How to Simplify Your Brand Message to Boost Sales with Donald Miller’s StoryBrand | The Big Success Podcast

0:00I think you need to surround yourself with people who have a very strong work ethic or not interested in doing mediocre work The more excellence-oriented that you surround yourself with, it's going to rub off on you. Donald Miller, the story guy, what he shares with you and me about marketing and how to own a problem, he gives us great case studies of dominoes, what Ryan Reynolds is doing, great stories, but amazing lessons. It's one of the reasons that you want to talk 75 % about the problem, 25 % about the solution, because the problem is the trigger that makes people want to buy the solution.

0:29There's good in the world and there's bad in the world. And I just want to wake up and say, let me put a little something on the good. Donald Miller. Let's go. So Donald Miller, your version of success, how does success happen? How does it happen? You make good decisions over and over and over and over again. And then you look back and pretend that you intended to do it. So is there a formula for success that you've worked out after all these years? I think that there are formulas that are very, very helpful. right but the definition of success changes I mean it changes for me when I was a kid it was you know you know to get on some sports team or something like that and then you know you know now it's being a dad my definition of success has has changed over the years you know I think when I was young it was sort of to prove myself yeah and now that I'm older it's to help other people yeah and i don't know that i could have had that early because you know you got to figure out yeah you know and then when you go really like and then we i mean the car or the watch or that when you're young yes and then you get it you go that's not as fulfilling as i thought it was yeah but you know what pete carroll i interviewed pete carroll when he was coach of the seattle seahawks and he said, Don, I had the luxury of succeeding early, which taught me success doesn't matter as much, that there's a diminishing return on me winning.

2:03It becomes less and less valuable. He said, but when I started helping other people win, there was no diminishing return. It just got better and better and better. I've borrowed his definition of success was just to help other people win. So if you go back somewhere in life, you chose success as your performance standard. Do you remember when that was or how that happened? Well, I don't know if you're, if you're an Enneagram fan, have you ever gotten into an Enneagram? It's like personality types. There's nine of them, according to this particular theory. I'm a three of the nine and the three is all about success.

2:38You know, the, the two will define themselves by quality relationships. Three is by winning. And so for me, it was embedded in me that if you win, if you are successful, you matter. I don't believe that's true. I think there's a bunch of different ways to matter. But for me, it was important to get out there and compete and try to win. I didn't do that in sports because God did not give me the sort of body that would do that. But when I discovered writing books, you know it was important for me to write a really good book and then it was important for me for that book to be a bestseller what's the formula for writing a great book then uh is that one yes i can give you well a talent i don't have talent so let's go with a different formula uh you know every chapter should solve a problem and every pro every chapter should solve should come together to solve a much bigger problem yeah but i think if you if you're sitting down to write a book you say, what problem do I want to solve, you know, or help somebody else solve, you're probably going to end up with a pretty good book.

3:41Yeah. So if you look at success, people say you got to surround yourself with successful people. That's the stuff. What's your theory on that? Well, I think you need to surround yourself with people who have a very strong work ethic, who are not interested in doing mediocre work, who will, you know, put forth the effort to, accomplish great things, people who are intelligent. I 100 % believe that the more excellence-oriented that you surround yourself with, those people who you surround yourself with, it's going to rub off on you. So I think there's no question that that's true. People often refer to success and failure.

4:21How do you view the relationship between success and failure? Well, they're called stakes. Stakes in a story are very important. And if there are no If there are no stakes in the story, there's no story. So to always have in your mind, hey, if you don't get up out of bed, and for me, get in the cold plunge, get in the gym, failure's waiting for you, and it's chasing you. And it wants you. It wants to destroy you. To me, I see it as a game. I'm not talking about, I don't think if I go to heaven and God says, you didn't make enough money, I don't think that's ever going to happen. I don't think that's ever going to happen.

5:02So I mean this in a playful sense. If you don't get up and put some work into that book, somebody's going to write on Amazon that it's a terrible book. So let's get up and do the work. Doing the work is one part of success. What else is there that someone has to have in order to make success a part of their life? Routine. So I don't know that we need to think very much about the end result. right i i don't know that it's that's very helpful but you know um you'll love this brad i i used to i used to weigh 200 more pounds than i weigh now and i'm i'm within five i have noticed that yes i'm within five to ten pounds of wrapping it up i can still grab my failure that caught me uh you would pay for that for a long time but what i found was that if i if i think about you know being in good shape or something like that, it's not very helpful.

5:58But if I, if I just think about waking up and getting down into the garage and doing my ridiculous excuse for a workout, but I do it, you know, uh, if I just think about, if I obsess about the process and not about the result, things happen. So that's, we all understand fitness and things like that. The same is true with writing a book. You know, I go to a coffee shop in Nashville, Tennessee called stay golden. They put me at table 74 and I order the exact same meal. In fact, if I walk in that door, the chef sees me and he starts cooking my food. Done it for years. For me, I just need to sit down in that seat and stay there for two and a half hours.

6:40If I do that, I will write a book, a bestselling book, every 18 months. And I've been doing that for a lot of years. And so for me, it's really not about writing the book or the bestselling book, although that's the end result. It's about, did you show up at Stay Golden? Did you sit down in that seat? And did you do something that day? Sometimes it's no words, you know? Sometimes it's 2 ,000 words. But if I go through the routine, the routine produces results. Yeah. So that goes back to the theory of it's you don't rise to your goals, you fall to your systems, or you call it routines type thing.

7:18What you want to do is you want to get yourself, you want to, you know, to use James Clear's ideas, you know, you want to create the habits that produce results without really thinking about the results. Yeah. You know, if I get out of bed, you know, the other thing is it habits, you know, slash, you know, addictions, right? What are some happy, positive, good, healthy addictions that you can have? You know, I wake up every morning. I do not feel like working out. I don't feel like doing anything, but I know that All I have to do is walk downstairs, get into my cold plunge, and when I get to my cold plunge, it's going to make me want to get on the exercise bike.

7:58When I get on the exercise bike, it's going to make me want to get on the rower. When I get on the rower, it's going to make me want to hit the heavy bag. So I've got to control one thing, walking downstairs and getting into freezing water, if I can do that. But I don't wake up and go, I want to be excellent. Look, I don't do that. I wake up going, you've just got to do one thing, Miller. Just put the first foot out. You know, I remember as a young man getting that whole theory of I got to wake up and look in the mirror. Yeah, it's never worked for me. You know, it was about I got to fake it in my own head till I make it.

8:30I got to bring my own belief. Where does that belief come from for you? How does that happen for you? Well, you know, my faith is not very complicated. it. I believe that God loves people and I believe, true or not, I don't know, way out of my pay grade. I believe that the devil hates people and I want to play on the right team. And so for me, it's like, hey, Don, if you're willing to wake up every morning and help somebody, God's with you. Got it. And for you, that's it. I realize that's not true in the sense that it's much more complicated than that. And I don't want to get into astrophysics.

9:08Greatest philosophers than you and I. We've made this for a lot longer than we've been alive. That's exactly it. Way smarter. But there's good in the world and there's bad in the world. And I just want to wake up and say, let me put a little something on the good. And if I can do that, I think I'm going to be okay. Dollar Miller, marketing, massive term today. How do you define it? Well, I define marketing as telling people about what you're doing. That's really it. And now some people tell people about what they're doing and it's a massive failure. And they spend millions of dollars telling people about what they're doing and nobody pays attention.

9:46So I call that bad marketing. No one called. It's not a good ad. No, no one. No. I mean, we have to say that, right? And marketing is one of the few businesses where you can pay somebody a lot of money and they can give you nothing in return and they keep the money. So that's called a ripoff. You got conned. Now, I don't think there's a lot of bad marketing people out there. I think, you know, they try something and it doesn't work and they charge you anyway. Yeah. Uh, if I go in and do a strategy session for somebody, I offer a 10 X return on the investment. So if you pay me, uh, you have to make 10 times the money that you paid me or else I give you your money back and I've never failed.

10:27Well, I'm a big Donald Miller believer. We, you know, SB seven framework for all the new websites, all this good. Couldn't help a better guy. But when you look at success in marketing today, what is it that makes marketing work now? Yeah. Whenever I go in with a client, the number one thing I want that client to do is own a problem. And what I mean by that is I want to know what, first of all, I want them to know, because they often don't, what is the number one problem that your product solves? And by number one, I mean the one that resonates the strongest with the customer. And then if we are able to define that, sometimes we A-B test it, sometimes we survey it, but what are they responding to?

11:16If we can own that problem, we can take the market. And so whenever somebody thinks of that problem, they need to think of your product. So what that normally means is we're going to talk 75 % of the time about the customer's problem and only 25 % about your product. Because what we're going to do is we're going to associate that problem with your, with your thing. And you know, it needs to be a problem that people feel. And when they feel it, they go, Oh, call X. So what that means is the marketing is if you ever feel this call us. And then what you do is when you get that sentence, which is the hardest part, if you ever feel this problem, call us.

11:54And then you repeat it 750 million times. I'm at least 750. Yeah. Yeah. And they'll go closely. Well, it's still going great. I said, but you've only repeated it 300 million times. You have a lot more to go. You know, you got to keep doing it. And that's what, when I say own a problem, the goal of a marketing plan or a campaign is to own a problem. And you got to buy that mental real estate with repetition. Yeah. Where did you fall in love with marketing? How did that become your passion? You know, I didn't realize it, but for 10, 15 years, I wrote memoirs. I had no interest in business really.

12:28Uh, you know, I accidentally stumbled into business, but I wrote seven or eight memoirs. They ended up on the New York times bestsellers list for over a year, did very, very well. And in order to write those books and keep people reading those books, I had to figure out how to get the, get the reader to turn the page. So I've got to write something that makes you want to turn the page. And so unknowingly I got really good at figuring out how to open what's called story loops. You know, you open a story loop, you know, my, my cousin and I just tried to jump across the Grand Canyon on our motorbikes, opened a story loop.

13:02How'd it go? Actually terrible. That's not a true story. But you open and close these story loops. And so I realized when I'd written my seventh or eighth memoir, nothing else had happened. I didn't want to write another memoir. I didn't need the money. And somebody came to me just accidentally with some marketing questions and I realized, oh, this is the same skill set. This company needs to open a story loop that the customer needs to buy their product to close it. Domino's Pizza was going bankrupt. The new CEO of Domino Pizza came in to save the company. He paid millions of dollars, probably their last bit of change.

13:47He went on national television and he said, you know, I'm the CEO of Domino's Pizza and our pizza for a decade has tasted horrible. He said, you've probably spent money in order to Domino's Pizza and been so disappointed by how this thing tasted. I want you to know I fixed it and it tastes amazing. Well, everybody out there is going, I'm going to spend, I'm going to go ahead and spend 10 bucks and see if this guy's right. And you know what? One of the fastest growing chains in America. I thought it was one of the bravest marketing moves. Also, never do it unless you're going bankrupt.

14:25Terrible move if your company is doing well. But what the great move was, he opened a story loop. It made people so intensely curious to find out if it's true. And they spent the money. And by the way, I ordered a lot of Domino's pizza that year. And it was true. It tasted pretty good. I am still a Domino's customer because of that campaign. That's amazing. It got me brilliant. I remember as a kid reading John Caple's tested advertising methods, and he would start headlines with, here's how and here's why and seven reasons this. And it was like, that's all he did. He opened a little open story loops, you know?

15:01Yeah. So when we look at marketing today, owning the brand, that sort of thing, people come to their business and they look at, well, how do I do that? So how does a normal business owner thinking about their business go, how do I start a story loop? Well, going back to the beginning, the way to start a story loop is to open with the problem. For example, let's say you and I are at a cocktail party, walk around talking to people. You talk to one person and say, what do you do? And they say, I'm an at-home chef. I come to your house and cook. You're probably going to say, it's interesting. My wife and I actually occasionally need a chef.

15:39you know, you try to remember, uh, chances are you're never going to give that person a dollar. Yeah. You'll have conversations about their favorite restaurants. Let's listen. You go to another person an hour later, same product, same quality, same price. You say, what do you do? They say, well, you know how most families don't eat together anymore. And when they do, they don't eat healthy. I'm an at-home chef. Now, what did chef number two do? They opened a story loop by agitating in you a problem that they feel. And whenever they felt that all of a sudden they feel that and they want a solution now.

16:11And then you say, here's the solution. So it's a matter of saying, here's the problem that you solve, opens the story loop. And here's this now, there's some mistakes that people make. The first is they're too vague. So if I say something like, you know how a lot of people don't have fulfillment in their life? It doesn't open. Yeah, absolutely. But if I say to you, you know, a lot of people have a dog and when somebody knocks at the door, the dog barks and barks at the door and it drives everybody crazy. Yes. By the way, I do have that dog. And I'm not found anybody who can solve that problem.

16:42I'm a dog trainer. You're going to do so much more business. And it's one of the reasons that you want to talk 75 % about the problem, 25 % about the solution, because the problem is the trigger that makes people want to buy the solution. Got it. Last year, when you were on stage for us in Vegas, you tell the story about people want to get married on the first date. Can you please explain that. First of all, tell it on the story because I love the way you position marketing. Yeah. If you meet somebody or if you go to, you know, they go to your website or whatever and you immediately sell your product, which by the way, I do want you to sell your product on your website.

17:23So don't get me wrong. What you're doing is you're asking for a commitment before you've actually built the relationship. So you do want to ask for that commitment on your website because it might be the fifth or sixth time somebody comes to you. But if it's the first time, you actually want to take them on a first date, a second date, a third date, and a fourth date. Relationships move through three phases, curiosity, enlightenment, and commitment. Curiosity happens when somebody realizes there's something about this person, this brand, this leader, this product that might help me improve my life, might help me survive, might help me thrive.

17:56Hey, I'm interested. That's exactly it. When you trigger that response, they actually automatically move to the second phase of a relationship, which is enlightenment. And enlightenment is when we're discovering due diligence. We're saying, hey, how much is this going to cost? Will it actually work for me? What happens if it doesn't work? And then if I can answer those questions well, I move to the third phase, which is commitment. And commitment is where I'm willing to exchange some money for the product. In relationships, it's, wow, she looks pretty good. And wow, she's actually not crazy and I love spending time with her and she's really a wonderful person.

18:32Will you marry me? Curiosity, enlightenment, commitment. So the brands are the same way. The problem that most brands have is they never peak curiosity. They go right into enlightenment and ask for commitment or worse, they just ask for the commitment. But you never actually peaked my curiosity. And the way you peak curiosity is you open a story loop that somehow makes me feel like this brand could help me survive and thrive. And let me find out how and whether or not it's true. Yeah. I try and help people understand that you got to get them to raise their hand and say, Hey, I'm interested. And then you got to nurture them enough to say, Hey, I'm ready.

19:06Yes. You know, and, and get those two actions out of people. When you think, uh, a brand today, like, you know, you mentioned Domino's, that sort of thing. What's a brand that's doing it well. and what's a brand that's not doing it well? Well, it's harder to name the brands that aren't doing it well because while there are millions of them, nobody has ever heard of them. They don't live very long because if you're not piquing people's curiosity, you're forgotten. You're just forgotten. Let's take the case of Ryan Reynolds who owns Mint Mobile. He owns Wrexham. He owns Aviation Gen. You might say that Ryan's formula is to take something and then bring the celebrity spotlight to it.

19:55I think that's part of it. But I think let's take Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile, he buys this little mobile phone company. And then of course he brings his attention to it. But he actually runs advertising that's very, very bad advertising. He says, the reason that we're running such cheap advertising as we just want to pass the money on to you. Yeah. So he chose, the problem is cell phone coverage is actually expensive and I'm going to get away, do away with all that and give you a really great price on this. And that's what brings attention to the brand. Yeah. Uh, and so I think you want to identify what problem are we going to solve?

20:31Met mobile probably could have solved 50 problems. He chose one. Yeah. Here's a great example. Uh, aura rings. This is not an aura ring. This is just a wedding ring. This is an aura, but I, I did wear one. I wore one for a long time. And it does a lot. It measures your heartbeat and all that kind of stuff, measures the steps that you do in a day, tells you whether or not you had a good night's sleep. The sleep part always confused me because I know if I got a good night's sleep, right? But one of the things that that brand did was they did some studies on what's the number one problem that people are loving that we solve.

21:06They discovered it wasn't step count, heart rate, any of that. It was sleep. And so what happens is after years of advertising the Oura Ring, they stopped advertising all of the benefits and only advertised one, sleep. Now think about that. They took all these wonderful things that this product does and said, let's not talk about it. Let's only talk about one of the problems that it solves. And we're going to own that problem because you can't own 30 problems. You can only own one. So they spent millions of dollars calling it a sleep lab on your finger and sales went up. Let me be really clear.

21:38They reduced the number of problems that this thing solved, at least in the mind of the public, because it actually solves a lot of problems. They reduced and sales went up. And what that says to us is you can't own 30 problems. You can only own one. And so they picked the problem and sales go up.

22:04guests, better quality content, and serve you better with even more podcasts. So please hit that subscribe button. It only takes a second. It makes a huge difference. If you support us, we're going to support your success and help you achieve big success together. So a business that goes from small to midsize, midsize to large, what's the difference between a business that goes from good to great, that scales specifically with the marketing side of it? Because a lot of them struggle with scaling from marketing. Yeah. Well, you've got to get, you know, this, you've got to get your processes down.

22:42So when a business first starts, you're, you know, you're, you're, it's called an owner hustle. Yeah. And you're just out there trying to get, you know, trying to dot every I across every T. Uh, and then you start bringing people on board. And when people come on board, you realize you've got to have processes. And so you create those processes. I think scaling is really about turning things into repeatable processes. That's the first challenge. We need to figure out what's our marketing process, what's our sales process, what's our product optimization process, what's our inventory process, all those sorts of things.

23:15When you start putting these things into books, metaphorical books, then people can come and go, but your processes are there. I think processes is probably the hardest part. And then you start realizing that we've got to start replacing people, that the people just have to be hired. I think business owners think that the right employee is going to solve their problem. It's the right employee running the right processes that's going to solve your problem. If you bring in the right employee and there's no processes, that employees are replaceable. And if they go, the business goes. And we've all experienced that.

23:50So, you know, I think you get your processes right. And then you just bring in excellent, excellent people. Scaling the marketing, taking that marketing process and building it big. How do we do that? Where do we start? Well, for most people watching, if you don't have a sales funnel, you want to create a sales funnel. And so what I mean by sales funnel is, you know, I sell books for a living. So let me just use myself for example. A book is 25 books on Amazon. A lot of people will just buy the book. But what if we create a free PDF that is downloadable, cheaper than a book, and then write them 52 emails, one every week that talk about the book.

24:30Now we can get them to write the book. So we've just done that. Now, once that works, we want to actually create a different PDF that creates 52 more emails that sells the book. When we have 20 PDFs that are putting people on emails, we're going to sell a lot more books, which we do. We sell a ton of books. And that's why you do it. So I think you create one thing that works. Most people will stop there and you don't want to stop. You want to keep creating more and more and more. And when you do the more, do you do a slightly different target audience? 100%. Right. So tell me more about that process.

25:03Well, you want to figure out the demographics of people who would be interested in your book. I wrote a book called Building a Story Brand. It's the reason that we're talking. It helps you clarify your marketing message. All right. So I'm going to put a lead generator on for the five mistakes dentists make. Got it. Right. And then I'm going to do the three mistakes pet stores make. And I'm going to do the 10 things every lawyer needs to do to run an effective marketing. And now I'm just a hub and spoke, right? So here's my building a story brand. I've got to outreach to lawyers and outreach to dentists and outreach this.

25:34And you want to find those demographics. often the smaller that demographic is the more books they will buy because you're the only one talking to them got it so keep building keep building keep building on it um how much testing and measuring do you guys do with that then how much science is there behind it for us almost none right yeah i mean for us almost none we do some of it you know to be honest but i know if i create a lead generator, I know how many people downloaded it. I know if it worked or it didn't work. And if it works, we're going to change it a little bit and create another one for dentists and another one for lawyers and another one for whatever.