You have Product-Market Fit. Do you have Story-Market Fit?
For tech B2B companies, few ideas loom larger than product-market fit, the moment when your firm’s product perfectly solves a real, urgent problem and customers eagerly begin adopting it. More customers start to come on board and revenue grows. None of this can happen without product-market fit.
But to truly scale a B2B tech business, product-market fit alone isn’t enough. To really grow – to drive leads, convert prospects, and expand revenue – you now also need something just as critical: story-market fit.
Story-market fit is a business narrative that perfectly aligns with your market’s needs, beliefs, and pressures. It’s unique, memorable and motivates your audience to act. When your story resonates as acutely as your product does, everything accelerates: journalists care, marketing works harder, sales calls succeed more often, and your revenue goes up. In a crowded, high-stakes B2B landscape, story-market fit can be the inflection point between incremental progress and outsized growth.
Of course, most B2B organizations have stories they tell about their business. However, very few achieve story-market fit. It’s not for lack of effort. It’s because three key dimensions make the job unusually difficult:
Internal complexity. Sales pushes for short-term deals. Marketing invests in brand-building. Product wants feature-forward positioning. Executives want a transformative vision. Aligning these forces in one coherent story is hard.
External complexity. As product lines expand, audiences multiply. The story must work across industries, personas, competitors, analysts, journalists, and partners.
Storytelling excellence. Effective B2B storytelling is a specialized craft, distinct from B2C stories, TED-style keynotes, and the dramatic approach we’ve all been taught. It matters who develops your narrative. Creative agencies, PR firms, speechwriters, and even internal teams are optimized for other types of communications tasks.
Despite these challenges, story-market fit is attainable with the right process. Our firm, Narrative Partners, a specialized story-market fit consultancy, uses a five-phase approach to deliver an effective narrative that works across your company, your products, and your key markets:
Research. We start by deeply understanding your products, strategy, buyers, competitors, ecosystem players, and internal stakeholders. This foundational step is critical for success.
Prototype. We then develop one or more draft stories quickly to explore different narrative angles.
Validate. We pressure-test and refine the story with AI personas, internal teams, and customers. Our benchmarks guide the process, but one consistent signal stands out: when buyers literally stop multitasking and lean in, you’re close to story-market fit.
Build. Then we turn the validated story into scalable assets – a lighthouse presentation, a narrative handbook, an evergreen brief, and more, so your organization can use it consistently.
Scale. We help you equip your leaders, teams, and partners to be fluent with the narrative, ensuring your story lands consistently and successfully across every stage of the buyer journey.
Our small, expert team runs this process, accountable to the most senior stakeholder to avoid committee dilution. Done well, this entire cycle takes eight to twelve weeks. And this is where the payoff shows up. In the words of a recent client, the founder of a publicly traded company: “this will have a major impact on our 2026 revenue.”
Bottom line: If you’re a B2B tech leader aiming for your next wave of growth, there is almost always untapped headroom in your narrative. Story-Market Fit is what unlocks it. The organizations that break out in crowded markets aren’t just the ones with the best technology, they’re the ones whose stories land with unmistakable clarity. Those are the companies with Story-Market Fit.
———————————————
Narrative Partners is a boutique consultancy specializing in developing Story-Market Fit for leading B2B Tech companies. The partners are Matt Maltby, who led Narratives & Thought Leadership for Google Ads, and Jim Lecinski, former Google vice president, now a Clinical Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Working together across a decade of building Google’s B2B storytelling muscle, they created the Narrative Partners’ story-market fit framework to solve the challenges they saw firsthand.
If you’d like to understand your firm’s story-market fit, reach out for an initial conversation: hello@narrativepartners.co
