(Cross-posted, originally published in Wearables Magazine, March 2013).

Masses of B2B marketers are trying to move the proverbial needle in sales today by resorting to a centuries old tradition: storytelling. Once an exclusive domain reserved for artisans, it is now the purview of the average businessperson; you must create. To be precise, you must learn how to tell a good story.

Why story?

Measure your own digital consumption habits: you are more likely to read an article, view a video, or listen to an audio clip about a particular service or product before you decide to purchase. In short, you would rather hear a narrative (experience a story) than suffer through a sales pitch (same as it ever was if you ask any sales raconteur who knows his way successfully toward a close).

The good news is you neither have to wax elegiac like a french poet nor portray sweeping narratives with paint like Van Gogh, you simply have to abide by a few guiding principles of sound storytelling plus learn how to leverage the right tools for you. (For the moment, we're going to shelve the words "marketing" and "content" because these words might impede progress, we will return to renovate them). In our business, we've learned a few vital keys that have unlocked the magic of storytelling but before I share with you the critical principles we've learned ("are learning" is more apropos), we have to remove one seriously stubborn obstacle: you.

If there is a villain (and there is always a villain in the arc of any good story), it's you. Suffer this fool for a moment and pretend we both believe the most important person in the room is the customer. (The most important person is not the customer, as sales pundit Jeffrey Gitomer once wryly noted: "Two people in a room, you and the customer, who is the most important person? The customer. Let me ask it another way, one of you has to drop dead, who will it be? That's right: the customer. Now we've established who is the most important person in the room). The villain I refer to is not you per se, it is your antiquated sales mentality.

For starters, the features and benefits side of your Jekyl and Hyde sales demeanor must die. The modern mindset can scarcely stomach a sales pitch and can sniff a set-up a mile away. "If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they'd punch you in the face," Hugh MacLeod observed. Our days are inundated with advertising messages, the deluge deadens us. The only way to break through the barricades of mental defenses is to attempt to enchant our audience, we must learn to captivate, and our audience won't be captivated by terminology lifted from your technical manuals or the charming prose pilfered from your bill of lading. You are getting in the way of your own story because you incorrectly believe that your product and your product details are more important than your product's purpose when, in the eyes of your customers, purpose trumps product (which is ironic because both you and the customer spend an inordinate amount of time discussing details about the product). Watch the fashion industry spin sartorial stories with beautiful people in commercials and on runways and you begin to believe  "if I wear that garment, I could be beautiful too". The material specifications about textiles are left backstage. "Polyester tricot with mesh insets" emits yawns. Glitz on the runway and glamour on the magazine cover yields sales.

Watch a video of master storyteller Steve Jobs unveil a product at one of his infamous keynotes, (appropriately dubbed "Stevenotes"), Steve discusses technical details lightly. Those details are minor characters in the story. What is crucial, (and what becomes memorable), is Steve's descriptive narrative about what we can do with his wonderful products. His interjections (beautiful! awesome!) are practically primary but he knows how to captivate an audience. His palpable enthusiasm is spellbinding because, as his willing participants, we want to believe. Steve's congregation of consumers (your audience, too) is no different than theatre audiences, sports spectators, or even restaurant patrons (where the author Gay Talese calls the art of plating, "theatre in the round"): we all want to believe!

 (If you are reading this post via email, please click here to view the video).

The product is not unimportant, without it there would be no story, but the star of the show (the hero), is you (and if facebook as didactic has proven anything, it has proven we love to be the principle players in our own drama). Hearing that there is an accelerometer in the iPad or "three-axis gyro plus fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating" seduces no one, observing what I can do with an iPad makes me want to rush to buy one (ergo, multi-millions in iPad sales). Apple has figured out a few key components in the fairy tale formula not the least of which is, move the product backstage (or at least transmute it to a backdrop) but portray the customer as hero. It's an almost imperceptible shift in perspective. When Annie Leibovitz started working for Rolling Stone, she became "very interested in journalism and thought maybe that’s what I was doing, but it wasn’t true. What became important was to have a point of view.”  Your point of view  and the point of view in your stories must alter, from product-centric stories to customer-centric stories.

I hear the objector whine that we, as an industry, are not Apple, "we don't have a product worth getting excited about, what we sell is not story-worthy". You're dead wrong. If you believe that, it's time to move to another industry (our ranks are rife with too many faux believers as it is). I have friends in other industries who sell boring products. Screwdriver-to-the-eye-socket boring (that's excruciatingly boring in case you can't feel it). Far from banal, we as an industry wield powerful products. Every product we sell has a purpose. Every. Single. Product. Sometimes the customers themselves are unaware of the real purpose but there is always a purpose with our products. This should ignite your storyteller's heart (it does mine), it opens up vistas of storytelling and unlocks the crucial component: find the purpose, you'll find the story.

In addition to finding the purpose, you'll have to brush off a few key elements you left behind at school, namely, those interrogative pronouns that comprise the basics of effective journalism: who, what, when, where, why and how. Why did the customer buy your product? Who was the intended recipient? What emotion did the experience attempt to evoke? (Surprise? Delight?) What action was the product intended to trigger? (Move a suspect to a prospect? Close a sale?) Where was the product distributed? Where was it Worn? How was it used? You get the idea, the more questions you ask (open-ended preferred) the more of the story you'll discover. Think of yourself less a journalist and more an archaeologist at a site dig: the questions help excavate the details of the story, ask enough questions and the entire story reveals itself to you.

Finally, what are your tools for telling your story? What is your canvas for creating your art? Video? Audio? Email? I can't prescribe to you your output, you'll have to define how you craft your stories based on your capabilities, budget, and time, but I can tell you that your first attempts will be ugly. When I teach a class on creating content, I like to show weblebrity Gary Vaynerchuk's first wine video. Production value is poor, content is weak, and if you viewed it when it debuted in 2006, you would have grossly underestimated its impact by assuming it was merely a liquor store salesperson innocuously schlepping his wares (particularly compared to episode 1,000). What Gary did by simply sitting down in front of a video camera to broadcast a few wine tastings was to stoke his superb salesmanship skills from a small flame to a roaring fire by using the medium he excelled at: speaking. In addition to using the medium that most suited him, Gary moved the needle for wine sales by helping transform an average Joe like me into a wine connoisseur. Gary's audience became wine heroes by dint of Gary's rudimentary and risky sales gambit and it paid in droves: 90,000 people were estimated to have watched his show daily. Gary's secret? Embrace "permanent beta" (a principle I first read via Michael Hyatt). Begin to  create your art and tell your story no matter how pathetic your first performance. Just do it. Creating good art requires failure but this just means you do it poorly until you learn to do it well. Your community will surprise you, they will applaud your efforts. Why? Because, remember, as audiences and fans, we want businesses to win. No one wants Apple to manufacture an inferior iPhone. Your market wants you to win, they want to cheer your efforts with pluses and thumbs and rave reviews that should culminate in sales but first, you have to get in the race. You must start telling your stories.

By now, you will have surely expressed the one critical objection to effective storytelling that every business (that isn't awash with cash like Apple) faces, and that is: time. You'll have to remove the enemy again (your outmoded mindset) or you'll preclude any progress in storytelling, and this time the old nemesis is how you allocate your sales and marketing resources (I'll speak to the solopreneur in a moment). I'm not speaking strictly of money here but of all resources: budget, your allocation of time, and foremostly, priority.

For some of you this is no minor decision. This decision to embrace storytelling is a teutonic shift in how you view your sales process. You must allocate more sales energy (usually payroll or resources) to the marketing department, the "transmedia storytelling department" as I have learned to call it. Crafting a good story is a part of the sales cycle, not a mere component of marketing or communications. This moves beyond simple social media tactics and it's not something easily pawned off on an intern. But the dilemma for most of us is one of scale: how does a small business or solo entrepreneur scale himself? How do you craft a story with so little time? In our office, we are constantly on the lookout for a good story. It took us a few years but we finally permeated the practices of our employees to flag us when they are working on a story-worthy project. The size of the order is immaterial, we look for one story per week that either proves the power of branded products or highlights members of our community who are doing unique, notable work. Source one story per week (or every two weeks if you are a solopreneur) and craft that story. Once you create the story using your preferred medium (video, writing, or even presentation slides via SlideShare) don't forget to duplicate its content on your website/blog. Blast that story out on the social networks but make sure you house it on your own domain so that you gain all the benefits from organic search online.

If we as an industry would ever seize upon revelatory storytelling practices, and fall in love again with fairy tale, it will be a heuristic, monumental moment for our market. We will decommoditize our product by educating the corporate citizenry to the higher calling of our products' purpose. Storytelling will result in higher profitability, more community engagement with your brand and more referrals resulting in new business. Storytelling bridges your business and your audience, it builds a pipeline of opportunity and heralds a new renaissance in advertising by tapping into one of man's most profound and fundamental desires: the desire to share stories.

 (With apologies to Steven Pressfield).

As an avid book collector, I've amassed more than my share of unread books. It's a possessive obsession, an incurable malady. Of the piles and piles of books I've purchased through the years, none seem to retain their unread status longer than the books that fall into the two categories of 'self-help' and 'business'. Most business books are extrapolated essays padded for the sake of the publisher, and most self-help books feature such fleeting remedies that the only solace they tend to provide is the spine to spine comfort found among each other in the remainder bin (someone needs to write a self-help book for self-help books). Acres and acres of advice rooted in about a centimeter of top soil yielding a harvest of pulp and chaff.

Few business books achieve success above the pantheon of fire sale conquerors. Books such as Good to Great, the E-Myth series (which I finally read), virtually anything penned by Peter Drucker, Guerilla Marketing (the archetypal marketing handbook), the polemical Atlas Shrugged, Getting Things Done, Content Rules (and more) have at least secured their superiority on my bookshelves.

For me, one business and self-help book supersedes them all: The War of Art.

The War of Art is the one book that were I flush with cash and less miserly than I'm purported to be, I'd mail everyone I know a copy. I'd be the Phillip Van Dorn of the business world, mailing Pressfield's book to every single connection in my network, a bold surety of faith in my fellow man (with any residue of reservation backed by the full faith and credit of the rising boot heel of Pressfield's mighty dictums).

Few business books move people, fewer still move people to immediate action. The War of Art is the ultimate business book and self-help book. Its entire premise is dealing with the number one obstacle to your success: you. (Or, more aptly, the resistance within you). I won't labor to define the entire premise since Amazon's omnipotence and omnipresence metes out all your premise pining needs but I will tell you: go buy the book. (After you've read it, you can buy me a celebratory soda at Gower's).

One of the many proverbial statements that moved me was Pressfield's comment on "peripheral opponents".

Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. “Peripheral opponents,” as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers.  

Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.

I don't disagree with this statement nor any of the forms of resistance posited in the book but I wonder if there isn't still a chance the peripheral opponent could even be me. Not me as in "the resistance within me", but me the multi-faceted goal setter, me and my numerous life goals, me and my myriad objectives within my hobbies, passions and pursuits, the multi-splintered tasks and to-dos so numerous that the total weight combined suffocates progress.

For example, the internet is such a pedagogic trove that, were I to decide to learn how to play the guitar or learn to make croissants or take up cycling, I'm a google search away from a rabbit hole of video tutorials and articles that will ensure I embark on yet another "life goal". Perhaps this is right and good that I pursue this and perhaps I even accomplish what I set out to do, but at what cost to my core purpose?

This is beyond the resistance of the distracted or the resistance of unwillingness to do the work, this is a specialized form of peripheral opponent, insidious in its opposition since this enemy knows your every move and (moreover) uses your strength and passion for getting things done as the ultimate weapon to ensure your demise. If this were an obvious enemy, we'd respect the hell out of the shrewdness and cunning it took to accomplish this in collusion with our purposed-self, our ardent-self, our goal-setter-self: the finisher.

If there is a moral here, it is likely this: beware the proliferation of purpose, ironically, a fait accompli - the doing becomes a declaration of one's undoing.

For those reading this via email or RSS, you might want to unsubscribe. I'll explain:

Writers are perennials. Struggling to harness a beleaguered discipline, they spend a lifetime resuscitating the vernal season: a persistent, meticulous cultivation of crafting and creating with multiple lives and many deaths.

If writers are perennials, their conspicuous cousins, bloggers, are annuals. Writers persist for many growing seasons; annuals thrive within a single season. Constricted by their one-topic focus (food, healthy living, marketing, business, etc.) a blogger's lifespan often measures several years but their narrow theme necessitates a one dimensional view. This isn't a negative criticism, it is merely an observation. Many bloggers feel strangled by their exclusivity and long for the broader life of a perennial.

It is ironic then that Montaigne, the 16th century writer who popularized the format of the essay (which, translated in French means simply "to try")[1], is considered by many the godfather of modern blogging. He wrote on topics as broad as the sea and as ephemeral as its waves. Montaigne's Essays, are "a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him"[1]. Montaigne was, without question, a perennial.

For me, one-dimensional writing induces dullness. It evokes a lassitude in the reader and a lethargy in the writer that eventually results in burnout for both. William Zinnser once advised, "Given a choice between two projects - one that you feel you ought to write and one that sounds like fun - go for the one you'll enjoy working on. It will show in your writing."

Glancing back at my most widely read posts, they've rarely been about topics related to branded matters. Posts like What Would You Tell a Twenty-Year Younger You, Life Herself Without Rabid Hype, and Get Real (An Unconventional Guide to Goal Setting), have garnered the most interest and elicited the most conversation. These posts have more to do with living well rather than branding well. They were also articles I relished writing ("In both writing and cooking, you're a dead duck if you don't love the process")[2].

I enjoy exploring topics related to business and marketing but I wish to enlarge my own life by "essaying" (if you will) any topic that suits my particular whim. This might be unsettling for those that wish to engage along the lines of "business only" so, if that is you, I encourage you to unsubscribe (and I completely understand). My next post might be a new dish I learned to cook or a time management tool I want to explore but at least you've been warned.

This little nook of mine on the web has always been an idea incubator, a repository for reflection, and a place to simply plow my hack-trade as hobbyist-writer. Many of you have tolerated my ramblings since 2005 and I'm indebted to you.

Our lives are much larger than the compartmentalization of individual facets of our experience. Were we to be honest, we all yearn to know and be known beyond our perceived selves. Many of us long to live the creative life of a perennial rather than the constricted life of an annual. In the end, we are all Montaigne's suffragettes.

"I had rather … nettle my reader, than tire him." - Montaigne

[1] How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Blakewell

[2] The Raw and the Cooked by Jim Harrison