Over at Ford Motor Company, all sorts of great stuff is going on – first and foremost, the car company that started an industry made a profit for the first quarter of 2008. This is good news indeed for Ford, who has seen its revenues slide, and its losses slide further, every year in the 21st century.

Ford is probably the most emblematic American company of the 20th century. Henry Ford created the assembly line, offered profit-sharing to his workers, reduced shift hours to eight (from nine), and turned the US, and the world, into car nuts.

That story – the story of Ford’s dominance in the auto industry – rolled on like thunder, until the sun of the rising Japanese auto industry started casting a shadow over Detroit in the ’70s.

Since then, Japan has risen to dominate the market in every sector but trucks, with Ford and the rest of Detroit struggling to compete.

A story coming out of Dearborn – by way of Vegas – gives some real hope to Ford fans, and investors, in what feels like the nick of time.

James D. Farley, the marketing whiz-kid who put Toyota’s Scion line on the map, who understands that the voice of the customer must be part of the story any company tells – Ford stole him away from Toyota. And he’s determined to make Ford’s story a 21st century success story.

Farley’s dealing with an old-world corporate culture at Ford, and it looks like the new sheriff in town is making some real progress. Ford’s ‘Drive One’ ad campaign was created after Farley spent time with dealers, listening to their passion for Ford’s products – asking people to ‘drive one’, to see what Ford has to offer, is storytelling at its simplest and most effective.

“We needed a transactional campaign where the product speaks for
itself,” said Mr. Farley. “I mean, don’t believe us. Let the product
speak to you.”

That’s a quote from a NY Times piece on Farley, which tells the full story on his Ford story so far. The NYT piece concludes with this:

“What I’m doing at Ford is in one sense a dream come true,” he finally
said. “But it’s also the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Do I feel
comfortable? Absolutely not. Do I try my best? Yes.”

All enterprise, from the behemoth to the basement start-up, needs to look long and hard at the story it’s telling. If the story isn’t working, if it doesn’t reflect reality, if it doesn’t connect with your team and your customers – you need to start telling a better story.

Discovering what that new story needs to be starts within, with what the enterprise is telling itself. Once that story is working, the story you need to tell your customers starts to tell itself.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

Retail.

Look at it this way: the current crop of presidential candidates are marketing themselves wide, via the national news media. They’re also marketing themselves locally (particularly in Pennsylvania, where I am very glad I do not live this month), tailoring their messages to local concerns. National political messaging, tailored to a locality-based group of voters, requires that the story be tweaked to make it fully resonant with the target audience.

Local = retail.

If you’re a company with national presence – say, for example, you’re Microsoft, with a global presence – it is, of course, important that you tell a consistent, authentic story to your world-wide marketplace. For Microsoft, that’s always been some version of ‘we’ve got what you need’. As a company that currently produces what many people believe is the only OS available (they’re wrong, but Bill Gates isn’t going to tell them that, is he?), they’ve built a pretty impressive market presence and penetration.

However, what – and who – really sells their products? Their partners. Those partners are the engine that really drives the company’s continued presence, and expansion. Those partners tell the MS story, but they also must tell one of their own, developing their own relationships and trust with the customers they serve with MS products and services.

Retail, baby.

Some retail is purely transactional, like MickeyD’s and BK. If you hit a drive-thru, you aren’t looking for a relationship with the store. You just want a #5 combo, and you know just where to get it. If you’re in a transactional business, you still have to tell a story: that your customer can rely on getting exactly what they want, when they want it, at the price that they want to pay.

Still retail. Still tellin’ a story.

I read a piece in Business Week Online yesterday that says that if your sales are stuck, you must use a script. I say that’s a crock. Scripts are for cold-calls, and if you’re doing cold-calls you’re spinning your wheels. Even if you’re in a transactional business, cold-calls are a waste of time.

Transaction-based business – other than stuff like the drive thrus, and when was the last time you got a cold-call from MickeyD’s? – has, for the most part, moved to the Web. Those businesses still use cold-calls, much  of which winds up in your spam folder, or as a delete-after-hearing-one-sentence voicemail.

If you’re looking to sell products or services, and retain those customers, you have to build a relationship with them. One of the best ways to do that is sharing stories: theirs will reveal the problems they have that you can solve, yours will tell them that you’ve got what they need. Using this approach, you’ll build trust in your prospects, and loyalty in your customers.

A number of whom will become the storied ‘raving fans’ – also known as ‘referral machines’.

So, take the retail approach, even if you’re selling globally. Build relationships by telling authentic stories: about why you do what you do, the problems you solve, why solving those problems makes your day worth living.

All business is retail.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

What if your story never gets told?

Impossible, you say? What if you were a woman in the 17th, or even the early 20th, century? What if you were black, in the South, in 1930? Or black in the projects in the South Bronx, or the South Side of Chicago, today?

This question has been rolling around in my head for a while, and became a sharper internal inquiry after hearing a lecture this last Saturday night by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard history professor and editor of the first encyclopedia of African and African-American history, the Encyclopedia Africana.

The stories in that 2.5 million word encyclopedia are, in large part, being told for the first time outside the small family, church, civic, and cultural circles that lived them. How can an entire race of people take their full measure of place in the world without a full understanding of the fullness of their history? I don’t think they can, and I also think that’s one of the legacies of that great American original sin: slavery.

That a scholar of the repute and reach of Dr. Gates has pulled off an achievement that W.E.B. DuBois conceived of in 1909 is good news, for every person in the U.S. Children who learn a full picture of history have a better chance of finding their way, and their place, in the world. The current state of race politics aside, failure to educate all our children is a guarantee of both economic havoc and electoral ignorance.

Long ago and far away, I was a young grade-schooler who learned that women and people of color weren’t as important as dead white guys. I carried that with me until college, and started to break free as women’s history began to bubble up from the zeitgeist, and every mom’s kaffee klatsch from coast to coast became a consciousness-raising group.

Black history had a zeitgeist moment at the same time, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, yet some of the loudest voices exhorting change muffled their message with political overkill. Shirley Chisholm’s famous epigram, “I’d rather be black than a woman”, became less and less relevant in the following decades, as women – white, black, and brown – rose to the highest ranks in public and private commerce. Women reaped greater lasting benefits from the social change of the ’60s than did African-Americans, and I think that outcome can be laid directly at the feet of a lack of knowledge of the breadth and depth of their own history.

Dr. Gates made several points in his lecture Saturday at the Richmond Forum that black culture must re-embrace being “people of the book” – the keepin’-it-real, if-you-get-good-grades-you’re-an-Oreo embrace of ignorance that’s rampant in black youth culture now is antithetical to any idea of having a voice in the larger world. The second part of that sentence is mine, not Dr. Gates’, but I think if you asked him, he’d agree.

Today, Barack Obama made what might just be an historic speech on the racial divide in America, how it’s affected and affecting politics – and society at large – and how he wants to influence the national conversation on race, which is over two centuries overdue.

Whatever your politics, you have to welcome the fact that someone with some real experience of the issue has opened the discussion while the whole world was literally watching.

Two centuries late, we’ve all got a lot to discuss.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

The word “story” and the word “lie” – or, less in-your-face, “prevaricate” – are often thought to be synonymous.

They often ARE synonymous.

The marketing & advertising world is full of all sorts of examples: skin lightening creams; all the, um, “enhancement” products for one’s “masculinity” that keep spammers in business; bait-and-switch electronics ads in local papers; anything that says “new & improved”; decades of “cigarettes won’t hurt you” ads. The list is almost endless.

This isn’t a recent phenomenon, either – H.G. Wells famously remarked, “all advertising is legalized lying.”

Given the perception that all marketers are liars (a shout-out to one of the smartest dudes on the planet, Seth Godin), what’s a poor marketer to do?

Here’s a revolutionary idea: tell the truth. It will set you, and your customers, free.

This will have a payoff in traditional marketing. And it will be a huge plus in online/social media marketing campaigns, because that’s where the truth will out in a NY nano-second.

SXSWi, the interactive media conference that’s part of the annual South X SouthWest festival, went so far as to offer up awards for the worst social media campaigns of the year, Suxorz 2007. Some of the nominees?

• Wal-Mart, for the heartwarming Jim & Laura/Wal-Marting Across America blog, written by a couple who was criss-crossing the country, blogging tales from the road and spending their nights in their RV in Wal-Mart parking lots. A great idea, full of great stories of the great folks who work at Wal-Mart. Problem? Wal-Mart paid Jim (a professional photog) & Laura (a freelance writer). So much for truth in heartwarming…
• HP, who paid a Chicago mom $1000 to have her kids smash a digital camera with a hammer, on video, because “it wasn’t an HP camera”, and post it to her blog. Hey, I’d love it if someone offered ME some cold, hard chedda for blog-space…but isn’t that called “advertising”? And shouldn’t it be labeled, um, “advertising”?
• Revenge of Rahodeb. “Rahodeb” is apparently a handle used for several years by Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey on Yahoo Finance to post praise for Whole Foods (and its CEO), and heap invective on a competitor, Wild Oats. And I thought vegans were, like, non-aggressive, dude…

There were others, including Molson Brewery for a lame attempt at a Facebook tie-in and Rudy Giuliani for starting a MySpace page for his campaign that unfortunately didn’t allow anyone to ‘friend’ him (um, Rudy – that’s the whole POINT of MySpace, buddy. BUDDIES.)

The winner? HP for the smash-mom pay-for-post big fat paid lie.

Bottom line? When you work on what story to tell, don’t work too hard. Make it real, make it simple…and make it TRUE. The whole world literally IS watching.

Just ask Elliot Spitzer.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

I’ve been hammering away at this storytelling thing for quite some time, and you might be asking yourself by now why I think it’s so important.

Good question.

Best answer? Stories are how we – and by ‘we’ I mean humans – connect with and make sense out of the world around us, and what’s happening in it. Stories are how we form connections with our friends, our families, our colleagues, even our competitors.

That connection-forming piece is why the 20th century selling approach called A-B-C – “Always Be Closing” – doesn’t work very well in our 21st century world.

First, people are exhausted by all the relentless commercial messages pounding away at them all day, every day. If you’re selling something, you want to get the attention of the folks you want to sell to. Grabbing attention by annoying the crap out of them might seem appealing, and it can work if you’re looking for high-volume sales of low-cost items. However, if you’re selling high-cost products or services, you need to get and KEEP attention by sharing a story with your prospective customers that tells them you’ve got something they need.

Second, all that pounding away at sales resistance that marks the old-school approach just won’t work on 21st century buyers. They’ve seen it before, and they hate it. They see you coming, and fade into the woodwork. Call them, email them, send them your newsletter – you can even buttonhole ’em at a business event and give ’em your best pitch. They won’t catch it, and likely stopped listening within the first 15 seconds.

Sales is a seduction. You can’t shake someone’s hand and then shove ’em in the bedroom, unless you’re looking for a felony conviction. You have to build trust and intimacy before getting them to the point where they’ll put out. Same with selling – build a relationship first. Gain trust, really show value. Tell a story that demonstrates your value, that connects with your prospect’s world-view, that says you have the answer to their business prayers.

This will, of course, require some work on your part – you have to find out what your prospect’s world-view IS, and determine if you could fit into it. Also, you have to look at what you’re offering, and determine if it does indeed have value to that prospect, or if you’re just A-B-C-ing yourself into oblivion. Literally.

Bottom line? You cannot be all things to all people. What value DO you bring? Who would most benefit from that value offering? What’s the most authentic story that connects those two dots?

Like I said, think of it as a seduction – of someone you really feel a connection to. That’s not something you can pull off quick. Well, you can pull off their clothes quick, but that might not have the desired results. You want to solidify that connection, form a real bond. One that will last longer than a one-sale-stand.

So – be like Sheherazade, the heroine of Thousand and One Nights who saved her life by telling stories. Spin a tale that captivates and connects. That’s real selling magic.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

I’ve hit the big-time. I’m on YouTube.

Several moments from my How To Use Improv Skills To Be Brilliant In The Moment workshop.

I was highly entertained this week by the news that Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO)> has eaten up – literally – Emeril Lagasse.

No, she didn’t go at him with a knife and fork. She did, however, buy his brand and image, adding a second personality – and story – with at least as much power as her own to her brand stable. She’s collected a number of satellites over the last few year, but Emeril is his own planet.

Love her or hate her (I’m not saying what camp I fall into, but if you’re good at reading between the lines, you might be able to guess), you have to give Martha a lot of credit for being pretty darn indefatigable. Not everyone would be able to bounce back from a very public smack-down that wound up smacking one into a federal pen.

Martha has had some rough patches since she got sprung, but her company found itself in the black again in 2007 for the first time since she wound up in the pen. Now, adding another big, bright, shiny planet to her universe could wind up putting her back into the raking-it-in column.

Provided, of course, she and Emeril blend well, story-wise.

What’s that? You say that since they’re both comfortable in the kitchen, they should get along like, well, two peas in cream sauce? If you cook, you know how dangerous it can be to share your kitchen with anyone, even your best friend. If you and your new BFF have strong personalities and equally strong stories, there can be souffles fallin’ all over the place.

You might end up with the most stellar dinner the world has ever seen…or it could all end in tears. And lawyers.

In my David & Goliath post earlier this week, I talked about how both sides of that equation need to know what story to tell to their market, and how important it is for both the big guys and the little guys to be consistent and authentic. In the Martha + Emeril story, this could prove a challenge.

Emeril and Martha both tell consistent stories. In a nutshell: “Kick it up a notch! Pig fat rules!” and “Mine is better.”

On the authenticity scale, I give Emeril more points than I do Martha, because her persona and story seem to be more calculatedly crafted. Emeril is no dope, and from the beginning of the rise of his empire he’s worked hard to appear both knowledgeable and approachable. Martha’s iron persona brooks no sweat, minimal exuberance, and very little passion.

I wonder if Martha will be foolish enough to try to manage or recast Emeril’s highly successful formula, or if she’ll be savvy enough to let him continue to tell his own story.

I don’t think Martha’s any kind of fool.

Another BMIK (big man in the kitchen), Anthony Bourdain, weighed in on this topic over at Michael Ruhlman’s blog the other day…and I guess the Food Network has waved a wand and made Ruhlman pull the post. Too bad, because it was one of the funniest – and most laceratingly truthful – stream of consciousness rants I’ve read in a long time.

Bourdain, who is not known for his lukewarm opinions, is no fan of Emeril’s. Or Martha’s. He did express concern for Mr. Lagasse in this equation, though.

So, stay tuned. To the Food Network. If you can stand it. If not, head on over to the Travel Channel for No Reservations. One of the best shows on television, at least in this writer’s humble opinion.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

When you’re speaking to a group – of two or two hundred – can you hold their attention? With the average adult attention span at 5 to 7 minutes (and falling), this is a challenge.

Personally, I blame the microwave oven – until we stood in front of a countdown clock, waiting for food, who realized how long a minute really could be?

When you talk to your project team, or your board of directors, or a room full of potential customers, you need to be able to get your point across quickly.

You have an hour’s worth of material in your sales presentation? Present it it all in one go, and you’ll probably find out that your audience has embraced the idea that a nap during the day is a good idea. Or they’ll be checking email under the table after about ten minutes.

If you have a lot of information to share, you need to break it up into bite-sized chunks, with plenty of opportunities for interaction with your audience. After you’ve shared your first point, engage someone in the audience in a short exchange about what you just said. This makes your audience feel like active participants instead of passive listeners.

If you’re speaking to a large group – over a hundred – work some video into your presentation. A demo of your product, done by a real live human. Testimonials from customers. Input from a colleague who is a key player, but wasn’t able to be in the room with you. Keep these short, too.

Think of it as 60-second storytelling.

Even if you have a huge amount of information you want to share, you must make it easily digestible for your audience. Would you be able to absorb a solid hour of Power Point? I’d run screaming from the room after about ten minutes – or I’d want to. I doubt that’s the effect you’re going for with that hour-long progress report you’re preparing for your board.

Break your material down. What are the major points you’re trying to make? What’s the essential story behind each of them? And, most important, why does your audience care how that story turns out?

With those elements identified, turn each of your major points into 60-second stories, with interaction time between each of them for the audience to engage with you about the information you just shared.

You’ll notice two things with this approach: first, it will be easier for you to organize and deliver your message; second, your audience will be paying attention.

The 60-Second Storytelling approach will guarantee win-win for you, and for the people you present to. You’ll get your point across, and understood.

They’ll gain your knowledge…and think you’re a pretty terrific speaker.