Creating Clarity In Your Marketing One Good Story At A Time
If you’re a regular reader, you know that we talk about 1 of the 9 whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. We’re going to be talking about the why of clarify. If this is your why, then you are a master in communication. You seek to be fully understood at all times. It is important for you to know that people get what you are saying and you generally employ numerous methods to express a given point. You will use analogies and metaphors to share your views in interesting and unique manners that share your why often suffered in a dysfunctional communication environment during their upbringing and seek to make up for that with extraordinary clarity both spoken and written. You feel successful when you know with confidence that your message has been fully understood and received and have tremendous command over language generally superior to most.
I’ve got a great guest for you. His name is John Livesay, also known as, The Pitch Whisperer. He is a sales keynote speaker where he shows companies how to turn mundane case studies into compelling case stories, so they will win more new business. From John’s award-winning career at Conde Nast, he shares the lessons he learned that turned sales teams into revenue rockstars. His TEDx Talk, Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life! has over one million views. Clients love working with John because of his ongoing support after his talk, which includes implementing the storytelling skills from his bestselling book and online course, Better Selling Through Storytelling. His book is now required reading for the UTLA University of Texas in LA course on Entertainment and Media Studies. He is also the host of The Successful Pitch podcast, which has been heard in over 60 countries.
I’ve been excited about this because you and I talked before and I was telling you that I’ve heard a lot of people say they’re good storytellers and how to use stories. You do it at a different level, so I’m excited about this. Give us your life story. Where’d you go to school and how did you get into storytelling?
I went to school at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and got a degree in Advertising, which is the ultimate combination of showbusiness and business. I was always fascinated by how something motivates somebody and how does somebody remembers a jingle from a commercial. All that fascinated me. That was always of interest to me. I found advertising fascinating. I took a trip around the world after school, came back, and decided, “I want to get into the tech world.” I got a job selling these multimillion-dollar computers competing against IBM, living in San Francisco, and getting involved in Silicon Valley. I realized that even if you had something less expensive and more reliable and faster, people still wouldn’t buy it. If IBM was putting fear, uncertainty, and doubt in their head that if something broke and it was your equipment, you would get fired for bringing it in.
I had to understand the psychology underneath people’s decision-making. I then moved to LA and got a job at an ad agency where my job was to sell that agency services to create movies for commercials. You’d watch a commercial to rent a movie at Blockbuster back when that was happening. That’s where I got to hone my storytelling skills because if a movie had come out theatrically and not done well, it’s almost like a second chance for the studio to have the home video division to tell the agency, “Let’s create a different commercial and reposition this movie in 30 seconds to get people to want to go rent or buy it.” That was a lot of fun. I’m still selling and then I had a fifteen-year sales career at Conde Nast selling to brands like Lexus, Guess jeans, the Banana Republic, and Nike. It was all about how do you convince them or all the choices they have to run their ads in a particular magazine.
It was always about whoever told the best story got the sale. That’s why I’m able to speak to sales teams because I’ve been in their shoes. I had quotas, trying to beat your numbers, competing against other people, and trying to differentiate yourself every time. For the last several years, I’ve been helping salespeople get off what I call the self-esteem rollercoaster because I was on it and it’s miserable. You only feel good about yourself if your numbers are up and things are going great and bad if they’re not. When we can zoom out and realize that our identity is bigger than any one thing happening to us, whether it’s losing a job like I got laid off or winning a sales award as I did a couple of years later, we are free from that rollercoaster.
What was that incident when you noticed that stories sell? What happened?
For me personally, it was the first time I had to sell myself to get a job at Conde Nast. We often sell ourselves all the time, even if we’re not in that “position” to get hired or promoted. They put you through many interviews there. There’s a lot of competition. When it got to the 3rd and 4th interview, and I was talking to HR, and it had been very clear that this was an expensive ad magazine to run it and you had to convince people to pay a premium, I was saying to them, “You want to have somebody who can do that, and yet you only want to pay this. If I can’t convince you to pay me what my salary requirements are even if it’s above what your budget is, then I wouldn’t be good at selling your magazine?” They then went, “Oh.”
I said, “It reminds me of when you go looking for a house and you have your dream list, ‘I want a view, the pool, in a great neighborhood, and I only have this budget.’” A lot of times, you have to give up one of those three things to fit your budget. I said, “I need a house with the pool, the view and the location. Location-wise, I know the territory, the view I can get not only the obvious clients to advertise but non-obvious clients. As far as hitting the ground running, that’s what I offer. If you don’t have the budget to have that, then you might have to give something up and hire another candidate that doesn’t bring all of that.” That’s what allowed me to use storytelling to get myself hired the first time.
From then forward, you started using storytelling in selling product for their advertising agency and got better and better at it.
One of the clients I was able to convince to advertise with me at the time when I was selling a high fashion magazine called W was understanding their problem. Jaguar had said, “We want people to think of our cars as moving sculpture, but we have no idea how to make that happen.” I worked with the marketing team and came up with a story of how we would have ten couples that have the income level. We can even slice it down to people who have a competitive car lease coming up within six months and get picked up in a new Jaguar, taken to our Golden Globes party, and then from there, to a private dinner at a private dining room with the chef.
Some people from the Museum of Modern Art would be speaking about art and a Jaguar representative could be there. In between courses, people could take another test driver on the block in another car. They loved that idea. It worked so well that I got ten pages of advertising, which was $500,000. They sold two cars that night. They’ve felt like they were part of the conversation because the Museum of Art was talking about what sculpture and art are, and then someone from Jaguar would say, “That inspired our design of this.”
What makes a good story? How do you help somebody? If I’m reading and I think, “I’ve got a great product. I’ve got great service. I’m talented in these different areas.” How do I create a story that helps me to sell? What makes up a great story?
A good story has four parts. The first part is the exposition. You’ve got to think of yourself like a journalist. The who, what, where, when, all of that is to paint the picture so that people see themselves in the story. The second part of the story is the problem. The better you described the problem, the more people think you have their solution. In any good story, the stakes are pretty high. That makes us lean in and wonder. We have to care about the hero of the story. By the way, you’re not the hero of the story, your client is, and you’re the Sherpa. You then present your solution and the magic sauce to any great story is the resolution. Most people don’t have that.
What happens to this person after they bought your product? Imagine if The Wizard of Oz ended where Dorothy getting in the balloon and going back to Kansas? There wasn’t that wonderful resolution scene where she’s in bed going, “There’s no place like home. You were there. I learned so much about myself, and what matters.” That’s why that movie and that story is so classic. When I can work with people on having all four of those elements in their case stories instead of case studies, then they are memorable, and they’re tugging at people’s heartstrings, and then people want to open the purse strings.
Click through to read the rest of the interview.
If you want help on how to craft a better story, My Better Selling Through Storytelling Method online course is for you.
Are you tired of coming in 2nd place when you pitch?
Are you struggling to be persuasive without being pushy?
Are you looking for a way to become irresistible to your ideal clients?
Then the Better Selling Through Storytelling Method is for you.
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