Sean Soth

#394: How Successful Associations Use Storytelling to Grow Membership

#394: How Successful Associations Use Storytelling to Grow Membership

For many, a successful business is all about scalability. You want to gain more customers, so you optimize your product offering, reduce inefficiencies, minimize costs, master your marketing funnel and sell more products to more customers. No problem. Now it’s even possible with some service-based businesses.

But having people buy into something more intangible – a mission – is a different animal.

Fortunately, the value of connection is more powerful than ever. People want to be part of something. They want something to believe in. Maybe they want to help make a difference. By utilizing the powers of story, connection, experience and community, your association can thrive and grow its membership, even in trying times.

Sean Soth is the Leadership Advisory Board Chair of Professionals for Association Revenue, a member organization focused on improving association revenue health through community and resources. Sean says your success is based on how well you tell the story of your organization through the amazing stories found in your community.

Sean is a recognized business development expert who has led multiple sales portfolios in a variety of industries including life sciences, legal, government contracting, association management, training and development, and healthcare. In these relationships, Sean’s teams surpass budget objectives, while launching new program and product development for hundreds of clients per year.

In addition to his role with Professionals for Association Revenue (PAR), Sean is owner of Hi-Fidelity Group, Inc. a managed sales and marketing firm focused on exhibit and sponsorship sales and a Co-Founder of Webvent, a digital platform for webcast management and online directories for associations.

If you’re trying to recruit, retain and grow your membership for a community or an association and you want to replace your boring, rational promotions with emotional triggers to get your prospects and members to act, then this show is for you.

Discussed in this episode:

• How story can connect members and stakeholders to aligned outcomes
• Why your mission story matters to build emotional connection with your membership
• Why every association must embrace change
• The differences between selling physical products vs. selling a mission and community
• The art of establishing lasting connection to your brand through your stakeholders stories and experiences

Links:

• Connect with Sean on LinkedIn
• Professionals for Association Revenue (PAR)
• The Society for Clinical Research Sites (SCRS)
• Hi-Fidelity Group
• Webvent

Your Storytelling Resources:

Pablo Gonzalez

#393: How To Grow Your Community of Raving Fans With Business Storytelling

#393: How To Grow Your Community of Raving Fans With Business Storytelling

You know the importance of community building around your brand to grow your business.

But your community may not be growing as fast as you like because other business priorities are sucking your time and energy away from one of your most important brand-building activities.

Pablo Gonzalez, founder and CEO of BeTheStage.live, and host of the B2B Community Builder and Not Your Average Investor podcasts, is obsessed with human connection.

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Heather Pierce

#392: How to Turn Data Into Drama With Your Business Storytelling

#392: How to Turn Data Into Drama With Your Business Storytelling

Benjamin Franklin once said that “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”

I think I might add to that death, taxes AND insurance. Insurance to most of us is a necessary evil and one most of us don’t want to have to figure out, haggle over, pay for, and bitch about deductibles when our premiums already seem over the top.

So how do you make insurance appealing to customers when what most insurance salesmen sell are the numbers? Our guest today has some thoughts on how to turn NUMBers into visceral experiences that your audience can’t ignore.

Heather Pierce leads the communications and content strategy team for Leavitt Group, a top 20 national insurance brokerage firm. Her marketing success in the highly logic-driven, paint-by-numbers insurance world is due to how she and her colleagues personalize numbers by telling authentic human-interest stories.

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Sabrina Hansen

#391: How to Unearth the Memorable Moments That Power Your Personal Stories

#391: How to Unearth the Memorable Moments That Power Your Personal Stories

A few weeks ago, I was doing some one-on-one storytelling coaching with Sabrina Hansen, Senior Director of Strategic Relationships at Embark Behavioral Health, followed by a half-day session with their team. She was preparing her speech for their conference and had this line in it that I love…

“Be the best part of someone’s day.”

In fact, I loved it so much that I pulled out my dad’s old label maker and punched out that saying and attached it to my monitor as a reminder to be the best part of someone’s day.

On today’s show, Sabrina shares how she learned to use tales about her personal moments that have shaped who she is today.

She uses her moments to build trust with her colleagues, clients and the communities she serves.

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Robin Landa

#390: How to Generate Strategically Creative Brand Stories

How to Generate Strategically Creative Brand Stories

You know how important it is to come up with brilliant ideas and the stories to communicate them to grow your business. You’ve tried countless ideation methods to keep those ideas flowing.

But nothing seems to work consistently. It’s frustrating.

Perhaps the 3G process of Goal, Gap and Gain might be your answer.

I found this three-step ideation process intriguing because the goal/gap/gain method is another example of the tripartite structure of storytelling. Like the ABT (And, But, Therefore). Setup/Problem/Resolution. Our brain LOVES this structure to ideas and the stories that communicate them.

On today’s show, you’ll learn how to put the 3G ideation process to work for you from its creator.

Robin Landa is a distinguished professor at Kean University and a globally recognized ideation expert. Robin is a best-selling author of 25 books on creativity, branding, advertising, and design including her new book, The New Art of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential and Strategic Creativity: A Business Field Guide to Advertising, Branding and Design.

Robin believes that people share brand stories that resonate with them.

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Jason Harris

#389: The Art of Soulful Persuasion Through Brand Storytelling

#389: The Art of Soulful Persuasion Through Brand Storytelling

You and I live in a land of abundance. We have myriad choices of what brand to buy from. Scarcity is not the market dynamic it once was.

So as a sales and marketing leader, you must find a way for your product or service to stand out from the crowd by sharing the story of what you stand for.

But what DO you stand for? Without answering this question in an authentic way, you will remain viewed as a commodity, which impacts pricing, margins and growth.

Today, you’ll learn from Jason Harris, the Co-Founder and CEO of Mekanism, an award-winning New York-based creative advertising agency and author of The Soulful Art of Persuasion: The 11 Habits That Will Make Anyone a Master Influencer.

Jason works closely with iconic brands including Peloton, Ben & Jerry’s, Jose Cuervo, Alaska Airlines, Charles Schwab and OkCupid through a blend of creativity and performance, an approach they call Soul + Science.

Under his leadership, Mekanism was most recently named Independent Agency of the Year by The Drum, and ranked by the Effie Index as a top 10 Most Effective Independent Agency in the United States. Mekanism has also been named to Ad Age’s Agency A-list and twice to their Best Places to Work.

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Dr. Marlis Douglas & Dr. Keisha Bahr

#388: How to Turn Nerd Speak into Business Solutions With the ABT

#388: How to Turn Nerd Speak into Business Solutions With the ABT

We all nerd out.

We get overzealous with our inventions. Gleefully share our innovation. Blather on and on about the uniqueness of our product or service or initiative.

We presume that our audience knows everything we know about what we’re trying to communicate. It’s obvious, right? At least to us.

But the “Curse of Expert” is a pandemic that impacts us all. Are you and your communications suffering from it?

Your job is to translate your brilliance into bite-sized stories so the people we’re connecting with *get it* immediately.

An anecdote is the antidote for obfuscation.

Today, you’ll learn how to turn nerd speak into business solutions using the ABT agile narrative framework from the co-authors of the new book:

The Narrative Gym for Science Graduates Students and Postdocs: Using the ABT Framework for Proposals, Papers, Presentations, and Life in General. 

Dr. Marlis Douglas and Dr. Keisha Bahr have dedicated their science careers to making their complex messages simple so that everyone in the room understands and appreciates the important projects they’re working on.

They both believe:

Scientists are curious and quite creative AND IF they are good at storytelling, THEN they can persuade that science can help.

BUT, scientists are bad at storytelling, because they are too detail-oriented and don’t think about how to relate to non-scientists.

THEREFORE, training scientists in storytelling helps them focus their messaging and the ABT provides an agile framework so scientists can be part of the solution, and not the problem.

Dr. Marlis Douglas is an endowed professor in Biological Sciences at the University of Arkansas (since 2012). Her conservation genetics/genomics research on fish and wildlife informs management and guides conservation planning across the globe.

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Douglas Utberg

#387: How to Use Stories to Drive Your Affiliate Marketing Success

#387: How to Use Stories to Drive Your Affiliate Marketing Success

You work hard to tell your brand, sales and marketing stories. You know that if they resonate with your prospects, buyers, customers and colleagues, then you will move them to action.

But you’re not resonating like you could because you’re NOT telling the most important story to them at precisely the right time from their point of view.

Today, you’ll learn how to truly understand where your prospect is on their buyer journey and how to trigger their desire to buy what you have to offer.

Doug Utberg is a business growth authority and host of the Terminal Value podcast. He shares how to engage at the current level of awareness your prospect has about you and your offering to connect on a primal level with their buying brain. We explore the trends in agile organizations and communications and you’ll learn about the Collier Principle on how to enter the conversation already going on in your customer’s mind.

Knowing where you’re audience is relative to their awareness and understanding of your offering is crucial in all sales and marketing, especially if you’re developing an affiliate marketing program.

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Luis Miguel & Roxanne Addison

#386: How Storytelling Helps Immigrants Realize Their American Dream

#386: How Storytelling Helps Immigrants Realize Their American Dream

In 2016, I helped Luis Miguel, the founder of the international translation firm Avantpage, clarify their brand story using the Story Cycle System™. Since then, his company has grown to 50 people and has offices around the world.

Luis and his marketing manager Roxanne Addison discuss how their brand story unites their people, attracts precisely the right customer, and provides the aspirational North Star for everyone to shoot for.

The following is an excerpt from my book Brand Bewitchery: How to Wield the Story Cycle System™ to Craft Spellbinding Stories for Your Brand, which will provide the backstory for this episode’s conversation.

HOW SOCIAL RESISTANCE PROVIDES BRAND LIFT

Luis Miguel contacted me about helping refine Avantpage’s brand story. For the previous 22 years, Luis and his team had provided language translation services for government, elections officials, and healthcare and educational programs to help immigrants assimilate in this country. Avantpage is headquartered in Davis, California, and has offices in Mexico City and Warsaw, Poland.

In 1973, Luis Miguel traveled from his home in Mexico City to the Ozark Mountains in Missouri for summer camp. It was his first visit to the United States. He was 15 years old. He was excited to experience America, but his excitement quickly dimmed when a boy at camp referred to Luis using a term he had never heard before.

Being bookish, Luis returned home and looked up the meaning of wetback.

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Tommy Mello

#385: What You Can Learn From Your Mother About Business Storytelling

#385: What You Can Learn From Your Mother About Business Storytelling

On Friday, I had the honor of producing a half-day Business of Story training for Tommy Mello’s amazing team at A1 Garage Doors.

In fact, I mentioned to a few of my friends about the training, and I was blown away by how many of them have used A1 and the rave reviews that followed.

But then again I shouldn’t have been surprised. Because Tommy and his team are crazy about leadership and customer service training. That’s probably why they’ve grown from a single service in Phoenix to more than 600 employees operating in 18 states.

I had fun working in-person at A1’s excellent Phoenix training facility (I mean, just look at it) #team while also hosting a number of their colleagues around the country on ZOOM.

Tommy tells stories to connect with everyone from his colleagues to his customers. He demonstrates the ROI of storytelling by growing from a single shop in Phoenix Arizona to a $100 million-plus home service business with more than 600 people operating in 17 states and growing.

He follows a philosophy of working smart, building the right connections, and being 100 percent committed to supporting his team in every aspect of their lives. He provides employees with business development and life coaching opportunities and he spends a significant time on local philanthropic efforts.

Tommy is also the Author of the book Home Service Millionaire and his new book Elevate coming early next year.

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