Win Them With ‘Why’: Getting the Details Right in Your Business Storytelling
Think about the last story you heard or read. What made you keep listening or reading? What about that story that hooked your attention and stuck in your brain?
Chances are there were some critical details in the story that you could relate to. Whether it was a shared emotion or core value, a deeply-felt connection to the “hero” of the story, or simply a situation or fact that you’d experienced yourself, something about that story and the way it was told spoke to you and left an impact.
This is what every business should strive to do with its customers. To continue moving them forward to purchase, you need to win them over with a compelling and emotionally engaging “WHY.”
This “why” is where the customer journey starts. When it comes to storytelling and crafting strategic narratives, the WHY is always at the center (I talk more about this in my testimonial for the WHY Institute). After all, people won’t follow you if they don’t sense a common, shared WHY.
From there, the customer journey leans heavily on story and often explicit storytelling.
Explicit storytelling?! No, not that.
I mean the act of actually telling a story. Stories that put your customer at the center as the hero and make them want you to be their guide. These stories need to solve a “value problem”—for instance, clearly, the “how” a fancy new tech does what it does and the “what” impact that has on the world. But the details of your story can serve as the sugar to the bitter pill of “speeds and feeds.”
The customer journey moves from the emotional into the rational where customers need details — evidence, justification, and proof of your claim — to help them make a purchasing decision. A good story defines all of these details and facts and lays them out so that human beings will care about and act on. Through anecdotes and metaphors, you can tell distilled stories to hack your audience’s brain and empowers them to fill in those essential details themselves.
But where do you begin? How do you set up a story properly to get that “domino effect” going in your customers’ minds? How do you frame your message in a way that pulls the right mental triggers to get your audience to make a powerful connection and access the all-important “why”?
The answer to all of these questions is a proper storytelling framework that accounts for your customer wants, the challenges they face in achieving their desires, and the solution they need to overcome their challenges. The real magic in these frameworks is that they give you a process to reach success — which, in itself, is all about finding and then following repeatable steps to achieve the desired goal.
Desire, Difficulty, Denouement: Our 3D Story™ model
Much of our work here at Go Narrative is based on a deceptively simple but effective storytelling framework that we like to call “the 3Ds.” We explain it in-depth here, but if you’re not familiar, it describes a buyer’s desire, difficulty, and denouement (“untangling of the knot,” or the resolution to their problem).
The 3D Story™ model was designed with a storytelling structure in mind. When applied to your business, this framework helps you take your customer on a journey where they can fill in the “blanks” with their own experiences, so they can own it, remember it, and use it.
If you’ve never thought about your storytelling in terms of a structured framework before, try asking yourself these seed questions to get the wheels turning:
What can you improve about your customer’s life?
What do they need to consider when working with you?
How do they tackle the problem facing them?
How can you help, specifically?
Our 3D StoryTM framework was inspired by the Context, Action, and Results (CAR) model coined by Paul Smith in his 2012 book, “Lead with a Story.” While each element of these two models touches on slightly different themes, they align quite nicely to help you think about the details to include in your business storytelling. It was also designed to intentionally engage the reader in a way that I didn’t feel CAR fully captured.
Here are a few more questions you can ask yourself, looking at your customer’s journey through the lens of CAR and the 3Ds:
Context/Desire – Who is the hero of your story? What is their challenge? Why do they care about it? What could be better?
Action/Difficulty - What do they do about it? What happens when they try? What pushback is there?
Results/Denouement - How did they solve the problem? How did you help?
Once you’ve laid out your customer’s 3Ds, you have everything you need to craft your emotionally engaging “why” — the highly-targeted, compelling reason they should do business with you and not ignore the problem or go with a competitor.
In essence, your story should leverage the 3Ds to help the customer realize, on their own, that they can overcome their specific difficulty and achieve their specific desire with the help of your specific product or service.
Curating the details: Storytelling tools to guide you through the process
A storytelling framework, like the 3D StoryTM model is just one element of a more extensive strategic messaging foundation. It works in conjunction with some other important storytelling tools that can help you curate the customer information you need to build the perfect “why.”
A few additional tools that build upon each other to help you set the stage for your story details include:
Value proposition: Your value proposition explains what someone has to do (and what they have to trade to get it) in order to acquire your product and get the promised value. More importantly, it shows the customer that their “give” is worth the “get” from your business.
Positioning and messaging framework (PMF): A PMF directly connects customer pain points with specific product benefits. It takes an outside-in view, exploring the challenges your customers go through and how your product or service answers those particular challenges.
Strategic brand narrative: In your strategic narrative, you find common ground with your customers by tapping into their larger cultural and historical experiences and frame them in a way that strengthens the mutual understanding that a company and its customers have with each other. The narrative also helps you frame a transformation for your customers and sets up all the stories you tell to align to this agreed-upon shift in the world and the customers’ lives.
Buyer personas: Every story needs a person or hero at the center. Personas are the people that fill your stories. Taking an outside-in approach with your personas means going beyond the functional aspects of your audience and digging deeper into the unique psychographic aspects of specific types of buyers. This may include their motivators, decision-making approaches, and potential cultural influences that shape the way they understand, seek out, research, and buy products.
Customer discovery and decision-making journeys: As the name implies, the customer journey represents the steps someone takes before, during, and after they make a purchase from your business, and the specific things they’re thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage. We like to sum up the journey with a six-step “ARIVDE” model — Awareness, Realize, Internalize, Visualize, Decide, and Evangelize.
This is where story frameworks come in. When you have that structural focus in your business messaging and introduce relevant details of the why, what, and how, your customer will see a clear path forward with your business. In turn, you’ll be off to a running start in your approach to convert them because you won’t have to reinvent the “story” wheel with each new piece of content you create.
Think of Henry Ford and his automobile assembly line. Like Ford, you can harness the power of process for a scalable, repeatable, and most importantly, effective business storytelling method. These frameworks and tools help you gain clarity of purpose AND the ability to execute — and that’s the real magic of business storytelling.
Want to unlock the power of storytelling and discover the story details that will drive conversions? Book a complimentary 30-minute consultation with Go Narrative, and let’s chat.
Go Narrative is a Seattle Based company that assists business leaders in technology companies build and implement advanced marketing strategies. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.
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