Merging storytelling with sales for decreased sales cycles with Stephen Steers

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Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money, and keep more of the money you make. The Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ is packed with insights on how small to mid-size agencies are getting things done, bringing his 25 years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Build a Better Agency. This is your friendly and congenial host, Drew McLellan from Agency Management Institute. Super glad to be back with you. You know, we talk a lot about storytelling in our industry. We talk about it from a client’s perspective, from a creative perspective, but one of the ways we don’t always use the word storytelling, even though it’s absolutely what we do, is when we start talking about sales, we talk about case studies, we talk about testimonials, but all of those tools tell a story. One of the things that I love about the workshop that we’re doing in October with Mercer Island Group, which is all about all of the written ways, written tools, RFP responses, RFI, responses, proposals, case studies, cover letters, bios.

We’re gonna talk about all of that with Mercer Island Group in a workshop on October, I think it’s 11th and 12th here in Denver. But one of the things I love about this workshop that they teach is it really is all about how do you tell your story in a way that is not all about you, that is not about bragging on yourself, but is in a way that helps the prospect get to know you better, understand what you’ve already done, learn to trust you and have confidence in you. So, a, we’re gonna be talking about that in October, but way before that, I wanna talk about it today with our guest. So Steven Steers has, is a sales coach and he’s written a book about sort of the merger of storytelling in sales.

And I think it’s a very interesting perspective that sometimes we sort of dance around, but we don’t dig into maybe as deeply as we could. So we’ve invited him to be on the show. I’m super excited for you to meet him and hear what he has to say. And what I’m hoping is that it sort of begins to get you to reframe the way you think about sales and how you approach it and that what kind of stories you could or should be telling that might help you close a deal, close a deal faster if you think of it from that perspective. So without further ado, let’s welcome Steven to the show. Steven, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me today, drew, happy Friday to you.

You as well. So give everybody a little bit of your backstory. So before I start peppering you with questions, they understand why you are the expert that you are.

Bear. Well, again, thank you so much for having me. I’m Steven Steers, I’m a native of New York City. I’ve been in the sales game for a bit over 10 years and my charge is to help founders fire themselves from sales. So I’ve been in many different roles in many different companies and I’ve seen across them that people love to sell things they hate selling and they don’t know how to do it as efficiently as they can. And I got into doing this type of work because when I started out as a rep, I didn’t have the support and I didn’t have the training. So I do what I do in order to be the help that I didn’t have, so that there’s a lot more smoothness in the sales process and it doesn’t feel like you’re selling. ’cause if it feels like you’re selling, you’re doing it wrong.

Yeah, and it’s uncomfortable on the receiving end too. It’s

Gross. Yeah. We’ve all gotten some people where it’s like, ugh, I just feel nasty about this. And I, I wanna help people avoid that. And in my time doing this, I’ve worked with around a thousand companies from 35 or plus countries and cool little fact about me, I was in a Beyonce music video for about three seconds.

What I’m curious, what, what were you doing and what were you wearing in this Beyonce video?

For those that care? The, the, the video is party with j Cole. I’m featured at about one minute and five seconds in the top right corner, you’ll see my afro just pop up very quick with sunglasses. And that’s it. In former life, I worked retail and a stylist came into the store and started peppering me with questions and then asked me if I wanted to be in the video. And I thought that was a hilarious way to get hit on. So I was like, yeah, I’ll give you my number and you let me on the video. And sure enough, it was Solange’s stylist. So I, I have a

Quick, I like cameo. I like it. A vi a video credit. I like it. Yeah,

It’s pretty, pretty random, but cool.

So I wanna pull on the thread a little bit where in your intro you said, help founders not be in sales, so fire themselves

From sales. Yeah,

Absolutely. So why, why shouldn’t a founder be doing sales?

I don’t think that a founder shouldn’t be doing sales if they like to do sales. A lot of people don’t like to do sales,

Right?

So let’s start there. But whether you want to do it or you don’t want to do it, it still doesn’t mean you’re immune from having a process that you could then outsource to somebody if you decided to not do it. Yeah. So that’s one. The second thing on that is you may want scale. So even if you still wanna sell as a founder, you may want other reps in to handle the volume that you’re, you’re getting by other successful processes. If you ever wanna get acquired, they’re not gonna acquire a, a business that doesn’t have a system that they could then put somebody into work. So whether you want to or not, it makes sense to build the systems to enable to fire yourself so you have the option if you so choose.

Yeah. You know, we do a lot of m and a work with agencies, and you’re right, one of the Achilles heels is agency owners are great at selling themselves and their agency, but they have to have something transferrable when they’re ready to sell. Doesn’t mean that they can’t sell up to the day they sell, but they have to have something transferrable. Otherwise the buyer is kind of hosed or requires the seller to stay and by the time they sell their agency, they don’t wanna stay anymore.

Exactly. Yeah. Right. You have to do that dreaded earnout, right. For like three to five years. Yeah. Right. But, but I think it, it all comes back to, I I was checking out your, your, your LinkedIn a few days before here too. And we talk about like systems. Systems are the scary part of the business because you have to sit down and look at what you have and what you don’t have. And, and I get that and I’m an entrepreneur too, and sometimes it’s really scary to like, ah, I don’t have this, why I don’t I have this. But you have to think about who you want to be as the agency owner in three to five years. Yeah. And my chances are you probably have a lot of the stuff you need already. You just haven’t codified it. So when I say I help people fire themselves from sales, one, one of the things I do is I do a full audit of everything that’s happening in sales from interviews with people looking at all the assets, and then there’s a preparedness score for how ready are you to hire somebody in to take this over?

Do you have the right things in place? And do we have an on-ramp for that person to take this over from you? Now again, if you want to do that, awesome. If you don’t wanna do that just is fine. But now you’re in position and you know exactly what you have and what you have to work with, and that can lower a lot of cortisol for the rest of the difficulty of selling anything.

Yeah. So, you know, for agencies, and I know you work with a lot of professional service firms, so for agencies, it’s not a volume thing, right? It’s not a, I gotta sell 12 of these a day. And in fact, if an agency sells like that, they can’t sustain it. So for them it’s, it’s really about, well, I need, I need two big sales a year and I need three or four medium sized sales a year, and if I do that, I’m good. And in fact, one of the challenges for many agencies is they sell below what they should be selling. So they’re selling a bunch of piddly little things, which take up just as much time and energy as a big thing. So I’m curious, when you work with professional service firms who, who, it’s not about volume, it really is about right fit clients and right conversations, how do you help them sort of adjust their perspective on sales that it is a longer sales cycle?

Because, you know, if for agencies, a, it’s a big ticket item for most clients to buy off, let’s hope and and B, it’s either wear, we’re not selling cars or jewelry or clothes. We’re selling strategy and marketing plans. And yes, there’s some deliverables to that, but it’s very different. So talk a little bit about how we should be thinking about approaching that kind of sales sort of deliverable, but also that sort of volume.

Yeah, I love the question, the way I think about this as a follow, so I read about this in my book and I call it the Magnificent Seven Reasons Why people buy. So we’re selling strategy, we’re selling marketing services. What’s the big reason a business needs to have those services or have that strategy? Are you able to quantify that in a certain way? So what I write about and and share help people understand your agency probably helps do more than one of these, but pick one and know how to tell the story of how you’ve done it for other people in the same position. So the first reason a business buys anything is that you’re gonna help make more money. Yeah. Okay. So if you’re gonna have a big marketing strategy, we wanna know where they were with their marketing strategy last year, what their goal is and what’s that delta.

And the bigger the gap is, the much easier it is for you to talk about how your services, products, or strategy can affect that bigger goal. Here’s how you’re currently working, here’s what you’re missing, here’s how we can help you achieve this delta in a measurable way. So quick thing on that too is there’s a old sales trainer I love named Tom Hopkins. He’s famous for selling a house a day at the age of 26 for an entire year.

Good lord.

One house a day. Think about that. Like, I don’t think he could do that these days, but this guy knows his stuff. And one of the things that I love that he says is if the customer says it, it’s true. So the reason I press on that is we want to structure the way we run conversations to get some numbers behind what they’re currently doing and where they want to go, because then we can start to quantify how much money they’re potentially leaving on the table by not taking action. And that’s a crawl that’s gonna stick with them after the call that they’re gonna take to management, right? That’s the story that they’re gonna have to sit in themselves, that you can always agitate to keep a conversation moving and potentially speed up your cycle. So keep that in mind.

So to reiterate, the first reason is you’re gonna help ’em make more money. The second is you’re gonna help them save money. Do they have a really terrible process for what they’re doing? Or are they spending way too much on software that we could do something better, cleaner, faster, et cetera. The third is increase efficiency. So do they have a process that’s wildly inefficient and takes six days for them to get a rendering? First you could do it 20 minutes. And then the fourth one, and this is an interesting one, which is a little harder to quantify but could be really helpful for people, is you help the company mitigate risk. For example, if we’re talking strategy for our, for our listeners out here who are strategists, strategy is a big risk mitigation thing because if you can help them see what their competitors are doing and how their competitors are taking advantage of the market or trends and they’re not, there’s a huge risk to the business for them not acting on stuff.

And if you could talk about the p and l and how much money they’ve made, or the projected roas, let’s say we’re talking ads for what their strategy is, is using, you could say, Hey, you’re literally leaving X amount of dollars on the table by not addressing this. And here’s the value of this. Most people who sell services don’t sell that way. They’re just like, oh, I have, I can make you X amount of social media posts, sir, I’m gonna build you a strategy. Versus, Hey, here’s what’s happening in the market that you’re not privy to, right? We want to build you a strategy, build you a marketing plan that’s gonna help you make more money and take advantage of what’s coming over here so that this time next year you have these metrics behind it. Yeah. Now, I don’t know about you, but if someone’s selling to me that way, it’s like, oh, you actually understand the problem, you understand the context behind the problem and you want to help me fill that gap with a solution that works.

And I think a lot of agency owners I’ve talked to and seen don’t sell that way, which is why the sales cycle takes so long. One of the many reasons. So

Let’s, so let’s talk about the sales cycle length, because many agency owners will say sales cycle post covid. So right after Covid, it was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Like everybody had gone dark during Covid, they had pent up demand, they had pent up cash they had to spend, so 22, 20, 21, 20 end of 21, 22 was a good year for agencies. But 22 and 23 were hard, hard, hard years. Yeah. Sales cycle were long. Many agencies didn’t sell one new client in 23. That’s how hard it was. Those sales cycles just dragged out. Good news is 24, things are getting better, but many agency owners are frustrated that the sales cycle takes as long, they’re getting ghosted, they’re getting a lot of yes, but not now is all of that sort of things.

And so part of what you and I were talking about before we hit the record button was how does an agency owner or seller, whoever that is in the organization, how do they stay in relationship or contact with someone through the sales cycle in a way that’s meaningful and that in theory starts to truncate the duration of that sales cycle?

Yeah. This is a great question too, and I’m gonna give you a consulting answer, which is, it depends,

Of course it does. Right? Thanks so much for being on the show.

Well, the, the first place I would say that’s really important for people to look at. Yes, we wanna maintain the relationship, but have you established credibility in the relationship at the start of a relationship to earn the right, to build a relationship and keep a relationship moving forward? And I see a lot of people don’t do that. So one of the things that I talk with a lot of people about and I make a recommendation on is, Hey, send me one of your phone calls. ’cause I review phone calls and I can, I can tell so much about your agency, about your business by listening to how you talk to your client. It’s not just the words you use, what que it’s what questions you ask. It’s how do you structure the way you speak to people. And so one of the things I’ve seen that can balloon balloon a sales cycle is a, is a lack of structure in your discovery.

Hmm. So one thing I’ve learned is if your, if your sales cycle is ballooning and people are ghosting you and you’re learning all this extra stuff at later on in the sale and it’s like six months in, it’s because you didn’t do good discovery in the beginning and identify all of those things. So I would say the first place to combat for any agency and keep a relationship is inside of your discovery process. So for anybody who’s interested, I have a resource available, I’ll, I’ll give you guys a link. If you go to steven steers.com/podcast, it’ll the script call script, you can just take it and use it. And if you wanna send me a call, I’ll happily listen to one and give you feedback completely for free. But the first thing is establishing an agenda. Here’s what I mean. So when I start a call, hey, great to be here with you today, drew, I have a really light framework for us today.

I wanna learn a little bit about you and what you guys are building over there. I wanna share a little bit about us and the things that we’re working on and if there are any synergies based on what we uncover today, we’ll schedule some more time to talk about how we might be able to work together and move forward. Does that sound good? Now what did I do there? One, I set the, the tone for what we’re gonna talk about, right? So I’m not gonna sell you anything, right? Which means I can, you can relax and we’re just gonna talk to each other like human beings. And I also created a verbal contract that if I identify any synergies between us inside of this conversation, we’re going to schedule a step to talk about it. Yeah, makes sense. And they’ve agreed to that, right? Yeah. Just that small piece sets you up for asking for what you want, which is the next step.

The other things, again, we could go into, it’s a nine step process, but you wanna know where they are, like why they got on the phone with you now. Like what made them get on the phone, phone call, I call it the kryptonite question, right? So they’re gonna give you the answer and you wanna know where they want to go, where they are, what’s in the way, you wanna summarize the call, and then you wanna talk about your offer and then you wanna book your next meeting while on the phone. I can’t stress how much people miss this. I read a stat drew that it’s about 48% of sales calls end without an attempt to close the next step. So for my listeners, for our listeners, Drew’s listeners out here, half of the time people get on the phone, that’s probably you. I’m not picking on you.

You don’t ask for the business or ask for the next step. That’s why your sales cycle’s so long. You’re expecting people to know what to do and they don’t. Yeah. People don’t know how to buy things. That’s your job to teach them. So if, if not, if you hear nothing else today from our, from this session, set an agenda and book your next step on the meeting, why that number one, it gives you a concrete date to pursue the relationship. So every time you have a call, book, another call, that’ll shorten the sales cycle because someone’s committed time to potentially solve the problem. Now you might say, well what if they don’t wanna book a call? Well, if they don’t wanna book a call, they’re probably not serious about solving their problem. Right? Which is why your sales cycle is ballooning.

So that’s a qualify them out or put them into the later pile. So it’s these types of small things where a lot of agency owners or small shops, we have to sell, oh, you have to buy this. Look, buy this thing from me. Versus hey, here’s how we work. Here’s how this moves. And if you don’t wanna follow that, there’s no problem with it. But that just means I’m putting you over in this other bucket and I’m gonna nurture you and move forward with content or webinars.

So does that same methodology work if it’s not a phone call, if it’s a coffee meeting or you’re responding to an email or it’s an inbounding inquiry, do it. Does the structure the same?

The structure is is the same. I think there’s a gonna be slightly different questions you might wanna ask folks, depending on the context, little different funnels, little different nurture. Like an inbound person probably knows a little bit more about you. They’ve done some research. I think any agency owner who’s listening will tell anybody, it’s like, oh, like the consumer’s so much more educated. They don’t come to us until they’ve done some research. Right? Right. So other thing, have content that talks about things you’ve done, how you’ve helped people so that it’s easy for people to find you and really agitate the problem. Tell the stories of where people were when they came to you and how you helped them get towards those four things. Make money, save money, increase efficiency, mitigate risk. Have those there. Those are measurable outcomes I can take to my team at whatever size company and say, Hey, if we implement this strategy or this marketing plan, they can help us increase by X fold.

Yeah. Really easy to sell to an executive if I know that two sentence thing about how you can help me. Right? Other thing I would add here is just know your numbers, man. Like know what you’re going for and be able to tell people about it. Because if you can, you, it’s much clearer. But yeah, phone call, non phone call, whatever the same structure’s there. Tell people what to expect so that they can agree. And at very least tell people what happens next and book that in while you have them live email or otherwise, you’re gonna see your SI sales cycle shorten for sure.

Yeah, makes sense. So I, I wanna take a quick break, but when we come back, we wanna talk about this whole idea of storytelling and how you use that to create connection, relationship to create desire to buy all of that. So let’s take a quick break and then we’re gonna come back and just talk about the magic of storytelling and, and I think everybody, I think that, I think storytelling is one of those words like synergy and other words that we say a lot, but I’m not sure we all have the same common understanding. So when we come back, let’s define sort of what good storytelling is from a sales point of view. And then, and then we’ll dig in from there. So we’ll be right back. Hey everybody, thanks for listening today. Before I go back to the interview, I just wanna remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops and you can see the whole [email protected], on the navigation head to how we help scroll down and you’ll see workshops and you can see the whole list there with descriptions of each workshop.

They are all in Denver and we’ve got them throughout the year for agency owners, account execs, agency leaders, CFOs. We have a little something for everybody no matter what it is that you’re struggling with, people, new business, money, all of those things we’ve got covered. So check ’em out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show. Alright, we’re back and we are talking to Steven about sales, but from the perspective of storytelling since that’s what his book is all around. So Steven, first let’s you and I define at least for today what you mean by storytelling.

Storytelling is you telling a story that helps your audience better tell their own story.

So gimme an example.

Okay? So like a case study as an example. The, the whole reason you tell a story is that I, as the audience can see myself as the hero, as the action, as the potential result that we’re talking through. Mm. You don’t have to be Steve Jobs, you don’t have to be David Sedaris. Like you don’t have to be this incredible, like it’s not what we’re talking about here. If you want to or you have the ability, I can’t wait to hear it. But just more of I’m not just selling you stuff and telling you things. The story is about social proof. And so for the type of work we do at agencies, it’s a big trust business. I’m gonna open up the kimono and let you get access to documents and messaging and you’re gonna expose things that I didn’t see. I need to trust you. Right?

And so you’re telling, I, I have to tell you my sales numbers I have and and think about it from the client’s perspective. I have to tell you the places I’m not good that we’re failing, that we could be better. So you’re right, you’re exposing a lot of vulnerability in the sales process.

Yeah. And you have to, you have to like really sit down and think about how your client would receive what you’re offering. You have to get them into that emotional space where they’re okay with somebody looking at what they might not have done correctly, right? And so a story is one of the fastest ways that you can get people into that emotional space. So what do I mean here? Two things. There’s two stats. 65% of information is retained when shared in the form of a story. So if you need to tell someone a story, it’s easier for them to tell that story to somebody else and remember it after we get off the phone with each other. So you could talk about strategy, strategy, strategy, but if you say, Hey, we helped Nike to increase their ROAS by 53% in a six month period by leveraging these new strategies and we wanna do the same for you, I’ll remember that I could take that to anybody else and be like, Hey, come to this meeting.

They’re gonna tell us how they did that. Yeah, really fast, simple and easy. So that’s the first piece. Have that as the framework for how you think about a story. It’s just to help people cross the chasm into a place of vulnerability and acceptance and see social proof. The second thing is, 95% of purchasing decisions are made subconsciously, which means our animal brain is the thing that says, Hey, I’m gonna buy this.

Right? No doubt if you don’t

Activate that, it’s harder for somebody to be like, yeah, I’m gonna do this. So a story’s a really nice way to see and feel what you’re up to without you having to push me around or tell me really weird stuff. It’s, Hey, so we helped someone like you who experiencing similar things like you were to do this thing that you also wanna do. You can I share more? And now it’s about me. And as we kind of talked about before we started recording here is how do I tell you about me without making it about me, right? The story is how you tell people about themselves by telling them about you.

Yeah.

That’s how I define foot storytelling.

Okay? So case studies is a great example. You’ve already given us. How else do we do that? And so let, let’s say you and I have had a phone conversation and I am, I’m not quite ready or whatever. How do you stay in contact with me with storytelling to draw me closer in to understand you and what you can do for me better. But to your point without talking about you all the time,

Okay, two parts, two ways I want to answer this. Drew, is the first we wanna establish urgent, or pardon me, unlock urgency on the phone call. So I, I caught myself and I said establish, ’cause every sales person like hey, you gotta make a feel urgent, blah, blah blah. When I say unlock urgency, I think that’s the only way you can do it. You have to ask the right questions that get someone to feel like now is the time.

Okay? So you have to figure out actually what is urgent is what I’m hearing. Correct. You say, rather than me establishing like creating urgency, it’s really in theory there’s already urgency there. You just have to figure out what it is.

You have to frame it. Yeah. Right? That’s why your agency’s better at strategy or marketing than other people because you can reframe how to help them understand that now is the time. Yeah. So it’s gonna be a slightly longer winded answer, but I want to give it to make sure the, the audience gets it here. So there there’s four questions anyone should ask before they tell a story. And these are questions to ask yourself and write down have them inside of your company manuals. The first is, what’s at stake for your audience? What’s the big picture thing that they should be worried about or is happening? An example I like to cite is ai. Everybody’s got it on their mind. Yeah. Is this gonna change the world? Is it gonna take jobs? Is this gonna create a lot of opportunity? Who knows? But everyone’s curious about it.

Yeah. The thing after that, the second question is what does the audience want to learn or achieve about that thing that’s at stake? Frame? What’s at stake? Here’s what they wanna learn or achieve by leveraging that thing. The third is how do you want them to feel? Right? Remember, emotions massively important to create a space for someone to build trust with you and to potentially be able to buy. And then the fourth, this is where most people get it wrong, especially agency owners, they, you need to tell people what to do next. So what do you want people to do next now that they know this information? And so if you’re gonna tell any stories, run them through this framework because it needs to be about them. Tell, tell people about how your, your dog ran off the leash at the park.

That’s fine. What does it mean for me as your potential client, right? Like make, bring it back and frame it in a way that makes sense for what you want me to learn about what I need to learn about. So you can use this in your content, you can use this in when you’re on podcasts or you’re talking from the stage at these different places. And I’d say for, for nurturing somebody in a sales cycle, if you work with a very specific ideal client profile, you’re probably very well aware of the metric that they most care about. Make money, save money, increase efficiency or mitigate risk. Start storing your stories of how you’ve helped clients to achieve these things in what I call a story bank. Just throw ’em in, throw ’em in. Find different memes on Instagram.

If you’re on Instagram that have relevance like oh I could talk about this and share with my client how this affects this. So build those things out and give people a very tailored structured picture based on their needs. That’s the first. The second thing I would say here is inside of your discovery call, if you’ve done it right, you have summarized at least three or maybe five major needs that the client potentially has and use those to guide the conversation. So hey, it sounds like here’s what we’ve covered. Here’s what’s at stake if you don’t act on this. And if you can frame it like, hey, so there’s this much money being left on the table by not doing this, that can be enough to unlock urgency in people and have them be like, actually you know what?

This is really important in three months time is when I know I’ll have the the bandwidth and the budget to move forward. And you can get more definite timelines because you structured it that way. Yeah. That’s how I do it. Yeah,

Makes sense. Are all stories basically case studies just not framed as case studies in this context?

Yes. And so I think there’s three stories that people already have that you can use. And I think you can use them from a business perspective and as a personal perspective. So the owner themselves. So the first is, is your mission. So why did you choose to solve this problem, be over here doing this type of work? Tell me about a customer that made you feel that way or a story from your life. If you remember earlier on when we started the, the episode today, I talked about how I wanted to be the help I didn’t have. Yeah, I could give you a much longer version of this story of how I got there, but that’s an incisive moment that got me on my mission because, and I can tell you exactly what it was. So when people ask, I’d be like, Hey, here’s exactly why I do what I do and this is why I think it needs to change in the marketplace.

So mission, mission is your first story. The second is your vision. What does it look like when your mission is completed? What’s the big overarching thing that you wanna do? These work great for hiring talent, especially people wanna be part of something big.

Yeah,

Share it, show it, right? It’s highly visible. The third, and these are the most human of them all are milestones. So what have you gone through? What have your clients gone through on the business side? And then what have you been through as a person that helped you get to where you are? Remember we all wanna see ourselves as the hero, as the protagonist, as that main character. And if you’re telling me about times that you’ve been through something difficult but you’ve achieved something great on the backend, I’m also able to see myself as a person who’s done similar things, which is the whole device of the story. Yeah. So when we say case study or not case study, I think of case studies as more formalized. Like oh here’s the metric, here’s this. But a story can also, it’s more of an arc of, of input.

Equaled equals output and it’s a clear through line. And me as the owner was someone who helped affect this change or our company was the protagonist that helped affect this change and lead to set outcome. So case studies are great, but it could also just be straight ahead. Like here’s why I started this agency. We wanted to work with people like you ’cause I saw this was a really persistent problem I didn’t wanna see in the market anymore. Yeah. Simple.

What do we get wrong when we tell stories?

People make it, they don’t answer the four questions. So I, I’ve I’ve, I’ve been guilty of this too before I really sat down and looked at it and I’ve seen people who just tell a great story that has no point. What’s the point? Yeah.

Like

Sit down and say what is the person who’s listening to this going to get out of this? Because if we think of it that way, remember 65% of information is retained when shared in a story. That’s the thing they’re gonna remember. Give them something good to remember.

Yeah, right.

Give them something good to remember. Be clear on that. That’s the only thing they’re really gonna take home with ’em. So make it strong. Make it worth it for them.

So it sounds like you should kind of already know before you go into the conversations, the stories you want to tell as opposed to, I always tell one of these five stories, it sounds like it should be more intentional. Is that true?

Absolutely. And and that’s another thing agencies get wrong, drew. They don’t prepare for the call. What do I mean? They’re not sitting down and going through the website finding potential vectors where they’ve identified problems and help. They’re not looking at what technology might be in play. Who are they hiring for? They’re, they’re not doing an exhaustive or even a 10 minute audit of what’s happening at the company to be conversational. For example, I can’t tell you how many agencies I’ve worked with, but they were like, oh, like we booked the next meeting. It’s like, okay with who? Well they’re the analysts they’re gonna bring the founder in. Do you know the founder’s name? No. But they’re gonna come to the meeting and then nothing happens. If you’ve done your homework and you’re having a conversation with the analyst, which you know, sometimes we have to take those calls, you could say, hey, so it looks like Joanne and Marcus are also inside of this department as well.

Would it be, would it make sense for us to include them to have the, as part of the conversation since we’re talking about this part of strategy and the person like, yeah it’s actually a really good idea. Why don’t you just throw me out their email addresses and I could shoot over a quick invite and now you’re in control of how the message is moving forward. Again, it’s these really small things, but that’s what adds up to adding three or six months to your sales cycle or just people just ghosting you. ’cause you unfortunately it falls back on you, the owner, you the agency, you did not structure the situation in a way to give you the advantage to move the thing forward. We relied on the customer to Yeah, agree. They had the problem and agree that now was the time and most people just don’t work that way unfortunately.

Yeah, it’s interesting. So as I’m listening to you, I’m thinking we often assume or allow the prospect to be in control of the relationship and the circumstance. And what I’m hearing you say is we need to take control but in a way that doesn’t feel pushy or salesy or whatever we have, we just have to be the one that is sort of guiding, maybe that’s a better word. Yep. The the relationship and the process.

Absolutely. And create accountability around the outcomes that the people want, right? Like that’s really at the core of what we do in agencies. We’re creating accountability for the metrics and results that you want. And our frameworks and processes are the ones that are gonna get you there efficiently. But this is what you want. That’s why we’re doing it. I’m not here to sell you anything. I’m here to solve your, your pain. Yeah. And so if we establish the size of the pain and can measure the size of the pain and get to the emotion of the pain, we could start to create a solution and people will want to solve the problem. ’cause I can’t unsee it once you showed it to me the right way.

Yeah, right. I can’t, I can’t unfeel the discomfort of it. Can’t. Yeah. So you said something earlier that I wanna circle back around because early in the conversation one of the things we said is whether you’re the founder or not, if, if your agency doesn’t have a sales system or process that whether you wanna scale or sell or whatever, it’s problematic. So that was a point we made early in the conversation. Yeah. Then you started talking about a story bank, which made me think, oh this is one of the ways we probably don’t codify what we do, which is have a collection, have a place where someone other than me who lived the stories as the agency owner knows the stories and knows how to tell the stories.

So you know, again, we all have formal case studies or God help us, we should have formal case studies. But let’s talk a little bit about this idea of the story bank. Like what does that look like? How does it work? How would other like, just give us the practicality of what that, what that is.

Super simple. Start a word document and think about the first three stories, mission, vision, and milestones. And just start to be, just make a a dump. Like it doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t have to be eat like anything sexy at this point. Just sit down and be like why am I doing this? And I bet most agency owners haven’t sat down to think about that in a little while. So that’ll be a strange exercise for you. Yeah. And get you emotional a little bit. But think about why, why are you doing this versus something else. Get there and, and, and I know it might feel a little weird, but it’s super important because when you show up on a call and you’re aware of that, I can feel that as a potential customer. Like you’re the founder, you’re on the phone with me. Like that’s never lost on me.

You didn’t send me to some salesperson or anybody else. Like you’re the person on the phone. Like transfer that to me. Right? Make me feel that like that’s important. You’re a business owner, you care about your clients so much that you’re willing to take the call with them. Like don’t lose the the the context on that. That’s really important. Write down your vision. I want to help this type of company achieve this because of x. Be clear on that. And then how have you helped people to get there? So you, I’m sure you have some great clients, you have good testimonials or whatever. Just codify those in one or two sentences that somebody else could read. Yeah. Then think about yourself. What are some really difficult things you’ve been through in your life that are relevant and have helped you grow your business or stick with your business through tough times?

Have that stuff just out there. Save memes or, or things you see online. A story does not have to be yours to tell it, it doesn’t have to be yours. There’s lots of great stories out there that are relevant and in context. And if you answer the four questions we covered earlier, they will apply to the people you wanna share them with. So I just say literally make a, make a word doc. Start throwing things you find interesting that you could explain and share with your clients. And then as you develop this and you have these things ready, if you want to take it to the next level, you can use the stories to fight objections. So for example like that there’s three types of of objections. They’re couched in different ways but it’s, is this gonna work?

Is now the right time and can I afford this? Right. Those, those are basically three that come in different, different dress but have a story for each one of those. So for example is now is now the right time, right? This is where you’re gonna hear from people ’cause the sales cycle’s long. Yeah. So they’ll be like, oh well three to six months from now we’ll think about it totally makes sense. Recently we were actually working with another owner of a company just like yours in your space and they had the same question. And so what we were able to help them understand was they were leaving $1 million a month on the table by waiting. The second thing we were able to help them understand is by not having this system, they were not in position to sell the company that they wanted to sell in three years time.

Once we uncovered that, we showed them by implementing these systems within three to six months time, we would have all of that addressed and we’d be able to capture that delta that they were leaving on the table. Within six months of us working together, we were able to get that $1 million they left on the table to capturing an additional $2 million in revenue. So if you wanna wait, I totally understand, but I definitely think it’s worth another look because this is a similar result we’ve seen across people in your space. Again, I’m not selling me, I’m selling the story of what we did for somebody else and as the context conquer the objection. Yeah.

Whether, whether we solve it for you or someone else does is worthy of solving. Yeah. That’s

It. And generally speaking, most people, if you help them see something the right way, there is that reciprocity thing, right? We come back to the emotions, it’s like, oh no, you really helped me think about the right way. You’re not trying to sell me on something doesn’t always work. But that can help people come back to you and be like, thank you for sharing that with me. That’s really important. Yeah. And that’s how I move that forward.

Yeah. I like it. Alright, we we have to wrap up ’cause we are almost out of time. What’s the one thing in your book that I should have asked you about that I am remiss in not making sure we talk about before I let you go? Great

Question. I think there is a, there’s a framework in there called the area framework, which is a way you can tell stories and conquer objections that’s formatted. So it’s, you can just kind of memorize it. Area stands for angle, reason, evidence and angle. If you’re in a position where you’re not sure what you’re talking about or looking for a nice structure on how to deliver your stories, that’s a really good one. I have a bunch of examples inside of the book, but for various quick purposes today, angle is where you state your position. So I believe that AI is going to be a huge game changer for the industry. R stands for reason. You would set it off by saying the reason is AI has grown in sentient 70% per day since its inception.

And then evidence would be a story and, and here’s a quick example. I was working with this one agency and they had X and now they have Y and they’ve been able to extremely grow their efficiency with this particular operation. And then you restate your angle and that’s why I think AI is gonna be very pervasive. So it’s a nice little chunky thing. Works great for podcasts, works great for things on stage, works great for content, just very clear and pithy and I think some folks may get some value outta that.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Steven, this has been a great conversation. I think you’ve given folks a lot of practical, tangible things to think about and the frameworks are really beautiful and easy and you know you’ve made something that is complicated and scary simple. So thank you for that.

I appreciate it. I really, really appreciate it and thank you so much for having me. Drew,

If folks want to find the book, follow you, learn from you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Thank you for asking. The best way to get in touch with me, I’m all over LinkedIn. If you want resources that we’ve discussed today, Stephen S-T-E-P-H-E-N, steers, S-T-E-E-R s.com/podcast. There is a bevy of stuff you can just download 100% for free. That’ll be tactical and you could put in your business today should you want more easy to find. And all my information is on the site as well.

I do like a a bevy of free things. That’s always up. Yeah, it’s hard to find a bevy. I want tell. Very intentional. It’s half half bevy sometimes, but a full on bevy hard to find. I like it for your listeners, they get the bevy for sure. Yeah, I like it. You’re a giver. This has been fun. Thank you for being with us. Alright guys, this wraps up another episode. So I know that for many of you, sales is a necessary evil and some of you it’s just your gift and even for you, lots of great tips and tricks to make it even easier and better. But for those of you that are like, I don’t love this. I wish I could find someone to do this, there’s two takeaways for me in this conversation.

Number one, you can do it better and you can do it easier with some of the things Steven’s been talking about. And number two, if you ever wanna stop doing it, the key is to figure out how to systemize it with some of the things like the Story bank and some of the other things he’s talking about. Building your case studies the way you talked about. Because if you don’t have something to hand to someone else, then guess what? You are always gonna be the salesperson. And you know that one of the things we talk about all the time is this idea of the importance of scale and being able to eventually build a business that you can sell if you want to.

And so again, what this is all about is how do you take what you are good at or even your mediocre at, make it better and then make it teachable so that whether you hire someone to do it, whether you teach the new buyer of your business to do it sooner or later, someone else is going to have to sell what you sell today. And the more you follow sort of some of the strategies that Steven’s talked about, the better and quicker you’re gonna be able to do that. So lots, lots to think about and take away from all of this. And I highly recommend a, you grab the book, you go grab the full bevy, not a half bevy, not a quarter bevy, but the full bevy of three things that Steven has for you on the website and that you start to apply them in the business.

Okay? So lots of lots of homework for you and lots of good takeaways from this episode. So you know, I love that when we give you some good homework to take away, wanna remind you that we are super grateful for two things. Number one, our friends at White Label IQ, they’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. So they do white label dev design and PPC for agencies just like yours. They come alongside agencies, they project manage those things. You are talking to someone here in the US during US hours, but they’re leveraging an entire team of people all over the world to do the work in a way that you can make money and they can make money. And most important, your clients are happy and satisfied with what you’re doing.

So check them out at White Label IQ dot com slash aami. They’ve got a deal there for you. And last, but absolutely not least, please know and remember that I am incredibly grateful that we get to hang out together so I don’t get to have guests like Steven come on the show. If you’re not on the other end listening to the show, nobody wants to come, just talk to me. They wanna talk to all of us. And so I am super grateful that you come back every week, that you give us great feedback on the guests, that you reach out to the guests and thank them for being on the show because you are, you make this possible. And I love the relationship that we have, that we get to share all of the smarts and we all get to get better together. So thank you for being with us.

Thanks for coming back. I’ll be back next week with another guest and hope you’ll join me. All right, thanks for listening.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agency management institute.com to check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.