#585. Attia Qureshi: How to Negotiate Sales and Marketing Into Telling One Story

Most organizations don't have a brand storytelling problem. They have a negotiation problem.

When sales, marketing, and IT each champion their own version of the company story, the result is narrative entropy — the slow fragmentation of your brand message across every channel, every team, and every customer touchpoint. And in the age of AI-powered search, that fragmentation doesn't just confuse your audience. It gets scraped, amplified, and fed back into the market as your brand identity.

Attia Qureshi knows how to stop it.

A negotiation and influence expert with two decades of experience, Attia has brokered agreements in Fortune 500 boardrooms, university classrooms, and conflict zones around the world — including negotiating with cartel-controlled farmers on behalf of the U.S. State Department in Colombia. She is a former MIT faculty member, adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, founder of Attia Qureshi Consulting, and author of the national bestseller Never Settle: Persuasion and Negotiation Skills to Get What You Want, which Daniel Pink calls a book that will "train you how to move through the world."

In this episode of the Business of Story, Park Howell and Attia explore how relational, interest-based negotiation is the missing discipline inside StoryOps — the practice of developing, operationalizing, and governing your brand narrative across every department in your organization.

In this episode you will learn:

Why sales and marketing fight over brand story — and the negotiation framework that ends it

How to map the interests of every internal stakeholder so you can build genuine cross-departmental buy-in around one sovereign brand narrative

Why narrative entropy accelerates in the age of AI — and how StoryOps, powered by negotiation, is your best defense

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Attia Qureshi Consulting: atiaqureshi.com

Never Settle by Attia Qureshi and John Richardson — available at all major retailers