Dave Lorenzo (00:00):
It's the Saturday side Hustle. And I'm Dave Lorenzo, the Godfather of Growth. This week we have a special presentation for you. This is an audio recording of a presentation I did just yesterday. The name of the presentation is Selling With Stories, and it's the seven steps to persuading people to adopt your ideas using stories. Enjoy the presentation and we'll be back with you at the end of the show.

(00:27):
I'm going to share with you our methodology for selling with stories. Now, the reason that stories are so impactful, the reason that stories work for people who are in sales or for people who want to influence others is because throughout human history we have been relating to one another through the telling of stories. Envision cavemen sitting around a fire telling each other about the, I don't know, brontosaurus that they just killed, my best Flintstone's reference that they just killed, and how the hunt was, and that's been going on from the beginning of time. So all of us as human beings love stories. We connect with one another through stories. Now, the beauty for us who are in the influence business, those of you who are marketers or business leaders who want to motivate your staff, motivate your team. The beauty of stories for us is that they tend to bypass the rational mind.

(01:33):
So if you want to connect with someone and influence them, using a story is a phenomenally powerful tool because people are less likely to pass judgment if they hear or they see something in a story that they can relate to that there are a few core principles. There's seven, as a matter of fact that I'm going to share with you today that make up a story that is incredibly influential, seven different principles. What I'll do first is I'll tell you a story and then we'll go through and we'll dissect the story based on these seven principles. 2009, my son, Nick, who you've all met today, was a year old, and I was introduced to a real estate lawyer in Aventura just a few miles from here. I was introduced by a good friend who happens to be in the same business I'm in now. My business is a little different than it was then.

(02:32):
At that time, I was focused almost exclusively on working with attorneys, and my friend was focused almost exclusively on working with women owned businesses. And she came to me and she said, I met this attorney. He's a general counsel of a large real estate firm and he wants to go out on his own. Doesn't even have an office yet. Would you like to meet with him? And I said, yes, of course, by all means, I would love to meet with him. So she gives me the phone number. We set up a meeting and meet at Starbucks because the guy doesn't have an office, and we got to meet at like nine o'clock at night because the guy's so busy he can't get out of the office until after eight o'clock at night. So we meet at a Starbucks and we hit it off and we agree to begin working together.

(03:13):
And he says, I'm the general counsel of a timeshare company up in Boca, and I've got a little side hustle going, remember it's 2009. And he said, my side hustle is I help people whose homes are in foreclosure. He said, I'm doing it almost pro bono because they really can't afford to pay me very much, but I make a couple of bucks here and there. And I said, how do you find your clients? And he said, oh. He's like, I got this great thing going on. He said, myself and an immigration attorney and a family law attorney go to the Dolphin Mall on the weekends and we stand in the middle of the Dolphin Mall and we do seminars. And I said, wait a minute. You're an attorney and you stand in the middle of a mall. He said, yeah, it's fantastic. People come from all over to hear us.

(03:59):
So now in my mind, I'm picturing a PT Barnum esque type of thing. So I said to him, I said, before we agree to work together, let me come and see one of these seminars. Now, I had lived in Miami for two years and I had never been to the Dolphin Mall. And I don't know if any of you had gone to the Dolphin Mall back in 2009, but the Dolphin Mall today is not the Dolphin Mall. It was in 2009. Okay, so I show up on the Saturday morning at 10 o'clock in the morning, and there's my guy on a riser in the middle of the mall. And sure enough, there's a crowd of people. I see a sea of heads and he's up there talking and talking, and then he's got a six by 30 table off to the side. So all these people, after he finishes follow him over the table, they all line up and he's sitting at the table signing people up at a table in the mall.

(04:47):
Now I'm thinking to myself, this guy's either a genius and he's going to do the highest volume business in the history of foreclosure defense, or we got to get him out of this. I go home and we have our first meeting and I sit down with him and I say, what's your vision for the future of your firm? And he sighs and he says, I would love to do really sophisticated corporate transactions. I would love to do commercial real estate transactions. That's my background, that's my history. That's what I love to do. And then he tells me about this really sophisticated transaction that he just completed on behalf of his company. He said, I could do that on my own. And he says, and I also have a vision for a condo association model where people wouldn't pay by the hour and they would get white glove service and it would be amazing.

(05:38):
And he says, and I also have some friends who are real estate litigators and I could pre-qualify the litigation for them, but only if it was really high end and bring it in. And I said, how does that fit with the vision that you have right now? And he says, it doesn't. It absolutely doesn't. And I said, well, what's your plan to the two? And he looked at me and he said, well, I guess I just make enough money doing the foreclosure defense so I can leave my corporate job, and then eventually I would have enough money and I could pivot my practice to this higher end clientele. Two years later, he's still at his corporate job. He's got thousands, and I'm not joking, thousands of foreclosure defense clients. He's working harder than he ever worked before. He's buried and he's absolutely miserable to the point where he actually had to be hospitalized at one point because I don't don't want there to be a HIPAA issue, but he had a health problem as a result of all the overwork and stress, I connect him with what I was calling a strategic advisory group at the time.

(06:43):
Steve Footner was in that group, and Steve and the other four people in the group get ahold of this guy and they convince him to leave his corporate job. He pivots his practice and goes upmarket uses his brilliance to begin doing training classes for commercial realtors. And the rest is history. Today. Russell Jacobs, who many of you know is a member of Miami three, owns two condos side by side office condos in Aventura, right behind where Jason Neufeld offices are. He's incredibly successful. Bought his beautiful family, a phenomenal new home. He carried both houses for like a year and a half. While he was doing it, he was able to finance putting his wife, who's a wonderful physician back into medical school. She went from being a pediatric, she was a pediatrician to now being a dermatologist. They financed that whole thing through Russell's practice, and he was able to make all of those changes on his own through sheer force of will and a little bit of guidance, a little bit of help.

(07:56):
But the power of that came from being convinced by his peers, Steve Klitzner and four other attorneys who were in this peer advisory group that we had at the time, that this was a good idea. He could take the chance and leave his corporate practice pivot from working with thousands of foreclosure defense clients and move into a model where he could take a chance on himself and do these education seminars. Now, that's a story that I use when I'm out speaking to people who are in the corporate world and they're afraid to take a chance and go out on their own because many people who are in the corporate world do what Russ did. They got one foot in the corporate world and they got one foot out in the entrepreneurial space, and that side hustle holds them back and it delays them for years and years and years.

(08:52):
So I use that specific story to help convince them that if you have the right guidance and the right support from your peers, when you take the leap, it will work out just fine for you as long as you have that support system in place. So that story helps convince people you have the entrepreneurial bug but are afraid to go out on their own. Here are the seven elements that were in that story. Number one is clarity of purpose. Clarity of purpose. When I get up in front of the room to tell that story to one thing in mind, and that's to convince you to leave your corporate job and go out on your own. That's my clarity of purpose. When you're telling a story to a group for persuasion purposes, do not ever abandon your clarity of purpose. If you've ever been in front of someone, my dad does this all the time, Nick is going to laugh.

(09:51):
My dad will tell you a story and he'll forget the reason why he's telling you the story, right? It's a good story and he loves to tell it, but he doesn't remember the reason why. That's the death nail in business. You don't want to do that in business. So the three questions you need to have clear in your mind when you're telling the story, what do you want the listener to do? What do you want the people in the audience to do? Why will they do it? So what's in it for them and what will they get in the end if they listen to you? Why? What and what do you want them to do? What action should they take? It has to be clear in your mind when you begin the story. Now, step number two is to start off your story by creating context.

(10:40):
Now, there are a number of ways to do this, and I used what's called a time marker in the beginning of the story. When did that story start? 2009. And I specifically did that. What was the economy like in 2009? It was shit, right? So I wanted you to make sure, I wanted to make sure that you knew when this story took place because it's much more powerful if I use that time marker in the beginning. You can also start off your story by grabbing people's attention with a question, or you can start off your story with some type of dramatic behavior. If you listen to the podcast that Nicola and I do, and Nicola hates this, but she's getting really good at it, you'll hear us start off the show by going Attention entrepreneurs. Do you want to be able to go out on your own, but you're afraid we've got the answer to that specific problem?

(11:37):
And so much more on this edition of the Inside BSS Show, what we do there is we call out specifically who the audience is. We tell them what we're going to give them, and then we tell them they're going to get more. So that's what I would call behavior. So three things you can use to start off your story, a time marker, some type of question or some type of dramatic behavior. So the question, I mean, you've seen people do this. Everybody from Tony Robbins to the guy who sells a Flex Seal on tv, got a hole in your roof. We know how to solve that problem, right? A question is a great way, right? He puts the Flex Seal on a boat, and now he's floating across like Lake Michigan. You try that at home. So step number two is to put the audience in the story immediately by using a question, a time marker or some type of dramatic behavior. Step number three is setting the scene. Where was the first place I went to meet Russ Starbucks? Starbucks? Where was the place where I went to see Russ speak? Dolphin Mall? Dolphin Mall. Starbucks was in Ura Dolphin Mall, right? And what did I tell you about

(12:51):
The Dolphin

(12:51):
Mall? I told you the Dolphin Mall wasn't the Dolphin Mall. It is today, right? It was like a Persian bazaar back then. Now it's really nice. But I set the scene for you. Now, why did I do that? You have to set the scene so that people put themselves in the story. It doesn't matter what it looks like in your mind, it doesn't matter if it's different in my mind than in Rhonda's mind. It just matters that we put the person who's listening to the story in the story, they have to be part of it. They have to feel like they're there. That's what setting the scene does. Point number four. Step number four is creating some sort of tension or conflict. What tension or conflict was there for us? What was the tension or conflict? The indecision.

(13:39):
The guy wants to go out on his own, but he's making too much money. As general counsel for a timeshare company, oh my gosh, what is he

(13:45):
Going to do? The only thing he can think of to do is be PT Barnum

(13:49):
In the middle of the Dolphin Mall,

(13:51):
Offering people a way to keep their homes right? There's tension there. There's conflict there. The reason you have to create tension and conflict when you're selling with the stories, because our minds hate conflict. What do we do immediately when we see some conflict or when we feel some conflict in our minds? We resolve that conflict. We immediately begin searching for a solution. So while you're telling this story, subconsciously your audience

(14:19):
Is searching for a solution to the problem that's going on in their minds. They want a solution. They're dying for a solution. They're begging for a solution.

(14:28):
That's why action movies have a story arc, and at the peak

(14:32):
Of the arc, you don't know what the main character's going to do. Are they going to

(14:35):
Catch Jason Bourne? Right? What happens in your mind? You're constantly searching for a solution. So when we are trying to influence people, when we have that solution, when we relieve the tension, we're somebody that everybody to hear more from. So that tension is critical. The question you need to be able to answer or the audience wants you to answer is, what does the main character of your story want? So what did Russ want? And we know what he wanted. What is preventing him from getting that? It was the conflict in his mind? And then if you want the audience to be motivated, who or what do they hate? That's creating this tension in conflict. Now, in the case of Russ, I didn't highlight this in the story, but the tension, the conflict was am I going to be able to feed my family if I leave this right?

(15:35):
It was unspoken. So we hate the economic conditions, the pressure that's put on somebody that's got three kids that wants to go out on his own and has so much value to add, but he can't do it because he feels like he's chained to this job that's not allowing him to seek his full potential. So that conflict is relieved through what I would call a transformation, and the transformation is the thing that rescues the person who's the subject of the story from the situation that they're in. And in the case of Russ, what rescued Russ from the situation that he was Inster and his little group there, right? By the way, Klitzner can do this for you. You can all line up and see him afterwards. He does transformations right here in the room. It's amazing. No, the strategic advisory group, the peer group that we created was the thing that rescued Russ.

(16:30):
But what did it take? That tension was so thick, it took two years. Took two years to get Russ to leave. By the way, this particular group, just as an aside, they did that with two people. They forced two good lawyers to leave perfectly good jobs and go out on their own. Both of those lawyers are highly successful. Now, the second one they did it with was an intellectual property attorney who's making $250,000 a year. It's a decent salary. They forced him to go out on his own $1.6 million a year law firm today. So Blitzer's magic line up afterwards. Step number six, after your story is over, tell the audience what they should have learned from it. Now, why do you do this? Do we have to? I mean, it's a good story. They should know, right? Here's the thing. We all bring our own baggage to the party. We all bring our own situation to every story. Now, what Fabrizio gets out of the story may be different than what Lenny gets out of the story. So I want to make sure that everybody gets what I want them to get out of the story. So I clarify at the end, the big thing I want you to take away. Okay? Then finally, number

(17:48):
Seven is the call to action. So now that we have this information, now that we know what's happened

(17:52):
In this story, what do we do? What do we do with this information? Dave, you got to tell them what to do, and this is where professionals get hung up. You all get

(18:04):
Hung up because you think if you tell somebody what to do,

(18:08):
You're selling them. You're worried about being salesy,

(18:12):
You're overly concerned that, oh, I can't come off like the Flex Seal guy or like somebody selling Tupperware or Amway products,

(18:20):
Right? What am I going to do, Dave?

(18:21):
Give 'em a set of steak knives. Do you know how many times I've brought down

(18:25):
My friends? Selling is helping. People don't know what you can do for them unless you tell them how the hell else are they supposed to know how great you are? You want to be the greatest lawyer and nobody's ever heard. Of course you don't. You want to help as many people as you can, so the only way they know you can help them is by letting them know that you're here and what specifically you can do. Now, when you use a story, there's something that's implied

(19:01):
In the story

(19:02):
That everybody gets that you never have to say. With my story about Russ, who was the person who convinced Russ to be a part of the strategic advisory group, who was the person that worked with Russ for those two years, while we had all kinds of arguments about how helping the

(19:23):
Unwashed masses with their

(19:24):
Foreclosures was not going to make him rich, who was the person that hung in there with Russ and kept telling him he was brilliant, he was a great lawyer. He deserved to have the clients who were at the top of the market. The subtext of that story is connected to you through the person who's telling the story. So when you tell the story, you are not the hero. The client is the hero of the story, and when the client is the hero of the story, everyone in the audience puts themself in that place, and everyone in the audience knows that they can do what Russ did. In

(20:11):
Fact, what most

(20:12):
Of you are thinking right now is, I'm smarter than Russ. I'm better than

(20:16):
Russ. If Russ can do that, I can do it too. It's okay. He's

(20:19):
Not here. You can admit it. It's fine. No,

(20:22):
It's a joke.

(20:22):
Russ is really smart. I was just playing out. But the thought

(20:26):
Process

(20:27):
That everybody has is I'm just like that guy. I'm just like that woman. If they can do it, I can do it. And that's why stories are so powerful. Let me share those seven steps with you again. Step number one is have clarity of purpose. Step number two is put the audience the story. Step number three is set the scene. Step number four is create tension or conflict. Step number five is the transformation. Step number six, tell 'em what they should have learned. And then step number seven is the call to action at the end. Okay? That's your seven steps to selling with a story.

(21:10):
Thanks for joining us for this edition of the Saturday Side Hustle. We're here every Saturday with something new for you to implement in your business. Also, join us every weekday as Nikki g and I cover the inside business secrets. We'll see you tomorrow for the Sunday Special.