Do you use stories in your marketing or sales?

Let me tell you a story. When I was growing up I was pretty good at school. Except there was one subject I struggled with. Do you know what subject that was? It was biology. It wasn’t because it was necessarily hard, it was because I thought it was irrelevant and boring. At least the class I took was boring.

Here’s why. Every day we had old Mrs. Walker ramble on about tape worms and plankton and sponges and carbon and plants and…you get the idea. And the REAL problem was there was a girl that sat across from me at a different lab table and she was cute. And she caught my “attention.” Her name was Julie and Julie had a cute little pony tail that waived at me all the time. And this pony tail caught my attention and distracted me from all the plankton and tape worms and sponges and…you get the idea. And I NEVER had the guts to go up and talk to her. I was a wimp.

Oh yeah, and another problem was that my grade wasn’t coming along too well in that class. So, between me being a chicken and my grade sagging lets just say that biology was not my favorite class…yeah, I liked GOING, but every day when I would walk past without talking to her I would kick myself….until James showed up.

James was a new kid from out of town. He came from Ohio and as luck would have it, the teacher reassigned him in MY space, and moved me right next to Julie. Whoo boy… Now, I have no idea why this happened but I wasn’t about to question any higher power–I was just going to thank that higher power.

But the problem was I still chicken. So what happened next? Well, Julie and I had to become lab partners. She was very smart and I didn’t come across as Mr. Beaker so she kind of took the lead in biology class. After about a week of this happening I started gaining confidence and then actually started to feel comfortable around her.

Well, one day I asked Julie how she was so good at biology and I’ll never forget what she told me. She explained that the way she was able to keep everything straight and what everything did was to form it into a …… a story. She had little characters in her mind in the role of the story, who did what, and how the tapeworms and plankton, and sponges and all that were essential to life. She explained it to me and related it to me and how it all worked together. She explained aspects of human biology and how the cells and mitochondria worked together…it really was amazing. And my grades started to get a lot better because I could visualize the story when I was taking the tests.

Now you want to know the most amazing part? Here it is. About a week after I started to feel comfortable Julie smiled at me really big and said she had noticed a “change in me.” Well, I was a bit flustered at first but I regained my composure and asked her what she thought. And she said (I kid you not)… , “Well Matt, to be honest…I was kind of intimidated by you at first. You were so quiet…I didn’t think you liked me. But I guess you are kind of shy like I am sometimes. It has been good to get to know you.”