Why Storyselling Beats the Elevator Pitch

Welcome everybody. Today I am super thrilled to have Jen Bullington here with us live. If you do great work, but struggle to explain it clearly, Jen Bullington is whom you want to have in the room. As a storytelling facilitator, she helps professionals uncover the key stories at the heart of their business. Clarify what truly sets them apart, and communicate it with confidence so ideal clients, partners, and teams immediately understand their value. And you know what, Jen? I love how you call yourself story selling because most people expect to hear the word storytelling.

They do.

And as business owners, we struggle to tell stories. A lot of people, they know that they do great work, but they struggle to explain it. Why is that such a common thing for us solopreneurs and business owners?

I think because everyone is too close to it, right? When you're good at what you do, your brain fills in all the gaps automatically. You forget what what it sounds like to someone who isn't inside your world. Like, I'm passionate about story. You're passionate about technology and helping people be seen. Like, we're passionate about stuff, but instead of telling a clear story, I think people default to details or credentials or processes, and none of that's wrong, but it doesn't help someone quickly understand why you matter, right? Story brings the perspective back to why what you're doing matters and why they need to work with you. And so conversely for them, for all the entrepreneurs and small, medium-sized businesses, solopreneurs, especially people who are really good with details and tech and numbers. They default to the who they are and what their credentials are instead of defaulting for why it matters and what's in it for their prospective client.

That's very good. And you're very right. I know very, I know a lot of, I call them engineered mind people.

Absolutely. Engineers and accountants. They love me.

Yes, because we do struggle with explaining to people why it matters, whatever it is that we offer, why does that matter to your ideal client? And I've never really heard you say anything about elevator pitches, which is what we usually hear. What's the difference?

There's actually a pretty big difference between the elevator pitch and the key story. The elevator pitch is you are asking people to compress themselves into something very clever or something that sounds rehearsed. And think about it, when you hear something that sounds rehearsed, immediately you go, "Ugh," and you come away. So in many ways, that elevator pitch, even though it's really pithy, it's not natural. And it kind of makes people tune out, whereas story makes people lean in. The story is going to give people context, meaning, proof, all the good stuff. And when you have the right stories, you don't need one perfect pitch. You have whatever story fits the moment, right? Like if it's your origin story, you are letting people know why you're passionate about this work. And we'll talk about what all the stories are, but different stories fit different moments and your conversations will become a lot more natural because you're responding as a human. Instead of performing as a brand.

And maybe that's why elevator pitches have just never resonated with me. I could never remember them. I was always changing it and it, it never just felt right.

Well, because it was something you had to memorize, right? That's, that's not natural. That's not, that's not the way the human brain works.

Yeah. My memory skills have never been what I would call Fantastic.

I think your memory skills are just fabulous, but I hear you, especially when people are put on the spot. Because I was talking to somebody this morning, I was at a networking meeting and she's like, God, I get so nervous whenever I get up and give my 3-minute, you know, intro, my elevator pitch, my all that. And I said, well, you do realize that people are more afraid of public embarrassment, AKA public speaking, than they are of death. Like people are more afraid to get up and speak than they are of dying. And she went, ah, that makes total sense.

In fact, at a few times in my past, I have wished that I would just die instead of being up on whatever stage saying whatever I was supposed to say.

Why do I have to be here right now when my mind just went blank? Can't I slink away? Can't I just fall through the floor? Yeah.

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? Because people don't care. You know, anyone who's listened to Simon Sinek, they don't care what you do. They care why you do it. And that's exactly right. So your origin story, why you do this work, 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, they were all but done. 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 sale is shorter. Everything just works better. People were writing letters like Domino's sucks, they're crust tastes like cardboard, their sauce tastes like ketchup. The CEO got on television and read those comments. They read those reviews. It was like such a moment. I don't know if anybody in big business had been that vulnerable to date at that time.

Yeah. And that brings up another point that people are afraid of those reviews. But if you actually look at that as this is feedback on what we're doing wrong and what people want to see us change, and you actually do that, then that's bringing all of it together. And they were such a great success. I love that story. I had not heard that story before.

Look up Domino's Pizza turnaround. Now I, you know, somewhere on my site, I wrote up a case study on that. I usually give that When I'm teaching like one of the immersion programs, I will give them things like the original Starbucks story. I will give them the pizza turnaround story, or I'll give them Patagonia's values in action story. And I will give them actual stories in their world that either they never heard or they already forgot, but they see clearly how they work and what a difference it makes because it makes a huge difference. You are 22 times more likely to remember a story than you are to remember facts. That was a Stanford study. They proved it clearly time over time.

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. 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 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 2 tax returns filed right then and there, saved that client, it reapplied that statute over their last 2-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, 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 savings. Now, would you rather hear about $948,000 or would you rather hear about provided significant tax savings to our clients? And that's funny. 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. They were like, oh, well, we do this every day. It's not special. I'm like, oh, it's special. And no, they would not be moved. That story died. And for 8 years, that story has haunted me. That is actually the origin story to Story Selling for Success.

That's awesome. You know, for, for our audience out there who can relate to how I feel, like I just freeze when people ask me, what is it that I do? Why do I do it? All of that. Like, what's the easiest way to get clarity on that? And then remember, yeah, someone asked me this, I should answer with this story. You know, how do you know when to pull them all out of your hat and which one to pull and all of that?

That's a great question. I mean, I, I will tell you that something that I see every day is that people explain instead of connect, right? And part of it is You know, a lot of people are introverts or they're shy, or they just, they don't know how to tell. It's just not comfortable. And so they lead with what they do and how they're qualified instead of why it matters. And so if I see an incredibly smart accountant talk for 5 minutes and still leave someone thinking, I'm not quite sure how they would help me, as opposed to accountant B, C, and D, a good story will flip that. And so you have to know why the story's valuable before you're motivated to start doing it, right? A good story will flip it and let that, that potential client, that listener recognize themselves in the situation that you talk about before you ever talk about a solution. You have attracted them before they ever hear you wanna buy it, right? Because if you haven't connected, why on earth would they buy from you? Now I have a story selling framework. I call it the Story Selling Trust Loop. And I talk about that a lot because you wanna know where in a cycle of a conversation that this story would be good or that that story would be good. Like you're maybe not going to talk about a future vision story before you've gone a little earlier in the process to say, well, I can tell you about one client. Why should they want the future vision if you haven't gotten them excited about it yet?

If you haven't hooked them in even to why they want to work with you.

And stories, they reduce resistance, right? Stories. Had, I don't remember which research it was. I think it was out of Harvard, but they wired up someone's brain and told them things like facts and figures, and you could see 3 parts of their left brain. Of course, they weren't even connected, but it was like 1, 2, 3. That's what lit up. And then they, they told them a story. They, I think they showed them a video actually, and you literally saw, brrr, front to back, left and right, interconnected stuff lighting up. Stories activate emotion in the brain. They activate memory. There's a pattern recognition because we've all grown up with story. We are wired for story. So it's really interesting. Lisa Cron wrote a really famous book in the story world called Wired for Story. And she said, "I think that storytelling has been as important to human development as opposable thumbs." She said, "Opposable thumbs let you hang on, but story tells you what to hang on to." And I went, "That's it." And story was initially our history, was it not? Absolutely. We were a completely oral tradition back in the day. Yeah, people couldn't read and write, but they could remember every single detail of a story.

Probably very similar to remembering the lyrics to a song.

I think you're exactly right. Cause a song is a story, really. I mean, it sounds great, but it is also a story. I mean, one of the things that I think is great about story for, particularly for people who are more introverted or maybe not so comfortable talking in a crowd, a story feels like a very one-on-one vehicle. And anyone you talk to, they're, they're sub, they're evaluating you on some level. They're subconsciously saying, oh, I felt that way, or I know someone like that. And that's why storytelling works because you're getting the emotions and the understanding first, because 95% of sales are emotional. It's, it's 85 to 95%. The other 5 to 15% is just trying to throw facts at a decision so you feel good about it, but the decision was made emotionally.