Storytelling Frameworks for Marketing and Sales

Emotion drives purchase decisions more in B2B than B2C. Let that sink in.

Yes, even when selecting professional service providers, emotion plays a major factor in decision-making. The relationships we forge and the stories we tell influence opportunities, contracts, and the clients we work with.

In this episode, John and Mark delve into proven storytelling frameworks that can help professional services firms set themselves apart and connect on a deeper emotional level with clients. Joined by guest expert Troy Hiduke Campbell, they break down how stories can transform bullet points into compelling narratives that resonate and drive action. In this conversation, we cover:

• The importance of storytelling in creating emotional connections in professional services.
• Troy Hiduke Campbell's insights on Disney's story spine framework and how it can be applied to business.
• The power of the word "because" in crafting causally related, memorable stories.
• Various storytelling frameworks, including customer success stories, the hero's journey, and the problem-agitate-solve method.
• Practical steps for gathering and structuring client experiences into impactful narratives that can be used in sales and marketing.

Connect with Troy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-hiduke-campbell/

Learn more about On Your Feet: https://www.oyf.com/

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhwainwright/
Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

www.breakingbizdev.com

Transcript

John Tyreman: 0:20

All right. Welcome back to another episode of breaking biz dev where Mark and I like to break down, beat up and redefine business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. And Mark, I'm excited to share some frameworks, some storytelling frameworks today. This is going to be a fun episode.

Mark Wainwright: 0:37

I know you, I know your frameworks and you know, I know that, I know that kind of gets you going. So, storytelling is fascinating because of all the stuff that's going on in our brains, it's heartwarming and familiar because I know all of us have experienced great stories. Heard great stories, maybe retold stories. And, uh, I also think it's a fantastic opportunity because so few firms that I, I, I work with that I'm aware of really embrace the whole idea of storytelling. And, you know, if, if, And if anybody out there is just tuned in and they're like, Oh my gosh, I'm just, you know, we're going to hear another storytelling podcast. There's, there's a bunch of them out there fair. There are, and I think it's because people who really understand the power of storytelling want others to understand that as well. So I think we hear a lot about storytelling. And I would say, if this kind of subject matter in your professional services from is not appealing, it's not something that's a high priority for you. I would ask that. Everybody listening, rethink that because every single firm that I have ever touched can benefit from the power of storytelling and we'll get into sort of the why behind that, John, we've talked about client success stories in the past on previous episodes. but today we're going to add in, another voice into today's podcast, which, I'm looking forward to.

John Tyreman: 2:05

Yeah, me too. And before we get to that, I want to start off this episode with a quote from Jonathan Gottschall, who is an author, a distinguished fellow in the English department of Washington and Jefferson college in Pennsylvania. And jonathan says, and I quote, We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night telling itself stories. I thought that was powerful because, you know, it is, it's ingrained in our mind, if you think before even the written word. is how we as humans communicated, information from generation to generation, before we learned how to write. So, um, stories are powerful, not just in life, but in business and in developing new business, and that's what our focus will be on today. Um, but before we get into all of this. Leave us a rating and a review. And we'll read what you say on the show. Good or bad rain or shine.

Mark Wainwright: 3:06

Yeah, absolutely. Sick. Maybe even six stars. Can they do six stars

John Tyreman: 3:10

don't think they can.

Mark Wainwright: 3:11

Just five.

John Tyreman: 3:12

Once a five star would be great. If you leave a one star, that's great too. That gives us feedback so that we can learn and grow.

Mark Wainwright: 3:20

All right. All right. Maybe, maybe, maybe fewer ones than, than fives. Either way. We appreciate everybody who tunes in and listens. So thank you for that.

John Tyreman: 3:30

All right. So let's get into why storytelling is important. And I pulled up some, some research on this. And I think it's just like at a broad level, people buy with emotion. And then they justify their decisions with logic. the reason why I'm bringing that up is because storytelling can be a great way to evoke certain emotions. Um, there is, there was a research study that Google did where they looked at, a bunch of B2C brands, business to consumer brands, if folks don't know what B2C Um, and they really wanted to understand the impact of emotion on decision making. And then they compared those results to, decisions in B2B company. So purchase decisions in B2B and what they found was not only did the B2B brands drive more emotional connections than B2C brands, but it wasn't even close. I think it was, um, B2C brands. Had emotional connections between 10 and 40 percent of consumers. While the B2B brands that they studied, um, 50 percent were, had more emotional connections. So there was, there was a big difference between those two.

Mark Wainwright: 4:49

That's interesting. I, I, uh, my, my intuition was telling me it would be, it would be different. Uh, yeah, that's interesting. Interesting. What do you think? What do you think's behind that?

John Tyreman: 4:59

I think it is, there is an emotional connection to the decisions that B2B. buyers make because it's tied to their career, right? There's, there's more risk involved in those decisions. And so they're more emotionally invested. That's my hypothesis.

Mark Wainwright: 5:14

I think that's a good take. I, that, that makes, that makes some sense to me. we've kind of brushed up against this a little bit, you know, how our brains make decisions. We've talked about cognitive bias in the past and, just assuming that, our buyers are making these, logical, rational, reasonable decisions when they are not, and I think storytelling, this whole concept kind of weaves together with that, you know, there's, there's. Hold different parts of our brain that are firing off when people are, listening to, stories that, that poke and prod on their emotions, then if, you know, people are processing sort of bullet points and, things like that. So there's, storytelling. As sort of professional services sellers or anybody who's selling just about anything, whether it's a product or a service, just access different parts of people's heads.

John Tyreman: 5:58

So let's dive into some different frameworks that folks can use. I'd like to reprise. the customer success story that we did an entire episode about, a few months ago and, um, Mark, I'd love to give you the floor and kind of give us an overview, a reprise of that customer success story.

Mark Wainwright: 6:18

Yeah. hopefully we've talked about this enough, obviously not just in that one episode, but in others. I use the customer success story personally all the time. I use it when I am selling my services and, I talk about it frequently with the firms that I, that I work with, that it just needs to be this thing that is leveraged, you know, throughout the entire, sales process. I mean, even, even kind of creeping into kind of the marketing end of things is just because the power of, of telling stories is so important that the, the client success story framework that I talk about is a four part framework where, we articulate. First, the situation, the client situation, if we're telling a story about the work we've done, one is the client situation, two is the client need, you know, what, what arose in their world to, create the need for them to seek assistance. Third part is the work that we as a consultant did to help that client organization resolve the issue or achieve, achieve what they wanted to achieve. And the fourth part is that outcome. It's, you know, when we cross the finish line, you know, what was the, what was happening in the client organization and how did they measure that? You know, so that's my four part framework that we've talked about and is super important to integrate. And like I said, throughout all. Marketing and selling,

John Tyreman: 7:39

One thing that I want to point out for our listeners is that the, the role of. Your organization in that story is not, you're not the hero of the story. You are more or less the guide in that, in that story. Because three out of those four parts of that client success story are about the client. And there was one that third, you know, what were the solutions that we provided. that's about you and that's your role in the client's story. But it is, again, it's very focused on the client is the hero in that story.

Mark Wainwright: 8:10

Agreed. And I even like to think of that, that third part is like the work that was done as a collaboration as a co creation.

John Tyreman: 8:18

Yeah, I love that. Love that. what I'd like to do, Mark now is, um, we have a guest clip that I'd like to get to, Troy. Hi, Duke. Campbell is the founder of high Duke house. He is the chief scientist at on your feet, which is a consulting firm. And Troy has experience as a researcher and a designer for behavioral science based experiments for Disney parks and other Disney experiences. And I caught up with Troy and we talked about storytelling and he offered Disney's story spine framework And he gave an overview of that framework. And so I'd like to throw to Troy, um, hear what he has to say. And then Mark, you and I can break it down.

Mark Wainwright: 9:00

Great. Let's take a listen.

John Tyreman: 9:02

Troy, I, you mentioned that on your feet, you do, you help companies with storytelling and I'm really intrigued by this because, um, you know, a lot of buying decisions, even in professional services are made with emotion. Right. More so than logic or they're made with emotion and then justified with logic and reason. And, um, I think stories have, uh, they're a great way to evoke specific emotions, um, when used in business development. And so what I'd love to do is kind of explore this whole concept of, you know, the role of storytelling and new business development, how can experts and consultants kind of incorporate that?

Troy Hiduke Campbell: 9:43

Yeah, so let's let's back up and just say story is unbelievably important, right? So all decision making is emotional and lots and lots of researchers and theorists would say that narrative thinking is the way that the brain most easily processes and remembers information and may be one of the most distinct things that separates human cognition from other species cognition, that we can think in a cause and effect narrative flow. And that's really what, at the end of the day, story is. So, storytelling really is, at its basis, the word because. You do this, and because you did this, this positive thing happened for a client. Because this shock happened to the market, a client is now here, and now that they're here, they need something that, because of that thing, will get them back. And that really simple idea of understanding that storytelling is really about causal flow, Is something that really gets missed and that's a real basic lesson. And so when we're helping people with storytelling, we spend a lot of time first, convincing them that story is important, second, showing them that they can tell story and everybody's great at storytelling. If I asked you to tell the story of how you won an award, got a nickname or got a scar, you could probably do it really, really well. Um, and we've done that, uh, in workshops. We have everybody do it with a partner and their partner then can immediately remember and communicate it. And we're like, look, all of you just did everything we need to know about story. You brought meaning to something. You made it something that was memorable. You, you, and you told a story that was based on because. You have, you won an award because of this. You got a scar because of this. You got a nickname because of this. You're all great storytellers, and you all, um, can tell story, and now you all understand what storytelling is, the word because, and that it creates memorable, that it's, that it brings meaning and memory.

John Tyreman: 11:45

beats are not bullet points, but causally related. I love that line from Troy and I love how he tied everything together. It's the word because, because of this, this happened because of that, we discovered this and so on and so forth. So I thought that was a. A really good framework,

Mark Wainwright: 12:03

the whole because word is, is almost forcing us to turn our bullet points into the narrative. And I think that, that's 1 thing that that needs to happen is, and it's hard, it's hard for a lot of technical professionals, folks that I come across work with in the work that I do, engineers, other, you know, subject matter experts. it's hard for them to kind of get away from the bullet point stuff. And, you know, just the facts, right. And actually start to transition that or, or, or transform that into a narrative that can be spoken and read, but it's important.

John Tyreman: 12:42

Totally. And, uh, we talked about the client success story and that framework. And before we get into some other frameworks that, and I think as we go through these frameworks, we'll start to see that there are, there's a pattern that emerges and there's a lot of similar themes. Um, but before we get into that, I'd like to kind of dive into how storytelling can be used in marketing and business development and some specific examples of that.

Mark Wainwright: 13:09

Yeah, great. You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 13:13

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 13:27

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 13:37

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 13:43

and now back to the show.

John Tyreman: 13:46

I've broken it down into, there's really like two flavors. There's these long form stories and then there's short vignettes, so these long form, these case stories, the client success stories, you could package these up into downloadable PDFs, you could have dedicated web pages on your, on your website. Interviews with your client on a podcast is a great way to tell stories. In fact, I, um, was doing work with a client recently. He's a fractional chief operating officer and he wanted to source client testimonials. For his business. He's, he's going from a fractional COO and he wants to build a firm and he wants to get client testimonials for social proof. And he asked me, he said, Hey, John, what other questions should I be asking? What other information should I be pulling out? And I sent him our episode about the client success story. And, uh, I gave him some examples of some questions that he could ask his client on this interview to tease out that client success story as told by the client in their own words. And so I think that kind of podcast interview scenario, whether you have a podcast or not, just getting on a, a zoom call or on Riverside, like we're doing right now and having those kinds of conversations could be a way to tell those stories.

Mark Wainwright: 15:04

the client voice needs to come through in those stories. We can't just make them up in our heads, you know, because the client needs to really, articulate their, their, their need, their situation, you know, the, the, the, the. What solution did we kind of come up with together and ultimately their results, right? So it, it needs to come from the, from the client and you are, as the consultant telling these stories, you are simply the retailer, right? You're simply taking these, experiences, this history, maybe you've had with your clients and, and repackaging it into, into a story. the other, the other, how do we apply this to sales and marketing? That sort of second part, John, the first thing that comes to mind are the sales conversations for me. It's, you know, can you take a story and retell it live when you're having a conversation in 60 seconds, you know, or 120 seconds, you know, and it's not the long form downloadable. You know, case study pdf thing. It's, you know, are you able to articulate the situation, the need, the work done and the results really quickly and make it memorable and repeatable because that's the power, right? The power is taking the story or, you know, telling it to someone and then they go and they tell it to their other decision makers or their other team members, in their organization. I mean, that's the power, right? Is that, you know, just. Here, take this PDF and forward it off to your, 10, co workers or, your leadership team who needs to make a decision about working with a particular consultant or whatever else. There's so much more power in telling them the story and having them go retell it. Right. That's why, that's why storytelling is so fantastic.

John Tyreman: 16:42

And those, the, the PDFs play a role, right? You know, tell that story and, you know, succinctly in 60 seconds and then follow it up with here. Here's some more details about that story if you want to reference it. But to your point, the power is in the storytelling. It's telling the story and telling it in a, in a one to one, a synchronous environment where you do have a captive audience, um, or maybe it's asynchronous in, in, you know, it's like a video snippet or something like that. Um, Or you're telling that vignette, that short story in a webinar presentation, or as I'm sure you have, mark, um, you, you're a, a veteran podcast guesser, right? You've probably told many stories as a guest on other folks' podcasts,

Mark Wainwright: 17:23

I, I try, you know, and, and, and, um, hopefully, uh, if, if the audience kind of understands this is that you and I are not absolute storytelling professionals, which is why we bring in these other voices who have, more experience in our, our deeper professionals when it comes to storytelling. But, I feel I'm, I'm always kind of a student of, of storytelling, always learning, um, how to do it, when to do it, how to make it fit into a conversation. And I'd say I'm, I'm, I'm getting better and better at it. I'm not a pro, but, it's just so powerful when I'm able to recognize the moments that the story is appropriate and use it.

John Tyreman: 18:01

Totally, totally. And I've tried to make a more considerate effort myself being a guest on other folks podcast using stories. Um, and I think that's why, you know, like, like you said, we're not experts and that's why we're bringing in these voices. I'm learning a ton just from, you know, talking with folks like Troy, or, you know, going and doing research on different storytelling frameworks for this podcast conversation. For example, Donald Miller, the host of the story brand podcast, he has a framework called the story brand framework, and it is essentially, you know, there's six parts, there's a character with a problem who meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action and the result is either a success or a failure. And I think that's a simple way, a simple storytelling framework that could be applied to those little short vignettes that we talked about earlier, and you know, how you can tell a succinct story. there is the famous hero's journey framework, and this is, this is a framework that dates back to like ancient Greek mythology, right? Where you've got Odysseus and Homer and, um, all of those, those different stories where the, there is a, a hero and, or no, they're a, they're a normal individual, right? And they're called to an adventure and they meet a mentor, right? You can start to see some of the similarities here and they descend into the underworld. And they're faced with tests, they're faced with an ordeal, and then they rise above and they come out the other side and come back to that normal world where they began, but they're not the same person, they're changed. Um, they're a hero, they're, it's, they call this the resurrection in the Hero Journeys framework.

Mark Wainwright: 19:57

Right. This is the Hobbit, right? This is, uh, this is star Wars. This is, this is all of them, you know, and that's the fun thing about storytelling and about these storytelling frameworks is that every single time someone walks through a framework, I'm immediately pulling in these, all these anchors that I've created over, you know, the decades that I've been on this earth of all these fantastic stories and how they fit into these different frameworks. And, oh, right. Yeah. So they're, so powerfully embedded into our brains that, we cannot deny, you know, try as we might. We cannot deny the power of a great story.

John Tyreman: 20:33

sure. Yeah. I like Lord of the Rings, Gandalf the Gray, and turning into Gandalf the White. I'm reminded of Virgil guiding Dante through hell and purgatory, right?

Mark Wainwright: 20:42

There it is.

John Tyreman: 20:43

Each one of these frameworks that we're going over, there's really, it boils down to those three acts, right? There's the problem, And then there's some conflict that happens and then there's some solution. And, um, this last framework is exactly that it's called the problem agitate, solve framework. And now we're kind of bleeding into some copywriting frameworks. This is very similar to some other copywriting frameworks that are out there, you know, copywriting and storytelling. They're very similar. There's a lot of overlap. Um, again, there's a problem. You agitate the problem. And then solve the problem. And so that's another, a framework that folks can use. If you're thinking of a story and okay, what was the problem? Why did it suck? And then how did we solve it? You know, it's very simple way to think about it.

Mark Wainwright: 21:33

Yeah. The, the, the go and do part of all of this, John is for people to start, um, you know, just, just taking a step back, gathering the work they've done maybe with a particular client or even a group of clients who are very similar and just start to get this down, frameworks, whether it's the client success story that we've talked about in the past, or one of these other frameworks that you've discussed, you know, these three, the three part. Frameworks are fine as well. Um, just take some of some of that, some of that works, that client experience that you've had in the past and get these down and then tie the parts together into a nice story, right? Troy sort of because, you know, as a result, that kind of stuff, tie it together in a nice narrative and then start to use it, start to practice it. You can practice it internally. You can practice it externally with, with, you know, prospective clients. Um, But this is such a powerful tool that embeds the work that you do into the brains of your current prospective clients, partners, as we've kind of talked about in the past. So these stories are incredibly powerful and, will separate you from others who are just in, you know, bullet point land.

John Tyreman: 22:54

Yeah. You don't want to be in bullet point land. You want to turn those bullets into causally related. Steps of the story, like Troy outlined earlier.

Mark Wainwright: 23:04

yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the, the other thing that comes to mind is that, you know, a lot of times when professional services firms, particularly folks that, you know, I work with when they talk about developing new business, um, they, they have these experts come in and tell them that they have to develop their elevator pitch. Right. Uh, you know, and that's, I have never, ever asked my clients to do that and I never will. You know, what I would rather have them spend their time on is developing these stories.

John Tyreman: 23:34

All right, Mark. Well, I think we've broken down a bunch of storytelling frameworks. I think, like you said, the go and do part of this is to go and think about those stories that you have and start to try to organize those for your own vignettes that you can bring out in sales conversations and so forth.

Mark Wainwright: 23:51

I'd agree. I think this was a good episode and hopefully people will embrace the power of storytelling

John Tyreman: 23:57

Exactly. Until next time.

Mark Wainwright: 24:00

until next time, John.