CIOs of hospital systems.
“We had people both internally and externally to McKesson that really understood what we were trying to say, and it made so much sense.”
Paula Cobb, Marketing Leader
You can’t afford to go to market twice. Especially when the market is in one building for three days.
The reviews were slow because the founder was reading them
Problem: Infosys was standing up cloud services, a bet-the-business area. They needed the strategy, the go-to-market playbook, and the visual narrative.
The part worth telling: Post-workshop reviews took a long time, and I read that as drift. Years later I learned why. The founder had returned as CEO mid-initiative and was personally reviewing the work. He was never in the initial room, and he was engaged the entire time. Read the delay against the stakes.
THE PROBLEM: SCATTERED CONTENT AND CONVERSATIONS
This is the one we now call value dissonance. It was on this page under a different name for six years.
Thirty-three people and one narrative
Problem: Tableau was scaling fast, and the story was not scaling with it.
Outcome: What came out of the room did not go into a deck. It became the company’s onboarding, and then its ever-boarding. The CEO attended the rollout training and came back for the mid-term tune-up.
Solution: A design workshop with thirty-three people in it. Not a message handoff, a design session, and the distinction mattered. 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 directly on the narrative.
Nobody defends language they were handed.
Communications and Collaboration Made Easy
Problem: CSC (now part of DXC Technology) had several practice areas spread across different business units, each saying something different.
Outcome: A single big idea that let sales have a much bigger conversation than any one practice area could hold alone.
“Our work together resulted in a simple, impactful ‘big idea’ that helped us align our sales and marketing efforts for greater impact.”
Lisa Giles, Business Partner Executive, Global Business Services, CSC
Solution: We started inside, finding out who was doing and saying what across CSC. Then we scanned outside for the customer challenges that mattered. The theme landed on Communications and Collaboration Made Easy. Easy to use, easy to manage, easy to innovate. Then a solution framework, because no customer consumes everything at once.
THE PROBLEM: A TOUGH INDUSTRY GORILLA
The CEO used the tool himself
Problem: Brocade was up against the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in their market with a newer technology to promote. They needed sellers to be able to quantify the automation value.
Outcome: A value-selling campaign that reps actually adopted, including the number one seller in the building: Brocade’s CEO, who used the tool personally and loved it. Marketing improved its relevance by handing sales leads who had already explored the value on the marketing version of the tool.
“We had a compelling business value proposition, and Bruce and his team helped us communicate and quantify it with a first rate demand gen tool, sales enablement tool, and adoption support that aligned sales and marketing for go to market success. They did a fantastic job.”
Gautam Roy, Senior Manager, Product Management and Marketing, Brocade
A business case nobody can operate is not a business case.
THE PROBLEM: THE PRODUCT IS RIGHT AND THE STORY IS NOT
The deal that closed in a room I was not in
Problem: CoreConnex, a Seattle startup with a good product and a story that was not landing.
Outcome: We tested the new narrative with a focus group of real buyers on a Tuesday afternoon. One participant went to his CEO the next morning and signed. He had heard the earlier version from the VP of Sales weeks before and passed. Same product. Same buyer. Two conversations. The only variable was the story. The company was later acquired by ConnectWise.
ALIGNING 25 EXECUTIVES ON THEIR DIFFERENTIATED VALUE PROPOSITION
Could we just do this ourselves?
Problem: Later acquired by Keysight, IXIA had twenty-five senior GTM executives across separate solution areas who couldn’t align on one story, and a CMO tired of paying someone else to get them there.
Outcome: He sent his VP of Marketing into the workshop with instructions to learn the methodology and bring it in-house. She watched the room of twenty-five converge on three differentiating attributes in a single session, came back, and told him there was no way to replicate it without the room itself. The framework is learnable, and the book gives it away. Holding twenty-five senior executives in a room until they actually agree is a different thing.
PRO BONO
Community Impact
Ambassadors of Compassion: One Story, Three Audiences, No More Guessing
Norm Schulz ran Ambassadors of Compassion like most nonprofit leaders run theirs: raising money from donors in one room, convincing school principals in the next, recruiting volunteer coaches in a third. Three audiences. Three different versions of why AOC mattered. None of them repeatable by anyone but him.
That’s a scaling problem, not a mission problem. AOC’s curriculum was already working: a resiliency program proven to help at-risk students, running in eight states plus Canada and Australia, with more than 6,700 students through the journey. The program wasn’t the gap. The story was.
I offered to help pro bono. Norm and I had met on a plane, and the work AOC was doing was worth doing right. Jim Karrh and I spent two days with AOC’s leadership team building a whiteboard conversation and a messaging playbook, the same process I run for corporate clients: one narrative, built by the team, tested until they could each defend it in their own words to a donor, a principal, or a volunteer without a slide deck in the room.
“Bruce gladly offered his services pro bono to a group called Ambassadors of Compassion... Together we created a go-to-market narrative for growth, including very practical steps such as data to present, questions to ask, and stories to share... Our team found a renewed energy and confidence because we now had a common conversation.”
Norm Schulz, Executive Director, Ambassadors of Compassion
It aligned the people who mattered most. AOC’s chairman, Dave Hannah, a former NFL player and world powerlifting champion, championed it. Its board included the chairman of AT&T, who backed the new narrative because it did exactly what a shared story is supposed to do: get a donor, a principal, and a volunteer coach all pointed at the same outcome instead of hearing three different pitches for the same mission. The philanthropists in the room didn’t just like the playbook. They saw it align everyone around one story, and that’s what made them believers.
Journeymen: A Story a Volunteer Can Draw on a Napkin
Journeymen exists to raise wholehearted men. That mission is easy to feel and hard to sell in a five-minute donor conversation, especially against a wall of statistics most people have gone numb to.
We built Journeymen a narrative they could draw, not just recite. It starts with a question every parent recognizes: what kind of men are we raising? Then it names the maze boys are actually navigating: isolation, confusion, addiction, domination, what Journeymen calls the Lost Boys Crisis. Then it shows the way through: awareness, belonging, and contribution, converging into what they call Wholehearted Men.
The stakes are real and sourced, not hypothetical. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for adolescent boys, at nearly four times the rate of girls (CDC). Ninety-eight percent of mass shooters are male (The Violence Project). A single disconnected boy costs society an estimated $3 million over his lifetime in direct and indirect costs (Brookings; Measure of America). Those numbers earn the attention. The story is what earns the gift.
It’s working. Boys who complete the program report an 88% increase in self-confidence and a 100% improvement in their sense of who they are (Journeymen program data). One participant, called Aiden here to protect his privacy, joined mid-pandemic depressed and disconnected. He’s now mentoring younger boys at Journeymen camps and building a career in healthcare, and was recently mistaken by a stranger for a staff member because of how he carried himself.
The whole narrative lives on one page, meant to be sketched on a whiteboard or a napkin mid-conversation, built with the donor instead of presented at them. Same principle behind every narrative spine I build for a corporate sales team: nobody defends a story they were handed. Everybody defends a story they helped draw.
Vashon HouseHold: Making an Invisible Crisis Visible
Vashon Island is losing the people who make it work. Teachers, first responders, tradespeople, the barista at the coffee shop your kids love, priced out one by one as home values on the island roughly doubled in a decade, from about $420,000 to over $940,000, while rental vacancy sits near 4%.
That’s a hard story to tell an island’s wealthiest residents without triggering the two things that kill giving: guilt fatigue and glazed eyes at housing jargon. Vashon HouseHold needed a story their volunteers could tell a potential donor over coffee, one that made an invisible problem visible in about ninety seconds.
I built them a narrative using the same seven-step framework I use with enterprise sales teams: Aspirations, Problem, Risks, Opportunity, Path, Others, Steps. APROPOS, for short, my own methodology, licensed to VHH to use freely. It starts by asking someone what they love about the island, not what’s wrong with it, then shows exactly how what they love is disappearing, the Vanishing Island, and exactly what restores it: an Island in Balance, built on permanently affordable housing.
The organization has been doing this work for 35 years, and today stewards 166 homes serving roughly 400 of your neighbors. Every 100 affordable homes built generates an estimated $11.7 million in local income and 161 jobs in the first year alone (National Association of Home Builders). VHH’s own goal is to double its housing inventory by 2035, another 134 homes.
The interim CMO of OpenAI sat through the workshop where we built this narrative, a sign of how far this story travels beyond the island itself.
This is not sales technique. It is how humans move humans.
