People value trust, purpose, and integrity so highly it is fundamental to everything we do.
We admire people like Nelson Mandella, whose purpose and integrity for decades was to free his people from apartheid.
First, being jailed for decades for his cause, he became Prime Minister – delivering on his purpose.
You cannot be friends with someone you don’t trust first.
You won’t buy from a business you don’t trust – first.
The ROI for a more trusted business is significant.
Across the world, being more trusted, with clarity of purpose and integrity, earn more – have more buyers.
Revenue – 5x to 8x faster growth
Margin – +16%
Marketing | sales – 22x more recognisable
Productivity – +19% improved operating margin
Total Shareholder Returns – 2x growth
Share price – 2.6x faster growth
HOW does a potential buyer in a digital world choose one business (one person in the business) over another?
Four hundred thousand businesses across forty-seven countries over ten years of research provides clarity.
There are five steps,
- Trust Assets ( visual, content, graphics)
- WHY – answer this question – If I am your ideal buyer why should I only buy from your business rather than your competitors?
- Strategic Narrative – tell me your story that is bigger than just your products and services.
- Strategic Pitch – condense your offer to a couple of sentences that nails your offer.
- Go Viral – tell your story everywhere that counts #socialselling.
Today’s focus is on Strategic Narrative.
“The mistake people make is thinking the strategic story is just about marketing. No, the story is the business strategy.
If you make your story better, you make the strategy better and improve your financial performance.” Ben Horowitz.
People do not easily remember facts, phone numbers, names. We do remember great storytelling.
The great storytellers have an unfair competitive advantage. They are going to recruit better, they will be darlings in the press, they are going to raise money more easily and at higher prices… and they are going to have a strong-cohesive corporate culture. Perhaps more to the point, they are more likely to deliver a positive investment return.” Bill Gurley Partner, Benchmark
Buying is about change. A change in vendor, a change in operation when you add a new supplier.
“What attracts human attention is change, if the temperature around you changes, if the phone rings – that gets your attention. The way in which story begins is a starting event that creates a moment of change.” Robert McKee Author, Story, Style, Structure, and the principle of screenwriting
The best strategic narratives are written with the same framework as the best selling books and movies of all time. Andy explains this as
1 Name The Enemy | Big Shift
Never start by talking about yourself, your team, your product, or your total addressable market. Instead, start by naming the thing that’s getting in the way of your customer’s happiness.
Paint an emotionally resonant picture of how the world currently sucks for your customer, who/what is to blame, and why.
2 Answer WHY Now?
Elon Musk when presenting his Tesla batteries to the world said …”we’re at a critical point in the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration; if we don’t act now, things quickly get much, much worse.
When Musk says, “We should collectively do something about this,” his audience howls in support.
Telsa Batteries sales on this day were equal to six months previously.
3 Show the Promised Land
The Promised Land is shorthand for the desirable, difficult-to-achieve future that you commit to making real for your customers (or other relevant stakeholders).
4 Identity the Obstacles – explain how to overcome them.
5 Present Evidence.
Two-thirds of the world’s businesses have either no strategy or strategies that have no likelihood of achieving the goals.
In part, this is because in a digital world how we need to operate, think, act and communicate is fundamentally different – but in part the same.
- A strategic narrative keeps attention and builds engagement past eight seconds.
- It helps to explain to your potential buyers how your products and services make sense of their world and deliver a better outcome.
- This level of engagement doesn’t happen from corporate brochures.
Do you have a choice of not having a Strategic Narrative?
Andys answer is – ‘changes in your market require that you act in a fundamentally different way (play a new game) which is a life-or-death opportunity/threat for you, ( your business will boom with supplier A) and which will require you to overcome obstacles x, y and z, which, by the way, our technology can help you do it all”
In short, if you are not deploying all five steps then growth at your business will be much slower than it would otherwise be.
How do I know? Four hundred thousand businesses tell us so.
We now live in a Social Selling Economy
Andy provides the architecture to better explain your WHY and how you better solve your new client’s problems better. Getting the narrative accelerates your social selling success.
Accelerate provides a subscription publishing + strategy service to
- lift influence and social selling
- that schedules and distributes
- the most engaging content across all top five social media platforms every day.
Increasing your share of voice and engagement – maximises influence, revenue and market dominance.
The average results are
- 2x more organic posts,
- 144x more engagement with your future buyers,
- 3x faster sales cycles,
- 2x lift in conversions for
- 1/2 the price of our competitors.
- Delivering influence, revenue and market dominance.
All for one low monthly price includes
- monthly strategy sessions
- professional content generation – video and written
Immediate results.
If you have read this far, thank you for your attention. This means a lot. I hope this helped you even a little bit in better making sense of this topic and if it did please share it with a friend who might also benefit from it.
Thanks for reading,
David
