Want me to buy your product? Ditch the tech specs and tell me a story.
A senior executive came to us in despair after a disastrous client pitch. The meeting had ended abruptly when her bemused and exasperated prospect finally exclaimed “just tell me the story!”
This particular executive was widely regarded by her colleagues as a genius: a super-smart dynamo trained at one of the prestigious scientific institutions in the world.
But despite — or more probably because of — her technical smarts, she struggled to communicate. More used to dealing with scientific peers, she’d never learned to shape her material in a way that resonated with a broader audience. AKA her target buyer.
So she’d get bogged down in the minutiae of the AI she was selling — technical details that really mattered to her and her fellow scientists.
To a less highly trained audience, this approach made it seem like everything was important — and therefore nothing was important.
And as her frustrated prospect picked up on, what she needed to do was bring her company’s product to life with a story.
Perhaps, like many technical types, our executive worried that storytelling is about dumbing down. But that’s not the case.
Storytelling is simply about presenting ideas in a style and structure that makes your audience’s eyes light up. Whether that’s with surprise, recognition, or a feeling of possibility.
We see it a lot when we tell people the story behind our own name 😊
Style-wise, it means using concrete, visual language to paint a vivid picture in the mind of your audience. A picture of what is and what could be.
When it comes to structure, the classic narrative framework is the one identified in the 1940s by US literature professor Joseph Campbell. In his classic guide to stories, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell argues that every story — from the Aeneid to Hollywood — has the same basic, three-part structure.
A hero is presented with some kind of challenge or conflict.
Said hero ventures out of their everyday world into a new, special world in search of a resolution.
After an adventure, the hero returns with a deeper understanding of the world.
What's all this got to do with selling? Here’s how to use Campbell’s insights to craft a persuasive story for your product.
Know your audience
Yes, the basic three-part structure is the same the world over.
But you still need to adapt it to your audience. Shaping a powerful product narrative starts with understanding exactly who you’re talking to.
For example, as our despairing client found out to her cost, what makes a scientist’s eyes light up may well fall flat in front of a lay person.
So commit to understanding your target buyer. Know who they are and what matters most to them.
2. People first, product second
As Campbell observed, at the heart of every story is a hero: a human being who, presented with a problem, embarks on a journey that changes everything.
So always talk about people, not products
Ditch the tech specs — and the chest-beating about how fast/sophisticated/generally superior your product is.
Instead, tell the tale of a client whose life or business it transformed.
3. Tragedy, not statistics.
There’s a well-known saying (often attributed to Stalin) that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.
Indeed, our brains and hearts do seem to be hardwired to respond more emotionally to things on a smaller scale.
As any charity fundraiser will tell you, a picture of a single starving child will have more impact than reams of data on how many people famine kills a year.
So for maximum emotive and persuasive effect, zoom in.
Ditch the stuff about how your product has created hundreds or thousands of happy clients.
Instead, paint a vivid and detailed picture of how it solved one specific problem for one specific client.
4. Drama! Conflict! Action!
People alone do not a story make, says Campbell. To be heroes, they need to take action. And that action should be in response to some kind of conflict — also known as the “inciting incident”.
In selling, your inciting incident is the challenge that necessitates change. So again, don’t start with the product. Start by dramatising the problem faced by your prospect.
Take an example from our own work. Just as Campbell identifies a three-part structure comprised of conflict, resolution and change, so our own client case studies are structured under the following headings:
Problem
Solution
Outcome
As you map out the narrative arc of your product story, think about what you’d put under each of these three headings.
5. Be. More. Wizard.
When crafting your story, it’s crucial to choose the right hero.
We can’t say it better than Geoffrey James, who in his brilliant book How to Say it: Business to Business Selling, puts it like this:
“Every sales message is a story. Unfortunately, it’s usually the wrong one.
Every good story has a hero, a goal, and supporting characters. In lousy sales messages, your firm is the hero, the goal is making a sale, and the customer is a supporting character who either helps or hinders that sale.
In effective sales messages, the customer is the hero, the goal is what the customer wants to accomplish, and your firm is a supporting character who helps that customer achieve that goal.
In other words, when you’re writing your sales message, don’t try to be the hero who conquers the dragon. Instead, try to be the wizard who gives the hero the magic sword, so that the hero can conquer the dragon.”
Our ultimate advice to our despairing brainbox of a client? Be less hero and more wizard. Your prospect doesn’t need to know every last detail of how your company’s AI works.
They want to be inspired by the possibility of the magic it can create in their world.
The new product pitch deck we created for our despairing exec was designed to do just that.
Want to tell more and better stories? Get in touch!
