Section 1
The six constraints, in the order they bind
A business narrative has to answer six things, and the order matters more than the wording. Who this is about, and it is not you. What it currently costs them to carry on as they are, stated in something countable. What has changed recently that makes the old approach worse than it used to be. What the mechanism is, meaning why your approach produces a different result rather than merely a different vendor. What evidence exists that it has worked when you were not personally supervising it. And what the reader is being asked to do next, sized so that a reasonable person could say yes today. Miss the first and the reader never engages. Miss the third and the piece reads as timeless, which in commercial writing means ignorable. Miss the fourth and you have a claim with no engine underneath it. The sequencing question gets a fuller treatment in [How to Structure a Business Story for Maximum Impact](/blog/how-to-structure-a-business-story-for-maximum-impact).
Section 2
The element nobody lists: what you leave out
The most reliable signal of a real narrative is subtraction. A company that has decided something can say what it does not do, who it is a poor fit for, and which use case it deliberately sends elsewhere. This is not modesty, it is compression. Every capability you add to the description dilutes the ones that matter, and a reader who cannot tell which two things you are best at will assume you are averagely good at all of them. Omission is also the fastest credibility test available to a buyer. Anyone can claim strength. Only someone who has made a real choice can name the cost of that choice without flinching.
Section 3
Auditing an existing narrative
Run your current homepage, one-pager or pitch through the table below. Score each constraint present, weak or missing, and mark the sentence that carries it. Constraints with no sentence attached are the ones to fix first, and they are usually numbers three and four.
Section 4
Rebuilding it from evidence you already have
Do not start at the keyboard. Start in the record. Pull the last ten deals you won and the last ten you lost, and for each one write the single sentence the buyer used to describe their own problem. Buyers describe problems in a small number of shapes, and after twenty examples the shapes are visible. That gives you constraint one and constraint two in the customer's own vocabulary rather than yours. Now write the mechanism in one sentence that a competitor could not honestly copy. If a competitor could paste their name into your sentence and it would still be true, you have described a category, not a mechanism. Finally, attach one piece of evidence to each claim and delete every claim that has none. What survives is short. Short is the point. The people best placed to write those sentences are the ones who sat in the calls, which is part of the argument in [Why Storytelling Is a Critical Leadership Skill for Founders](/blog/why-storytelling-is-a-critical-leadership-skill-for-founders).
Section 5
What breaks a narrative that has all six elements
The usual breakage is scale mismatch. The problem is described at the level of an industry while the evidence sits at the level of a single account, and the reader feels the gap even when they cannot name it. Match the two: an industry-level claim needs industry-level proof, or the claim should shrink. The second breakage is a stack of adjectives standing in for the mechanism. Words such as intelligent, integrated and end-to-end usually mark the spot where the writer did not know how the thing works. Where those words cluster, an explanation is missing, and a plain-English one is worth more than any of them. [AI vs. Automation vs. Machine Learning: The Business Difference](/blog/ai-vs-automation-vs-machine-learning-the-business-difference) is a working example of what that plain-English replacement looks like.