PRAISE FOR THE STORYBRAND FRAMEWORK

“Before StoryBrand, customers weren’t seeing themselves in our offering. We’re a staffing agency that specializes in helping companies find and hire the right people. We help companies post job applications, we test candidates, and we provide software for applicant tracking. Sadly, our message, though, was all about us. We were talking about our strengths rather than the customer’s needs. Also, our marketing material was too complex and hard to understand. After bringing in a StoryBrand facilitator, we clarified our message and made it about our customer. We revised our sales process and started listening to our customers’ needs, asking them about their external problems and how those problems were making them feel in their daily work. The results were immediate. We created our BrandScript in December and spent the next couple months executing our new messaging across every part of the customer journey. Within seven months we’d seen a 118 percent increase in overall revenue. Yes, that means we more than doubled sales. We also saw a 276 percent increase in the number of paying customers during that same time period. And we’re still growing. In the last six months, we’ve been increasing revenue 9 percent month over month, which really adds up!”

—EDWIN JANSEN, HEAD OF MARKETING, FITZII

“Lipscomb University is one of the fastest growing universities in the Southeast, so it was no small task to get all the stories of our school clear and on mission. We knew it was important, and so we brought in StoryBrand to deliver a workshop to our entire faculty. Without question, it helped us understand who we were, who we were serving, and what we needed to communicate to offer value. After StoryBrand, each department felt like they were a subplot in the greater story of Lipscomb. The most tangible way we saw results was through our outreach to the community. We stopped positioning ourselves as the hero and instead began to serve the greater collective vision of Nashville. All of this culminated in a series called ‘Imagine,’ in which we brought in the mayor of Nashville, Governor Bill Haslam, and former president George W. Bush to speak about how Nashville and Lipscomb could positively contribute to the world. We stopped talking about us and we started serving as a guide to the community around us. Since this dramatic pivot, the renewed energy around a greater vision in which Lipscomb would play a part has resulted in more than $50 million in donations that will go toward development. I’d say the results have been fantastic.”

—JOHN LOWRY, VICE PRESIDENT OF DEVELOPMENT, LIPSCOMB UNIVERSITY

“Before StoryBrand, we at Reed’s Dairy thought we had to tell people about us. Our marketing was clumsy and awkward, and our conversion rates on e-mails were declining. This was keeping me up at night. I bought the StoryBrand online course and put the framework to use immediately. We have an annual campaign in which we sell little milk coupons so people can buy their milk in advance, twenty gallons at a time. The most we’d ever sold through an e-mail campaign was $3,000 worth. We only do this campaign for one day each year, so we considered $3,000 pretty good. I wondered if the StoryBrand Framework could help us do even better. I sat and wrote that year’s e-mail using a few of the things I had learned in the workshop. The response was incredible: $52,000 worth of coupon books in one day. We’d never seen anything like it. I got on a plane to Nashville to attend the next live workshop and have since bought the copywriting course. Our conversion rates on our e-mails have more than doubled. In the last few months we’ve increased our extra product sales by 12.5 percent. We keep seeing results in everything we apply the framework to, including our retail stores and our ice cream division. I sleep pretty good these days.”

—ALAN REED, CEO OF REED’S DAIRY

“I was asked to give a TED Talk about the work I do advocating for proton therapy as a treatment for cancer. As I reviewed the enormous binder of material I wanted to cover, I realized the task was epic. There was no way I could boil down all I wanted to say into an eighteen-minute talk. After spending a single day with a StoryBrand facilitator, I had hope. We mapped out my talk on a whiteboard, and I agreed to leave most of the things I wanted to talk about on the editing room floor. The talk was easy to memorize, flowed like a short story, and engaged the audience from beginning to end. StoryBrand didn’t just help me prepare my TED Talk, they helped me understand how to better approach the advocacy I’d been doing. It all comes down to simple, repeatable messages that grab the audience. Without StoryBrand, I’d have never been able to clarify my message and inform the audience about a cause I care so deeply about. With the help of StoryBrand, I hit a home run, or more appropriately, I landed a triple luxe.”

—SCOTT HAMILTON, OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST, FOUNDER OF SCOTT CARES, AND THREE-TIME CANCER SURVIVOR

“These Numbers Have Faces is a nonprofit working to provide educational equality in Sub-Saharan Africa, where only 5 percent of the population will attend university. Before StoryBrand, our biggest problem was we were playing the hero. We talked more about our nonprofit than we did about our students or our donors. When we did talk about our students’ problems, we talked about their external problems rather than their internal problems, which we now know is a limited way of approaching our messaging. After attending the StoryBrand workshop, we overhauled our messaging. In our e-mails, we began to connect donors with the narrative of the mission, and on social media, we told the stories of our heroic students. We used our StoryBrand BrandScript to draft our end-of-year report that got significant attention. As of today, we are on track to raise more money this year than ever before. We blew our fund-raising goal out of the water. We will go into next year with the largest cash advantage we’ve ever had. Team, donor, and student morale is at an all-time high.”

—JUSTIN ZORADI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THESE NUMBERS HAVE FACES

“When EntreLeadership grew from a brand that basically just offered live events into a full-fledged coaching service for small business owners, we started experiencing challenges in how to explain what we did and how we did it. Even though we’d been writing copy and updating our website for years, the reality was that most of the time we were just guessing at the best way to say things. As a result people didn’t understand our coaching service the way we thought they did. This was frustrating because the value of our program was so obvious to us. The mistake we made was assuming it was obvious to our customers too. We were clear . . . they were confused. That doesn’t sell. I knew we were capable of more conversions and more effective connection with our audience, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. It wasn’t until we brought in a StoryBrand facilitator and sat down as a team to overhaul our entire world through the lens of the StoryBrand Framework that we became crystal clear on how to explain our coaching service. EntreLeadership has grown significantly, and we are tracking to more than double membership in the next two years. The StoryBrand Framework is an invaluable resource, and I now expect our marketers to use it in everything we create.”

—DANIEL TARDY, VICE PRESIDENT OF ENTRELEADERSHIP, RAMSEY SOLUTIONS

“At Marie Mae we sell beautiful paper products and office supplies. Before StoryBrand, our marketing efforts were a jumbled mess. I once overheard a close friend talking about Marie Mae Company . . . and it was nothing close to what we were doing. I attended a StoryBrand Marketing Workshop and learned we were talking about the wrong things in our marketing copy. This was life changing for our start-up. We used the framework to simplify our message down to a single tagline: ‘You are changing the world from your desk. Shouldn’t your office products do the same?’ We started focusing more on the meaningful work our customers were doing and showing how they could make an even bigger impact around the world just by choosing office products that also make an impact. We simplified our website using the SB7 Framework, and all of our marketing e-mails are now run through the SB7 filter as well. In the year since we implemented the StoryBrand Framework, we have increased our revenue by 20x and gotten our products into the hands of 250,000 people. We attribute this success largely to the clarity in our story and the shift in our marketing messages. We are grateful.”

—JILLIAN RYAN, FOUNDER OF MARIE MAE COMPANY

“Before StoryBrand, I felt like my marketing was falling flat. I felt like my business had hit a ceiling. Going through the framework taught me I was talking about my programs all wrong. I used the StoryBrand Framework to recreate my sales material from scratch. It took quite a bit of effort to rethink the whole thing. I dipped my toes in the water by making a few changes to key pieces of marketing material, being sure they spoke directly to my clients’ needs. I relaunched my program with my new sales materials and saw a massive response. A campaign that would have typically brought in $6,000 to $9,000 brought in more than $40,000. StoryBrand is the most practical, applicable, implementable, logical, simple, useful marketing program I’ve ever experienced. It’s going to change everything in my business, and I’m just getting started.”

—JENNY SHIH, BUSINESS COACH

“We often got a great deal of confusion when we tried to answer the question, ‘So what do you do?’ We were regularly frustrated by the fact that we had a huge body of organizational knowledge about our own work, and it required at least an hour to convey it to people. As a start-up, nonprofit organization, our revenue (donations) were barely enough to keep us afloat. We knew a big reason for this was that our model was a bit complex and it didn’t get communicated with clarity, leaving potential donors confused. We took a big risk and chose to send our entire US team (three people) to StoryBrand—a risk that ate up a significant cut of our cash on hand. StoryBrand was indispensable for us. In the days following StoryBrand, we made a hard pivot on our communications strategy. Over the course of a couple months, we went from an organization on the verge of collapse to an organization that was thriving. In Q4 alone (post-StoryBrand), we literally tripled our annual revenue. Now Mavuno has expanded its reach by 400 percent in eastern Congo, and we are ending extreme poverty for thousands of Congolese. We are making dramatic change for some of the most vulnerable people in one of the world’s most war-torn environments. We are postured for enormous scale, and that is due in large part to StoryBrand. Thank you for helping us change the world.”

—DANIEL MYATT, CEO OF MAVUNO