How to improve sales performance through stories with Bruce Scheer and Kelly Breslin Wright

Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show where value pros get value ready. Welcome to another episode of the ValuePros Show. I'm your host, Bruce Scheer. And today, we have an incredible conversation lined up. Joining me is none other than Kelly Wright, a powerhouse in sales and go to market leadership with an impressive career that includes scaling Tableau from its early days to a $1,000,000,000 IPO, and also leading strategic initiatives as the immediate past present at Gong. Today, she's joining us as the founder of Culture Driven Sales, a firm dedicated to creating alignment between company missions, cultures, and go to market strategies. Kelly's here to share her insights on the power of storytelling in sales and how it can transform the way you connect with buyers, building trust, and ultimately closing more deals. So grab your coffee so you can try your best to match Kelly's incredible energy, get comfortable, and let's dive in.

Bruce Scheer: So here we are today chatting with, Kelly Breslin Wright about the power of stories. To help us get in the in the in the mood and talking about stories, Kelly, would you mind giving us your your story, if you would, just to kick us off?

Kelly Breslin Wright: Bruce, first of all, just thank you so much for having me today. What a fun opportunity to chat with you again and to be able to share stories back and forth. So what is my story? Well, I I it's hard to know how far back to go, but I'll just give you kind of my abbreviated life story. I actually started when we think about stories, I fell in love with sales and stories when I was in college. I was looking for a summer job, and I decided to do this crazy summer job where I sold educational books door to door, ran my own business selling educational books door to door. And I did this for 4 summers. And over the 4 summers in college, I sat down with over 12,000 families in their houses to talk about kids' school and education. And what I found was, 1, I loved doing something that was impactful.

Kelly Breslin Wright: I loved being able to help solve people's challenges and problems. But most importantly, it was just so fun for me to hear everyone's unique story, and that's when I really fell in love with sales and entrepreneurship. And so that goes all the way back to when I was in college. If I walk through my career after selling books, I worked for Dale Carnegie training, and I actually sold sales training. I sold public speaking training. After that, I sold residential mortgages at Bank of America, so sold all kinds of things. Sold books, sold training, sold mortgages of financial services, and then I ended up going back to business school. I went to Wharton for business school and thought, well, if I wanna be an entrepreneur or a business leader, I should understand more about all the different components of business.

Kelly Breslin Wright: So I worked for a while in strategic consulting at McKinsey and then at Bain and Company, but then I decided sales is really my jam. Like, I that's what I really love to do. So in the Internet boom, I left consulting. I went and worked for this small technology startup called Ad hoc where I was running sales and client services for a while. And then I ended up going to this little known startup right when it was getting started. I was employee number 10 and the 1st salesperson 1 month before we launched version 1 of this company called Tableau. And I was at Tableau running all sales as executive vice president of sales and chief revenue officer from basically 0 in revenue till almost a1000000000 through the IPO. And I'm sure we'll end up talking about some of that time because that was when we were really using stories in building our sales market, and sales motion.

Kelly Breslin Wright: After Tableau, I did a bunch of board work, and I one of the boards actually asked me to come back to be chief operating officer and president. So that was Gong, so I ended up having some time at Gong. And now I'm really spending time on my own business venture, which is called Culture Driven Sales, which I founded as, as a way to help other companies and other individuals really build their go to market motion.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Thanks so much for your background, and that's personal story, Kelly. Really love it. And Tableau, I'm so honored, you know, that I had the opportunity to work with you and and your fantastic team at Tableau. Not not when you were employee number 10. I don't know when what you were employee of at that point in time, but we we did, you know gosh. Dang. I was

Kelly Breslin Wright: funny that we're talking about stories because that's how you and I met because we brought you and your team in to help us really finesse and figure out how to tell our own unique Tableau story in a way where it was captivating. It was emotionally connecting. It was differentiated. And so you are a pro at storytelling, and so I just feel honored to be able to talk about it with you because you're one of

Bruce Scheer: the key masters of it. Yeah. No. Love it. Love it. So, Kelly, that's a wonderful background of of where how you got to where you are today, but could you tell us about Culture Driven Sales? What's the story behind this new firm of yours?

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yeah. Well, Bruce, everything everything starts with mission and vision of a company. And so product and the service is important, of course. But how do you engage with customers, attract your prospects, tell your unique story? It all comes back to the company's purpose and the why, and this threads back to stories. So I'll I'll communicate this with the story as I always talk in stories myself. So when I was, finished my time at Tableau and I knew I wanted to do some board work and I wanted to do some speaking, I decided that I would meet with a bunch of founders and heads of sales and CEOs so that I could understand how I could be the most valuable when people thought about sales and go to market. So in that first, maybe 18 months after my time at Tableau, this is back in 2,000 16, 2017, I met with over a 100 founders and CEOs. And most of these were in hypergrowth tech, but they were in all different sectors and all different size companies, public companies, private companies.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And I was meeting these CEOs because I would meet them at a CEO summit, at a go to market, or a sales seminar. Oftentimes, companies were calling and had questions if I could help them with consulting or whatever it may be. So I was asking, well, what what's your biggest challenge in sales and go to market? And oftentimes, companies would say or the CEO would say, well, our sales and marketing team is not aligned, or our sales team is trying to sell something that's different than what our product team is building, or we're just not on the same page. We just don't have alignment. And so it gave me this epiphany, and I started asking these questions of to the CEO. Well, what's your mission? What's your mission, and what's your company purpose? And it was very interesting. First of all, not everyone even had a mission, and not everyone could even tell me what their story was. But even if they had a mission, oftentimes, their mission wouldn't match the words of what their mission was on their website.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Or on their website, they'd have something on their own page and something else on their hiring page and something else on their about page. And then I'd start asking, well, can I talk to the different executives on your team? And maybe the CEO would have a different answer to what their mission and story was to the cofounder, and that was a different answer to the head of product and a different answer to the sales team. And I was just scratching my head of, well, of course, you're not gonna have alignment if you go to a company and the executive team is telling different stories about who they are and why they exist? How in the world are your salespeople and your marketers, and how are your employee or your employees gonna understand what you're doing, and how are your customers gonna even understand what you're about? And so I decided, okay. I need to actually put together this understanding and framework that is you have to have an integrated umbrella go to market strategy, which is tightly coupled with your company strategy. And what how does this all start? It starts first way at the top of what is the company's mission and vision. Why does a company exist in the first place? 2nd, well, what are your company core values and your operating principles? Because that helps to explain how you're going to actually do business and how you're going to engage with your employees and your customers and your prospects and your partners. But then once you understand your mission and your vision and your core values, then you have to be able to articulate what is your unique company story. And that company story is not the what and the how.

Kelly Breslin Wright: We it incorporates that too, but it's your why. It's what is your company's purpose? What is your why? What is the whole essence of the company and the reason that you exist? So you have your mission vision. You have your core value. You have your company story, and then this is how you start to communicate why you're different. What are your differentiated value propositions, and how should you engage with your ideal customer profile who actually cares about that? And then this flows down to how you're gonna go to market and your sales motion and all the operational pieces. And so when I realized this and started talking to companies about this, they they were, we don't actually have a framework for them. And so I decided to teach a course on go to market strategy and sales strategy, And I taught this course at University of Washington at the Foster School of Business MBAs. And then I had a number of CEOs and sales leaders who said, well, why are you only teaching this to MBAs? We can actually use this help as well.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And that was the impetus of Culture Driven Sales. So Culture Driven Sales, sometimes people think, what is culture about in the Culture Driven Sales? But the culture is if you want to actually drive sales, is if you want to actually drive sales, how are you integrating into your overall narrative and your sales motion, the mission, the vision, the why, your company story in a way that it can the why, your company story in a way that it connects with other people, that's how do you drive the whole culture in? Because my belief is if you actually nail that culture piece that emotionally connects, that brings people in, you're gonna drive a lot more sales than if you're just focused on the how and the what, which is all about data and facts and features and functions because it's important, but that's not what's gonna drive people to make decisions, and it's not gonna drive them to engage with you. And so Yeah. That's the statistical church of the sales.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Thank you for describing the mission of your own firm, and, gosh, that resonates so much with me. I used to have a jokingly joking phrase, but it actually comes from reality. Adobe acquired a company, and, I'd spoken to 10 different executives and got 10 different stories before I started working with them. And, you know, it's just normal, that lack of alignment. And, I love what Culture Driven Sales can do for a firm to create that type of alignment. And, especially, when you're involved, the momentum that that's really gonna, bump performance. So fantastic.

Bruce Scheer: Well, let's, talk a little bit more than about why story. You know, you know, why is it so critical for go to market and sales improvement? What do you have to say for us there?

Kelly Breslin Wright: I mean, Bruce, we we just we just talked about this in a way, but people are just attracted to stories. It's the facts, and it's the truth. Stories engage people. They engage other human beings, and they help people to connect and to emotionally connect. They also help to convey the real meaning of what people are trying to say, and you can see this literally for generations. Think about how families pass down their traditions, how they pass down their come their family stories, how they pass down their recipes. They do this with stories. And this is how lessons are conveyed to children too.

Kelly Breslin Wright: I mean, when you're trying to teach a young child something, rather than just tell them, do this, do that, do that, you do this with stories. That's why there's books and there's Aesop's fables that are actually teaching moral stories and valuable lessons through these stories that the kids can relate to and that they can understand. And so, I mean, you can even think about this. Consider what you remember most. Take it out of business altogether. We go to a dinner party. And when you're at a dinner party and people are going around the table and talking, who is it that people want to listen to? Who is it that people gravitate to? It's the person that actually can engage in these stories where people just they want to listen. They find it interesting and compelling, and they're drawn in, and then they remember that.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And so people and companies often put tons of words together, but they don't land. They aren't memorable. People, though, do remember stories. They land. They emotionally connect. They are memorable, and this is what people remember. And this is true with the way that the brain is wired too. There is tons of research on this that shows that the brain actually can process stories.

Kelly Breslin Wright: It sets off the brain in a way that people listen and engage better. And so if you think about companies throwing all these facts and data, that's important, but the brain is not necessarily gonna engage. There's also research that shows that people make decisions not only with rational thought, but with emotional thought. And stories are what are tapping into that emotional side of the brain. And so when companies are or when people are making decisions about what to buy, they are making these decisions for emotional reasons, and this is all critical to sales. And if you want someone to buy your product, you need to think about how are you engaging with them in a way where they can hear you, they can remember you, they can emotionally connect and understand what you're doing. And this is all super, super important with stories.

Bruce Scheer: Well, Kelly, let's talk about, just a maybe set the table with a great story, you know, just as an example.

Kelly Breslin Wright: I think this is something that at Tableau, we did very well. This was something that our CEO was absolutely fantastic at. And a lot of this comes back of I I started as the first salesperson, employee number 10, 1 month before we launched version 1. And when I started, the mission of the company at Tableau was to help people see and understand data. And that's still the mission now. You know? And I joined in 2,005. And so that kinda comes back to how do you have this overarching where everyone's very clear on the mission and vision and the overarching purpose. But then we also told the story, and we told the story in every pitch deck when we met with investors.

Kelly Breslin Wright: We started off when we talked with customers, and the story was pretty short. It talked about the impetus and the founding story of Tableau. And what happened was at the the Department of Defense had a had approached one of our founders, Pat Hanrahan, who was the founded one of the founders of Pixar. He actually created the technology behind Pixar, and he was, and still is a decorated computer scientist and professor at Stanford. And he has 3 Academy Awards for his work in data, and visual graphics and visualization. And the Department of Defense came to him and said, hey, Pat. Can you help solve one of the key business problems of the world today? And that is that the whole world of databases and rows and columns of text is totally divorced and separated from the world of visual graphics and visualization. And there's all this science that shows that the brain and the eye actually can process data better, huge amounts of data when it's represented in pictures.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And so is there a way that you can help tie this together? And that is actually how Tableau got started. So, Pat ended up joining up with the lead PhD on the product, which were on the project at Stanford, who is Chris Stolte, and they developed this very interesting way to drag and drop visualization, and then they joined up with Christian Chabot, who is our CEO. And Stanford's very good at helping companies spin out, but the whole idea is, hey. People have tons of questions with their data. Is there a better and simpler way that we could leverage visualization and visual graphics to help people have a more interactive conversation with their data? And we started with the this with everyone because it brought people in. It was a new approach to business intelligence. It was a new approach to how people thought about doing data analytics. Because everyone said, hey.

Kelly Breslin Wright: I have questions. And there's tons of people in my organization who are not savvy with data, and they have questions too. So if I can empower more people to be more self-service, to answer their own questions with data, then I'm very interested. And what this did is it drew in not only our prospects and our customers, but it actually attracted tons of employees who wanted to be part of this mission that we were doing to help people be able to be empowered to answer their own questions. And that was super compelling company story. So that was one example of a company story. I think a second story, if we go away from the company side, though, is over the core this is more of a personal 30 plus years in sales and tech, I've done a lot of keynotes and a lot of speeches. And so when you're doing a keynote, it might be at a customer conference.

Kelly Breslin Wright: It might be at some kind of a partner event. It could be a company kickoff or a sales kickoff. I kinda took an approach very early days. This this will illustrate that I'm, like, hugely a story person, but I thought, okay. I'm gonna be giving a whole bunch of data and facts and talking about our results and talking about what our goals and priorities are. But I want people to actually listen and be engaged, so I try to always weave in some kind of a personal story. And what I decided to do in these talks is weave in something with my kids of some kind of a lesson about leadership with my kids. And this was a very short bit.

Kelly Breslin Wright: It would be 3 or 5 minutes in each hour long talk. So I'd talk about when my son came to the office and he wanted to learn about sales. I would talk about some trip of some lesson that we had based on my my kids. I would talk about taking my my children to a movie and something that happened that we engage with how people were interacting within the theater. And I'd tell these stories. And the interesting thing is still today, like, over a decade later, when I run into someone who is in that room, they often will say to me like, it happened to me just recently. I ran into someone. This speech was, like, 15 years ago.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And that person didn't remember what sales goals we were talking about or or, like, what were the numbers on the screen, but they said, oh, your son that came to office that you told that story about wanting to do sales, like, he's probably in college now. What is he doing? Is that what he wants to do? Does he wanna go into business or do something else? And so it lands. People remember it. They retain it, and that's how they connect with you even a long time later. So the power of stories, I think, is just evident in everything we do, and it's just human nature.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. I I love what you just framed. Those those are two beautiful examples of how you're connecting with with with your buyers and in in a way that is extremely memorable, especially the tableau of, you know, y story, if you would, the the mission and the origin. So powerful for people wanting to be behind that and understanding, you know, the rationale and the differentiation from that.

Kelly Breslin Wright: I just wanted to give you props for that because you were helpful in helping us to frame and articulate that story in a simple way where everyone could explain it, where we were aligned on it and it emotionally connected. So thank you to you years later for helping us to articulate that story.

Bruce Scheer: Of course. Yeah. No. It's such a wonderful story, and, you know, so grateful to be part of that. Well, let's, Kelly, let's talk about, how to improve sales performance with stories. And we already you already did illustrate with a couple of examples, but I'd love for you to help the audience kinda frame this, you know, the different types of stories.

Kelly Breslin Wright: The first is the company story. So what is very interesting is oftentimes, company will bring me in and say, can you help us with our company story? And they'll show me their narrative, and they'll show me their customer pitch deck. And it's all about the what and the how. We've talked about that a lot. It's not very much about the why. It's all very tactical. And they'll have the salespeople go, and they're leading with that. And they're saying, well, it's not as effective.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And then I'll say, well, if you bring the CEO to the meeting, how does the CEO tell that story? And then I'll go have a meeting with the CEO or I'll listen to one of the CEO's pitches, and it's totally different. The CEO has this story that ties back to the company why and why they exist and why the why the founder started the company in the first place, and that is that emotionally connected story. So how are companies making sure not only everyone's aligned and not only that it's emotionally connected, but how are they communicating the story in a way where it actually draws in and helps people to understand that essence in the why? And that comes back to the company because people care. They wanna do business with people that they're aligned with what your purpose and mission is and why what you're all about. So that's the first, the company story. The second is customer stories. And this, again, most companies do have customer stories. But if you go and you look at customer stories, much of customer stories are again about the what and the how.

Kelly Breslin Wright: They're here's the customer's ROI. Here's how they're using the product. This is how they got much more efficiency and effectiveness. And that's all really important, but it's not gonna be compelling enough that your other customers and prospects are gonna necessarily want to listen to all of that. And so if you think about the customer and I have, you know, in training, we used my my late very good friend, unfortunately passed away, Skip Miller, always talked about the 3 the 3 levels of why. And most companies, when they go to the customer, they get to the 1st level of why. Why is this prospect calling you in the first place? Maybe they get to the 2nd level of why, which is what is a meaningful difference that this is going to have on the company or the company's strategic goals. But what really matters if you can get to that 3rd level of why, which is the individual motivation for that person.

Kelly Breslin Wright: So for that customer as a human being, not that customer as a customer as a human being, not that customer as a company because it's people that buy companies, not I mean, people that buy products, not companies that buy product, but we're always trying to sell company to company. And if you think about these customer stories and here's another example of a story of what we did at Tableau is we went to all of our customers and asked them why did they buy Tableau, and how did Tableau have an impact. And, initially, they wanna talk about ROI, and they saved money, and they worked faster. But we tried to get to that 3rd level of why, and we had our customers saying, like, I remember stories of one person said, I I have my son is on a little league team, and I work so hard, and I have so much work that I can never go to the games. And then I started using Tableau, and Tableau helped me to do everything so much faster and so much more effectively. I was able to do what was taking me till 10 PM. I was able to leave at, you know, 3 o'clock on those game days and still get my work done and go to those little league games. So I feel like Tableau has helped me to have a better relationship with my son.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Or another example where the customer said, I've been trying to get a promotion, and I've been saying we should do these things with data for so long, and no one really, like, listened. And then I started using Tableau, and Tableau has helped to drive our decision making in our company so much that I've actually had 3 promotions in just a short period of time that I've used Tableau. And so people got very emotionally engaged, and this is what we did with our customer stories. Of course, we talked about the ROI and how they were using it, but we got into the actual human essence of why that person cared, that bought them level of why, the individual motivations of the customer. And so I would ask for in your go to market team and in your marketing and your sales, are you actually using customer stories that they emotionally connect, and they're driving a level of engagement and empathy that people are gonna care, and it's not just about the data and facts. So that's the second level, which is the customer level.

Bruce Scheer: Excellent. Now, perfectly stated, how can you really resonate, connect, and engage emotionally at that, you know, individual buyer level. That that's really powerful. Well, let's, talk about the 3rd.

Kelly Breslin Wright: It's good for individuals when they're first interacting with the prospect or customer to actually tell their own personal story as to why they're working for this company in the first place, why they're passionate about this company's mission. And that is like for instance, if you think about podcast, all podcast, what they're doing is they're trying to get people's personal stories. Right? What is the story? And so the whole world operates in stories, but companies end up spending a lot of time and energy on their company story, maybe some on their customer story, but they don't actually invest in having their sales and marketers and the rest of their executive team understand understand how to actually tell their own personal story in a way where it fits in to the whole broader equation.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yeah. So so many things, to say about this one. I used to do a presentation, Kelly, called connect before you sell, which is a little bit of a misnomer because, you know, you don't sell anything if you don't connect, and, you know, it it goes hand in hand. But first, connect, you know, at a personal level. You know, make make sure there's some sort of a trust bond so you can move forward into some of the bigger dialogues that you're gonna have together as part of that whole buying experience. But, you know, the personal story really does help in creating that bond. As you say, even, you know, with people coming back to you 15 years later remembering your personal story about your kids at that point in time and checking in because because they care, because you created that bond from the stage or or even from the one to one dialogue that you're having.

Bruce Scheer: But, you know, the personal stories are are the best at that, you know, where you can tell common stories and figure out what what your buyer believes in, what's important to them, what are they passionate about, and you're sharing yours, and you're looking for those points of connection through those personal stories. Absolutely. Laid out. Well laid out. Well, why do so we've got our 3 types of stories. Why don't we talk a little bit more, Kelly, next about just how do you create these stories and integrate these stories into your go to market or sales motion?

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yes. Well, Bruce, as as we've talked about, companies spend a lot of time and energy developing playbooks and stories, but there could be a lot more training and learning of how to be effective storytellers. So if you think about how companies engage their go to market teams, I mean, there's a whole bunch of trainings around it. You have, you know, solution selling, spin selling, customer centric selling, and then all these other sales philosophies and methodologies, Medpick, all these different things. But are people and companies actually spending enough time teaching storytelling? And so this goes back to one of the things that we had done when I was a leader is realized, well, maybe we should actually invest in storytelling. And so and this goes back to time at Tableau, which is my longest tenure. I was there for 12 years as sales leader, and we went and told all of our sales leaders, all of our go to market leaders, a 100% of our enterprise sellers that we were putting them through a storytelling workshop. And people thought this was crazy.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Like, why are you spending money on storytelling? Can't you tell like, we're trying to get into enterprise selling more. Can you teach us more about this customer centric selling or whatever was the latest enterprise selling fad? We said, no. We're we're gonna take a different approach, and we're gonna teach the storytelling. And so we brought everyone in the room, and a lot of that was, well, can you start off with a personal story? Tell us who you're about, how like, why why are you here? How do you tick? Tell us something about customer stories. We help to get everyone to understand how to tell company story. And an interesting thing happened with this because if you're telling stories, you have to get personal. People were able to show much more vulnerability. But 2 interesting takeaways came from this.

Kelly Breslin Wright: One is at the end of this whole session, we had a bunch of our salespeople that said, wow. This was super powerful. This is not only helping me to connect with my customers and prospects. This is helping me to better connect with my coworkers and my direct reports. It's helping me on a family level to connect better with my significant other and with my kids and my family members. Like, this has been profound in life changing. That was the first interesting takeaway, which was unexpected. The second was oftentimes when I, as the sales leader in the the chief revenue officer type, was brought in to talk to our customers and our customer execs.

Kelly Breslin Wright: It happened very frequently that these executives who are our key buyers said to me, hey, Kelly. I just have a question for you. Try to understand, like, why is it that your salespeople seem to understand our our what we're doing so much better? Like, we're dealing with tons of other of your competitors and other vendors, and they're trying to sell us all these different things. And I know you're trying to sell, but it seems like your team is understanding us on a different level. And I realize it's all coming back to the storytelling. People are starting with stories, and they're developing a sense of trust, of openness, of vulnerability where the prospects able to open up in a way where maybe they weren't if we were just going back to the beginning, peppering them with questions. And so I think that companies should be thinking, like, are they actually intentionally training how people can tell stories instead of just walking through a pitch deck. So that's number 1 of a really important how to.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. If I could anchor on that just for a little bit, what what you're saying there, in my experience with Tableau and you, Kelly, is, we were able to train everybody in in the Tableau story from chairman, you know, to to frontline, to to even product development, etcetera. So it became whole company training, which was so impressive for people to be able to embrace that. And then, the way we crafted that story as, you know, it was being delivered to 2 potential buyers. You know, we were in inside their mind, Kelly. I don't know if I mentioned to you, but when I was doing a bunch of testing of the story with Tableau customers, you know, they they I would share some of the visuals, and that's also what made, the Tableau story so powerful. There are visuals to back it up and and to help with that, you know, the memory forming on behalf of the buyer. But when I chose some of those visuals, they would just go, oh my gosh.

Bruce Scheer: That's us. You know? We we really got inside of their world in their mind showing that current state visual around that. And if you can remember, it was around, you know, the people dimension, the experience dimension, the time dimension, but especially as it went to the experience, and we talked about the report factory. And I I just, you know, remember testing that, and then subsequently where customers, like, just gonna, oh my god. That's us. You know? It's almost like, how did you know? And they they would laugh a little bit sheepishly, but talk about a connection point, just really meeting them where they're at.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yeah. Well, Bruce, I think this brings up another point too. Like, the whole world of sales and how companies buy is evolving in a very big way. We're seeing a massive, massive transformation. So I think that let's talk about that just for a moment. It used to be when companies were selling, they needed their marketing team and their salespeople to give the large volume of information about whatever that product was, but the world has changed. There's so much information out there on the web. And there's now you have AI that is giving all kinds of information.

Kelly Breslin Wright: There's tons of competitors. There's lots of data that's available. And so your prospects and your customers are very well versed probably when they come to you. They already know 70 or 80% of what you historically would have taught them along the way. They've already done the research themselves. And so they're coming to you to say, hey. I'm trying to decide which which company I'm gonna go to, which solution I'm going to use, and they're already very knowledgeable and well versed in whatever it is that you're selling. And so what they're looking for is they're looking for not only someone that they can trust and someone that's gonna help them to achieve their ROI, but they're also looking for a vendor that's gonna help teach them and provide some thought leadership so that they can be challenged and listen and learn along the way.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And so this is a whole different element of stories because companies often were all talking about this is what we do and very vendor centric. And that's not effective anyway because people don't wanna hear, like, all about the vendor. But it's changed and become even more important that thought leadership is very, very critical. And so if you think about a customer saying, well, what is the state of the status quo? What's the problem and the challenge to the status quo? And where what is it that would help them to break out of the status quo in a way where they could actually be better? Think about it of going to the desired state or to the promised state. And then they're looking for companies to help lead and guide to paint a narrative of not only what their company is about, but how you're going to help teach and bring and lead that company to this promised desired state. And that is all about framing this narrative and in a storytelling in this thought leadership way. So I think what companies can think about when they're thinking about their narrative, their go to market approach stories, it's not only, well, what are our company story and our customer story and the personal story? What are the stories in a way that can emotionally connect? That's number 1. Number 2 is, how do we actually train our team to be more skilled in storytelling? Because storytelling I mean, if you think about it, you go look at your best salespeople.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Almost always, your best salespeople are your best communicators, and your best communicators are fantastic storytellers. So communication and storytelling and emotionally connecting is all that. So the second is, how do you train them? But then you also have this 3rd piece when you think about the how is how are you creating thought leadership and a narrative of telling a story of how you wanna guide and lead and bring your customers to this new desired state. And that is a company story that is related to your company story, but it sounds slightly different. And so you should be asking how skilled is your team on thought leadership and telling those thought leadership stories. So those are the 3 how to that I think are really important.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Absolutely. And should we talk about, you know, where that comes from a little bit in terms of how to how to craft the the story? I thought that could be interesting. Well, you know, where does the thought leadership and where where where does that narrative come from?

Kelly Breslin Wright: I think a lot of that, Bruce, goes back to this whole thought the thought leadership is tied to the narrative. So you have your mission, vision, differentiated value proposition, and this is a lot I mean, this is a whole impetus of what I teach in Culture Driven Sales. This is basically, like, what my course is and what the framework is and the thought leadership of this. It is you want to understand from your prospects what is the current state of affairs? Like, what it where are they in right now, and what is frustrating and challenging to them in that current state? And if they were to look at this current state, then where is it that they want to go? So this is what I was talking about. What is the desired state? What is the place they want to be? And then there's a gap. There's a gap between the current status quo and the desired state. This is why they're talking to you you in the 1st place. If they didn't care and they didn't have this challenge, they wouldn't even be engaged in your company to solve a problem.

Kelly Breslin Wright: But rather than just talk about, here's all these features and functions and ROI and data to get you from here to there. What you actually want to do is you wanna understand, well, what are the biggest challenges with the current state? And then you know what your company is super good at, And then you need to figure out what are your unique differentiated value propositions. So companies should have maybe 3 to 5. Some companies have 25 value propositions. It's way too many. And oftentimes, people will have value propositions that all of their other competitors have, so they're not differentiated at all. So you wanna think in a unique and differentiated way. What are the 3 to 5 most important differentiated values you have? And then you do this in a thought leadership way where you're marrying it together.

Kelly Breslin Wright: So you say, what are the challenges with the current state? And you wanna get out of the current state and get to the desired state. Well, your biggest challenges are these four things, and then those four things exactly map with our value propositions. So to give you an example of that, and since we've been talking about Tableau, go back to Tableau. Like, the biggest challenge that people had was time. It took people way, way, way too long. And if you look at the other things that they had, it took too long. It was too complicated, so you had to have a very, very skilled computer scientist or data scientist to do it. And it took took way too many resources for them.

Kelly Breslin Wright: So you had to have a whole teams taking huge amount of time, but it actually drew them away from other important stuff. So there were some other things, but when you think about that, if you said, well, people doing data analytics is taking too much time. It's taking way too highly specialized people. And of those people, it's taking way too much of those people's resources. Well, what Tableau did is it created this self-service where people could do what was taking weeks months in literally minutes and hours. It was a self-service, so when it empowered everyone to be a data worker where you didn't have to be a specialized data scientist to do it. You could have anyone who is in recruiting or sales or marketing or product be able to answer their own own questions. And 3, it freed up these really complex resources that you wanted them to be able to be doing more complicated tasks that you freed up all their time, so it freed up all these resources.

Kelly Breslin Wright: A thought leadership around where we told our company story. We were able to tell a picture of the status quo. We were able to explain this what the desired state was, and then we were able to come up with very differentiated unique value propositions where we could make this claim knowing that our competitors couldn't touch us with the 10 foot pole on that. And so that's the kind of thought leadership you wanna be thinking. How can you teach them and guide them in the future and then tie that back to your company story and narrative that makes you very differentiated?

Bruce Scheer: Oh, per perfect. Perfect. Well, let's talk about some of the, traps and pitfalls to avoid when when crafting these amazing stories. Do you wanna go first? Or

Kelly Breslin Wright: Well, do you have anything that you wanna start with?

Bruce Scheer: Well, yeah, I'll I would. Typically, you know, we we did talk about either delegating it down or delegating it out, you know, to try to work on a story. And with the tableau story, you know, I can remember it like it was yesterday. But, you know, we all got into a, you know, wonderful hotel room at the time and just batted ideas around. Kelly, I don't know if you were there personally. There there's probably about 25 people there. And, from product development, from sales, from marketing, you know, and we were just getting ideas on the table, which was fantastic for a few different reasons. A lot of those ideas were excellent.

Bruce Scheer: But, b, you know, the the revenue team effectively was uniting and working towards this common goal of having a really compelling story. So that level of involvement, I, is is unlike things I I typically see where it gets delegated down or out, and then and then it sometimes it comes back really good. Oftentimes, it doesn't. Or most often, it doesn't. But sometimes it comes back really good, but then it goes onto the shelf or the digital shelf, if you would, and nobody uses it. But in in Tableau's instance, everybody effectively had a hand in creating the narrative and owning it over time, which was really special.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yeah. Bruce, I I completely agree with you. I think if let let's go over some of the traps and pitfalls. The first, I would a 100% agree with you that be careful about not delegating down or out because when you think about a company story remember, a company story is not just a messaging playbook. It is your company story is tightly integrated with your go to market strategy, and this all threads back to your mission, your vision, your purpose, the why, which is your company story. And you need to make sure everyone on your executive team, everyone on your board is completely aligned by that. Otherwise, you might have a story that sounds really good, but it's not gonna land. It's not gonna drive alignment, and it's not gonna be used.

Kelly Breslin Wright: So you need to make sure that you have, it's it's an having a company story is an executive level top priority. So that's the first. I thinks too is companies don't focus enough on the why. And a lot of that is because it's much easier to do the what and the how. It's easy to say, this is what we do. Here are our features. Here are our functions. Here are our benefits.

Kelly Breslin Wright: This is how we implement, and it's actually really hard to put everyone in a room to figure out how are you gonna tell a story, how are you gonna convey a mission where it's short, it's succinct, it's powerful, it's engaging, it emotionally connects? It's it's very hard. It's one of the hardest parts about coming up with the whole go to market and marketing and sales strategy. And so because it's hard and it requires people sitting in a room for a long period of time talking about what words evoke the right emotions, what what, what are the feelings you want people to think? How are you gonna actually engage in, like, in a connected type of way? It's not the way people usually think when we're working so fast on an operational tactical way. And so many companies just bypass it. I mean, I've been at companies. I've done a lot of advising, and oftentimes, they'll say, hey, Kelly. I understand that you think mission and vision and company story is all important. We are moving so fast.

Kelly Breslin Wright: We literally don't have time. So we're gonna bypass that, and we'll come back at some point in the future. And I'm like, but you brought me in to help drive alignment on your executive team to help you figure out how you're gonna grow faster and increase sales. And you're saying it's not important to have a company, a holistic company story. Like, what else could be more important? And and so I think they're just kinda missing the So that is a huge other tactical pitfall. So the first is don't delegate it. 2, you have to make time to understand and communicate the why instead of the what and the how. And I think the third, and we've talked about this before, is you actually have to invest in how people tell the story.

Kelly Breslin Wright: You can't just say, hey. We just developed this story, and now I have a pitch deck, and everyone just go to it. That that's the 3rd. And, actually, I'll add a 4th. The 4th is you have to do periodic checking of asking all of your salespeople, asking your marketing, asking your executive team what is your story. And if you ask 10 people and you get 10 different stories, then you have work to do. And I'll tell you work. It, like, it's more than 50% of the time.

Kelly Breslin Wright: It could be 70, 80, even more percent of the time that you asked 10 different people. And you might not get 10 different answers, but you get more than 5 different answers, and then it's just not gonna work. So that's another.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. No. I love it. No. I think we did that really well, and then I think we just need to move towards final thoughts. This has been so rich. Any other thing that you'd love the audience to walk away with, Kelly?

Kelly Breslin Wright: I think, I would I would challenge each of you whether it is how you're engaging with your prospects and customers, how you're talking to your peers at work in your direct reports, or even think about how you're engaging with people and communicating your personal life. Just track yourself for the day or for the week. Are you using stories? And if you're not, try to integrate them and see if you notice a difference. Like, are people engaging better when you use stories? And, of course, the answer is going to be yes. So are you peppering with questions instead of stories? If if so, tweak it. And just see how you can whether you're doing an intro, you're doing a speech, you're doing a 1 on 1, Try to thread in those stories because, remember, the best salespeople and the best communicators, and I would say the best leaders and the best employees, they're the ones that know how to have empathetic two way communication, and they are going to be fantastic storytellers.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, let's, talk about just, you know, you did lay out stories should be a top priority for for any executive team, and you gotta get that right that drives alignment and go to market success. How can people reach out to you for that type of support, Kelly?

Kelly Breslin Wright: Oh, perfect. Well, I would love to connect with as many of you as possible. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just go search for Kelly Breslin Wright and Culture Driven Sales. You can also find me on my website, which is www.culturedrivensales.com. On that site, there's a bunch of articles. There's a series of different podcasts. I also do executive seminars that help companies to understand who are we and why do we exist, walking through how to have an effective integrated go to market strategy.

Kelly Breslin Wright: So if your company is interested in that, whether it is for your company internally or for venture capital funds or PE firms if they wanna bring a collection of different executives from different companies together. I offer seminars on all of that. But most importantly, just use your stories, and I'd love to hear from you. So reach out on LinkedIn or on my site.

Bruce Scheer: Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you, Kelly. Thanks for all this wisdom, all this practical wisdom on just embracing the power of stories. Really appreciate it.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And thank you, Bruce, to one of the main pros in the worlds of storytelling. So thanks for having me today.

Bruce Scheer: Awesome. Thank you. What an insightful conversation with Kelly. She gave us a master class in the art of storytelling and sales. She covered the importance of anchoring your company's mission and vision within your company story, how to craft compelling customer stories that emotionally connect and engage, and last but not least, she taught us how to harness the power of our own personal narratives. Her experiences from selling books door to door to scaling some of the most successful SaaS companies are a testament to the transformative power of stories in connecting with buyers and driving improved sales performance. Remember, your stories aren't just about products or services. They're about building trust, creating emotional connections, and aligning on shared values.

Bruce Scheer: If you're looking to elevate your sales game or transform your team's approach to storytelling, be sure to check out Culture Driven Sales for more insights from Kelly. And thanks for tuning in to the ValuePros Show. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode with anyone who needs a little storytelling inspiration. And until next next time, keep delivering the value your buyers love.