Building a Storyteller Competency

tl:dr; Crypto storytelling will be a marketing differentiator that impacts a project’s chance for success. It will be worthwhile for aspiring crypto-marketers to develop the skill.

A few years ago, I was recruited for a CMO job at a business unit of one of the top banks in the US. Intrigued, I figured I would go through the process to learn how it worked.

The job description- I kid you not- was 6 pages long.

I remember reading it and saying to the recruiter, “you know, if you can find someone who can do all of these things, you should hire that person immediately.”

Marketing is not one discipline. It’s many, many, many disciplines.

Kind of like basketball or any sport. You can be a great shooter, a great ball handler, a great defender, a great rebounder, etc., but it’s difficult to be great at all of them.

It’s important to know what you are gifted at and work at that diligently. For me, when it comes to marketing, I think it’s content (particularly writing) and community (particularly via events and social media).

Then there are things where you have no natural talent.

For me, it’s a design aesthetic and the visual representation of the brand. I’ve worked really hard to move it from the point where it’s a liability (which it was a few years ago) to a point where it doesn’t hurt the project or the team.

You don’t want a “Hack a Shaq” situation.

Then there are things that you are either ok or have some potential for doing well. When you figure those out, that’s an opportunity to “build a more complete game.” It requires you to get out of your comfort zone and try new things.

I had this experience at Sprinklr around leadership of marketing teams and thanks to some great coaches and very understanding direct reports, achieved some growth (still more to come).

The two I am focused on now are Strategy and Storytelling.

I’ll leave strategy for another post, but as I shared in the Decentralized Marketing Organization (and subsequent posts), the need for powerful storytelling is even more acute in a crypto-based network because of the relatively low switching costs that the user/customer faces.

A good story will drive an emotional connection with the brand, hopefully elevating someone from a mere passerby (over time) to a passionate evangelist of the brand, becoming a storyteller herself.

So, a brand’s story must both engage the target audience but also, and equally important, be told in a way that the individual can retell it to others, thus creating a ripple (uh, sorry, domino) effect and generating additional ROI.

This was the essence of Made To Stick, still one of my favorite books and a member of the NSM Book Hall of Fame.

Nevertheless, I’ve struggled with corporate storytelling, though to this day, I’m still proud of the first version of our Sprinklr brand story that we created.

I’m relatively adept at telling my own story and stories that have happened to me, but the real value that I see is for any marketer, but particularly a crypto-marketer, is to be able to work with a client or for their company and craft a narrative that really works.

Too bad, it’s not easy.

That’s probably why, when you search “business storytelling” on Amazon, you get 99 pages of results.

Clearly, I’m not alone in this struggle.

But, I’m determined to get better at it and have been reading a number of books on the topic recently including:

• Story Driven: You don’t need to compete when you know who you are by Bernadette Jiwa. [Solid and I also love her blog]
• Storynomics by Robert McKee. [Medium quality]
• The Storyteller’s Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch on and Others Don’t by Carmine Gallo [Some good ideas]
• Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller. [I thought this one was terrible]
• Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks. [Shows promise]

I’ve read a bunch of others over the years as well and am committed to building this skill set. My pal, Matthew Woodget has a company devoted just to this craft called Go Narrative.

Humans have always used stories to communicate. It’s the basis of community, religions, and many more movements.

Crypto-economies are not just dispassionate places for transactions.

I believe they will be groups of people who share like-minded views of the world (like VeganCoin) and align around values and beliefs, as we have discussed here, here, and here.

Those values and beliefs will be transmitted by members who benefit both philosophically and economically by recruiting new members. Those new members will be most effectively convinced that a given community aligns with their pre-existing worldview through stories.

Powerful stories, consistently re-told by motivated members feels like it will be fairly important for long-term success of crypto-projects.