Master these two stories for your business

In my last newsletter, I talked about the power of a business having a story.

Not just a strategy, but a wider narrative that the strategy sits within, explaining where the business has come from, the change it wants to make, and what that would mean to the world.

Safe to say, it went down well.

But there was also a misunderstanding.

Some people asked me how I reconcile this idea of a “business story” with talking to customers on their terms about what they want. And the answer is: you don’t. You don’t because that is a different story.

Every business has not one, but two stories:

  1. The business story
  2. The customer story

The business story is the one “about the business”. The customer story is the one “about the customer”. In the business story, the business is the protagonist. And in the customer story, the customer is.

These two stories have entirely different use cases – but as you’ll see, you need them both.

Business story use cases are for whenever you are trying to sell the idea of the business. Not the product, but the idea as a whole. This might be to people like:

  • Your team
  • New hires
  • Investors
  • The media
  • Conference audiences
  • Partners
  • Etc.

None of these people are your customers. None are interested in buying your product or service. Instead, they are interested in buying into you. Your vision, your ideas, and what you want to do in the world.

The customer story use case, as you can probably imagine, is for selling your stuff. For marketing. For the most part customers don’t give a crap about your back story, or your vision, or how great you are or any of that stuff. They only think about themselves, and what you can do for them. That’s why this story is about them, and your company only plays a supporting role. You would use this for things like:

  • Ads
  • Sales decks
  • Sales scripts
  • Website copy
  • Etc.

Do you see how you need both of these?

And how you can’t get away with just one?

(Although heck, most businesses have neither and somehow they struggle on…)

OK so having established the difference, how do you create each one?

I’ve actually written about both of these separately before, so here I’m just going to give you the skeleton of each.

____

Business story skeleton:

(As per last email)

  1. Origin
  2. Introduction of the industry problem
  3. Your belief about the industry problem
  4. How you are going to overcome it
  5. What this will mean for customers (i.e. individuals)
  6. What this will mean for the world (i.e. larger vision and consequences)

Customer story skeleton:

  1. Statement of a personal problem they would recognise
  2. Your unique solution to overcome it
  3. The stakes if the problem isn’t solved
  4. The dream state they reach if the problem is solved

____

Now, what I want you to see is how these are the same story but told from different points of view.

At the heart of both of them is your strategy, which is made up of your unique belief / insight, the new action you are taking because of that belief, and the resulting value to the customer.

In the business story, this is basically laid out in points 2-5. In the customer story you have to flip this so they are at the centre of it. This means starting with the value you’re creating for the customer, and then tying it to a personal problem they believe they have.

Now you might think this is the same problem as the one in the business story, but that isn’t always true. The problem in the business story should be an “industry wide” problem. I.e. “the issue with this industry is X, and we’re going to fix it”. The customer however doesn’t generally give a crap about that, they only care about their problem, so you have to bring it down to their personal level.

For example we might say that Apple solved an industry problem back in the 90s of limited uptake of computers outside non-technical audiences. That’s a business story. But at the personal level the problem was something more like the customer not having the technical capabilities to make their goals happen.

Both of these problems were solved by their “friendly intuitive design” (i.e. the one strategy).

But they are communicated differently due to the priorities of the different audiences for the business and customer stories.

In my case there is an industry problem of low understanding of strategy across businesses. But the customer doesn’t recognise that problem when framed that way. The way they experience it is more like difficulty articulating their offer.

It’s the same thing, from different points of view.

Imagine if you got all this straight in your head. Imagine if you could finally know not only what your business is actually doing (the strategy bit), but also how to explain it to everyone, in exactly the way that would tickle them, and motivate them to do business with you.

Man, that is the dream.

In 2025, that’s what I want to help you with.

Let’s go.

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