How to win customers through storytelling

So now please welcome the lovely James. Thank you very much.

So I just got fired. I probably wasn’t this happy. I was probably more like this. But I was head of sales for a, large marketing agency, and I wasn’t hitting my targets, and it was time for me to be shown the door. And so I had a choice. I had a choice of either go and do things the way I’ve always been told to do them, which was, I wasn’t agreeing with, and it didn’t seem to be working, or fulfil the dream of starting my own company and trying to back myself and, you know, go along with the things that I thought were right.

And so my mum and dad very kindly lent me ten grand, and I spent five of it on a holiday to Switzerland, which was great. And then I got back, and I’d made the choice, that I was going to start Human, which was a marketing agency, and The Marketing Meetup at the same time.

Today’s running order, I couldn’t find a running photo, only a jumping one. I’m going to talk about how stories can help you sell. If you’re in a position where you have to sell your freelance business, I’m going to get you thinking about who the story is for, and who the stories are about.

Then when to tell them, because we we can tell them all the time, essentially, but some examples of when it’s useful to tell stories, and then I’m going to touch on, I’m going to touch on frameworks actually throughout the presentation. But I’m going to give you my spin on some traditional frameworks. So this was my first client, Malcolm Gray optometrists.

So they’re at the end of my road, they’re about a mile away. And they’ve been there since I was a kid. So my dad used to go there when, you know, drag me in as a 2 or 3 year old. And they’re right on the roundabout in the centre of town, and there are all these new retail units, just been built, and Boots, the optician and Specsavers or Vision Express, I can’t remember which one had just moved in.

And I was like, oh, that’s going to be a problem for them. And I’m always rooting for the underdog, right? I think we all kind of like to hear a good story. This is a family run business that had no idea about marketing, and I thought, they’re going to get absolutely squashed because everybody’s offering free eye tests and special discounts, half price glasses, and these guys just can’t do that.

So I wrote Steve the owner an email. I’m going to read this to you because you’re probably a bit far away. I say, hello Steve, hope you’re well. I hope you don’t mind me contacting you, but I feel as an independent trying to stand out in a crowded marketplace, I could imagine the addition of new retail units like Boots may have impacted your revenue.

I’ve worked for years for a big London based marketing agency and I’ve recently set up on my own to offer local brands, cost effective campaigns. My model is a bit different to the usual agency model. I noticed you stopped blogging last year, and that your Facebook page doesn’t get much engagement when you create engaging content and combine it with advertising budgets as small as 10 pounds, you can get some really great results.

I appreciate it all depends on your objectives, but I’d love to have a coffee with you and explain how I might be able to help you drive more enquiries to Malcolm Gray for very reasonable budgets. I actually live on Litchfield Road, so let me know and I can pop in to explain more. This is 2018, so I wouldn’t write this now.

I’d probably, a bit shorter, a few tweaks, but it worked. But I need you to understand the basic storytelling format before I break that email down. So most stories have this, three act, framework. So the set up, I’m using Cinderella as an example. A poor girl who wants to be loved for who she is.

She has the conflict or obstacle, which is, you know, she can’t go to the, to the ball. But she gets over that obstacle with the fairy godmother. And the resolution is, you know, the slipper fits, and yey happily ever after. Most traditional stories work like this, and it’s good to have that when you’re writing a story.

This is probably the most basic kind of framework that you can go with, and it’s a really useful tool to have in your bag. So breaking this down, when I contacted him, I’ve given him the set up. You’re an independent trying to stand out in a crowded marketplace. This is where they are right now. But I’ve introduced the villain or the conflict, which is Boots.

They’re the baddie, they’re the problem that we’ve got, and I’ve talked about the real business pain as well, right at the beginning. So I’m showing a bit of empathy. I’ve then said I’ve, it’s a slight exaggeration that I’ve said, I’m working for a London based marketing agency. It was actually a Norfolk based marketing agency that had an office in London, but it just sounded a bit fancier, and I thought they’d take me more seriously.

I’m then sort of hinting at a possible resolution. So I’m talking about the end of the story. Again, I repeat this process. So, in doing my homework, I said, you know, looking that you haven’t done any blogging, that your Facebook page doesn’t get much engagement. This is their current world view. But this is the possible future, bit of advertising budget, bit of boosting on your content, some better content, and it could be getting you great results.

There’s a bit of empathy in there as well, sort of saying like, I don’t know what your objectives are, but, you know, let’s have a coffee and then I’m making the call to action really simple, like I literally just live around the corner. Do you want me to come in and explain a little bit more?

And so I’ve created a story of what could be. And that’s the important thing there. So who is that story about? Who is the story about? Is it about me. It’s about Steve and his business. And this is one of the biggest mistakes. Malcolm’s retired actually, I did meet Malcolm. Nice guy.

When you make the story about you and your business, and I do this, and this is me, and this is great. Like, people kind of go, I don’t care. And so you make it about their business, and you talk about the threats to them, and you talk about the opportunities that they have, the thresholds that they can cross.

And then you give them the chance to be the hero in the new world. And that landed me a 12 month contract from one email, which was quite cool. So I’ve told you about how you can use storytelling to win customers, but I think there’s almost a more important one in terms of how to keep customers as well.

And I’m going to take you right back to my 20s a very long time ago, when I ran a business that arranged removals for house builders. And my biggest, customer was McCarthy and Stone, who build retirement apartments. And we used to pack up, their old home, do all their packing for them. We’d unpack them the other end.
We do a decluttering service. We guarantee to move them on dates that the builders wanted us to move them in on. We help with their customer service results.

We were like this really useful sales tool that they had. And, my AI generated image here, which clearly hasn’t worked properly. F**k AI. The thing that I could have done is reported to the people that employed us, we’ve done x amount of moves, we’ve moved, an average distance of this.

This is our average size move. These are the timescales or the facts of what we’ve been doing. That’s kind of not very interesting. There’s no emotion in there. And so this was pre people being like really on email that much. I’m going to sound really old now but I would physically send out a printed report to all the regional sales and marketing directors, all the MD’s, some of the sales managers as well.

And I would tell stories every month about the people we’d been moving. So it would be the Welsh Dresser that took six men to get up to the third floor. In this building. It would be the vase that got broken because Mrs. Miggin’s knocked it on the way out, but we went out and got her a new one. It’s the handwritten letters.

We used to get handwritten letters every single week. They were gorgeous. So I’d scan them in and put them into this thing that we printed out. And yes, the data would be in there. We’d still say how many moves there were, but that’s kind of not the interesting thing. The emotional stories were the things that would then get planted in these people’s minds.

And so what happened was, they were spending about 2 million with us a year, and we were at great risk of just being taken off if times were, you know, a little bit harder because we were just this cost at the bottom. And it was, there was a board meeting where the CEO had got hold of this report and they were struggling a bit on customer care results.

It was actually a chap, but he came in and he threw it in front of all the regional directors. And he was like, why has nobody told me about this? And it was proof that, like, people just don’t know what you’re doing and how well you’re, you know, the results you’re getting for them. I’m guilty of this in The Marketing Meetup.
Like, we don’t tell our sponsors how many people are seeing the brands. Like you need to communicate this, but you need to tell it in a way that really lands in their minds. And so when you’ve got all these senior leaders hearing these stories that are happening out there, it might not be all the stories. Most of them might be really boring, but you just pick and choose the ones that matter to them, and they’re going to create a bit of an emotional response.

So the two frameworks, that I was just going to suggest that you look up if you get the chance. One is Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, have you heard of that before? Really worth watching. There’s a couple of YouTube videos on how that works, but essentially, they usually use the Lord of the Rings as the example.

But the thing that I think is most interesting in the Hero’s Journey is the threshold. It’s between the known and the unknown. And your job as you know, as a marketer, like how do you get them from A to B or as an architect, how do you take them from a crappy 1940s house to this beautiful like, vision of the future?

Like, you can tell stories in different ways, but it’s taking them across that threshold that’s key. And then the one that I’ve told you about, Cinderella, is that is the three steps, the three act structure, the set up, the confrontation or conflict, and then the resolution. But I actually think there’s more that you can do with these frameworks.
And certainly if you’re trying to sell your business is to think about the relatable story.

So what matters to them in a very particular way. And you can use this if you’ve got case studies and examples of things that you’ve already done, you can say, look, I’ve, I’ve seen this thing about your business. You’ve made the observation like I did, but actually I’ve done this with similar businesses before.

And here’s the little thing that I’ve, you know, the case study that I’ve done and these are the results that we’ve got. You don’t really need to sell anything more. You’re talking about somebody else. But you, you know that that point is going to matter to them. And it’s a really relatable thing. So saying, you know, should we have a chat is quite an easy win.

You’re basically showing them what is possible. But this thing that always sort of sits in my mind, when I’m talking to like, sponsors of The Marketing Meetup is going, right, well, let’s help them write the script of what could be and let’s make them the star of the story. So where do you start?

Where do you start to build this muscle of telling stories? I somehow managed to link mountain biking to what I do in do marketing? I mean, god knows how. I’ve done it more than enough times on LinkedIn that people are like, how’s the cycling going, when I bump into them. But there’s a story in everything, and the art is about making a link in between something that’s unusual or tangential and bringing it to something that matters to your customers.

And so I would set yourself a challenge to think about maybe something that you really enjoy. It might be cookery, it might be, golf. It might be yoga, I don’t know, but like the things that you like really love spending your time thinking about and bring that into your business and then do the same, you know, that’s the muscle that you can build to then take your business to your potential customers as well.

And then think about the format, what matters to you. So I love pictures and videos. I’ve grown to love writing words. I’m not so good on audio, so think about the format as well, and then pick the one that your, you know your in your sort of happiest place with. It may be that, and I’m going to pick on you again as an architect, that actually pictures and images are the thing that tell the story best about what you do and build the muscle that way. And then create the habit.

So you need to do something regularly to become good at it. But also it’s quite hard to tell your story in one go. So LinkedIn’s great for telling your story in parts as well. And you can just drip feed, you know, mountain biking, relating to community. I don’t know, I’m making this up on the spot now, but, you know, there’s a cycling community and a marketing community, well what are the crossovers between them.

So that’s you know, one of the things I want to be talking about is community. If you keep telling all these micro stories, you end up telling a bigger story over a longer period of time. Which leads to playing the long game. Sending one report isn’t going to be particularly powerful. Writing one email probably won’t work.

I was very lucky with that first one. You need to just keep doing it. And for me, this is the most useful habit for somebody trying to grow their business, is about blocking out half an hour to an hour every single working day to do the uncomfortable thing, which is trying to sell and trying to write stories to sell as well.

So I would do, an hour a day, every single day, and it would usually be half an hour of outreach emails and a half an hour of something like LinkedIn or writing my newsletter. And that produced incredible results because it was something that was always on.

Before I finish up, there’s some resources. This is just stuff I like. I’m always talking about My First Million Podcast that you probably won’t, well, a lot of people don’t like the the guys that run it, but it’s, they kind of spitball ideas, business ideas all the time, and they’re always telling stories of different companies. I find that really interesting.

A couple of newsletters, Dylan Ladd and David Hyatt. And then on LinkedIn, Mel, who I didn’t realise was going to be here, and Dave Harland, you know, both brilliant copywriters, way better at storytelling than I am. And you start to see the patterns and you start to learn how they write copy, that you can then basically steal their ideas or employ them, to do it for you.

So the question to yourself is, what is your story? And that’s me.