Authentic Marketing Podcast

Introduction

To make the story interesting, focus on your hero's problem.

Problems are where your story begins. When a customer has a problem, you have something you can solve.

In this second episode of our build-your-own story sprints, Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber continue our deep dive into storytelling and see how you can uncover and define the problem that your customers struggle with in just 15 minutes.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

wantauthentic.com/brandscript

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Join marketing experts Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber on Authentic Marketing, the biweekly podcast that provides proven marketing tips to improve your marketing efforts and help your business grow.

Subscribe to our biweekly episodes dropping Friday on your favourite podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other.

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Episode Transcript

Problems are where your story begins. When a customer has a problem, you have something to solve. In this, the second episode of our build your own story. We continue our deep dive into storytelling and see how you can uncover and define the problem that your customers struggle with in just 15 minutes. So let's get started. Hi there, I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and welcome back to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you create marketing that works. So in this special season, we've been going through the whole of our storytelling process, and we've been looking at each of the individual steps. So if you joined us last time, we learned how to identify the main character in the story. So we looked at the hero within the story. But in order to make a story interesting, we need a little bit more than the hero. The hero, at some point in time, has to find something that they're struggling with, something that stops them achieving what they want. You know, if every hero just got what they wanted, you know, the guy gets the girl straight away in there, the bank robber gets the money out of the bank, it would be a bit of a boring film. And so what we need is we need a problem. And that's really the thing that gets the story started. So today on today's episode, we're going to focus on the problem and we're going to talk about the problem as it relates to your brand story. So as it relates to your company and to your specific hero. So as always with us here, we've got Daniel. Hi there, Daniel. So yeah, let's start about looking at the problem. So maybe, yeah, Daniel, just a quick question to you. I mean, maybe you can give me an example, you know, the problem that you solve. What do you do for your job, basically?

Well, Simon, I solve a lot of problems every day.

I'm sure you do.

No, what I do is I help businesses get new leads, and then I help them to turn those leads into new customers.

Mm hmm. Okay. So I would say there, you know, what we're looking for really is a problem here. And yeah, you talked about what you help them to do in a lot of the ways. And I think this is actually a really good point, because I see a lot of customers that I work with going through a similar sort of, you know, exercise in their own mind. You know, everybody's used to talking about what we do, and it's a very different set to actually start talking about the problem first. So to give you a hint, to give you a clue, maybe try doing the same exercise again, but instead of starting off with, I help my customers to do this, try thinking about starting the sentence with the problem that I solve for my customers is, or something like that. You know, the problem is, see if that helps you.

All right. Let's give that a try. The problem is that my customers don't have enough customers And I help them get more customers

Your problem your customers don't have enough customers and then you help them get customers. Okay,

exactly

So I think that's getting much closer. So the problem is that your customers can't find Customers your customers can't find leads or something like that. Yeah, what you're saying And I think that's starting to get much more down to it. So the problem is the problem that your customers are feeling is that, yeah, they can't get customers. And that's the thing that we're looking for with our business problem. If you're a marketing industry, yeah, maybe you're helping your customers can't get enough leads. They're having problems getting leads, or maybe the problem, you could word it in a slightly different way. They might not know how to sell, they might not understand marketing best practices or something like that. So you can word the problem in different ways that sounds a little bit more interesting rather than just that they can't get customers in there. So again, for other, Industries we talked in the last episode about gardening, for example, and we talked about the hero wanting their garden to look pretty, you know, wanting to be attractive. And then the problem that they might have is, well, maybe the problem is if they've got a big garden and they don't have the necessary machinery, they don't have a big mower or something like that. So they don't have the necessary equipment to maintain their garden. If it's a small garden, maybe they're lacking the knowledge, they don't have the knowledge to decide which plants to use to put onto a small balcony garden, because when they've done that in the past, all the plants have died. So, that's the sort of thing I think that you want to think about there, you know, the problem is you don't have the knowledge in here, or the problem is you don't have the experience or the tools or those sorts of things.

Okay, so what you were talking about is that there are two different types of problems?

Yeah, um, I suppose you could look at it that way as well, yes, so what you have is, a lot of people come to me and say they've got multiple different problems that they solve, which is true, but the thing is, usually what there is is one big problem that people solve. So in the case of our business, for example, the big problem that people typically have is that they just are unable to inspire their audience, you know, that's the big problem. But actually that big problem breaks down into a set of small problems. The small problems might just be, as you said, they can't get enough leads. Or the small problem might be that they can't sell things and sales are taking forever. Or the small problem could be that people websites. They've got all the forms there and they've got adverts there, but they're not filling them in. So these are what I would call internal problems. And so that's the next section in the brand script to really think about, you know, is to think about the external problem. That's the big problem that your business solves. And then think about the underlying pains that that causes, you know, what are the symptoms of that problem? That would be the way I would think about describing that. So does that help you think about those, those sort of internal problems there?

So, internal problems. You're saying there are external and internal problems, and the internal problems are the smaller problems, and the external problem is the bigger issue.

Almost. I would say that if you think of it like going to the doctors, when you go to the doctors, you go to the doctors and you say, I've got a headache. Now that's a problem to you. I've got a sore throat. I've got a cough. I've got a backache. I've got no energy. You know, they're all problems. Mm hmm. But actually, they're symptoms of the big problem and the big problem may be that you've got pneumonia and you need to go to the hospital or something. So the same thing applies with the business. Basically, there are symptoms that people might have, like, yes, I don't get enough leads. People aren't filling in my web forms. Sales are taking ages. People aren't responding to my emails. All of those things are symptoms. Or what we call here internal problems as part of the brand script. But the big problem is, you know, that's the actual illness. So in your case, the illness is, you know, you've got all these symptoms and the illnesses, you've got pneumonia.

I understand. Yes. I get what you're saying. So let's say my customer is someone that has to track the time, the work time of his employees manually, then his internal problem is that he should be spending time on strategic tasks that involve more planning stuff, which would increase efficiency in all processes.

Yeah, I think you're going beyond the internal problem there. I think, think smaller.

Smaller.

Yeah. So I think if you're talking about internal problems for time tracking in there, the internal problems could be the fact that it's taking your staff too long to fill in their time, that people aren't filling in their time because they have to do it manually. People are putting inaccurate times into the system. Those might be internal problems. And the external problem might be that you don't have an effective way of tracking time automatically.

Okay. Okay. All right. That makes sense.

So I think just going back to the brand script idea, there's two other things that we mentioned on the brand script that I think are worth talking through briefly here. One is the philosophical problem and the other is the villain. So let's take a quick start with the villain. Maybe you can give us an example, Daniel, of a villain that you would see coming into these sorts of conversations typically when we're talking with customers, you know, who would be the villain?

The villain is always someone. Who doesn't like the idea of the hero,

you know, someone that's getting in the way of the hero. Yeah. Yes,

like if the hero knows what the solution to his problem could be, it is typically someone who says, No, you're not right. That's not the solution to that problem or we don't need that. Yeah, that could be someone internal, you know, working for the same company. Or that could be someone external, like a competitive company, you know?

Yeah, I think they're both good examples. So a couple of examples of villains that you might see appearing on your brand scripts. Uh, competitors in there, you know, if you're selling IT solutions, the villain may be Microsoft or an IT manager that will only deploy Microsoft products. That would be your villain. If you're trying to do something a little bit more creative in your organization, the villain might be the CEO or somebody else in your organization that's blocking your ideas because they don't understand the value that they're going to get out of it. So, the idea of the villain in our brand script is it's trying to identify roadblocks in your sales process. You know, who's going to get in the way of the sales? And ultimately, what we want to do with the villain is we want to be able to highlight the villain and say, Okay, Microsoft is our villain. In this case, let's come up with some good arguments. So when we're talking to our hero, we can give them some arguments that says this is why You know, Microsoft shouldn't be used, for example, or this is how you're going to sell to your CFO because they're going to get around this, or this is how you're going to apply to some regulation that might be the villain in your story.

Yes, and, uh, you were also talking about the philosophical problem.

Yes, exactly, that's the other one there. Yeah, so any examples of that?

A philosophical problem?

Mm

hmm. Well, philosophical problem could be that if the hero doesn't get what he needs, then the whole world will collapse.

That could be, I mean, evil should never triumph over good, something like that. That would be an example of a philosophical statement, certainly a philosophical problem. Some examples of things that you should put into here, or some cues that you can use when you're filling out this philosophical problem section. Think about using the words ought to or should have to, or ought not to or shouldn't have to, depending on which way you're arguing it, within your phrase. So Some examples should be, you know, staff should never have to spend time filling out timesheets or staff shouldn't have to waste their day filling out timesheets. That might be a philosophical problem relating to somebody selling timesheet software. You should always have the information you need to make decisions accurately. You know, that might be something related to some analytical software or data management software, you know, turning it around saying you should have to have something rather than you shouldn't have to. So those would be a couple of examples that you can use for philosophical problems in there. The reason I include philosophical problems as part of the story is, I think, philosophical problems, they're a way of wording stuff that really gets people thinking about this. Again, it's something that's really, it's quite empathetic very often, these philosophical problems. You can really get people to feel or to understand that you feel their pain if you use this sort of philosophical problem way of wording things. So if you say you should or shouldn't have to do stuff, people really sort of understand you and empathize with you much more and you get people on board very easily.

I understand. The philosophical problem is, uh, sounds logical.

Yep.

Yeah.

Good. Okay. So I think that's probably everything that we've got on the brand script for today sorted out. That gives us the problem section. So as a reminder, your task for today in your 15 minutes, I'd like you to fill out the problem section of your brand script earlier on. If you didn't download that, you can go to wantauthentic. com brand script, and you'll find the brand script there. And yeah, you can go back, of course, and listen to the conversation Daniel and I have had, and hopefully that gives you some clues as to how to fill out each of those sections. So you want to think about, you know, the challenge that you've got, the main challenge that your hero has, and the internal struggles that they're going through. They're the main things. I would tell you that from our experience, this is probably the hardest section of the brand script to get right. It's where we spend most time going through with companies to do this. So your 15 minutes may well turn into an hour quite easily here, especially if you're doing this as part of an exercise with a broader team. But it's really worthwhile spending the time to get right because this is what's going to actually impact your sales to customers more than anything else. I think in the whole scripting process, of course, if you're having problems and you'd want to help creating the brand script, or you want to test your ideas with other people, you can do that in a safe environment within our authentic marketing or authentic engagement coaching community. So you can just go to wantauthentic. com and then click on the coaching menu at the top and you can join myself, uh, Daniel and a group of other sort of like minded small business owners and founders there that, you know, just helping each other out, really helping each other to solve communication problems and to grow their businesses. So that's all for today's episode. Thanks for joining us. And yeah, if this has been useful for you or you know somebody else that's trying to grow their own business, then please feel free to share this episode. I'm sure over the next couple of episodes, they're going to get a lot of value out of this and it will really help them to take their story process and build that into something they can use within their business. Thanks for joining us and I look forward to speaking with you again very shortly. Bye for now.