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Attract Clients With An Engaging Business Story

This article is more than 2 years old.

If you want to attract high-paying clients with a book, can the rhetoric and engage in storytelling.

What do these client-attracting books have in common: The One Minute Manager, Who Moved My Cheese, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team?

They are all examples of a business novella, which is a work of fiction.

Books open many doors to help attract clients, such as speaking engagements, podcast interviews, book reviews, blogs, articles and workshops based on the book. The book is the key that creates opportunities for prospects to experience you.

Instead of writing a typical non-fiction business advice book based on your expertise, consider writing a piece of fiction.

Advances in neurosciences prove that prospects make decisions based on emotion, not logic. But how do you access the emotional part of the brain? The answer is to weave your message into a story. Human brains are hardwired for stories.

“We have always preferred books that were told as a tale, fable or a story, whether fiction or nonfiction,” says Gary Maag, coauthor along with David Kalinowski of New Directions: A Competitive Intelligence Tale. “When reading books from authors such as Ken Blanchard, Matthew Kelley, and Patrick Lencioni, who get their messages across in a more interesting way, it hit us that we should take that approach for a book in our industry of competitive intelligence.”

Maag and Kalinowski are the leaders of Proactive Worldwide, a 30-year-old firm with clients on three continents. About 90% of the firm’s clients are in the Fortune 500.

“Writing our book as a story was also a fun way to dispel the myths or beliefs held by some when they hear the words ‘competitive intelligence’ that somehow this equates with corporate espionage, spying, midnight rendezvous, secret handshakes, and decoder rings,” said Kalinowski.

As they read the various books in their space, Maag and Kalinowski realized nearly all were lacking an engaging way to get readers to understand what competitive intelligence is and how it adds value to any organization. So, in 2011 they decided to educate business professionals through the power of storytelling. We met when they asked for help editing their upcoming business novella.

“One of the biggest reasons we wrote the book as a tale was that we wanted to provide C-suite executives something they would find different and interesting enough to spend their time reading and do so fairly quickly,” said Maag. “We wanted it to be an effortless and light-hearted read that they enjoyed and could easily digest in a three-hour plane ride, tarmac to tarmac, on their next business trip.”

These authors figured telling a story that they found highly entertaining and informative would be a winning combination and be more effective to an audience than common rhetoric.

Here are my three best tips for creating a compelling business novella:

Tip #1: Make sure your book solves a problem. Before you write word one you must be crystal clear on what business problem you are solving. People have three basic problems: a lack of money, a lack of health and a lack of love. Start there but get specific.

Tip #2: Keep your book light, tight and bright. You are not writing the great American novel. Some of the biggest business novella bestsellers of all time are short: The Greatest Salesman in the World, by Og Mandino, comes in at 130 pages; Spencer Johnson’s training and development masterpiece—Who Moved My Cheese—is only 95 pages; and The Go-Giver: A Little Story About A Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann is 132 pages.

Tip #3: Create Nine Characters. Each character has a role in telling the story. For illustration purposes, consider the characters from the original Star Wars film (for full disclosure, I own a tiny amount of Disney stock, which owns the Star Wars franchise).

  • Hero. This is the main character of the story. We see the story through the eyes and ears of the main character. In Star Wars, this is Luke Skywalker.
  • Sidekick. A hero needs a sidekick to share his or her thoughts with. Have the hero tell the sidekick what he or she is thinking. In Star Wars, these are the droids.
  • Nemesis. Someone needs to oppose the hero for conflict. This person does not need to be a villain or evil. In Star Wars, it’s the emperor (but he is extremely evil).
  • Mentor. The hero can’t succeed alone. So, cue the guru. Enter the mentor. In Star Wars, this is Yoda. This character is the voice of wisdom and experience (hint: it is really you in disguise).
  • Confounder. This character is not the nemesis or antagonist. This person may or may not work in concert with the nemesis. It just might be a character that gets in the way of the hero to create conflict. Without conflict, the story is too boring to read. In Star Wars, this is Darth Vader (plot spoiler, he is Luke’s father).
  • Logic. The hero needs teammates on the journey. One character is the voice of reason. In Star Wars, this is Princess Leia Organa.
  • Heart. The hero needs teammates on the journey. One character is the voice of emotion. In Star Wars, this is Chewbacca. Chewie wails pure emotion.
  • Skeptic. The hero needs teammates on the journey. One character is the voice of skepticism. In Star Wars, this is Han “I got a bad feeling about this” Solo.
  • Recruit. The recruit is a trainee. The recruit’s role in the story is for exposition. Recruits are stand-ins for the audience as other characters explain to them the world they are in. (In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker and others fulfill this role.)

Maag and Kalinowski use many characters to propel their story.

“While competitive intelligence is certainly an exciting discipline in every industry to piece together and analyze fragments of knowledge, it isn’t quite as sexy as spycraft,” says Kalinowski. “We want people to think more of investigative reporters like Murphy Brown or Clark Kent and less of secret agents like James Bond when it comes to competitive intelligence.”

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