On a recent B2B software engagement, I spent time listening to sales conversations, comparing how different people described the business, looking at customer feedback and seeing where people became confused during training.
The proposition did not travel evenly.
Much of the existing sales language started from the product. More experienced people knew how to translate it into the customer’s problem, choose the right proof and make the relevance clearer.
Senior people were still drawn into important conversations. Newer sellers had more of the commercial logic to reconstruct for themselves.
The difference was useful.
It showed how much work the person selling the proposition still had to do before the proposition became compelling.
The repairs are evidence
Good sellers adapt.
They listen for what matters to the buyer. They change emphasis. They skip detail that is getting in the way and bring in an example when another explanation will not help.
That variation is part of selling.
Repeated variation tells you more.
An experienced seller may consistently move the same idea earlier. Several people may translate the same product language into plainer terms. The same customer example may appear in successful conversations even though it is buried in the official material.
Those behaviours are worth studying.
I saw some of that in this engagement. The commercial story became clearer when it started closer to the customer’s problem and when the website, sales narrative and proposition followed the same underlying logic.
Changing the material was relatively straightforward.
Changing years of accumulated selling habits was harder.
I do not know how durable that change ultimately proved to be. That is useful context too. A sound positioning decision does not automatically become the story an organisation actually uses.
One way to find the gap is to look at what effective sellers repeatedly add, remove, translate or move earlier.
They may already be showing you what the formal message has missed.
The message has to survive two handovers
The immediate cost of a message that depends on interpretation is uneven selling.
The wider cost is dependence.
Newer sellers learn the real commercial story informally. Important opportunities continue to attract senior involvement. Approved materials keep being revised because they never quite feel sufficient.
When someone experienced leaves, the company can lose more than their relationships.
It can lose part of the unwritten message system: which problem to lead with, which proof matters early, which language buyers respond to and which parts of the official story routinely create confusion.
Then the message leaves the selling organisation.
The first buyer may have understood the conversation perfectly. Their colleague was not there.
Now the buyer becomes the carrier of the argument.
They shorten it. They translate it into their own language. Detail falls away. The next person hears a compressed version of whatever survived.
That second handover matters in complex B2B sales because the first interested person is often several conversations away from the final decision.
The message has to travel through both systems: the people selling it and the people buying it.
A five-part stress test
I would push the central commercial story through five stages.
- Claim
What is the main thing the buyer needs to understand?
- Explanation
Can a competent seller explain why that claim is true without having to invent the missing logic?
- Evidence
Is suitable proof close enough to the claim for the connection to be clear?
- Retelling
After hearing the story once, can another person describe the business accurately in their own words?
- Decision
Does that shorter version still give the next person enough reason to consider the business seriously?
The value lies in seeing where the story starts to lose integrity.
A claim that needs several minutes of explanation may be too abstract.
If the argument only becomes convincing when one particular case study appears, that evidence may belong much earlier.
A seller who repeatedly changes the sequence may have discovered a hierarchy the official story has missed.
And when the retelling preserves the product category but loses the customer problem, the difference or the reason to believe, you have learnt what the original explanation was carrying for the listener.
Write for the retelling
The strongest B2B stories usually have a simple underlying sequence.
The exact content varies, but the movement should remain visible: there is a problem worth caring about, it has a consequence, the business changes something meaningful, and there is evidence that makes the change credible.
That sequence gives the listener something to reconstruct later.
Proof helps.
A buyer may forget the detail of a customer story while remembering the operating result that made the claim believable. They may lose half the product explanation but retain one concrete example that explains why the difference matters.
That is why proof works best close to the claim it supports.
A deck that stores all its evidence at the end asks the seller, and later the buyer, to recreate those connections from memory. Putting suitable evidence beside the important claims gives the story more structure as it travels.
The message will still lose detail.
That is expected.
The test is whether the shorter version remains recognisably the same argument.
What your best sellers may already know
The engagement reinforced why I pay attention to departures from the approved story.
They are not automatically failures of discipline.
A seller may have found a better route through the argument.
Training can reveal the same thing. When people repeatedly struggle at the same point, ask for clarification on the same idea or need an experienced person to explain how the pieces connect, the confusion itself is diagnostic.
The useful work is to identify which of those patterns should become part of the shared commercial story.
That does not mean turning sellers into script readers.
Experienced people should still adapt to the buyer in front of them. Their judgement is valuable precisely because they can respond to context.
The proposition should give that judgement a stronger starting point.
Then newer sellers have something solid to learn, experienced sellers can spend less effort repairing the underlying story, and buyers have a better chance of carrying the argument into the next room.
That is what I would stress-test.