Sales is a critical business function just like any other studied in business school: marketing, finance, leadership, operations, strategy. Sales has its own body of knowledge, its own set of skills, and requires tremendous discipline to become great at it. In addition, sales knowledge, skill, and discipline stand on the foundation of research into persuasion and influence drawn from neuroscience, social science, and psychology. We view sales as helping people make progress in their lives. Everything we do springs from that mindset.

Sales and Marketing

As a sister function of marketing, sales has a lot to learn from marketing and vice versa. While these functions are distinct, there is some important common ground. And one place where the Venn diagrams of sales and marketing overlap almost completely is storytelling. Marketers and salespeople are inherently storytellers, and both professions need to get much better at telling the right story at the right time for the right reasons. Therein lies the opportunity and the reason we decided to include this chapter in a book on marketing.

Marketing is best thought of as one‐to‐many, using multiple channels to build awareness and brand and attract the right customers. Marketing tells stories about the company, its value proposition, its solutions, and its customers—all of which are conveyed through many channels to reach as many of the right customers as possible.

Sales, on the other hand, is one‐to‐one, and so are the stories that salespeople tell, whether in a room or on a zoom. They're personal, and they're meant to be relevant to each listener and the progress they are trying to make. Although different in approach, sales and marketing are acts of persuasion. This chapter focuses on storytelling largely from the sales point of view, with the objective to bridge understanding and encourage more collaboration with marketing.

Before we dive into storytelling, we first need to acknowledge what so many of us get wrong. Too many people in our professions mistake facts and data for persuasion. Attempts at persuasion that just throw datasets and charts and bullet‐pointed lists of facts at people, using intellectual arguments in hopes of winning their hearts and minds, are doomed to fail.

The main problem with that approach is that most people are what I call “bulletproof”—largely immune to the barrage of bits and bullets lobbed at them in hopes of influencing a decision, such as in making a sale. When facts and data come their way, most people simply put up a shield comprised of all the opinions and points of view they already carry around. Facts alone are poor persuaders.

The way we approach selling is far different. It unleashes the power of storytelling to make a connection first, which then allows people to see the possibilities for improving their own lives or businesses in some tangible way. One of my favorite quotes on this subject is from Hollywood screenwriting coach Robert McKee, in an interview with Harvard Business Review: “The other way to persuade people—and ultimately a much more powerful way—is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story. In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener's emotions and energy.”¹ McKee's comment should come as no surprise since storytelling has been around from the dawn of civilization, first as oral tradition and then written down. Humans have intuitively understood the impact and importance of stories.

In recent years, there has been greater emphasis on storytelling in everything from corporate branding to creating a movement. The emotional power of storytelling has also been uncovered by an ever‐increasing body of scientific research, such as identifying parts of the brain involved in telling and hearing stories and determining how the brain processes these narratives to understand complex concepts and ideas.² Frequently quoted research also shows that storytelling is exponentially more effective at making things memorable for the listener than merely reciting facts. Some claim it's 20 times more effective³; a seminal study from 1969 showed storytelling to be six to seven times more effective.⁴ Whatever the number, the point is obvious: Stories help people remember information and experiences because of the emotions involved. Hence, whether someone is selling a product, service, or technology, the research indicates a story will be much, much more effective than any fact or datapoint alone.

What we now know from decades of research is that if you are trying to persuade someone to do something, your most powerful tool is story. Given the well‐recognized power of stories to persuade, it only makes sense that business professionals in general—and sales and marketing professionals in particular—should be equipped with this tool as they go to market.

Since 2000, when I helped launch a company focused on stories, I have been on a mission to help everyone from MBA students to business leaders be better at capturing, distilling, labeling, curating, and telling their stories. For example, in training sessions, I frequently pose this question: “Could you come up to the front of the room right now and tell me 100 different stories?” Admittedly, the high number is meant to add a little shock value, but it really isn't far off the mark for the kind of repertoire an experienced salesperson should build.

I think back to when I got my job at IBM and how crucial storytelling was. I was a scared young kid working at a government job in Washington, DC, and IBM took a risk bringing me in to work with them in Chicago. Arriving in Chicago, I knew nothing about sales, business, or technology, but what happened next changed my life.

IBM placed me in a year‐long sales school where I first had to learn business, then technology and computers, and finally sales. This was one of the hardest yet most amazing years for me because I emerged from this program a very different person. The biggest gift IBM gave me was a new mindset: “I can do this” and “I can get better at this.” And that became part of my story, which I use to connect with sales teams today.

In a training session I held recently for a sales team from one of the world's top tech companies, I asked them to tell one story after another—for example: the company's origin story, what it is like to work with such an amazing company, why they joined the firm (their “origin” story), how their team took care of customers, their last five customer successes, their last five customer failures, how they compete against the tough competition they face every day, and why they are excited to be part of the sales team. The point wasn't the content of these stories, but rather experiencing the raw power contained in these stories—the kind that these sellers and every other sales professional should have in their metaphorical quiver. And yet, sadly, sales pitches continue to be driven by 95‐page PowerPoint presentations packed with data on features and benefits—not stories uniting ideas with emotions.

Yet, I remain convinced that when we begin to understand and experience the power of stories, we will change our approach. We'll move away from merely trying to persuade with facts and tap the raw persuasive power of stories.

If we are to be powerful and effective sellers and marketers, the question we each must answer is:

• Do you carry a quiver on your back that contains hundreds of stories, such that in any room or on any zoom or for any campaign on any channel you can always tell the right story at the right time for the right reasons?

The rest of this chapter is devoted to enabling you to respond, “Yes!”

Why Story?

“This toothpaste is 5X better than its nearest rival.”

It's the kind of statement that sales and marketing teams too often rely on in hopes of influencing customers with data. This is in spite of the fact that time and again it's been shown that facts alone do little to convince people of the merits or benefits of a particular product, service, or concept.

As Annette Simmons, author of The Story Factor, states provocatively, “Facts are neutral until human beings add their own meaning to those facts. The meaning they add to facts depends on their current story. People stick with their story even when presented with facts that don't fit. They simply interpret or discount the facts to fit their story. This is why facts are not terribly useful in influencing others.”⁵

Every time I share this quote with others—from students to researchers, entrepreneurs to medical doctors—I encounter pushback. People have a hard time accepting that facts are not the most powerful of all persuasion tools. But a second look at the quote reveals an important nuance. It's not that the facts are wrong or disputed. Rather, they are neutral; they lack a positive or negative emotional charge. The charge only happens when you add a story to bring the facts to life. Not to change the facts or alter them in any way, but to illustrate them.

Two powerful examples I use with students prove the point. The first is a 2007 study by three Carnegie Mellon researchers who approached undergraduate students with the premise of wanting to study how they use technology. After taking a survey about their technology use, students were paid $5 for their trouble. In their envelopes, along with the money, some students found a donation pledge for the charity Save the Children, with facts about food shortages in Malawi, lack of rain in Zambia, and dislocation of millions of people in Angola. Others received a pledge form and a story about a young girl, Rokia, who lives in Mali. Those who received the facts alone donated $1.14 on average to Save the Children, while those who read the story about Rokia gave $2.38.⁶

The survey, as you might guess, was only a ruse. Researchers did not care about technology use among undergraduate students. Rather, they were trying to measure the impact of facts versus stories. And the result was clear: Stories had twice the impact of facts alone.

A second example is a storytelling experiment by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn from 2009, entitled “Significant Objects.” The project involved selling thrift store items on eBay with descriptions that included short stories written by more than 200 writers. The objects were purchased for $1.25 each on average and sold for nearly $8,000 in total; a 2,700% markup. For example, a $1.49 paperweight sold for $197.50 because the story that went along with it resonated with the buyer, making it much more valuable. Then there was the tiny jar of mayonnaise—about an ounce or so—that was given out as a sample. In other words, the original price was free. But once a story was attached to it (“Guy comes on the train, Sunday morning …”), it sold for $51. (The proceeds, as with all the auctioned items, went to charity.)⁷ In this case, we might say that the story created all the value, since no one would mistake a tiny jar of mayo as being worth $51. But someone found it to be that compelling because of the story's sheer emotional power.

The stories we tell as salespeople and marketers can move people to see the real value in what we're offering by showing how a product, service, or solution will help them make progress in their lives. With one significant difference: While the Significant Object project involved made‐up stories, we are in business and, thus, our stories must be true stories. We are not inflating, manipulating, or changing the facts. Rather, we're using the power of emotion to create a connection and make those facts more relevant and memorable.

One of my favorite examples of the power of stories comes from something I witnessed a couple of years ago. The seller in this instance was a young entrepreneur named Daniel Rotman, who was pitching a cat litter business to a venture capital firm where I serve as an operating partner. As with any initial VC pitch, Daniel had about 20 minutes to convey the uniqueness and viability of his business idea in hopes of gaining our interest in taking a deeper look at a possible investment. When I heard about this phone interview, I just had to sit in on it. What could I learn from a pitch about cat litter?

The call between Daniel and the e‐commerce expert at our VC firm kept getting pushed back due to scheduling conflicts. Finally, it was held in the evening at the end of a long day for all of us. This was hardly an ideal time or setup for Daniel to make his pitch. Making matters worse, the e‐commerce expert was driving through a rainstorm, while I was at home. But with our apologies, we told Daniel he had our full attention.

At this point, imagine that you were in Daniel's position. What would you do to make the most of those 20 minutes, knowing that they could be an important chapter in the future of your nascent company? Most of the time, entrepreneurs shower the VC with facts in hopes of convincing them that theirs is a great business. “Here are our features and our specs and our pro‐forma revenue line. And look, it goes up and to the right!” Instead, Daniel took the opposite tack.

After a pause, he told us, “Three years ago, my cat died. And I was devastated. He was a two‐year‐old, seemingly healthy cat, and one day he was here, and the next day he was gone.” With that opening line, he had our full attention. We were immediately drawn into his story.

After his pet died, Daniel told us, he wandered around in a funk. And then he got angry. “I had to know why this had happened,” Daniel continued.

We listened intently as Daniel explained how he channeled that emotion into action. “I talked with lots of veterinarians, and you know what? I learned a lot about cats. I learned that they are stoic animals, which means that they wear their emotions on the inside. I don't know if you two are dog lovers or cat lovers or even pet owners, but if you have a dog and you get home from work, you know exactly what you are getting because dogs wear their emotions on the outside. Cats are very different, and what that means is that your cat can have a very debilitating disease and you will never know it. You'll never know it unless you take your cat to the vet‐recommended quarterly checkup that costs an average of $287 a visit. I didn't do that … and I regret it.”

At this point, Daniel pivoted his story to explain how this series of events caused him to start his company. He resolved to address this difficulty of early detection of illness in cats by inventing a new cat litter. He called it “PrettyLitter” because it's based on a white silica that exists in only four mines in China—and he owned the exclusive rights to one of those mines. White silica is important, he explained, because silica is four times lighter than clay, which means the litter can be shipped. (Cat litter the world over is made from clay, which makes it very heavy to ship.)

“But now I can disrupt that business model and this industry because I can create a subscription business for cat litter.” Daniel said, “Furthermore, I've treated the white silica with an enzyme, such that if your cat has any of seven disease states, when it pees on the cat litter the litter turns red. So now you know.”

After taking us on that short but compelling journey of how and why he started PrettyLitter, Daniel finished his engrossing story by simply asking: “What questions do you have?” We were hooked.

Even today, PrettyLitter is marketed and sold with the power of stories about pets and their owners, who want to detect health issues early and avoid unnecessary veterinarian bills. And every time I share this story, I hear the same thing from the cat owners in the audience: “Where can I get this product?” As for Daniel, in 2021 he went on to sell PrettyLitter to Mars Inc. for a valuation of $500 million to $1 billion.⁸

As this example compellingly shows, whether you're selling a product or selling a company, you need to reach for the right story at the right time for the right reasons. You can't make them up on the spot. You need to generate and curate these stories out of real‐life experiences—yours, your company's, and those of your customers. To do that, you need to learn a little about the mechanics of storytelling.

The Two Arcs of Storytelling

Stories, from a literary perspective, have what's known as a narrative arc, meaning how the story unfolds from beginning, to middle, to end. The narrative arc drives the plot and the character development. By the end of the story, the reader has been transported along an arc that follows the rise—or fall—of a character and the change in that character's life.

For our purposes, we'll look at two distinct arcs that help us tell our sales and marketing stories: The business arc and the emotional arc. Let's examine them one at a time. The business arc refers to the “job” a story is doing. Entrepreneurship often uses the phrase “job to be done” when referring to the purpose and function of a new company or its solutions. What's the job to be done by this startup (ideally, one that's not being done now)? In the case of PrettyLitter, the job to be done is ensuring that your cat is healthy.

We can ask the same question of our stories: What job is this story doing? When I think of Daniel telling his company's origin story, the job to be done was to attract investor interest in his company by showing the passion and commitment that led him to invent a new cat litter product and establish a company. In one tight story, he answered two questions we sales and marketing professionals must always be prepared to answer: “Why you?” and “Why now?”

So how does a story accomplish that job? That's where the business arc and the emotional arc come into play. My friend and fellow Kellogg professor David Schonthal and I have collaborated on defining these arcs as a way to structure stories. When we work with business audiences to help them construct their stories, we frame them in terms of the five Cs:

1. Character: Who is this story about?
2. Context: What is the setup?
3. Conflict: What is the challenge or problem to be solved?
4. Climax: What was the moment of breakthrough?
5. Closure: What do we do from here?

To see the five Cs in action, we can re‐examine the PrettyLitter story. Clearly, the character is Daniel, since he's sharing a personal journey that became the origin story of the company. (In a different story, the character could be a customer, and the story could be about that customer's experience with a product that changed their life in some way.)

The context, or setup, in Daniel's story is that three years ago his cat died. The conflict was his anger and need to find out what caused his cat's death, which led him to seek out veterinarians and engage in research. The climax was his invention of a new type of cat litter as a diagnostic tool to promote feline health. Closure was asking us what questions we had to further explore how we might do business together.

The five Cs of Daniel's story clearly served the job to be done: Obtaining venture capital interest by presenting a compelling business case. We can also see that his storytelling did that far more effectively than any slideshow presentation backed with bullets and data points. But notice, too, that Daniel was able to simply weave the facts into and around the story. As we can see, the business arc is not a decision of facts versus stories. It's a technique that brings the facts to life by adding context, shape, color, and emotion.

Next, we look at the emotional arc—the ups and downs, trials and tribulations experienced by the character. The emotion is what makes a story relatable (as we listen, we feel those same emotions) and memorable. In Daniel's story, the arc starts at a very low point, with the death of a beloved pet and Daniel's grief that turned to anger and propelled him into action. By the end, the excitement and sense of purpose from formulating PrettyLitter and securing a supply of silica bring the emotional arc to a high point.

Bringing the two arcs together, we have a short but impactful story. The business arc lays out the elements of the story and what happened, one event following another. The emotional arc rises and falls along that linear timeline, through the highs and lows in succession.

You don't have to be a great writer to do this, and you do not need memoir‐worthy stories. You just need to know what stories to tell and when to tell them. As illustrated, the facts are still important, but it's all about how you use them. When facts are wrapped up in emotion through story, they are far more potent in how they make people feel about and connect with a product, a solution, or a company.

Here is the common ground where marketing and sales can work effectively together. It's like an actor in the scene of your favorite movie. If you think about it, you know the actor is reciting words that were written down in a script—words that someone else wrote. But the minute the director says, “Action!” the actor embodies that story. As the viewer, you lose the conscious realization that this is an actor because you are lost in the emotion. In the same way, getting those stories down is what marketers and salespeople have to do together.

Not everyone buys into this thinking. The objection I hear occasionally is that, in what I am describing, stories appear to be curated or designed in a way that seems robotic. This kind of pushback, however, reveals misconceptions about the story process. It is not manipulating or going into the wind‐up of “Have I got a story to tell you!” It requires listening to the customer, understanding with empathy where they are coming from and what progress they are trying to make, and then reaching into your quiver and sharing a story about someone else's experience and how they made progress, changed a circumstance, eliminated an obstacle, or opened a door to a new opportunity.

Viewed this way, the salesperson telling a story is no different from a counselor who shares the experience of someone who struggled with a similar problem or faced the same challenge and found a way forward. In fact, I believe that all professionals do better when they leverage the power of stories to help people see themselves, their circumstances, and what can change their lives for the better.

A New Asset Class

Given how important they are, stories are an asset class. Too often, though, organizations don't treat them as investments. Rather, we treat them more like anecdotes or conversation starters. Instead, we invest loads of money in other assets that help us run our sales and marketing organizations, like our customer relationship management (CRM) systems and our demand‐side platforms (DSPs). While these are powerful systems that help organize and guide our behaviors, there is another asset to consider—one that guides the behaviors of our customers. You guessed it: That asset is stories.

In our work with some of the largest sales forces in the most successful companies in the world, we frequently hear this lament from the leadership teams: Why do our salespeople just talk at our customers using 95‐page PowerPoint decks? And our answer is that salespeople are taught “product, not people.” Product is communicated by facts, whereas people communicate by stories.

Having an inventory of stories to tell, and selecting the right one to share depending on the customer interaction the salesperson is engaged in at a particular moment, is what having a quiver full of stories is all about. That means stories must be uncovered, learned, and categorized so a salesperson can describe an opportunity, challenge, or pain point that someone else faced. In telling that story, a current or prospective customer can see themselves in it and can see the path to progress.

The Story Matrix™

Our name for this quiver of stories is the Story Matrix™. The purpose of the Story Matrix™ is to give salespeople and marketers ready access to stories so that they can be more consistent and intentional about weaving those stories into their communications.

To understand the Story Matrix™ concept, think of the brain as a storage room. We are constantly accumulating more information and knowledge and cramming it into the storage room. What a mess! When it's unorganized, we can't find anything, especially when we need it most. The Story Matrix™ acts like shelving, containers, and labels for your information and knowledge—all packaged in your stories. With the Story Matrix™, you have an organizing implement at your fingertips that makes your most powerful tool of influence—your stories—accessible and usable.

The Story Matrix™ is a simple spreadsheet designed to allow easy access to the right story at the right time for the right reasons. Like any spreadsheet, it has rows and columns. The rows are the jobs to be done and the columns are the types of stories we should be telling about those jobs to be done.

Forward Together

The Story Matrix™ answers a fundamental question that we may not be accustomed to asking: How do I get access to the right story at the right time for the right reasons?” This question brings us back to the premise of this chapter: Marketing and sales need to collaborate to create a shared Story Matrix™. This repository of stories then becomes a treasure trove of assets that marketing can use for its one‐to‐many campaigns while sales uses them for one‐to‐one meetings and presentations. Since they both benefit from stories, who better to identify, capture, and label those stories than sales and marketing working collaboratively?

Where do we go from here? Here's what we recommend:

• Step 1: Assign a very small team from sales and marketing to sketch out a draft Story Matrix™ with the right “job to be done” rows.
• Step 2: For each row, assign two champions, one from sales and one from marketing. The champion's role is to search for stories to populate that row.
• Step 3: During weekly meetings, ask one person on the sales and marketing teams to capture, distill, and then write up a story and deliver it to the champion for that row.
• Step 4: Edit the story for clarity and impact using the 5Cs and place that story in the company Story Matrix™.
• Step 5: Have fun. Celebrate storytelling and give awards for the best story told at company meetings and weekly meetings, as well as in marketing campaigns and customer presentations.

In our work with organizations all over the world, we often find that beginning with these simple steps results in the building of a robust and powerful organizational Story Matrix™. And that's a tool that will benefit sales and marketing and the organization as a whole.

Conclusion

For both the marketing and sales teams, it is critical that they become better storytellers. As we have seen, stories are one of our most powerful tools of persuasion and the best way to help our customers discover the progress they are trying to make. We have no shortage of data, but we must work hard to capture, distill, label, and tell our best stories that bring that data to life. In other words, we must be always ready to tell the right story at the right time for the right reasons. This is the key to crafting a successful communication campaign.

Author Biography

Craig Wortmann is a clinical professor of marketing, CEO of Sales Engine Inc., and an operating partner with Pritzker Group Venture Capital. He is also the founder and academic director of the Kellogg Sales Institute, which defines sales as “helping people become both magnetic and unstoppable in their pursuit of progress … for themselves and for everyone they come across.” Craig's teaching covers a wide range of topics based on his experiences as a professional salesperson, CEO, founder, entrepreneur, and investor. In all of his teaching—from interactive online courses to MBA and Executive MBA classrooms—Craig attempts to create immersive experiences that help people develop into dynamic leaders who drive predictably consistent high growth for their organizations.