Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

Normal: Back to the Beginning
Crafting the normal is the most fun and most important piece of the story
process. This is where you take a happening and make it matter. This is where
you get to make your audience care. Additionally, this is where you get to flex
your empathetic muscles, where you simultaneously say, “I know you” and
“You know me.” This is where the listener, reader, or hearer of your story settles
in, lets down their guard, and if you do it right, blurs the lines between their
world and yours long enough for you to bridge the gap.
And in case you’re wondering, this is the part we humans love. Your
audience will enjoy that subtle sense that, while everything appears to be going
along as planned, something is about to happen. You see this play out a hundred
times magnified when you watch a movie with someone who is extremely
sensitive to the normal. Children are like this. My husband is like this too. It
doesn’t even have to be a thriller! All it needs is a steadily developing normal,
and they can barely contain themselves. They have to ask questions. They have
to make predictions. They are overwhelmed by the normal and know that
something is about to explode, and they just can’t handle it.
When it comes to business storytelling, it’s much less dramatic than that but
equally as effective.
The normal for the CEO of the Maricopa Medical Center was the developing
scene at the community forum as the homeless man shuffled in, and we cared
when they treated him differently than what we expected.
The normal for the boy in the McDonald’s commercial was feeling like he
had nothing in common with his father, so we cared when he found something

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they shared.
The normal for the water polo player was the entire story leading up to the
moment he quit the team.
In each of these cases, the effect of the explosion was completely dependent
on the crafting of the normal. And the same will be true for you and your stories.
The good news is, you can use the story components as a checklist as you are
building your normal.
Include details about the identifiable character, details that will paint the
picture and sound familiar to the audience. Check!
Include the emotions, what they (or you if you’re the character in the story)
were feeling or hopeful for or thinking as the situation was unfolding. Check!
Include the particular moment in time and place that this was happening. A
restaurant? A town hall? A regular Tuesday in mid-June? A stressful Friday
during the holidays? Check!
And last, with your particular audience in mind, include details so it sounds
familiar to them. Throughout the whole story they should be saying to
themselves, 
I’ve felt that. I understand that. That sounds about right. Yep. Yes.
Yes. Yes.
Check!
Then, after all that yessing, when the explosion hits and the solution is found
or the lesson is learned or the realization is had, the audience will say, “Oh—”
And much like in 
When Harry Met Sally,
the next natural response is, “I’ll
have what she’s having.”
New Normal: Smooth Sailing
If you get the rest of the story right, the new normal writes itself. It’s the
recap of the lesson learned and what it means for the person hearing the story.
As you craft the new normal, it’s up to you how blatant you want to get about
the message.
The water-polo-player-turned-executive didn’t tell the audience not to give
up or they’ll regret it. But he implied it in the way he ended the new normal.
The Desert Star Construction founder finished his story by reminiscing about
his first fort and saying that he couldn’t wait to see what he and the new client
might build together next.
The financial advisor assured her potential clients that she would treat their
money with as much love as she had treated her own since she was a child.
The most important piece of crafting the new normal is to use it as an
opportunity to come full circle. End the story back at the beginning, except with

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the benefit of the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding you didn’t have in the
normal.
There it is.
That’s all you need to start crafting your stories. Like with anything, practice
will make you better. Over time, either through external feedback or your own,
you’ll get a sense for what works and what doesn’t. And if you get the luxury of
being able to tell a story more than once, perhaps in repeated pitches or in
multiple interviews, use each telling as an opportunity to evaluate which pieces
really hit the mark and which don’t resonate as well and adjust as needed.
No Fine Print, No Gimmicks
The best part about using this proven method for crafting stories (besides the fact
that it’s as straightforward and simple as it sounds) is that it works. Fully.
Completely. No tricks or gimmicks necessary.
Someone once approached me with a slight smirk after I spoke to a
marketing audience.
“You changed the music, didn’t you?” he said as he stood two inches from
my face and stared at me.
“Uh . . . Ah . . . I’m . . .” I stuttered a bit, confused by the question and taken
aback by the abruptness of it all.
The man didn’t even introduce himself, he was so giddy about what he
thought he’d figured out.
“In the after video. You changed the music to make it more emotional, didn’t
you?!” He smirked again.
Okay. It made sense now. In the presentation I had used an example of a
brand who thought they were telling a story in one video and then showed the
contrast in a second video when they actually did tell a story. The difference was
profound, as you might expect. Apparently, the difference was so profound this
video marketing expert couldn’t believe the distinction was made by the story
alone. There must have been more to it. We must have changed the music as
well to really drive home the contrast between the two stories.
“No,” I answered with my own smirk. We had used the same track. The
same footage. We only added some small clips, because the story version was
slightly longer. All that had changed between the two videos was that we crafted
a story and told it.

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Well-crafted stories don’t need gimmicks to work. That’s the point!
Remember how I listened to the Juan and Sarah gum commercial on mute?
Or how the Apple and Budweiser commercials didn’t use words?
Any of the other stories in this book—and there have been a lot of them—
have done the job not because we dressed them up or manipulated them in any
way but rather because they were real, they included our necessary story
components, and they followed this simple formula.
That is the beauty of storytelling. A story can just be itself.
Think how much better the world would be if we didn’t have to approach
each message with a smirk.
Story Anytime in Anytime
I’m often asked how long a story should be. The conversation can go a few
different directions after this. Sometimes the person will mention the baby shoes
story that may or may not have been written by Hemingway. I often mention the
Mark Twain quote: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”—a
nod to how much harder brevity is than length.
Perhaps the most aggravating answer I give is that a story should be as long
as it needs to be.
For example, I recently stepped onto an elevator at the airport, and three
people followed me: a young woman and two young men. They were going to
the fourth floor. I was continuing on to the fifth.
The door closed, and the woman turned to her friends. “Do you know where
my parents are right now?”
The guys shook their heads.
She said, “They’re at a burial service for my grandfather’s friend who died at
Pearl Harbor. They just found the body, and they’re going to pay their respects
to good ol’ Uncle Mike.”
At that point the doors opened and the trio stepped off, leaving me alone in
the elevator, my jaw on the floor. A Pearl Harbor victim just found now? I was
so intrigued I almost jumped out after them, but the steel doors slammed shut,
mocking both my curiosity and hesitation.
For decades, sales and marketing experts have been trying to solve the
“elevator pitch” conundrum. How do you deliver enough information and create
enough intrigue so that, in a short elevator journey with a prospect, they’d want

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to learn more?
Certainly, these travelers weren’t trying to sell anything, but that’s exactly
the point. Their elevator pitch wasn’t a pitch at all. It was a story.
Think about it. It had identifiable characters: the girl’s parents and good ol’
Uncle Mike. There was a moment in time: “right now.” And even the specific
detail of Pearl Harbor, which, like mentioning John F. Kennedy in the Eight &
Bob story, is a shortcut to a whole world of familiarity for Americans.
I arrived home from the airport that evening and told my husband the story
of the best elevator pitch ever—and admitted to almost losing a limb in the
elevator shaft trying to chase them down to hear the rest. Together, we googled
“Mike Pearl Harbor body found” and read about new DNA testing that meant
families could finally lay their loved ones to rest. And, indeed, there had been a
service that day—the one that young woman’s parents were likely attending.
In truth, I don’t think elevator pitches even matter that much. It’s one of
those sales techniques you hear about, but they never actually happen in the real
world. What the story does reveal, though, is that stories don’t have to be long to
be effective. They just need to be as long as they need to be.
I know saying, “As long as it needs to be” is an annoying answer. But it’s
true. Like the story in the elevator, a story can be ten seconds or, if you were to
attend the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and have
the honor of hearing famed storyteller Jay O’Callahan tell his story, “The Spirit
of the Great Auk,” you would be transfixed for ninety minutes. Yes, stories can
be as long or as short as you need them to be as long as they follow the
framework and include the components.
I find the best approach is to start with the whole story. Write it out, tell it all,
hold nothing back. From there, cut it back to fit the space you have. Here are a
few examples of what that might look like.