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Company Vision & Story (Identify obstacles ((There had better be some…
Company Vision & Story
Main character?
When telling about the company, describe the customer.
This casts the target customer as the protagonist, while the entrepreneur/company takes on a helper role
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First, when you shift your role from protagonist to helper — as long as your story is credible — you often become more likeable.
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Why Now?
Audiences — particularly investors — are skeptical. They’re thinking, “People have lived this way for a long time — are they really going to change now?”
Promised Land
Show the promised land before explaining how you’ll get there: But when an audience knows where you’re headed, they’re much more likely to buckle in for the ride.
Again, before revealing the product Jobs defines the Promised Land unto which the iPhone will deliver his audience.
Upon revealing your solution, show how it does help customers get to your promised land, in all the ways competitors don’t.
But to get your audience to buckle in for the ride, you have to talk about the outcome much earlier. That’s why I call it the Move: you’re moving up the outcome — or at least an advertisement for it — higher in your narrative
Another benefit of the Move is that by getting clear on the future you want for your customer, your product roadmap gets clearer too. I’d go as far as to say that if you haven’t defined the Promised Land for your customer, it’s impossible to build a great product.
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The Promised Land is my shorthand for the desirable, difficult-to-achieve future that you commit to make real for your customers
The Promised Land is the North Star that guides everything that everyone does in your company, and should always be the thing that you are ultimately pitching—on your website, in sales conversations, in recruiting discussions, and with potential investors.
Searching for an answer to Simon Sinek’s “Why?” Getting customers to your Promised Land is your why.
Five questions to ask
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- Does it motivate your target audience?
- Is it emotional for your target audience?
- Will it align everyone in your company?
- Is it worded the way people actually talk?
- Does it define a huge, profitable, differentiated category?
Nope: the Promised Land is not having your technology, but what life is like thanks to having your technology.
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the audience knows not only why Luke wants to act, but why he has to act now.
Identify obstacles
(There had better be some big, nasty obstacles — otherwise who needs what you’re selling?)
then explain how you’ll overcome them: show how your company/product/service will overcome each one.
3 obstacles and 3 gifts: Why can’t your customer reach the Promised Land without you, and how will you help?
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It’s tempting at this point to jump into the details of your product or service. Resist that urge. If you introduce product/service details too soon, prospects won’t yet have enough context for why those details are important, and they’ll tune out.
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Then come Uberflip’s “gifts.” If—and only if—you’ve clearly stated your Promised Land and the obstacles to it, prospects have the context they need to understand why your capabilities matter
“There’s so much that goes into closing deals, but I attribute a lot of our recent success to this change in our messaging. We didn’t change our product. We changed the story that we’re all aligning around—especially the scale of it. Now it’s about a big shift in the world, and that’s driving urgency. It has taken us from being a nice-to-have to literally hearing prospects say, ‘Holy shit, I need this.’”
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Competition?
Competition: What if, instead, you could position yourself as running a somewhat different race? But by introducing competitors early and making them part of the problem, you shift the narrative in a crucial way: from us against them, to us fighting for a better future for our customers.
Jobs essentially prepares his audience to think of the iMac not simply as a new product, but as a kind of hero — one that will rescue them from a world in which they have to suffer competitors’ shortcomings.
Of course, Jobs isn’t saying competitors suck at everything. They just suck at making a satisfying a customer who wants to spend a lot of time on the Internet. First, he always talks about competitors as a group (even when he names the smartphones, above, he doesn’t single one out for criticism).
Competitor X? They’re great if you‘re looking for a future that looks like Y. But if you want the Promised Land we’re talking about, here’s why we’re the only ones who can get you there.
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Pitch
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“Is it a Story Yet?”
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First who. Then Why now. Then promised land. Then Obstacles and gifts (lightsaber! = your solution) + evidence.
Bare bones: For [MAIN CHARACTER], [WHY NOW]. So we thought, what if we could [HELP THEM REACH THE PROMISED LAND].
The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make your story better, you make the strategy better.
For sales teams
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Strategic stories power qualification: A well-structured sales story has within it an element that I call “why now?” that is invaluable for qualification.
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Strategic stories help salespeople build trust, uncover pain: The way to get reluctant prospects to open up is to model that behavior by telling a story that reveals your own pain and vulnerability.
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If we’re going to meet our growth targets, we’re going to have to radically shorten our sales cycle. So we need a story that creates urgency. How do we position our platform as more than just a nice-to-have?
The Stinky Cow Principle: How to Tell Stories that Make People Trust You: Details—even the gory ones—make you more likable.
The Stinky Cow Principle: Tell inciting incidents as scenes, not summaries
When you’re telling a story—whether writing a novel or relating recent events to a colleague—you’re constantly making a choice between the two narrative modes that writers call scene and summary.
For example, the next time you tell a customer success story, instead of just saying, “they had X problem,” paint a full picture — in all its Stinky Cow glory — of how your customers were suffering before you helped them make a change.
Most people you’re selling to are not experiencing much pain. On the scale of unbearable suffering to unfettered joy, most people vacillate within a range they would describe as “basically OK,” and they assume life will always be that way (shout out to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Shapes of Stories” lecture, which informs this graph).