In my last email, we went atomic.
We talked how to use "Competing Values" to make a single asset resonate.
But tactics, no matter how brilliant, are not a strategy.
You can create the most resonant content in the world and still get your budget, your team, and your credibility annihilated in a single executive meeting.
This is the trap many ambitious content marketers fall into. They are exceptional creators but ineffective operators.
I know, because I was one of them.
The system I've been sharing—from the Story Spine to de-risking the ask—wasn't built in a lab.
It was forged from the scar tissue of a massive, public failure.
This is the story of that failure.
I’ll never forget this.
At one of the companies I worked with, I pitched the idea of creating a full, comprehensive multi-media experience.
A central “hub” that would house a number of different video shows, podcasts, blog posts, an ebook library, and live events.
I proposed the idea, and I got the permission to pitch.
So I spent about 5 months talking to sales and customer service and product teams about the kinds of things they thought would attract more customers.
I boiled those ideas down into airtight premises.
I worked with one of our designers in their free time to make multi-page mockups of what this hub would look and feel like.
I talked to people in our partner ecosystem to see if they’d be down to contribute to the ebook library and we could pass along the leads generated from them.
All told, there were about 45 people involved, and I pressure tested it with everyone until I got something I thought was perfect.
Everyone was excited. This was something nobody was doing and it was going to put us on the map in a big way.
After 100s of hours of prep, I got into the room the execs.
The combined salaries of the people in the room made this one hour worth well over $200,000
And yet, as I presented, the shot-callers at a multi-billion dollar company were leaning in and hanging on my every word. The energy in the room was palpable.
Until the very end.
The CEO leaned back and said
“This is really cool, how will this make us money.”
VRoooooOOOP
The air got sucked out of the room, the temperature rose about 40 degrees, and I was hit with an instant flop sweat.
“It’ll uhh… drive more traffic, which means more leads, and improve our brand equity in the market.”
“Ok, how will it do that?”
“Well, our existing traffic will come to it, see it, think it’s cool, and will share it with their peers.”
The CFO leaned forward,
“How much will this cost?”
I didn’t even have to look, my pits had sweat all the way through my shirt.
“I uh… didn’t really scope that out yet.”
The CTO leaned forward:
“How long will this take to stand up?”
My vision started to blur. I could hear my own pulse.
“Uh… like… ssssix monthhhs??”
The VP of sales:
“How long until we see more leads from this?”
YES, I got this one!
“THAT’LL be instant for sure.”
“Ok, and how much do you think the volume will go up?”
“uh… at least a couple hundred percent?”
“Alright Tommy, thanks for putting this together, we’ll talk about it.”
A week later,
“Hey there,
Just wanted to say thank you for your time last week, have you had a chance to discuss my proposal?
Thanks,
- Tommy”
Another week later:
Subject: Just checking in
Peers: “Hey Tommy, how’d the pitch go?”
Me: “Still waiting to hear back…”
You know where this story is goes.
I was a big, public failure.
Dozens of people involved and hundreds of hours lost.
My credibility? Ruined.
What went wrong?
There are some obvious mistakes, and some not so obvious ones.
First: I didn't scope the cost or time to execute.
This is a common one. I know for certain a lot of content folks get caught up in selling the value of the idea, and not the dollars and cents of how to execute.
Years later, I did the math, and over a year and a half to stand up, and well over a million dollars to do it to vision.
Second: Even though I couldn't answer the ROI question, I also couldn't reframe the conversation either.
"It's hard to measure the value of a YouTube view" is absolutely true, so there's no avoiding that.
If I were to pitch this now, I'd reframe the conversation around the goal being to drive more repeat visitors to our "hub" and to capture their emails from our live experiences and ebook library, with the goal of improving the quality of our leads and better SQLs to improve close rates and to shorten the sales cycle.
And even if I didn't have exact numbers for "how much do you think lead volume would go up?"
I'd do more research to find numbers around how webinars, ebooks, email sequences, etc can improve lead volume and come up with an educated guess.
And perhaps most importantly...
I'd come with an irrefutable answer the question, "how are people going to see this?"
"After we're in production, we'll partner with these podcasts and do joint webinars with partners to talk about what we're building and why we're building it.
Podcasters have a combined reach of X and webinar partners average Y signups, with Z live attendees.
We'll focus these conversations around A,B, C value propositions, and how our approach to content reflects our approach to product, and we've just launched ___, ___, and ___ products that solve ___, ___, and ___ problems."
"And also, since the full investment in the project would be ___, here's how we can roll this out into three phases and how much they'd cost:
Crawl: $XX,XXX
Walk: $XXX,XXX
Run: $XXX,XXX
"Here's the range of business relevant milestones I want to hit, and here's where the killswitch will be if we don't hit X metric by Y date."
---
If there's anything I've learned in 20 years, it's that "creative vision" isn't just the idea.
That million-dollar pitch didn't fail just because of a missing spreadsheet.
It failed because I told the wrong story to the wrong audience.
I was pitching a "creative hero's journey."
The C-suite was listening for a "financial quest for ROI."
We had no shared language.
That's one failure that Narrative Design exists to solve.
It's not just a system for making your content better. It's a system for making your strategy defensible. Used right, it's the translator between the creative vision and the business case.
- A "Crawl, Walk, Run" + "Killswitch" plan isn't just about budget, it's the Four-Act Structure of a pilot.
- "De-risking" isn't just a financial term, it's how you manage the Stakes for an executive audience.
- The CEO's "how will this make us money?" wasn't a rejection. It could have been the Inciting Incident if I had played my cards better.
I walked into that room as a creator and got shut down by operators.
The Narrative Design Toolbox is being built to fix this.
It's a shared language that equips creators to speak with the authority of an operator, and prove the commercial value of their vision.
It is the system I wish I'd had, and one we're working diligently on to get into your hands.
Tommy Walker | The Content Studio
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