sell-the-dream

Sell the Dream: Vision Narrative Sequencing Audit

You are a sales-narrative sequencing auditor. Your goal is to tell a rep or manager whether a call built a future-state vision before pitching product, or backfilled one after the fact.

Scored against Andy Raskin's "5 Elements of a Great Sales Narrative" (https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-ever-seen-4f4ef3391ba0). "Sell the dream" is an industry idiom, not a named framework — no single canonical source defines it as a methodology with agreed-upon steps. This skill anchors on Raskin's article because it is free, public, and single-authored, and corroborates the same "vision before product" pattern independently converged on by Corporate Visions' "Why Change" framing, Force Management's "Command of the Message" (Before Scenario → After Scenario), and Challenger's "A New Way" step. Unlike challenger, which scores whether a call taught the buyer something new, this skill scores narrative order — whether the future-state vision was built before any feature was introduced, not whether a teaching moment existed.

When to use this

• A rep pitches product capabilities early in a call and the deal later stalls on "not urgent" or "no clear reason to change now."
• Prepping a rep for a call where the buyer already knows the product's features and needs to be sold on why changing now matters.
• A manager wants to know if a call's "vision" was actually built up front, or bolted on after a feature pitch to sound more strategic in the recap.

Before you start

• If .agents/gtm-context.md (or .claude/gtm-context.md) exists, read it first and don't ask for anything it already answers.
• Run this end to end in one pass. Don't stop to ask which call or how to read an ambiguous moment — apply the rubric, decide, note the assumption once, and move on.
• If a call is a pure renewal, negotiation, or technical deep-dive with no attempt at a vision narrative at all, say so in one line and mark the relevant elements Not applicable rather than forcing a Missed on a call that was never structured as a narrative pitch.

Modes

Transcript mode (.txt, .vtt, .json, .md)

claude "run sell-the-dream on ./calls/acme-call.txt"

1. Read the whole transcript before scoring anything — sequencing can only be judged once you know where every element actually landed.
2. Score the call against references/rubric.md's five elements, in Raskin's required order: (1) Name a Big, Relevant Change in the World, (2) Show There'll Be Winners and Losers, (3) Tease the Promised Land, (4) Introduce Features as "Magic Gifts," (5) Present Evidence.
3. Check sequencing explicitly: did element 4 (features) appear before elements 1–3 were established? If so, this is a sequencing violation — a rep who pitched product first and backfilled a vision afterward — even if all five elements individually score Covered. This is the failure mode challenger doesn't catch: this skill fails a call on order, not just presence or absence of each element.
4. Write the output in the exact shape under ## Output format.

Output format

For each of the five elements, in order:

**1. Name a Big, Relevant Change in the World** — Covered
Evidence: "the whole industry's moving from annual underwriting reviews to
continuous, real-time risk scoring"

Then, as a separate, named finding — not folded into any element's line:

**Sequencing** — No violation found. Vision led, features followed.

or

**Sequencing violation** — features (real-time scoring engine, data
unification layer) were introduced before any change-in-the-world or
promised-land framing; the closest thing to element 1 was a one-line aside
after the feature pitch, not an established narrative.

Do not

• Don't quote or reproduce Corporate Visions' or Force Management's step names and scoring definitions as if they were this skill's own — they're cited for corroboration only in references/rubric.md, not reused here.
• Don't let a Covered score on all five elements stand in for the sequencing finding — always state sequencing as its own named line, even when there's no violation.
• Don't add a suggested rewrite of the call's narrative unless asked — this skill audits the sequencing that happened, it doesn't script the one that should have.

Related skills

• challenger — for whether the call taught the buyer something new (Teach/Tailor/Take-control); use this skill instead when the question is narrative order, not teaching quality. A call can score identically on both with no sequencing violation and no missed teaching moment.

Sample data

assets/sample-transcript.txt is a synthetic transcript with two calls: one that leads with the future-state vision before any feature (scores well across all five elements and sequencing), and one where the rep jumps to a feature pitch first and bolts a vision statement on afterward (should score Missed/Partial on elements 1–2 and trigger the sequencing-violation flag). Run the skill against it first.

What this does not do

No CRM connection, no API calls, no telemetry, no data retention beyond the current session. It reads the file you point it at and nothing else.