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May 13, 2022

502: What Makes a Great Story? - Storytelling 101 with Billy Madison

What makes a good story? We're going to find out using *that* Billy Madison.

Yup... we're talking storytelling using *that* Billy Madison.

 

Or at least, we'll be using the scene that features the book, "The Puppy Who Lost His Way" and why Billy didn't find the children's book as compelling as Ms. Lippy had hoped. 

 

Oh, and did you know we can use storytelling in sales? It's true! And not only can you use storytelling, but it'll be a GAMECHANGER.

 

What makes a good story? Take a listen to find out!

 

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Transcript

Brian Nichols  0:03  
focusing on winning arguments. We're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, happy Friday there folks trying to go we are out on The Brian Nichols Show. And thank you for joining us on a portion of the fun filled episode I am as always, your humble host. And today, we're gonna be talking storytelling. With Billy Madison. That's right storytelling, one on one. And we're gonna be taking some examples from the one and only Billy Madison. So think about when you're in school, you're in class, and your teacher is standing up at the board, and you're furiously scribbling down notes, trying to keep up with all the formulas and equations that she's writing. And suddenly, she just stops writing turns around and share some random story. What do you do? What would the rest of the class do? You take a breath, you lean back, you relax, you lower your defenses. And you start to listen, it may sound counterintuitive, but that's exactly what your buyer wants to do, your buyer wants to sit back, relax. And listen. When you're giving a sales pitch, they automatically go into a defensive mode. But when you tell a story, they'll lower their defenses just like you have done in class. But when you tell that story, you have to make sure it's actually a good story. It cannot be a sales pitch, I repeat, it cannot be a sales pitch. A sales pitch is nothing more than a list. It's a logical list of features and benefits of reasons and rationale of why your prospects should buy whatever it is that you're selling. But we don't want to speak to that rational, logical side of the brain. Rather, we want to speak to the emotional side of the brain. And we do so most effectively by telling stories that contain lessons. Why? Because stories that offer lessons are the stories we remember most. Going back to the elements of a good story. But what are we looking for? Well, we all know there has to be a main character, or the hero and that hero will have some goal or some objective that they're trying to accomplish. There is our villain and an obstacle that gets in their way and usually stops him from accomplishing those goals but have no fear. Because as we go through our story, the hero finds themselves overcoming that villain or obstacle and achieving success at the end by learning something new or doing something incredible. And when any part of that story is missing our prospects feel it just as much as we would if we were hearing the story ourselves. For example, let's take a look. As I mentioned earlier at our buddy there, Billy Madison. Yeah, that Billy Madison because when Billy Madison is in kindergarten, he gets to hear the story read by Miss lippy called the little puppy who lost his way. Here's how that went Take a listen

Unknown Speaker  3:18  
the puppy who lost his

Brian Nichols  3:32  
the if YouTube works

Unknown Speaker  3:48  
the puppy who lost his way by Chrissy Taylor. One fine morning, Puppy popped his puppy paws out of his puppy house. This was no ordinary puppy. This puppy was the happiest puppy in the whole world. In fact, his name was happy. Happy looks really pushy. Never let you get lost again. cried a little boy who was so happy that he gave happy a kiss on his wet little puppy knows the end.

Unknown Speaker  4:32  
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Mississippi. The part of the story I don't like is that the little boy gave up looking for happy after an hour. He didn't put posters up or anything. He just sat on the porch like a goon and waited. That little boy's got to think you got to pet you gotta responsibility. If your dog is lost, you don't look for an hour then call it quits. You get your ass out there and you find that fucking door.

Brian Nichols  5:01  
You gotta love it. So, going back, Billy got frustrated. Why? Because the little boy, the hero in the book didn't experience the hero's journey. He searched for an hour and that was it. And he gave up and the puppy just happened to come back. There was no evolution in that hero's story, he just fell into a good situation. At the end, there was nothing learned. There was no growth. And to Billy's point, there was no lesson learned. Whoa, whoa, whoa, Miss lippy, the part of the story I didn't like is that the little boy gave up looking for happy after an hour. He didn't put up posters, he didn't do anything. He just sat on the porch, like a goon and waited. Now a little boy's got to think you have a pet, you got to responsibility. If your dog is lost, you don't call or you know, look for an hour, then call it quits. You get your ass out there, and you find that effing dog tenacity, perseverance, that's what Billy was looking for in the story. And that's what we're looking for in our heroes as well. Now, when we're talking about a sale story, that's gonna have some additional things that a normal story, a story that we just talked about, it's not going to have. So while there will be a lesson, it'll be more so a recommendation and a plan of action, namely, going with your solution, your sales stories are easily the most valuable assets you have in sales. And in life. It's how we communicate. It's how we share ideas. And it's how we transfer emotion. Now, it's impossible for you to tell every story yourself based on your own personal experiences, which is why it's absolutely imperative and entirely okay to share other people's stories, just obviously, don't do so in a dishonest way. But more so use them to teach values and draw correlations. And remember, there's inspiration from stories everywhere, your coworkers, your family, your friends, your your countless areas to pull awesome stories from including your customer success stories. And of course, there's no sad stories that we can share, like those who didn't take action, and then maybe those who didn't even take them or not only that they didn't, they took the wrong action to get the words out. But either way, at the end of the day, the main goal is to tell stories that connect to tell stories that transfer emotion. And with that, that's going to wrap up our morning sales huddle episode. Yeah, that's right. If you didn't know that, that was from our morning sales huddled today. You can go ahead and get that in your inbox once a week over at Brian Nichols show.com. Sign up for the morning sales huddle. And just as a sign of good faith. I'll go ahead and shoot over a copy of my ebook, four easy steps you can implement now to help sell liberty to friends and family by the way, folks, did you catch yesterday's episode? It was a great one we had Ellie puentes. Now he was also a little sad because she got expelled from college for refusing a COVID booster after she had a severe reaction to the COVID vaccine. A crazy story you gotta hear for yourself. I'll include the link here on YouTube for our YouTube watcher at the end, it'll bring you right to our episode. I will see you there. And for our audio listener, no worries. Please go ahead and make sure you click the artwork in your podcast catcher. It'll bring you to today's episode, where of course you can find the entire transcript of today's episode along with Yes, all 500 Plus episodes of The Brian Nichols Show, including Yes, the one I just mentioned there with Elliot puentes episode 501. But with that being said, it's Brian Nichols signing off, you're on The Brian Nichols Show. We'll see you next week for listening to The Brian Nichols Show. Find more episodes

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