BDTP. Storytelling in SaaS with Stephen Steers
39:06 Share

Hello everyone and welcome to Better Done Than Perfect, a podcast for SaaS marketers and product people. Today, our awesome guest is Stephen Steers, sales coach, consultant, and storyteller, and we're going to talk about storytelling in SaaS sales. This show is brought to you by UserList, an email automation platform for SaaS companies.

It matches the complexity of your customer data, including many-to-many relationships between users and companies. Book your demo call today at userless.com. Hi, Steven. Hi, Jane. How are you? Thank you for having me.

We are so, so excited to learn about this topic and spice up our boring sales practices and emails and everything. Well, if I can add some color to it, I'm here for it. And hopefully I can help people leave here with something they can use immediately in their software business. So...

How did you end up talking and writing about storytelling? By the way, congrats on your recent book. Kudos on that. Thank you. What's your background story from your childhood towards the book and the consulting practice you run these days? Super short version. I became fascinated with storytelling as a kid. We weren't allowed to watch television in our house unless it was a weekend.

But we were allowed to listen to the old radio shows from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. So I got to listen to all these adventures about detectives, about explorers, about comedians, everything just really old entertainment while I play with my Legos. And I would play with my Legos as I listened to these shows and I would craft different stories around what would happen after the show.

And that's where it just kind of started. And from there, it kind of ballooned into a lot of different things. I always noticed when I would tell a story in any business context, when I was in the construction business, for example, people would get the point. And it wasn't until much later in sales where I would have someone who was confused about what we did. And then I would tell them a story about how we'd help somebody else and you could see their lights go off. And then it took me another couple of years of working with founders and seeing that they too

didn't understand that people wanted to know about the story behind what their technology did versus just hearing what the technology did, that I was like, oh, I think we're onto something here. This is something founders, especially software companies, should use to build a better and deeper relationship with their customer to attract them to the outcome that their software can help people to achieve versus just another button or a widget that they can install on their website.

What does your professional life look like these days between your clients and books and things like that? In what capacity? Like what's an average day in my life? Oh, that would be also interesting. Yes. What do you do? Okay. My average day, I'm up at around 4.30 in the morning. I have a long morning routine. I don't have kids. So I always get people giving me crap. Like, oh, you can only do that because you don't have kids. It's like, well, I don't. So I do. But anyway, I meditate for a half an hour.

I write in my journal just morning pages for another half an hour. I then will read or study something sales or business related for 30 minutes. And then I'm a stand up comedian as well. So I write jokes or sit in and review a set from a previous night for 30 minutes. After that, I then get into the day of work. And I'm usually at the office, you could say by 637 o'clock.

my time and then I'm ready to have meetings and move things forward. Quick note on that. I think every person in the world, you have no business giving eight hours or 10 hours or 12 hours to a thing if you can't find at least one hour for yourself, the things that you want to do. Because if you don't take that time,

You're never going to get a chance to do it. And I find the morning is the best time because nobody else is up and you don't have to compete for other people's attention. So that's what I do. After that, I work through until probably noon or one where I'm exhausted for the first eight hours I put into the day. And then I'll take a nap for about an hour or two, depending on how I feel. I'll wake up. I'll go to the gym for an hour or two. I'll come back and have a shower and eat dinner. And then I'll go back to work for another two or three hours and then plan my day. And I do that five days a week.

Saturdays, I sleep in till like seven. I have a nice full sleep till seven. And then I will either go to the gym and or do an hour or two if I feel like it. That's my average day. This is literally the first daily schedule we've had on this show. But I think there's much more to that. We all like we got your philosophy now. I feel like

I know you as a person much, much closer after I know your date. Awesome. I love that. And as far as consulting is concerned, who is your ideal client? And if there's anyone listening, like what does your gig look like? What exactly are you helping people with? Yeah. Thank you for the question. So I work with,

B2B, across B2B, I've successfully worked with software founders for a number of years, specifically building out sales process for them. I've worked with professional services as in agencies and consulting firms, usually that are somewhat tech-enabled or work with tech because I have that tech background. And then I've started to dabble in the managed service provider space as well because they're kind of technology-based. So it's all around technology. Typically, the way I engage with any client is very much the same.

I'm big on being a consultative seller and I don't want to work with people that I can't help. You'll hear a lot of consultants who are like, oh yeah, just get the thing. Let me consult you. Like, I don't want to work with you if I can't help you on something because that's not good for either of us. So I start every engagement with something I call a sales elevation roadmap, which is where I go through everything that is your current sales process.

look through every asset, talk to every person who's involved. And then I build you a report about the state of sales inside of your organization and where the biggest gaps are for you to improve sales based on the goals that you've set forward in previous conversations we have. So let's say you want to double your revenue. You want to hire six salespeople and you want to shorten your sales cycle. I'm going to go through everything that you have in your company and say, hey, here's where you're currently having a gap that's affecting these three big things you want to achieve.

If that makes sense to you, we can then talk about some ways we would work together. I usually work with folks for at least six months in some form of retainer base where we build out certain assets and then either do a coaching arrangement to help them build out those things with their team, or we work directly with their team to coach them and upskill them so that they're ready to be very useful salespeople telling the right stories to the right people at the right time with the right inflections that are going to speed up the cycle.

Between sales and storytelling, chicken and egg, what came first? How did you make it special about you that you sell storytelling to salespeople or vice versa? I think sales came first and it kind of came out of a pain, right? So I don't remember the second part of the anecdote I'm going to share here. But the first part is, it basically says you sell for two reasons. One is to help your past self. And I don't remember the second piece, but I'm very much, I want to sell to help my past self.

So I've worked in startups most of my sales career and we didn't get any training. We just like literally my first day in sales, they were like, here's a list of list of leads, get meetings. And I was like, OK, but what do I say? They're like, figure it out, which I think if I look back on it, it was a formative moment because I had to figure things out. But man, what a terrible way to run a company.

Like you want me to make the company money, at least teach me how you've made the company money already so I could learn and use that as an experience to shorten my learning cycle.

So I come from that place of having had that pain, having to figure stuff out, having to knock my head against the wall. And I was like, I don't think this is a good way to run a company. Let me be the help I didn't have and help founders to fire themselves from sales and then train up really solid salespeople that can sell from a good place. We talked a little bit about my philosophy at the start. My other big philosophy of selling is that we're humans solving human problems in a business context. So

The things I talk about with storytelling specifically are one of the key ways to humanize what we sell because we're helping people solve their problems. So stories are the fastest way to bridge a gap between two people because you can see yourself in the action. And so once I saw that as a pain that I had and saw how it actually helped me to close more deals and build deeper conversations with people, get on stages, et cetera, it was like, well, every founder has some stories, right?

Those are worth hearing. Let me help people figure out what those are and how to leverage them so that they can differentiate themselves better in the market versus just being another widget people put on their website, as I mentioned a little earlier.

So one of the things we wanted to discuss first was why you should be using stories. And I think you've answered like 75% of that question, but please let's formalize it into a few key statements of why every salesperson slash founder should bother, and marketer also, by the way, should bother using stories. So the reason you tell a story is to help your audience better tell their own story. You might be like, well, what does that mean exactly? So let me explain very briefly.

You have a company that does a thing. I don't care about that. I care about the outcome that your thing helps me to have. You need to be able to tell me a story about how you helped somebody else get there, as an example, that will help me say, oh, that's me. I'm experiencing that same emotional input, that same problem. Oh, tell me more about that. You have to make something that gives me something to pay attention to, where I can then want to learn more about your technology, if that's the thing that you're selling to me.

So that's the first. You're telling me a story because you're helping me tell my own story better. The second side of this is if we were to look at what storytelling does, 65% of information is retained when shared in story form. So you could tell me about the widgets. You could tell me about how you built it, how it's coded faster, the efficiency, no downtime, whatever it is that your technology does. But I don't care about that stuff. I'll remember the story.

I'll remember and be able to take that story to other people inside of my company as well. When they ask me, oh, who'd you talk to today? What are they saying? Oh, well, they helped another vendor increase their efficiency of their operation by 65% by leveraging this part of their technology stack. Cool. Now you teach people what to say about you and that can become your business card. The last piece is everybody is doing a lot of the similar things in this market. You and I talked a little bit about this before we started recording, Jane.

There's a lot of folks who do what we do. There's a lot of folks who do what I do. But who you are is the most interesting thing about what you do. And if you don't tell me what that is, you're leaving it up to the market to decide who you are and what your story is. And the market doesn't know how to help you craft your story. You have to put that out there and create that lore in the ocean, in the sea, that the fishes, as they come by, can come on and attach to your message.

We recently had an episode about PR strategies here, but I really want to believe that you don't need to hire a PR professional and do a tour around newspapers in order to share your founder story. But honestly...

I struggled to integrate, we struggled to integrate like our personal journeys and interesting facts from like how the product was started into the process of how it's sold. Sure, we can dedicate a couple paragraphs of that in the lead nurture sequence or welcome email or something, but that's not the type of story, that's not the type of placement that would really make a sales success.

How on earth do we integrate interesting, personal-looking stories into very, very much B2B business-looking transactions? Okay, so I have two pieces of tactical information for folks on that. So the first thing is there are three stories that work really well in a sales context, and there's two ways to tell each one.

OK, the first story is is your your mission. So, for example, what is the company's mission? What are you looking to achieve? Why did you start the company? Right. Like that's the most basic one. The second version is your version of that. Why are you on this mission? Why are you doing this thing? What made you say, you know what, I'm going to work on solving this problem? It's that's your mission.

The second story is your vision. What does it look like when your mission is completed? What's the big overarching thing that you want to help affect in the marketplace? These are really good stories to help you attract talent, right? A big vision draws a bigger crowd and helps people say, yeah, I want to be a part of that, right? I want to solve this big issue. It attracts people to it. You can tell that for the company and then for yourself as a founder. Why am I, why is this my vision for the world?

Now, the other thing to think about is a lot more engagement comes from personal than it does from company. So you're thinking about telling a story. It's better if it comes from you, the founder, than it does come from your company page. So just something to consider. The third type of story that works really well are your milestones. So these can be for your company, as in maybe they're milestones your company experienced on the way to being where you are.

They could be what your customers have experienced. Like, for example, the classic one is our customer came to us with X problem. We helped them with Y solution and they got Z result in a time period. Really flat, normal, regular story. But again, it covers all of the arcs, the inflection points. And again, you could tell that in a more robust and emotional way, too, if you want. And then there's you as the person, as a founder.

For any founders listening, I'm sure you would all agree that this is probably one of the most difficult things you've ever done with your entire life. And you may want to quit some days like the rest of us do. And you're like, why am I doing this? That's an interesting story. What keeps you staying there? What have you been through? Have you almost lost your business? And then you came back and built something cool. That's interesting. That makes me love you and respect you because you're not one of these gurus just telling me everything's great all the time.

Like that's the most human part of you. That's what's interesting to tell people about. So three stories, mission, vision, and milestones. The next part of it to answer your question here, Jane, is how do we know how to use it? There are four questions you should ask yourself before you tell a story in order to know which story to tell and how to make it useful for your audience. And they are the following questions. Question one is what is at stake?

What's the big thing in the marketplace that your customers are most concerned about? Write it down. The second question is, what does your market want to learn or achieve about that thing that is at stake? What are you going to teach them? Do they want to learn how to be more successful with it? Who's going to be the winner or the loser? What are techniques they can use to streamline their operation with respect to that thing that's at stake? The third question is,

How do you want them to feel? Now, this is crazy, but sales takes place in the emotions first. So 95% of purchasing decisions, B2B or B2C, take place in the subconscious, which means the animal brain is making the decision for us. And then we back into that animal decision with a 5% of logic. Label the emotion you want people to feel. That'll tell you a lot about which story to tell.

And then the fourth question you need to answer is what do you want the audience to do next now that they know this information? This is where everybody falls off. They tell a great story that has no relevance to people because they don't tell people what to do with it. So if you're going to tell me a story about where you grew up,

That's great. But where you grew up, what does that have to do with the issue that you solved that helped you get on this mission? And then how are you going to say, hey, so now that you know this information, check out my five tips on how you can leverage your personal story in order to sell more customers or move your vision forward. Make it all relevant.

The story captures the attention and keeps the engagement. And then we move through the rest of those questions to then create a nugget that people can then take home, use for their own benefit and in an effort to help them tell their own story better. Could you possibly unpack the four questions using a recent case study or a couple of case studies from your practice or maybe something else? I'll give you an example, right? So one of the biggest things people are talking about right now is AI.

Nobody knows what's happening with AI. Is it going to help us? Is it going to hurt us? Is it going to take all the jobs? Are we going to have a utopia? That's a big thing that's out there. So what's at stake with AI? That's a question every business owner wants to know, right? They'll say that's the big issue. AI is the thing that's at stake. Who's going to win? Who's going to lose? The next thing, what do they want to learn? How do I leverage AI to streamline my business? How do I make sure that AI isn't taking jobs away?

You label it for your marketplace, but come up with those issues. What do they want to learn about AI that's relevant to what you teach or what you can help them with? How do I leverage AI to automate my emails to get a higher click-through rate, more robust response rate, and then increase conversion rate without having to actually talk to customers? If that's what you do, right? How do I do that? That's the thing they want to learn.

How do we want them to feel? We want them to feel like they haven't got it figured out yet and that they may stand to lose if they don't invest their time or attention into learning and achieving what's at stake. So it's like, hey, if those that don't leverage AI are going to either go out of business or be way behind in the marketplace if they don't leverage the techniques we're going to share. Now you got somebody feeling some type of emotion.

And then what do you want to do next? If you'd like to learn how to leverage these techniques, register for our upcoming webinar where we're going to discuss these three key issues and leave you with something that you can use to make sure AI is present in your business and is helping you grow the way you want. I think basically everybody who can speak English did a webinar like that this year. This is the most... On AI. Yes. The typical...

Story where you helped customer solve problem X, achieve result Y, I forgot what the Z was. Basically this story, which looks like a super successful case study with a 10X multiplier. Not every type of product and business has those. For sure. Not everything is impressive. For example, email marketing automation that we sell sounds like you can get 10X with it. But in fact, it's more like an infrastructure essential. Yeah.

So the example I used half an hour ago was it's like a mattress. You replace one every five years. You need it, but you don't rave about your mattress. And also it's kind of just not so exciting to share stories about. How do you approach that? Okay. First thing is change the mindset around. It's not exciting to sell stories about it because what really are you selling? Hearing you describe it, you're selling peace of mind.

You're selling operational efficiency and you're selling like a streamlined movement through my business so I can concentrate on other stressful parts of the business. Right. So if I take that back for folks listening to there's four reasons a business buys anything. You can help them make more money. You can help them save money. You're going to increase their efficiency and you're going to help mitigate risk.

Chances are your business does multiple of those things and you need to craft a story about how you do each of those depending on who you're talking to. But the key part to remember and to outline and to continually share is what is the thing, the outcome you help people to achieve here? So if I'm currently inside of a business and I'm doing all this manual stuff, it's taking a ton of time. I'm frustrated by it. I always have to manually click through stuff. Something's breaking.

The story you tell is how that manager who manages the current email process is no longer stressed. They're able to then take that time and invest in coming with great content or interviewing customers to know what their real problems are instead of being stuck in the weeds in the admin. Now, it may not be the sexiest story of all time, but it is a true story for how you've affected people and have them felt better about being in their role and in their business. That's what your customer is going to buy from you. But that's the story you tell.

Because that's the input that they've gotten from or the outcome they've gotten from your inputs. That's a type of way to tell the story. And then you could also say, hey, so we've helped cut down from six hours a day to two hours a week, which has given Suzanne more hours to be able to create great content, go to conferences and spend more time at home with her child.

Just depends what you sell and what narrative you want to go with. But talk about what it did for that person that illustrates one of those four outcomes that they may want to have for themselves as well.

What's interesting, the thing we learned over the years is that you don't need to sell the idea of having a mattress. So everybody knows that they need email marketing, but we had to dig one level deeper and people worry about how successful their implementation is going to be and how they struggle with it. So that's the level we're working in right now. Over the last year or two, we started doing hands-on onboarding and things like that. So that's the selling point at the moment.

That does not contradict what you're saying, but it's interesting. It might not be the product you need to sell, but something more interesting around it. Correct. It's outcome-based, especially for software founders. You may have asked a number of people, what is it you sell? And they're like, oh, we sell a software that

With this, this, that, and the other thing, it's like, no, you sell the outcome the software creates. That's what I want to buy as your customer. I want the outcome. There's a quote by, I believe his name is Theodore Levitt. He used to be a professor of marketing at, I believe it's Harvard. You could fact check me on that, but it's Theodore Levitt. And his quote is the following. People don't want to buy a drill drill.

They want to buy a hole. You've heard it if you're a marketer, but that's a fax. Sell me the hole. The drill is just the vehicle I use to get there. And a lot of software founders sell drills and that's not what people want to buy. So they're like, oh, I'm going to sell a drill bit instead. It's like, no, sell the outcome.

A story is how you sell the outcome. Once I know about what the outcome it is, then I may want to learn about what your drill does, why it's faster with higher RPMs, why your drill bits are more better because they're diamond-tipped, whatever that is. But you need the story as the entree to show, oh, you've solved this problem that I'm experiencing as well. Let's talk about how to apply this in a typical sales environment, which is, let's say, a call. Sure.

That's your playground. So what's your idea of a great call that involves storytelling? How do we bake those in? So two, not two things, 25 things. No, I think the first piece where I see founders, salespeople and software companies fall off, people don't do their research before they get on the phone with a prospect. So that's number one.

know who you're talking to and look at what their potential use case might be for your product before you get on the phone. That'll be very, very useful for having you know what story to tell. Like, oh, we worked with this marketing agency just like you. Here's the outcome we helped them to get to. So you'll already have a story plan for, hey, here's how we can help you guys make more money or increase your efficiency based on what we know about you already. You have that in your head and have it written down and ready before you got on the call. So that's the first piece. When you're in a call or in a demo environment,

you probably should be, if you're not asking, you should already be asking, hey, so what made you hop on the phone with us today? That person is going to give you some context. I call that the kryptonite question. I call it that specifically because when I was coming up, I'm aging myself here. We used to carry around physical textbooks. So every once in a while, the teacher would be like, hey, we're having an open book test today, which means I could use my textbook and get all the answers.

So there's no excuse for failing right there when you have it. That's the equivalent of that question in sales. Somebody's going to tell you why they're on the phone. Oh, we're looking to potentially build the solution in-house, but we're entertaining vendors because we're not sure how long it's going to take. Now we know exactly what argument we need to make for our solution in contrast to the information they've shared. That's the first. Once we have why they're on the phone, we can talk about in story form, a short story about somebody in a similar situation or predicament that we've helped.

For example, if I was going to say, thank you so much for that information. That makes a lot of sense. We've actually been talking to a lot of people in your industry who are experiencing very similar problems. I'm going to share more details on it a little bit later in the call, but that's definitely a problem we're hearing. And it's definitely a problem we've helped a number of people to solve as well. It doesn't have to be Steve Jobs level storytelling, but it's like, hey, you're in the right place. You're here. I've seen this issue before. I'm going to share more about it.

And it just lowers the sales resistance as well. So that's where I would, the first place I would use a story. The second place I'd use a story, and for anybody who's interested on this too, I have a resource on my website,

stevensteers.com. That's Steve with a P-H-S-T-E-E-R-S.com slash podcast, P-O-D-C-A-S-T. You'll see something that has a call script, OCGC call script. You can just take this and everything we're talking about will be written in written form and you can update it for yourself. And if you even want to send me a call to review, you can do that on that page. But the second place for a story is after you've done all your discovery, you are going to summarize the findings and

So that makes, it's like, hey, it sounds like you need X, you're looking for Y, and Z's been a problem because you haven't been able to achieve A. Is that right? Yes. Okay, cool. Now you can jump into a very light case study.

So based on what you've shared today, this is exactly the same situation that I mentioned before. We worked with another marketing agency. They had the exact same problems. And I want to walk you through exactly how we were able to take them from where they are at, which is where you are right now, to here and just walk them through a very light case study, very light story. This is how we've done it. This is how we do it. This is what we think we can do for you. And then we ask the powerful question, does that sound like results that you might want to?

And they're probably going to say yes if they're a qualified prospect. And then from there, we've already solved for the fit objection. Is this a fit for me? And now we're left with, is now the right time? And is this something I can afford, which we can get to as well? But if we had asked the right discovery, those stories are how we create that social proof without you guys saying, oh, we're the best in market. It's here's what they say about us. And that social proof is how we can move the needle that way. Those are the two places I would use a story in a sales or demo environment.

I'd love to hear a bit more, maybe examples around those social proof stories, how to approach them so they don't look overwhelming and also don't disclose too much, but just highlight just the right amount of information.

When you say overwhelming, what do you mean? Let's say it feels to me that if I start during a sales call to take a deep dive into another customer's needs, even though they might be similar, it just feels like it might take everything off track and look irrelevant. I may be wrong. I think the answer is it depends, but that's where if you did your research,

At the start of the call, you'll know, oh, we've worked with two other marketing agencies and here's the problems we solved for them. I'm going to, what inputs did they have when we came in? What did we help them get to and what timeframe? And I just have those ready. I think one thing that's important too

As a sales professional, it's your job to be nimble because every call, no matter how much we prepare, we may have something come up that we didn't expect. And I'm sure anybody who's been on the phone with a prospect can be like, oh, I just, I wasn't ready for that. That happens to us all. You want to do your best.

So having those ideas ready primes your mind for how you could potentially add value, which also helps you direct the call towards the right outcome for yourself as the professional, as the doctor, for lack of a better term, making the prescription for what your client needs. I would also make sure to mention your story is a response to the needs that the prospect has outlined.

You're not just bringing a story to be like, oh, I got a story. That's why I think the sequencing of it is really important. If you tell the story out of sequence, it could come off like what versus, hey, so based on your needs, here's another example of how we've done something very similar for someone just like you. Oh, it applies to me. As long as we remove customer names, again, where appropriate, it's like they're the hero in the story.

marketing agency, similar size, founder with about as much experience as you, experiencing basically the same three issues we've outlined here. Here's what she was experiencing when she came to us. Here's what we were able to uncover through our work together. Here's what we built. And here's what she's doing now, six months into our engagement. Flat, clear, easy. And then again, because it's about somebody who's similar and it comes in sequence, that's where the value comes in.

Because it's in response versus just you throwing it out there. Sometimes there is information that you need to deliver more like a step-by-step instruction on how to get started or an introduction to our processes, which is just a list of things you need to explain.

It does not sound like a very good idea to tell that story on behalf of Mary from another company because it would just look very superficial, honestly. But what are the tips for delivering such information, which is not pleasant for the human eye, not exciting, but necessary for them to know in order to move forward? Like handling an objection? More like just giving them information, like a lot of information.

Give me an example. One of the important parts of our demo is walking the user through stages of getting started, which includes technical integration, copywriting, setup, and explanation about each stage. And honestly, I am struggling how to make this exciting because it, of course, is great, but in no way fascinating. Is it part of the onboarding or part of the sale? Part of the sale is...

And reassuring the user that we've got that covered. Okay. Do you mean that this does not to be explained on that call? It should not be explained in the sales call, right? So coming back to, especially in a demo environment, you only want to show the prospect the things that are relevant to their problem.

Period. Right. So that's also where we talk about a story. You're only showing me the three major parts of the platform that are going to answer my question. You're not walking me through the whole platform because if you're doing that, you're selling me the whole product.

And yes, I'm buying the whole product, but I'm buying the outcomes that the three major parts you're going to show me are relevant. So for example, for listeners, you're going to demo me a product. If you understand my three major needs, you would say, all right, so let me walk you through the platform right over here in this section. This is how we're going to take your data, run your data through the system and help you increase your conversion rates. For example, when we did this with another marketing agency, we were able to move their data and show that they were not

not actually having any pixels on their site. So they weren't actually retargeting anybody, even though they were spending all this money on ad spend. It was going nowhere. We were able to see that. And once we re-bridged that connection, they were able to increase their conversions. The next thing I'm going to show you is you said your sales cycle is really, really long. Inside of this asset, when we're looking at your CRM, here's one of the key indicators we're able to show you about why it's long and to give you insights on how to shorten it.

And then the third thing you mentioned is you wanted to be able to hire people. Here's where your system doesn't actually have the right process and system to be able to hire someone in that's going to be effective. As you mentioned, you've had a lot of problems with turnover. Here's the three pieces. Here's where our system can bolt in, create a pattern, and create a framework around what you're already doing without you having to touch any buttons. And that'll be printed out and go into your knowledge base.

So based on those three things alone, we've built an entire system that's going to help you with X, it's going to help you with Y, it's going to help you with Z. And that solves their problems. And then if they have other questions, we have a whole lot of other functionality that I'm happily able to talk through as well. But I wanted to show you the most important things in our platform that are going to be relevant to your use case and help you get the results you're looking for right now. The rest of it doesn't matter.

I would buy from you. That's amazing. I appreciate it. But that's the thing. That's where a lot of people get it wrong. Don't sell me the product. Sell me the solution the product creates. And then again, when you're onboarding, you're going to walk the people who are touching the product through those pieces. But that's just extra time in the demo that can confuse people and it's probably lowering your close rate.

I didn't mean for the reference walking through the entire product. I think I stopped making this mistake a few years ago, but more like walking them through the next steps and what actually those steps entail. And we just have a lot of next steps. That was the frustration. Again, I'd have to look at your specific situation, but when I've heard similar things, it's I would book another call that's specifically for that after they've made an agreement.

Like, cool. So here's what happens next. We're going to have another call where we walk you through how to get yourself set up on the platform so that you are then doing X, Y, and Z. And that could be a part of your sales process too. But if it's really, really like tedious and not exciting and like administrative, you're lowering their excitement around the solution versus, hey, that'll be part of your onboarding.

Awesome. Actually, we also just started doing that this year, making that into a roadmapping call. But what this conversation makes me realize, even more can be fleshed out in other calls and situations from the demo. You don't have to do it all in one. So if we were to think about this in an arc specifically for your business, think about each call as part of the entire hero's journey story.

You don't want to tell the entire story in one chapter.

depending on what it is you're doing. So it's chapter one is, hey, let's meet each other. This is discovery. Chapter two, let's walk you through a very light demo that shows how we can solve your needs. Chapter three, we'll start building your specific use case and instance. Chapter four, we'll close in the deal and sign the contracts and then get you guys set up to be automating so that X outcome happens. Chapter five, we have regular meetings, meetups about your results to help you move forward in the next thing.

But a lot of folks try to cram it all into one thing and it overwhelms the prospect and overwhelmed people don't usually buy stuff. Thank you so much for giving us a detailed tour of storytelling. Where can people learn more? But no, wait, first I'm going to ask you for one do and one don't when it comes to storytelling. Yes, before that. My one do is start a story bank.

So have a document where you collect your own stories, stories from your company. It could even be memes from Instagram or TikTok that somebody's telling a good story that you like, that you're like, oh, that applies to something that I think would be relevant to my client. Start hoarding those things and have those ready because that makes you more effective and able to demonstrate a breadth of knowledge to people in a way that's going to grab them.

That's my first do. Love this. Love this. And it's going to help with marketing and everything else, right? And you're going to get people where they are, which is really important. The don't is don't think that you can start tomorrow and you'll get to it. Start right now. Those are my two. Very proactive steps you're describing here. Even the don't is proactive. Yes.

I can tell you're good at next steps. And now the next question is, where can people find your book and where can they learn from you further? That landing page you mentioned worth bringing up again and any socials or anything like that? Before I jump into that, I want to say thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It's been a pleasure to get to know you and to just

Learn from the questions you're asking. It helps me better be able to describe what I do and how it can help people. If you're interested in anything that I do, you can find me on stevensteers.com. For the resources, it will also be stevensteers.com slash podcast. There you can find the call script we mentioned. There'll be a series of slides that explains on how to use it. There'll be a series of trainings there.

Talk about how I wrote my book. You can also buy the book on the website or on Amazon. It is called Superpower Storytelling. And then I'm all over LinkedIn at Steven Steers. You could find me. I'm the guy with the hair and bigger hair gets you bigger profits. So that's me. Thank you so much once again. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. You do the same. Bye.

Thanks for listening. You can find a written recap for this episode at usaless.com slash podcast. Please help us grow by leaving a review on iTunes.