Anthropic is paying up to $400,000 for a “Head of GTM Narrative.” Microsoft and Google are recruiting storytelling leads for their cloud teams. Vanta is offering $274,000 for a “head of storytelling.”
If you’ve been in B2B tech long enough, you’ve seen this before. A certain function gets hot companies throw money at a title (remember the VP of Growth Hacking era?), and two years later everyone quietly admits it didn’t work.
This one feels different. But it’s still going to disappoint most of the companies betting on it.
The Information Environment Has Changed
Jim VandeHei at Axios put it bluntly: “We’ve entered the post-news era. Your reality, how you see the world, is no longer defined by ‘the news.’ Instead, it’s shaped by the videos you watch, the podcasts you listen to, the people you follow on social media and know in person, and the reporting you consume.”
For B2B companies, the implication is uncomfortable. The Wall Street Journal hit that validated your Series B matters less than it used to. The TechCrunch feature that once drove inbound for months now disappears into the feed within hours. Earned media isn’t dead – it just doesn’t last the way it used to.
For a deeper dive into how PR and narrative strategy are evolving in this fragmented media landscape, see our post “Tech PR Has Entered the Post-Playbook and Rolodex Era,” which explores how startups and B2B tech can influence audiences beyond traditional outlets.
So companies are responding by trying to own the narrative directly. Hence the storyteller gold rush.
The instinct is right. The execution is where it falls apart.
The Problem With “Doing Narrative”
Jack Raines, who writes the Young Money newsletter, asked the obvious question about these roles: “What do these companies expect a ‘Head of GTM Narrative’ to do? It’s not like sales, where you’re selling, or engineering, where you’re building. ‘Crafting narrative’ is a weird job.”
He’s right. And his diagnosis is on point: “It’s hard to just slap ‘story’ on top of something no one cares about and expect them to suddenly start caring.”
The problem with dedicated narrative roles is that they sit outside the business. They’re brought in to manufacture a story rather than extract one. They produce launch videos and case studies and messaging frameworks that sound good in internal reviews but don’t actually change how the market sees the company.
Raines argues there are really only three ways to play the B2B tech narrative game right:
- The CEO crafts and controls it through their own public presence
- An outside agency helps shape and pressure-test it
- Someone embedded in product marketing or customer-facing work makes it part of their broader responsibilities
Notice what’s missing: someone whose job is “narrative,” but who isn’t actually close to what’s being built or sold.
Embedded Narrative Works. Bolted-On Narrative Doesn’t.
Raines points to Ramp’s “chief economist” as a model. Ara Kharazian’s job title has nothing to do with narrative. His job is to draw insights from Ramp’s spend data and share those stories with the world. The narrative work is a byproduct of a role that’s already plugged into the business.
This is the difference between manufactured story and extracted story.
Manufactured story: “We’re the leading AI-powered platform for [category].”
Extracted story: “We analyzed 10 million customer service interactions and found that agents abandon their AI tools the exact moment they need them most.”
By “extracted,” I don’t mean marketing spin pulled from a roadmap. I mean insight surfaced from how the product is actually used: the data, behavior, and patterns it sees simply by simply by being used every day.
The first is positioning. The second is insight that only exists because the company has unique access to data or behavior that no one else can see.
We’ve built our agency around this distinction. When we work with a B2B payments company, we turn their transaction data into an economic indicator that reporters actually want to cite. For a creator fundraising platform, we extract patterns about how Gen Z gives differently that contradict long-held nonprofit assumptions. When we work with an AI customer service company, we publish findings about why enterprise AI investments collapse under pressure.
The narrative lives inside the business. It comes from what the business sees that no one else can see.
What Actually Works
If you’re trying to figure out your B2B tech narrative in 2026, here’s what we’d tell you:
Start with data extraction, not message development. Ask what your product or platform sees that’s unique. What patterns emerge from usage that would surprise people? What can you track over time that becomes a proprietary benchmark?
Build reporter dependencies. The goal isn’t a one-time hit. You want to become the go-to source for a specific slice of insight. When journalists need a stat on B2B payment trends or creator economy behavior or customer service breakdowns, they should think of you first.
Tie narrative to product cycles. Quarterly data drops, seasonal reports, annual benchmarks. The story isn’t a launch moment. It’s a rhythm that mirrors how the business actually operates.
Align sales and PR. If your sales team is telling a different story than your PR pitches, the narrative falls apart. The insight that closes deals should be the same insight that earns coverage.
Skip the $400K hire. At least until you’ve figured out what story you’re actually trying to tell. Heavy upfront strategy work followed by ongoing execution is exactly what agencies are built for. You don’t need a full-time narrative philosopher. You need someone who can connect the dots between what your business knows and what the market wants to hear, then get it in front of the right people.
Why This Matters Going Into 2026
Headed into 2026, one thing is clear: the information environment has fundamentally changed. Trust in traditional media is at historic lows. Audiences are scattered across podcasts, newsletters, YouTube, and social feeds. The reporters who are left are stretched thin and skeptical of anything that smells like a pitch.
The bar for attention has never been higher. Generic company news doesn’t clear it. Product launches don’t clear it unless they’re genuinely novel. Funding announcements barely get heard outside of the trade press.
What does work: proprietary insight, contrarian data, patterns that challenge conventional wisdom.
We’ve been using data to for B2B tech narrative building for clients since our early days, back when it was a real differentiator. Then everyone caught on. Agencies started churning out “research reports” and the whole thing got commoditized. But the issue was never surveys vs. first-party data or whatever. Surveys still work. Platform data works. The problem was lazy thinking.
A generic survey about “trends in [industry]” doesn’t tell anyone anything a competitor couldn’t also say. The data that actually cuts through is built to surface tension, challenge assumptions, or show the market something it doesn’t already believe. How you get there matters far less than whether you actually get there.
The companies winning narrative right now aren’t the ones with the biggest PR budgets. They’re the ones that figured out how to turn data into stories that reporters and audiences actually want.
The shift isn’t from “earned media” to “owned content.” That’s too simple. It’s from “get coverage for what we’re doing” to “be the source of insight that coverage depends on.”
When you’re the source, you stop chasing the story. It starts chasing you.
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