How to understand what your buyers mean, not what they say.
If you’ve ever watched a film told from an unreliable narrator. Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, Rashomon. You know the feeling. What you believed was true turns out to be an illusion the storyteller needed to believe.
That’s your typical software buyer.
They think they bought your product because it “integrated with HubSpot,” or because “the team liked the UX”
They’ll even tell you that in the win/loss call. But underneath the rational narrative is something else. A survival story they tell themselves to stay afloat in a system of risk, politics, and perception.
In B2B, every deal is a kind of movie. And the buyer is directing it to protect their reputation.
Not malicious. Certainly defensive.
Software buyers operate in environments where the truth is too risky. They can’t say:
- “We chose you because your sales rep made me feel smarter than the other vendor did.”
- “We went with your competitor because I didn’t want to explain a miss to my boss.”
- “We didn’t even read your one-pager. The others just felt safer.”
Not really. So they retrofit a story. One with logic, frameworks, and consensus. No one wants to be the villain in their own purchase order.
This is why 'message testing' and 'buyer interviews' often produce fictional truths.
Buyers aren’t actually lying to you. But they’re 100% editing the film for the leadership team/boardroom.
“Listen to the customer” is a bad joke
B2B teams believe listening harder is the fix. Surveys. Interviews. Committees.
But listening to an unreliable narrator doesn’t yield ‘facts’. You get plot summaries. If you build your messaging, product, or onboarding around what buyers say after the fact, you’re optimizing for the movie, not the motive.
That’s why every SaaS site in a mature category sounds identical. Each company is quoting the same post-purchase rationalizations.
Plot twist: The story comes first
Here’s a paradox.
If buyers are unreliable narrators, your job isn’t to extract truth. It’s to supply the narrative they can live inside.
That’s what great B2B storytelling does. It gives the buyer a coherent, career-safe arc to step into. BEFORE they even start rationalizing stuff.
- Before: “I’m frustrated but not sure how to fix it.”
- After: “This platform helps leaders like me create order in chaos.”
The sale doesn’t happen when they understand your product. It happens when they understand themselves differently through your story.
That’s why category leaders don’t wait for buyer insight. They get out there and create buyer narrative.
Story first. Product second. Validation third.
How to sell to an unreliable narrator
Three parts or acts for founder-led or narrative-driven SaaS:
1. Stage the scene, don’t recite the features
Don’t sell “features,” offer a believable act structure:
Act 1: Chaos.
Act 2: Your solution enters.
Act 3: Order (but earned).
Give your buyer a role that flatters them and makes their story make sense.
2. Build “career justification collateral”
Decks, PDFs, and one-pagers aren’t for you. They’re props for the buyer to justify the decision to their peers and boss.
Design for THAT.
3. Reward the rewrite
When buyers retell your story internally, they’ll inevitably twist it. That’s fine. Good narratives survive distortion. The goal isn’t message control. You want to seed message coherence.
The sort of ending you can’t script
You’ll never know the full truth of why you won the deal. The buyer might not either.
But if your story gives them a version of events they can repeat without fear. You’ve done your job, so to speak.
Reality doesn’t close deals. Narrative does. That’s the B2B way.
