Selling your Story
Donald Miller’s Building a Storybrand, clarify your message so customers will listen
Book review by Alison Jones
Spoiler alert: This is quite simply one of the best business books I’ve ever read. More accurately, I listened to the audio book, and on getting out of the car immediately bought the paperback. It’s THAT good.
(It’s also a superb example of an author walking their talk: it’s not just WHAT Miller says, it’s how he says it, and how he backs it up with his own company presence and practice.)
The core of the book is the StoryBrand 7 (SB7) Framework, which is itself a beautiful example of one of Miller’s top tips. So many businesses ‘get’ the idea of storytelling, but make the mistake of positioning themselves as the Hero of the story. You’re not the Hero, says Miller, your customer is the Hero. And Heroes aren’t looking for other Heroes to compete with them, they’re looking for Guides to help them. More specifically, they’re looking for Guides with a Plan. They want empathy, sure, but they also want authority. Yoda’s a nice guy, but he’s only useful to Luke because he can teach him how to use the Force.
Here’s Miller’s plan, the SB7 framework, which you might recognise from pretty much every blockbusting film you’ve ever seen:
1. A character… [the customer is the hero]
2. ….has a problem… [not just an external problem, but internal and even philosophical ones too]
3. …and meets a guide… [that’s you, or it could be if you get the empathy/authority mix right]
4 …who has a plan… [you have a plan, right? Make sure it’s clear to your customer.]
5. …and calls them to action… [it’s not enough to tell them you have a plan — you need to actually tell them to buy it]
6. ….that helps them avoid failure… [they’ll only act if there’s real skin in the game, and you can help by pointing out the potential cost of NOT taking action]
7. …and ends in a success. [show them just how much better their life will be if they let you solve their problem]
Deceptively, profoundly simple. That point about not being the hero of your own company message is worth the price of the book alone.
There’s also lots of good tactical stuff about stripping back your website, creating valuable lead generators, getting email systems in place etc, all of which is spot on.
But in a book packed full of valuable content, the single most valuable takeaway for me was about simplicity. Understanding your offer requires a potential customer to burn calories, says Miller, and we’re programmed to conserve calories. So here’s the brutal truth, and one that’s forced me to go back and look again at my own suite of products and services:
‘People don’t buy the best products; they buy the products they can understand the fastest.’
If that doesn’t make you go back and review your sales copy, I don’t know what will.
Building a Storybrand is available from Blackwell’s here.
Alison Jones (@bookstothesky) is a publishing partner for businesses and organizations with something to say. Formerly Director of Innovation Strategy with Palgrave Macmillan, she hosts The Extraordinary Business Book Clubpodcast, regularly speaks and blogs on publishing, business and writing, sits on the board of the IPG, and is the author of This Book Means Business (2018).
