How We Think about Storytelling at Drift

I am not a natural storyteller. 

You know when you go to an event or a dinner and there’s the person who can just tell stories? A person who has the crowd wrapped around their finger? That’s not me. I’m the wallflower. 

I’d also never really considered the importance of storytelling until we started Drift and I was trying to really understand marketing and how to market to marketers. And being able to tell a good story is one of the biggest advantages you can have.

So from the very beginning of Drift we’ve tried to explain what we’re trying to solve, not with a pitch, but with a story. We thought about what would be the most general thing that everyone has gone through. What people deal with in their normal lives, something universal. 

And that’s how we came up with the empty store analogy. Everyone -- no matter what age, demographic or location, has been to a store. So we said, OK what if you went to a store and it was completely empty? What if you needed help and no one was there?

That is what your website is like now. 

By starting with something everyone has experienced, versus immediately going into the technology, it allowed the customer to immediately put themselves in that story and understand who we are solving for (which is them).

Here are three storytelling secrets I’ll share:

1. Start with an analogy: Is this necessary? Probably not. But I like frameworks and so this is the easiest way for me to start a story -- it allows you to compare two things.
2. Play on the things people are thinking but are too polite to say: This is something I learned by studying old copywriting and sales letters. If you look for sales letters (from when they were letters, not emails!), the best performing ones always named a problem -- an issue that most of us knew but either were too polite to say or couldn’t articulate. 
3. Test and learn: The easiest way to test a story is to tell it to someone and then watch. Does that person’s eyes light up? Is there a spark? Do they sit up a little straighter? When do they start paying attention? Make a mental note of when that all happens, and also if at any point you lose their attention. And if you want to get better at this -- watch comedians. They are always testing and learning, and understanding what resonates and what doesn’t. 

Want to know more? I talk about this and how we came up with the Drift story in my latest episode of Seeking Wisdom. 

-DC