April Dunford, world-leading expert on positioning for B2B tech companies, explains why the Hero's Journey framework works for traditional storytelling, but not for B2B sales.

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Storytelling is one of these things marketers think a lot about storytelling and I'm Cecil storytelling particularly on the consumer side business-to-business marketers like to think about storytelling. I don't think a lot of B2B companies are doing an amazing job at storytelling what's really funny about that as we go over to sales sales doesn't care about storytelling. They never talk about storytelling and yet they're the ones that actually are face-to-face with a customer and if anyone should be telling a story maybe it's your sales team that you see or at least what I learned as a marketer going through if you go to marketing school story telling a lot of what you'll see is this hero's journey structure for storytelling which is very common in entertainment. It's the way most movies are written a lot of stories are written with the hero's journey in B2B storytelling. We think about the hero is a customer is a customer has a problem. They embark on this Quest. They meet a guy that's us where the guide them a plan and help them be successful and avoid defeat a hero's journey the problem with that storytelling ARG is just kind of dope competitor in there and if we think about what a buyer is actually trying to figure out why pick you over the other guys hero's journey doesn't really give us an ark to do that in the work that I do with customers we start with positioning so we get really clear on what's the value we can deliver that no one else can see who are the customers it really care about that and then we want to build a story around that. The story that we're trying to tell needs to answer this question why pick up some of the other guys? So in that storytelling framework we need to we need to have a spot in that framework to paint a picture of the whole market and then she'll where we fit and where everybody fits two shouldn't actually be just talking about us. We should be talking about the alternative approaches to the problem, which means we're going to talk about competitors or at least the approach to the competitors take In the work, I do we take the position we translated into a sales pitch that sales pitch has a storytelling structure that starts with a conversation around the market. So we'll talk about look we look at this Market in a different way than our competitors and because we look at it in a different way, we built the product in a different way and your your customer you have lots of choices. There's other products that you could buy there's other approaches. You can say we have opinions about it. We want to hear what you have to say about it to this is the way we look at it. You can do it this way this way or this way and here's the pluses and minuses of these different ways of solving this problem. And this is the conversation with the customer more than me telling the customer stuff. But at the same time I'm teaching the customer about what we think is important in a purchase decision. Which most customers don't know early in their purchase process. They're trying to buy a counting softer half the people doing a purchase and B2B have never purchased a product like yours before so they're doing this for the first time. They're overwhelmed with information on the internet. Every vendor says where the best know where the best know we are the best we need to do any good sales storytelling and B2B is help customers understand how to confidently make a decision in order to do that. I have to paint a picture of the whole market. So they feel good that they understand if I choose this I'm choosing to go big on this and low on this if I choose this here the trade-offs for this bike shoes this year the trail for this or you could choose us and here's the trade-off for us. Are we good for you or not? That's what we should be doing in a good sale storytelling in my opinion.

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