Martinka Consulting's Getting the Deal Done Podcast
Martinka Consulting's Getting the Deal Done Podcast
Stories Sell - Mario Juarez on the Power of Stories in Life & Business
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Mario Juarez is a born story teller and helps others get their story out to the public. A journalist by trade, he's always been attracted to good stories. At Microsoft he helped co-workers craft their message to make sales. in this episode (which just flew by as we recorded it) we discuss:
- Why tell stories
- Leveraging stories in (small) business
- What makes a good story
- The powerful impact stories have had with his clients.
Mario can be reached at: (206) 650-1056 or mario@mario-juarez.com or https://mario-juarez.com/.
John Martinka
Jessica Martinka
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Welcome to the Getting the Deal Done podcast series. I am John Martinka, and my special guest today is my friend Mario Juarez. I have known Mario for about half a dozen years now. Uh, I've known people whose businesses he has helped with what he does. And what he does is help them tell their story in the most compelling way. Now, I am no stranger to stories in my books. I tell a lot of them, and it is probably the biggest compliment I get from people who have read my books is I love it because you give all these examples stories. So, Mario, give us a two minutes on your background and then talk to us about why. Why stories? Well, thanks, John.
SPEAKER_01And first of all, thank you so much for having me here. It's it's a pleasure to have a chance to talk to you on your podcast. I've enjoyed uh knowing you over the years and and enjoying your extraordinary pizza, which your listeners should understand is the thing that maybe you are the best at in the world. But that's that's a different story. As for me, I am somebody who was born to be a storyteller, born to be a journalist. From the time I was a little kid, it was the thing that I wanted to do. I always thought I would be a journalist, and in fact, went to school for journalism. And in fact, for 10 years, I had a great journalism career working in newspapers and for national public radio and some other great uh adventures. And then one day in the late 1980s, I stumbled into a little software company called Microsoft, not having a clue of what that was about to become. And uh I spent 27 years there at Microsoft, working in all different kinds of communications roles. We had different labels on them. We called them, you know, public relations, marketing, communications, internal communications, but it was really all storytelling. And near the end of my career, the company put a new CEO in place, a man named Satchin Adela, who really changed the culture of the company and really had a high value on storytelling. And I had had the pleasure of working closely with him prior to his, just prior to his becoming the CEO. And I recognized that there was this uh, that there was something that maybe had been sitting in front of me my whole life, which was the power of story as a tool, as a strategic tool, as a as a lever that you can pull to drill to deliver, you know, measurable business results. And this just sort of took me over in my latter years at Microsoft. And I built uh first a presentation and then a methodology about how to help people understand and put this thing called storytelling to work in a very intentional way. And then about six years ago, I left Microsoft to start my own little company called Story Co., helping people through workshops and coaching and one-on-one, and in some cases, just direct hands-on helping them build their stories as a um as a way to help them just be more successful, either as a company or as a team or as just individuals. So, to your question of why that was the question, like why does storytelling matter? Is that right? That was your yeah, it matters in ways that I think are intuitive to all of us, which uh somehow seem to get lost when we cross over and start a business or take leadership in an organization, or just assume a professional role. Because in those situations, the demands are so high for this kind of quantified success, measurable success, that I think honestly people build this wall up because they're so focused on those outcomes that they somehow lose connection with this, with the other factors of life that actually lead to success. And the reason why storytelling matters is because it really creates human connections at a different level than the purely intellectual. It establishes connections at an emotional level, at a place of bonding, these kind of ancient human factors of tribalism and identity and status. And when you go there with people, in combination with the value proposition of your business or of you as a person or professional, then you have this irresistible combination of attraction and connection that really, when you establish that first, primes an audience, for lack of a better term, to be much more receptive to that value proposition that you're putting out there, that thing that you're sellering, selling, that service that you're offering. And it colors it in a very different way where there's this very high level of trust and a sense of shared purpose. That's what story does.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So I think I've shared with you this before. Just what you were saying. But let's tie that selling to stories to small business. Not to the Microsoft sort of world, but to the owner operators. Uh, you know, I've got 10, 20, 50 employee businesses.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna put it back on you and say that I've watched you operate in a number of scenarios. And where I, my observation of you presenting is that it's very clear in the first minute that you're an absolute domain master. You understand what you offer at a at a very deep level. And at some level, like in all businesses, that feels almost, and I don't mean this negatively, it feels almost bloodless or cold in the sense that, okay, it's very, very transactional. But when I spend time listening to you in any kind of a presentation, you naturally and automatically go to these places of story where you share anecdotes. Like this is maybe the most common and embraceable notion of what a story is. You share anecdotes about what you've seen, about, and sometimes it has nothing to do with your business. It has to do with your experience and what informs you. And that is what makes you attractive. And once I get that, or maybe in concert with my, you know, digesting of the intelligence of what you bring in your value proposition, then it's sort of irresistible. And that's, you know, that that's when I see small businesses, the thing, the common mistake that I see them make is that they tend to focus very much on the transactional. In other words, this is what I offer, this is what I sell. You know, I'm selling a house. I I I will to use an example of of um just a theoretical business. You know, we're a company that will come and wash the windows in your house. Well, okay, that's terrific. There, I can imagine, I can imagine why I might just say, I'll wash my windows if I'm a potential customer. For the business to break through in that scenario, you need to go to this deeper level of understanding what it means to a family when the windows are clean. What does it mean in terms of the way maybe the family, the one of the parents feels about the pride they take in their home, about the clarity that they see. And then they go into these places around parties and entertainment and enjoying the beauty of their home. And they get to this uh other place of association. And that's when I when I work with teams with small businesses, I try I spend a lot of time saying, okay, when you think about the thing that you're selling, what are the human experiences that surround it? And where do you change the life of your customer, not at a functional level, but at this transcendent level of their life gets better? There's some possibility that opens up that resonates with something very meaningful to them, something that really, really matters to them at a human level. And when I work with small businesses, typically what I see over and over again, I look at their website, which I don't know how much small businesses depend on websites, but it often is a model or a proxy for the way that they talk about themselves. They're very focused on that transactional. And they lose the opportunity of distinguishing themselves by saying what drives them, what values do they operate by, why do they operate by those values, and what do they see in their customers that delights them when their customers are delighted? And those are often things that I think sometimes for businesses, it seems so obvious to them that they sort of forget to write it down. But if you are competing in the marketplace and you are operating with people that that have never seen you before, that ability to incorporate story elements into the presentation of what you do, whether it's on your website or in your tagline or in the way that you've trained your people to talk or in whatever your storefront is, that can make all the differences. And I've seen it happen all the time.
SPEAKER_00So what I just heard from you is uh a good story has anecdotes and a human connection, much less to say, in your example, someone who's scared of getting on a ladder doesn't want to get up and clean their second story windows, right?
SPEAKER_01Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_00Stories are any other key components of a story?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. You know, I and I'll go with what you just said. You know, stories are all, and and the first thing that I say when I'm working with someone and says, Well, I don't know how to even find the stories. The first thing I say is just just expand your mind to look at the human factors, the human factors that surround your offering, the way you operate, your customers, and think in terms of anecdotes. Now let's let's drill down into this question, this, this, this idea of anecdotes, um, because it really it's it's a very good way to walk into an understanding of story dynamics. Anecdotes are fundamentally little experiences that you recreate. I mean, when you think about it, story is really virtual reality. It's like the original virtual reality. Sitting around campfires, you know, like our cavemen and cave women forefathers would sit around and explain all the things that had happened by recreating the experience. Hey, I was down by the waterhole and there was this bear. And, you know, I was there with with our buddy Og, and and the bear carried him away, and and he was screaming, and it was terrible, and there was blood in there. Everyone in the campfire now has this little virtual experience. And great storytellers are the ones that really know how to bring those experiences to life with the words that they choose. And that is the essence of a good story is the creation of an experience. Now, what kind of experience? What is the nature of the experience? I often say uh that, you know, every story is is some is a dance with pain of one form or another, of trouble or stress or a problem. The man on the ladder who's worried about falling off, he could tell you a story about, you know, that's fundamentally a story of stress, of worry, of pain. And that's what we humans are drawn to. Human, every story, you know, you can chart it out and have a line of uh, you know, a horizontal line on a graph, which is the point of feeling neutral. And above that line is somebody feeling great, and below that line is somebody feeling bad. Every story spends a little time below that line in one way or another. And it has to, because that's what makes human interest, humans interested. And there's actually even some sociological research that suggests that the evolutionary value of story is that it is a way for us to codify our learning. It's a way for us to live other people's mistakes and take other people's risks and derive the benefits of processing for ourselves what it means to go through that without paying the actual price. So every anecdote that you share is something that gives people a little taste of some form of stress that we get to try out, that we get to wear the cape for a little while, go fly around, learn the lesson, good or bad. And it improves us. But we also just pleasurably love it because it's all about experience and humans live for physical experience. It's the it's where we spend most of our time as and our idle time of thinking. And watch your thinking, you know, I'd say to our listeners, like, watch, watch the way that your thoughts roll and how many of them constantly shift to a place of physical activity and physical human factors, physical human experience with all of the attendant stresses and emotions that go with dealing with something troublesome.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Thank you, Mario. So I'm gonna throw you a curveball here. Okay, nothing we talked about before. Oh, so uh, I have attended quite a number of sessions. I get the newsletter from a person I think is the best uh speech uh not uh present presentation coach, speech coach, not you know, speech therapist kind of thing, Patricia Fripp. And she's fantastic, and she emphasizes stories. And one of the things that always resonated with me was she said, your stories, like you were saying, they need to be interesting. They you know, the up and the down and the back up again. She said, they need to be 70% accurate because you to make the story you may have to embellish a little bit. What do you think?
SPEAKER_01I couldn't agree more. I think that I mean, I remember an interview that I read with uh JK Rawling talking about the creation of the Harry Potter character. And she said she realized fairly early on in writing the books that she that she needed to just put this poor kid through hell, that it was just just pure hell, that the more pain and stress and you know, take him right to the edge of death, um, that the better the books would be. So I think that, yeah, you know, if I'm if I'm hearing your question right, it's it's that how much how much stress and trouble makes for a good story. I'd say as much as you can get into it. Um, and you know, it doesn't even mean that your story has to end happily. I mean, research shows that of the vast pool of things that we would call story in the world, it's about 50-50, whether they end up good or bad. I mean, as humans, we want morality in our stories. In other words, we we look for a sense of fairness, but even the lack of fairness in a story generates tension and energy that brings people together. And you know, it's really interesting. I'm gonna go a little sideways here too, because just like if you ever read a story, I mean, we're what we're so wired for this as animals, as people, we're so wired to this that you know. Have you ever read a story to a three-year-old or told a story to a small child, they have a sense first of all, you never have to explain narrative structure to children. They immediately get it, and from the very earliest phases of their cognition, they understand a sequencing of details that that go into a story and the notion of a story arc. And if you tell a three-year-old a story that is unfair, i.e., there's a hero, which maybe the care the kid relates to, who gets pokey, runs away and gets away with it, the child will be outraged because it seems so unfair. So these dynamics are are woven into us. But I think that there is a part of us that we tend to really like darkness, we tend to like trouble, we tend to like pain. And that doesn't mean that your stories have to be rife with that, but you should understand it in the way that you build your stories so that you have the ability to put messaging out that will resonate with your customer's sense of meaning and love and fear and value and trouble. And when someone understands that you understand that what they're going through, the level of trust goes very, very high. And there's no faster way to do that than with a well-crafted story.
SPEAKER_00Okay, great. So why don't we finish up with a couple few examples of uh you know powerful impacts stories have made for people you've worked with, whether it's a business or an individual or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, you know, I I I was thinking about this, and I it's it's it's so varied, and there's there's so much. Let me offer just a couple that I think are um representative. These are the things that are the most valuable to me. Like I love this work because I love empowerment, which seems like a buzzword, but it actually works here because you give people story, you give people the ability to use stories, and it it gives them like a different gear, it gives them another incredible tool. And working with um individuals, that's often a part of what I do is I'll work with a team, but then I'll work with individuals. This isn't quite germane to your question. I'll get to business in a moment, but the stories that are the most meaningful to me are actually with two of my relatives that I've worked with to help them build their stories. These are nieces, the one niece and one nephew that both became very interested in my work when I first began doing it and said, Well, can you help me? And one of them was um uh a nephew who wanted to get into medical school, into a medical program. And another was a niece who wanted to um become a lawyer in her in her late 20s. And in both cases, I helped them build stories that were so far afield from where they began the process of application and essay writing. And I told them in both cases to really tune into the dark periods of their life that were what informed them that they needed to take this new path. And that in both cases was really where they led that the anecdotes that they pulled out of that, really where they led and and in their in the essays that they wrote. And my niece ended up getting a full ride to USC law school, or excuse me, UCLA law school. And I was I had the great pleasure of uh uh attending her graduation earlier this year. And she came up to me in her cap and gown, and she looked at me and she said, This would not have happened without you. And so proud uncle moment. And I and I think that she was right because the story that she had to tell was so powerful, and she had just buried it. It had even occurred for her to use that that anecdote as as and and and utilize it properly. And in terms of a business, the one I would say is a friend of ours that we both know who runs uh an executive recruiting business and came to me saying, help me explain what I do. And all of her messaging was very transactional. I know how to get people to, I know how to put the right person in the right job. Basically a high-end recruiting function. And I work with her to just build a paragraph that was just essentially who she was. It ended up on her website, but I didn't write it for that. I said, This is this is who you are, this is the way you should describe yourself. And I said, you're not a recruiter, even a high-end recruiter. You're a you're a master curator of high of high-powered executive relationships. And that means that you care about much more than simply putting the right person in the right job. You are that person who sticks with somebody throughout the through the decades, through the careers. And you have the golden Rolodex. You're the ultimate connector, you're the person that I need to know, irrespective of where I am in my career journey or where my company is in terms of recruiting. This woman is someone you must know. And that fundamental shift created a whole set of stories, which we then curate and build and put on her website. And she tells me that this had a market effect on her business. In my mind, it was pretty easy to do, felt very obvious, but it felt uh, you know, revolutionary to her. And again, deeply satisfying to be able to help people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, you are the uh unconscious competent at stories. You don't even think about it, it did just come natural with what you did for her. And yet to her and others, and just like what a lot of us do, whether it's me or people I know who are our attorneys or help companies do certain things, uh, we know what we're doing. Uh, it's second nature, but to them, it's often they never thought of it the way we think of it. And you know, you're the you're saying uh yearly old pro from Dover that uh you are for stories. So thank you, Mario. Uh, why don't you tell people how they can get a hold of you?
SPEAKER_01Sure, you can get in touch with me um by sending me an email. My email is marioj at live.com. Uh, I also have a website which is uh mario-juarez.com. My business is storico. If you Google that, you probably come up with find your way to me. Unfortunately, somebody else already had that URL, so I just have my current website up there. And of course, they can always reach me through you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. They can, but uh uh that is great. I thank you so much again. Uh, this is my friend Mario Warriors, uh, this the ultimate storyteller. And if you think you can use him for your business or improving your team, or just uh you as a a person, like his example with his uh niece and nephew, uh please reach out to Mario. Thank you so much for being here on the Getting the Deal Done podcast.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having me.