Stephen's fascination with storytelling started when he was very young. Because they weren't allowed to watch television on the weekdays, he entertained himself by listening to old radio shows from the 1920s to the 1950s:
"I got to listen to all these adventures about detectives, explorers, comedians, and just about everything while I played with my Legos. I would then craft different stories around what would happen after the show."
This fascination ballooned into many different things, with Stephen even using storytelling in a business context. While this worked effectively in other industries, he noticed that this wasn't always the case:
"It wasn't until much later in sales that I would have someone who was confused about what we did. When I would tell them a story about how we've helped somebody else, you could see their light bulb go off.
And when I worked with founders, I saw that they too didn't understand that people wanted to know about the story behind their technology versus just hearing what the technology did."
This gap drove Stephen to advocate the use of storytelling in business:
"This is something founders, especially software companies, should use to build a better and deeper relationship with their customers to attract them to the outcome their software can help people achieve, versus just another button or widget they can install on their website."
Nowadays, Stephen works as a consultant across the B2B space where he helps clients build out their sales process.
Why Stephen advocates for storytelling
When Stephen worked in sales for startups, the lack of proper training became a transformative moment for him:
"On my first day in sales, they'd just give us a list of leads and told us to get meetings. I asked them, 'But what do I say?' and they just told me to figure it out. Looking back, that was a terrible way to run a company because they didn't do anything to shorten my learning cycle."
This pain fueled Stephen's drive to help founders do better in sales:
"Because I knew that that wasn't a good way to run a company, I wanted to be the help that I didn't have. I want to help founders fire themselves from sales, and train solid salespeople that can sell from a good place."
His philosophy on sales
"We're humans solving human problems in a business context.
So the things I talk about with storytelling specifically are one of the key ways to humanize what we sell because we're helping people solve their problems. Stories are the fastest way to bridge a gap between two people because you can see yourself in the action."
Why use storytelling?
Reason 1. It helps your audience tell their own stories better
"You have a company that has a product/service, but I don't really care about that. I care about the outcome that your product/service helps me have. You need to be able to tell me a story about how you helped somebody else get there as an example.
This will help me say, 'Hey, that's me!' because I'm experiencing the same problem. You have to give me something to pay attention to and want to learn more about your solution."
Reason 2 and 3. People remember stories better and you teach them what to say about you.
"You could tell me about your product, how you built it, how it's coded faster, but I don't really care about that stuff.
But I'll remember the story and tell that story to other people in my company. When they ask me about our conversation, I could tell them 'They helped another vendor increase their efficiency by 65% by leveraging this part of their tech stack.'"
Reason 4. It helps you differentiate yourself from the rest
"A lot of folks can do what you do, but who you are is the most interesting thing about what you do."
And if we don't tell our own stories, Stephen says the market will decide that for you:
"But the market doesn't know how to help you craft your story. That's why you have to put your story out there and create that lore in the sea so that the fish can come by and attach to your message."
How to integrate storytelling into B2B SaaS
In the B2B space, it would seem difficult to integrate personal stories into what we do.
Stephen says that there are three stories that could work really well in a sales context. Each one could be talked about in a company and a founder's perspective:
- Mission
- Vision
- Milestones
Mission
If you're talking about this as a company, you can answer questions such as:
- What is the company's mission?
- What are you trying to achieve as a company?
- Why did you start the company?
Here's how you can talk about it from a founder's point of view:
- Why are you on this mission?
- Why are you doing this thing?
- What made you get up and work on solving this problem?
Vision
The vision story answers questions such as:
- What does it look like when your mission is completed?
- What's the big overarching thing that you want to help affect in the marketplace?
Stephen says that stories about your company vision help you attract the right talent:
"A big vision draws a bigger crowd and helps people say, 'Yeah, I want to be part of that and solve this big issue.'"
As founder, you can talk about why this is your vision for the world.
Stephen adds that you can also think about the engagement when considering if you should be talking as a company or as a founder:
"A lot more engagement comes from the personal point of view than from a company's. So if you're thinking about telling a story, it would be better if it comes from you (the founder) than it does from your company page."
Milestones
If you'll be talking about it as a company, you can talk about:
- Company milestones
- The company's experience getting to that milestone
- Customers' experience working with you
From a personal point of view, you can talk about your journey as a founder:
"I'm sure that founding a company might be one of the most difficult things you've ever done in your entire life. You may want to quit some days like the rest of us do and you're asking yourself, 'Why am I doing this?' That's an interesting story."
You can also answer questions like:
- What keeps you staying there?
- What have you been through?
- Have you almost lost your business? Did you come back and build something cool?
"These things make people love and respect you because you're not one of these gurus that are just telling them, 'everything's great' all the time.
That's the most human part of you and that's what's interesting to tell people about."
When to tell a story
There are four questions you should ask yourself before telling a story. These also help you decide which story to tell and how to make it useful for your audience.
To illustrate the process, we'll be using the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) as an example.
Question 1: What's at stake?
This question talks about a pressing issue that your customers have.
Because there's currently an uncertainty with AI, a lot of business owners are asking questions such as:
- Is it going to help us or hurt us?
- Is it going to take all of our jobs?
- Are we going to have a utopia with AI?
"What's at stake with AI? That's a question every business owner wants to know. AI is the thing that's at stake. Who's going to win and who's going to lose?"
Question 2: What does your market want to learn about the thing at stake?
This next question covers concerns like:
- Does your audience want to learn how to be more successful with the thing at stake?
- Who's going to be the winner or loser?
- What are the techniques they can use to streamline their operation with respect to the thing that's at stake?
For the AI example, this would look like:
- How can they leverage AI to streamline their business?
- How can they make sure that AI doesn't take jobs away?
Question 3: How do you want them to feel?
"Sales takes place in the emotions first. 95% of purchasing decisions take place in the subconscious. This means the animal brain is making the decision for us and then we back into that animal decision with a 5% of logic.
Label that emotion you want people to feel. That'll tell you a lot about which story to tell."
In the AI example, we want our audience to feel like they haven't figured it out yet, and they might stand to lose if they don't invest their time or attention into learning and achieving what's at stake.
Question 4: What do you want your audience to do next?
Stephen says this is where everybody falls off:
"They tell a great story that has no relevance to people because they don't tell the audience what to do with it."
In the AI example, this should look like:
"If you'd like to learn more about how to leverage these techniques, register for our upcoming webinar. We're going to discuss three key issues and leave you with something that you can use to make sure AI is present in your business and is helping you grow the way you want."
Stephen adds that storytelling keeps the audience engaged while you're moving through the questions:
"The story captures the attention and keeps the engagement. And then we move through the rest of those questions to then create a nugget that people can then take home, use for their own benefit and in effort to help them tell their own story better."
Sell the outcome
"There's a quote by Theodore Levitt who was a professor at Harvard saying, 'People don't want to buy a drill. They want to buy a hole.' Sell me the hole because the drill is just the vehicle I use to get there."
Stephen shares that most SaaS founders make this mistake:
"A lot of SaaS founders sell drills and that's not what people want to buy. So they're like, 'Oh, I'll sell drill bits instead.' No, sell the outcome. The story is how you sell the outcome.
Once I know what the outcome is, then I may want to learn about what your drill does or why it's faster with higher RPMs. You need the story as the entree to show how you solved the problem I'm experiencing."
How to use storytelling in sales calls
Tip 1: Know who you're talking to and their potential use case
"I see a lot of founders, salespeople, and software companies fall off because they don't do their research before they get on the phone with the prospect."
By doing research upfront, Stephen says this helps you think of the story you'll tell about someone who experienced the same problem and how you helped solve it.
You should also ask the prospect the "kryptonite question":
"Ask them, 'What made you hop on that call today?' The prospect will give you some context so now you know exactly what argument you need to make for your solution in contrast to the information that they've shared."
Tip 2: Summarize the findings
After the discovery questions, you can insert another story when you're summarizing the findings:
"You can say, 'Hey, it sounds like you need X. You're looking for Y, and Z has been a problem because you haven't been able to achieve A, is that right?'
Now you can jump into a very light case study about how you've helped others with the same problem, and present what you think you can do for that prospect."
After walking through a very light case study, Stephen shares that they usually ask the powerful questions:
"We ask them, 'Does this sound like the results that you want to get?' If they're a qualified prospect, they're probably going to say yes."
Stephen says when the discovery questions are done right, you can present social proof without saying that you're the best in the market.
Final advice
Do start a story bank.
"Have a document where you can collect stories that apply to something you think will be relevant to your client. This makes you effective and able to demonstrate a breadth of knowledge to people in a way that's going to grab them."
Don't think that you can start tomorrow and you'll get to it.
"Start right now."
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