Sales and marketing, like every other profession, has been greatly impacted by technological advancements. The bulk of a salesperson’s or marketer’s work day today would be unrecognizable by someone doing the job 20 years ago.
Yet there seems to be one thing that technology has not displaced as a key component of a successful marketer’s or salesperson’s job: the story.
Entrepreneur magazine designated 2014 “The Year of the Story,” “Of all the highs and lows, storytelling seemed to be the major business lesson of 2014,” wrote staffer Amy Cosper. “Financials still matter to investors, but your story is now the story — and the one that will land you cash money.”
Harvard Business Review called it a strategic tool with “irresistible power.” “Storytelling may seem like an old-fashioned tool, today — and it is,” states executive coach Harrison Monarth, in an HBR.org blog post. “That’s exactly what makes it so powerful. Life happens in the narratives we tell one another. A story can go where quantitative analysis is denied admission: our hearts. Data can persuade people, but it doesn’t inspire them to act; to do that, you need to wrap your vision in a story that fires the imagination and stirs the soul.”
Good stories answer important questions
New York Times business reporter Alina Tugend recently extolled the importance of stories as career builders and business enhancers. “In these days of tougher-than-ever job searches, competition for crowdfunding and start-ups looking to be the next Google or Facebook, it’s not enough just to offer up the facts about you or your company to prospective employers or investors. You need to be compelling, unforgettable, funny and smart. Magnetic, even. You need to be able to answer the question that might be lingering in the minds of the people you’re trying to persuade: What makes you so special? You need to have a good story,” Tugend states.
“As human beings, we know that stories work, but when we get in a business relationship, we forget this,” Keith Quesenberry, a lecturer at the Center for Leadership Education at Johns Hopkins University, told Tugend.
Stories are the oldest sales tool, but “we keep rediscovering this and have to remind ourselves of the point of stories in a business context,” Quesenberry says. There is a formula for selling with stories, but he warns that stories fail if they’re perceived as formulaic.
Learning from a podcast
The importance of honing a well-told story is played out in the first few episodes of “Startup,” a podcast that offers a fascinating inside look at former National Public Radio producer Alex Blumberg’s launch of Gimlet Media, a podcasting production business (gimletmedia.com). In the first two episodes, Blumberg stumbles through his pitch to angel investors to the point where the investors take pity and organize his story for him. By the end of episodes three and four, Blumberg has shaped up his story, taken on a partner and signed on his first investors. By the end of episode eight, he’s hit his $1.5 million target for the startup phase with additional investors on the outside wanting in.
The “Startup” podcast is compelling listening that could be used in any company’s sales training sessions. As an added benefit, it has generated a conversation about the effectiveness — in some respects controversial — of narrative advertising. Forbes, Columbia Journalism Review and others have commented about Blumberg’s narrative approach to injecting “Startup’s” sponsored content into each podcast — almost, as CJR states, “like stories within the story.”
Blumberg is up front about it being paid content, but gives that content the same narrative treatment that he brings to the podcast. “I’m doing these sponsorships almost documentary style,” he tells his listeners.
“This storytelling thing? It’s big nowadays in marketing circles,” says Forbes contributor Michael Wolf. Commenting
on Blumberg’s approach, Wolf adds, “The ad lasted for all of 90 seconds, and that it was enjoyable for that long is kinda unimaginable since pretty much any 30-second commercial radio spot almost seems like an eternity to me. In other words, it felt like a story because it was, and it was a good one in spite of the fact it was one about a financial website that was paying Alex to do a sponsored story about them.”
“I have to wonder why more don’t follow Alex’s cue,” Wolf continues. “I’m sure some will. Most probably won’t be as good — after all, Alex’s pedigree as an audio storyteller is as bluechip as they come with ‘This American Life’ and ‘Planet Money’ on his resume. But even if they’re half as good, I’d still pay attention, and in today’s ad-saturated, everyone’s-a-storyteller world, that’s saying something.”
