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“Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin

WHY STORYTELLING WORKS

It’s time we acknowledge and leverage storytelling in our sales process. Effective storytelling is not easy. It requires communication skills and what some would call “the gift of gab”. Storytelling is not reporting. It’s having a conversation that is enchanting. Like great presenters, effective storytelling requires confidence, credibility and a servant leader attitude.

Our sales reps are often not skilled storytellers. Our sales teams are a skilled and integral part of our selling process. Our field sales teams are positioned to facilitate the transaction, drive profitable revenue and maintain the long term relationship with our customers. They are not, nor should they be tasked with “setting the landscape” optimizing the messaging” or “changing the world”. If IBM wants to lead and define the marketplace, it needs storytellers. We should align storytelling to our broader GTM and coverage disciplines. This would provide much better alignment of measurements, culture, and mission.

Our technical sales professionals are often not skilled storytellers. While good demos should tell a story, many of our demos are not good stories. They are at best, just good representations of a “day in the life” or “a business process”. Their purpose is usually to illustrate a function or capability. They show the “how” something can be done.

We can tell customers what we do and we can show them how we do it, but many of our opportunities are lost because we’ve not addressed the why.

Introducing Storytellers. Our sales reps will call on our storytellers to assist them by opening the conversation with prospects and to cast the vision in such a way as to establish the “bar” from which all others will be measured and a framework into which we can sell our solutions. Used in this way, effective storytelling can drastically reduce the competitive pressure often encountered during our sales processes.

Our storyteller engagements will result in conversations with line of business executives previously inaccessible to our average sellers.

We need to identify and utilize skilled storytellers

Our Storytellers will provide a specialized form of sales/marketing communication and air cover

Because of our position of leadership, IBM is fortunate to have many unique opportunities to deliver our message. As leaders and market definers we should have world class messengers.

The competitive landscape requires that we step up our messaging game. Our media rich culture has produced an audience that demands exceptional and awe inspiring messages. Historically, our technical competence and our IT focused audiences have allowed us to simply report what we know. Our audience has changed to one more focused on line-of business and culture. They expect to be enchanted.

Lesser capable companies are now able to attack us, not by offering superior products, but rather by garnering mind share and public attention through passionate messaging. Our market leading products have given us the higher ground that deserves to be protected by equally passionate and effective messaging.

HOW STORYTELLERS WORK

Proposal: Commission a dedicated team of storytellers

This team would be responsible to:

• Spend time with sales teams, customers and prospects for the purpose of discovering, developing and distributing stories to assist sales and marketing efforts
• Take existing customer references and turn them into effective stories
• Assist our customers to become better storytellers…to help them with internal adoption and external recognition
• Work directly with customers and field sales teams to help prospects understand the “essential” nature of our offerings
• Assist sales and marketing by presenting at multi-customer or single customer events
• Author and publish new stories for internal use and external distribution
• Leverage social networks to build distribute stories and awareness of our offerings
• Contribute to field and partner education (Both vision and strategy as well as communication / presentation / story telling skills)

WHAT STORYTELLERS DO

The make-up and measure of a Storytelling Team

This team will require the talents of our top communicators and presenters.

To be effective they must be:
Communicators: good presenters and writers
Caring: people focused with an approachable service attitude
Consultative: empathetic, business focused and adaptive
Credible: enthusiastic and experienced
Creative: open to suggesting & implementing new ideas/approaches

All candidates will be expected to produce samples of written communications (articles, blogs, etc.) as well as undergo an audition to include the development and delivery of a presentation to a panel of discerning individuals from IBM and our partner community.

When this concept spreads worldwide, the team should seek to include storytellers who represent our cultural diversity. While having someone “from the states come and speak” might appeal to some audiences, the requirement to scale this team and to be globally effective would be greatly enhanced by developing team members who are native speakers, regionally accessible and locally credible.

This team will be measured on Sales and Market Impact

Sales impact will be based on formal feedback of effectiveness and value by IOT sales and marketing leaders as well as our Business Partners. This will include the related impact on the advance of their software sales business. Storytellers are most often engaged in the early stages of a sales process and their contribution can be identified as they engage with prospects and customers. The Storytelling team will also develop and distribute messaging assets (presentations, videos, posts, etc.) that will be leveraged by our sales teams.

Market impact will consist of the reporting and effectiveness of our message through the storyteller’s personal, digital and social distribution. Storytellers will work directly with our event teams to staff and assist in the leadership of our messaging events. Each storyteller will develop and monitor their digital persona using social analytics and will establish personal targets for growth and extended reach.

Team size considerations

We can pilot the program with 3 or 4 storytellers. This will allow us to determine the fit and function of this new role in our sales and marketing processes. Obviously the impact of a few individuals will be proportional to the investment. However, after a period of time, if the concept is proven effective, the team could be expanded. The good leadership structure for this creative team would be the player/coach model. The Chief Storyteller would serve as mentor to help grow the skills and reach of the storytellers. This lead would also coordinate the activities of the team.

THE WAY STORYTELLERS ARE LED

Chief Storyteller

I have been created for this role and believe I am uniquely qualified to design, develop and lead such a creative team. For years I have passionately pursued the establishment of such a team. My experience as a Worldwide Storyteller has proven the effectiveness and desperate need for such a focused role. To this end, I’ve established myself as a Storyteller within IBM and have measurable results of my efforts.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at 100+ events in 50+ cities in 20+ countries. The majority of these were in a keynote capacity.

I post most of my presentations on my Slideshare channel which in the last year alone has yielded over 626K views.

I have a personal website www.creativitycrisis.com where you can find my CV, many of my presentations, videos and testimonials.

I am currently developing a Business Storyteller Community that will serve to enable storytellers. http://ibm.biz/storymatters . Following is the Introduction Video for the program.

THE WAY THIS STORYTELLER THINKS

I believe in the creative spirit in all of us. I enjoy sharing stories with individuals and large audiences. I’m a visual non-technical optimist and I know we change the world by being here. Early in 2016 I made a commitment that this year I would seek this plan put into place. I have a vision and a plan for this team and I would welcome the opportunity to share this with you.

Louis Richardson

“Put it before them briefly so they will hear it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and above all, accurately so they will be guided by it’s light.” – Joseph Pulitzer