Business of Story

Most salespeople believe objections are the problem. Sales trainer and convo control expert Tara Shuler says they are wrong. In this episode of the Business of Story podcast, host Park Howell sits down with Tara Shuler — high-ticket closer, corporate sales trainer, and author of Questions Close Deals — to reveal why your objections are a symptom of poor discovery, and how speaking entirely in questions transforms every sales conversation, difficult family negotiation, and leadership challenge you face.

What is speaking in questions in sales?

Speaking in questions is a trained sales methodology in which every response — including objections — is met with a redirecting question rather than a statement or pitch. Tara Shuler has practiced and drilled this technique for 15 years across high-ticket software sales, corporate training, and one-on-one coaching. The result: salespeople who guide buyers to their own decisions rather than pushing them toward a close.

What you will learn in this episode:

• Why your sales objections are almost always a symptom of skipping proper discovery — and how to fix the beginning of your conversation, not the end

• How speaking in questions eliminates the need for objection handling by uncovering the emotional why behind every buyer decision before the pitch ever starts

• How to practice the question-first method starting tonight — with your spouse, your kids, and your colleagues — without telling them you are practicing

• Why sales pressure causes trained salespeople to abandon every technique they know — and how Tara's gymnastics muscle memory framework builds the instinct to ask under fire

• How Tara used sales questioning skills to convince her reluctant mother to move from Pennsylvania to Florida — and what that story teaches every leader about emotional discovery

• Why generic AI will flatten your brand story — and why purpose-built tools like the StoryCycle Genie® deliver the narrative clarity no general platform can match

The episode's core insight:

"You're trying to figure out what their why is, and that's where the questions come into play. And then the arguments don't happen later because now you understand what you're fighting against. Because it's an invisible monster until you understand it." — Tara Shuler (00:12:28)

About Tara Shuler:

Tara Shuler is the founder of Convo Control, a sales training and coaching practice built on one foundational skill: speaking in questions. A competitive Level 9 gymnast turned high-ticket closer, Tara has spent 15 years closing large-ticket corporate software contracts, training sales teams, and coaching individuals to get out of their own way through disciplined question-based discovery. She is the author of three books — Questions Close Deals, Parenting a Parent, and Everything Is Sales — and the creator of the Convo Dojo, a live training format that puts salespeople under pressure so their muscle memory can do what their nervous brain cannot. Find Tara at convocontrol.com.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Questions Close Deals by Tara Shuler — available on Amazon and in audiobook at convocontrol.com

Parenting a Parent by Tara Shuler — available on Amazon

Everything Is Sales by Tara Shuler — available on Amazon

The StoryCycle Genie® Brand Story Grader — free brand assessment at storycycle.ai

About the Business of Story:

The Business of Story is hosted by Park Howell, founder of Business of Story and creator of the Story Cycle System™ — the narrative infrastructure framework used by leaders, agencies, and brands to instill their conviction in their people and install it in their organization. New episodes publish weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Park Howell:

Website: businessofstory.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/parkhowell StoryCycle Genie®: storycycle.ai

You want your brand story to drive real business results — define it, refine it, get every soul behind it — and you will create a competitive advantage nobody can take from you. But getting to your brand story is not the victory. It's the false summit.

Host Park Howell sits down with Sean Schroeder — co-creator of the StoryCycle Genie® and architect of the Cognitive Mesh Architecture — to tell the origin story of a platform built to solve the real Everest of brand storytelling: operationalizing your brand story across every department, channel, and team member before narrative entropy destroys it.

What is narrative entropy? It's what happens when every SDR, salesperson, and department head starts writing from their own lived experience — telling their version of the brand story rather than what it actually is at the nexus. Without disciplined governance, your story doesn't hold. It decays.

What is StoryOps™? It's brand story governance applied everywhere — HR onboarding, customer service, DevOps, FinOps, project management — not just marketing. Brand strategy is a business communications discipline, and it needs to show up in every single slice of the organization.

What is Cognitive Mesh Architecture? It's the system that captures professional intelligence, decision-making lineage, and human judgment as content is created — giving every AI-generated brand asset full provenance so your brand voice compounds instead of drifts. Combined with Brightsy's MCP server, it delivers your brand narrative to every team member through the tools they already use.

What is the StoryCycle Genie®? It's the AI platform that compresses months of brand story creation and operationalization into weeks — for a fraction of the cost of traditional brand agencies.

Ready to see where your brand story stands? Go to storycyclegenie.ai, enter your URL, and get a free 14-point Brand Story Assessment in under a minute.

Most creatives are terrified of AI.

And honestly? That terror makes sense.

Sameness. Replacement. Theft.

Those three fears have colonized the creative internet. And they're not entirely wrong. Bad AI use produces a gray paste of mediocrity. It steamrolls voice. It scrapes without permission.

But here's what I've come to believe after years of building the Story Cycle System™ and developing what I call Artful Intelligence™:

The fear isn't about AI itself.

It's about how most people are using it. Like a vending machine. Like a ghostwriter. Like a replacement for thinking.

That's not intelligence. Artificial or otherwise.

The creatives who are thriving right now aren't using AI instead of their genius.

They're encoding their genius into AI and firing it at scale.

There's a difference so profound it changes everything.

You've spent years building deep expertise. You have frameworks. Hard-won instincts. A distinctive voice that took real living to develop.

You want to scale your creative output without losing what makes it yours.

But AI feels like a trap. The outputs look generic. You're afraid that leaning in means becoming a content machine producing work even you won't recognize as your own.

There's a third path.

One that treats AI not as a replacement or a crutch — but as your 100x creative amplifier.

I know this because our son Parker Howell has been living it.

Parker is the founder of Howell XR — XR filmmaker, VR game developer, fire dancer, jiu-jitsu practitioner, Reiki healer, hospice volunteer.

In the last 18 months he: → Built Monkey Tower VR in 9 months with 2 people → Won $50,000 in a Meta hackathon in 30 days → Built the Tunorama AI photo booth in 48 hours for $40 → Took SkateBoss from concept to prototype in 24 hours

That's not hype. That's what happens when someone stops treating AI as a productivity hack and starts treating it as an extension of their own creative intelligence.

Parker said something I keep coming back to:

"It's your editor, packed with all of your genius, that can fire a billion times a second."

Not a generic editor. Not someone else's genius. Yours.

Your patterns. Your frameworks. Your voice. Your decade of taste — baked into a system that never sleeps and never runs out of bandwidth.

That's not sameness. That's a creative superpower only you can build.

He also said something that stopped me cold:

"I feel like I unwittingly have designed my entire career for this moment in time."

A filmmaker who moved between disciplines without apology. A developer who didn't wait for permission to start building in VR. A creative who treated every seemingly unrelated skill as preparation for a future nobody had mapped yet.

That's the Artful Intelligence mindset.

And to anyone still sitting on the sidelines? Parker was direct:

"Just go make some slop. Don't show it to anyone. But just play with it."

No judgment. No stakes. Just play.

Because the fear of producing slop is keeping more talented people from their own creative abundance than any shortcoming in the technology.

The question isn't "will AI replace me?"

It's "how do I encode what I know into something that compounds?"

The creatives who answer that question — who train AI on their irreplaceable expertise — are building something that genuinely can't be commoditized.

Because it's them.

If you're a creative who wants to think bigger than you've ever thought, this episode is for you.

If you're an expert who wants to encode your genius into something scalable, this episode is for you.

If you've been afraid that embracing AI means losing yourself — this one is especially for you.

🎧 Listen and watch — link in the first comment.

#ArtfulIntelligence #BusinessOfStory #100xCreator #AICreativeAmplifier #StoryCycleSystem

What kills iconic brands like MTV, Nike, Blockbuster, and GoPro? Not bad marketing. Not weak products. But four specific strategic traps that fragment brand story governance — and silently destroy enterprise value from the inside out.

Brand strategist and BrandStruck founder Magda Adamska joins Park Howell on the Business of Story to reveal the four strategic traps that cause even the world's most powerful brands to collapse: the Comfort Trap, the Efficiency Trap, Over-Expansion, and Growth-at-All-Costs. Drawing from 250-plus brand strategy case studies spanning nearly 50 countries, Magda shows exactly how narrative entropy sets in when brand story loses its governance — and how AI accelerates the damage at light speed.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why MTV had everything Spotify needed — and still failed to act

• How Nike's pandemic data trap triggered a brand crisis still unfolding today

• Why GoPro's move into media nearly destroyed the company

• How a governed brand story acts as the one strategic guardrail that protects against all four traps

Magda Adamska is an independent brand consultant with over 20 years guiding C-suite executives through brand transformations and portfolio optimizations for MTV, Pearson, Nike, Nestlé, JP Morgan, Procter & Gamble, and Guinness World Records.

If you lead a brand, market one, or build them for clients, this episode is essential listening.

Visit brandstruck.co to explore 250-plus brand strategy case studies including free access to Nike, Lego, and IKEA.

Most organizations don't have a brand storytelling problem. They have a negotiation problem.

When sales, marketing, and IT each champion their own version of the company story, the result is narrative entropy — the slow fragmentation of your brand message across every channel, every team, and every customer touchpoint. And in the age of AI-powered search, that fragmentation doesn't just confuse your audience. It gets scraped, amplified, and fed back into the market as your brand identity.

Attia Qureshi knows how to stop it.

A negotiation and influence expert with two decades of experience, Attia has brokered agreements in Fortune 500 boardrooms, university classrooms, and conflict zones around the world — including negotiating with cartel-controlled farmers on behalf of the U.S. State Department in Colombia. She is a former MIT faculty member, adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, founder of Attia Qureshi Consulting, and author of the national bestseller Never Settle: Persuasion and Negotiation Skills to Get What You Want, which Daniel Pink calls a book that will "train you how to move through the world."

In this episode of the Business of Story, Park Howell and Attia explore how relational, interest-based negotiation is the missing discipline inside StoryOps — the practice of developing, operationalizing, and governing your brand narrative across every department in your organization.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why sales and marketing fight over brand story — and the negotiation framework that ends it

• How to map the interests of every internal stakeholder so you can build genuine cross-departmental buy-in around one sovereign brand narrative

• Why narrative entropy accelerates in the age of AI — and how StoryOps, powered by negotiation, is your best defense

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Attia Qureshi Consulting: atiaqureshi.com

• Never Settle by Attia Qureshi and John Richardson — available at all major retailers

• Free internal influence guide: atiaqureshi.com/story

• Business of Story Brand Story Genie™: businessofstory.com

Your brand is being described right now on platforms you don't control — and AI is assembling those fragments into a story you'd never tell about yourself. Matt Beezley, Senior Strategist at Red Fan Communications and creator of the Brand Authority Index, calls it narrative entropy. And in this episode of the Business of Story, he explains exactly why it's the defining brand challenge of the AI search era.

Matt has spent more than a decade helping B2B companies across fintech, insurtech, sustainable technology, education, and supply chain find the story that holds through IPOs, acquisitions, and high-stakes go-to-market moments. He built Red Fan's brand positioning methodology from scratch — and then built the Brand Authority Index, a diagnostic tool that quantifies the signals large language models actually use to evaluate, cite, and recommend brands to potential buyers.

What those signals reveal should concern every brand marketer: over 80% of AI citations come from earned media, not your website. Query-based rankings barely correlate with what AI actually says about you. And if your brand is described differently on your website, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Google Knowledge Base, AI will either ignore you entirely or invent a Frankenstein version of your brand and serve it to buyers at the exact moment they're making a decision.

In this conversation, Park Howell and Matt unpack the concept of entity coherence — messaging consistency across every platform where your brand exists — and why it's the single highest-leverage fix available to brand communicators right now. They explore why gated content is killing your AI citation rate, how the prism model helps one core story speak to 25 different B2B buying stakeholders without fragmenting, and why the brands winning in generative engine optimization are doing the same things great marketers have always done — just doing them with discipline and consistency.

You will learn why AI detects and discounts AI-generated content, how a three-question monthly sales feedback loop starts closing the narrative entropy gap immediately, and why training AI on your own proprietary data produces results that are, in Matt's words, "light years better" than anything pumped out from a generic prompt.

If your brand is invisible in AI search — or worse, misrepresented — this episode is your diagnostic and your roadmap.

Connect with Matt Beezley and Red Fan Communications at redfancommunications.com and explore their Brand Authority Index diagnostic. Find Park Howell and the StoryCycle Genie™ at businessofstory.com, and subscribe to Park's Brand StoryOps™ for Agencies newsletter on LinkedIn.

What separates the brands that dominate their category from those that disappear into digital noise? Two things: a ruthlessly focused niche and a brand story governed with such precision that your ideal client finds no other logical answer.

Lindsey Busfield, co-founder of Optimize My Firm, built the nation's most recognized SEO agency for personal injury attorneys by doing exactly that — going so narrow, so deep, and so disciplined in her StoryOps™ that competitors simply can't follow.

In this episode of the Business of Story, host Park Howell and Lindsey unpack why niching down is the most powerful brand strategy available to any business, how governing your story with clarity, consistency, and coherence makes you the category king or queen of your market, and why AI-driven search now rewards exactly this kind of high-fidelity storytelling.

You'll discover:

• Why casting a wide net produces shallow results — and how radical niche focus turns your brand into the signal, not the noise
• How personal injury lawyers use story to win cases — and what every business can steal from that approach to govern their brand narrative
• How to build your digital footprint across SEO, AEO, and GEO so that Google, Perplexity, and every AI search engine serves you up as the definitive answer in your market

Lindsey is also host of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute podcast and author of How Personal Injury Lawyers Get Leads: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why — available now on Amazon.

Connect with Lindsey Busfield: Website: optimizemyfirm.com Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: Lindsey Busfield

Learn more about the Business of Story and StoryOps™: storycyclegenie.ai

Gavin McMahon: The Arrow of Coherence That Unifies Your Brand Storytelling Business of Story Podcast | Host: Park Howell

Most brand stories fragment the moment they leave the marketing department. Gavin McMahon has a name for what stops that — and it may be the most important concept in business storytelling you haven't heard yet.

Gavin McMahon is a recovering mechanical engineer, founder of a 25-year leadership and storytelling consultancy, and author of Story Business: Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business. He joins Park Howell on the Business of Story podcast to introduce the Arrow of Coherence — the cause-and-effect narrative logic that connects every layer of an organization, from the C-suite to the front line, into a single governing story world.

The problem Gavin diagnoses is one every business leader will recognize: the synonymous mess. Most companies tangle purpose, vision, mission, and strategy into one undifferentiated blob of corporate language. The result? Thousands of employees making daily decisions — small and large, value-creating and value-destroying — without a coherent narrative to guide them. In a pre-AI world, that fragmentation was a slow burn. Today, ungoverned AI scales that fragmented story at machine speed.

The Arrow of Coherence is Gavin's answer. Borrowed conceptually from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea of an arrow of relationship, Gavin defines the Arrow of Coherence as the cause-and-effect logic that must shine through a brand — the same governing logic that makes the world of IKEA, Apple, or Patagonia feel coherent whether you encounter it in product design, customer service, or a thirty-year-old marketing campaign. When that arrow is present, every decision in the organization points the same direction. When it's absent, you have drift.

In this conversation, Park Howell and Gavin McMahon explore why brand storytelling is not a marketing function but an act of world building — and why the best brands govern their stories through something closer to a show Bible than a brand guideline. They discuss why the CEO is the most underutilized storyteller in any company, how to build a coalition of the willing to embed story culturally rather than hierarchically, and why AI will amplify your narrative entropy unless a governing Brand Brain is installed first.

Gavin also shares the two things he wishes he had known in the 1990s when he was leading digital transformation at Gartner — lessons about human decision-making, the stories people tell themselves, and why the truth is never driven by facts alone.

What you will learn in this episode:

What the Arrow of Coherence is and how to apply it to unify your brand story across every department and channel. Why most organizations suffer from a synonymous mess of purpose, vision, mission, and strategy — and the single narrative move that untangles it. How show Bibles differ from brand guidelines and why that distinction determines whether your story survives scale. Why your CEO is your most underutilized brand storyteller. How to use AI as a collaborator without surrendering your story to it. The three practical steps you can take today to start building your own Arrow of Coherence.

Gavin McMahon is the author of Story Business: Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business. Learn more at storybusiness.com.

Park Howell is founder of The Business of Story, creator of the Story Cycle System™, and author of Brand Bewitchery and The Narrative Gym. Full episode show notes, transcript, and resources at businessofstory.com.

Rain Bennett — award-winning documentary filmmaker and author of The Chief Storytelling Officer — joins Park Howell on the Business of Story to make the case that your brand story doesn't belong to marketing. It belongs to your entire organization. And if no one is governing it, AI is fragmenting it faster than you can fix it.

In this episode, Rain introduces his Narrative Operating System (NOS) — a living, governing architecture that threads a single coherent brand story through every department, every touchpoint, and every AI tool you deploy. He explains why the Chief Storytelling Officer is not a communications role but an engagement role, and why the brands winning today built their story alongside their product — never after it.

You'll discover:

— Why marketing, sales, and HR are telling three different brand stories right now — and what to do about it — How Rain's Narrative Operating System governs story across Vision, Mission, Brand, Product, Marketing, Sales, and Feedback Loops — Why the Chief Storytelling Officer is the most important role most companies haven't created yet — How to extract the story your organization is already living before you try to tell the story you want to tell — Why AI has turned narrative drift from a slow burn into an exponential emergency

Rain Bennett is the founder of Elamir, a documentary filmmaking studio producing human stories for the tech industry. His new book, The Chief Storytelling Officer, is available now at rainbennett.com/businessofstory — where listeners can also get a signed copy for $10.

Park Howell is the world's leading brand storytelling advisor. For 40 years he has helped organizations grow by up to 600% using his Story Cycle System™. He is the host of the Business of Story — one of the world's top-ranked business storytelling podcasts — and co-creator of StoryCycle Genie®, the AI-powered brand narrative platform.

Before you govern your story, know where it stands. Get your free Brand Story Grade — an A+ to F assessment across 14 narrative dimensions — in minutes at storycyclegenie.ai/brand-story-grader.

Story on.

Sharon Toerek: Don't Sell What You Do. Profit from How You Think — Libsyn Description

Most marketing agencies are unknowingly giving away their most valuable asset — and AI has quietly turned that mistake into a legal emergency.

IP attorney Sharon Toerek, founder of Legal+Creative and host of The Innovative Agency podcast, joins Park Howell to reveal the intellectual property and AI legal risks every agency principal needs to understand right now.

Sharon is the agency industry's most trusted legal strategist on IP protection, trademark, copyright, and AI governance — and she's seen firsthand how fast agencies are falling behind.

In this episode you'll discover:

• Why generic AI-generated content may legally belong to no one — not your agency, not your client, not anyone — and what that means for every deliverable you produce • How feeding client data into generic AI tools is a hidden data privacy violation waiting to happen, and why most agencies don't realize they're doing it • The five moves every agency must make now — from internal AI policies to errors and omissions insurance — to protect their IP, govern their AI use, and build an agency worth far more when it's time to sell

Sharon also makes the case for the most important strategic shift in the agency business model: stop competing on execution and start commanding premium fees for your thinking and strategy.

Because what goes on between your ears is your most valuable and protectable asset.

Connect with Sharon Toerek: • legalandcreative.com • The Innovative Agency Podcast • LinkedIn: Sharon Toerek

Craft your vibrant brand story with the StoryCycle Genie®: storycyclegenie.ai