Your Buyer's Hero's Journey

Here's a useful principle when positioning your B2B business:

👉 Your customer is the hero, and you are the guide.

I learned this from Donald Miller's 'Building a StoryBrand' (a book I've gifted 15+ times)

Here's what it means:

Your buyer can be a founder, head of HR, CTO, head of demand gen, or a VP of sales.

Whoever they are, they're on their own hero's journey (think: Luke Skywalker).

On their journey, they have challenges (that you can help with).

Our job is to guide them to get them what they want. (think: Yoda)

As their expert guide, we become a trusted resource to help them overcome challenges.

A sneaky trap both I and others have fallen into is positioning our product/solution is the hero.

The problem with this is the best stories don't have two different heroes.

There is only one hero that matters.

And that one hero is your buyer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean that "your customer is the hero, and you are the guide"?

It means the buyer, whether a founder, head of HR, CTO, or VP of sales, is on their own hero's journey facing real challenges, and the business's role is to guide them toward overcoming those challenges, not to be the story's hero itself.

Where does this framework come from?

Donald Miller's book Building a StoryBrand, a resource considered valuable enough to have been gifted more than 15 times, given how directly it shapes effective positioning.

What's the "sneaky trap" many businesses fall into with positioning?

Positioning the product or solution itself as the hero of the story, rather than the buyer. This mistake is easy to make but undermines the narrative structure that actually resonates with buyers.

Why can't a story have two heroes, the business and the buyer?

Because the best stories only have one hero that matters, and in a business relationship, that hero is the buyer. Trying to make the product the hero competes with the buyer's own journey instead of supporting it.

What role does the business actually play if not the hero?

The guide, like Yoda to Luke Skywalker, a trusted resource that helps the hero, the buyer, get what they want and overcome the challenges standing in their way.