As an oral storyteller, you already have a powerful skill – you can make people feel anticipation and then feel release, through your stories. But did you know that this same dynamic is at the heart of succeeding in your storytelling business? Just like a compelling story, every successful business is built around a dynamic: tackling a problem and arriving at a solution. The many moments of tension and the desire for its resolution that your audience feels as they listen to your stories, is the same driving force that motivates customers to seek out your services. Just as you may tell of a fairytale hero pursuing a desire and searching for a path despite meeting obstacles, your customers are struggling with real-life challenges and hoping to find the magical unexpected way forwards.
By understanding this parallel between storytelling and entrepreneurship, you can harness your natural storytelling abilities to develop one part of the entrepreneurial mindset you need before you can truly thrive as a paid storyteller. Here’s how:
- By telling tales, you’re already skilled at tapping into the universal human experiences of struggle, desire, and resolution. Apply those same observational skills to identify the real-world problems and tensions that your potential customers are facing. For example, are those that might hire you (who may not be your actual audience) needing to creatively fill a slot in an existing event schedule? Worried about dwindling attendance? Desperate to revitalise an unengaged group or poor results?
- See your services as solutions that provide relief. Just as your stories offer a satisfying resolution to the tension you’ve built, your business offer should provide a clear solution that alleviates your customers’ problems. Just like you work on a story and find the drama and the flow in it, you’ve got to find that drama and flow in your customers’ lives and struggles and how your skills help them. Focus on how your offering can make their lives easier, better, or more fulfilling. For example are your potential hirers trying to find a novel way to keep people entertained? Hoping to attract new crowds? Wanting to bring a topic to life?
- Express the practical value of your storytelling. Your sales and marketing efforts should mirror the techniques you use to draw your audience into your stories. Use vivid language to paint a picture of the problem, build anticipation for the solution, and convey the transformative power of what you have to offer. You already enjoy doing this for your audiences – it can be just as fun to do it for your prospective clients.
In a nutshell, before you get hired to tell stories to your customers, tell the story of your customers so that they can feel the impact your storytelling services will have on their world. Tap into the stories they tell themselves about their tasks, where there isn’t any resolution yet. If you can help, you may have found a gap in your market, or at least a way to excite them.