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B2B tech companies often struggle with storytelling because their messaging starts with the product instead of the buyer.

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The product may be strong and the team may know exactly how it works. But strong B2B storytelling requires more than product knowledge. It means translating that knowledge into a clear customer problem, business impact, credible message, and story that fits the audience and channel.

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Ask a B2B tech company what it does, and you’ll usually get a good answer. Ask how the product works, and you’ll probably get an even better one. The team can walk you through features, use cases, architecture, differentiators, and competitors. They know the product inside and out.

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But what do you hear when you ask:

What are we asking the buyer to believe that the market hasn’t already told them?

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Many companies can explain the product in extraordinary detail, but they’ve spent far less time understanding what buyers already believe about the problem, the category, and the alternatives. They know what they want to say without always knowing which assumption they need to change.

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Why B2B Tech Companies Struggle With Storytelling

A technical founder builds something to solve a problem and starts talking to other technical people about it. Early sales conversations get deep quickly: features, functionality, use cases, objections, integrations, and what the product does differently.

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Those early buyers may already understand the problem and speak the same technical language as the founders. The founder can spend an hour explaining the product personally and answering questions.

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As the company grows, sales gets hired, product becomes more formalized, and eventually marketing arrives. The buying committee expands too, which means the story now has to work with a CFO, business leader, or executive who doesn’t share the same context as the technical buyer.

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By then, the language has already seeped into the organization.

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The sales deck sounds like the founder pitch and the website sounds like the product team. Marketing copy starts with capabilities because those are the words everyone internally already agrees on.

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The story may be accurate and still miss the mark because it reflects how the company thinks about the product more than how the buyer experiences the problem.

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Why Product Knowledge Does Not Automatically Create Buyer Relevance

Before someone is ready to consider a different approach, you need to understand what they already believe.

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Maybe the current workaround is annoying but acceptable. They may see every solution in the category as roughly interchangeable, or previous vendors may have trained them to expect a certain tradeoff. In some cases, the problem hasn’t become important enough to solve yet.

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That existing belief is the starting point for the story you need to tell.

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What frustrates them about the problem and the options they have today? How does it make their job harder? What does it cost the business? And what would have to be true for them to see the problem or the solution differently?

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How to Find the Story Buyers Will Care About

When I’m working with a client on storytelling and ask about their key buyers or personas, I often get a broad answer: “We sell to IT leaders at midmarket companies.”

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That gives me a category, but not much of a story. So I’ll usually ask them to think about the last real IT leader they talked to.

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Then I’ll ask:

• Who were they?
• What were they trying to accomplish?
• What was getting in their way?
• What was the business impact and personal impact?
• What they’ve already tried and what do they think a “good” solution looks like” 
• What words did they use to describe the problem?
• What do they believe today that we may need to change?
• What have competitors or the category already taught them to expect?
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I’ll compare those answers across founders, product, sales, customer success, and anyone else close to the market to see which beliefs, frustrations, and language show up consistently and where the internal story starts to diverge from the customer’s.

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The Best Product Story May Already Be Inside the Company

We once worked with a cybersecurity company solving a highly technical problem. We went in expecting to sharpen the positioning: why the solution was different, where the alternatives fell short, and why buyers needed another approach. Then we asked the founders why they had built it.

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Both had dealt with the same painful workaround early in their careers, including late nights, weekends, and holidays. Eventually, they decided there had to be a better way and built one.

That experience became the story. 

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How Message, Messenger, Audience, and Channel Work Together

Once the core story is clear, the next challenge is deciding how that story should show up for different audiences.I think about B2B storytelling through four elements:

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Message → Messenger → Audience → Channel

Message: What does this audience need to believe?

Messenger: Who is most credible saying it?

Audience: Who are we trying to influence?

Channel: Where will they encounter the story?

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Take a B2B company launching a new product at its annual industry conference. The core story stays consistent, but the emphasis and messenger change by audience.

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Buyers need to understand why the product is better than the status quo. Press and analysts need to understand why the launch matters to the market. Partners need to understand the opportunity for them.

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The story stays recognizable; the framing changes with the audience.

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Channel changes more than format. It changes what the audience has time for, what context they already have, and who is credible delivering the message. A keynote, sales follow-up, LinkedIn video, and customer story can all carry the same narrative without sounding like copies of one another.

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Why Video Exposes a Weak Story Fast

Video has a way of making a messaging problem harder to hide.

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A polished explainer can still fall flat if the story underneath it is mostly features, functionality, and product claims. Production quality can make the content look better, but it can’t give the audience a reason to care.

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That came up in a recent conversation with Matt Cancino at Colt Concepts about storytelling in B2B tech. Matt’s team creates people-first video and content, and we kept coming back to the same point from different sides: decide what story is worth telling before you decide how to produce it.

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Once the narrative is clear, video becomes a much stronger way to put a real person behind the story, whether that’s a founder explaining why the company exists, a product leader unpacking an innovation, or a customer describing the problem in language other buyers recognize.

What Happens When B2B Messaging Is Unclear

A weak narrative gets harder to fix as the content around it grows. The website heads in one direction, the sales deck takes another, and LinkedIn, blog articles, ads, and outbound start developing personalities of their own.

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Instead of reinforcing the same problem, value proposition, and differentiators, each asset introduces a slightly different version of the story. The audience is left to piece together what the company really wants them to understand.

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Sales usually fills the gaps. Give sellers an unclear narrative and they will solve the problem with impressive creativity; before long, the inevitable Franken-deck appears: part current presentation, part old presentation, part something someone found on a shared drive in 2024.

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As more versions accumulate, the original differentiation gets harder to see clearly, and eventually marketing or product marketing inherits the job of cleaning up the library.

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Now someone is spending weeks auditing mediocre assets and making incremental improvements to material that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place.

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What to Do Before Creating More B2B Content

Before creating another video, article, campaign, or sales deck, ask three questions.

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1. Why are we creating this?

What job is the content supposed to do? What question should it answer?

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2. Who is it for?

Go beyond the persona. Where are they in the buying journey? What questions are they asking at this stage? What do they already know about you? What alternatives are they considering? What are they likely to believe about the problem right now?

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3. Where will they encounter it?

Context changes how much detail they need, who should deliver the message, and what format makes sense.

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Once those answers are clear, the format usually becomes obvious.The harder work is deciding what the buyer needs to understand, believe, or reconsider and building the story around that.

Then choose the format that gives that story the best chance to resonate with your audience. 

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This piece was inspired by a conversation with Matt Cancino of Colt Concepts about B2B storytelling, video, and what happens when companies start producing content before the story is clear.

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FAQ

What makes a good B2B story?

A strong B2B story starts with the buyer’s problem and business impact, then connects the product to a clear reason to care.

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Why do B2B tech companies struggle with messaging?

Technical companies often inherit product-first language from founders, engineers, and early sales conversations, making it harder to communicate relevance to broader buying committees.

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Should B2B companies use the same message across every channel?

The core narrative should stay consistent, but the emphasis, messenger, level of detail, and format should change depending on the audience and channel.

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