How to Supercharge Customer Engagement with Storytelling – in Just 7 Minutes with Matthew Woodget

Related Links and Resources:

We've created an exclusive link for the listeners, go to www.gonarrative.com/supercharge. And on that page, we've included a definitive guide for business storytelling. It's a super condensed, super easy to read, super easy to get going, to start taking the advantages of storytelling on business today.

Summary:

Matthew Woodget is a technologist, marketer, and storyteller whose pedigree spans over 20 years of senior marketing at Intel, Microsoft and the agency world. Matthew's experience includes product marketing, branding, and content strategy. Matthew helps business leaders apply storytelling as a spearhead for thought leadership growth, transformation, and industry influence. He's a status quo challenger who is passionate about customer experiences.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:34 Matthew’s ideal Client: Our ideal client is either responsible for the company's purpose and 'why' or responsible for the company's messaging, everything that the company says and does. Often that's the same person, either it's the executive level or the owner. And sometimes with our cooperate clients, we go down to the Senior Director or the GM level as well.

2:02 Problem Matthew helps solve: We help our clients do three things; get attention, be heard, and sell more. It's really about getting that audience to listen, landing a message or having them remember it and then letting them act on it. We say sell more, that's obviously the end goal but it could be driving some type of engagement in an ad campaign, getting a downloadable Ebook on the website, getting them to click the 'buy now' button. Some type of action that moves that prospect or clients through the decision-making process. It's really about driving action.

3:04 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Matthew: They really come to us with 3 key issues. One of those is "my messaging is just not resonating. People aren't clicking with what we're trying to do and say as a company" so that's one thing that we see all the time. Another one, and this one is much more of a problem than people even know or realize explicitly, and that is a lack of consistency. A lack of consistency of what is said and done by the whole organization. We often heard about the tag-of-war between sales and marketing; marketing creates guidance for sales but sales go off and do something else. The problem is actually deeper than that, the problem is into what the engineers are building, are they building something that customers want. And then there's leadership; how is leadership talking to the whole organization. How they're rallying that sales force, how they're rallying engineering. And so a lot of our clients have a lot of inconsistency, sometimes they don't even realize what they're talking about.

4:37 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Matthew and his solution: The biggest mistake by far is thinking that speeds and feeds, and facts are enough. Even differentiation, and it's just not enough to win nowadays. If you want to be perceived as extraordinary, if you talk about speeds and feeds, then that's not going to happen. You need to connect not just with this (brain) but with this (heart). All humans make decisions based on emotions and then justify based on data, and most of our clients are actually doing a really good job in the first bucket of speeds and feeds and getting that dialed in. But then when it comes to connecting with hearts and minds, that's where they fail.

5:29 Matthew’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): My first official chief storytelling job was for Microsoft business unit, I thought "hey, this is going to be easy! I'm a passionate storyteller as it is" so I went to go and find some good framework to apply to business and you know what, I was mistaken. There's not a lot of good frameworks out there. If you're running a book or making a movie, there's a lot of storytelling advice. The first thing I did actually as an employee when I was in the corporation was playing as an interpreter. And then when I left the corporations, I sat down and built some frameworks. And the first one, super easy, 3Ds: Desire, Difficulty and a fancy French word 'Denouement'. Your customer wants something, what is it? And I meant need or maybe it's an explicit one. So, use the 3Ds when you think about storytelling and that will serve you well from scripts up to marketing campaigns.

6:48 Matthew’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): We've created an exclusive link for the listeners, go to gonarrative.com/supercharge. And on that page, we've included a definitive guide for business storytelling. It's a super condensed, super easy to read, super easy to get going, to start taking the advantages of storytelling on business today.

7:26 Isn't storytelling about marketing? It's not, it's not just about marketing, that's a piece of it, understanding the market, understanding the hero which is your customer, that's a part of it. But it's also about shaping the whole organization, creating that consistency into everything that's been said and done from your frontline workers out in the field to the engineers that are building the products, to everything your sales and marketing team, and leadership are saying. So, storytelling is just not about marketing, it's not about advertising, it's about unlocking the brain and harnessing the heart with everybody in the organization. When you do that, you'll be able to do it with your customers as well.