I was asked yesterday if I was in sales. “Honey, I said, We’re all in sales.” We spend most of our personal and professional lives, “selling”.  We sell our ideas, our self-worth, our right to live on the planet. The skill takes shape as soon as we can talk.

Every marketer talks about telling stories these days.  Heck, marketing’s been telling stories since the beginning of time. But there’s a problem. We’ve got one thing wrong. You don’t tell stories. You make people feel them. Psychologically that involves a lot of gray matter and other bodily chemistry heating up for both the deliverer and the recipient.

Real  A sellers have this uncanny knack of exploiting a buyer’s hidden desire and connecting it to the product. “This isn’t an automobile, this is a chick magnet.” I hear designers speak of the energy source they so crave as creative tension, the grist for the creative mill that takes full advantage of diversity. “ I always try out my designs on my kids. They see things I don’t. They ask different questions.” Movie producers have the log line, that one sentence description of the feature length film that sells it.  Movie title; Keynote, Logline: An Internet billionaire returns to his home town to deliver the keynote speech at his old high school graduation. Writers know they are more successful if they write about something they know or have actually experienced.  Author Thomas Steinbeck, son of John Steinbeck warns, “Let your audience hear a truth on the same scale as their own experience.” If you think about really effective marketing claims – they are way more relevant when they let the audience see themselves in the scene.

As my colleague, Richard Fouts says, “Stories spread. Good stories spread faster. Stories help us learn. Stories engage.  Good stories make an imprint on our memory. Memory, after all, is the crux of brand awareness. If you remember a product, it’s because someone communicated a brand promise through a relevant story. And the stories that are driven by a strong human emotion are the ones we remember most.”

So alongside the provocative headlines, loglines, pitches and tall tales there’s got to be some of the real deal – that emotional connection. And you can’t fake that. For marketers today, it plays out big time in brand authenticity. Organizational soul – that moral rudder that guides a brand on how to act when something bad happens and even how to celebrate success – and how to tell a story that moves people.

But the toughest sell, is the internal one. How do you convince the leadership team that your brand story or your next product campaign has to be more about the buyer than about the brand?

I’ve often told clients, don’t take this idea back for approval – sell it. You’re invested in it, you’ve tested it, you have data to back up why it will work, so make them believe. Show them how it will play out over time. Link it to what they already believe or risk raising their defensive shields. A great progression for selling your story is showing the mess everyone knows they’re in, then showing the desired state they so badly want to be in — and then hitting them with how you’re going to bridge the gap. The simple rule of three. Three visuals in three chapters, in three minutes. Practice building your own creative digital marketing loglines. Ue them to test your assumptions. Does the idea really ring true? Do you buy it?

Today’s marketing is so deterministic and technology-obsessed we’re forgetting that even if you get all the strategy parts right, if you don’t have a really great idea, no one will be listening. You may be proud of your ability to track sentiment as accurately as conversations, but have you got any worthwhile sentiments of your own to share?

So much technology, so little testimony.