<aside> 🎭 The Fábula is the buying scenario we bring to each competitor's sales team. It defines who we are, who our client is, why they need a solution, and what problems they're solving. Every detail is internally consistent and designed to pass qualification checks naturally.

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Mystery Demo is run by a consultancy. Consultancies routinely evaluate software on behalf of their clients, so the outreach itself is natural — no cover story is needed about who's asking. The only fictional element is the client we say we're representing. That fictional client is the Fábula.

The fictional element is the client scenario. We create an imaginary company on whose behalf we're evaluating solutions. This company has specific needs, pain points, and a buying timeline — all crafted to draw out the most useful information from each competitor's sales process.

How We Build the Client Scenario

<aside> 🏢 Anatomy of a Client Scenario. Every Fábula rests on a fictional buyer profile specific enough to feel real on a discovery call and broad enough to work across every competitor in the engagement. The six elements below are what goes into a scenario. For this example project, we describe the structure instead of showing a live scenario.

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• Industry and vertical. Names the market the fictional client operates in. Chosen to match the buyer persona every competitor sells to, so each pitch lands naturally and no seller flags the request as a wrong-ICP conversation.
• Headquarters and geography. Locates the fictional client in a region that makes multi-national, data-residency, and compliance questions credible without raising flags. A distributed-team angle often unlocks the most useful cross-border probing.
• Team size. Calibrated to the competitor's ICP. Too small and enterprise vendors disqualify; too large and SMB vendors escalate to specialists who would recognize the buyer-type mismatch. The sweet spot is serious enough to engage, not large enough to trigger procurement.
• Funding stage. Signals budget envelope. Series A implies a six-figure decision; Series C implies seven. The stage also implies the buying committee's shape — early-stage decisions move fast with two or three stakeholders, later stages add procurement and security reviews.
• Current stack and growth driver. Describes what the fictional client runs today and where it's stretched. A concrete growth driver ("3x data volume from new enterprise clients", "expansion into a regulated vertical") is the pain lever sellers lean into, which surfaces the sharpest product positioning.
• Decision timeline. Tight enough to command sales-team attention, loose enough to justify multiple touch-points and let a standard follow-up cadence play out. A 4-8 week window hits this zone for most mid-market B2B evaluations.

How the Outreach Works

The first touchpoint with each competitor opens by identifying the consultancy running the evaluation, introducing the fictional client we are representing, framing the business driver (scale inflection, vertical expansion, compliance requirement), and setting a decision window. Specifics change per engagement. The structure does not.

What Makes a Fábula Work

• Authentic positioning. The consultancy approaches each competitor as itself — an actual research firm evaluating tools on behalf of clients. No fake identity, no inconsistencies to maintain across meetings. Sellers take the call because the request type is familiar and low-friction.
• Credible buyer profile. The fictional client is built to match every competitor's ICP. A Fábula that reads as SMB to an enterprise vendor, or the reverse, gets disqualified fast. Calibrating the profile is the single most important craft decision on the page.
• Natural discovery surface. The scenario contains honest reasons to ask the discovery questions that surface real intelligence — multi-region data residency, compliance scoping, integration complexity, pricing floors. These are the dimensions where public marketing is least accurate and private conversation is most revealing.
• Right-sized urgency. The decision timeline is tight enough to earn AE preparation investment, loose enough to avoid triggering procurement scrutiny, and long enough that standard follow-up cadences play out in full. A 4-8 week window hits this zone for most B2B SaaS evaluations.

How We Adapt the Fábula Per Competitor

The scenario's core stays stable across every outreach — same fictional client, same pain, same timeline. What shifts is the emphasis: each conversation leads with whichever dimension the competitor is strongest on, so the discussion naturally tracks to their sharpest differentiator. Below are the axes on which emphasis typically adapts.