Donald Miller - Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

CONTENTS

PRAISE FOR BUILDING A STORYBRAND

This is a seminal book built around an idea that will clarify, energize, and transform your business. Donald Miller offers a specific, detailed, and useful way to change the way you talk about the work you care about.

SETH GODIN, AUTHOR OF ALL MARKETERS ARE LIARS

Donald Miller ought to be working with your company just like he worked with ours. We changed our website after learning his framework and the results were fantastic. We noticed a difference right away. The StoryBrand Framework worksand we are implementing it companywide. Read this book!

KEN BLANCHARD, CHIEF SPIRITUAL OFFICER OF THE KEN BLANCHARD COMPANIES AND COAUTHOR OF THE NEW ONE MINUTE MANAGER

Donald Miller will teach you a lot more than how to sell products; he will teach you how to transform the lives of your customers. Your customers need you to play a role in their lives, and this book will teach you how. If you want your business to grow, read this book.

JOHN C. MAXWELL, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

This is the most important business/marketing book of the year. All communicators know the power of Story. Donald Miller has captured the process to make your marketing pierce the white noise of the most overserved marketing generation in history. You have to read this book!

DAVE RAMSEY, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

Donald Miller reminds us that all good messaging begins and ends with empathy. He knows that if you want to be seen, heard, and understood, the first step is to listen. Get this book if you want to connect with people in a profound way.

BILL HASLAM, FORTY-NINTH GOVERNOR OF TENNESSEE

If you like making money, read this book. The StoryBrand Framework will help you create sales messages that people listen and respond to. We use it all the time and it works!

RYAN DEISS, FOUNDER AND CEO OF DIGITALMARKETER

In only a few hours this book demystified lessons about branding that Ive spent my entire career trying to understand. The brilliant StoryBrand Framework has now become the playbook for everything we do that is marketing-related.

RORY VADEN, COFOUNDER OF SOUTHWESTERN CONSULTING AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF TAKE THE STAIRS

Ive been using Don Millers StoryBrand framework in my business for a few years now. Its the single best marketing tool I know. We use it on every product we launch. Ive had Don personally teach my company and clients and I recommend him to everyone. Now, all these revolutionary insights are easily accessible between these covers.

MICHAEL HYATT, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF PLATFORM: GET NOTICED IN A NOISY WORLD

2017 by Donald Miller

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins.

The author is represented by Ambassador Literary Agency, Nashville, TN.

Graphics designed by Kyle Reid.

Epub Edition September 2017 ISBN 9780718033330

ISBN 978-0-7180-3333-0 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-0183-9 (IE)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937432
ISBN 978-0-7180-3332-3

Printed in the United States of America

17 18 19 20 21 LSC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to:

Tim Schurrer and Kyle Reid
for believing in the framework from the beginning.

What I love most about StoryBrand is it
allowed us to become friends.

And also:

Betsy Miller

Avery Csorba

Koula Callahan

JJ Peterson

Chad Snavely

Suzanne Norman

You are living proof that when a group of friends sacrifice
together for a common good, they can become family.

Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

Please note that footnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

This is not a book about telling your companys story. A book like that would be a waste of time. Customers dont generally care about your story; they care about their own.

Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand. This is the secret every phenomenally successful business understands.

What follows is a seven-part framework that will change the way you talk about your business and perhaps the way you do business.

Each year we help more than three thousand businesses stop wasting money on marketing and get their company growing by helping them clarify their message. This framework will work for you, regardless of your industry.

To get the most out of this book, I encourage you to do three things:

1. Read the book and understand the SB7 Framework.

2. Filter your message through the framework.

3. Clarify your message so more customers listen.

Marketing has changed. Businesses that invite their customers into a heroic story grow. Businesses that dont are forgotten.

May we all be richly rewarded for putting our customers stories above our own.

Most companies waste enormous amounts of money on marketing. We all know how mind-numbing it is to spend precious dollars on a new marketing effort that gets no results. When we see the reports, we wonder what went wrong, or worse, whether our product is really as good as we thought it was.

But what if the problem wasnt the product? What if the problem was the way we talked about the product?

The problem is simple. The graphic artists and designers were hiring to build our websites and brochures have degrees in design and know everything about Photoshop, but how many of them have read a single book about writing good sales copy? How many of them know how to clarify your message so customers listen? And worse, these companies are glad to take your money, regardless of whether you see results or not.

The fact is, pretty websites dont sell things. Words sell things. And if we havent clarified our message, our customers wont listen.

If we pay a lot of money to a design agency without first clarifying our message, we might as well be holding a bullhorn up to a monkey. The only thing a potential customer will hear is noise.

Still, clarifying our message isnt easy. I had one client say that when he tried to do so, he felt like he was inside the bottle trying to read the label. I understand. Before I started StoryBrand I was a writer and spent thousands of hours staring at a blank computer screen, wondering what to say. That soul-wrenching frustration led me to create a communication framework based on the proven power of story, and I swear it was like discovering a secret formula. The writing got easier and I sold millions of books. After using the framework to create clear messages in my books, I used it to filter the marketing collateral in my own small company. Once we got clear, we doubled in revenue for four consecutive years. I now teach that framework to more than three thousand businesses each year.

Once they get their message straight, our clients create quality websites, incredible keynotes, e-mails that get opened, and sales letters people respond to. Why? Because nobody will listen to you if your message isnt clear, no matter how expensive your marketing material may be.