The art of storytelling and getting the audience to listen
Sigma School
18th August 2023
For a startup, storytelling is marketing. For a startup, marketeers make stories.
The startup business is built on telling stories. People love stories, and they remember stories. But storytelling in marketing is harder than storytelling in art - art involves a sense of mystery; marketing requires a sense of logic.
There is an old idea that a good story has three parts: beginning, middle, and end. The middle is often the most interesting part. But marketing often has two parts: beginning, and end. The beginning is easy. You talk about your product, and people buy it. The end is the hard part. You sell, of course. But what happens next is even more important.
A story is only a story if people believe it. A marketer's job is to convince people to believe the story.
Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, calls this the 10X rule. If somebody's going to do something, do it 10 times better than anybody else.
In marketing, that means making something exciting enough so that other people will want to tell it.
There are three main ways in which marketers get stories told.
One is by advertising. Sales pitches, the pitches executives give to investors, and the pitches customers get at trade shows are all advertising.
Another is by word of mouth. The stories customers tell each other about products, and the stories that salespeople tell customers are word of mouth.
The third is by influencers. The stories bloggers, journalists, and other influencers tell about products - and the stories they tell about other marketers - are the last kind of story marketers can get told.
Sales managers know the benefits of storytelling. But most salespeople don't master the art of storytelling.
Stories are a way to frame problems, show what's at stake, and motivate people to act. In business, stories are used to persuade people to buy. But stories are also a way to get people to listen. They just make sense.
Some stories work better than others. The "how might we" story, in which a problem and its solution are framed in terms of a plausible, but imaginary, future, is more powerful than the "what should we do now?" story, which asks people to consider a problem as though it had already happened.
A "what might we" story can be told in a thousand ways, but they all share a key feature: the assumption that some future is possible. Stories are about the future. Without the assumption that the future is possible, there is no story.
But the "what might we" story isn't just about the future. It's also about human nature. Human nature is a story. Stories shape the way people see and understand the world. Stories are also part of human nature: human beings tell stories to explain events to themselves.
Stories help, because people naturally like stories. But stories aren't the only things people use to get an audience to listen. People also listen because listening to stories is easier than listening to arguments. People prefer to tell stories.
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