Dotty Scott breaks down five stories every business owner should tell: origin, client success, against-all-odds turnaround like Domino's, values-in-action, and future vision. These stories answer what customers actually want to know and shorten the sales cycle by building trust faster.
So what are the stories that business owners need to not memorize, but be familiar with?
I like that there's only a handful. There's 5 key stories that if you don't, if you don't get anything else, you want to get your 5 stories, right? So I talked about the origin story. Why do you do this business? Why? Your client success story. And for a service business, that might be a before and after result. Whereas for like a product-based business, it's an experience. It's a moment. You're marketing that moment when someone lit your candle, opened your box of chocolate, whatever that is, whatever that product is, and what was special about that moment. So that's a client success story. And that lets people go, oh, I see myself in there. You know, or you have an against-all-odds story. My favorite against-all-odds story is Domino's, the pizza turnaround story, right? I don't know if you're old enough to remember that. It was back in the early thousands, but Domino's was done and they completely turned it around and they were completely transparent. They brought the cameras into their kitchens. They read the terrible reviews. On camera. I mean, it was an against-the-odds story. And they said, hey, why don't you come try us now? And Domino's is like a major success story, right? Their stock price quadrupled. They— it was amazing. And that was them doing an against-the-odds story. Like, we're probably never going to make it, but we really hope you give us another whirl. And look at Domino's today. You know, they were— there's a values in action story, right? Like if you have values of things that are important to you and you tell the stories about what that looks like in action, then people are drawn to that. You know, a future vision story. If you work with us, this is what your life can look like. And you gotta be honest. I mean, you can't make them up, but those stories are living inside people. People already know their stories. They just haven't sat down to define them in an actual framework. And if you only have to remember 5, each of those 5 stories is answering an unspoken question that your audience already has. So you already know your stories, your audience has questions that those stories address. And when one of them is missing, people feel like something's off. But they can't exactly name what's off, but when all 5 are clear, then the trust builds faster. The time to sail is shorter. Everything just works better.
