BenP (00:04.224)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast. Now, today we're talking about stories and story arcs. We're talking about how to really engage people. And our guest today is a giant in the pre -sales world. He's one of the hosts of the Two Pre -Sales in a Pod podcast. He emcees at the Demo Fest events. And...
even fits in his day job as director of pre -sales and buyer enablement at Consensus. So please could you welcome to the show Mark Green.
Mark Green (Consensus) (00:43.754)
I can almost hear them clapping. There's like three of them. Welcome everybody. It's so nice to be here. Thank you so much, Ben. It's an absolute honor. I love being on the podcast and feel very honored to be able to talk about a passion of mine, which is storytelling and a few other things along the way.
BenP (01:01.312)
Yeah, well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm really looking forward to our chat today. And I wonder for those folks that maybe either haven't listened to your podcast already, there are some I believe, or weren't at DemoFest or those kinds of stuff. Could you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Mark Green (Consensus) (01:18.634)
Sure, and introducing myself is something I'd love to tell a story at some point about. Sometimes you say the wrong thing. And I gave an example now which we'll uncover later. It's very easy to joke about, oh, listen to those three listeners. And then in our world, in my very sort of British way, that's a kind of joke, whereas of course there's...
There's loads and loads of people that listen to this podcast, but it's perhaps a way to bring the intimacy and feeling like it's a small group of special people. And what's interesting as I learn going around the world is that that doesn't work in some places. So as an introduction, yes, my name's Mark Green, I've got a podcast, and podcast or two, and the...
My day job is wonderful. I'm absolutely passionate about helping people and I get to do it for all sorts of different customers across the world in my role as a pre -sales director at ConsenSys. But yes, but out on the airwaves as well. So we found this topic to cover looking through the previous episodes that you've done.
There's all sorts of different people. They're absolutely fascinating. So whilst I'm happy to introduce myself, I would also like to call out the other episodes, because I think there's some fantastic snippets of information and amazing learning in those as well.
BenP (03:00.928)
Yeah, oh, brilliant. Thanks, Mark. Now, your background, you come from a tech world, don't you? So I think that's just interesting to set the context because you're now in this sort of, I guess, a more customer facing buyer enablement type world. But your background, you started off very much on the tech side of things.
Mark Green (Consensus) (03:07.978)
Mmm.
Mark Green (Consensus) (03:19.242)
Yes, yes. So technology was always my first love. My father was, he worked for IBM from his first job all the way through his career to his last job. He then retired out of IBM. So I've always been around technology. It's kind of the thing that I can do. You know how some people can do maths? That's not me, by the way. I can't do maths, but I can do computers. And so I did that. And for years and years, that was the way that I made my...
BenP (03:34.792)
Wow.
Mark Green (Consensus) (03:48.842)
living and eventually two things happened. One is technology, of course, continued to grow and evolve and new people came into the market that were just going to be better than me at a lot of things. Like the depth to which integrations and the speed, there are some amazing people out there. So I knew at some point I wanted to shift slightly from.
my knowledge of technology being the thing that I could help the world with. But the second thing that happened is, you know what, I can do the technology, but it's not why I do what I do. The reason I do any of this is the interaction between people. I love people. And the psychology of why people do things and say things and listen to things and make the decisions that they do meant that I moved from IT, from tech,
into pre -sales and technology pre -sales. So they're still a communicator, but moved from explaining things to, from internal users to external customers. And yeah, that technology communicator badge I've worn with such pride for years and years and years. And now we get to help people.
create and craft amazing stories, but then share them with the world in a more digital means. And so that demo automation space is thriving right now and I'm absolutely loving it.
BenP (05:30.624)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's interesting because both of us come from quite a tech background. But both of us have probably been successful through actually our ability to understand the tech and the power and the impact that it can have, but also to be able to influence people, to get people to come with us.
Mark Green (Consensus) (05:36.394)
We do, we do.
Mark Green (Consensus) (05:45.674)
Yes.
BenP (05:50.4)
to get people to want to change, to get people to... And I think probably both of us sort of think this ability to communicate effectively, because sometimes storytelling is a bit of a buzzword, it's a bit of a jargon, it's a bit of a... So this idea that we're gonna try and really communicate effectively and engage people is something that we're probably both advocates and find really important and valuable.
Mark Green (Consensus) (06:05.546)
It is.
Mmm.
Mark Green (Consensus) (06:13.45)
Well, it is. And so let's have a, I'd love to have a quick think about what a story actually is. Because no one really rocks up to a work meeting and starts saying, one day there was a princess and she went on a quest to save a prince that was rotting away in a castle.
We don't talk about stories like that as much as fun as I'm sure they would be. But what we do is communicate in a way that is engaging to people and stories for millennia have been the way to do that. Take people on a little journey rather than just provide a stream of information. So I think that's...
BenP (07:02.56)
So if you were gonna have a go at defining then a story, like in the context of the tech world we're in, you know, the talking to customers, the talking to stakeholders, how would you define a story? What is it?
Mark Green (Consensus) (07:12.842)
Yes.
Mark Green (Consensus) (07:16.554)
Well, a story is a way of describing moving from one state to another state. So one situation to another situation. And of course, whilst that can be often in movies and books and fairy tales, people moving through different circumstances to get to a happy...
happily ever after situation, it's incredibly similar to what people want to do in business, which is they see that there are changes that need to happen and they know that the current status quo is not necessarily what they want. So they have to find a way to get to where they need to go. And understanding those steps and the journey that they've got to take and what that ultimate end will look like is exactly the same. And you can apply the same methods and it makes their ability,
to understand that journey much better.
BenP (08:15.776)
So this idea of sort of going on a bit of a journey, going, so there's a beginning and an end, I guess, and there's sort of a destination and a sort of a journey through it. The other thing I was thinking as I was reflecting on this is there needs to be some kind of emotional response. So, for example,
probably a sat -nav talk track would go through, would hit you. There's a beginning, there's an end. There's a turn left, a turn right, a straight on, go over this roundabout. And I think the thing that you add to that is maybe this idea that there's an emotional response. There's some way that you kind of engage and that might be that there's some surprise or some intrigue or some relatability to part of the story or some conflict or something like that. But there's something emotionally engaging in it as well.
Mark Green (Consensus) (08:41.352)
Hmm.
Mark Green (Consensus) (09:02.09)
Very much so. There's a very good book called Talk Like Ted by Carmine Gallo. And what he does is he looks through a different, a series of different Ted talks. And if you've not met Ted talks before, oh, wonderful audience, firstly, where have you been? Like they're a thing and they have been for a long time. But just in case, for clarity's sake, it's a way to,
BenP (09:09.76)
Okay.
BenP (09:25.824)
Ha ha ha.
Mark Green (Consensus) (09:32.15)
Share ideas worth spreading and so someone will stand on stage and they will talk to an audience But it's very short 17 minutes long pretty much that's the ideal length and the book goes through different ways to engage your audience and When they looked at the most successful Ted talks they found that it followed a very strict sort of set guidelines of what to include in that story in terms of creating an influential message
Now this was not invented by Ted Talks, it was invented, some say, by Aristotle. But he said, 10 % ethos is incredibility. So your story has to say, why are you listening to me? Why am I on stage? Why should you listen to anything? That's the reason why in business, we tend to, at the start of a presentation, say, hello, we are such and such, we're here to do X, we've done it before, this is who we are. Trying to create a bit of a...
Stable foundation, but you only need about 10 % of that 25 % logic data reasoning You know some facts and irrefutable evidence to hang any emotional decisions on Let's have a look at some actual data. So that's 25 % and the other 65 % is pathos. So it's the appealing to emotion so if you just put a bit of credibility some data and
That whole emotion part is 65 % of any massively effective presentation. And so if you don't think about how you're communicating and what emotions you're building in the other people, you've only got 35 % of your presentation done. So don't present it yet.
BenP (11:21.216)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you know what, I was researching a little bit about this idea of when there is emotion and logic together, what happens to your brain? Because it's more memorable, right? When you get logic mixed with pathos, it's more memorable.
Mark Green (Consensus) (11:38.89)
I must say.
BenP (11:42.944)
And so there's a study done where they stuck somebody's brain in an MRI, you know, while they're showing them certain images, you know, and doing certain things. And basically what happens, it seems, is the amygdala part of the brain. And I think it was... Oh, I've forgotten the part of the brain. I've got it. The hippocampus. Sorry, the anterior hippocampus. They fire at the same time. So basically your brain lights up in a different way when there's this... Which means it's more memorable.
Mark Green (Consensus) (11:47.784)
Mm -hmm.
BenP (12:08.064)
which means it stays in your brain for longer. And apparently for 30 minutes afterwards, your brain is more susceptible to remembering the things that are coming next. So I thought really fascinating at a neuroscience level, you know, people talk about how stories, you know, they're there of myths. It's how people have passed things down over generations. When you look at the brain, actually, there's a next year, different bits lighting up, which is saying, you know, this guy was right about years ago. He knew what he was talking about.
Mark Green (Consensus) (12:11.476)
Yes.
Mark Green (Consensus) (12:18.058)
Mmm.
Mark Green (Consensus) (12:33.482)
Very much so, very, very much so. And you know, there's a practical application of that. There's a way in which we can all practice this now, dear listeners, with everybody listening now. And basically, so you and I actually just before we hit record, my internet went down. Ben, you've got work going on outside your house laying fibre, fibre broadband. So that's very exciting in the technologists.
BenP (12:42.024)
Right.
BenP (12:56.352)
I have.
Mark Green (Consensus) (13:02.014)
In me I used to have one gig internet back at back in London. So that was lovely so you can look forward to that but I was in I was in Austin a while back with where my brother lives with his wife and we were on FaceTime to my grandma and We were out sort of after after work drinks and she was on her iPad the signal was pretty bad and She didn't know that
BenP (13:07.392)
Yeah, that's coming, that's coming.
Mark Green (Consensus) (13:31.37)
She didn't really know why but she apologized because she says oh well I've been playing puzzle bubble on my iPad quite a lot. So it's got quite a low battery. And she had connected the low battery with possibly being the cause of the low bandwidth. Now we know that that's not actually true but hey we'll let her off. She's now 96 so we've probably let her off anything. But what's wonderful about it is that it's a story about okay so it's
BenP (13:52.544)
You
Mark Green (Consensus) (14:01.002)
basically selling the wonderfulness of tablets and FaceTime that you can connect with your family across the seas. But the reason why it connects, and you were talking about the amygdala, the reason why it connects with people is most people, exception included, have a positive idea of grandmas. A positive thought.
And so what you're doing is you're conjuring in that person's brain the little bit that says, grandmas, oh yeah, I know them. They're wonderful. They do a cup of tea, you know, and all that. And it's lovely. And you're firing those bits and what's into great, with the great power comes great responsibility. Because if you've got the power to create those reactions in someone else's brain and to start firing those happiness thoughts in a connected...
sense to what you're trying to sell them the idea of a FaceTime, it's a responsibility that you shouldn't take lightly because you can literally change people's brains on what they're doing just by the story that you're telling. And so you can work some of those powers into your business print presentations, but do it right and it works well. You know the thing that most people forget?
do it wrong and you'll do yourself a disservice because you're accidentally turning them off the thing that you're trying to tell them because unbeknownst to you, you've somehow connected the story or the thing that you're presenting with an unhappy memory that they've got. And then suddenly all of that, your hard work is wasted. So get it right, but also don't get it wrong.
BenP (15:34.368)
Yeah.
BenP (15:44.544)
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
BenP (15:51.552)
Yeah, and do you know what, just as you were saying that, I was just thinking that there's these terms going around that you hear, greenwashing, sportswashing, and I wonder if there's almost, and you can see it in the adverts now. Yeah, the idea that governments are boosting their image by buying sports clubs and being very active in sports. So, yeah.
Mark Green (Consensus) (15:58.634)
Yes. I mean sports washing is after football. I don't know. I've not heard sports washing.
Mark Green (Consensus) (16:15.242)
Really? Okay, well there we go.
BenP (16:17.76)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's quite in the sports world, quite topical at the moment. And then this idea, and I think I see it in advertising all the time, it is emotion washing, you know, where the advert these days is of creating FaceTime with your grandma, you know, well, actually the product is cluster bombs and napalm. Do you know what mean? But they're actually sort of going, you know.
Mark Green (Consensus) (16:20.458)
Mmm.
Mark Green (Consensus) (16:32.746)
Yes.
BenP (16:39.328)
Oh, aren't we lovely here we are with grandma emotion watching emotion watching but product really and brand behind that is cluster bombs and Whatever thing it think it might be
Mark Green (Consensus) (16:47.082)
So the, yeah. Well, the world of marketing has been full of very much, very much an understanding of messaging and how to create different reactions in people. But I think so often in pre -sales, which is sort of the areas that I focus in, it's not as remembered as often. We think that there's this lovely shiny polished marketing.
Marketing flow and leads come in and they're coming in on a wave of positivity Hopefully You need to make sure that that positivity continues, but what's really nice is that pre -sales people? Historically have been the most authentic of people because they they use the product and in fact in many cases have been in industry and used The product or one similar to it. So there's that very authentic voice But it needs to
still be crafted. Not rather than just, hey, you've used the software before, just get on the phone with a customer. Sure, but think about...
BenP (17:56.16)
Yeah. So we've got this idea then, stories are taking a bit of your credibility, a bit of logic and a bit of emotion, fusing it together into a bit of a structure. It's not about Cinderella once upon a time, but it is perhaps setting the technology and the product and the solution in the context of something that's emotionally engaging for people. So that's, I guess what we've thought about as stories now.
Mark Green (Consensus) (18:04.586)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Mark Green (Consensus) (18:22.378)
Yes.
BenP (18:25.92)
Another concept that you, I know a big fan of and I've heard you talk about before, is this idea of story arcs. I wonder if we could maybe start to introduce what that concept is and how we can start to think about that as well.
Mark Green (Consensus) (18:42.154)
Very much so, yes. So we've got the concept of we need to craft a story. And there's many things that happen in stories. Let's look at a few of them. So firstly, you would have the protagonist. The person who the movie opens with. We learn a lot about that person. You can tell because we're looking at their backstory.
BenP (18:58.336)
Okay. Okay.
Mark Green (Consensus) (19:07.85)
that they're going to be part of the movie, hopefully for quite a while. Whereas someone who walks in and we don't know, we're not given their name, a bit like an old Star Trek reference, Ensign, come down to the planet with us. He's like, well, I don't have a name. I'm obviously the guy that's gonna not come back. So there's the protagonist. There is then, they do a thing, so then maybe they go on a journey or they need to get...
BenP (19:25.664)
Ha ha ha!
Mark Green (Consensus) (19:37.618)
achieve something and you build up some positivity about that but then oh some drama comes you know this is the point in the movie where everything's been going slightly too well then something bad happens or could happen or is about to happen and if it's about to happen you can build in some tension is it gonna get solved?
are they gonna make it to Mordor? And you build up that tension to the point where the thing in the listeners or the reader's mind that they want most is release from that tension. And then comes in the hero, riding over the hill on their horse. Come to save the day. And of course, then that releases the tension. Everybody's happy. Now, there is a shape that you can plot against that.
but it's called the Cinderella story arc. But let me tell you why it's an arc. So...
BenP (20:37.972)
Okay.
Mark Green (Consensus) (20:47.69)
A few years ago, there was a project that took all of the Project Gutenberg books. Now this is where thousands of books were being digitized. What they could do with that digital data then, so it took 18 ,000 books, is, sorry, 51 ,000 books, 18 and a half thousand of them were fiction books. So then they took fiction books and they used some incredibly...
Complex algorithms to look at the sentiment analysis of all of the different words and the sentences Within those books and they worked out. They were only six story arcs in all of those books they could all be categorized into one of six arcs and You got the rags to riches stories Sad person or so the protagonist that we've fallen in love with their
down in the dumps, they don't perhaps have the things that they would want to, and then they build up and they work hard and they get to the end, and it's fantastic. And that's the rags to riches. There's tragedy. Well, there's some very famous tragedies, and they are, I'm sure, very good stories, but they end not in the best of places. There's man in a hole, which is...
something great's happening, then something bad happens. But you know, it turns out okay in the end.
Icarus, now the story of Icarus is where he's in prison with his father, sad. They build some wings out of feathers and wax and they fly and he manages to escape and his father says, don't fly too close to the sun, son, because if you do, the wax will melt and you will fall ultimately into the sea. Of course, he flies too close to the sun, the wax melts and he falls into the sea. So that is...
Mark Green (Consensus) (22:49.77)
Bad place, yes, he's escaped and then crash. And now as we're going through these, think when I'm presenting, I don't want the end of the meeting to be in the sea. I want the end of the meeting to be up the good place. So the next one, then Cinderella. It's a little bit like it does end up in a good place, but instead of just going there immediately, it...
BenP (23:07.41)
Okay.
Okay?
Mark Green (Consensus) (23:17.578)
It starts off Cinderella wants to go to the ball. We fall in love with her. Oh, yes. We're on her side.
she gets to go to the ball, but then midnight comes, she has to go back, she loses her slipper. It's really sad. Will the prince find her? And then of course he does, and then happily ever after. So that's got the tension, it's got the hero, it's got the happy ending, but there's also fall and rise, which is...
It's great, it gets worse. Sorry. Rise, fall, rise. Yeah, so it goes, it's pretty bad. It gets better and then it gets worse again. So out of all of those, let's discount the ones that don't work. We don't want to end up in the sea, so we need to have only the ones that end well. And the best one is CINDERVELA. And you can apply this to your business.
BenP (24:18.046)
Okay.
Mark Green (Consensus) (24:23.178)
So you can think about, instead of the Cinderella story, you can think about perhaps Santa Claus. Trying to get all of the stock out of his warehouse to the customers. So there's a Christmas rush. Lots of people want presents. Brilliant. Okay, but the baddie comes, which is it's a messy warehouse. Unhappy staff. Oh no, what's going to happen?
Increase intention as more orders start flowing in. Is it going to happen? And then the hero comes in. It's your enterprise warehouse management software. Yes. With that, you can organize your warehouse, get all of the deliveries out on time, and then Christmas is saved. Let's take all fantasy away from this now and just think absolute business.
The situation is, so let's take a finance. You say you're selling a piece of finance software. The situation is you can't accurately forecast what your finances are gonna be over the next year with any degree of certainty because you don't trust the data that you have. But it's really important to you. And so we want to really help you. So we've got the protagonist, the main person in the story. We want to help you.
but the body comes along, it's end of year. We need to do the financial report. What are we going to do about this? And the tension is of course time -based. So the closer it gets, the more you have to produce the reports. You can click the button, but are the numbers that you produce actually what you need them to be? Do you trust them? Is your data accurate? And then of course the hero.
as pre -sales, we make the customer the hero by putting them in the position of the people that have made the decision to increase the accuracy of their data. Perhaps instead of manual entry tasks, you've created some integrations that means the data can flow through with no manual errors.
Mark Green (Consensus) (26:38.442)
Suddenly then, they've been the hero and the happily ever after is the fact that because of the accurate data integrations, the forecasts that the finance team are able to put to the board and to the public reports, they can trust them and they know that they're accurate and so they can actually build a stable business on that. That's exactly the same story arc as Cinderella, but talked about finance and data integration.
BenP (27:06.878)
Yeah, okay.
Mark Green (Consensus) (27:08.998)
Another passion of mine for another.
BenP (27:09.824)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think it's really interesting, isn't it? Because storytelling doesn't have to be twee and fairy tales and cliche. What you're taking is some of those, like you say, 18 ,000 books. These are the themes. And then you can set that.
in that setting, so whether that be pitching to the public sector, NHS. So say, for example, you were trying to get an NHS department to come and be transformed by your organisation wants to transform an NHS sector. And quite often, the sorts of things that you might see in that is people say,
We're gonna make you more secure, more scalable, support your end users, and you can literally insert any tech company here and any product here. And quite often I've heard that kind of beige -ness. Whereas if you start to then maybe take that and put that about a story about a midwife that is struggling with a backlog of patients because the WiFi's awful and the app keeps crashing and.
And so the tragedy that's going on there, you can start to make this like a real story that's not twee, that isn't a fairy tale. That's actually, that's it. It's about real people with real emotional connection. And then the fact that the hero is, of course we all want that fixed. Of course everybody wants, we want the hero, we want the product, we want the thing, but there's an emotional connection to make that happen. Yeah. Fascinating how that all works.
Mark Green (Consensus) (28:34.602)
And it's about real people.
Yeah.
Mark Green (Consensus) (28:49.482)
We do.
Now we've talked a lot about creating the right story. I mentioned before about creating the wrong effect by not thinking about doing this. So I've seen lots of presentations where the customer has asked for a bunch of things. A shopping list of dreams perhaps, but they've asked to see in the agenda, maybe 10 things. So you go back to your team and you go, okay, so we need to...
BenP (28:58.048)
Yeah.
BenP (29:01.44)
Okay.
BenP (29:13.28)
Okay.
Mark Green (Consensus) (29:21.322)
We need to present these 10 things. And we look through the list and we go, oh, three of those are not very confident about. Two of them aren't even set up in our demo system.
Mark Green (Consensus) (29:33.194)
So people start the meeting off and they thought, well, we'll go with a bang. We'll show them all the good stuff. And then once they've seen that, maybe they'll forget about the stuff that we don't wanna see. That we don't wanna show. Because you naturally want to show the things that are great. We'll start off with the beautiful dashboard. Well, remember the story arc.
BenP (29:46.016)
Okay.
Mark Green (Consensus) (30:00.554)
You're heading up uphill, right? So we're heading towards some good things. Unless you can maintain that the trajectory of the meeting from the status quo, where it is at the moment, to Dreamland, if you, unless you can maintain that upwards trajectory through the whole meeting, at some point you will need to disappoint these people. Now, there's a whole other thing about the speed of trust. Whereas if you just say yes to everyone,
they'll not believe you, you need to add in some no's along the way so that they will believe you. That's another thing, but you're gonna have to fit them in somewhere. If you fit them in at the end, you will leave these people in the sea, because they'll have been buoyed by the stuff at the start, but the thing they'll remember at the end is, yeah, well, that was that one that couldn't do those things. You've not had any opportunity to turn their smile or turn their frown upside down.
So my advice is use the things that are no as the baddie that adds some tension. Be a realist. That's the lovely thing about pre -sales. You can be that authentic self. Say, I know you wanted to see 10 things in this demo. We've prepared seven of them. Three of them we can't show you today.
But we do have this extra collateral and we've got a video of someone that recorded it. It's not currently set up in our system. So you can show them the really good stuff, say, okay, so this is where we would have shown these other parts. We're going to send that through to you. Is that okay? Check it. You're gonna disappoint them. But you've got a chance to bring that up again by making them the hero because you can say, well, we couldn't show them, but they really do work.
We're going to send that to you.
Mark Green (Consensus) (31:59.914)
make them the hero of sorting it all and then put some great stuff at the end. Some wonderful easy after -courter actions at the end. Leave them with a smile on their face. And please don't forget that because if you don't do that last bit, you've just left them in the sea again.
BenP (32:20.512)
Yeah.
And I really like what you said there about, you know, you've got to say no a little bit to build some trust if you just keep saying yes. And you can imagine, like, if we take it back to the storytelling, if you were to go to a film where it just starts off and goes, you know, like a gradient, a linear gradient up, up, up, up, up, up, by the end, I reckon everyone would be knackered. You can't take that level of like enthusiasm and that level of joy all the way through. So actually saying the no and thinking about that story arc and saying we need to put
Mark Green (Consensus) (32:26.154)
Oh sure. Mmm.
Mark Green (Consensus) (32:38.282)
Yes.
Mark Green (Consensus) (32:47.786)
Mm.
BenP (32:51.072)
conflict in it, we need to put some dips and so this is where we're going to talk about the things we can't do, the things that the challenge, the extra conflicts they've got and getting them up at the end. Really important, almost like a rock concert, you could also think of it like that, you know, you don't finish on your downer song.
Mark Green (Consensus) (32:53.738)
Yes.
Mark Green (Consensus) (33:01.514)
And the dips, yeah, well the dips don't have to be, yes, well the dips don't have to be stuff that you can't do as well. It could just be things they can't do. Or it could be things which are completely solvable. So add three things that you can't do and then a few things that they want to do but can only do with your help.
BenP (33:14.784)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark Green (Consensus) (33:30.122)
then you're working with them. There's lots of ways. And if you look at a movie story arc, it goes up and down and up and down. There's lots of different characters and they've all got their own story arcs, but it is crafted, the best movies, it is crafted very intentionally.
BenP (33:47.648)
Yeah, yeah.
Mark Green (Consensus) (33:48.01)
to elicit that tension in you and then the release. And then are they gonna make it? Think about...
Now it's gone out of my brain. The one where he says, where it says this, oh, Mission Impossible. There's so much tension in Mission Impossible. Is he gonna fall off the building? Well, that's not the end of the movie. No, he manages to get off and the movie continues. But that rise in tension and then release.
It's a psychological thing. It helps people, and if you make the customer the hero through the use of whatever it is that you're selling, you're just reinforcing how much of a hero the customer would feel if they went with the way that you're suggesting.
BenP (34:47.104)
Yeah. Now, we're zipping through time. I can't believe it. But one of the things I just wanted to kind of think about was you spend a lot of time thinking about...
Mark Green (Consensus) (34:48.138)
Um, yeah.
Oh, we are, we are.
BenP (35:00.)
I guess story automation, demo automation, so scalable ways to showcase your product, showcase your solution off to customers. If people are starting to think about, right, I wanna kind of automate and record and get some of these sorts of things, how do you take these concepts and apply them to either video on demand type stuff or demo on demand or those type solutions?
Mark Green (Consensus) (35:03.146)
Mmm.
Mark Green (Consensus) (35:27.594)
So, I find this fascinating. It's because what you're doing is crafting stories for people who are listening whilst you're not there. And the message that you're crafting is not, we have a product, it does what you need. Each of the stakeholders within that organization, whether they're the main champion that's already bought in or...
BenP (35:39.2)
Yeah.
Mark Green (Consensus) (35:57.546)
Maybe the CFO that doesn't understand how you're going to fit this into their budget, or the purchasing team who wants to understand whether or not you've done your due diligence. They're all at different stages of their learning journey about your solution. And of course, your solution is part of the project that that person or team is running. So if they're all at different stages and they have different purposes, the stories that you must tell need to work in different ways.
So if they're quite near at the start of their learning journey, then it's very value -based messaging. You don't want to read the manual. They're about, sorry, okay, so I'm gonna click on Setup and I go down to these bits and I can type this in. They don't need that. They want sort of a higher level value -based messaging about how doing anything to do with this project might help their business.
As you move through deeper understanding and as you move through that buying journey, it changes from being just based on more generic value messages. It then moves when they're in the learning part, it needs to be about your product more and about how it actually works. Still in relation to those value points.
And then maybe they are looking for some very specific things. They're quite near the end of the buying journey. They know the product, they know what it can do, but they've seen something about integrations and does it have web hooks and if so, which ones. So they need something that's incredibly detailed and that doesn't have to persuade them that integrations are good. You were looking for information and detail here.
So with regards to demo automation, when someone says, oh, how should we automate a demo? The difference is that when it's not live, someone can't stop you and say, can you actually show me that specific bit? I've just got a question about in there. That's not happening. People are watching these on their own. They're tailoring their journey, depending on what they want to see, and what they want to see changes. So you have to create content that can match those different parts of the story as they're moving through.
Mark Green (Consensus) (38:23.946)
Tension works just as well. The story arc works just as well. Just at the point where someone's come to the website, they've gone through marketing, they can see all of the wonderful benefits. Sure, okay. Well, I'll get in touch with the company.
then as you start to build that relationship, the idea is you want to shorten sales cycles a little. And so adding a little bit of tension in, like the previous example about trusting the annual reports and their ability to forecast accurately, what if you're getting nearer to the end of your financial year? You're gonna have to build these reports and you might want to start the new financial year with the new system.
So build in a bit of tension there about the, if you're creating an automated demo, then it's about the speed of change and the ability to make impact. So it works in exactly the same way. Closing demos. Closing demo is a confidence builder. It doesn't open up to, have you thought about exploring this whole array of other features? Because if you do that, the sales cycle lengthens, the project might expand, and that's lovely, but it might...
never happen then. So a closing demo is an automated demo that happens near the end of the sale cycle where it perhaps provides customer references. Maybe it provides a way for, perhaps it's a customized one where you've taken all of the value drivers that that business needs specifically and built them into a demo that addresses those specific things. So if anyone comes along at the end of the project and start, say they get a new,
a new finance director and they say, well, we'd like to check all of this stuff. They can say, here's the closing demo. This is a replay of all of the discovery sessions that we've had. These are all the points that we meet. This is how to get it done in the time. And these are some customers that we've done it for before. Now that's a wonderful thing, but you wouldn't do that at the start of the sale cycle.
BenP (40:32.48)
for it.
BenP (40:37.618)
No.
Mark Green (Consensus) (40:40.714)
So, yeah, so.
BenP (40:40.96)
Really interesting, I'm just thinking that through in my mind.
Yeah, really fascinating stuff. Yeah, really like the idea that this ancient approach is playing through right through, you know, working with customers today and automation of how we do that with customers today. Do you know what, Mark? We have zipped through time. We have run out of time. So I just wanted to wrap up really from your perspective, what would be the key takeaways?
Mark Green (Consensus) (40:57.13)
Yeah.
BenP (41:13.76)
that you'd like to leave our listeners with today.
Mark Green (Consensus) (41:18.506)
So the most important things that you need to know about storytelling are, remember what Aristotle said and many others after, that you need 10 % ethos, so that's credibility. Tell them why they should listen. And that doesn't have to be at the start of the presentation. You could have already sent that. Get everyone on board beforehand, that's okay. 25 % logic or data, irrefutable facts upon which your arguments can hang.
BenP (41:26.932)
Yeah.
Mark Green (Consensus) (41:46.442)
then you're all agreeing it's not an opinion whether or not these are true. And then 65 % ethos, so the appealing to emotion. So 10%, 25%, 65%, that's the first thing. And the second thing is that when you're creating your stories, you're crafting your stories, make sure that the flow of your presentation starts with one place, help them fall in love with the situation.
show them the possibility of greatness, cause enough tension in the room, make it a bit painful that this might not happen. The greatness might not come, but with us, you can be the hero, make them the hero that saves the day. And so they don't end up like Icarus in the sea, they end up like Cinderella marrying the prince and living happily ever after.
BenP (42:42.496)
Amazing. Well, yeah.
Mark Green (Consensus) (42:44.766)
And enjoy it, enjoy it, enjoy doing all of this stuff. Don't get it wrong because you can very accidentally screw up an amazing presentation by accidentally crafting a storyline that puts the bad things at the end and depressing everyone as the abiding memory when they leave.
BenP (43:06.528)
Yeah. Love it. And, you know, just I guess to finish on that high from this podcast, thinking about the story arc of the podcast, let's not finish there. So some really, really valuable practical techniques that we've got there that we can use to influence people, to drive change, to be more successful, actually. And it is really important.
Mark Green (Consensus) (43:15.036)
Yes.
Mark Green (Consensus) (43:26.442)
We can.
BenP (43:29.056)
even though we live in a rational, technical, logical world, that's the industry we're in, there is still all of that room, 65 % room for all of the emotion to bring that alive and to take people with us on the journey. Now just finally, if people have loved this conversation and wanna get in touch with you in the internet lands, what's the best way for people to find you?
Mark Green (Consensus) (43:51.594)
So they can go to LinkedIn, they can find me on mark .technology, which is my website. They can just type in mark .technology into the URL. They can message me at Consensus, mark .green at goconsensus .com. And I'm more than happy to chat about any of these things or anything else that they would wish.
BenP (44:17.408)
Well, I think the last thing to say is to say, well, thank you so much for all of your time, all of your energy, the great advice you've got, the context you've set it. It's been a really great conversation. So thank you so much for being with us today.
Mark Green (Consensus) (44:33.674)
Well, thank you very much indeed Ben really look forward to seeing it come out really looking forward to seeing where the podcast goes It's it's absolutely fascinating. Like I said right at the start. You've got some amazing guests on the podcast some amazing concepts and ideas and It's it's great to see how big it's growing as well. So thank you so much for having me on
BenP (44:59.808)
And we're done.
