The Filmmaker in the Room
A filmmaker named Jason joined one of our sales team calls. His background was indie horror: Blair Witch, special effects, underground film. He had been building a startup that combined interactive storytelling with AI technology, and someone on our team had introduced him to AWS a few months earlier. In less than sixty days, without a programming background, he had rebuilt his entire product demo using tools he did not know existed before September.
He was not there to tell us about his product. He was there to teach us something he had figured out about ours: that the way we were pitching was wrong, and that a framework developed by a mythologist named Joseph Campbell in the 1940s, formalized for filmmakers through Aristotle's Poetics, and visible in every movie you have ever loved, might fix it.
I sat through the whole session. I took notes. And something clicked: I had been circling for years without being able to say it clearly.
The Mistake Most Sellers Make
Jason's central argument is simple and, once you hear it, impossible to unhear: most sellers believe they are the hero of the story. They are not.
The Hero's Journey, as Joseph Campbell described it, follows a predictable structure. An ordinary world. A call to adventure. A mentor who appears. A series of trials. A defining test. A transformation. A return. Every film that works, every story that stays with you, moves through some version of this arc. The hero grows—the mentor guides. The world changes because of the journey.
In the version most sellers tell, they cast themselves as Luke Skywalker. They have the solution, the capability, the track record. They walk in with their slides, proof points, and reference customers, and they demonstrate their expertise. They are the ones who will save the day.
The problem is that the customer is sitting across the table waiting to be the hero of their own story. And when a vendor walks in and takes the protagonist role, the customer becomes an audience member rather than a partner. They watch. They evaluate. They decide whether to buy a seat for someone else's movie.
Jason's reframe: the customer is Luke. We are Obi-Wan. The technology is the Force. Our job is not to wield it for them. Our job is to teach them to wield it for themselves. Hand them the lightsaber. Walk beside them into the trench. And if we have to die on the sword to make sure they win, that is the mentor's role. Their success is our immortality.
Let Them Wallow
The part of Jason's framework I have thought about most is what he called Act One.
In a film, Act One establishes the ordinary world and then disrupts it. The hero's life is interrupted. Something they relied on is taken away or exposed as insufficient. The audience understands the stakes before anyone proposes a solution. The villain appears not as an abstraction but as a felt presence. You understand what is being threatened.
In a sales pitch, Act One is where you articulate the customer's problem. Not briefly, not as a preamble to your solution, but with enough specificity and patience that the customer feels seen. Their data is siloed. Their teams are fighting uphill battles to ship anything. Their legacy infrastructure is slowing every launch while costs climb. They have the talent, the ambition, and the vision. What they do not have yet is a foundation that moves at their speed.
Most sellers spend about thirty seconds in Act One before pivoting to their product. I know because I have done it. We feel the urgency to reach a solution. We know the answer, and we want to give it. But when we rush past the problem, we rob the customer of the experience of being understood. And if they do not feel understood, they will not trust that the solution is for them.
The phrase I have used with my teams is: " Let them wallow in the pain. Not cruelly. Not to manufacture drama. But to make sure we have heard the full story before we start writing the next chapter. Get all the acts out. Understand where the opportunity actually is. Only then does the mentor have enough information to be genuinely useful.
The Training Montage
Jason pointed out something I had never named but immediately recognized: in almost every great film, there is a training montage.
Rocky is running on the beach. Luke with the remote and the blast shield down. Karate Kid is waxing the car. The montage is where the mentor and the hero do the work together. It is the sequence that bridges the problem and the solution, where capability is built, where trust is established, where the relationship earns its weight.
In a sales context, the training montage is Act Two. It is where you explain not just what you offer but how you will work together. The pilot. The architecture session. The proof of concept. The co-built roadmap. This is where you stop presenting and start partnering. The customer begins to see themselves succeeding, not because you told them they would, but because you showed them, step by step, what the path looks like and who they will become by the end.
A pitch that skips the montage asks the customer to take your word for something you have not yet earned the right to claim. The montage is the proof that the transformation is real, not a promise but a process.
Beyond the Customer
I asked Jason a question during the session that I had been thinking about while he was talking. We were discussing all of this in the context of customer pitches. But what about the rest of what we do? The monthly business reviews—the escalation documents. The territory plans. The emails we send upward when we need something. The presentations we build for people who did not ask for a story but who will not remember a data dump.
His answer was honest: he had just developed this framework a few days earlier and was still figuring out where it applied. But his instinct was that it applied everywhere. Every communication has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Every message benefits from a clear problem, a coherent journey, and a resolution that asks something of the reader. If the structure is missing, we feel it, even if we cannot name it.
I have been testing this since. When I write a business review, I try to open with the tension, the thing that is at stake, before I report the numbers. When I send an escalation, I frame it as a story with a clear villain, a clear hero, and a specific ask that follows logically from the arc. When I build a territory plan, I try to tell the story of the customers I serve before describing the activities I plan.
The results are not always dramatic. But the conversations are different. People engage with the narrative. They ask questions about the story rather than challenging the data. They remember what was said.
What I Carry Forward
Jason closed his portion of the session by saying something that has stayed with me. He said he struggled with pitching. He was not a natural salesperson. But when he believed in what he was talking about, the authenticity was there, and authenticity was what connected. The structure gave him a familiar foundation. The rest came from knowing the story well enough to tell it.
I think about this in how I coach my team. We spend a lot of time on the data, proof points, competitive positioning, and technical depth. All of that matters. But the question we do not ask enough is: whose story is this? And are we telling it in a way that makes the customer the hero of their own journey, or are we crowding them out of their own narrative?
The best sellers I have worked with do not pitch. They tell stories. They know how to open with tension. They know how to sit with the problem long enough for it to be felt. They know how to position themselves as the guide rather than the savior. They make the customer feel capable rather than rescued.
A filmmaker who had never sold enterprise software walked into a room full of enterprise sellers and showed us the structure we had been operating within without knowing it. The Hero's Journey was already there in the best pitches we had ever given. We just had not been doing it on purpose.
Now we are.