• by Neil Rosen , April 9, 2013

In his book All Marketers Are Liars, marketing guru Seth Godin emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a successful marketing strategy. And, to my mind, he’s absolutely right. As a former teacher and a current-day online marketer, I know exactly how important it is to frame a customer’s need in the context of a story—and then to cast the solution as the happy conclusion to that story.

And it’s not just me. Time after time, you’ve probably heard sales and marketing directors asking, “What is the story we’re trying to tell here?” They don’t mean “story” in the sense of telling a lie (as in “what kind of story are you selling me?”): they mean it in the purest sense—that there is something that needs to be communicated, and the best mode of communication is storytelling.

From the Epic of Gilgamesh—the earliest extant human communication, a hero’s journey—onward, humanity has loved a good story. Great sales campaigns know this, as do great salespeople. And as anyone who watches specific series on television knows, an ongoing story told week by week is enthralling, captivating, even addictive. A series is a story told in installments. Email offers the same opportunity to tell the story in continuous installments.

There is a caveat. “Email marketers don't have a prayer to tell a story,” Godin says, “unless they tell it in advance, in another medium, before they get permission. Otherwise, it quickly becomes spam. The best email marketing starts with a foundation, like Amazon, and uses the email to drip the story, to have it gradually unfold.” 

So storytelling is a great sales and marketing tool, and email may be the best way to tell it. But does storytelling have something to offer customer relationship management?

I’d suggest that it does. At its most fundamental, storytelling makes content interesting, understandable, and easily accessible—three tenets of good CRM. No matter what it is that you’re marketing, you want to make the consumer’s experience as easy and as pleasant as possible. You want to engage them as prospects (as Godin said above, by getting their interest even before they become customers) and enable them to want to become customers; and once they’re regular consumers, you want to make sure that they don’t have obstacles in their way, that they feel good about dealing with you.

Good CRM, like a good story, is partially based on emotion. Emotion is what fixes something in our memories, both individual and collective. Everyone remembers where they were, for example, on 9/11: the sheer emotion of the event stamped its presence in most people’s psyches. People remember things about their best friend in grade school, their favorite job, their wedding day. They also remember a time when they had a particularly good or a particularly bad customer experience with a brand or company—because their emotions got involved.

So telling the story of your company’s product or service needs to appeal to the emotions of your prospects and customers, and preferably on the positive side.

And an ongoing customer relationship calls for an ongoing story. In Social CRM for Dummies, the authors note that:

“Customers want to consume their marketing content using games, videos, funny tweets, and so on. What they don’t want is the dry, dull corporate-speak that populated the web in the early days. The competition is fierce, so all eyes turned to Hollywood. Content creators realized they had more in common with the storytelling of Walt Disney than the dull documents of Dow Jones.”

Make your CRM storytelling fun! Include the stories of the customers themselves: there are few people who don’t like to see themselves in electronic print, and they’re going to be predisposed to think well of a company that clearly thinks well of them. 

Remember that, at the end of the day, customers aren’t buying a product or service from you. They’re buying your solution to their problem. So framing that problem and the route to that solution in a compelling way isn’t just going to help you with sales, it’s going to help you establish and maintain a bond with your customers, because you’re also framing it as you’re in this together. And that’s excellent CRM by anyone’s standards!