In this episode of the ValuePros Show, Bruce Scheer and value selling expert Mike Wilkinson explore how to be narrative ready. They make the case that a compelling narrative gives buyers a powerful reason to engage, and that most sellers rely on product centric messaging or a PowerPoint deck instead of a customer focused story where the buyer is the hero.
Bruce walks through his five part narrative model, target the right buyer, spotlight the problem, envision the outcome, showcase the solution, and prescribe next steps, illustrated with a memorable personal story about buying his dad's fishing boat. They then cover visualizing the problem as the "big ugly" against the "big beautiful" future state, and close with the SIZZLES framework for assessing whether a narrative truly sizzles.
“We need to give people a really good and powerful reason why they should be spending time talking with us.” – Mike Wilkinson
“It's a story line that features the customer, the buyer, as the hero.” – Bruce Scheer
“A problem is twice as likely to influence and motivate someone in change versus a gain or an outcome.” – Bruce Scheer
“It is so important that your customer knows that you understand the problem.” – Mike Wilkinson
“The uglier, the better.” – Mike Wilkinson
“If you get it right, you will definitely be in the minority.” – Mike Wilkinson
Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show where value pros get value ready. Hi, I'm for sure your host and guest in this episode on how to get narrative ready. I'm joined with Mike Wilkinson, an amazing thought leader and value trainer who's helped so many businesses and thousands of sellers get value ready with his teachings, methodologies, and wonderful books. Today, we're diving into the critical skill of crafting compelling sales narratives that resonate with buyers and drive results. Get ready to learn how to structure your story, spotlight problems, and showcase solutions in a way that truly sizzles. Well, Mike, hey. We're back together again for this episode. This episode title is how to be narrative ready.
Bruce Scheer: And, Mike, you and I love to start off with let's kick it off with a big why. Why do we need to be narrative ready? Go ahead and just give me any thoughts you might have, and then we'll kinda dig in, get into the how. But any thoughts on the why?
Mike Wilkinson: Well, I think the biggest why, Bruce, is we need to give people a really good and powerful reason why they should be spending time talking with us. And a narrative is a great way of building up that interest
Bruce Scheer: and making them curious about what we have to say. Absolutely. Yeah. It's very critical to set the theme, set the foundation, set the reason why for the engagement in the first place. Why are you reaching out to them and having dialogue with them? So it it's the narrative is really beautiful on the front end. But then, also, you're gonna meet all these different stakeholders as you're getting deeper into that buying journey, doing excellent discovery. And I'd encourage everyone to check out Mike's episode on how to be discovery ready and then also how to be demonstration ready. You're gonna meet different people on that buying journey, and the narrative really helps just set context for that meeting.
Bruce Scheer: I had built a narrative for Tableau, Mike, and it was really fun. I went down to their users conference down in San Francisco. They invited me down just to see how that was looking and working for them. And one of the guys who kicked off the whole user conference came up to me and said, Bruce, I shoulda used the narrative because they were just jumping straight into the tech and the tools and the gee whiz, the visuals. They missed the boat on just setting up the big why.
Mike Wilkinson: It's so easy to do to end up going to great talking about what you can do without setting the scene.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. So this whole thing on why be narrative ready. A couple of other points, Mike, I'd mentioned. Narrative. What is it? There's different notions of what that even means, but I would argue that many don't have a narrative. They might have a smattering of messaging, might have come from marketing, that might have been built over time based on just the experiences of the sales rep. Many reps do their own thing.
Bruce Scheer: I think only 10% of what marketing produces gets used by rep, but which literally is the case. There's typically this divide going on. So the rep might have built their own messaging, own presentation, etcetera. But what I mean by narrative is it follows this cognitive flow. It's a story line that features the customer, the buyer, as the hero. It's not a story about product as hero and getting into the tech. It features the buyer as hero. And most sellers that I interact with don't have it.
Bruce Scheer: And they'll just show up, they'll listen, they'll ask questions, and just kinda go where they go, but there's no narrative really to set context. One author I really love, his name's Mike Weinberg, he talked about having a sales story. It's one of your number one tools in your toolkit if you wanna be successful. And again, after serving sellers for the last 25 years, I rarely see it until somebody actually for the sellers.
Mike Wilkinson: I think you're right. I kinda think about it. I'm just thinking when you were talking, that is the storytelling bit, isn't it? It's the sitting around the campfire at night having a talk about things and putting your story together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: And the sales narrative is not a once upon a time story. It's a little different. It's more of a here's what we see. Here's what's going on, but you're speaking in a way that resonates with the buyer and puts them in the center of that narrative. And we'll talk a little bit more about that, how to do that. But, again, to the big why, I wrote a book. The world is hungry to know how to do this and for this, to have a sales narrative. I wrote a book called Inspire Your Buyers, Go to Market with a Story That Sizzles.
Bruce Scheer: And, Mike, I had really good fortune. It came out of the gate top 10 in Amazon's list under sales and sales management, a very competitive category. And literally, just a few weeks ago, a year later, it still creeped back up into that top ten category. So I've been totally delighted. People are reaching out to me all the time who've read the book and said, hey, Bruce. This is awesome. Thanks so much. We just passed 70 reviews, and it's still holding at a 4.9 rating. So Brilliant. Man, I'm on it. Whenever I need an ego boost, Mike, I just go in and read my Amazon reviews, and then I feel like king for the day. It's awesome.
Mike Wilkinson: Well, I have to tell you, Bruce, as an Inspire Your Buyer's reader,
Bruce Scheer: I can thoroughly recommend it to anybody. Yeah. And you're lucky, Mike. One of my mentors said, Bruce, we should write a book that can be read in the course of a flight. And that's what we literally did. We wrote this book so somebody could read it within an hour, hour and a half. And I had an executive send me a photo of him holding up, smiling. It's in the Amazon page if you guys wanna see it.
Bruce Scheer: His name's Brandt, but he read it while he's waiting for his doctor's visit. And then I had a few other guys. I've had 3 people send me photos of them reading the book on their flight. And without a request, they just naturally, that's the time when executives have some downtime when they can pop open a book from Bruce, and, so very appreciated. And, Mike, the beautiful thing is the book is built off of all this experience, crafting sales narratives for all these big logos like Dell, EMC, Adobe, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Google, IBM. I've had the honor of serving all these blue chip tech logos and then also scale ups like Concur, Tableau that I've already mentioned, a number of different entities within Amazon Web Services by helping organization also get to their IPO and have wild success be acquired. And then this formula that we'll be talking about and how to shape your narrative has been used for startups as well. So, really, it applies across the board, across different sizes of business, different sectors.
Bruce Scheer: Having a sales narrative and how that's structured, I've seen that hold true across all different types of organizations. So very, very grounded in experience and practice. And then the most important thing, the book was able to beat Donald Trump, Mike, and that's something that I'm not tired of winning. Not yet. So you keep telling me this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: And for our listening audience, Donald Trump, a book featuring Donald was rated 3 when I made it on number 1 on Amazon sales and sales management. Okay. So, boy, do I just have to bask in this victory. V stands for value pros, but also stands for victory, and we love that. So the big rub, Mike, on sales narratives is I love showing a visual that has a person looking at a seller trying to describe things and just talking, and there's a little thought bubble in the buyer's mind that has within it 3 acronyms, WTF and then a question mark. And I think we all know what that might mean. And very often, there's buyer confusion. And we also coined a phrase with value pros, what we call value fob.
Bruce Scheer: And when the buyer doesn't understand things, it's like a whiteout. Where do I go? What's going on? And it's a scary place, and why am I wasting my time? And the narrative really helps deal with that. So just a story on this, Mike. I've had the beautiful opportunity to go out to Dubai to for a global sales kickoff for a global firm called SITA, And it was really neat. The chief commercial officer was out there, and, I got to have lunch with him. But that morning, he and his team had worked really, really hard on some new branding. And he joined one of the rooms with some of the sales leaders, and there's about 30 of them in the room. And he asked them to go 1 by 1 just to give in a quick pitch, their introduction to CETA.
Bruce Scheer: And he wanted to hear it as if he was a buyer. So he said, hey. I'm an executive. Why don't you treat me like an executive like you would a normal executive? Just give me the introduction for SETA. What do you like to say? So we went 1 by 1 by 1 by 1. And by the end of that, Mike and I've been watching Shogun lately with my wife. Literally, if I would have passed him a sword, I think that would have been the end of him. He did a useful officer.
Bruce Scheer: He just saw full failure in that. And then, again, luckily, I had the opportunity to have lunch with him, and he told me about that harrowing story. And I'm, like, just going, well, what'd you expect? And he goes, well, I expected all this beautiful branding to hear about how innovative we are and a bunch of different things that we've been working on to recast our brand. I go, well, did you pass them the story, the narrative? And he goes, doll what? And I'm, like, going, yeah. That's what I thought. They don't have a story. They don't have a narrative that they can use. Nobody's trained them on it.
Bruce Scheer: You can't just have a bunch of messaging and brand guides and stuff and expect sellers to adopt it. That ain't gonna happen. But he's astute. He knows as a chief commercial officer, hey. Those salespeople are the brand ambassador for his organization. They've got to have a story. And the upside of it for me, given all the pain that he suffered, is he said, hey, Bruce. Could you help us fix it? And I go, oh, absolutely.
Bruce Scheer: We'd love to. He goes, I don't have any budget, but I'm finding budget. Have a proposal into me. Let's get started. And didn't even discuss price. He just said, this is mission critical. So, anyways, we did do some beautiful work, and it ended up becoming strategic, Mike, which it often can, and we even recast how they characterize their whole portfolio of offerings based on the narrative that we built that their sellers could use in their selling conversations. And so, of course, he was delighted with that work.
Bruce Scheer: I was as well. That's one of the things I love doing is just making sure sellers are successful. They show up and they they do have a story to tell that's compelling, engaging, relevant. And often, I don't see it. It's a big struggle.
Mike Wilkinson: I think it's a great story. And I think if you asked an awful lot of CMOs or sales directors or whatever over here, you'd have exactly the same response. I've just stayed through my mind. And I'm absolutely sure that if I asked the majority of salespeople that I see to do exactly that thing, they'd be lost. All they have is a PowerPoint that they hide behind, but they don't have a story.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. It's just a norm. Yeah. I rarely see it. Once you see how to do it, it's gonna be incredibly simple.
Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, I think if the PowerPoint deck is the substitute, the problem there is you're like everybody else because there's a fallback for everybody.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. And it's typically product centric. Again, treating the product as hero versus the buyer hero and the orientation of the whole thing. And very often, especially when you're getting to the more senior decision making level and the executive levels, they're going, oh, you're speaking a different language. You should be talking to people over there in the boiler room, the engine room, not me. So that's a problem as well when you don't have that narrative, which very often is a little bit more strategic in nature, a little bit more conceptual. But once you've got it, accelerated growth. And it's one of the fastest things that you can change to accelerate growth because you don't have to divide physics.
Bruce Scheer: You just have to get it right, get people behind that, get your sponsorship and your champion, and inculcate it across your revenue team, both marketing product and sales. But once that's done, you can really move mountains. You can accelerate revenue growth. It's one of the fastest ways that doesn't cost 1,000,000 of dollars in r and d investment. It's not new features, not new functions. No. It's the overlay. It's the narrative that makes that happen.
Bruce Scheer: And as a little acid test, it needs to be a narrative that sizzles, a story that sizzles, Mike. And for everybody sticking into the full duration of this episode, we will have more of a breakdown of the sizzles framework. Sizzles does stand for something, and a critical assessment of it does your narrative sizzle? Is it structured right? Does it have insight, etcetera? And so we'll dig into that just a little bit later. Hang on. As we get more into we'll talk about the how, and then we're gonna move into how to test it and make sure you've got it right. So, Mike, moving on to the how then, let's jump in and think about how to structure a great narrative. And the first principle of having a great narrative is targeting the right organizations and the right buyer. And I love talking about targeting the buyer.
Bruce Scheer: Who's the target buyer for the narrative? They're the hero, and then you build that narrative around them. Gosh. Sometimes, Mike, I hear people saying, hey. There's 10 plus buyers, and we've got stats to prove it, that there's 10 plus buyers on complex big ticket item types of deals. So do I have to make a narrative for every single one of them? And my answer is no. You need to think about the critical one or 2 who are often the decision makers in most deals. Where does this kick up to? Who provides the ultimate decision approval to proceed? And who's the business stakeholder behind that? And once we've got that identified, then we can start to craft the narrative. And it's super important.
Bruce Scheer: I've got something, Mike, a little bit of a quiz for you to see if you can answer correctly. I love hitting you with quizzes. What does a rare orchid in a forest? Think of a rainforest with this blue brilliant, completely out of place orchid. That's one visual. Another visual to think about, an amazing cave formulation with things coming off the wall, things growing up from the floor just with crystals and looking amazing. And then the 3rd visual would be a unique star constellation. And what the heck do these visuals have to do with my point of targeting the right buyer? So, again, a rare orchid in a forest, an amazing cave formulation, and a unique star constellation.
Mike Wilkinson: Well, there's an interesting series of questions. Very fact, I'm guessing, and I am only guessing here. The rare orchid in the forest is perhaps that rare individual that you are looking for and seeking out to target. I mean, well, I'll get off base here. The amazing cane formulation. That's gotta be something around the kind of story that you're going to put together, I'm guessing. And that the unique star constellation. Now you've got me there. Well, you don't have to tell me. Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. You're getting an a for effort, mister. So here here we go. Here
Mike Wilkinson: I'm working. I never had to bring up the thing we've spoken about this before, Bruce.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. No. I surprised you. I love throwing these little brain puzzles at you. Yeah. So here's the deal. Each one of these visuals will resonate with the right person. So Bruce Scheer goes walking through a rainforest and sees a a blue orchid there. If I saw that mic, I'd go, That's interesting. I wouldn't even break stride. I'd keep walking. But someone who is a botanist would, like, go, holy heck. How did a rare blue orchid find its way into this rainforest? That I've never seen it. That is bizarre. And they'd probably camp there for a day and just scratching their head wondering how in the heck. An amazing cave formulation, brochure.
Bruce Scheer: I've been through many. I love splunking. But I look at that and go, and I'd say, oh, that's cool. And then just keep moving along. However, a geologist would look at that and go, oh my. Oh my gosh. I've never seen him and just study the heck out of it. And then a unique star constellation, I look at it and go, oh, wow.
Bruce Scheer: The stars are out tonight. However, somebody who's an astronomer, Mike, would go, oh, wow. I haven't seen that. I think I might even have a discovery. And the big point is if you cast the right story to the right, it'll resonate with that target buyer, but it might not resonate so much with the non target buyer. So that's the power of this. You really need to identify your target buyer and build the story specifically for them. So thank you, Mike. You were close, but no cigar. But I'm I'm still giving you an a for effort. In in
Mike Wilkinson: the in in all honesty, I don't think I was even close.
Bruce Scheer: But I don't know how many people who are listening are saying, well, well, we weren't either. Okay. Okay. Alright. I don't like to fool the audience. Yeah. That's not nice. Well hey.
Bruce Scheer: So moving on. That's the first part of this 5 part model of crafting your sales narrative. Make sure to target the right buyer, and we've made that point. Secondly, you want to spotlight the problem as part of your story flow. You start with the problem. Mike, I talk about spotlighting the problem. I love the analogy of a spotlight. When you shine a spotlight, anything inside the ray, the the light of the spotlight is just dramatically pronounced, and everything else around it is dark.
Bruce Scheer: You can't even see it because the spotlight's so bright, and it's shining on something. So you certainly see what it's shining on. And, again, everything else is just kinda black. Yeah. Dark. You can't even see it. And I love that analogy for spotlighting the problem because that's what great sellers do. They come in and they help their customers see what they didn't see before.
Bruce Scheer: Maybe it's an approach they've taken and they've just thought about it as, hey. That's good enough. That works. And they're unaware of a new approach, or maybe they haven't taken an approach. Maybe it's just kinda complete greenfield. They don't have a CRM system, and then you can say, gosh, life would be different if you had something. But you're spotlighting the problem domain and helping them think about that in a way that doesn't feel very good. And a little bit later on, I'll put all this together with a story just to make these points.
Bruce Scheer: But that's the first part of a storyline. It's problem first, and you spotlight the problem. Mike, any, thoughts around that notion?
Mike Wilkinson: Yes. Absolutely. What it does do is it just reminds us how important it is to do that background research and planning before you start the process and begin to uncover where these issues are, whether they're industry wide issues or whether they're specific to the individual client. But, yes, the background work that you do will have a big impact on the quality of your problem recognition.
Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yeah. When I went to buy an electric car, it was kind of interesting. My world was normal, but I was curious. And, luckily, I had a seller who was saying to Bruce, hey. Do you really like going to gas stations? Do you like the smell of the gas as it's going into your car? And so he started kinda playfully highlighting a problem. I I wasn't even conscious that I had. I'd been experiencing it, the consequences of it, but he shed a new light.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Do you like paying that much at the pump? Did you know you could save this much and how much that's costing you? And just kinda adding a little bit of gravity to the problem that, again, I didn't even really know I had. So that's the beauty of this, exposing, spotlighting, and making sure that customers' corners a little bit. And, Mike, you and I have kinda played the game in the past about what do you sell first, second, 3rd, the problem, the solution, or the outcome. And I'd mentioned to you that there's some real science behind this. How do you sell in your story line, in that narrative? So, again, I talk about problem first. One of the biggest reasons for that, there's been a lot of studies on this, but one of the most famous one was made by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. And won a Nobel Prize, and he's just been infatuated with irrational thinking of human beings and of buyers.
Bruce Scheer: And we found after multiple studies is a problem is twice as likely to influence and motivate someone in change versus a gain or an outcome. So, the problem has the most gravity for change. So, that's why we start there and also even stop there as we have a narrative. As you're telling your story, if that doesn't land, it's not a one way story. Often, you can get some interaction. You highlight the problem, but you go, hey, do you guys have this type of problem in your situation? And you can have some dialogue as part of that narrative flow. If there's not a problem, gosh, you might be wasting both your and your buyer's time. So start there, and that's the ultimate acid test.
Bruce Scheer: Another quick story. 1 of my clients, Mike, had a meeting with a CEO of a Korean airline. And she gave me a call one day and said, hey, Bruce. We've met with the CEO of a Korean airline. I flew in my executives, and we had a great meeting. The guy seemed to be really happy with what we were showing. I did see a smile on his face. Now he won't return my phone calls, my emails.
Bruce Scheer: He's just gone silent. Do you have any ideas for how I can reengage him? And, sadly, I said, gosh, I'm all fresh out of silver bullets. Don't have any more. But I'd love to talk more about that meeting. How did you frame the problem in that meeting? And how did that resonate with him? And she said, problem. We kinda talked about how we could help and what we had to offer. And I'm like, yeah. I figured.
Bruce Scheer: He probably missed the whole problem part. And hence why he's not returning the call. But you're not solving a problem for him, and he's moving on. He's got problems, and he's got priorities, and, sadly, you didn't make it in there. So we need to plan that problem.
Mike Wilkinson: Just on that problem thing, I think it is so important that your customer knows that you understand the problem. Because if you can let them know that you understand what the problems are that they're facing, They're halfway there. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Yep. And just all
Bruce Scheer: that homework that you talked about and showing up kind of value ready is quite critical. But the narrative part, you can have a repeatable narrative that you tailor for different situations, different sectors, etcetera, using the right language. But that central narrative, you can tailor. But having that in your back pocket is just critical for setting the right themes and showcasing and spotlighting that big problem. One other distinction I often like to use my a big problem versus a little problem, and a big problem that your ultimate decision maker would care about versus a little problem, and being able to name that problem in 1, 2, 3, or no more than 4 words. So naming that problem state, I rarely see that. But when you can do that, that sets the theme that you can return to in all those downstream conversations and the business case that you're gonna be developing. That problem theme and the agreement with your buyer around that sets that theme that'll carry you all the way through that buying cycle.
Bruce Scheer: Very, very powerful. Let's move on. I wanna hit the next, element of the story, and that would be envisioning the desired outcome. So we're not talking about the solution yet. We're gonna start with the pain, pain of sane with that problem domain, but then we're gonna move into what life looks like on the beach. Once that problem goes away, Mike, and we're achieving wild success, what's that look like? What's that picture in their mind look like? And that's what we cocreate with that buyer. Of course, we've got it in our back pocket, but we introduce that and we work with them to shape that in something that would be ultimately delightful for them, where they can see themselves getting promoted because they're victorious, where they can see their organization really moving ahead, where they can see their functional area, step change. That's the beauty that we're seeking to envision with our buyer.
Bruce Scheer: Envision the desired outcome. That's the next step in this story flow. How's that resonate with you, Mike?
Mike Wilkinson: I was just thinking about it. I feel that it's absolutely right. I think you go into a customer and you've got a pretty good idea because you've done the research, what issues and challenges you're going to find they are facing. And as you said earlier on, the key there is to pick it up. You really want them to feel the pain because the more pain they feel, the more motivated they are to do something about it. And similarly on the other side, working with them to paint the picture of what the ideal solution is going to be. It's just a great way of actually bringing the 2 things together. So that outcome focus, I think, is really important.
Mike Wilkinson: You've got it. Yeah. It's absolutely critical.
Bruce Scheer: And then once we've got agreement there, now we've got the problem we're solving, we've got the outcome that we're looking for, then we can move on. Yeah. And let's go ahead and do that. So the next step in your story would be to describe just a taste of the how. So we're not doing a product demo. No way in heck at this point in time. We're trying to show I call it showcase the solution, where think of your solution sitting on a showcase. It's featured in a way that's really special, and it's going to help be that bridge to get out of that problem state and then move into that desired state.
Bruce Scheer: This solution is how you can do that. But I'm not thinking of a solution as a product name and all the product features and benefits. It's not time for that. What we're trying to do is introduce the big solution in 1, 2, 3, or no more than 4 words. We're naming it again, and in a way that sets the theme for the solution. Then we can talk about all the stuff that makes that solution theme possible.
Mike Wilkinson: Does that make sense, Mike? That makes absolutely perfect sense to me. This is your trophy cabinet. But I think the point being late, which is really important, so we're not talking about the solution because all of this conversation is about them. It's not about us of what we can do
Bruce Scheer: at the moment. You've got it. Yeah. Some of my clients, they don't even mention that their product may. They introduce a solution concept, and once that's understood, then we can schedule some additional times to do more discovery, to do value demonstration, do do the other things that come later in that sales cycle. And for everybody watching and listening, we do have episodes on all those other key value ready dimensions once you've got your sales narrative in place. So that's one of the key things about being value ready. But the solution, we're just talking about it from a conceptual level.
Bruce Scheer: We're not getting into details, and we're naming the solutions. And then the final part of this narrative is prescribing next steps. We've talked about the problem, the outcome, the solution. So where would we go from here? What are some logical next steps that can help us move a little bit more deeply into the situation where we understand the problem better, the outcome we're going to achieve a little bit better, the solution a little bit better. We make sure that everything's approval ready, one of our other value dimensions. We've shaped the value proposition so we're negotiation ready. We can talk about sharing value versus taking value from one another, and we can justify the whole thing with a business case. But those are some of the things that we'd lay out as part of that buying journey, as part of this key sales narrative.
Bruce Scheer: Any thoughts on that, Mike?
Mike Wilkinson: Well, my thought on this is just stand this up, isn't it? It's about being proactive. If you think about your Korean Airways analogy or story, it's that proactive bit, agreeing the next steps before you leave is just so important.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. I learned that through I worked on a project for Steve Balmer and Mark Bird. They were trying to put a joint venture focus between HP and Microsoft at the CEO level, and I got saddled with trying to make that happen with my team and herding cats on both side of the organization. It resulted in a $375,000,000 investment on 8 solutions we chose to go to market together with, and we had to characterize all that. But Ballmer himself taught me a good one. When he put together that agreement with Heard that we should partner together and be strategic partners as what they were calling a frontline partnership, Ballmer walking out of Heard's office went up to us and said, hey. Can you pull up Mark's calendar? I wanna find a time for us 2 months from now where we make our formal agreement. And but just he had that next step nailed.
Bruce Scheer: And after I heard that story, just everything I've ever done is part of a sales narrative has next step. You don't leave a meeting without next steps. That's correct. Michael.
Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. When you say to any seller, how did the meeting go? They'll always say, alright. Well, well, look, for me, the only good meeting is one that has a clearly defined next step attached to it before you walk out
Bruce Scheer: the door. Yeah. Yeah. You need a return trip ticket and and it needs to be Yeah. I agree. Well, yeah, just to put it all together in front of us here, Mike. So it's this 5 part model of target the right buyer. We made that point, spotlight the problem, envision the outcome, showcase the solution, and then next steps.
Bruce Scheer: And what I'd love to do is just kinda put this into context so everybody really gets it. I'd like to do that through a personal story, Mike. So early on in the pandemic, 1st year of the pandemic back in 2020, my oldest brother, and some might argue the smarter between the 2, he gave me a call one morning, and he rarely calls me. I'm typically calling him because he's the wise one of the bunch. But he calls me and he goes, hey. How are you doing? Hey. I'm doing great. Kinda curious why you're calling, but I'm doing good.
Bruce Scheer: And so my brother Steve says, well, yeah. I did wanna talk to you. Yeah. I was talking to dad, and it looks like dad wants to sell his old fishing boat. And then he just pauses for a fact. And then I'm doing, in my mind, oh, shit. That means I'm selling dad's fishing boat. Because at the time, my dad was 92 years of age and typically needed assistance on on different types of things.
Bruce Scheer: And then my brother, after he gave me a chance to think those thoughts and to voice those thoughts, he said, yeah. And he wants to sell it on Craigslist. And I'm like, oh, double whammy. My dad can turn on a PC. He did figure out how to do that. And he can pop open the email. Somebody made that easy for him, and he can do emails, and he spams me all the time with him. But selling something on Craigslist, me trying to talk him through that being 400 miles away, I was thinking just ultimate pain, Mike.
Bruce Scheer: So, anyways, that really hurt. And I'm not going, okay. Do you have any information on it? He goes, yeah. Dad's got some stuff. I go, I'll talk to him, see if he can pop it in the mail, and I'll see if I can set up Craigslist, get into this whole thing. He goes, yeah. I was hoping you'd say that. And I'm, like, going, well, yeah, thanks, Steve.
Bruce Scheer: And he goes, hey. Before I go, I was kinda thinking you might wanna buy it. I go, what? I might wanna buy it. And I got to think, why would I wanna buy an old, nasty, polluting fishing boat? Does it have a 49 inch screen like the one on my desk right now? Is it battery operated like the Tesla in the garage? What's cool about this device? Nothing really. No. It's just an old fishing boat. Runs pretty good, but it's an old fishing boat. I go, okay.
Bruce Scheer: I'm stuck, man. Why in the hell would I wanna buy this thing? My brother was asking me, how long have you been living on that island? I said, 16 years. And he said, wow. 16 years living on an island without a boat. He said, if I was you, I would just feel trapped. I'm like going trapped. Why in the hell would I feel trapped? He goes, oh, I don't know. I I don't know.
Bruce Scheer: On an island, I just I go, well, I've got a ferry system here. We take that all the time. Believe me, I'm painfully aware of it. It costs us a bomb going back and forth, but we've got the ferry system, etcetera. And he's, like, going, yeah. I don't know. Gosh. Could be 50 years, could be 500 years, but there's a earthquake that's predicted that in anything left of interstate 5, I've gonna have a problem.
Bruce Scheer: He's like, just going, man, if I was there, my family without a boat, I'd just feel trapped. And I'm like going, well, I don't feel trapped, and I kinda gotta run too, Steve. I'll give you a call in the morning, and we'll figure out how to get this boat. So he goes, okay. Yeah. Talk to you later. So, anyways, I'm glad he had called me on a weekend because that night, I tossed and turned and didn't sleep very well and kinda was feeling really trapped. So I I called him first thing in the morning.
Bruce Scheer: I go, hey, Steve. I'm feeling trapped. Give me some other reasons why I need to buy this boat. He was, like, going, oh, wow. Okay. He goes, well, Bruce, I didn't know I don't know if you knew, but there's a marina probably about every mile around that island. There's marinas all over the Puget Sound. It's like boating mecca and all these different marinas.
Bruce Scheer: And he goes, yeah. During the pandemic, everything's kinda closed, but the marinas are trying to stay alive, and they still have kitchens. And your wife loves eating out. My wife's Singaporean Chinese, and food is such a big central element in her life, and she loves eating out. And he goes, what you could do is you could take Cindy out, go marina by marina, order your food in advance, takeout, and delight your wife with some great food. And I'm, like, going, oh my gosh. Would that boat do that? He goes, yeah. Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Even out in the sound, he goes, yeah. There's enough draft. There's about 14 inches of draft. But, hey, if things kick up and it gets real wavy out there, if you just slow it down, that boat will pretty much go anywhere. You'll be fine. And I might go, wow. I'm thinking in my mind, gosh.
Bruce Scheer: That sounds fun. Fun and happy wife. How do you beat that? I'm thinking about that, and I go, well, Steve, that sounds really, really cool. How would I get it? And where would I store it? What do I do here? He goes, do you still have that old Lexus? I go, yeah. Yeah. I've got a Lexus. He goes, by any chance, does it have a trailer hitch on it? And I go, yeah. Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. For my mountain bikes. It's set up for it. He goes, oh, perfect. Bruce, all you have to do is stop by a U Haul store and just get a 2 inch trailer hitch, and that ball will fit the trailer for dad's boat. And all you do is just pop that thing on there, plug it in, and you're ready to rock and roll. And I'm like, wow. Okay.
Bruce Scheer: Where do I store? What do I do? And he goes, do you still have that driveway up at the edge of your property? And I'm like going, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Next to the yeah. There's just still the driveway there. And he goes, you could just stick it in the corner of that. And it comes with a cover and everything. Just stick it there. It'll be fine. I'm, like, going, oh my god. And, so that weekend, I went out and bought that boat from my dad, Mike. We had a tough negotiation. He wanted to sell it to me for 2,000. I countered with 3,000, and then we landed on 25100. So I came up with a good deal for it. And, feel like you by your brother.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. It was a total, total setup. Absolutely. He laughed about this story, but it's so true. And now I'm on to boat number 2, and it'll be boat number 3 after a while, I'm sure. But yeah. And he just nailed. But just to go over the principles of what we've been talking about in terms of a sales narrative, he targeted the right buyer.
Bruce Scheer: He knew I had some spare money, and I had the right conditions for having a boat. I had a way to tow it. I had a place to store it. So everything was set in his mind why I needed it, and I was trapped. I was living on an island without a boat. Then he spotlighted the problem, Mike, and he did it in one word. Remember I talked about naming the problem state in 1, 2, 3, or no more than 4 words. He did it in 1, the word trapped.
Bruce Scheer: And then I couldn't unsee that. I couldn't unhear that. He got me. He exposed a blind spot that I hadn't seen before and just nailed me by spot lighting the problem. Then after that, he went on to help me envision the outcome. He talked about me gonna be adventurous and have fun out on the water and how I was gonna be delighting my wife who I've been married to for 35 years. Hey. I'm always looking for ways to spice up the relationship, and he gave me a quick path to doing that.
Bruce Scheer: So fun and happy wife, 4 words. He helped me envision that outcome. And then he showcased the solution. And the solution was dad's boat. Two words. He didn't get into the fact that what the brand was, what the horsepower, the motor was on it, and what kind of fuel it used, and he didn't get into any of that detail. I literally bought that boat not knowing any of that detail. He sold me on the concept of dad's boat, and dad's boat was gonna get me untrapped and help me have fun in a happy way.
Bruce Scheer: And then he laid out all the next steps, how to tow it, how to store it, and just kinda created that path to the wind. And so I love that story, Mike. It's just a simple illustration for how to lay this out. So what I thought we could do next, Mike, is just to bring it home a bit. I wanna introduce a whole notion of visualizing the narrative and how critical that is. And very often, when I'm working with clients, I'll ask them, hey. Could you send me a visual of your narrative? And, specifically, I'm looking for a visual of the problem state. I wanna see the problem state as a buyer should see it.
Bruce Scheer: And normally, after I ask that question, can you send it to me? Then I hear one of my partners likes to say a 1,000 watts of silence. I don't hear anything. And then I go, what do you mean? I go, what I mean is what I just said. Can you send me a picture, a visual, a slide that illustrates the problem state of the customer? I don't know if we have anything like that. Now I'm going, okay. That's a problem. We need that. That needs to be the central part of the narrative.
Bruce Scheer: Remember, I talked about the problem state being 2 x the influence other than outcome or solution. The problem is the number one driver of change. People wanna move away from problems at 2 x the rate of moving towards an outcome. If you don't have a visualization of the problem, oh my god, you're probably talking about product, and that's no good. So, that's typically where we start trying to get a really good framing of what's that problem state look like. It's not easy to do that. I don't blame people for not having it. You need to have acute awareness and insight on the typical customer situation, and most don't.
Bruce Scheer: We have to figure that out. You know, what's going on in their world? What's that problem state look like from their perspective? How do we make that look uglier? The
Mike Wilkinson: uglier, the better.
Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. I got that from one of my clients at Informatica, Mike. He called it the big ugly. How do we paint that picture? So I'll show you a quick, example of the big ugly. And for our listening audience, I'll describe it for you. The big ugly, I was asked to work with a group in McKesson, and they had a beautiful technology platform, which would really streamline communications and document flow within hospitals. And so we created a big ugly visual of what communications and document flows look like in a hospital. And if you could envision with me, it's a big, hairy spaghetti ball and just this nasty amorphous looking thing zigzagging and dead ends and how information flows normally in a hospital with all the stakeholders.
Bruce Scheer: You know, we painted a picture of stakeholders around that and labeled them and described what their thought bubbles would be, which weren't good. There were lots of WTFs and everything else. Most of those stop bubbles were filled with swear words. And that really treated a picture of the ugly communication flows and mess that your typical hospital was facing. And when we showed that visual to the stakeholders in the hospital, we got really horrible responses from them, which was a good thing, where they were, like, going, yeah, that's us, and we hate it, and could really identify with that as we showcased it. And the way we showcased or we spotlighted that problem was we helped them see something a little bit different than they normally experience. We helped increase the gravity of the pain just by illustrating the problem. Again, called the big ugly.
Bruce Scheer: So the other thing we did, Mike, is we created a contrasting visual of what life looks like with streamline communications and document flows. And if you could think of that with me as being the big beauty or the beautiful. And to quote another person in the industry, the values and the contrast, we were able to contrast the big ugly and the big beautiful in a way that would, of course, make people feel bad. The big ugly really spotlighting that problem, but also helping them feel awesome if they could envision that desired state, which we helped them do that by helping them literally visualizing it, painting a picture around that. So with that, those 2 push and pull types of techniques, that oh, my gosh. The solution group, if you would, within McKesson was wildly successful once we put this narrative in place. It increased the confidence of the revenue team because they had a story to tell, one that landed exceptionally well when they told it and really drove the right type of outcome for that revenue team, accelerated revenue growth by having this in place. Very, very powerful.
Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. I think the the real key for me at this is the scale of that difference, the contrast between the big ugly and the beautiful. Yeah. The further apart the 2 can be, the better.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. You've got it exactly right. And that's what we're trying to strive for. How can we do that pre post or return state, future state in a way that just really showcases that contrast and creeps at just this powerful gap between the woes of now versus the delight of the future if that problem goes away and we realize our outcome, just how much life is gonna be better. That's what we're trying to illustrate for the customer, and that's visualizing that narrative. And I rarely see this done well, Mike. Just absolutely rarely. Chances are they're a former client that's who's done this and tried to do it again.
Bruce Scheer: But when you've got it, it changes everything. It's very, very powerful, and it sets the backbone for all those subsequent buying conversations that you need to have so the customer can truly buy and realize the value that you're promising in that desired outcome. Yeah. Yep. So I thought what we could do, Mike, we've got an assessment that you can use for your own narrative, and it's off our website at valuepros.io. If you go to the resources tab drop down, you're gonna see a narrative assessment. And the beautiful thing about this assessment is if you have a narrative, you can assess it.
Bruce Scheer: And if you don't have one, you need to start. And then you can assess, hey. How's that great start? Is it working for you? And the reason we came up with this sizzles framework, Mike, is a great narrative. I like to equate it to a waiter walking into the dining room carrying sizzling fajitas. And every time that waiter walks in with sizzling fajitas, everybody turns. They wanna see it. They wanna see the smoke rising. They can hear the crackling.
Bruce Scheer: It just grabs the attention of the room when that waiter walks in holding it. And that's what I want our clients' narratives to be, that sizzling narrative where it just captures the attention, makes that initiative a priority across all the other boring priorities. This one's the most important. This is gonna move the dial the most because the narrative is so compelling. It's so compelling that it sizzles. And so with that, Mike, the sizzles is a framework. It's an anagram. Each letter stands for something.
Bruce Scheer: I'll quickly rip through this, but I encourage you to go to our website, check out the SSISLS assessment, and it's got a lot of definition, etcetera. You can buy my book as well if you're feeling kind and also wanna dig into this further as a helpful companion or reach out to us as well. But back to the sizzle framework, s stands for structure, and you need to follow this 5 part structure and have the proper cognitive flow around that. So that's the s. The I stands for insight. Is there insight in your narrative? And most decision makers, especially executives, they expect insight. If they don't have insight, if they don't learn anything new or see things in a new way after they meet with you, chances are that selling conversation didn't go very well, and they're gonna ghost you. They're not gonna return the call.
Bruce Scheer: You didn't give them anything that's really gonna foster change in their mind. So you need to have insight, and that takes a cute customer understanding. Next, you need to be zippy. Z in the and zippy means when you're talking to an executive, very often, there's a fast clock speed. They're executives for a reason. They're kinda special people, and, you need to match their pace. So we're not talking about death by PowerPoint, long PowerPoint presentation slide after slide after slide. Gosh. The best narratives we build are typically one slide.
Mike Wilkinson: Right there, Bruce. I think that applies to anybody. I think anybody who thinks that somebody's happy to sit down and watch 20 PowerPoint slides, that just doesn't happen.
Bruce Scheer: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I was working with 1 organization, a very large organization with letters, AWS. Their first call deck was 44 slides. And I'm like, okay. That ain't gonna that's no good. I was working with another client, and he proudly went from a multitude of slides to 10 slides. He said, I finally got it down to 10. I'm, like, going, great job. We're gonna get it down to 1 as part of our
Mike Wilkinson: I was never saying that. My client's too many.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. But when you do that, you can make your narrative more zippy. You can get through it faster.
Bruce Scheer: Sometimes we even make explainer videos for some sellers or off websites that get the narrative across and take 2, 2 and a half minutes that give that backbone and that fabric to build upon in those further selling conversations. Or you can kinda inch it out and have a two way dialogue with that executive, but you just wanna match that pace. That's what we mean by zippy. Zappy is the next z. So one of my buddies out in Asia, we like to talk about being an a state inducer, where your story is so good, that narrative, that it induces a new state. And it makes people feel uncomfortable emotionally, and it makes people feel excited when you talk about the outcomes. But, emotionally, you are changing their state, and that's what I call zappy. I'm zapping that buyer, and they're gonna feel differently and think differently as a result of that narrative.
Bruce Scheer: And then it's leading, especially as we talk about next steps like my brother did with that boat story. You lead that buyer to the promised land. What's the road map look like and the steps in that road map that we need to hold ourselves accountable to where you could realize that outcome and get rid of that? And then e stands for empathetic. Again, we talked about the narrative having the hero be the buyer. You're empathizing with their problem state. You're empathizing with the outcome state. That's kind of exciting. And then you're empathizing with them with their hesitations about the solution and and infusing confidence in move forward with your proof points, with the value justification, all the other things that need to go on place to help them be comfortable in moving forward.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. You got the end user. Then the final s in SIZL stands for sass. And I kinda got this one, Mike. We coined this as part of the SIZLs framework after my wife and I were watching a few episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. That whole series here in America, Mike, sadly, you haven't lived yet. I don't think you've seen it, but you should, and you can't unsee it. But the story line there is they go in and they do makeovers and make people go from looking kinda cruddy and provincial to look being dynamic and really in top of their game and completely confident.
Bruce Scheer: That's what they're trying to instill as part of their makeovers. And a a great narrative does that. It breathes new life. The buyers can feel that. It's got a certain degree of sass. It's got a certain degree of cool. And, gosh, back to that story with that chief commercial officer out in Dubai. Once we were done with his story, there was a certain degree of sass.
Bruce Scheer: They could talk about their heritage. They could talk about their investments. They could talk about what they had done as it relates to the hero of the story, the buyer. But the way they told their narrative had some sass. It was something that buyer hadn't heard before and something that was kind of dynamic and exciting. So that's the sizzles framework, Mike. And any observations before we round out?
Mike Wilkinson: No. I have to say, I love that sort of framework. I think it just helps to focus our minds as we're thinking through what it is we're trying to do. So, yeah, I think that's really great. And I absolutely would encourage people to go and take a
Bruce Scheer: look at the narrative assessment. So, Mike, yeah, let me show the narrative just for a little bit here. People can go to the website and check it out. It's actually online as a Google Sheet. But you've got all the dimensions of the sizzles framework, and you can score it individually if you'd like. Or if you wanna get, opinion of your colleagues, you can have a few people score your narrative and just see how you're doing against these 6 dimensions of the Sizzles framework. So you'll see all the definitions in here. And, also, we've got a nice little rubric for how to score.
Bruce Scheer: So how to give yourself a 1 through 5 against structure, for example. We've defined what a 1 is, a 2, is a 3, is a 4, is a 5. 5 means mastery, 1 means novice, but just where are we as you go ahead and score yourself across those dimensions. And then from there, we have recommendations for what you can do to improve your narrative. So if you're an individual value professional, we like to say value pro versus sales rep, but if you're a value pro, your organization's not supporting you in this. Please check out this assessment, grab the book, build your own narrative, and we'll be here as a backstop if you wanna reach out to us. If you're in a capacity to influence others, to enable others, I would encourage you to use the narrative, rate how you're doing on your different go to market narratives, and how the sales narrative's coming across for your sellers. Do they have the visualizations, etcetera? But go through this and and get your head around it.
Bruce Scheer: You might be sitting on a huge opportunity for accelerating your revenue growth by getting your story straight, by having a compelling sales narrative.
Mike Wilkinson: That one thing I can guarantee, Bruce, that I think you alluded to it really in a roundabout sort of way is if you get it right, you will definitely be in the minority.
Bruce Scheer: Yep. Oh, yeah. You'll sizzle and the others won't. Mike, this has been a fun one. What a great episode. Thanks so much for guiding us through and talking about just the power of being narrative ready, part of all the value dimensions we have as part of our value ready framework that we're helping people with.
Mike Wilkinson: Brilliant. It's been really good and really, really useful. Thank you, Mike. We'll talk
Bruce Scheer: to you on next one. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, that wraps up our discussion on getting narrative ready. I wanna thank Mike Wilkinson for sharing his invaluable insights and expertise. And remember, a great sales narrative can be a game changer for your business. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with your college and check out our website at valuepros.io for more resources, including our sizzles narrative assessment. Until next time, this is Bruce Scheer reminding you to keep sharpening your value skills and crafting those sizzling narratives.
Bruce Scheer: Thanks for watching on YouTube and listening on your favorite podcast player to the ValuePros Show.
