How I Unlocked the Secret to Better Business Storytelling

Throughout my career, I've encountered so many business and marketing leaders who simply don't believe storytelling can be applied to business. They think it's too hard — that business marketing can't possibly operate on the same basic principles of traditional storytelling used in books, television shows, and screenplays.

These chains of false belief have led to the notion that marketers need to "reinvent the wheel" and develop unique frameworks and approaches to tell effective business stories.

Well, I've always sought to avoid reinventing the wheel whenever possible. And that's where my journey to find a business storytelling framework began.

In our last blog, I shared my personal relationship with storytelling and how I found myself at the intersection of story and business. I talked about my search for existing story methods like Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" and Pixar's approach (the "wheels," if you will) that could give marketers a repeatable process for crafting engaging, effective business stories.

If you read that blog, you know I couldn't find one.

I couldn't find any "how-to" for applying to business and marketing in a repeatable manner, especially not one that was accessible to the typical business leader. I was raised on story and have spent my life immersed in creative endeavors, so I often found myself falling prey to the "curse of knowledge" when I tried to interpret and explain these storytelling frameworks to my colleagues. They didn't get it, and I couldn't make them get it, no matter how hard I tried.

But I was determined. My experiences would eventually fuel my mission to unlock the secret to better business storytelling for marketers and entrepreneurs when I launched Go Narrative. 

The Go Narrative journey: Building business-centric story frameworks

When I worked at Microsoft, I created a patent for our “Customer Engagement Accelerator,” a technology designed to make Microsoft Dynamics even better.

Creating a patent isn’t easy. You need to be very detailed in the technical flow of information — processing it, managing outputs, storing data, amongst other things. I worked with Fred Studer, GM of the CRM business, and Kelly Rigotti, the Dynamics social media manager, to make sure we covered all our bases, from the strategic all the way to the tactical. 

What brought it together was looking at the patent through the lens of storytelling.  

I was lucky to have had this experience. It taught me lessons I would later put to work building the Go Narrative business-centric story frameworks. It was also a great lesson of how storytelling isn’t just about marketing.

One of the most exciting things about founding Go Narrative was the opportunity to work with a diverse group of clients, products, and industries. Not only did it make me a better storyteller and give me more stories to tell, but it also helped me see more clearly. It helped me crystalize what needed to be done. 

I settled on a few simple rules for our frameworks:  

1. Focus on the hero. Use personas to guide decisions.  
2. Prioritize the demonstration of overcoming of challenges that these personas/people had.  
3. Focus less on products/services and more on the people whose lives your products impact. If you do nothing else, do this. 

When I discovered Paul Smith’s Lead with a Story, I found a great book with lots of practical examples for leaders, especially those in a corporation, to improve their approach. Specifically, Paul presents the idea that you can be a better leader by using storytelling. It frames solving specific leadership challenges by using stories. There is immense value in that, and I highly recommend this book for that reason alone.  He even includes a story bank to get you going! Great stuff. 

Paul also introduced this idea of "Context, Action, Results." I loved it. It spoke to my need to talk about the customer and their situation (context), the things they did (action), and the transformative results they achieved.

But it wasn’t quite what I needed. 

Starting with context left something off the table. There was no punch. Action and results didn’t seem to encompass enough of the transformation. And all of Paul’s other frameworks were too many for me to remember easily. CAR = STORY MAKERS just didn’t stick in my brain.

In Expert Secrets, Russell Brunson explains how you need to start with a big bang — get people's attention and hook them immediately. Most blockbuster films usually devote some time to soft character development. However, the action usually starts straight away, like in Revenge of the Sith (I still use that movie to torture visiting friends with my surround sound home theater.

Just like Brunson, I wanted that 7.2 THX mind-melting POW! at the beginning of my stories, and I want to help you get the same. 

The universal business storytelling and strategy tool

Nobody has time to read all the books out there about applying storytelling to specific business areas (not even me). That's why I passionately wanted to create a way to unlock the true power of story structures simply. 

While there are resources out there to help you apply storytelling in very targeted ways, such as leadership advice, presentation delivery, harnessing your personal story for confidence, and even how to craft your brand with storytelling, I couldn't find a common denominator that served all masters. 

That’s what I wanted to create for you. I wanted to create something that would help with long-term marketing strategy as much as it helped with crafting campaigns, writing creative briefs, or even directing teams, agencies, and partners.  

Why did I want to do this? Because I believe that you — yes, you, a C-suite leader or marketing director — can take your storytelling destiny into your own hands, even if you don't think you're a natural-born "storyteller" and your brain just isn't "wired that way." You can learn it and apply it in your own business, be it for marketing, leadership, product management, or internal politics. 

All you need is a good, old-fashioned, reliable tool, like the wrench hanging above your tool bench. The tool that's always there for you to grab and use whenever you have a problem that needs fixing. Just don’t try using it as a hammer; I’ve tried, it didn’t go too well.

That's what I wanted our frameworks to be for business storytellers—practical, useful tools.

The 3D Story? framework: Our original business storytelling methodology

Some may say that “Beginning, Middle, End” is the simplest of story frameworks. And while it’s logical and somewhat useful, it doesn’t speak to people or change. 

Our very first storytelling framework, the 3D Story? framework, does. It helps you see your story from all the most important angles.  

The "3 Ds" are Desire, Difficulty, and Denouement:

• Desire packs in the hero, the person, the customer. 
• Difficulty packs in the challenges they have in their life that they want to overcome — what stands between them and their desire. 
• Denouement answers these questions in a way you can take away and apply yourself. 

I briefly considered Conclusion as the final stage, but “conclusion” didn’t represent the point I wanted to make (plus, DDC didn't sound as good as 3D). Likewise, using the word Done as the third D was too brief and didn’t represent the effort our hero must go through. 

So instead, I chose the fancy French word, Denouement, which means “the untangling of the knot.”

What a wonderful metaphor! How was it untangled? With what? Was a specific approach used? How was the transformation realized? 

We designed our 3D Story? framework to be deceptively simple — a rich microcosm of nuances, details, and context packed into three simple words, much like Nike’s “Just do it” tagline.

A good story puts you in the center, and those three words (Nike's and ours) do just that. Like a hologram, this "micro-storytelling" approach captures more than one angle in a single image. It presents it in such a way that allows you to see every single detail as you view it from different perspectives. 

Our achievements and transformation, enabled by the 3 Ds

 I was excited. The 3D Story? framework not only helped me see our story from all angles (I could dive as deep as I needed into each "D"), I was inspired by how these structures could be applied to our client businesses, from taglines to strategic narratives. I was particularly excited for the framework's simplicity, which meant our clients could remember and practice it without relying on us or another agency. 

Internally, we started applying the 3D Story? framework immediately and watched the lightbulbs start turning on when we talked to clients and prospects. We used it in our sales conversations to uncover prospects' actual needs, not just their wants, and identify if we could help and what that would look like. 

For our external clients, we used the 3 Ds for many things. We use it to break down value propositions based on real customer stories in our workshops. We use it to create train the trainer guides to help product marketers, and salespeople ensure they retain an outside-in perspective. We use it to coach our clients on how to quickly and easily tell stories without the baggage of the hero's journey. 

Since the birth of the 3D Story? framework, we have also developed our TRIPS Storytelling? methodology, which also provides a simple, repeatable approach to crafting effective business stories. With both of these frameworks, we put the power into your hands. It's our way of making business storytelling easy whilst also enabling you, the user of our framework, to dig deeper and understand your stakeholders from a multitude of important angles.

Curious about how business storytelling frameworks can streamline your marketing and communication efforts, both internally and externally? Book a complimentary consultation with Go Narrative to learn more. 

Go Narrative is a Seattle Based firm that helps business leaders challenge the status quo to find a better way to clarity through storytelling. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.

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