One of the most significant innovations we've developed over the last four years is a way of deconstructing our client's sales story and reconstructing it to better work for buyers.
We've developed a model that we call the "Story Canvas". The crux of the canvas is to align your sales story to your buyer's journey. At its heart, it is about alignment. But, as I discuss in this post, alignment is a function of the sequence. Let me explain...
The importance of sequence
Good stories follow a narrative arc.
If you want to do some digging into the research behind this, google - The Hero's Journey. It will take you through to a discussion about Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Written in 1949, it is the definitive work on the common structure of stories and his concept of a single narrative that underpins all stories/myths - The Monomyth.
The Monomyth has been popularised into what we now refer to as "The Hero's Journey".
Dan Harmon - the creator of the NBC series Community and co-writer of Rick and Morty, distilled this down even further to his concept of the Story Circle. Here is a great video explaining this.
So, centuries of storytelling knowledge distilled into the concept of taking your reader on a journey traversing their known (ordered) world, then through the unknown (chaotic) world of trials and tribulations and returning triumphant at the end. Simple but very powerful.
What is really interesting, when you geek out on this stuff as much as we do, is you find that good sales conversations follow a similar arc.
They take buyers on a journey from the ordered world (their status quo) and provoke them to enter the chaotic world (change) to seek the ultimate prize (the value).
I say GOOD sales conversations intentionally to juxtapose the majority of sales conversation that are BAD, and don't follow any sequence - because the seller just wants to hurry to the end of the story, the bit where the buyer buys their stuff.
If you want my view on the single biggest reason that the sales role is so un-trusted today... it is this. You're out of sequence with your buyer, and not equipped to course correct.
Our story canvas seeks to change this and is, essentially, a distillation of the Hero's Journey applied to how you connect with your buyers.
Here, the BUYER IS THE HERO. You, the seller, are their guide.
When we think about content, we think about questions like:
Where in the sequence it goes?
How does it propel the buyer further through the journey?
How does it position you as someone worthy of trust?
How does it educate the buyer on what they need to learn to succeed?
How does it make your competitive advantages necessary in the buyer's eyes? So that when you "fight the battle" with your competition, you're best positioned to win.
When we work with teams to explain this better, I use the first Star Wars movie as an example.
Here is a recap we made of this using the "story circle" concept.
As a way of explaining this to salespeople, I ask them to imagine the following situation...
Imagine that you are salesperson selling laser guidance systems for X-wing star-fighters. Luke is the buyer. But Luke is at the start of his journey, he is still on Tatooine.
Which leads to the most important question...
Well, you don't do it by banging on about the features of your product! Or even the problems it solves, or the ROI it delivers. He's a farmer! Until he meets a couple of droids in a few scenes time, he doesn't even know he's got a problem. You can talk about you all you like. He can't hear you.
You need to speak to him directly. Within his current context.
That's why the first step in our model is "Speak to their world". Don't focus on you; focus on them. That's the first gate. Get through it - you become signal. Miss it - you become noise.
When we create content for this stage, our obsession is how to position you as someone that gets what they're going through. That's it - that is the point of the content. It is an acknowledgement of the importance of respecting the buyer and letting them "pull" their engagement with you, rather than you "pushing" your engagement on them.
The rest of the model provides the scaffold for how you can stay in sync as the buyer, hopefully, progresses on their journey with you.
If you're interested in what happens as a result of all of this...
It is not a perfect science, as every engagement is different. But we recently did an exercise of going back over all of our engagements to date to get a sense of the impact we deliver.
We typically see email click-through rates 10x the industry average. The engagement with content can get to hours long. And we've recently completed a longitudinal study with three control groups (within a large Telco) that saw DOUBLE the pipeline created over the period. On top of this, is a big uptick in employee engagement - the frontline staff love this.
So it is really impactful.
Conclusion
So there you go. It's a long post - but an important subject. And it gives you a little insight into the substance underneath the heavy-lifting we do when we work with our clients.
Let us know if you have any feedback or questions.
Cheers
[Craft] Creating good sales content using our story canvas
