The best storytellers in the world take events that aren’t real and spin them out in stories that bring the picture in their head to life. Storytellers of the top caliber become marketers, politicians, consultants and maybe even novelists. However, the majority of storytellers don’t end up writing books.
The best piece of sales advice I was ever given was to not tell someone why you are the best or about your features or about how valuable your product is. Instead you should tell them stories about all of the ways that you are going to make their life easier or better. Paint them a picture so that they can see themselves in the situations that you are trying to help them with. Make them feel their current frustration and make them realize how quickly and easily you can take that frustration away. Make the story of your product about them.
Notice how journalists are often writing their articles about big topics by focusing on a single person impacted by the issue? They write about the single mother that only lives because of Obamacare. They write about the small business that is going under because of Obamacare. They give you a story of why their position or angle is the right one. They simply don’t tell you that in this enormous world you can find a single case study to support any position that may have happened to want to take up. Some was hurt by every decision just as someone was helped by that same decision.
Storytellers know that their message needs to have an audience and a moment. They have to capture the feeling of the time while giving the audience something to believe in while also giving them something to run with.
I always hated case studies to show how products made someone else’s life better. You are never handed a case study showing how the product wrecked a person’s organization. You never are given the case study about where the implementation failed and nothing went right. You are given the ones that look the most like you and that went really, really well. Because case studies are simply stories. It’s something to make you feel comfortable without giving you the rest of the context that is being left out.
When you start to experience the stories around you always ask yourself what the broader context is. There’s really no such thing as fake news, only news that has the wrong context.