How B2B companies can use stories to increase sales and revenue

Published in

Marketing And Growth Hacking

4 min readOct 9, 2017

B2C brands have been using stories to create relatable narratives for their customers to buy their products. It was long thought that B2B couldn’t implement storytelling since stories implies emotion and everyone knows B2B purchases are made 100% logically, right?

Wrong.

B2B companies sell on the foundation of emotion AND logic, and story telling can be a very effective content marketing tool to generate leads and develop the company’s brand. Storytelling is a very effective way of communicating a brand’s value and values to a target audience. Customers want to see evidence of a brand sticking to its values, and story telling is the perfect proof of that.

Components of a great brand story:

Creating the main characters, setting, etc

The main character should be a reflection of a brand’s ideal buyer persona. The story must be relatable to the average prospect, and they must be able to put themselves in the character’s shoes in order to be engaged or else the story will not deliver results.

Determining a brand’s ideal buyer persona

Demographic profile (Age, Marital status, Income, etc)
Psychographic profile (Motivations, Desires, Values, etc)

The rising action, conflict, etc

During this part of the story, the character will experience several obstacles which prohibit them from achieving their goal. These should be common goals which your prospect can easily relate to, or they won’t be as invested in the story leading to a missed sale.

After the character is left frustrated or unmotivated after the ordeals, the story should transition into depicting their struggles going away upon discovery of your brand’s offerings.

The final resolution

This is the portion of the story where the solution is introduced and the story is brought to a close. Introduce a pitch for your product and describe how it can help your prospect much like how it helped the character in the story.

Keep the pitch short and sweet just like the whole story or they will lose interest at this stage as well.

Insert a strong CTA so prospects can reach out to find out more information if they are interested.

How do we use great storytelling to build our brand and increase sales?

By using a structure to create relatable narratives, B2B brands can create effective case studies and populate their website or blog with them.

The brand will introduce the client and the issues they were undergoing before the brand was introduced to them. Then the brand will showcase their thought process in solving the problem and then finally resolve the issue with one of their solutions (products).

This creates both the emotional and logical appeal because the prospect can relate to the client’s struggles but also is informed of the logical benefits of purchasing the brand’s offering allowing them to make the rational purchase.

Hope you enjoyed the article and happy storytelling! :)