How to Use the “Building a StoryBrand” Framework to Drive MSP Sales

In a crowded market, how does your MSP stand out?

I love the book Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. If you’ve never read the book, I suggest that you pick it up! The book is a powerful tool that we used to transform how we sold managed services and cloud to grow our MSP. Its principles are also the framework of this blog!

The Power of Storytelling in Sales

A really good story can grab your customers’ attention and make your message memorable. It’s a powerful way to transform your marketing and sales strategies!

Essentially, a StoryBrand is a proven storytelling framework that helps you to clarify your message. It helps you to connect with your customers and prospects and ultimately increase your revenue or monthly recurring revenue.

So first, I want to talk about the power of storytelling in your sales. Storytelling is a universal language, and you’ve probably heard people mention that stories are so compelling because we’ve communicated with storytelling for thousands of years.

Selling is all about building relationships and helping your clients and prospects to solve their problems. I’m sure that you’ve been to a webinar or event where the speaker talks about their products and services in bullet point format for what feels like hours. Do you remember a lot from these events? Probably not!

However, if they tell a story, there’s a good chance that you’ll remember that story. And that’s why storytelling is so important! A good story can grab your audience’s attention and make your message memorable. It’s not about listing the benefits and features of what you do; it’s about taking your customer on a journey.

This is the basis of the StoryBrand framework, taking your customers and prospects on a journey where they see themselves as a hero with you as a guide who helps them to achieve their goals!

Of course, there are several principles of how the StoryBrnad framework helps you to build your story. We’ll cover a few here, but make sure to read the full book by Donald Miller if you are interested: it’s worth it!

Your Prospect – The Hero

The first principle of the framework is to make your prospect the hero of your story. When we were an MSP, one of the things that we focused on was helping businesses that were in natural disaster-prone areas. For example, we had a law firm client that was in a hurricane-prone area with an on-premise server. When talking to the, we would frame our conversation around the risks that they faced, such as data loss, downtime, and the high cost of disaster recovery. If there was some type of disaster.

Instead of just trying to sell them cloud services, we would make the law firm owners, as the heroes in the story, someone that would recognize the risks that we were talking about and decides to take action to protect their firm’s future.

By positioning your customer or prospect as that hero, you make the decision to move to the cloud about their success, not just about their technology. You’re showing them that they’re in control and they have the power to protect their business with your guidance!

Your MSP – The Guide

The second principle of building a StoryBrand is to create a guide: in every great story, a hero needs a guide, right? Someone who has the experience and expertise to help the hero to overcome their challenges. This is where your MSP comes in!

You have the knowledge and skills to ensure that your prospect’s migration to the cloud will be smooth (If not, Cloud Services for MSPs is here to help!).

Remember to use your experience to build trust. Share success stories and testimonials that are relevant to your prospect based on the pain points they are facing! You’re not just offering cloud or your services: you’re really offering peace of mind.

Defining the Problem

The third principle of building a StoryBrand is defining the problem and stakes. In every great story, the hero typically faces some type of problem. It’s your job to clearly define what that problem is for your customers and prospects.

In our case, the problem is the risk of sticking with outdated on-premise servers. Failure to confront this problem risks data loss, extended downtime, and even complete business failure in the event of a disaster!

You don’t want to just stop at defining the problem: you also want to highlight the stakes. What happens if the prospect doesn’t move to the cloud? By clearly defining the problem and the stakes, it’s going to help your customers and prospects to understand why they need to take action sooner rather than later.

This urgency is one of the keys to driving sales!

Presenting a Plan

The fourth principle of building a StoryBrand is presenting a plan that should outline exactly how you’re going to help your customers and prospects to move their service to the cloud.

Conducting a thorough assessment of your prospect’s infrastructure and identifying any vulnerabilities and areas where cloud would help is a must. We used to create a customized plan that focused on minimizing downtime and data loss!

By presenting a clear plan, you can remove any uncertainty from what you’re proposing and really make it easy for your customers and prospects to say yes to your services. After all, they now know exactly what to expect and how you’re going to guide them through each step!

Implementing Your Story Into Your Marketing

The final principle of building a StoryBrand is to implement your story throughout your marketing and sales strategy.

You want your story to be communicated on your website. You want to put it on any type of marketing collateral that you have, on your social media, in your sales brochures and handouts… This story needs to be central to the value that you can provide prospects!

Your unique story obviously helps your customers and prospects to understand your offerings, but it also helps you to stand out in a crowded market. The MSP market is very crowded today, so a cohesive story will help you to stand out because others are not taking the time to do this!

Start Building Your MSP’s Story!

If you liked what you read, make sure to purchase and read through Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller! This strategy was essential for our MSP, and hopefully it can be just as effective for yours.

As always, I’m going to leave you with a quote, this time from Milton Berle: “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”

Have a great week!