Tweet

StorySelling “How to Write Mini User Stories”

Guest post by: Michael Harris

Article Overview: Why: Use mini user stories, with the right sales message, so that your salespeople are able to sell value and differentiate your offering instead of pitching product and reducing price. Mini User Stories: Make the stories short. Use only one constraint per story otherwise you risk flooding the Buyer with too much information. Make the Buyer the Hero of the Story: Many Customer Stories make the company out to be the hero who rode in on their white shinny horse to save the Buyer.

StorySelling “How to Write Mini User Stories”

But do potential Buyer’s want to see themselves as losers in your story? No, so change the story. Make it a story that attracts rather than repels the Buyer: A story the Buyer actually wants to see themselves in it. How? Make the Buyer the hero.

Joseph Campbell’s “Hero Story” is hardwired into our heads through movies and stories. He travelled to over 100 countries and documented Myths & Hero stories in his book “The Hero with 1000 faces.” It’s required reading for screenwriters. George Lucas, for instance, reread it before making Star Wars. In this book, Josephshowed how all Hero Stories follow a similar pattern of five steps: 1) The world is normal; 2) Something changes; 3) The hero pushes back; 4) The mentor guides the hero to victory; 5) The hero saves the day.

So, following this process, guess what role the Salesperson plays? That’s right, not the hero but the mentor. The customer is the hero.

How do you do that? Every story needs conflict to be interesting and a villain makes it even better. How many movies, for instance, do you see about a happily married couple? None. Why? Because it’s dull.

However, never make the Customer or their employees out to be the villain. Prospective Buyer’s don’t want to see themselves in that story. Instead, describe how the customer was smart at the time to buy your competitor’s product and that they have good employees. The problem is that with time, through no fault of the Buyer, the landscape changed and they now need to change. Hence, make the villain external (changing time, government regulation, new market conditions, changes competitive landscape or changes in technology).

So, the simple story is 1) Challenge; 2) Struggle and; 3) Resolution.

Delta: Make sure you create contrast between where the customer is and where they need to be so that the cost of the problem is greater than the cost of your offering plus the risk of change.

When the Buyer is in denial that they have a problem, asking them questions about their problem will get you nowhere because they don’t see themselves as having a problem. They are like the frog in water that doesn’t notice as the water gradually gets hot, until it’s too late. For example, asking the frog if he finds the water hot doesn’t work. This represents the status quo bias that every Enterprise Salesperson is up against and it manifests itself as resistance to change. And no change means no sale.

A story, however, is a soft way to help the Buyer see themselves in your story. With a story, hopefully they may gain sufficient insight that their problem is bigger than they thought, and maybe, they may consider changing. Like the frog in the pot who suddenly realizes that the water is about to boil.

Emotion: Someone once described a story as a fact wrapped in emotion. Try to let your imagination wander and build up a story in your mind with emotional words like frustrated, desired, exasperated etc. so that it reads like a story instead of a string of boring facts. Make it memorable by making it real: About real people facing real problems. Talk about how people were affected by the before and after of your offering. Remember, with StorySelling, you are in the emotional transportation business.

Quantify: Try to quantify the cost of the status quo. That’s what we try to do in the ‘Value Creation Worksheets’ in the ‘Constraint’ and the ‘$ Constraint column’. You can also include the value of the capability.

Metaphors: If you can add a metaphor or an analogy, your story will be greatly improved. It will help make the abstract concrete. It will make your story memorable. The only problem is that I only come up with a metaphor for 1 in 10 stories. Maybe you will have a higher success rate.

Showtime: Before a client meeting, tear up your story and be in the moment with the Customer.

Acid Test: How do you know if it’s a story and not a collection of facts? Tell it to a colleague and see if they can tell it back to you. If they can’t, rework it.

How do you improve a story? Tell it to a customer, gauge their response, refine the story, tell it again etc. That’s how you naturally improve your story about your vacation, how you met your partner etc.

My Story for your Story: I try to end each story with ‘that’s Paul’s story, what’s yours?’ I then add quantification questions just in case the Buyer needs help to quantify the cost of the status quo for their story.

Writing Stories is Easy: You know how to tell a story. And with these guidelines, you’ll be even better. But StorySelling requires that you must first create the right argument for your offering, before you wrap it in a story, otherwise your stories will be off target and pointless. To help you create the right raw ingredients for your stories, we have designed the Sales Messaging in a Box 1^1/2 day Workshop.

Good luck.

Related Articles
  StorySelling: How to get past your Buyer’s defensive wall and create a need
  Deciding the Nature of Your eZine
  Evaluate Traders by Their Stories
  Nothing about the revamped Mac desktop line-up tempts my wallet
  Cool Sales Idea You Can Learn From a Christmas Orange
  Mobile Privacy – 4 Points to mobile app developers
  How Mini Courses Work For An Internet Marketing Business
  Start A Consulting Business And Build A Client Base With Autoresponders
  Repurpose and Repackage Your Products To Build Your Six-Figure Online Business
  How is your self esteem doing today?
  4 Point Plan: Use Your Stories To Sell More
  Create a Powerful Marketing Story in Three Steps
  Rule #13: Tell Your Story with Sub-Headlines
  How to Churn out eZine Content
  “Buy on Emotion” now supported by brain scans.
  Leverage Social Media - LinkedIn Strategies
  Analyst says we shouldn’t expect revamped Mac desktops anytime soon—but I beg to differ
  My call: Snow Leopard by July, quad-core iMacs by October
  Get Smart - Offer a Proposal
  Quantifying the User Experience

Article Tags: 1000 faces, amp, challenge 2, changes in technology, competitor, five steps, george lucas, government regulation, hero story, joseph campbell, landscape, losers, married couple, mentor, myths, prospective buyer, salesperson, screenwriters, time government, villain



Related Forum Posts
Re: Quote of the Day - "Have the courage to follow your heart an - [quote="GT Bulmer":102twzd2]Hi, Evan: I haven't yet managed to capitalize on the longings of my heart as successfully as Jobs did[/quote:102twzd2] Hi GT - I woke up thinking about this post and I have a challenge for you for May if you're up to it. Here it is: Write the blog post / article you were born to write. Write something that you can pour your heart and all your passion into. Write something where you can change the life of the person reading it. Write something where if you look back in 10 years you'll be really proud of what you created. Can you do that? I'd love to read it (and I bet a lot of others will too!)
Facebook and Beacon - What Do You Think - This landed in my inbox. Any thoughts???? Personally, I think they really overstepped the bounds of maintaining personal privacy with this one. Facebook Signals Changes With Beacon David A. Utter | Staff Writer The ringing outcry against Facebook Beacon, which posted people's online purchases to their friends' News Feeds, led to Facebook altering the program. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive move into referral advertising through the Beacon technology ran into a brick wall of user discontent. After days of complaints that spread throughout the media world, Facebook has changed their Beacon policies. "Users now have more control over the stories that get published to their Mini-Feed and potentially to their friends' News Feeds," the company said. Other details of the changes have been published in the Beacon FAQ available to Facebook members: "If you are logged in to Facebook and visit a Beacon Affiliate, an action you take (like writing a review or purchasing an item), may trigger that website to want to publish a story to Facebook. Before that happens, a notification will display in the lower right corner of your screen. If you click "No Thanks"...no stories or information will be published anywhere on Facebook. If you click "Close" or ignore the story, the story will be sent to Facebook, but not yet published." The previous version of Beacon would go ahead and publish details of a purchase or other conversion activity on a participating website directly to the Facebook user's Mini-Feed, which would then appear on the News Feeds of friends tracking that Mini-Feed. Some people complained that the notification appearing on a Beacon partner site of the pending publication did not appear. Facebook said people were leaving pages before the notification dialogue could be fully displayed, and they have changed the process to confirm the full notification has been shown to the person. Chris
Re: Picking an external hard drive to backup my files - So I ended up buying a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 250GB External Hard Drive from TigerDirect.ca for $97.99. While I wasn't able to get the pre-installed software to work on my computer for whatever reason... I was still able to transfer all 14 GB of my personal files via the old fashioned "copy" and "paste" method. Hopefully this won't compromise the safety of my stored data.
Re: Join an inventor's group - This is a great list of inventors groups. Are online inventors meetings. We all try to protect our ideas and therefore are reluctant to talk about about ideas in the development phase in public. I'm interested in inventors Success Stories.
Re: New Guy Here - Automobile Industry - Hi Ray, Welcome to the forum. If you use a website to promote your business, please add it to your signature file (via the User Control Panel) so that we can check it out. Best wishes, David H


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

SEO Gurus, Software and Ebooks

How to sell a business

THE “SECRET RECIPES” OF LEADERSHIP

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.