Why your messaging needs a number written for the buyer, not for you.
Musical theater offers a surprisingly useful lesson for B2B marketers: the “I want”song. Nearly every musical features an “I want” song third or fourth in the score, after we’ve been introduced to the characters but before we understand their motivations. That’s when the protagonist steps forward and articulates what they want, often in the language of longing. It is a structural requirement: the audience cannot understand the stakes of the story unless they first understand the desire that animates its hero.
Hercules wants to find where he belongs. Hamilton wants his shot. Ariel wants to be part of another world. Mulan (like Rumi) wants to be accepted as her true self. Elder Price wants to do something incredible. The details vary, but the mechanism does not: the story cannot begin until the protagonist tells us what they want.
This turns out to be a useful metaphor for B2B marketing. Every buyer has an “I want” song: usually unspoken, often half-formed, but always present. Yet most messaging fails to reveal it. Instead, we default to talking about our own technology, our architecture, our features, our AI, our category. We sing our song. When we should be singing theirs.
I like devices that force a frame switch, and thinking about “I want” songs does exactly that. They push us out of vendor-centric thinking and into a more empathic posture: what does the buyer wish were true, not only organizationally but personally? To make the idea concrete, I went so far as to draft a sample FP&A “I want” song to the tune of Go the Distance, which worked quite well as a template. The exercise also forced me into short, simple phrasing — an unexpected but useful reminder to use plain language.
That detour was fun, but let’s return to the main argument.
The reason the “I want” structure works as a messaging framework is that its underlying components — the ache, the aspiration, and the bridge — map surprisingly well onto the way buyers perceive their own situation.
First comes the ache: the protagonist’s sense that something is missing. Ariel feels trapped; Moana feels pulled toward something beyond the reef; Hercules feels out of place. In a business context, the ache is rarely “we need AI-driven orchestration.” It is more grounded and more personal:
- I want to stop feeling constantly behind.
- I want the board to stop grilling me every month.
- I want managers to believe in the plan rather than treat it as something imposed on them.
- I want my team to get home at a reasonable hour.
- I want to actually do analysis instead of wrestling with systems.
These are the underlying motivations that drive buyers. As I’ve said before, marketers tend to remember the business benefits but forget the personal ones –i.e., the “kiss” in the benefits stack. Writing an “I want” song forces us to reinsert the personal dimension.
Next is the aspiration — the imagined better world. Hercules imagines belonging; Mulan imagines authenticity without alienation; Elder Price imagines extraordinary accomplishment. In FP&A terms, aspirations could include:
- A plan that people believe in and are committed to
- A model that can be updated without triggering a cascade of breakage.
- A planning cycle that doesn’t consume nights and weekends.
- A finance team that is viewed as a strategic partner rather than a reporting function.
These aspirations, importantly, should be described in terms the buyer actually uses, not in vendor jargon.
Finally comes the bridge — the mechanism that makes the aspiration feel reachable. In a musical, this is the moment when the hero decides to act. In marketing, this is where the product finally enters, not as the hero but as the tool that enables the hero’s journey. If the ache is “I’m stuck in Excel hell” and the aspiration is “I want a planning process that people trust and that lets me get home for dinner,” then the bridge might be: This system will take me from the chaos I live with today to a world in which the plan is credible, the board is confident, and I’m not working every weekend.
In this framing, the buyer is the protagonist and you are the mentor, guide, or map. The best narratives work this way. The worst invert the roles.
Unfortunately, much of modern B2B messaging still sings the wrong song. “We’re an AI-enabled platform delivering real-time insights at scale” is an “I am” song. The buyer does not care who you are until they understand why it matters. A better start would acknowledge the ache, gesture toward the aspiration, and only then offer the bridge: “FP&A teams spend 30% of their week pulling data instead of analyzing the business. Our platform gives them that time back.” That’s the beginning of an “I want” song: I want to put the A back in FP&A.
Companies that successfully reframe markets often do this instinctively. Snowflake didn’t lead with “cloud data warehousing”; they led with, “I want my data to be usable.” Figma didn’t lead with “multiplayer design”; they led with, “I want design to move at product speed.” Datadog didn’t lead with “observability”; they led with, “I want to see everything before it breaks.” These are buyer “I want” statements, whether or not the companies described them that way.
Narrative, messaging, and positioning are distinct disciplines, but they share a foundational principle: the buyer is the protagonist. Your first task is to understand the buyer’s “I want,” and your second is to articulate it more clearly than they can themselves.
Try this simple test: read your homepage aloud and ask whether the buyer can hear themselves as the one singing it. If the answer is no, you are singing your song, not theirs.
You know you’re on the right track when buyers start reacting not just to your product, but to your understanding of their situation. They nod before you ever show a screenshot. They finish your sentences. They repeat your messaging back to you in their own words, often with a slight sense of relief that someone has articulated the problem. They circulate your deck internally not because it describes your offering, but because it describes their goals. They say things like, “This is exactly what we’ve been trying to do,” or — my personal favorite thing to hear — “It sounds like you’ve been in our meetings for the last three years.”
Let’s net this out: if this were a musical and your buyer was the protagonist, what “I want” song would they sing?
Figure that out and you’ll build some powerful messaging. But don’t be like me and actually try to pair those lyrics to a song — though I have to admit it is fun.