There are many, many elements that set the best stories from the meh (or straight up boring) ones apart. Compelling characters, clear structure, authentic language, emotional stakes, vivid imagery…the list goes on.
But there's a solid reason some stories grip you where others fall flat: the build-up of tension.
“Tension focuses our attention. Tension brings us closer, eager to find out how the tension will be relieved.” - Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception
A look at some of this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Picture showcases what building tension in great storytelling looks like:
- Ryan Coogler's Sinners earned a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations in part because Coogler keeps the tension high with pacing, creating an emotional, anticipatory push and pull throughout its Jim Crow-era vampire story.
- Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme maintains his trademark suffocating atmosphere where a series of interwoven plotlines build into a never-ending anxiety attack as a table tennis hustler pursues greatness at any cost.
- Sentimental Value explores an uneasiness between artistic expression and personal connection, with long-standing family tension building over every scene as estranged daughters reunite with their filmmaker father.
These films establish a gap and make you, the viewer, live in it. The best product stories do the same thing, creating tension in the gap between where your buyer is now, and where they want to be.
Why tension works in product storytelling (and how to build it)
Tension creates urgency. When buyers see the gap (and feel the.. well, tension) between where they are now and where they could be, they want to close it. When done well, tension makes buyers so uncomfortable with their current state, it drives the motivation to change.
This discomfort is the point. We're wired to resolve gaps between our reality and our desired state. When you show buyers the distance between their painful current situation and the outcome they're desperate to achieve, you create a psychological pull. They need to see how it resolves. That pull is what keeps them engaged through your entire story, from the first moment of recognition through to the solution you eventually show them.
But here's where most B2B marketing misses the mark: when marketers don't start by building tension, instead leading with "our platform does X, Y, Z," they skip right over making buyers feel or relate to the pain points. The result is a lack of emotional investment, urgency, and, ultimately, story. Buyers might intellectually acknowledge they have a problem, but acknowledgment isn't the same as feeling it. And if they don't feel it, they won't prioritize solving it.
It’s important to strike the right balance, however – you don’t want to overcorrect because, as former Head of Content and current host of the How Stories Happen podcast put it, "[t]oo much tension is obnoxious, but the right amount is inspiring." Pile on too much pain without direction, and buyers shut down or disengage. They need to feel the problem is real and urgent, but also solvable. The art is in building enough tension to create discomfort and motivation without tipping into overwhelm.
How tension shows up in B2B: Three “currencies”
In B2B storytelling, tension most commonly shows up in three specific ways buyers feel pain:
- Lost time: Work takes longer than expected; progress slows to a crawl
- Lost revenue: Opportunities fail to convert or expand when they should
- Lost efficiency: Effort and investment produce diminishing returns
Here's the critical part: simply naming these currencies doesn't evoke emotion or inspire action on their own. Saying "you're losing time" or "you're losing revenue" is still too abstract. Tension only works when it's tied to concrete specifics that resonate.
Why Specificity Matters
The difference between generic tension and effective tension comes down to specificity:
Generic: "Communication is inefficient"
- Creates distance because it could apply to anyone.
- Buyers think "yeah, sure" and move on.
Specific: "After eight Slack threads and six revised decks, no one knew which version was final"
- Creates immediate recognition, and evokes feeling: "Yes! That happened to my team last month."
- Buyers feel seen and understood, becoming receptive to what comes next.
Concrete, observable moments transport buyers into the problem, and that's when tension is doing its job.
Tension in Action
The best GTM teams understand this balance: enough specificity to create recognition, and enough pain to make the gap feel urgent. Here's how some of the most successful companies built real tension into their stories:
What building tension looks like in practice
Slack
Before Slack became ubiquitous, they didn't lead with being a "team messaging platform." They built tension by painting a visceral picture of communication chaos. Their early marketing showed you living in the pain: important conversations buried in email threads you'll never find again, files scattered across five different tools, that one person who always replies-all, your team spending more time looking for information than actually using it.
Instead of just saying "email is inefficient", they made you feel the specific, maddening micro-moments of that inefficiency. The tension worked because they let you sit in the frustration before showing you the way out. The gap they established was clear: the distance between scattered, chaotic communication and the seamless collaboration your team desperately needed.
“Slack didn’t just position itself as a better communication tool. It made email the bottleneck of modern work and turned ‘Slack vs. Email’ into an industry-wide debate. The best narratives don’t just prove a product works. They make the audience rethink the way things should work.” – “B2B storytelling is broken. Here’s how to fix it.”, Marketing Qualified
Gong
Gong's storytelling tapped into a deeply personal tension every sales leader feels: you have no idea what's actually happening on your team's calls. Their narrative wasn't about "call recording and analytics" – it was about the anxiety-inducing gap between what your reps say is happening and what's actually happening. Between the deal you thought was in the bag and the one that went dark. Between coaching based on assumptions and coaching based on reality.
In their demos and content, they showed you the exact moments: a rep talking 80% of the call when buyers want to talk, missing buying signals, or making promises the company can't keep. They made you feel the consequences – not just lost deals, but damaged relationships, blown quotas, and coaching built on fiction. Tension was built through recognizing the blindness of managing without visibility.
Notion
Notion didn't tell you they were an "all-in-one workspace." They showed you the chaos first. Their storytelling opened with the familiar nightmare: meeting notes in Google Docs, project updates in Slack, roadmaps in Jira, design specs in Figma, important decisions scattered across eleven different threads with no one knowing where anything is. Teams asking the same questions twice because the answer is buried somewhere no one can find.
The genius was in the specificity – not "tools are fragmented" but showing you the actual lived experience of that fragmentation. The seventh time someone asks "where's that document?" The moment you realize the source of truth doesn't exist. The tension they built was the exhausting cognitive load of context-switching between tools and the organizational chaos of having no single source of truth. Then, the solution came by showing what the light at the end of the tunnel could look like.
“Craft campaigns that focus on your customers’ aspirations rather than your product’s features. When you position your brand as an active participant in their success stories, you create emotional resonance that drives loyalty.” – Christopher Ruben, “How Storytelling Transformed Notion into a $10 Billion Movement“
Figma
Figma's early positioning identified a tension most designers didn't even realize they were living with: the painful isolation of design work. Their narrative showed you the broken workflow – designers working in isolated files, emailing static mockups back and forth, sitting in conference rooms pointing at screens trying to explain interactions, developers squinting at redlined PDFs trying to guess at spacing and behavior. They didn't just say "real-time collaboration."
They showed you the designer staying late to incorporate feedback because no one could edit the file directly. The project was delayed three days because one person was out sick and had the only version. The handoff meeting that took two hours to explain what could have been experienced in two minutes. The tension they built was the gap between design's potential as collaborative craft and the reality of it being practiced in silos with clunky, asynchronous handoffs.
How to build tension in your product story
“You can't have a story without tension, and you can’t have tension without conflict. And neuroscience research has found that this dynamic makes us immersed and emotionally engaged. It’s addictive!” – Joe Lazer, “RENT: The 4 Elements of Great Stories, According to Neuroscience”
Here's the framework the best GTM storytellers use:
1. Identify Your Central Tension
What's the specific, painful gap between where your buyer is and where they desperately want to be? Not the product gap – the emotional gap.
Write it down: "The gap between _____ [current painful reality] and _____ [desired state]"
2. Show the Pain in Specifics (Don't Just Tell It)
Replace abstractions with observable moments. Not "It was frustrating" but "After eight separate Slack threads and six revised decks, no one knew which version was final." Make them see it, feel it, recognize themselves in it.
Use "you" language to put your buyer in the narrative – "Your team spending more time looking than doing" not "companies struggle with this."
3. Quantify What's Being Lost
Make the gap measurable in one of three currencies:
- Time: "Your team spends 12 hours a week in status meetings that could be async updates"
- Money: "20% of deals stall because buyers can't get answers fast enough"
- Efficiency: "Every handoff adds three days to the timeline"
4. Let Them Live in It Before You Solve It
This is where most demos fail. They introduce the problem in one slide and jump to features by slide two. Instead, show multiple moments of the daily pain. Let them feel it before you offer relief.
5. Show the Path Through (Not Just the Destination)
When you finally show your solution, tie each capability directly back to the specific pain points you established. Not "Here are our features" but "Remember that two-hour handoff meeting? Here's how that becomes two minutes..."
The tension is the story
Here's what great storytellers – whether filmmakers or GTM leaders – understand: tension is the fundamental mechanism that keeps audiences engaged. It's the gap that demands to be closed, the question that demands to be answered, and the pain that demands to be resolved.
Your product story needs a central tension because it sustains the entire narrative, capturing and holding your audience’s attention.
Not "our platform solves X", but "here's the gap you're living in every day – the distance between where you are and where you could be. Here's what that gap is costing you, here's what it feels like to live there, and here's the clear path through."
If your buyer doesn't feel you understand their problem deeply, they'll never value your solution enough to change their behavior.
Without tension, all they’re left with is a feature list.
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