See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 57 Mastering the Art of Customer-Centric Storytelling in Business | Show notes
0:00:01 - Alex Shevelenko
I am delighted to introduce you to Park Howell, an Emmy Award-winning business storytelling coach at the Business of Story and the author of The Narrative Gym for Business and Brand Bewitchery. Park, welcome to the pod!
0:00:17 - Park Howell
Alex, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it!
0:00:21 - Alex Shevelenko
I am in the business of storytelling, but I feel like I could use some coaching myself. I’m really excited to hear about your story and how you help business owners, marketers, and key communicators get their stories across. First, tell us your story, and maybe we can start learning from that part.
0:00:47 - Park Howell
Well, I thought my world was falling apart at the ripe age of 55, so I had to take action. But let’s jump back a few decades, Alex. I grew up in the advertising, branding, and marketing world. I’ve been at it for almost 40 years. I ran my own ad agency in Phoenix, Arizona, for 20 of those years. I enjoyed it for the first 10 years, but the second 10 were challenging when the internet and digital marketing hit. I was at a loss.
I couldn't figure it out. How do we use this new technology? It completely changed the rules of traditional advertising. As I used to tell my clients, you used to own the influence of mass media, but now the masses are the media. They own your story and are creating all this noise. How do you possibly stand out?
So, in the early 2000s, Alex, I went in search of answers and was fortunate. Our son, Parker, was attending film school at Chapman University in Orange, California, one of the top five film programs in the world. I said, “Parker, send me your books and recorded lectures when you're done with them since I’m paying for them.” I wanted to learn what Hollywood knows about storytelling in the most competitive storytelling market in the world.
And that's when I started studying these frameworks, everything from the hero's journey to Blake Snyder's “15 beats to the story”, it occurred to me that what Hollywood was using was the ideal template for a customer journey or a brand journey that we're all on, and I asked myself, “How come we have never learned this in the advertising marketing world what Hollywood knew about it?”
So I started applying and using it, and I wrote my first textbook, Brand Bewitchery. I took the hero's journey and boiled it down to 10 steps called the Story Cycle System. We used it to create brand story narratives, and it was hugely successful.
It started as a science project to see if it would really work, and it did. Our first customer grew by 400% precisely because they got their story pulled together. That’s when I knew I was onto something, and that’s when my life changed. I had customers coming to me, asking to be taught how to use it in their own worlds and to teach their own teams. I was no longer just an ad agency guy but also a coach and a teacher, and I loved it. One morning, when I was 55 years old, I realized I hated running my ad agency. I wasn’t an ad guy anymore and knew I had to make a change. That’s when I jumped into the business of story. Since then, I have been consulting, teaching, coaching, and speaking on the power of story internationally.
0:03:39 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, and I'll just give you a shout-out. Some of the notable companies you work with include Dell, Hilton Hotels, Walgreens, Coca-Cola—I thought these guys knew something about storytelling—and Home Depot. One I particularly like is Visit California, which is very helpful. We need more tourists because we’re developing some reputational issues, so this is fantastic. I'm looking forward to seeing what my kids will learn at university, but I love the storytelling aspect.
I share your passion for applying frameworks from one field, where people are highly competent, into another field. However, one thing I find amusing is when you tell a technology CEO about storytelling, they often start thinking, “I’m the hero, my startup is the hero!” But you’d probably say that it’s actually the customer who is the hero, right? They are your champions and your investors. You need to make an investor feel like a hero, right?
So, tell us a bit about some of the most common mistakes in applying storytelling. We all watch Hollywood movies, and everyone wants to be a hero, right? You wouldn’t be a startup founder if you didn’t think you were a hero or some Star Wars character. Yet, we sometimes miss the obvious point that the hero’s journey is not about us.
0:05:26 - Park Howell
When you talk about storytelling to a startup founder, the first reaction is often eye-rolling, as if to say, “Oh, that’s just woo-woo storytelling stuff. It doesn’t work. We need to lead with logic and reason. We have the best widget out there.”
That's all people need to know? That's not the case. What they really care about is how you impact their world. So, Alex, to your point, story truth number one is that you and your brand are not the center of the story. Nobody actually cares about you. They don’t care about your brand. They only care about outcomes, which trump offerings every single time.
So, number one: your story is not about you, it's about your audience from their point of view. And number two: your story is not about what you make, but what you make happen in their lives because that's what they're investing in—the outcome. Well, I think even the terminology is messed up. There is one of the most common terms in the software and generally tech industry—product marketer. Just think about it for a second. So people really believe it's about like, “Hey, I have a widget x and I'm gonna market the widget x. And then maybe some more sophisticated folks that are more mature have industry marketing or solution marketing. Sounds a little bit better. At great companies like Salesforce, you have customer marketers, and that gets closer to what we're describing. But I think just the terminology feels like we're starting with the wrong side of the equation here.
0:07:49 - Park Howell
Yeah, because it becomes product-centric and you need to be customer-centric. You need to be audience-centric. What's in it for them? Centric is what it's all about. I was working with a CEO in Toronto. It was a CEO group. There were a number of them in the room and I took them through my “and but therefore” training.
Towards the end of it he just kind of dismissed me and dismissed it. He goes, “You know, we're actually the leader in our industry. That's all we got to do is tell people and they're going to just naturally gravitate to us because we are number one in our industry.” And I go, “No, I don't think they will. What are sales? How much did sales grow last year?” He goes, “Sales are pretty good.” But he couldn't give me a number on what the growth is. I go, “What if you could 10X that growth by changing your mentality right now from being ‘we're number one and we're the best’ to ‘what's actually in it for my audience?’”
And it was so funny to see that I thought just a near-sighted approach to sales and marketing of his company—we're number one, they're naturally going to buy from us. No, that's not the case. You'll soon be number two, and then number three, and then you've got to rebuild that thread through storytelling. So why not just begin with it right now?
0:09:10 - Alex Shevelenko
So one of the interesting nuances that we see is that who tells the story is just as important and how it's told is just as important as the story itself. It's a pretty well-known fact that some of the most compelling stories come when another customer who had success tells the story versus the “oh, look at us, how great we are” type of narrative. And also when that's done casually, maybe when we're not in the room, they're not obviously incented to tell that.
So guide me a little bit on how you simplify the story in such a way that a gazillion other fans that you have would make, would find it easy and exciting and fun to retell your story, because I think a lot of times we even forget that that's the step. That it’s actually a 10X, 100X multiplier, because, if I get the word-of-mouth momentum going that's natural and organic, that's way more cost-efficient than any sales reps and a huge marketing department.
0:10:25 - Park Howell
Jeff Bezos of Amazon said it beautifully. He said, “A brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.” I’ve co-opted that a little and believe that a brand is really the stories people tell about you when you're not in the room. So you want to be able to arm them with the right stories: from how they participate with your brand to how you deliver on your story promises to the actual stories themselves. And so one of the frameworks that I love—in fact, I do all of my training—started with this three word framework. Remember, Alex, I first started with like the 17-step hero's journey and then the 15-step, Blake Snyder’s 15 beats to the story. There's all these long, big, complicated frameworks and they're good, they work, but you got to be a real solid story artist to pull them off.
In all of my travels and studies, I learned about what is called the ABT—“and, but, therefore.” I learned it from my now-good friend, Dr. Randy Olson. A Harvard PhD evolutionary biologist, he gave up tenure in his mid-30s, went to USC film school, graduated, and produced three documentaries on climate change and global warming. His work has been teaching scientists and academics how to use story frameworks like “and, but, therefore” to make their complex messages simple and compelling.
When I first learned about the ABT framework back in 2013, I said, “This is exactly what we need to do in sales and marketing, especially in the B2B world, where we often lead with complex, logic-driven messaging to customers. What they really want is the emotional pull of a story.” So, instead of teaching these big, long frameworks, I start with “and, but, therefore.”
0:12:23 - Alex Shevelenko
I'm intrigued, I'm sure our audiences as well. Let's do it!
0:12:26 - Park Howell
Now, let's do it. Can I use you as an experiment case study for your show? Right here, I'm going to show you how to refine your brand story using the “and, but, therefore”
Now, the ABT works because it uses what we call the three forces: a story of agreement, contradiction, and consequence. Our pattern-seeking, problem-solving, decision-making, and buying limbic brain loves to receive information this way. It’s like you’re spoon-feeding it. So here's how you do it for the brand—and, but, therefore, Who, Alex, is your number one audience member? Give me the persona that makes up 80% of your viewing audience.
0:13:20 - Alex Shevelenko
For Experience-focused Leaders or RELAYTO?
0:13:25 - Park Howell
It could be either one. Which one would you like to work on, the podcast brand or your product brand?
0:13:31 - Alex Shevelenko
Let's do the product brand. There is some overlap. Because we love our audience, our product users also love it.
0:13:42 - Park Howell
So RELAYTO. Let's do RELAYTO. Who's your number one audience?
0:13:52 - Alex Shevelenko
Innovative B2B marketers on a small team. It could be a large organization or a small organization, but they want to do more with less. They are in the B2B or scientific complex world and they are marketers or think like marketers.
0:14:08 - Park Howell
And they want to do more with less. And why is that important to them?
0:14:14 - Alex Shevelenko
Marketing, as you know, is a highly ungrateful role in B2B where you are expected to drive leads, nurture those leads, support sales teams, get customers successful, and upsell a new product and offer. And you have a team of, typically in the small organization, small team, sometimes two, three, four, five small units in a division or product all trying to do that. And I think in the B2B world and large ticket items marketers often don't get a great seat at the table so they're resource-constrained and people just expect outcomes without investments.
0:15:09 - Park Howell
Okay, so what is the main problem RELAYTO solves for them? What are they struggling with that you help them overcome?
0:15:16 - Alex Shevelenko
We help them turn content outputs which are an ebook, sales deck, white paper, and customer testimonial into outcomes, meaning customers and prospects go through that. Those resources self-educate and help to become well-educated, high-quality leads. Or in the proposal, RFP response, or sales presentations, in the finals you look 10 times better than your competitors and get a competitive edge. And then when customers or partners on boards understand your product well, they get to the wow faster and they start succeeding with your solution. These are the types of. So that's where you take the content and turn it from a deliverable to a business outcome.
0:16:18 - Park Howell
We'll get to that, Alex. You just defaulted on telling us all about what you guys do. But my real question is, what problem do you solve? Yeah, by doing all that. What problem do you solve for your customers?
0:16:34 - Alex Shevelenko
Turn what traditionally has been content into another sale, an effective salesperson communicator who's working 24/7 to engage with customers.
0:16:48 - Park Howell
So that's what you do, but what problem do you solve? See how hard this is sometimes.
0:16:53 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, the problem—I think that's specific—there are generally three types of problems: more leads that are educated, right? We generate from the same resources the second one, and if you're going later in the sales cycle, you'll have a higher win rate because the resources sell themselves.
0:17:15 - Park Howell
Those are all outcomes, but what problem do you solve?
0:17:22 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, as a marketer, I can't produce compelling content quickly, right?
0:17:47 - Park Howell
So here they are. They are not creating compelling content fast enough that actually engages the audience. Therefore, you can speed up that sale with the RELAYTO Content Experience platform that ignites the meaning of your content. I don't know what that final answer is to ultimately get you to that sale faster. Now I'm just sort of piecing this together.
You're basically breaking down, separating the outcomes, which come later, from the problem, which is the reason I can't get those outcomes. And we're avoiding that default that you went to: immediately talk about RELAYTO and what you do and all the stuff.
Nobody cares about that unless we have adequately set that up. Your statement is a statement of agreement. It's like a shared vision of what tomorrow can be. So you are and you want to speak in the first person to that audience, you being your customer. You are an innovative B2B marketer and if you just had the resources to create compelling content quickly and then measure its impact, then you would have the growth, the revenue growth.
0:19:21 - Alex Shevelenko
You'll get the respect! But you don't, because you're still in PowerPoint mode. Yeah, and you can't create compelling content quickly enough, because you certainly simply don't have the right tools around you.
0:19:36 - Park Howell
Just imagine being expedited. Not only expediting your content but igniting your sales. When you use RELAYTO, it's like bringing six people onto your staff through one content experience platform. So, again, I'm kind of clunking through this, but I'm trying to show the form. Start with agreement. What's in it for them Then? But why don't they have it? What's the frustration that they're experiencing because of this major problem? Therefore, what's the consequence of that? When you do this with us, you'll be able to achieve this.
0:20:20 - Alex Shevelenko
And let's get to an agreement. If you go directly into the problem, is that an area of agreement? Cause not everybody, let's say somebody doesn't. I think they have other problems. Do you give them an option of like, “Hey, here are the three most common problems we hear from marketers,” and they go, “Yeah, that one in your discovery?”
0:20:48 - Park Howell
Every person is their own individual and they might be able to lump into one, two, or three different problems. But every time you do an ABT, you want it on a singular problem-solution narrative. You don't want to introduce two problems or three problems, because our brains are not wired to consume a lot of different problems. One problem at a time, one ABT per problem. So we don't like to lead with the problem because you, as the advisor looking in, may see the problem differently than your customer sees the problem.
And now if you spout off what you believe the customer wants and they push back, you’ve created a divisive relationship that you’ll now need to repair if you want to build any trust with them. Instead, start with the positive outcome: what is it that they want, and why is it important to them? So you get them nodding in agreement, Alex, you've done your homework, you understand who I am and you appreciate what I want and why it's important to me. Then you introduce the problem and you want to build as much contrast between that shared vision of a prosperous tomorrow and why you don't have it because of this major problem. The larger the void there, the longer your customer is going to give you for your therefore solution.
0:22:11 - Alex Shevelenko
So, agreement, then the but, and then the third piece is a consequence, or what is the consequence of your actions?
0:22:26 - Park Howell
If you do nothing, you're not going to improve. However, if you do this with us, picture this outcome because we have this proven content experience platform. So here are the steps. Here are the steps for everybody listening and watching. Alex, name your number one audience.
So your ABT is always a singular narrative. It speaks to one particular audience. You create different ABTs for different audiences and different problems. What do they want relative to your offering, and why is that important to them? Raising the stakes who's your audience? What do they want and why is it important to them? But what frustration are they experiencing? What negative emotions are they experiencing because of the defined problem? Therefore, what are they going to experience when they overcome that problem? By doing what? With you?
So you, as the brand, don't come to the very end of the ABT. You stay focused on your audience, placing them at the center of the story and what's in it for them. By the way, I mentioned the three forces of the story: agreement, contradiction, and consequence. The ABT also automatically builds the three forces of trust building, as I call them, by demonstrating you understand your audience, by calling them out, appreciating what they want and why that's important to them, and empathizing with them why they don't currently have it. You're building those three forces of trust that then come into, and, but, therefore, which is ultimately your call to action.
0:24:16 - Alex Shevelenko
What I really like about this and what I think is challenging sometimes, is this focus on one person, persona. That said, in the typical enterprise organization, let's say you're selling to the CMO and the CMO has different specialist marketing teams. Obviously, how would you recommend integrating a more complete portfolio? Because do you just build the story for the CMO only and then have like sub stories for different teams inside the CMO organization? How you would recommend it?
0:25:05 - Park Howell
Yeah, you want to always have a singular narrative. So, I actually experienced this at Coca-Cola. This was back in 2009. When I was still running my ad agency, we were hired by Coke to launch this big eco-driving initiative for their 60,000 fleet drivers and their staff. The whole idea of the Smart Driver Program is that it would help reduce fuel use, reduce our carbon footprint, reduce maintenance, and create safer drivers.
Well, they hired us to come into the brand internally inside of Coca-Cola, and when we got there, they said, “Park, we also need you to help us kind of sell it up through the C-suite.” We thought it was a done deal. But they now said how do we talk to our chief marketing officer, our HR person, and our chief sustainability officer to share this program with them, to get them to buy in? Well, it's not one story fits all. The chief marketing officer has a completely different set of care about than the HR person and the chief sustainability officer set of care abouts than the HR person.
So, for the marketer, we share with them, “Here you're going to have a program that you're going to be able to market out to the world and demonstrate the impact that Coca-Cola is having and it will help you just to build that brand equity, that brand essence out there.” For the chief sustainability officer, we said, “You are going to have an actual measurable program that can demonstrate the savings and fuel and maintenance, as well as the reducing of your carbon footprint, that you can take out to a skeptical world and say, here's what we're doing and here's the measurable impact we're having.”
For HR that was pushing back by saying we don't really need another program. Do we? HR was pushing back by saying, “We don't really need another program, do we?” We demonstrated HR by basically gamifying this program to put division against division in a fun, competitive way. Let's say, “Look, you are going to be building camaraderie within the HR ranks through this particular program.” So, Alex, that's an example of we're selling the same narrative, the same smart driver program, but we're speaking to our audiences from their particular point of view. What's in it for them and that's what we want to do for everybody. Once you start generalizing and putting all of your problems in one basket for all of these audiences, you will become boring. You will lose them, and that pattern-seeking, problem-solving, decision-making, buying limbic brain will completely tune out. It’ll shut you out.
0:27:45 - Alex Shevelenko
I get it. So let me throw out something that we are solving for our customers with technology because what you're describing is basically a recipe for disaster for an average presentation that goes to a buying committee. Because if I put an average deck, I would have a collection of slideware, and at best it would be like we'll start with the CMO, then some other group, then some other group. And then at the end of that linear let's say, 30-page presentation, I get to the HR person, and that HR person will be by that point gone, like you said, unless you grasp them at the very beginning. And we see, particularly in our customers that are in the enterprise cycles where there are a lot of stakeholders, that what they're doing is they're basically putting a little mini-site or mini-presentation for each stakeholder.
They could be independent, they're modular so they could be sent directly to that stakeholder and that stakeholder alone, but yet they sit inside an architecture that basically helps you self-select who you are and you could say, “Hey, I am CMO and I want to hear my story. I am HR and I want to hear my story. I am HR and I want to hear my procurement in this.”
And I think something about the B2B world the way it used to be done was a sort of monolithic RFPs and monolithic sales presentations. It's not really well supported for this. Let's jump to my persona and address my questions. And people sometimes figure out how to do it on a website, where you get a solution section. And you find your persona and you're like, “Oh, finally, this is for me!” But it's kind of painful, and half the time you skip these things. So what's your take? Because what you've described is something really critical is that you can't have multiple narratives attached together yet you don't necessarily know if you're a sponsor for this product. Who's going to see this stuff? You have a buying committee the size of the state of California.
They need to find themselves quickly. Otherwise, like you said, you lose it. What have you found that works to engage those? What other people have done? We definitely are using our tech, but I'm curious if there are other solutions our customers can use.
0:30:30 - Park Howell
Well, I don't know about other tech solutions, it's discovery, it's research, it's doing the hard work in advance of understanding who's sitting in that audience and or who's going to be an audience to whatever presentation you have, maybe even if they're not there, but they're going to get it after the fact. If you have a number of different decision-makers from different departments, then I ask you to really work hard to figure out what is the one common theme, what is the one thing that they all have in common that you could at least build your baseline story on. And then, if you're lucky enough that you can have different presentations to different stakeholders, then of course you use the ABT to get focused on that stakeholder.
What do they certainly care about? Think a bit about it like a Hollywood movie. Hollywood movie Star Wars, has an overarching framework, a brand narrative if you would. Good versus evil, right? But then they got all of these other little stories going on and yet all of these other scenes and stories all floated up to support this good versus evil context. So I asked brands to do the same thing. What's your overall brand narrative? What does it stand for?
Let's take the business of story, for instance. My thing, my overall narrative arc, is learn how to excel through the stories you tell. Now I have different audiences, so quite often when I first developed this I wasn't thinking about learning and development people, but now that's my largest audience. So, Walmart Canada. Right now we are teaching thousands of their associates how to use the ABT so that they have more efficient and effective communication internally. So I will share the stories differently with Walmart Canada L&D people and Visit California. I just got done with Visit Phoenix, a tourism group here, last week in Arizona, so it's the same thing with them. How can I help you excel through the stories you tell? Well, we are now going to focus on sales and marketing of Phoenix as a destination.
So my overarching message is to excel through the stories you tell. However, depending on who I'm talking to, it will take on a different color. I’ve got to support it from a sales and marketing standpoint, a learning and development standpoint, an HR standpoint, and a leadership standpoint. I do a lot of work with the Air Force, so when I am talking to them, that's not about sales and marketing, it's about leadership, development and how do you develop your teams internally? Well, the same mantra of excel through the stories you tell works for them. It's just coming at it from a different perspective, their perspective. So that's the first thing I'd ask you to do is what is your overarching RAN narrative that relates to all of your audiences? And then how can you tell a story from your audience's point of view that supports that overall mantra?
0:33:35 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, and I think my general concern is that—and you know, I'm curious how you deal with it—you're obviously in the consulting business, so you have more room to adapt to a particular client, right? And it's easier to do on the fly if you're enabling a larger sales force, right? So, for example, I could say—and you literally used these words, which is why I love to have you on the call—we are building audience-centric content experiences, literally audience-centric. Because historically, if you think of PowerPoint, it was designed as a creator-centric.
Great, let's crank out bullet points, I don't care how they look, it's easy to put together a bullet point, which is why my former employers at Microsoft said, “Great, we need to teach people to create PowerPoints. Bullet points are easy!”
0:34:27 - Park Howell
And then we have the sort of bullet point which leads to my saying that PowerPoints riddled with bullet points kill presentations because they are user-centric.
0:34:43 - Alex Shevelenko
They're not audience-centric, and I think that's just on the creation side. A few years after PowerPoint, this thing called PDF emerged and I happened to be at Microsoft at that time and we were looking at it. What is this thing? We know there's some issues with PowerPoint. It's not perfect, but at least it's animated.
PDF was fixed for printing, but it was like bringing this document totally to death, it was fixing it, it was turning it into a real piece of paper. And again, it had its benefits for the era of the intranet. But, I think now, in this day and age, it's like PDFs is where knowledge goes to die. So it's like a similar thing because it doesn't fit your audience. And so this is how we're thinking about this. But then I'll tell you what the issue is.
When I say audience-centric versus maybe collaborator or presenter-centric tools, then people are like, “What's audience-centric?” It's too broad, whereas if I say, “Marketing experience”, people go, “Oh, okay, great, this is marketing.” And if that's our main use case, as an example, then basically you could almost bypass that generic narrative that dilutes it to everybody and says, “Marketing, great content for everyone”, or something like that. At least it takes that main value proposition, it doesn't dilute it. So how do you make that trade-off between peanut butter it to make it acceptable to everybody and the specificity.
0:36:30 - Park Howell
I just love to get rid of all the jargon. Good friend of mine coined the term jargon monoxide, because jargon just kills any sort of communication, unless you're really on the inner group. I like to just get down to. I would ask him, “Alex, how do you make your audiences care about you, care about your product or offering?” You know what are you doing right now. Forget marketing, forget even audience-centric. We talk about that because they're buzzwords.
0:37:01 - Alex Shevelenko
It already looked like somebody from HR and marketing put that. Well, it's one step away.
0:37:09 - Park Howell
You make it audience-centric. Because you want that audience to actually care about you and what you have to offer. So that's, Park, audience-centric over here, knowing it's important. But why is it important? Because you ultimately are asking yourself how do I make this audience care about what I have to offer, providing you have something that's going to solve their problem.
If you don't have something that solves their problem. Don't waste their time and your time and money. But if you can identify that major problem, then get in there and then you can earnestly go in and say, “Tell the story from their point of view to get them to care.” First by demonstrating that you care about them by understanding, appreciating and empathizing with them.
0:37:56 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, that's fantastic and I think, with the sort of “make people care”, that sort of “make your audience care”.
I'm curious about your take at the industry. Having been in the industry for many years, the more complex, the more important, the more valuable idea is, the more horrifically it is communicated, to the point that it only engages people that were already “you had me on hello” type of folks, the scientists that are waiting for your scientific research and can't wait to receive it. Anybody else may struggle with understanding the relevance, and yet this could be game-changing research for them. It could be behavioral change that will make you live 20 years longer, happier, and achieve professional success. So what do you see is happening in the modern age where there's the AI that kind of remove, but maybe digest the stories a little bit better for us. What are people doing to connect the complex, particularly complex, difficult ideas to the audience. Is it better storytelling? Are there other tools that you're seeing as well?
0:39:29 - Park Howell
I think the trick is exactly what you said—making the complex simple. So we are all bombarded by content, both online, and it affects how we operate offline as well. There's tremendous creativity out there. You could go on Instagram, TikTok, whatever. See some of these memes and laugh your asses off.
0:39:56 - Alex Shevelenko
In fact, especially monetize, especially on TikTok, Facebook and other things whose business model is to grab your attention. They're really-really good at it, as opposed to the people that actually need your attention because they have something valuable to offer. They're really-really bad at it because they're product people, they're scientists.
0:40:22 - Park Howell
They're not behavioral manipulators, like measuring every pixel for your attention optimization, especially in the B2B world where quite often you have a complex message, you want to simplify it. And to me, what wins the day in this day and age of too much information is compelling clarity, taking that complex message, making it simple, using and, but, therefore—the three forces of story. So you are whispering into that pattern-seeking, problem-solving, decision-making, buying limbic brain in the way it wants to be engaged, in the way it wants to receive information, set up problem resolution, agreement, contradiction, and consequence—the three forces of story. I believe that the B2B marketer who quickly masters the approach to producing and delivering compellingly clear communication is the one who will win the day. Creativity comes from the voice, comes from the brand, whatever. But if you don't have that really creative thing, come at it with compelling clarity using the ABT.
0:41:36 - Alex Shevelenko
I'm curious what your take is on adding one step before, and to me that step is friction.
So maybe you have a very compelling and clear message, but let's say you have to go through a bunch of steps to pull into your first name, your last name, your email, the size of your company, your mother's maiden name, right, like last four digits of social, whatever it is to get to that, maybe even well put together very simple message. And I feel like that we don't have patience for that anymore, that level of friction. And yet that is actually a default behavior for lots of B2B marketers because, “Hey, we need to get leads and the only way to get to leads is through this forum.” And we don't think very hard that 90, 95 of the audience drops off the moment they see the form. Maybe some of them are not super motivated, but I bet you, a bunch of them are right and they could be more motivated, especially if you have a great message across.
So that's friction, right? What do you think about friction before we even get to the storytelling and ways to remove it?
0:42:55 - Park Howell
Well, I mean they're getting there to that particular form because you've done some sort of marketing or some sort of storytelling to let them know that there's even a form available to them. The ABT is also used beautifully on your websites, on your landing pages, to set someone up to fill out that form. If you know there's friction in there and they're not completely motivated, do a quick little ABT and the copy above it to say, “Here's what you stand to lose if you don't do this form.” So you keep wanting to use this problem solution dynamic in all of your communications and all of your channels, from oral communication and presentation to social media, to website to whatever, because you want to keep picking on. Picking on and playing to that problem solution dynamic, buying limbic brain, so just keep using it.
And, by the way, when you've got long form communication, say it's a podcast interview, say it's a presentation, it's a white paper, it's a blog post, first write an ABT. What is this about? What's the one problem we're solving for today? I'm believing it's a how to create compelling clarity in this noisy, complex, annoying world where your information is not getting through. So first try an ABT for yourself to get focused on that long form communication and then, as you're presenting it every time you're bringing up a new point to support your overarching point, use an ABT to set that up and then a little anecdotal story to show it in action, followed by the logic and reason and the data to then logically proof out this point that you've made in the emotional context of an ABT in a short little anecdotal story.
0:44:41 - Alex Shevelenko
That's interesting. So I guess we we have something in the spirit of bouncing ideas. We have a slightly different take on what comes first, and so to me what we're seeing as a trend in the market because of all the social and attractiveness of visual content that happens outside of B2B world typically. You have a world of more visual experiential storytelling and you could get a great narrative, but probably like a great image that excite you, or background video animation or something like that that excites you, makes you curious, makes you feel somebody cares about this.
Versus yeah, this is another regurgitated B2B white paper. Yeah, I've probably learned something, but we all know that you could hire somebody in India to put this together based on five other blogs and gate it right. Versus, “Hey, this is something that's really valuable. Just the way it's communicated. It means this is a serious piece of work and they really care about me engaging with it.” Just like you walk into a building and the lobby in a law firm has to make an impression to feel like, “Okay, these people deserve my attention, they've made it.” Something tells me we're not that sophisticated in the visual storytelling mode as the Hollywood is because their trailers are amazing in terms of getting our attention. You said like, “Write a good ABT.” But it assumes that people will read it. It assumes that they actually won't scan it the way they do a LinkedIn feed or Facebook.
0:46:40 - Park Howell
Well, let me give you an example of this.
So, working with Trimble, which is a SaaS platform company out of Denver, Colorado, they have a global SaaS program platform for agriculture for anybody using heavy equipment to be able to manage and basically have a real-time EKG on the health of that particular piece of equipment heavy construction, transportation, agriculture and so forth.
I taught their sales team in March of 2022, sales and marketing about the ABT. About my two other frameworks too, but really focused on the ABT, and then we put it to the test. They were running a LinkedIn campaign in five different countries, so they did March 2022, their usual stuff, and they were actually getting about a 3.4% engagement, which is pretty damn good considering that LinkedIn themselves said, “Anything over two points really good.” So we took their content and I didn't rewrite it. I just reordered it using and, but, therefore, and across five different countries. In was March, April of 2022, we increased engagement by 400%. So it wasn't because it was fabulously creative and interesting Emmy award-winning copy. It's just that the copy that they gave me, I simply reordered and put it into an ABT. That was the only thing we did different.
0:48:13 - Alex Shevelenko
What does engagement mean in this case? It just means that they downloaded, they clicked through?
0:48:25 - Park Howell
They actually acted upon that ad and so forth now here, and they didn't have great visuals to go with it, but they did have a short, powerful ABT that connected with that problem solving limbic brain so well. Now, I also wanted to point your viewers and listeners because you were talking about visual storytelling.
I just literally wrote a blog post about this on my website about the LEGO print campaign, so people can go to businessofstory.com. There you're going to find my blog. It's the very top blog post, but, Alex, it speaks directly to what you're talking about. How do you use an ABT with visual storytelling, and LEGO has a great example of that.
0:49:11 - Alex Shevelenko
We've seen 12x conversion uplifts by not even changing the text. By changing the visuals. I believe in the text and you see, we could imagine you could combine the two and you could actually measure the analytics but it all starts with what message are you sending?
0:49:32 - Park Howell
Send on that message, then you're not going to know what visual to put with it.
ABT, to get focused on that first. And then find that compelling.
0:49:42 - Alex Shevelenko
I think having a beautiful engaging presentation with a wrong message is not going to help anyone. Not going to work. You could measure it on the backend that it doesn't work, but it's still not the outcome. But let's assume you got the conversion. This is where back to friction. So I'm interested. But there is no call to action anywhere. So I have to be really, really interested.
0:50:17 - Park Howell
Well, most B2B marketers for some reason forget the idea of a call to action from a PDF. And with the ABT, you've got a built-in call to action, because it makes you as the storyteller or content creator think about that problem solution and what's the way forward. Call to action before you write any copy, before you look for any visual. It is a strategy tool to make sure that the message is compellingly clear, with an immediate call to action in it.
0:50:44 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I think you're talking about conceptual call to action. I'm talking about a physical button that says book a meeting, or kind of sign up to register.
0:50:54 - Park Howell
I've called all kinds of CTAs.
0:50:58 - Alex Shevelenko
So what you're describing is like a motivational thing. What I'm describing is that—I think you come from the world of content—the message is about the content. I just don't disagree with you, but I think experience and low friction experience together was great content. That's the 100x multiplier, otherwise you get 10x.
0:51:27 - Park Howell
I am all about taking friction out of the entire customer journey, which is the hero's journey. Stories, first and foremost, are what take friction out of understanding and creating meaning about what it is that you have to offer and what's in it for that audience. And then to your point, physically, you've got to take the friction out of the interaction on that website, on that PDF, on that sales presentation or whatever. But you know what it all starts by you as the storyteller getting your shit together on what is the exact story.
I'm trying to communicate singular problem solution dynamic to one particular audience, first using the ABT to get that framework in place and then apply it to every touch point of that customer experience, from where they first see that LinkedIn ad to where they click through to get them to the landing page to continue the ABT experience through that, to reduce the friction. Think of it like if you're a coder, you're a software designer, your job number one is to reduce friction and it's all about user experience, right? You want to make that code so seamless, so perfect, that anyone showing up on that particular website has this unbelievably frictionless experience. Is that fair enough to say?
0:52:52 - Alex Shevelenko
Absolutely, yeah.
Well, I think there's an excitement and there's a friction, there's two. I think there's two parallel areas. Let's say, I type in, “Tell me about ABT.” I train my ChatGPT on what is ABT. I put in my core text and I'd say, “Rewrite it within the ABT framework.”
0:53:25 - Park Howell
And it can't do it very well. It's okay, we've been building a custom.
0:53:28 - Alex Shevelenko
I'm sure you've been, but I think some of that is going on everywhere and it tends to be caught focused. Like 90% of innovation right now is around copy and you could measure it, and some of it will will be ABT. Some of it is going to be like some data surprises, like some things you don't expect that work. You could measure them, certainly on ads, where you're spending a lot of money. This is fun because we'll have to disagree on something. I actually think the table stakes is going to move closer on getting the messaging right, or at least pseudo right, cause you could start getting to mass personalization.
We're starting to get these emails that you could kind of spot the ChatGPT or Claude there but over time, they'll get better and better and they will all use some other framework that will be tested within reason. Doesn't mean that we don't need to be experts in storytelling, doesn't mean that we can't do discovery. But I think then the question becomes, what's going to stand out? My email, my ad and that's where I think the visual is still a little bit less proven. I go back to “experience is the message’. So you're a believer that the message is the message and if you don't get the message right, you don't succeed.
0:55:02 - Park Howell
Then you have a lousy experience.
0:55:05 - Alex Shevelenko
My sense is like experience oftentimes comes before the message. Because if I'm entering the building that smells rich and valuable and important, then I see your logo, then I see the people and the introductions, and then I hear your legal theory. I think they're not mutually exclusive, but I think I'm coming from my worldview. I think the superpowers, if you can combine the two right and you don't separate experience from the message, and you could start testing what would get you in the mood.
0:55:42 - Park Howell
Let me add to this, Alex. Is there a worse experience than confusion and obfuscation? If you're confused, you're out of there. It's a horrible experience because you're like, “I don't know what's right, what's wrong, what's up, what's down.” If a brand is confusing you, it's a horrible experience. If worse, they're so obfuscated in how they communicate, you have no idea what the hell they're talking about. You're not even going to experience any more of them. So to me, that experience begins with that initial touch. How do I know about you? What do I know about your story? Your brand is about the stories people tell about you and you are not in the room. So are they telling an accurate story, an accurate depiction of who you are, what you stand for and what you actually deliver and make happen in people's lives? That's the ultimate experience. People get that story down.
0:56:35 - Alex Shevelenko
It's truthful you mentioned limbic brain, so let's use limbic brain. My limbic brain notices the image of you before you utter a single word. My limbic brain is going to notice a video's you use. So all the other writers, Jennifer Duarte, folks like that, talk about the sense of awe. If it creates a sense of awe. And that's ballpark aligned with how you want your product or service, like the awe of Arizona canyons. Product or service like the Arizona Canyons, right. Or then you actually already hit my limbic brain and you actually may have a permission on screwing up some of the messaging.
I would be strongly supportive of that. So it's kind of a question of are you going to be slightly better on the copy and the clarity than 10 other people using ChatGPT or Claude? You know an identical way to optimize that or are you going to have a differentiator? And again, the answer is 10x times. You have to get the clarity across. But in advertising, one of the powerful metaphors that stuck with me from one of my mentors, it's like how do you get the visuals to do the talking? If the visual can tell the story, that's a critical thing. And so I agree with you because if your visual is off right, like because you don't know what the story is, what's the point?
So we're kind of in this part, we're in violent agreement. Where I think we disagree is what's going to be the only beings that we know of that plan, organize and act using fictional storytelling. And it's fictional because we're trying to create a better tomorrow.
0:59:11 - Park Howell
It's total fiction until we make it happen. Now you use the written word.
0:59:15 - Alex Shevelenko
Or I'm a cave painting guy, and you're the alphabet. I'm the cave painting.
0:59:22 - Park Howell
You use all of that. Those are all the tools in great storytelling. So, I'm not disagreeing with you that a powerful visual isn't important in storytelling—it absolutely is. But the first and foremost thing in B2B marketing is, what is your freaking story? Does it even make sense to anybody? Is it focused on you as the brand, or is it focused on your customer? How are you making them care? What's the one thing you're solving for? Or are you bombarding me with a whole bunch of different problems and solutions so that I don't care anymore? Until you get that dialed in, I don't give a shit what visual you use, what tactic you use, or how frictionless your website is—if people don't get your story from the get-go, none of that matters.
1:00:09 - Alex Shevelenko
I agree with you.
So, I think we have a lot of evidence that the most successful experiences are data-driven, right?
If you create a personalized entry point for someone that says, "I'm this person. I'm a software executive," and then you say, "I'm a software executive interested in solving a marketing problem," and then down the road, you present a portfolio of five marketing problems, in a few clicks, I feel understood, appreciated, and I have a relevant solution. That interface—that ability to organize the entry point to make me feel like I can get to the story I care about—is actually in line with your vision for clarity and where experience matters. It basically says, "Yeah, we're a B2B vendor, we have a lot of offerings, but we don't want to overwhelm you with all of them right now. You don't need to look through a three-page table of contents. In one or two clicks, you can instantly get to where you need to and solve something." That builds trust and gets you to the story you care about. So, on this part, I agree.
And this is where it goes beyond pictures and more into the architecture, which I think is what you're describing. Let's summarize some takeaways for our audience that we can both agree on. In the B2B world, since you have multiple narratives going on at once, a critical point is getting you to the right narrative—a singular narrative. At the same time, you still need to know that there are other narratives, because the type of B2B buyers you want are typically savvy enough to know they aren't the only stakeholder.
And you want them to know that there are others, but they care about their narrative. So I think we are in violent agreement that we need to do that much better. And then, regarding what that narrative needs to look and sound like, I think everyone should go check out your book, your workbooks, and maybe your ChatGPT tips and workshops to figure it out.
Okay, once I'm inside that narrative, how do you make me feel understood? How do you make me feel like, "Oh, this is the problem, and the consequences of solving it are magnificent for me," right? That, I think, is the key piece.
And I would add that another dimension is this: when you describe the problem, you could use words, statistics, or whatever, but if you describe it with a visual that moves me, that interrupts me, that makes me feel the pain—or the joy of the solution—viscerally, then I think you combine the power of the narrative with the power of experience. And I think that’s where you get the nuclear fission of outcomes. Otherwise, if it's just one or the other, you're right—if you get a beautiful narrative, but it's confusing, it doesn't help. Or you have a great story, but someone has to be a motivated reader to get through it. But if you mix the two, you'll probably reach a much larger audience.
1:03:52 - Park Howell
The narrative is experience. When we hear a narrative, our brain actively participates as if the story is happening to us. So, I don't think they’re mutually exclusive. ABT is the content experience framework because you want people to experience that message, even if you have no visuals at all.
Here's an example: I was working with The Home Depot’s internal sales team, and one of the Home Depot guys, in a kind of smart-ass way, asked me, "Park, what's the shortest ABT you know?" And I said, "Oh, that's easy. The ABT is short and sweet but tricky. Therefore, practice, practice, practice—set up, problem, resolution." He experienced a 10-word ABT describing the ABT. There was an absolute experience in it. He started laughing, and he goes, "How would you expand that?" I said, "Oh well, you communicate and care, but bore."
1:04:55 - Alex Shevelenko
Therefore, tell a story that's great, right? It's an experience.
1:05:01 - Park Howell
You are experiencing this. Then I could get in and actually tell you a story about something that happens, lights up the theater of the mind, and your brain is experiencing that narrative right along with me.
1:05:16 - Alex Shevelenko
And this I salute you on because I've noticed several times during this conversation that you're absolutely right. If you could say, "To be effective, these are the words you need to use for certain audiences to break through the noise," and then maybe you combine the words with images that support them or visuals that reinforce them, that's powerful. But again, I think it's fascinating because, on the one hand, we sometimes work with great companies that get the words right. They are pretty sophisticated at listening to their customers.
They've been, you know, kind of innovators, and we sometimes forget that this is also a big problem for other customers who are not as sophisticated. What you're bringing up is, like, you need to have a consistent combination. And maybe the real help—and perhaps this is a partnership opportunity down the road at some point—is to combine the narrative framework, the words, and the concrete, de-jargonized words that get people into the ABT mode, and then reinforce it with visuals that sink into the depth of your being because it's a visceral image, right? It gets there faster than the word does, but then the word reinforces and contextualizes it.
1:07:06 - Park Howell
Absolutely, they work in tandem.
1:07:09 - Alex Shevelenko
Yep, awesome. Well, listen, I've learned a ton. I love the back and forth and figuring things out because that's how I think we learn. It's great to come to the view that, you know, we can coexist—the frameworks really coexist well. Tell us how, if people want to go and get their narrative fixed, where can they find you?
1:07:36 - Park Howell
Well, LinkedIn is probably the best place. That's the platform I'm on the most. Park Howell—it's a weird name, so it's easy to find. Also, I've been doing my podcast for over eight years, and it's ranked among the top 10% of downloaded shows. So if any of your viewers or listeners want to take a deeper dive into business storytelling in lots of different ways, come on over to my show, Business of Story. You can find it on all the typical platforms. And finally, if they want to actually learn the ABT themselves, I've got a little micro-training course called the ABTs of Storytelling. You'll find it at businessofstory.com/ABT. It's three modules, not even an hour long, and they can learn how to apply the ABT in their world and all of their messaging.
1:08:27 - Alex Shevelenko
Amazing, Park. Thank you so much. Thank you for making me apply this. I obviously see the value in getting our stories straight, and thanks for sharing your insights with our audience.
1:08:50 - Park Howell
Thank you, Alex. It's been an honor.