Dance With Strangers

This past Friday at around 9am I was sitting in the passenger seat of our car while my wife did her best Mario Andretti through the curvy roads of the Texas Hill Country. Our mission was to reach the ER since I had suddenly come down with a very bad allergic reaction to antibiotics I was on and it felt as if my throat was constricting along with the rest of my body. Fortunately for me nothing serious did happen and once they stuck that Epi into my left arm and filled my IV up with a bunch of steroids I was on my way back to normal. By the time we were driving back home, this time obeying the speed limits, I was just annoyed at how I had lost most of my day and the fact that my mind was so cloudy that doing work in the afternoon seemed impossible.

The latter part proved to be true. The mix of anti-histamine, epinephrine and steroids created this odd sense of being tired, but every time you close your eyes all you see is bright flashing lights. Thus sleep was not an option and I sat downstairs in my new favorite chair while my wife worked out of her home office upstairs. Little did I know she was about to give me a terrific reminder of how our jobs have shifted in marketing.

Phone call after phone call I listened to her tell folks about a job opportunity within her company. The details don’t truly matter, rather it’s the fact that the people who do this job perform it basically at no pay, have to look after teenage students from foreign countries and deal with host parents. Sounds really great huh? Well after you listen to my wife tell the story of this position you might be submitting an application immediately.

Marketing, and selling, is about telling a story. It is not about regurgitating a messaging platform or a tagline (although those serve as building blocks). They story you tell about your product or service must be entertaining, personalized, seemingly original everytime and easily weave in the paing points you are feeling every minute of every day. Sitting downstairs I must have heard my wife make eight phone calls, each one had a different yet similar story, but there were always some common traits:

1. A measured cadence.
2. Inserting key pain points throughout the story, not simply at the beginning.
3. No reliance on a script.
4. Ability to recognize when to stop talking and start listening.
5. You tell the story from your own perspective, not the company’s.
6. Sound bites throughout which are ideal for the audience to write down for later review.
7. Confidence in each and every word.
8. Accurate use of analogies in order to ensure your story is understood.
9. Admitting when you don’t know the answer, but assuring the person they will have that answer immediately after the story is done.
10. Ending the story by leaving them wanting more of the story.

Great marketers and sales personnel, no matter the industry, are good at their jobs because they most likely had all of the skills listed above, plus more. As a B2B marketer you need to be an even better story teller than the sales force, since your job is to generate leads for the sales force. By the time you pass the lead into the funnel they have bought into the story, now they want to get into the product details and negotiation.

Have you listened to different people inside your company tell the story? Besides other marketers? Besides sales? No?

Get up and go talk to the engineers that designed the product, your CTO who co-founded the company, the CEO who has to tell the story each quarter to the Board, the COO, accounting and more. Each of these folks have been told what the tagline and the value proposition is for the company, but how do they actually tell the story? You’ll be surprised how much you will learn and how must stronger a storyteller it will make you.