The Cost of an Untold Business Story

So I've heard you use the term story selling, and I think I mentioned earlier, we're used to hearing storytelling. So what's happening when you're using the word story selling? Like what, what is it that people are actually taking in?

That's a great question. The word story selling comes about when instead of you saying, you know, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. You're saying this person who did buy my service, product, et cetera, experienced this transformation. You can see it in the Super Bowl commercials. You can see them clearly showing how this worked for an athlete or for a client or for a child or whatever their particular product is or their service is, you can see it clearly. And I think there's one that talks about Copilot and it's got two football coaches looking for a particular football position and they're typing in really quick who has the runtime under this amount and it narrows down and then who has this and it narrows down. And you are watching it work in action. They are showing you a story of how someone's life got easier using Copilot.

Interesting.

Yeah. So that is story selling. They are telling you, look at how fast they made this decision with all that data. Instead of having to go through all that data, those two football coaches got to concentrate on the players and the game. And Copilot did all that data analysis for them. So they clearly showed like 2 or 3 different stories at once, right? They showed a client success story. They showed a vision story. Like they showed a couple stories. That's a great story.

You've worked with several clients on, and, um, can you just share how, like, just maybe one of the clients how that has shifted, the ability to do story selling, how that has shifted or changed for them.

The story that actually started this business, I worked for an accounting firm for probably more than a decade, right around then. And these, these partners were amazing. And so there was, there was a Tax Cuts Jobs Act that came out in like 2018. And there was something in there. They had a client who who did a whole bunch of real estate. A statute changed how they could write off their repairs to all that real estate. One of my partners went back with that client, two tax returns filed right then and there, saved that client. It reapplied that statute over their last two-year returns, and they got a refund of $948,000.. And that was immediate. That was not, you know, virtual dollars. That was actual dollars. And that's exciting stuff, right? You would think that would be amazing. And I was on them. I was on him so hard. Oh, give me the details. Oh, it's confidential. I'm like, well, I'm not going to use their name, but let's do those details. Like, what did that $948,000 do to them? Did they expand their business? Did they hire people? Did they give people raises? Did they do a charitable endeavor they'd been wanting to do? Like, let's go. I wanted to rejuvenate their social calendar, their case studies, their website. Like, it was a revolutionary story. And it showed up as a line item in a brochure, provided significant tax— now, would you rather hear about $948,000, or would you rather hear about provided significant tax savings to our clients? And that story— I know, give me the money, right? What happened?

Woo!

Right? I was lit on fire. And that story died in email. And there's a cost to an untold story. You've probably heard about the cost of inaction.

It's—

nothing shows that as well as a story that should be told. That is not told because you are not giving people the opportunity to find you, see your clear value.