Storytelling Converts Better Than Sales Tactics Every Time

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Chance. My guest today is David Garfunkel. I messed his name up. It's Garfinkel. Sorry about that. We do one take here, so you're going to have to live with that, David. I'll live with it. He's a renowned copywriting expert, author, and coach, widely regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on persuasive communication. Spent decades helping businesses, entrepreneurs, and marketers craft compelling messages that drive results. We're going to talk about his latest book, The Persuasion Story Code, The Magic of Conversational Storytelling.

0:47So David Garfinkel, welcome to the show. Thanks, John. So before we get into the content of the book, storytelling has become a pretty hot topic, especially in marketing circles. A number of books, I've interviewed a number of authors that have written about it. I always like to start with, what do you feel like you offer that's different in this book? Well, to put it bluntly, I offer stories that people can learn quickly and use immediately that aren't going to put their listeners to sleep or go, what is he talking about? Let's dive right into that. You have, I don't know, 25 or so what you call mini story frameworks?

1:26Yeah, I call them persuasion stories, and they are actually stories we tell every day, but we don't realize it. And sometimes when we tell them, they're not as persuasive as they could be. I show you how to make them persuasive without coming across like a carnival barker, but just like a normal human being telling a story. Can you give me a couple examples of how you would apply some of those story frameworks in particularly in marketing circles? Sure. Well, let me turn the tables on you for just a second for the first one. an empathy story, you know? So, John, I know you do a podcast. I do one too.

2:08And sometimes it can be stressful because the guest doesn't show up or they get tongue-tied and they're tripping over their words. And it's always a good idea to have a backup, a way to get yourself out of it. That's what I call an empathy story. Now, you're obviously an experienced guy and you probably have a dozen backups or workarounds. But I mean, even as I was saying that to you, didn't you feel like I knew you just a little better? Sure, sure, sure, sure. No question. That, you know, most podcasters have been through the same thing. So yeah, absolutely. And I want to point out that story has a beginning and a middle, but it doesn't have an end.

2:51it opens the door for me to sell you my brand new$10 ,000 course backups and workarounds for tongue-tied guests, right? Which of course is a joke. And I don't really have that. That would be a short course, right? Exactly. So you introduced the idea, you've probably trademarked this even, of stories with a dollar sign to start the S. You want to talk a little bit about that concept? Yeah. So what most people think of stories, they think of a novel. They might think of an Orphan X novel. I love those novels myself. Or a Lee Child Jack Reacher novel, or maybe an 18th century Emily Bronte novel or something, 19th century, I guess.

3:44Those are very long stories. And I call them stories with a dollar sign because we have to pay money to read them, to see them. You know, even cable TV movies, we're paying a cable bill or we're paying some kind of bill for that. And so those cost us money and usually well worth it. But that's why it has a dollar sign instead of an S at the beginning. Stories, the other type, persuasion stories, are stories that make us money, stories that help us build trust, build rapport. and in some cases, certain kinds of stories close sales. And they're much shorter. They're much simpler. They don't have lots of characters and character development and an inner journey and an outer journey and, you know, mentors and villains and all that stuff that you need for an entertainment story, the story with a dollar sign.

4:35Otherwise, why would anyone bother paying for it if it's not interesting? That story you started with, the empathy story, is that something that, you know, particularly when it comes to resonating with the target audience, that you're trying to attract. I mean, is that an essential piece of even getting started? It's one way to do it. I think it's the best way. There are other ways. You can cite statistics, you can talk about, there's another kind of story called a story about what's going on in the world today. A lot of people in the financial marketing space call this a top of mind story because it's about the news and it connects with what the person's thinking, but it doesn't always connect with what they're feeling.

5:13Now, if it's very pitched, if it's political about a point that your target market strongly agrees with, then it does have an emotional connection. How do you make stories? I mean, you see people trying to do this and they come off sort of canned. How do you make a story feel very conversational? I mean, do you have some elements that you bring to that or is that just you're a good writer or you just intuitively know this? I mean, how do you get that conversation element? Well, sometimes it takes practice and some people are better at this naturally than others. But basically, if you're talking about something you already know, whether it's about yourself or your product or most likely about your prospect and their pains or their dreams or their hopes or some imagined future that you can provide for them, deliver to them, it'll come across more naturally.

6:07It's really when you try to be someone you're not. You remember Hal Holbrook and he did all the Mark Twain stuff. I mean, there's a professional storyteller. My gosh, he spent years and years owning his craft and probably spent hours in makeup, making himself look like Mark Twain and all the rest. That's not what you do as a business person, unless you're in the entertainment business. It's what you do as a salesperson is you talk to people, you talk to them about what they need, about their problems, about a solution that you have, and to deliver the same information you're already delivering conversationally, but in a story form, it's just going to work a little better.

6:48So a lot of what you're talking about, selling, is getting the order. So you tell a story, you get some rapport, bring in some empathy, but ultimately you have to say, buy now. So how do you work a call to action in that meets the same meter as the story? Well, the interesting thing is a lot of people think that when you tell a persuasion story, the persuasion story has to close the deal. Right. And it doesn't. What I like to say is it moves the prospect closer. So you can tell a story that eliminates objection. You know, some people think that this$10 ,000 podcast workaround course isn't for them.

7:31But let me tell you about George. He was always getting these guests that started drooling when they come to this podcast. And we taught them how to get them to actually wipe the saliva off their mouth before. Okay, terrible example. But you get the point. You're just telling about something that happened. And in the process, you're giving an example that obliterates an objection. So getting over objections is one of the most important steps in closing a sale. There is one story I have in there, and I don't remember the official name I gave it, but the shorthand is the choice of one, where it basically eliminates all the other alternatives.

8:12You can tell that story, talk about how all of the competition doesn't do this, but we do, doesn't do this, but we do, doesn't do this, but we do. And that can be pretty close to, okay, would you like one? You know? Are the stories that you are explaining in the book that need to be in print, need to be spoken? Are there differences to, you know, to the medium or to the, the, where they're encountered? No, no difference. I mean, I'm of the school, direct response marketing, that copy is basically the spoken language in written form. So anything written in copy could be spoken out loud. And so the words would be the same.

8:52Now, there are other people I know who think that copy needs to be big and bold and flamboyant. And I think that's more like a story with the dollar sign. It's very entertaining, but in my experience, It rarely works in actually getting new customers. Can you use this technique to get attention? I know one of the chores for a lot of marketers is just people have shorter attention spans. The world is cluttered. You know, search engines take people where they want to take them. I mean, can you use this to really get that initial attention in your view? Sure. There are four types of origin stories that I have in chapter three.

9:31and any one of those could very easily get attention. The coffee that I'm drinking here is made with my favorite device in the world. The Arobi Aeropress costs about 30 bucks and it makes delicious coffee. And I actually include their origin story, which is not all that dramatic from their website. But if you wanted to get more attention, you could say, you know, that was the last cup of coffee at the office. I could take, you know, burned flavorless. I was going out of my mind. And then I thought, and that will get someone's attention. And then he can describe how he invented and tested and perfected and rolled out and offers this Arobiero press for$39 as opposed to$2 ,000 for an espresso machine.

10:25It makes better coffee. So you can use origin stories to get attention. you you can also use an empathy story if you start talking about somebody's pain you could be talking you're selling a remedy for a joint pain you could say you know you wake up in the morning and once again you dread to get up not because you're sleepy because you know that your joints are going to hurt and soon it starts to feel like sandpaper you know somebody who is in the market for something to get rid of that feeling is going to pay attention. Does a story in this format have a headline? Does it need to have a headline?

11:05Well, the story is a component of a sales pitch or of a sales letter. So the sales letter probably should have a headline. Yeah. In fact, you can even start your story in the headline. I mean, one of the most famous ads ever was the John Cable's ad. They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I began to play, you know, and then he actually develops the story. It's about one sixth of the whole ad. So it's not a long story, but it's, you know, it's a failure, success, problem, solution kind of story. He wrote it about 101 years ago and we still talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you ever feel like TV ads are just for the big guys?

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12:33Head on over to adcritter.com. That's adcritter.com and get started. So what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making when really trying to persuade through storytelling? Oh, TMI. Too much information. They try to tell everything. They can go into way too much technical detail. I mean, stories get translated into pictures in people's minds. And if the picture is too ornate and detailed, they're not going to be able to process it before you move to the next point in the story. Also, sometimes people are pushing too hard in the story. And you don't need to push. You're just moving people gently from where they are to, I want it.

13:14And sometimes there's no momentum at all. The story is just sort of sitting there and it's not focused. It's going around circles and it's not very persuasive. Can people learn, like, how would you tell, obviously, your book gives them a lot of training, but I think the best writers, maybe you agree with this, the best writers are commonly readers of a lot of things. Can we learn anything from our favorite fiction works? Yeah. So about 100 years ago, I don't know why I keep bringing up these old examples. I guess I'm feeling old today. Because that's when we started Invisas as well. Exactly. Good boy, touche.

14:02There was an actor. I don't remember her name, but she was C.B. DeMille's, you know, filmmaker, favorite actor. And she said that every, and I'm paraphrasing, every scene in a movie is a story. So if you realize the kind of stories we're talking about with persuasion stories are little bricks that build the wall of a whole story with a dollar sign. And so I think if you, I mean, you know, my go-to favorites are Stephen King, Lee Child wrote the Jack Reacher books, Greg Hurwitz, who wrote the Orphan X books. All of those guys, they write very tight, moving, and I don't just mean emotionally moving.

14:51I mean, there's some momentum in the story. They write little snippets of things that happen, little scenes that are complete stories in themselves. and those are really good examples. I had one client who was a crazy Jack Reacher fan and he was having trouble with some stuff and I told him, get five or six of your favorite Jack Reacher books and just copy the first page. Hand copy it, word for word. Not to use in anything, not to violate copyright, not to be plagiarist, but just to get a sense of the rhythm and the tone and the feel. And he did and it transformed him. I was going to ask you for a success story but that's a pretty good one right there.

15:30Let's talk a little bit about AI and storytelling automation. I mean, is this going to complement or hinder what you're teaching? Both. So I'm taking the book, The Persuasion Story Code, and I'm creating a video course, which is going to be much more thorough. And I've been working with Rhonda Lynn. She's been helping me develop an AI feature to go inside, behind the paywall, inside the course. And what I am insisting that it do, even though it doesn't want to, it wants to write the stories. I don't like stories that AI writes that generally screws them up. And sometimes it makes up facts that you won't catch and that can get you in trouble with your customers or with regulators.

16:14But what I'm having it do is draw out of the person key points in the story so that you come up with an outline in your own words through a conversation with the AI. And I prefer to use AI that way a lot where I'm very good at interviewing people, but I also enjoy being interviewed. As you can tell, you're interviewing me right now, and I enjoy having a conversation with an AI when it asks me good questions. So you'll basically answer six questions with a single sentence, and it'll arrange those sentences for you, and you have the outline of your story. I think the problem with AI writing in general and writing stories in specific is there's something that whether you're good at writing stories or writing copy or writing conversationally or not, you and everyone else has a life experience, has had a lot of conversations with people, has a spidey sense, you know, what's real and what's phony.

17:20AI knows what it's been fed in its training by its developers. And sometimes the stuff it comes up with. Plus, AI seems to have this algorithm or tendency to want to make everything better and inspirational at the end, even if that's not what you want to do. And so you end up editing it and you could end up spending more time editing it than you would have if you'd written in the first place. Well, I'm really happy to hear you describe it that way, because I've been saying for a long time that our job now is going to be provide context. And I think that that's really what you're describing because it can't do that.

17:59It really can't. Now, you can do more of that than you might have imagined by giving it rules. But even figuring out what those rules are is quite a mental strategic exercise in itself. and then communicating it, figuring out how to communicate it so it's effective to the AI is also an exercise in itself. But you can do more with AI and get higher quality output than you thought. When it comes to something like stories, I'm not sure. Yeah, I think you just have to treat it as that assistant, is what I've told people. I mean, you can even – I've had a lot of luck with – I mean, never had luck with saying write something, But I have had good luck saying, could you make this sentence better?

18:46You know, things along that line. And then it will bring in lots of stuff because you've trained it. Is there a formula like a must have? You must have an object of desire. There must be a climax. There must be all those kind of writing types of commandments. For stories? Yeah. Well, these stories are different. I mean, in the typical hero's journey story, there are those rules. But a hero's journey story is two hours long and has many pieces to it. And there are specific rules, but they're different for an origin story than they are for an empathy story. An empathy story, all of the story, I call it, there are four types, and I call them stories about what your customer is experiencing.

19:32Those generally only have a beginning and a middle. There are case study stories and, you know, with case studies and other proof stories, testimonials that are effective, you generally want to have a crisis, an obstacle, a way the person overcame the obstacle and a positive resolution. And that's a lot like a typical hero's journey story, sort of shrunken down to two or three minutes. So it depends. I'm curious, who did you read? Who did you learn from when you were getting started? In storytelling? Well, or copywriting period. Oh, my gosh. Well, Gary Halbert was the guy. I read all his newsletters.

20:19I went to one of his seminars. It changed my life. Was it from Fish Creek or something like that? Where did he write from? I can't remember what the... Well, he was in Key West, but he was south of something, Dewfish Key or something like that. Yeah. But I read all the classics. I read scientific advertising 15 times. It's not even a very enjoyable book, but incredibly valuable. I like Gene Schwartz's book a lot, Breakthrough Advertising. I've been reading it for 30 years. I still keep getting new things out of it. I love Joe Sugarman's book. It was originally called Advertising Secrets of the written word is reissued at a much better price by Adweek magazine.

21:01And it's, I think now called the Adweek Copywriting Guide. And that's one of my top books. So I've read a lot of copywriting books. A few of them have been really good like those. So David, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the podcast. Where can people find out more about your work, certainly learn more about the frameworks and obviously pick up a copy of the persuasive persuasion story code i've been i've i've been sick with a headache today and so i'm like oh that's okay that's okay no you're doing great thank you persuasion story code persuasion story code is available on amazon the persuasion story code because some people look for the persuasion code which is a different book You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter X or X or Twitter.

21:52And I have a podcast myself, Copywriters Podcast. You can find it at copywriterspodcast.com. We're also on all of the platforms, Spotify and Apple Podcasts and all the rest. if someone is has a fairly robust business or they're doing pretty well as a copywriter and they want coaching they can go to garfinkelcoaching.com i think that's about it i don't know again i appreciate you taking a few moments out of the day to stop by the podcast oh thanks for having me my pleasure great questions too thank you hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road that sounds good i'd like that

22:35I'll see you next time.