After the demo, what's next? 

Join ShiftHappens on Thurs Dec 10th to explore marketing myths, define value drivers, and craft better stories to engage stakeholders.

Meghann Misiak,  Sales Strategist at The Path to President's Club.

Trent Anderson,  Chief Operating Officer at Prewrite.

Chris Ortolano, Account Strategist at Outbound Edge.

Topics include:

Walk away a template to stand apart from the competition with account specific value stories to increase stakeholder engagement.

The Path to President's Club  enables B2B Sales Teams to increase close rates & ACV through value-centric sales training, coaching, & proven frameworks.

Prewrite helps Marketing and Sales leaders craft a business story library to deliver stories that add value and capture the imagination.

Outbound Edge develops sales process templates and diagnostic content for AM's to  increase stakeholder engagement via Account Growth plans.  Outbound Edge is a certified Membrain Partner.

The Art of Storytelling: Finding Your Story  

We all know people who are gifted storytellers - people who can captivate a crowd with their tales. While most of these people are charismatic and have a flair for language, they also have one important quality that you don't see: they know what makes a story worth telling.  

All good stories have a few elements in common: they contain interesting characters, who are involved in dramatic situations, and they all have a point, or a controlling idea. No one will be enthralled by a story that lacks these key elements.  

You may already have a sense of what makes a good story, but you may not be sure where to start when crafting a story of your own. Do you start with an interesting character? A dramatic moment? An intriguing idea?  

A good story should have dramatic characters and a good dramatic idea. However, when you're writing short-form content, there's a third possible starting place: the dramatic moment.   

Longer-form content give you more time to explore character, to develop plots and subplots, and to suggest ideas. But in the short-form content, you need to be economic and find a quicker route to your story.   

A truly dramatic moment has everything a good story needs - interesting characters in compelling situations, who are wrestling with a big idea. If a moment strikes you as dramatic, and you learn how to unpack it, you'll have all the important elements of a good story.

Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XDnNwZaSmPI

Follow on Twitter: Twitter.com/trentanders0n

It’s one thing to build an audience — it’s another to monetize your audience.  

There are infinite products and services you can sell, but success in doing so ultimately hinges on one thing: Alignment.  

The audience you target, products you offer, and ways you position them must be in alignment with each other.  

To ensure your efforts to monetize your audience are not mismatched, consider the following six questions…   

1. Will you monetize an audience of the many or the few? 

2. Will you sell to an audience seeking a solution or an audience who doesn’t know they have a problem? 

3. Will you teach people how to do something or do it for them? 

4. Will you sell something that earns or costs? 

5. Will you target new money or existing spend? 

6. Will you sell to people once or on repeat?

The death of webinars has been greatly exaggerated.  

Every once in a while, someone declares webinars “over” as a viable lead generation and nurturing format. 

But how can they be when nine out of 10 B2B professionals say that webinars are their preferred content type?  So maybe it’s not webinars that don’t work. It’s a tendency toward broad, boring, and overlong webinars that turns people off.  What’s going to get that 90 percent of people to show up and stay engaged with your webinar? Yup, storytelling. 

Here’s how to use it:  

5 ways to set up your webinar for storytelling success  

1. Pick a hero. Choose one ICP to target with your webinar. It may seem more efficient to hold 1 webinar that appeals to multiple target audiences but by trying to appeal to many you end up pleasing no one.  

2. Pick a niche. Now that you have the hero, focus your webinar content on one pain point your hero is interested in using or solving. Ideally, it’s one you offer.  

3. Pick a point of view. Stories have conflict. So if you’re just showcasing how your product works, that’s a demo, not a webinar. Take an interesting stance. Go against an industry norm. Ask a polarizing question.  

4. Pick some ‘action points’. Like a page-turning book, your webinar needs cliff-hangers and foreshadowing. Ask questions you don’t answer for a slide or two. Introduce a startling statistic or attention-grabbing graph. Tease some info that you’re gonna touch on later.  

5. Pick a format. How you present your webinar is going to inform how you tell your story. Single-presenter webinars are the most common and the easiest way to control how you tell the story with a detailed script. But if you opt for multiple presenters, it’s still possible to keep your story flowing. Structure your webinar with a clear beginning-middle-end

Plan your webinar for free at prewrite.com

Say you’re selling widgets. You know your widget is 39% lighter than the competition, works 53% faster, costs 13% less, and has 29% more support.

Your client is asleep by now.

But maybe, three years ago you had a friend who struggled with their widget, who complained about the cost, the size, and how frustrated they were because a widget part broke, and they couldn’t get any support to fix it. So you decided to do something about that. And you designed this better, cheaper widget, and have around-the-clock o-call support, and your friend’s company has now doubled their production capacity.

This is the difference between fact-telling and storytelling, and it's even more effective when told via video.

Ali Hammoud and his team at Vidyard have cracked the code on effective video selling and video marketing.

Now we examine video selling and video marketing through a storytelling lens. 

Key Points:

"Video storytelling becomes effective when you treat your prospects as if they were archetypal characters in a story."

You have to figure out their:

* character traits

* wants

* needs

Then you can weave in your narrative.

How do you stand out in senior living - arguably the most competitive sales environment today?  

According to Jeff Altschul, Director of Sales and Marketing at Arboria of Long Grove, you stand out by using storytelling in marketing and sales videos.

Do you ever wish you could give a big middle finger to your dead-end, 9-5 day job?

No more BS reports, no more infantile coworkers, no more absolute clown of a boss.

And instead of all that crap, you get paid to talk about topics you LOVE - baseball, reality TV, dogs, whatever.

Well good news, you can ditch the 9-5 and create content for a living. 

The road ain't easy, but there are 7 Lessons I learned from a good friend who did exactly that.

He parlayed his passion for baseball into a full-time gig with Barstool Sports, the fastest growing and, arguably, most influential new media brand in the world. 

In this episode I talk with Dave Williams, aka White Sox Dave, about his journey from dorm room blogger to breaking news on Twitter to leaving his day job to ultimately landing his dream job at Barstool. 

You might be surprised to learn of 7 Lessons that stood out through the conversation:

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Told any good stories lately?

No? Well you might want to start.

Stories are more than simple fairy tales. Turns out, they actually alter our brains, and can even change the way we think and act.

Storytelling is a community act that involves sharing knowledge and values. It's one of the most unifying elements of mankind, central to human existence, taking place in every known culture in the world.

Here’s the psychology behind stories, and how you can craft a story for your brand that engages your customers and drives conversions.

Your brain is programmed to recognize patterns of information (human faces, letters, music notes, etc.) and assign them meaning (your mother’s face, the alphabet, the Star Spangled Banner, etc.)

Stories, too, are recognizable patterns, and we use them to find meaning in the world around us. We see ourselves in them, and the stories we hear become personal to us.

Stories are so near and dear to us, in fact, that we even invent them when they’re not actually there.

In 1944, 34 Massachusetts college students were shown a short film with two triangles and a circle moving across the screen. They were then asked to describe the scene. All but one described the movements with elaborate, human narratives, including:

This study demonstrates our tendency to personify abstract shapes and seek ourselves in the objects around us. This is called pareidolia, or “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist.” It’s what happens when you see a face in an electric outlet, or when you see shapes in the clouds.

Basically, we’re obsessed with the human story and want to hear it all the time.

Why are we so in love with human stories? Because they activate our minds. Stories can activate parts of our brains that give us sensory experiences and influence our way of thinking.

prewrite.com

twitter.com/prewriteapp

twitter.com/trentanders0n

Marti Sanchez, CEO of Influence Podium , drops by to help us learn how to become an influential thought leader by using storytelling.

Marti and his team have helped c-suite leaders CRUSH it on social media with their personal brand in a box service offering.

They even have their own process:

Define objectives and prepare the Content Pillar series that will drive all the content volume.

Assign a personal brand manager that will place and lead the right team around you — producing, creating, and publishing your content assets across all platforms to build your personal brand and drive business opportunities.

Constantly audit and report analytics, apply newfound audience insights, monitor social media trends, and take advantage of dynamic opportunities.

Marti also tells us his story, which is bound to get you determined.

Many business people have already discovered the power of storytelling in a practical sense – they have observed how compelling a well-constructed narrative can be. But recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

As social creatures, we depend on others for our survival and happiness. A decade ago, my lab discovered that a neurochemical called oxytocin is a key “it’s safe to approach others” signal in the brain. Oxytocin is produced when we are trusted or shown a kindness, and it motivates cooperation with others. It does this by enhancing the sense of empathy, our ability to experience others’ emotions. Empathy is important for social creatures because it allows us to understand how others are likely to react to a situation, including those with whom we work.