How many times have you heard that storytelling is the future of B2B marketing?

And how many times has that advice helped you craft a better customer story, sharpen a sales enablement piece, or shape a compelling thought leadership article?

Exactly.

You’ve been told that storytelling makes marketing great. You’re probably thinking, “Yeah, I heard that from you!” And you’re right.

And it’s true.

But, too often, that advice lands in the same category as “be more creative” or “surprise and delight your audience.”

It’s vague. It's inspirational. And it leaves teams right where they started — staring at a four-slide product-marketing deck, wondering how to answer the request to “make it more exciting.”

The B2B storytelling industry (yes, that’s a thing now) has spawned countless frameworks, methodologies, and models. (Again, mea culpa!)

Many of them are good. But too many seem esoteric or overly complex. More to the point, they focus on only one aspect of storytelling — the structure of the content itself.

I’ve been considering a deeper, yet simpler and more practical, way to think about B2B storytelling.

Ironically, the idea came about while rereading one of my favorite books on storytelling structure: Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

In it, Snyder points to a scene in the movie The Plot to Kill the Pope in which a character relates dry exposition while the pope swims laps in a pool. The unexpected visual keeps the audience’s attention even as they absorb complex (some might say boring) information.

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B2B marketers often stumble into the same tactic without realizing it. They dress up dry information with something shiny to keep audiences engaged.

It’s instinct. It’s survival. But it also lacks the crucial elements of consistency and scalability.

Take, for example, a compliance software company explaining GDPR through a quirky cartoon character named Data Dave. Dave walks the audience through the latest enforcement guidance in a sing-song voice. It’s watchable.

But it’s barely more than a PowerPoint presentation with animation. And, in context with its other educational materials, it never quite lands.

I’m not here to pick on Data Dave. These attempts aren’t the problem — they show that marketers want to make content more compelling.

But the pope-in-the-pool example reminded me that it’s easy to copy the aesthetics of great narratives (the voiceover tone, the documentary lighting, the cinematic drone shots) without understanding the underlying operational system that makes stories resonate.

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Without that support, you get, at best, one-off hits. Not a culture. Not a system. Not an operation.

The issue isn’t how to decorate content — it’s how to organize the entire storytelling function.

The ideal alignment with storytelling in media (films, TV, novels) for marketing (thought leadership, campaigns, customer experiences) isn’t story structure.

It’s the operation.

In B2B, it’s not enough to find your hero, identify your villain, or introduce the struggle. You can’t just toss a pope into the pool and call it a narrative.

The entire storytelling function has to be repeatable, measurable, and built to scale.

Storytelling is an operational function

Here’s the thing no one wants to admit: B2B storytelling doesn’t fail because the stories are bad or the team didn’t check off the right archetypes, but because the system around it is broken.

Now that content marketing has become marketing, teams are expected to be screenwriters and editors, researchers and analysts, platform strategists, and brand cops.

And when that approach doesn’t scale, executives often bolt on templates, run a storytelling workshop, or (worse yet) outsource storytelling to AI. Then they wonder why nothing changes.

The mistake? Leaders treat storytelling like a craft but manage it like a specialist role to slot in at the point of creation.

Related:How This B2B Company Stole B2C’s Sizzle To Heat Up Its Content

Here’s a real example. I worked with an enterprise tech company that moved the content team into marketing operations. Immediately, the team heard the mandate to take off their “storytelling” hats.

Their job now? Edit efficiently. Repurpose relentlessly. Fit content to the format and move it through the pipeline.

“The storytelling,” they were told, “happens before it gets to you.”

Over time, the quality degraded. And the results tanked.

Imagine telling the director, editor, costume designer, and cinematographer on a Hollywood film that they don’t need to worry about storytelling. “The writer handled that.”

Storytelling isn’t an element that gets added in once you start creating the content. It’s the operating system that runs underneath everything marketing does.

And if you don’t design for it (with structure, governance, workflows, and measurement), your best stories will get lost in Slack threads, overwritten by stakeholders, or buried in Editorial Guideline PDFs no one reads.

Let’s be clear: Creativity matters. So do voice, timing, and surprise.

But creativity alone doesn’t scale. Operations do.

The best B2B brands today aren’t just telling better stories. They’ve built systems that ensure the right story gets told in the right way, at the right time, across the entire content lifecycle.

If you want stories that sell (and scale), you don’t just need a hero. You need a strategy.

You need story operations (or story ops).

Before you roll your eyes and say, “Oh great, another framework,”  know that I hear you. It’s not another model to memorize or add to a PowerPoint presentation.

It’s shorthand for rethinking storytelling as an operational discipline. Not a content format. Not a campaign tactic. And not an abstract creative muse.

It’s about making what we already do actually work.

4 better practices for building a story operation

If storytelling is the engine of modern marketing, most B2B teams are stuck pushing uphill in first gear. They don’t lack ideas, necessarily. They just haven’t built a system that lets stories do real work.

Below are a few better practices (not a comprehensive list) that can help any team start to operationalize storytelling.

1. Define both template and architecture

The best stories don’t follow a template, but most B2B content does: an intro, some SEO-throat-clearing paragraphs, a tidy list of things to know or do, a CTA … fade to black.

But great stories do follow an architecture.

It’s easy to confuse these ideas. Architecture defines a story's underlying structure and logic, while a template dictates the surface layout or format it takes.

In other words, a story’s architecture is the invisible framework that gives meaning; a template is the visible form that gives shape.

But let’s be honest, not every format needs a complete narrative arc. Try applying a three-act structure to a LinkedIn post. Or the hero’s journey to a technical white paper on cloud computing.

The goal isn’t standardization. It’s shared expectations and operations.

You may already have standard definitions for the templated content you create (though not everyone does). Standard architectures are much less typical.

Yet every team needs to create a way of working that identifies the architecture and (perhaps) the ultimate format.

For example, these are a few fundamental differences that you might define with your team.

When your team agrees on the purpose, structure, and elements of both template and architecture, you stop reinventing the wheel and start building with intention.

2. Build the tension

Many B2B stories lack friction. Everything is smooth. Everything goes right. But tension makes the audience care about the answer.

If your story doesn’t include something to lose, it won’t create something to gain.

Classic narrative frameworks make an appearance here. Most include struggle as a core element. But you also need to operationalize those struggles.

For example, when documenting personas, use “discomfort with the status quo” as a dimension and define the reputational, operational, or professional risks they face.

Then, importantly, check whether your multi-functional team agrees that these risks are correct.

How can you build that tension into a common understanding across the process (content briefs, creative reviews, and storytelling quality checks) so that everyone watches for it and doesn’t try to undo it when they see it?

I worked with a professional services company where the content team regularly wrote tension and struggle into case studies, thought leadership papers, and blog posts. But, as these pieces made the rounds through the stakeholder groups, the tension got edited out. By the time it reached “approved” status, the pieces were nothing more than watered-down product positioning pieces.

3. Create the operations

Yes, this is the heart of the “ops.” You can’t scale storytelling without process.

But many content teams still treat B2B stories as projects rather than products. That’s a trap.

A story built solely to support a single campaign, quarter, or persona carries a hidden risk. To force-fit a narrative into that tight of a container, people usually end up doing one of two things:

They either inflate a small story (stretching it into something it’s not) or take a powerful story and cram it into a box that’s too small (missing the opportunity to do something truly bold and expansive). In both cases, the story suffers.

The alternative? Treat storytelling like a product line with structured intake, thoughtful development, intentional packaging, and consistent distribution.

That means:

The most common pushback I get when I suggest this to clients goes something like: “Separating storytelling from the rest of the content process will slow everything down.”

And I tell them, “Yes. It will.”

You intentionally slow down the process to surface the remarkable and deliver it more consistently.

When you design your storytelling operations right, stories can move. They flex. They travel from sales decks to email nurtures to onboarding scripts without losing their shape or soul.

And here’s the kicker: The operations aren’t just there to make things efficient. They’re there to make stories stronger.

A good operational model doesn’t strip out the magic. It protects it. It preserves the thing that made a story resonate in one format and makes it show up just as powerfully in the next.

4. Plan to measure the system

When B2B storytelling becomes an operational strategy (not just a content format or creative application), it should be measured as one.

Consider how a studio evaluates the success of a film production — box office revenue matters, of course. But the sustainable, repeatable value lies in the system that creates the film, not just the film itself.

Studios track:

That’s precisely how you should think about B2B storytelling.

You shouldn't just measure the impact of one content asset. You should measure how well the story was made and how well the system around it performed:

And, sure, your story may win awards. It may bring in big numbers.

But remember to ask this question: Did this story make your storytelling system better?

The only thing more valuable than a great story is a system that knows how to make one again.

If the story works, you won’t just see it in dashboards. You’ll hear it coming back to you.

From one scene to a system

So yeah, keep the creativity. Put the pope in the pool. Just don’t mistake the scene for the system.

Effective storytelling isn’t just a clever delivery of exposition. It’s the consistent, operational effort that ensures the right story shows up again and again, wherever and whenever your audience is ready to hear it.

It’s your story. Tell it well.

Updated from a March 2022 story.

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