StoryQuest Blog

Shorten Your Sales Cycle by Combining Video Stories & Social Selling
 Presented By:
Tim Keelan, Founder & CEO, StoryQuest Inc ; Jamie Shanks, MBA – Managing Partner

>>> View RECORDED WEBINR <<<

Join us for this BrightTALK webinar on Friday May 10th, where you can learn how to leverage your customer stories in selling to their “Sphere of Influence”. Use video & LinkedIn messages to book more meetings, and close deals faster!

• 94% of marketers say that Voice of the Customer content is their most effective content.
• 83% of your buyers are starting their buying journey online – what first message do you want them to see?
• 50% of our Social Selling meetings booked are by telling client success stories to their “Sphere of Influence”

In this webinar you will learn:

• How to capture and produce customer stories faster and easier
• How to customize your stories to target very specific buyers
• Where in LinkedIn you can leverage you stories more effectively

About the presenters:
Continue reading “Video Stories & Social Selling Webinar” »

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Bagger Vance is the title a character (played by Wil Smith) in a golf movie about the last match played by Bobby Jones. That’s the context, but its really about reluctant onetime golf prodigy (played by Matt Damon) trying to find his swing – in golf and in life. Bagger Vance was on HBO last Saturday – I am sure to help all of us get pumped up for this weeks Masters. The movie is loaded with wisdom, but one phrase struck me … not as a golfer but as a marketer.

“You can’t make the ball go into the hole, you can only let it.”

The same is true of prospects and customers … you can’t make them buy, you can only let them. And it reminded me to be imperfect. With all the sales and marketing advice out there, it can be easy to view yourself as constantly lacking perfection. Of course every message, pitch, article and PowerPoint deck lacks perfection. You cannot compel customers to buy, but by offering your authentic message, you do give them a chance to.

This same idea is made in a different context by Amanda Palmer, in her Ted Talk “The Art of Asking“

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Guest Blog Post by Andrew Nemiccolo

Has this ever happened to you? You want to develop customer references for B2B marketing. You contact several clients and ask for a “quote,” but the clients are unsure of exactly what to provide. Their intentions are good, but you end up with something glowing and bland. Or they say, “write something yourself and we’ll approve it,” and it comes off feeling less than authentic. You have the nagging feeling that you’ve missed the essence of why that client has been so loyal.

“ABC software consulting is the best!”

“BDE Financial Group has been meeting our financial needs for 12 years with top notch service.”

The clients who love you, refer you, and stay with you don’t always know what to provide when it comes to references.

Skip the Sweetener

Extremely positive customer testimonials and reviews might be tuned out, according to several studies.

In “The Positive Effect of Negative Information,” researchers from Stanford and Tel Aviv Universities found that customer reviews that included small bits of negative information were more influential on purchasing decisions than were reviews that were purely positive.

The Enterprise Council on Small Business surveyed SMB owners to find which type of recommendations is most influential on B2B purchasing decisions. That report, “Cheerleaders Make Bad Advocates,” found that stories were the most effective of four types of customer references that were tested:

• Fair & Balanced: These were from owners who “called it right down the middle.” They gave a detailed assessment of the positive and negative aspects about products or services to their fellow owners.
• Cheerleading: These were from owners who gave overwhelmingly positive reviews about all aspects of the product/service to their peers.
• Specs: These were from owners who focused on the product features in their reviews to other owners.
• Stories: These were from owners who framed their reviews/recommendations in a story about what happened to them, which included both problems AND the resolutions encountered throughout their experience with the supplier/vendor.

Share your Clients’ Stories

It’s tempting to showcase superlative testimonials or lists of product specifications, features, and benefits. These feel safe. But for B2B content marketing that will stick, consider a story instead.

• Be memorable. Share a story. The human mind is wired to recall the story format more easily than a random quote or testimonial. Tell a story with a specific, time, place and event: “GHI Services amazed us recently. One night last October during the World Series, our network servers were compromised, but GHI had already isolated the attack before we even noticed ourselves, and they stopped any further damage. GHI’s team had us back online within 6 minutes, and this was a Saturday night.”
• Seek out conflict. It’s counterintuitive, but this is your opportunity to demonstrate problem solving. “We had several bumps in the road, as might be expected with any technology platform conversion, but LMNOP stayed with us every step of the way and addressed the problems with no excuses or finger pointing. Highly professional and effective.”
• Be surprising. “I normally wouldn’t be open to using an outside social media marketer, since we are an ad agency ourselves, but when I found out what XYZ Social could do for us with data integration, I was sold!”

So don’t burden your clients with vague requests for bland quotes or over-the-top comments that most sales prospects will disregard or forget anyway. Share a story instead!

Andrew Nemiccolo is founder of Seven Story Learning and author of Aizuchi Playbook: Brand Your Business with Story.  Andrew gives keynote talks and workshops on stories for business and develops client success story programs. For more resources, visit http://sevenstorylearning.com and connect on twitter or Facebook.Sugar Dish photo courtesy of Steve Snodgrass

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This post is about a guy who completely gets it when it comes to A – Social Selling, and B – making things easy to buy.  One of the things I like most about Jamie Shanks from SalesforLife is that he succeeds where we sometimes struggle. Jamie runs a Canadian based firm that teaches people how to do social selling – with a heavy emphasis on LinkedIn. In fact SalesforLife is about to become the internal LinkedIn training company for LinkedIn!

Now it seems like everyone I know is opening a social media / social business consulting company – so at one level, SalesforLife is not unique, but there in lies the difference. They are unique – maybe not in the concept of social selling, but in the execution. It is easy. Contact Jamie and you will quickly understand why they exist, what they do, and what you get if you engage.  No baloney, just simple explanation of a straight forward offer. And they he makes the mechanics easy. After a call you get all the content and info you need to review his offering, evangelize it to others, and ultimately buy.

Jamie recently started using our digital postcards – so while I  am surely biased – I am still learning from and amazed by Jamie. He reminds me to do the work of making it easy for customer to “get” you, buy from you, and buy again. We are not always there but I keep watching Jamie and moving in the right direction. – Thanks Jamie

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I speak with authority on this topic. ;-)

I’m not turning a lot of heads at the my kids’ soccer games. But like everyone, I want to connect with people in more personal and compelling ways while looking my best and professional. I know video can be a great tool for that, but doing even a decent job with video gets challenging – at least for me. I have done it, somedays it is easy – most days its hard. I have two problems. First – me, I don’t always look particularly stellar at the right moments, and getting my message right, with eye contact, keeping things brief – it’s hard.  Second, even on my best day – shooting a decent video is hard. Getting in the right location, (without kids or office noise) with the right gear, lighting, the mics – for me, it proves challenging.

But everyone is beautiful in our moments of authenticity. When we share stories and the sound of our honest voices. Think about yourself. Whether talking to your kids or presenting to a client – often you are not face to face, but when you share your voice and stories what happens? You convey not only your identity, age, ethnicity, and gender, but also your knowledge, experience, passion, confidence – all the things that make us human. There’s only one thing missing: your face. People like to see people – to put a face to a name so to speak.

Bring together your best most professional images, with your voice, passion, and stories. It works even when you’re in your PJs, or it’s that unshaved morning, or when the kids or the co-workers are making noise. With digital storytelling you can do it without all the cost and hassle of traditional video. And it not only works for videos of you – but also as new way to capture the stories of your customers and leaders. The simple recipe is: sequenced photos of you + some slides or other images + your voice in a brief, personal message. You can do this in Powerpoint, iPhoto, or right from your phone.

Video is powerful. Personal video can be hard. Good quality photos + your voice are easier and often much more professional looking. That is what works for me and and you can see how this works with customer stories and thought leadership too.

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Create Content That Cuts Through the Noise

Download the Free Visual Whitepaper:
10 Ways to Create and Enable Compelling B2B Content.

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There have been plenty of articles written about content marketing, the content marketing arms race, and the resulting deluge of content. They all (quite properly) end with the same conclusion: Stop making crap, and focus on good content, rather than just volumes of content.  This point is made wonderfully in the Velocity Partners Slideshare “Crap” or in Joe Pulizzi’s article here.

We want to help push the needle in the direction of quality over quantity by encouraging and helping others to create and enable compelling content. While we at StoryQuest have a passion for customer stories and customer reference stories, we know that compelling content takes many forms. Stories, whitepapers, videos and all kinds of new media formats. The key is creating content that raises an eyebrow, gets noodled over, and helps make decisions. We believe doing that lends support to any brand, marketing or sales goals.

We’ve created a visual whitepaper that dives into what we believe are the two sides of compelling content. Specifically, first creating great content, and then enabling that content into awesome, simple and beautiful user experiences. Because poor content is, well, lame. But good content poorly enabled or delivered is a waste too. In the linked whitepaper we look at 5 keys to creating compelling content, and 5 keys to enabling that content. For each point we share our perspective while linking to outside resources and ideas. The whitepaper is just a start. In each area we will be writing more, providing more details, examples and resources. So please download the pdf, and feel free to share your ideas, examples, and feedback with us here.

Clearly, what we're all trying to avoid!

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How to share a complex story, in a brief package

Stories and storytelling – on this blog or on just about any marketing blog  - are touted as the key to connecting with your audience. But there is a problem.

Attention spans are short. Stories take time. At least real stories do. The ones about real people, with details that resonate, get heads nodding, teach and start conversations. Those stories take more than 140 characters, or 60 seconds or two pages to share. So how do you balance complexity with brevity?

Continue reading “Customer Stories – Micro Style.” »

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You need compelling content. What makes content compelling? Stories. I know, not a big surprise. But it’s true and here are two stats for you:

• 94% consider voice of the customer content the most effective in convincing prospects. See Full study here.
• #1 element for compelling and engaging content – storytelling. See Optify Content Marketing Trends Report

Business stories are different. 

While everyone likes to be entertained, but B2B is different.  It is hard to pull off comedy, sexy, or action effectively. But, stories work and can be done by anyone. But even without comedy, sex and action – you still need to engage, keep them interested and encourage action.  If stories are the answer, then how do you write and produce compelling B2B stories? There is a ton of advice out there on this topic, the three most important elements we have found are:

• Make it personal
• Leverage fear and doubt
• Talk about the past, not the future.

Continue reading “How to Tell Compelling B2B Customer Stories” »

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As we each battle with our information overload dragons, we face a paradox. While we fight the dragon, we are like the grasshopper. You know the grasshopper – the inquisitive young priest who sought true understanding to complex problems. His teacher, “Master Po” providing first simple analogies as answers, then as the boy understands more – come more complex answers. Content marketing can learn from Master Po.

The Web as our “Master Po.” It has a simple answer to everything.  But as we seek deeper understanding – beyond the highest rated stereo or the best route to take, when we ask “Who is the best consulting partner?” or “What is the most appropriate software product to buy?” Master Po has that answer too.

What does Master Po do when the grasshopper seeks deeper understanding? He shares stories.

Continue reading “The Content Paradox: Depth vs Brevity / Dragon vs Grasshopper” »

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OK – this is not news. 

But it is powerful.

It is the story of a comedian who was diagnosed with cancer, and within a day of finding out, she went on stage – and was wonderfully honest, funny, … and I don’t know … beautiful about it. You can read more about the story in lots of places like The New Yorker, and a great show about her on This American Life. I like an email I recently got from Louis CK – that is below.

Nothing else I can add, other than I love honesty, and this is honest.

Email from Louis CK:  Greetings to the people and parts of people that are reading this. Hi. This is Louis. I’m a comedian and you bought a thing from me. Well, I’m writing to tell You that there is a new thing you can buy on my website louisck.com. It’s an audio standup set by not me but another comedian named Tig Notaro. Why am I selling someone else’s comedy on my website?

Continue reading “The Tig Nitaro Story” »

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