Episode 675 | Storytelling as a Sales Superpower (Book Recommendation)

Rob Walling:
It’s Startups for the Rest of Us and I’m Rob Walling. This week I have a great conversation with Stephen Steers. He’s the author of the new book, Superpower Storytelling: A Tactical Guide to Telling the Stories You Need to Lead, Sell, and Inspire. We get a lot of pitches from authors wanting to promote their book on startups for the rest of us, and frankly, we don’t interview almost all of them, but Stephen is someone that we sought out based on his resume, his experience, and frankly the quality of the book that he’s written. 

This is another one of those short and sweet manuscripts, 150 pages, so you can read it in an afternoon or on an airplane, and he really focuses on how to shape stories around selling, around positioning, around talking to prospects, getting customers excited to buy, and then even has some tips at the end of the book about how to be the most interesting person in a room, some thoughts on humor because as you’ll hear in the interview, one of Stephen’s hobbies is standup comedy. But what I like about Stephen’s experience is he has boots-on-the-ground experience selling and then as a consultant teaching startups how to sell better and he’s put that experience into the book. So with that, let’s dive into our conversation. 

Stephen, thanks so much for joining me on the show.  

Stephen Steers:
Thank you for having me, Rob. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, so we were talking offline and you mentioned that you had recognized my name vaguely and Start Small, Stay Small. That’s such a cool connection. You read it years ago?  

Stephen Steers:
Yeah, I don’t remember how I came up to it. I think it was 2016, 2017, something like this during my wantrepreneur stage, thinking about frameworks and everybody’s raising all this money in venture capital, and I was like, “I don’t have a good idea. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to start,” and somebody mentioned the book to me, I bought a copy, and it just really succinctly brought out how you could bootstrap, ways to think about accountability, goal setting, and just there was no fluff, which I really enjoyed, and I have to say, especially in the venture space and startups, everything’s sexy and fluffy and all this other stuff and this was like, “Nope, here’s how you do it. Here’s how it works, here’s why it’s going to work. Here’s what I’ve done,” and an incredible book, and just funnily, as we mentioned at the start, I actually did a book review of it on my YouTube channel in the very early days, and it’s one of my higher-rated views on my tiny YouTube channel, so thank you for writing it and it’s still singing out there in the universe.  

Rob Walling:
That’s great, man, and it’s such a trip how these things happen ’cause it’s purely we found you, I think producer Xander probably, or producer Ron, found a YouTube video of you doing some talks on sales, B2B sales, a lot in software, and anytime we, we being MicroConf and this podcast, can find just a new name, a new voice talking about these things. There are only so many of us and it does get old hearing from the same people, including me over time and anytime I can bring someone in who’s an expert on sales, who’s an expert on pricing, who’s an expert on branding, who’s an expert on positioning, marketing, whatever it may be, product, I love having that conversation, so I’m really glad to have you on the show today.  

Stephen Steers:
Thanks again for having me.  

Rob Walling:
Speaking of books, you just wrote your own, Superpower Storytelling, and it’s a book about how to learn… Well, I’m going to summarize it and you tell me what I miss. It’s about how to tell your story of your company, how to tell your story of your company’s mission and how that can help you sell both to prospects, sell your actual software, if you want to raise investment, how to sell to investors, how to sell to your internal team to keep them motivated, and how to sell to potential hires because to convince someone to leave their job and come work, “Hi, I’m a four-person company, come be employee number five,” right, it’s always a selling job. Did I do a decent job? What did I miss in terms of the manuscript?  

Stephen Steers:
Pretty much on it. The only thing I would add is it’s not just your company, it’s about you because the most interesting thing about what you do is who you are. So there’s plenty of developers who can code like the wind, but you and your specific story and why this problem and what you want to actually build is what enables the right people to be like, “You know what? Yeah, I’ll quit my corporate job and be employee number five because you’ve really outlaid this thing in the right way. I need to be a part of this.” So storytelling is one of the vehicles that really helps with that for sure.  

Rob Walling:
And so someone listening to this, let’s say a left-brain developer type who is cranking out code and getting some traction, maybe with a co-founder, 10K a month, 20K a month, they might be thinking, “Well, why do I need a story? Why can’t I just solve a problem? My software solves scheduling problems for hair salons and I’ve landed 50 hair salons,” and I really haven’t told them a story and I’m just here to fix it.  

Stephen Steers:
Why?  

Rob Walling:
So what’s the impetus? Yeah, why? What’s the why here?  

Stephen Steers:
Yeah, why the heck would I tell a story? I think that’s a great question and the main reason I think a story works really well is because this is something I’ve seen across the board with the hundreds, if not thousands of startups I’ve encountered or worked with, especially developers, so no shade on you guys. You guys are brilliant. You can do things that I can’t do yet. People who develop generally think that people care about the product, which they do, but not before they care about what problem it solves for them, so when you’re solving a problem for somebody, if I’m not a developer and I run a hair salon, my problems are probably I want more customers, I want a higher amount of money that I get from each customer, I want to be able to follow up with them and invite them in and enable them to tell other people about how well I cut their hair. 

Telling me, the salon owner, the story of how you met Sally, who had the worst time finding customers and keeping her bookkeeping straight and how when you met Sally, she was at X revenue and having this much stress, and now after of when you got your software and how Sally’s able to hire more people, get another franchise going or something, that’s an outcome that me as a listener, a story that I want to see myself in. 

So there’s a quote I really, really like. I mentioned this in the book. It’s by a guy named Horace in the ancient Greek times, he has a proper Greek name, I just don’t remember it off the top of my head, but it says, “You need only change the name and you are the subject of the story,” so if you’re selling anything, no matter how great your product is, I don’t care about it until you show me the outcome your product’s going to help me get to, and telling me a story about that outcome, that’s when you really start to resonate on a human level and you start to get someone into an emotional state, which is how 95% of purchasing decisions are made. So you can solve a problem, you’re great at it, tell me about how you did that for somebody else in the form of a story and you’re going to get not only more resonance with the market, but they’re going to be able to tell other people the same story and then get you referrals and put business in front of you and your company and your story does the work for you instead of just you making more product. That’s what I’ve seen happen,  

Rob Walling:
Right, and that’s the magic of stories, right? I read Made to Stick by the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, I believe. They talk about how stories are so memorable and so if I tell you a bunch of facts right now and you need to go convince someone else at your company because you need three people to buy in to buy the software.  

Stephen Steers:
Seven, usually.  

Rob Walling:
Seven, you’re not going to remember the facts. But if I tell you a story, they can at least halfway retell the story, right, in a reasonable way.  

Stephen Steers:
Exactly, yeah, and I think it’s 60 to 70% of information is retained when told through story. Hilarious to cite a factoid to tell that, but you get the point.  

Rob Walling:
Makes sense, yeah. And so folks listening to this, you’ve written a book on this topic. What’s your background that got you here? I know, I mean, you and I were talking offline, you’re a sales consultant, you help a lot of B2B companies grow and you obviously have a lot of experience in that, but I guess it’s like this is the question I often, my second slide of every presentation I do is, why should you listen to me? So teeing you up here.  

Stephen Steers:
Do you want the long version or of the fun version?  

Rob Walling:
Let’s do the fun version.  

Stephen Steers:
The fun version, okay. So I started in sales probably eight or nine years ago just doing an SDR, which is a sales development representative. I was the cold-calling guy, sending all the emails, sending all of the communications to set meetings for an account executive. I say it’s the equivalent of setting up somebody else for all the dates and they get to have all the fun on the dates and everybody else is getting laid but you. 

It was a very difficult job. I learned a lot and I didn’t have as much training as I wanted and I was vocal about not having training and eventually I got let go of the company and I got a note from the founder about how he saw I got the short end of the stick with management, with territory, and with verticals, but he hoped I had a great time at the company, and I laughed about this many years later because it’s like, “Man, you knew that this was going wrong. Why didn’t you do something about it?” 

So over that time, I got into other startups where I was selling software. I got into the consulting side, was running sales at a consulting company, and it was clear that lots of startups had the exact same issue. So my general mission, why should people trust me? I hope you do. But again, it comes from almost a decade’s worth of experience selling myself and failing at selling because I didn’t have the frameworks and scenarios that I now teach people to have. 

So in essence, I think a lot of people, one of the ways people start companies is to be the help they didn’t have and that’s very much why I do it because I work with developers every day. I’m a scrum master too, so I actually, like developers, I used to go and sit on the scrum meetings and just learn how you’re talking about the product. Are we building this the right way? What does a roadmap really mean? If I’m going to be selling this, somebody wants this feature, I can speak in a very educated way about, “Actually, that’s probably two years down the line and here’s why,” and that built a lot more trust for me in a sales perspective. 

So anyway, why should people trust me? I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I talk about some of them in the books, and I think it’s all in service of you being the best founder at whatever you can be based on leveraging who you are is the most interesting part about what it is you do.  

Rob Walling:
And if folks want to pick up the book, they can go to stephensteers.com. It’s S-T-E-P-H-E-N-S-T-E-E-R-S dot com / superpower storytelling book. We will link that up in the show notes, of course. I’ll mention that again towards the end, but I want folks to, if it’s, “Shut up and take my money already,” you should be able to get there. 

Stephen, you just mentioned frameworks, right, mental frameworks. I’m a huge fan of them. I love reading them because they allow me to understand things quicker. To me, it’s like a story that’s a little more technical. It’s like a shortcut to getting to an idea. I can see it in my head. You have a framework called the AREA framework and you talk about how powerful storytelling has clear structure, stories have arcs, ups and downs, et cetera. It always feels weird for someone to read your book to you. It’s good stuff.  

Stephen Steers:
I’ll take it.  

Rob Walling:
So you have A, R, E, and A. Do you want to talk us through what those mean and why they’re in that order, basically?  

Stephen Steers:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I often hear from lots of people who get on the phone or start selling or do presenting or go on podcasts is they don’t know what to say and then they may get stumped in a situation where they don’t actually know the answer or have to think. The AREA framework is named aptly because it covers all scenarios that you may be needing to communicate something and don’t want to sound silly. 

So A stands for “angle,” so you’re going to state your angle on an issue. Let’s say it’s bootstrapping a company is better than raising venture capital. That’s our angle. We then followed up with R, which stands for “reason,” and then you can offset a reason to anything to say, “The reason that bootstrapping a company is better than raising venture capital is it gives you a lot more freedom of your business model.” Then we’d followed up with E, which is an example. So an example, this is one of the best places to put in your stories or your situations and scenarios and make it real to you. 

So it would say something like, “A quick example of this would be my own company, so because of the fact that I didn’t have to actually take on venture funding, I was able to actually go out to the market, validate my idea using this start small stay small framework by actually talking to customers and pre-selling my ideas, and because I was able to pre-sells, actually to get able to get revenue into the door to then reinvest and build my company versus having to hope that somebody got it and bringing that over to a venture capitalist hoping that they would send me some money, and that’s why I believe that bootstrapping a company is better than getting venture capital.” So A again is restating your angle. 

So A-R-E-A, AREA, angle, reason, evidence, and restates your angle, that’ll give you a framework to make any point you want to make and you can also think while you’re speaking and you don’t sound like you’re thinking when you’re speaking and I made all of that up off the top of my head as we went.  

Rob Walling:
I was going to give you a clap on that ’cause yeah, it was just off the cuff. We did not prepare for this, folks, so that is, I think, you embracing your own storytelling framework ’cause you just told a story right off the cuff. It’s pretty impressive, man.  

Stephen Steers:
That’s it. That’s what it’ll teach you.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. All right, so we have AREA, and obviously, you dive deep into that. You have almost a whole chapter on it in the book. There’s another section that caught my eye and it is about the problem stack. It’s a little later in the book. Can you talk us through that? ‘Cause I read it and I was like, “This is really…” It was that thing. You know when you read something you’re like, “Oh, of course,” but no one’s ever said it this way before? So you want to talk us through what the problem stack is? It’s during your sales process, right?  

Stephen Steers:
Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, it is not my model. I learned it from a guy named Taki Moore through one of my mentors, Scott Sambucci, so they helped me get that, but it’s super important, and it’s on three levels. So when we think about solving a problem, right, these developers, they build incredible software, they got it to 10 to 20K a month. They’re kind of figuring out, “Well, look, we could stay here, it’s lifestyle business, but if we want to grow this and move this and make this SaaS something that really changes our lives and our future generations and all this other stuff, we need to be thinking about problems in different ways.” 

So the problem stack outlines that and the three levels are the following. So it’s the known said problem. So for an example, it would be a salon owner has trouble retaining clients or getting clients back. It’s the problem that they’re going to talk about openly. It’s not a secret. Everybody knows this is a thing, no one’s hiding this. 

The second level of the problem is the known unsaid problem. This is the problem where maybe you as a developer would only talk to really trusted people about that problem because it’s something that maybe you’re a little ashamed of or you’re just not sure if it’s the right thing and you don’t want to put yourself out there that way. If you can in your marketing or in your storytelling unlock a problem like that, you’re getting people to be like, “Oh, you understand me,” so that’s the second level of the problem. 

And then the third, the most important and probably the most difficult one to find, especially if you’re in the software space, but if you can find this one you’re in for pay dirt is the unknown unsaid problem, and this is the problem that once you explain to people, to salon owners how this particular lack of software is causing them to not only lose clients, to lose good stylists, and to cause their rent to go up, once they see that problem and you’ve explained it to them, they can’t unsee it, so everything else in their business is now viewed through that lens. 

And again, if you can tell stories that unpack and help people go through this ascension ladder of understanding the problems that you can see because they can’t, you’re extremely valuable, and then everything is predicated on, “I need to solve this problem. Oh, my gosh, how did I not see this?” And I think storytelling is a nice, kind way to push people towards those outcomes, or rather invite people towards those outcomes with you as the logical person to solve those problems.  

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Stephen Steers:
So the problem stack I think is really analogous to your book, Start Small, Stay Small, because we talk about validating a problem before you build any software, right? A lot of folks will go into the basement and just start coding. It’s like, “Ah, I think this will work,” and then they hope people find it and buy it, which doesn’t really happen to most of us. 

But when you take the idea of validating and you actually get out and talk to people if you ask the right questions, right, this is kind of why I love sales, I’m curious, I love to ask questions, and when you can find a word or phrase, and pardon the word choice here, but pick at the scab, “Tell me a bit more about that, why that?”, you’ll start to have people just tell you about where those levels of the problem are and what’s really important about leveraging your framework to validate ideas is the more people you talk to is the more patterns you see in the market, the more of a pattern you see in the market is where you’re building something that people will use and want to solve their problem with. 

Not only that, if you actually talk to people, you build relationships with people, so when you do have a ready product, you already have buyers, not the other way around, so I think leveraging that and talking to people and hearing them speak about the problem the right way, it’ll give you all the stories you need to tell in your marketing and it will give you the right words to use that resonate with the people who will actually buy your product and tell other people about it.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, like that. And what you’re talking about is not just, it’s not just sales, it’s a mix of sales and almost customer development, it sounds like, where you’re getting feedback that’s probably going to impact what you build, how you build it, and how you sell it. Would you say that’s accurate?  

Stephen Steers:
I would absolutely say that’s accurate.  

Rob Walling:
And so I can imagine as a founder, there’s a lot of founders listening to this who are in this space, in this state where they’re like, “Ooh, I just don’t know what to build next,” and they are having these conversations and let’s say they get to the point where they are a bootstrap founder and they’re making 10K, 20K a month, they’re doing pretty well for themselves and they think, “You know what? I don’t like sales. I want to delegate. I want to delegate sales.” Do you have a sense or an opinion on when the founder themselves can start handing this off?  

Stephen Steers:
I do, and I don’t think your audience will like what I have to say, but I’m going to tell you the truth, that’s my goal here. So the way I think about it and the way I was taught to think about it is it really depends on your revenue scale, all right? So these aren’t hard and fast rules, per se, but this is how I would think about it. If you are in the zero to 300K, the only things you should be outsourcing are tasks that don’t have to do with sales. This is you doing bookkeeping, automation stuff. You should be doing all of the selling if you’re at that level. The only exception to any of these levels I’ll mention is if you have a ton of leads and you as the founder can’t take care of the volume, then it makes sense to outsource and I’ll explain a little bit more about why in just a second. 

The second level is 300K to a million. This is when you start to potentially outsource some sales. This would be where you’re outsourcing the appointment setting depending on your ticket, of course, and then customer success, so the fulfillment side and the onboarding and that stuff. 

From a million to 3 million, you actually can hire full-on salespeople. You run the process tip to tail and then you would manage them and then 3 million plus is when you’d hire a VP of sales who runs the whole thing and they just pass reporting on to you. 

The reason I say it needs to kind of be in that general level of zero to 300K, again, depending on what you sell is most people make the mistake of hiring sales too early. People don’t like selling, they want to get rid of it and they’re just like, “All right, you come in here and you do it,” and the problem with that is usually how I’ve seen with many startup founders, especially SaaS folks, they don’t document what worked well and how an actual deal should go through, literally from first contact to signed contract. They don’t have scripts, they don’t have templates for follow-up, they don’t have their products properly outlined in descriptions, and that might not sound like a lot, but you have to think, when I’ve been a rep, I’ve been hired to get into companies to sell, right, and then they give me a quota and I got to go out here and do my thing. 

And then when we dive into it’s like, “Well, why did customers buy this?” “Oh, we’re not sure.” “Okay. Well, who’s the ideal client for us?” “Well, the ones that have money.” “Okay, where do I find more of those?” “Well, that’s your job.” “Okay, I’ll take it. Fine.” But that’s not a sales job. That’s a business development job. And I think a lot of founders hire salespeople, but they’re actually hiring business development people because business development, my definition here, is the person who figures out what is sellable in the market, how the market’s talking about it, and what will make this solution commercially viable to be purchased. 

Once that process is run at least 10 times and we have recorded systemized versions, it doesn’t have to be anything special or fancy, but once we’ve documented that, now we can hire someone into sales, not before, because I’ve been hired into roles like that before and I wasn’t set up for success. I had some level of success ’cause I was very hungry, but that took money out of my pocket and out of the company’s pocket because they didn’t do the pre-work of saying, “Hey, you’re now part of the team. Here’s how we do it. Take this, study it, and come back with questions,” and everything’s laid out. 

So I would say to any founder, if you’re thinking about hiring for sales, kudos, make sure you’ve met certain thresholds, but at least have done it yourself 10 times and have that documented from tip to tail as much as you can so that when you do bring someone in, they’re there to make what you’ve already done better, not make what you haven’t done.  

Rob Walling:
In the book, you talk about the four reasons why businesses buy, so this is B2B, and the first is make more money, second is save money, the third is increase efficiency, and the fourth is to mitigate risk, and you give examples of each of those. Have you found that one of those is the best or better than others?  

Stephen Steers:
No, not at all, and the reason for that is I also cite a stat in there, I think it’s about seven people need to agree to buy a software solution. Again, this is probably in the SMB and enterprise space. If you’re talking about growing your SaaS, you want to get up to that. But let’s just say multiple people, more than one person needs to say yes to buying your software solution, right, which means each person in a company is going to have a slightly different metric or KPI that they’re shooting for in their role. So the CEO certainly cares about making more money, right, increasing the bottom line, whatever, the CFO’s probably going to want to save more money because they get comped on that bonus. Someone in a different department who’s going to be using your software wants to make it more efficient. 

So your software solution can do all of those things, but the key is to be able to tell a story about how your solution does each of those things, depending on who you’re talking to, because at the end of the day, we’re humans solving human problems in a business context and if you can talk to me as a human about how your solution helps me in my role, I’m listening, and that’s the reason you’re going to want to have and understand how your business does all of those things, depending on who you talk to ’cause it’s not just one size fits all. And that’s the other thing, we could talk more about this, too, but a consultative sale is asking the questions first and then being able to talk about how your solution ties to the outcomes that that person has based on the questions you asked.  

Rob Walling:
Let’s continue with that. Some listeners may not have ever heard the term “consultative sale.” How is that different than I’m selling whatever? What does that mean?  

Stephen Steers:
Yeah. Oh, man. I love this one. Sales is a four-letter word to most people, right? They hate doing it, they just want to stay as far away from it, and salespeople are icky and annoying and pushy and gross and I agree and that’s part of why I do what I do ’cause I want to be a difference in that and help people enjoy selling again. But consultative selling is, I think the first part of being a good consultative seller is how you open your call, right? So if you’re on the phone, I’ll give you an exact example of how I would open it. “Hey, Rob. Great to be here with you today. I have a super light framework for how I want to run this call. I want to learn a little bit more about you, ask some questions about you and your company, want to share a little bit about us and what we’re up to, and if there is room for a conversation for us to have about working together on anything we talk about today, I’m here for that as well. Is that fair?”  

Rob Walling:
Sounds good.  

Stephen Steers:
Boom. So what did I do there? I set up my next steps with talking about, “Hey, we’re going to talk about if this is a fit, we’re going to have that conversation at the end.” I don’t have to rush into a sale. I’ve also given you the out by asking for your permission on that. So a consultative seller sets the agenda, as it were, and then you ask questions that invite pain, if you will. “What’s agitating you? What’s going well? What’s not going well? Where do you want to go?” Then painting a picture of what the overall goals are of the business, why the person doesn’t have those things. And then after you’ve got that information, you can now speak accurately with truthful information to how your solution or solutions help solve the problems the person had. So that is a consultative sale and you’re not pushing it on it. We talked about, “You mentioned that you had this problem with your salons. Here’s how our solution can help that be a thing of the past.”  

Rob Walling:
And is consultative selling, in your opinion, is that the best way to sell, let’s say B2B SaaS to SMBs or enterprise?  

Stephen Steers:
I’m going to give you a consulting answer here, Rob. I think it depends, so it depends on your ticket price. Some folks I talk to, they sell something that’s $25 a month, you’re not getting on the phone for that. That’s not worth it. That’s more marketing and great content with storytelling, I think.  

Rob Walling:
It’s a funnel.  

Stephen Steers:
Yeah, it’s a funnel, right? If you’re selling something over a thousand, $2,000, you’re probably going to have someone who’s going to get on the phone and talk to you about it. I think a consultative sale is the best kind of sale because it doesn’t force people into decisions, it logically walks them and also emotionally walks them through why this is the best way to go forward. It’s not pushy. 

And again, this is another thing to think about, too, if you do get on the phone with folks and you’re pushy, that’s also a story they’re going to tell the market about you. “Oh, don’t talk to this guy. He was really just trying to close me really too hard. He was not consultative, he didn’t ask about my problems, and was just trying to get me to buy today. I felt really uncomfortable. Don’t do business with this person.” 

So I think it’s the best. That’s how I sell, and again, I think it’s also predicated on I might not be able to help you. Let’s find that out first. And I think sales is all about know, like, and trust and building a long-term relationship, so, “Hey, actually you know what, Rob? Based on everything you said, I’m not the right person to solve these problems. I may know somebody, which I’m happy to introduce you to, but I wanted to be very upfront and direct about that.” And most people are like, “What? You’re not going to try to …? Really? What, are you serious?” And that’s how you build trust and you get people to be like, “You know what? I wasn’t a fit, but I know 10 people who would be a good fit for your business.” That’s a great way to get referrals if you could do it the right way.  

Rob Walling:
And it feels good. It makes sales feel legit and just like you’re being honest. I like that.  

Stephen Steers:
Yep.  

Rob Walling:
So as we wrap up, I want to talk about, I think it’s the last section of your book. It’s about humor. And you have in your bio and you told me offline that you do standup comedy, you’re a standup comedian, and so I imagine humor is a pretty important part of your life, but I’m curious in business context, in selling, have you used humor to your advantage? And the second part of that is do you think people can learn to be funny? Or what is the process there? ‘Cause I sometimes try to be funny and I find out that I’m not. So just talk me through that. Has it been an advantage to you and how can folks take advantage of that?  

Stephen Steers:
First thing to say is sometimes I try to be funny and I’m not either, so that’s what the world will tell you.  

Rob Walling:
Nice.  

Stephen Steers:
But it certainly has worked to my advantage in some ways, especially in workshop settings. You mentioned at the start of this, it’s really cool to get new perspectives from different types of people, right? You’ve heard the same thing over and over and over again. I don’t want to say a lot of the information I share or most people share is the same, but we can definitely change the recipe and so what I find is if I can give you the hard medicine of, “Hey, you’re not making enough money to outsource sales, but we can make it funny and interesting,” you take the lesson in a better and different way. It goes home with you in a positive way. So I think as far as humor is concerned, the way to leverage it is to, it helps people build relationships like, “Oh, that guy was funny.” It helps me get asked back for workshops like, “Oh, that was fun. I enjoyed that. Let’s come back again.” Right, so that’s the first, it’s inviting, humor is. 

As far as people who aren’t funny, that’s okay. There’s a difference between being funny and using humor. So being funny, right, you could think of your favorite standup comedian or your favorite sitcom or whatever it is and these people are just cutting up and you can’t hold it in, that’s a very different thing than telling jokes. So jokes are kind of a structured thing. I go into this a little bit in the book, and again, I’m still learning as well, but I think especially, I wrote one in there about SaaS founders, I think, for the joke. But if you use humor in a self-deprecating way, people love it. It’s like, “Oh, you don’t take yourself too seriously.” It’s a good way to bridge. 

So I think for people who aren’t funny, I go over a slight framework in there in the book. I think the acronym is the best and fastest way to turn something funny, even if you’re not funny, and you can use it in stride in your talks or in the way you sell to people because it’s an acronym they might know. Right, that’s the easiest way, and I think it’s the easiest way because there’s the innate idea of what they think it already means, and humor, good humor, good jokes, leverage, misdirection, so the fact that you’ve changed it automatically creates a dissonance where there’s room for a laugh and a chuckle. So I think everybody can use it. Again, if it’s off-brand for you to be funny, really think about how that works. But I find it is one of the coolest instruments to build good relationships with people, and at the end of the day, people smiling and enjoying whatever it is they’re doing with you, that’s what we look for.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Yeah, it raises the game of a conference talk of a workshop of a sales call. And for the record, I have your SaaS joke here. I love this. You have a whole explanation of how you construct the joke and why and you say, “Let’s make it self-deprecating,” specifically, and so the joke is, “I’m a computer nerd. I’ve built software since the age of 12. It’s hard to get a date. I live a SaaS founder lifestyle. To some, it means software as a service. But in my experience, SaaS means sometimes alone, always single,” and then what I love is you have this comment that says, “Not bad, not great, but it’s a start,” and it’s real self-reflective, so I appreciate that. That whole last chapter is about, right, or maybe it’s second to last, but it’s about how to think about and construct jokes when you walk through your process of, “Here are the facts. How do we try to make those funny?” Which I think it’s a pretty cool thing to have in a sales book.  

Stephen Steers:
And then adding one other level to that, you’re going to fail at it most of the time with jokes. It’s just how it works, unfortunately. But I’ll say this about it, I love standup comedy, I have for many years, but I think if you are a founder, it’s one of the things you should absolutely try and here’s why. As a founder, you’re mostly alone. You’ve got to figure out what information is important information and take it back and use it and you always have to stand on your square and own where you are, whether you’re winning or losing. And I think entrepreneurship is really a feedback game. If you’re having the right type of marketing, you’re making the right type of actions, the market will respond in kind. 

The fastest place you get a response in any performative art is standup comedy. If it’s funny, people are going to laugh. If it’s not funny, it’s going to be crickets, and I think taking those two dichotomies, you bring that back into your process and you say, “All right, no, I think that was funny. I need to try it another way.” Or, “This feature is really important to the market. I know it’s worth something. Maybe I need to ask a better question to the next customer to understand how they would use something like this.” So I think they’re very analogous to each other and it’s just fun, so I highly recommend it.  

Rob Walling:
It’s like finding your sales pitch is like audience testing and trying to find your tight five, right? That’s it.  

Stephen Steers:
That’s exactly it, yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Amazing. Stephen Steers, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. If folks want to buy your book, it’s at stephensteers.com/superpowerstorytellingbook, and we’ll link that up in the show notes, of course. And you’re on LinkedIn. You said if folks want to DM you on LinkedIn, that’s a good way to get ahold of you and to follow you?  

Stephen Steers:
That’s a great way, yep.  

Rob Walling:
Sounds great. Thanks again for coming on the show.  

Stephen Steers:
Thank you for having me, and thank you for doing what you do as well out here. Appreciate you.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Stephen for coming on the show. As a reminder, you can head to stephensteers.com to learn more about him and thanks for coming back to this show this week and every week. This is Rob Walling, signing off from episode 675.