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Tag: Story
Storytelling In Businesses Is An Effective Sales Tool
Why don’t more entrepreneurs use stories to explain their businesses?
The reason maybe they don’t understand the important benefits of storytelling in business
or how compelling stories are. But, defining and crafting a story takes time. Another misconception
is that stories are what the marketing department does.
True. But every employee should be able to tell the company’s story.
But your story needs to start long before there is a marketing department.
If it doesn’t, you could be trying to wordsmith your sales communications later for short-term
tactical gains because you don’t have a competitive advantage. Why?
Most companies have competitors, and everyone may be selling a similar product
at the same price with the same service.
Here is what Ben Horowitz, at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, says:
“The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing, No.
The story is the strategy. If you make your story better, you make your strategy better.”
The story is the engine that drives successful companies. And with today’s technology,
you can tell your story, many times for free, to individuals anywhere in the world.
That makes stories more important than ever.
Benefits Of A Storytelling Strategy
Stories will help you build and grow your company and your brand.
According to Kevin Smith, the world’s most valuable, innovative, and fastest-growing companies
know the story behind the brand regardless of age, industry, or size. (Airbnb, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, etc.) delivers success.
Or Simon Sinek, author of “Start With Why,” put it another way,
“Remember, people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it, And what you do simply proves what you believe.”
The following are some of the benefits you will get from a well-crafted story.
Stories help you develop and sell your idea.
Stories simplify big ideas in a way that sticks in one’s mind.
Data can persuade people, but data doesn’t inspire them to act.
Stories help you attract and keep talent and then improve efficiency by keeping everyone on the same page.
Stories help you transfer your beliefs to your audience.
Stories help you keep all employees on the same page and focused on the same mission.
Stories give your company a short- and long-term advantage over competitors.
Facts are essential, but sories connect and motivate people.
People remember stories but not many facts.
Stories help you build a brand.
Stories will build a foundation of trust, but a customer’s personal experience will cement
that trust into something that lasts,
Buyers often look to the story to justify the purchase.
Stories can raise the value and, therefore, the price you can charge.
You need a better story if you can’t get a higher price for your brand.
Stories help you market your brand to potential customers.
When done right, stories can significantly boost lead generation by many times normal.
Stories grow your sales pipeline — stories make it easier for your ideal customer to recognize your value.
Stories shorten your sales cycle and increase the sale ratio
Stories build your sales pipeline — stories make it easier for your ideal customer to understand your value
Stories Improve the quality of your sales forecast because they attract better-qualified prospects
If you are looking to take your startup to the next level, stories are a great way to accomplish that.
Innovative strategies that create more profits
15 Benefits Of Storytelling In Businesses
Why don’t more entrepreneurs use stories to explain their business? The reason maybe they don’t understand the important benefits of storytelling in business or how compelling stories are. But, defining, and crafting a story takes time, Another misconception is that stories are what the marketing department does. True.
But your story needs to start long before there is a marketing department. If it doesn’t, you could be trying to wordsmith your sales communications later for short-term tactical gains because you don’t have a competitive advantage. Why? Most companies have competitors, and everyone is selling the same product at the same price with the same service.
Here is what Ben Horowitz, venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz says: “The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing, No. The story is the strategy. If you make your story better, you make your strategy better.”
The story is the engine that drives successful companies. And with today’s technology, you can tell your story, many times for free, to individuals anywhere in the world. That makes stories more important than ever.
Benefits Of A Storytelling Strategy
Stories will help you build and grow your company and your brand. According to Kevin Smith, the world’s most valuable, innovative, and fastest-growing companies, regardless of age, industry, or size – know the story behind the brand. (Airbnb, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, etc.) delivers success.
Or Simon Sinek, author of “Start With Why” put it another way, “Remember, people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it, And what you do simply proves what you believe.” Simon Sinek, author.
The following are some of the benefits you will get from a well-crafted story.
Stories help you develop and sell your idea.
-
Stories simplify big ideas in a way that sticks in one’s mind.
-
Data can persuade people, but data doesn’t inspire them to act.
-
Stories help you attract and keep talent and then improve efficiency by keeping everyone on the same page.
-
Stories help you transfer your beliefs to your audience.
-
Stories help you keep all employees on the same page and focused on the same mission.
-
Stories give your company a short- and long-term advantage over competitors.
-
Facts are essential, but sories connect and motivate people.
-
People remember stories but not many facts.
Stories help you build a brand.
-
Stories will build a foundation of trust, but a customers’ personal experience will cement that trust into something that lasts,
-
Buyers often look to the story to justify the purchase.
-
Stories can raise the value and, therefore, the price you can charge. If you can’t get a higher price for your brand, you need a better story.
Stories help you market your brand to potential customers.
-
Stories, when done right, can significantly boost lead generation by many times normal.
-
Stories grow your sales pipeline — stories make it easier for your ideal customer to recognize your value
-
Stories shorten your sales cycle and increase sale ratio
-
stories build your sales pipeline — stories make it easier for your ideal customer to understand your value
-
Stories Improve the quality of your sales forecast because they attract better-qualified prospects
If you are looking to take your startup to the next level, stories are a great way to accomplish that.
Also, see our blog,” Five Quick, Effective Ways To Tell Your Business Story.”
Jim Zitek/ Harbor Capital Group
We empower entrepreneurs with information, insights, and the conviction they need to find, develop, and embed their stories throughout the development process to build successful companies.
Why Start Developing A Company Before Having Product-Market Fit?
People have product ideas all the time. Many of them are probably not winners. The number one reason they fail is achieving product-market fit. Yes, not enough money is also a big reason for failure, But money alone cannot make a startup successful. Remember Pets.com. They started with several hundred million dollars, blew it all in two years trying to find product-market fit, and went bankrupt.
So why would an entrepreneur want to start spending money developing a product before having a product-market fit? No matter how good you think, the idea is, you may be the only one in any zip code that thinks so.
So, how do you get a product-market fit? Don’t you need a product to show potential customers to see if it solves their problem and the problem is serious enough that they would spend money to buy it?
No, you don’t. However, you must have a product or service idea that solves a high priority problem, and a solution that makes sense to the buyer, and at a price, the buyer is willing to pay.
OK. What do you do? You start doing your homework. Mostly, your homework is a time requirement, not a cost problem. Be frugal and resourceful. Frugal people are generally more resourceful and, therefore, more creative than people with lots of money to spend.
Start by defining the problem, What is the problem you are trying to solve? That is not easy to answer because there isn’t a large market with a common problem. Geographic and demographic markets are filled with people who will interpret the issue in many different ways. Seth Godin, author, and entrepreneur, wrote in his book “Tribes” about how markets consist of people with a certain mindset in any zip code. Which mindset in which zip codes are you going to select?
Then, what is the solution? The solution is your story (which is also your strategy) about the problem, solution, results, and why prospects should buy from you. If you define, create, and prepare a story to explain what you offer — your value proposition, you are ready to begin talking to prospects and getting their feedback before you spend development money.
You could prepare to present your story in many different ways. For example, you could do it with a slideshow, a white piece of typing paper with hand-drawn illustrations showing key elements ( I have done that, and it works perfectly) of your story. You could produce an animated whiteboard video that would allow you to show a five-minute presentation in less than two minutes. You could use an easel with paper and make key points as you tell your story. As I said before, be resourceful. A good story packed with facts and emotion plus a visual will enable you to tell a compelling story.
No matter how technical or complicated your product is, select a story format that allows you to tell the story without jargon, and without technical terms, the audience will not understand. An excellent simple story and some illustrations will enable you to tell a compelling story,
These simple presentations will get you the information you need to find out if your value proposition could be a winner. Also, the questions you ask, and they ask you will offer insights into how you can keep revising your product until they say, “you can do that?”
Once you get to a point where you think you have a product-market fit for this specific product design and this specific audience, you will have the confidence to begin the development process.
Also, see our blog,” Five Quick, Effective Ways To Tell Your Business Story.“
Jim Zitek/ Harbor Capital Group
We empower entrepreneurs with information, insights, and the conviction they need to find, develop, and embed their stories throughout the development process to build successful companies.
How To Begin Preparing Your Story For Presentation
Anyone who has sat through a presentation knows what a data dump is. The presenter goes on and on in infinite detail until you want to cry or check your email. However, there is a time you will want to do a data dump, and its when you are preparing your story for a presentation.
Jerry Weissman, the author of “Presenting To Win,” has better use for all of this data. Instead of using it in your presentation, get out your whiteboard and set up a brainstorming session, and do your data dump there. You want to identify as much pertinent data as you can so you can create a story that will get your audience to yes.
First, start with the significant points that need to be covered. Then the supporting data for these significant points and connect the supporting data to the significant data points. When you run out of new data, you can begin to cluster the data around each major point.
You should end up with no more than 4 or 5 clusters for any presentation. Then evaluate and prioritize the data attached to each cluster. These four or five significant clusters and their supporting data form the basis and structure for your presentation. But, remember every point needs a benefit for the audience.
This approach will help keep your audiences off their cell phones.
How To Get Audience From Point A (skeptic) To Point B (convinced)
Being persuasive is one of the most important skills one can develop. Compelling situations themselves will be varied, each one posing its unique challenges and opportunities.
All presentations have one common element. To take the audience from Point A, the start of your presentation and move them to your objective Point B (your call to action). This dynamic shift is real persuasion.
According to Weissman, your presentation may be entertaining, most everyone wants that, but entertainment is not the primary purpose. When your point is not clear, you have committed one of the five cardinal sins. When your position is readily apparent, you have the opportunity to achieve your call to action.
Here is a closer look at your challenge. Point A is where your audience starts: uninformed, uninformed, dubious and skeptical about your business. Or in the worst-case, resistant, firmly committed to a position contrary to what you are asking them to do.
Weissman puts it simply. To reach point B, you need to move the uninformed audience to understand, —the dubious audience to believe, —and the resistant audience to act in a neutral way.
Understand, belief, and act are not three separate goals but three stages in reaching a single, cumulative, ultimate goal. Audiences will not act as you want them to if they don’t first understand your story and believe the message it conveys. Point B is the objective of every presentation, and the sure way to create a successful presentation is to begin with, your goal in mind.
You would be surprised at how many people forget to ask for the order at the end of their presentation. At the same time, to reach this goal, you have to understand that you have to see yourself and your presentation from your audience’s point of view. In other words, there must be empathy, an emotional connection, between you and the audience.
One way to do this is to shift your focus from features to benefits. Simply stated, a feature is a fact about your product. A Benefit is how that fact will help your audience. A feature may be necessary, but a benefit is always required. It’s their reason to act.
Persuasion Requires Understanding And Empathy
To be persuasive, you have to spend a considerable amount of time getting to know your audience. What is it that they want to hear, not what you want to tell them.
A key element of persuasion is empathy (the feelings desires. wishes, fears, and passion of the audience). Persuasion comes when you stir their emotions. The best way to achieve empathy is with a story that relates to their situation.
Everything you say and do must serve the needs of the audience and if you are guided by the audience, you will be successful. An important way to achieve understanding and empathy is to change your focus from features to benefits.
A feature is a fact about you or your product or service and may not be relevant, but a benefit is always relevant. People need a reason to act and that reason must be theirs, not yours.
Think about this. Give the audience a fact and some context as to why that fact is important. Then, give them the benefit of that fact. If you don’t have a benefit, you don’t need that fact.
If you know someone who needs to turn skeptics into believers, tell them about this post. Maybe it will help.
Great Temptations
Don’t Be Tempted
When you tell your story to prospects who want to hear it, you are tempted to “stretch” the story a little to improve it.
Peter Theil, the Venture Capitalist, assumes most people say their product performs 20% better than it does.
So he wants to invest in companies with ten times better products than the competitors.
We don’t know if 20% is the right amount of exaggeration, but it does bring up an important point.
We are exposed to so many competing stories 24/7 that this “standard” exaggeration may no longer work.
Today, you will get caught, your audience will tell others about your overkill, and you will end up the loser.
Remember, a story that resonates with people who want to hear your story are likely to believe it is true.
They will find instances that reinforce this truth, called cognitive bias, and tell others.
How can you prove your product, service, or value proposition is true (metrics, testimonials, studies, case studies, referrals, etc.)?
