The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Nothing Gets Sold Until the Story Gets Told: Corporate Storytelling for Career Success and Value-Driven Marketing by Steve Multer

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

Nothing Gets Sold Until the Story Gets Told: Corporate Storytelling for Career Success and Value-Driven Marketing by Steve Multer https://amzn.to/46vK2TV The corporate speaker's best friend for adding value, passion, and connection to any talk you give. No one likes to be sold to, but everyone loves a great story. That's why average brands pitch, but smart brands communicate. Get ready to rise above the average. Corporate storytelling combines informative content with personal investment, turning your typical lecture into a meaningful conversation. Whatever work you do or topic you're asked to deliver, learning to connect with your audience as trusted partners rather than captive commodities instantly elevates your message's success. Veteran Fortune 500 spokesman and executive speaker coach Steve Multer shares the marketing strategies and secrets to delivering value-driven content that reaches the heart as well as the head. With fun, practical, easily applied tips, this energetic and insightful guide will level up your public speaking skills, build your confidence onstage or on-camera, and position you as a more valuable representative for your company. Steve helps you to Speak from your audience's perspective for maximum attention, retention, and follow-up response. Leverage crucial rules of business in the dynamic speaker-audience relationship. Reduce fear of public speaking through clarity, structure, and undeniable value. Add personal passion to your talk that inspires equal passion in your listeners. Craft a winning sales plan to open strong, close stronger, and never say goodbye until you've set up the next hello. Build brand-identity skills into a better story for any audience, any size, any topic. Ensure your talk lasts long after you've left the spotlight. Get Nothing Gets Sold Until the Story Gets Told and discover the power of corporate storytelling.

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He is the author of the amazing new book that came out January 11th, 2023. Steve Malter is on the show with us today. His book is entitled, Nothing Gets Sold Until the Story Gets Told. Sounds like a song. That could be like a country music song. There you go. Nothing Gets Told Until the Story Gets Told. Anyway, enough of butchering people's book titles. Nothing gets

sold until the story gets told. Corporate storytelling for career success and value driven marketing. Something we all need. Welcome to the show, Steve. How are you? My man, I am so good. You're a juggernaut. Every time I hear you introduce your show, I'm like, is there anything that Chris has not done, I don't know. You belie your years. You're mass following the number of things that you've done in your own career and in your past. It's a pleasure to be a part of. Thank you. There you go.

Thank you. Well, you're assuming you know my past. You know what I mean? There could be some things back there. There was that one time where I was a… No, no, no. I just worked for the Chippendales. What happens at Voss stays at Voss.

There you go. I was the centerfold for Playgirl. Steve Moulter is the founder of Steve Moulter Corporate Storytelling, a strategic messaging partner for Fortune and mid-sized brands to expand and enhance their customers' partners in media to reach through value-driven marketing communications. He's a global spokesman. He's not some guy on an island, people. He's a global spokesman. He's not some guy on an island, people.

He's a global spokesman, a keynoter. He's crafted and delivered over 20,000 on-stage and on-screen presentations for industry giants like Cisco, Fujifilm, Siemens, HP, Panasonic, Bayer, and Intel. And now he's here at the Pinnacle of his career on the Chris Voss Show. He trains global C-suites and ELT teams in winning communication methodologies. He's coached more than 2,500 executives and sales innovators to become stronger company assets and branding leaders. Welcome to the show.

Once again, Steve, I kind of skipped the bio, so I did a roundabout on that. That's all right. You want to give me two welcomes? I'm going to say two thank yous back to you. There you go. To all of your listeners. There you go. I will accept that. Judges, will you accept that? Yes, we will. So give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. Man, I'm easy to track down. SteveMolter.com or CorporateStorytelling.com. You pick your

preference and they're both going to lead directly to me. So easy to spot, easy to find. There you go. So Steve, give us a 30,000 overview of the book. Nothing gets sold until the story gets told. All right. So three pillars of fundamental communication value. Winning communication, whether you are an individual just trying to live your own life on a personal basis, or you're somebody in the C-suite of a major corporation. Three pillars, as you mentioned a moment ago value passion connection and everything in the book is how do we include personal human to human corporate storytelling to take whatever product we're trying to pitch or solution or service or capability take our brand and create a human

connection with our customers partners and media analysts that goes way beyond the product itself so it's the idea of how do i get up in front of one person or 10,000 people and not just sell at them or sell to them, but how do I create brand success through human to human corporate connection that incorporates both the selling aspect and the personal branding aspect. Put the two of them together, you're unstoppable and you're unbeatable. There you go. And the skills here can be used just not for corporate speakers, but for just about anybody, I think in sales, right? I think, Chris, that is like a number one thing. A lot of people make this distinction and they say, okay, well, the way that I speak to people personally, one-on-one, the way you and

I are talking to each other right now, now that's different than standing on a stage and delivering a presentation or a keynote. Now it counts, right? Now people are watching and they're paying close. And then we say, no. You know what corporations are made up of? Thousands and thousands of individual humans. And each one of them has their own want and need and desire. And we all process information, data, content, sales on a human level long before we ever process it on an employee level or on a corporate level.

So the reason so many presentations don't land or don't stick is that people go directly to the hard sell to the corporation. What I always want to say is, no, no, no, pull back, speak to the human being like a fellow traveler first. We share certain things as individuals. So if you can start to look at your corporate communication on the same level that you do your personal intercommunications, you can incorporate these same winning communication strategies with your boss, with your colleagues, with your team, with a room full of strangers, or with your spouse, with your kids, with your family members, with your best friend. Winning communication creates value for everybody, whether that's personal or business.

There you go. Well said. Where did you get the title from? I love the title. Oh man, I had to fight for that title actually, because I personally started to doubt it. I came up with it. I thought it was so great. And then I put it in front of my editors and the people I was working with and everybody said, it's a little long, Steve. You maybe want to like truncate that thing. Usually three to five words is a great book title. And I tried, I sort of messed around with it a bit, but it all felt really corporate speak. It felt jargony within the corporation. And what happened was my editors ended up coming back to me and saying, you know what, let's pump the brakes on that. We actually like it because of the rhyme. Yes, it's a little longer, but it's memorable because

of the rhyme and also because it includes no jargon. Anybody can pick this thing up, look at it and say, ah, I know what's in that book. They don't have to make it up for themselves or figure it out. So it was a let's call it a bit of trial and error, a bit of accident, a bit of self-doubt. And we ended up where we ended up. And fortunately, knock wood, it went well. There you go. I love it.

I mean, I love the title. Nothing gets sold. So being a salesman all my life, I mean, it just clicks. It makes so much sense. And, you know, most of the books that we do, I mean, you know, we get all the books these days. They're long titles. There's some that are kind of out of control. There's just like, there's some. Brevity has never been my strong suit, my friend. I got to tell you that if you talk to everybody who knows me, it's like brief. No, Steve, those two words do not go together. There you go. Uh, the, uh, uh, you know, and, and it's kind of, I think it's more like keyword targeting where people just get all the keywords in there. That subtitle, by the way, that subtitle is so keyword heavy, right? Corporate storytelling for career success and

value-driven marketing. That's where we shoveled all those keywords in there because we couldn't get them in the title. So we shoveled them into the subtitle. Shoveled them in. There you go. So give us a little bit of your history, Steve. Let's let the audience get to know you a little bit more better and they can get personal with you. They can sit down by the fireplace and pour up a drink. Tell us about your origin story and how you got here. As long as they're pouring me a cocktail, I'm right there with them. What are you drinking? You know what? Normally, if I was cocktailing with you right

now, I'd become a sidecar guy of late. I discovered the sidecar. I was on an event out in Las Vegas and I went into Delmonico's with the client and I said, I don't know what I'm in the mood for. And the bartender said, I had a sidecar. And I was like, I bartender said, you know, I had a sidecar. And I was like, I think I did like 25 years ago.

Try a sidecar. And I guess Delmonico's sort of single-handedly brought the sidecar back. It was popular at the same time the martini was. The martini never fell out of favor and the sidecar totally fell out of favor. And about 20 years ago, I guess the sidecar started to make a return. Man, I've fallen in love. And now it makes me wish I, I have water, Chris. This water chris this is this is unimpressive i uh you at least have a nice coffee mug i don't even have that to show for it actually it actually it is impressive i think it's good that we're it's a jam jar does that help with anything yeah that's uh i mean that's all i get enough i mean

i'm drinking wine a stupid old coffee cup but uh, you know, these days, you know, you get old. You got to hydrate. You got to hydrate, damn it. Hydrate or die. So let's get into this. You're dodging the question, I think. Yeah, you're right. I did, didn't I?

All right, so my background. It's actually, it sort of flows from exactly where you would think. I spent the first 30 years of my life as an actor. So I grew up as an actor. I was doing on-camera work. I was doing a combination of advertising and television, a little bit of film work, and a lot of stage work. Trekked all over the U.S. Ended up in Chicago, which is where I live to this day.

And this is back when I was about 26 years old. And I met the woman who I ended up marrying. And at the time, she was an actor as well, but she had started doing, in 1991, this thing called corporate theater. That's what they called it at the time. And it was still standing on a stage. Somebody gives you a script. You're going to represent the brand. And we used to be called

ringers back then as well. You would hear that term of a corporation would say, well, our engineers, our developers, our designers, not the best communicators, brilliant at building software or hardware or medical devices or printing presses or whatever it happened to be, but not so good at telling the story about them. So we'd be brought in. And I did my first one in 1996 for Tivoli Systems right after they had just been purchased by IBM. And all of a sudden, like everybody in the dot-com era, overnight gazillionaires.

And they started to pick up people like me who didn't know what the hell we were talking about, but seemed to sound like we knew what the hell we were talking about. So I did one of these things, then did another, then did another. And about two years later, I woke up, looked at my girlfriend at the time, wife now, and I said, I'm not an actor anymore. She said, how do you feel about that? And I said, surprisingly good. And so it was totally accident. I would love to say that I had this epiphany and I came to it out of my sheer incredible quantities of skill and marvelous

good looks and intellect. And it's none of those things. I accidentally was in the right place at the right time. And I at least was smart enough to take advantage of the open door when it was offered to me along with the mentorship that was offered. I seized it. And that's now been 27 years, which is hard to believe. There you go. And so you've been running your consulting or speaking agency business all this time? I actually kicked it off in 1998. So yeah, what are we? We're 25 years into it here at this point. And when I first started, I was really just, I don't use just in a diminutive way, but I was just a speaker for organizations. They would

bring me, I would come in the door, I would go to their events, trade shows, conferences, sales meetings, what have you, and speak about whatever was important to them at the time. But I paid enough attention to my clients to realize that the stories that I was being hired to tell were not actually the stories that my companies wanted to tell. They were what the either marketing leadership at the time wanted, or the shareholders wanted, or the executive team whose feet were way too far off the ground ground and they didn't really understand their true core market. It's what they wanted to tell because they were telling their story from an internal perspective. And I very quickly at a relatively young age in my early thirties realized, you know what? That is not speaking to the audience. And I started to develop a mantra back then that became the mantra of my organization.

Still my mantra today. You're ready for it. I'm going to lay it on you. Shoot. Don't tell them what you want to tell them. Tell them what they want to hear. Oh, I love it. I love it. You're giving me, um,

my nipples are getting hard. Uh, I, I, I know if there's, if there's no video, it's not happening. I think,

I think that's on the Patreon. That's the extra, uh, bonus round of the show. That's on the, that's on the only. That's the extra bonus round of the show. That's on the OnlyFans. There you go. People are always trying to find the OnlyFans. What's the link to the OnlyFans, Chris?

I'm like, I'm disgusted that you're asking. But no, I love that. I am so tired. This is, you know, my audience is probably going to say it again. I am so tired of the non-report building, non-qualifying abuse of sales in today's corporate world. And it's the boom push. You don't even take me to dinner. You don't even take me to first base. You just go right for home.

And it's just in your face. And half the time, you're just going, I don't even qualify for what the fuck you're selling. You're wasting your time. Yeah. You're wasting your time. Yeah. Would you like to buy computer wafers and manufacturing that you can resell on retail? Like, I don't do that.

You don't know me, man. You know what it is? I always call it speaking to the wallet instead of speaking to the human. If we get out there and we talk to people like they're nothing more than contracts, it's guaranteed failed communication. You're going to lose them out of the gate. And even if you have a powerful message, they're never going to hear it. They're never going to internalize it. They won't accept it.

And they certainly won't incorporate it into their own existence and become proactive about it. We've got to meet people on their own terms and in their own language first, get to know who they are, genuinely care about them, want to be in service of them. And that's when sales flies. own terms and in their own language first, get to know who they are, genuinely care about them, want to be in service of them. And that's when sales flies. That's when it really soars, but not until that point. I love it. Speak to the wall. That describes my first nine divorces. Again, no video, no proof. I'm sorry to keep coming back to that, Chris. My first go on Facebook and see my complaints about dating. So there you go. But I love this concept of telling a story. And why are stories so important? I mean, that's kind of what we try and do on the show. Stories to me are like a,

well, I don't want to shade your, whatever your explanation is. But to me, stories are like the little lessons of life and kind of like an owner's manual. But in sales and marketing, I'm sure they're a little bit different. Tell us why story is important in getting told to get the sale. I'm going to, first of all, it's such a great question. It's such a vital question for all of us to communicate with. Two things. I'm going to back up for one step first. And a lot of people confuse story because to them, a story is, well, as I was on the bus this morning, coming to this sales meeting, dot, dot, dot, there's nothing really personal in there. What you're doing is you're trying to enter with something personal, but then you're very quickly, I know you're going to get to the marketing pitch. It's coming at me. I can

feel it. A genuine story is something that sort of exposes our soft, fuzzy underbelly, right? I'm going to share something with you that I know is relatively personal. I'm going to show you a bit about who I am and what makes me tick in hopes that I can find correlation with you, that you're going to look at me and say, I know that guy. He thinks the same way I do. You know what? That makes me tick as well. That gets me excited. When I said to you a moment ago, that mantra of mine, right? And you're like, oh my God, my nipples got hard. I'm not going to repeat that. But it's personal, right? This is something that you can look at me and say, I know exactly what Steve is talking about. And I can say, yep, Chris, you do, because I know this is the way you live your life as well. We create correlation.

That's what a good corporate story is. And we hear a lot of failed corporate stories because they stay on the surface. They don't dig. There's nothing human that delves. So there is a really cool dude. If you've ever seen his 2016 TED Talk, his name is Yuri Hassan. And he runs the Hassan Lab at Princeton University. And the Hassan Lab is pretty remarkable at what they do. But the title of Hassan's talk is This is Your Brain on Communication, which I thought was really cool. So definitely check that out if you haven't seen it before.

He's pretty amazing. But his concept is what we call brain coupling. It's natural synchronization. It's the idea that you and I know each other on some level long before we ever meet. We don't know each other's name. We don't know what we do. But what we know is we're both human beings who have human experiences. And my job as a speaker, as a communicator, is how do I find that correlation with you that gets you to say, I like this guy. I trust him. He's credible. I want to

listen to what he has to say. I can't pitch you. I can't sell you. I can't market to you until you're ready to let me in. And it's why most marketing messages fall flat. So it's the basic idea of what Hassan says is we can get others to experience something that we ourselves have experienced based around a shared narrative. Look for what you have in common with your audience or things that might click with them or make sense to them. You immediately open yourself up. You expose a bit about your own pathos, ethos, logos, all of those words that we learned back in high school and college. You just expose enough about yourself to become a human instead of a pitch machine for your brand.

And the minute you do that, your communication goes through the roof. It becomes so much more powerful and so much more valuable for your listener? You know, you hit the nail on the head and you actually, one of the formulas of the Chris Voss show is how we sell people, we sell guests to the audience. And one thing we learned from our audience over the years is they will listen to the first five to 10 minutes of the show and decide if they're going to keep listening. And what they're usually listening for is what is this guy about? What is he, you know, what is his thing? And then who is he? And so that's why we use the format of the show. I kind of sometimes

get bored with the formulaic nature of it. I wonder if our audience says, I hope they don't. And from what I hear, they don't. I think your five-star reviews are saying all they need to say. Well, you know, I had to PayPal them, but don't buy reviews, people. That's the worst thing you can ever do. We've seen some podcasts that have like five episodes and like 10 000 reviews and you're like seriously um but uh

but what we do is when you come in the show we we okay what are you about and this they go okay i like this topic and then we ask you to talk about your origin story who you are and that gives people a connection to you from what the stories you tell them goes. I like this guy. He's like me. He's gone through maybe some cathartic journeys or some sort of thing in life. He's a human being who started out as a human being and he found his

way through the trials and tribulations. Instead of just being like, hey, here's a glossed over golden boy who's just showed up and he's going to tell you how fucking great he is. That's my job. Look at failure. How much more fun is it to talk about our failures? Success is more the living hell out of people. They're like, oh, good for you. Your life

is so grand. You make all this money. You got all this power, blah, blah, blah. Talk to me about where you screwed up. What did you do wrong? Because that humanizes us. Again, it allows people to see there's no separation when I'm speaking. Okay. So if I'm on, if I'm on a stage in front of four people, or I'm on a stage in front of literally arena with 20,000 people in it, you don't want the first things I do. I step off the stage. I leave it.

And I go walk around with people. I go and I sit down next to people sometimes like a free seat. You know what? I'm tired. I'm going to sit down next to you. I'm going to do this next little bit sitting next to you because there's no separation. I am no better than anybody else in that room. It just may be that in that moment, I have got some information that can improve somebody else's life. That can empower them, make them more

successful, give them a leg up, break down an obstacle or a barrier that they've been fighting up against. Or I might be able to inspire them to take that next step toward their new successful reality. That doesn't make me any better. It just means I've got a bit of information today that you can use. Tomorrow, I get to be the one sitting out there listening to somebody else who may have that bit of information that makes my life better. We serve one another. True winning communication is about service. It's not about braggadocio. It's not about how much I know and how little you know. It's how can I help benefit, support, serve you? That's what it's all about. You know, it was interesting to me, service leadership, servant leadership. It was interesting to me. We had somebody on recently who was talking about how

they spent like two hours or something with Bill Clinton. And, you know, I'm not getting into politics, people. We play it out of the mouth. Come on. Stop it. Just listen to what I have to say. And I hear this a lot with presidents and people that have this sort of elegance. And he sat in a room.

They were stuck there for like an hour or two. And so he was there with Hillary and Bill in an office and they were just kind of waiting for something. I don't remember what the scenario was. And Bill the whole time was asking questions about who he was. He wasn't, he wasn't saying, Hey, I'm the president or I'm the ex-president and you should see what the hell I did over here. You know, none of that. He was like, Hey, you know, who are you? And he listened and he's like, you know, and every time he would say, you know, well, we're trying to do some stuff over and, you know, Africa, or we're trying to work on this. He goes, Hey, I know a guy. And it was just like, he goes, I will hook you up with this. I know a guy that

you can talk to in Africa that will help you achieve what you're trying to do. And the whole time, that's the whole time what it was. And he's sitting there the whole time going, yeah, you know a guy, and yeah, you're going to put me together with you guys. You're the ex-president. When you're done out of here, I'll never hear from you again, right? And the whole time, the guy was, Bill Clinton was like really into him and had that charm that Bill Clinton does and really does. And they say a lot about presidents that have that sort of quality,

you know, because they've done tours and meeting a million people traveling around the country. That's kind of the interesting litmus test that we have as a, as a country for politicians. But he said, he said, you know,

the whole time it was all about never about bill, never standoffish. He was warm. He was very interested. Tell me about your kids, your family, everything, getting to know you. And when he left, he followed through on every one of those promises, every single one of those promises. Regardless of your politics, what a great way to have that connection

and make it all about someone else instead of about yourself. You know, what we talked about today, pushing yourself on people. And what you want to sell. Can I share a story? I thought of like three stories while you were telling that story, which is so cool. I don't know if you've read Desmond Morris. Desmond Morris is a British behavioral scientist who specialized in concepts of dominance and submission. We can think of all communication in terms of dominance and submission. And at any given time, one person is going to be more dominant. The other is going to be more submissive. And in a good conversation, everybody shares that, right? Right now, a moment ago,

you were the dominant one. I was the submissive one. Right now, I'm being the dominant. You're being the submissive. It's great. Perfect. Do I have to pay for this? We have to get creepy about it. No. We've already gone there twice in this episode. It's a callback, but it's the idea that charismatic leaders, right? What is charisma? Dave Stachowiak talks about this a lot in his podcast, right? In his business leadership podcast. What is charisma? Charismatic leaders tend to feel high inner status and demonstrate low outer status. At the same same time they are gifting their audience with high status meaning bill clinton will just use him as an example since you just brought him

up he's like you know what i'm the president do i need to get out there and tell everybody i'm the president or what's the president no i don't so how about if i diminish myself a little bit and how about if i try to empower the people i'm talking to and give them higher status than me? So even though on the outside, on the inside, he knows he's high status. Let's not screw around here. But he's choosing in his interaction with somebody else to demonstrate lower status and gift that higher status to his audience. It's brilliant. Same thing happened. Sorry to stay on the Democrat side. Again, no politics here, but I have a dear friend and colleague, Christian Galvez, over in Cologne, Germany. And Chris got a chance to interview Obama about five years ago. And it was like the highlight of Chris's career, that it was one-on-one, him and Obama on stage for 45 minutes together as the ex-president, but it was talking about the nature of the European economy. And he said an amazing thing happened at the end of 45 minutes. He had 12,000 people sitting in an arena in front of him.

He said at the end, of course, he asked the final question. He thanked Obama. They stood up. The audience stood up and applauded. And he said Obama did an incredible thing. He didn't look out to the audience. He stayed with Chris. And the first thing he did is put his hands on Chris's shoulder while the audience is

standing there and applauding and said, I really enjoyed that interview. You did such a fantastic job. Congratulations. This was loads of fun. I appreciated it. And then he turned to the audience. Most celebrities, what are they going to do? They're going to go right to give me the applause on me. And Chris was like, Holy crap, this guy, he took that extra time with me to make me feel I've got the ex president of the United States and he took this time for this nobody German to tell me what a great job I did and to gift me with higher status. And I love that. I love that concept. So your story, it clicked into a third story that I don't want to dominate too much time in the conversation,

but maybe we'll get to that story. I'll save it for a moment in case we accidentally end up there together. There you go. You know, and this is what I love is, is worrying about the other people and not worrying about yourself. And there's kind of an ego. Is there, is, is the problem that our ego gets in the way as to why we're trying to push

selling something rather than worrying about what other people want? It's actually, here's what's interesting, Chris. I would argue that it's actually the other way around. It's that people are insecure and it's the constant need to say, I belong here. I need to make sure that you understand how smart I am and how much I know and that you never stop to doubt

why you're in this conversation with me or think, you know what, maybe Steve doesn't bring a whole lot of value to the table and maybe I wasn't wise to invite him on my podcast. I don't know if he's given much value. And because I'm scared of that, I'm going to overspeak and I'm going to prove to you, no, no, no, I'm worth it. And I think that's where a lot of that ego comes in is people feel they're chasing validation from whoever they're speaking to. And a lot of speakers who get up on stage, I get the sense that's what they're doing. I need to make sure that none of you out there are wondering whether or not I know my shit. I want to make sure that you all know how amazing

I am. And therefore I'm going to talk at you. I won't communicate with you. I'm not going to engage. I'm not going to encourage your participation and make it a conversation. I'm going to lecture you so you never forget how good I am. And it comes from insecurity, not ego. There you go. That's interesting. And maybe that's why people don't respect it is because they see you're insecure. Maybe there's a little bit of suspicion, like, aha, you're full of shit, as George Crowder would say.

Try to talk your way out of this nonsense. No crap on me, man. That makes sense. That explains why it's a turnoff. People look to a leader for confidence. They do. And there's more so to a quiet confidence than someone who has to go tell everybody, you know, who they are and all that good stuff. Very interesting. talk about the book that comes out to me as an interesting topic is how to add personal passion

to your talk that inspires equal passion in your listeners. Passion and emotion is a big thing in sales. I mean, if you don't sell, you know, from that aspect, you know, there's very few people that you're going to sell to that are, you know, logically going to buy something. People buy from motion. It's really true, right? If you compare equal products, right? So this is, this is the way I'll tend to put it, especially when I'm working with, uh, with a, with a team of execs somewhere. So I'll say, all right, you're in the market for a vehicle and you're going to choose between the equal lines of the BMW, the Mercedes, the Lexus, the Audi, the infinity, right? Let's say those are your five cars that you're trying to choose. Every one of those manufacturers is going to give you their

white papers. They're going to give you their brochures. They're going to send you their website and they're going to show you all of the specs, all the data, the metrics, the numbers, the measurements that show why their vehicle is the best vehicle. This is the problem with most sales, right? People get out there and they try to give you everything that's amazing about their product. And what the client, what the customer, what the audience is thinking is, yeah, you know what? Your competitor told me the exact same thing an hour ago. And your other competitor is going to tell me the same thing an hour from now. You've all got your reasons why you're the best. And it ends up leaving the customer in the dust. Because what they end up saying is, I can't tell the difference between any of you.

You all say yours is the best. You all make a great product. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to say, screw all that. I'm going to go on gut instinct. My dad was a BMW guy. I've always had nice BMWs. I'm buying a BMW.

And everybody else is saying, well, why did we lose that sale? You lost it by not creating differentiation, by not setting yourself apart in terms of your communication. You weren't special. Therefore, what you're trying to sell isn't special. And when sales go that route, when sales just try to go on, here's how strong our company is. Here's our market dominance. Here is all of the amazing customers that trust us and want to work with us. And the customer is

saying, well, guess what? Us is not them. You're not my company. How am I supposed to compare? So Apple is one of your customers. Congratulations. I'm not Apple. I don't have their budget. I don't have their numbers of people. I don't have their depth. I don't have their strength. How am I supposed to compete? And that's what you're showing me is a customer success story with Apple. Apple is not my story. Our job as communicators, how do I tell the other person's story? Not my story. How do I tell your story? Oh.

Right? I love that. How about the tone that you set at the top of your podcast? I love the way you start your podcast. Chris, tell me why I love the way you start your podcast. What do you think?

There's a lot of emotion in it. There's a lot of energy. There's a lot of passion in it. Yeah. You're not bullshitting. You're speaking from the heart. You don't have it all scripted out. You're making it up as you go along. You're goofing off with your audience.

You're having a good time with them. You're showing, dude, this is who I am. Like me, subscribe. Don't like me, go away. It's up to you. We go right out on the gangplank. We improv every ramble. Some are funny, some are not, but I think even when it dies is the comedy, they get the joke.

They're just like, okay. There's a reason you're as big as you are and you have as many followers is that people look at that and they say, hallelujah. A refreshing, honest, organic voice. It isn't trying to shovel anything down. It's just going to have fun with me. Hallelujah. That's what I want. Let's have fun together.

You also change the way your guests. Ideally, if you've got a good guest on your your podcast your guest is going to adapt to your style and methodology hopefully how many how many total stiffies if you're out in your program where they go okay i'm just going to talk to you and i'm going to tell you we've had a few they're good people like come on let's drag the story out man let's talk to each other yeah we we're developing a shock system that we can shock them on the other side. But no, we have a pretty good writer. I think we send out. We just need people to read it.

But I mean, you're right. Emotion is the key. It's the key, man. It so is. It really is because you can sell. It seems like you can talk to anybody or almost sell anything with emotion. I mean, all my great salespeople always sold with emotion and understanding what that person wants to achieve and everything else. Some of the other aspects you throw in here, because I want to definitely pitch the book out to people, building brand identity skills into a better story for any audience.

Is that where people get really lost is trying to bridge that gap. You're like, okay, so what is my brand identity? And, and then how do we, how do we make this, you know, for any audience, any size, any topic? And how do we get the, how do we get the best story out of it? Sometimes, you know, the mechanics of your brand, you're trying to figure out how do we turn this into a messaging and passion. So true. Right, Chris. All right. So I'm going to actually go to another mentor of mine who I've never had a chance to meet in person, but he's amazing. So if you know Terry O'Reilly, Terry is just, he's a brilliant Canadian. He's one of the foremost marketing advertising professionals in the world today. He hosts an amazing podcast. If you've never seen his under

the influence or heard his under the influence podcast, he's brilliant. But here's what Terry talks about all the time. Know what business you're in. And most companies do not know what business they're in. Most people are selling because they have to pay the bills. They've got to keep the doors open. They've got to keep their employees happy. They've got to satisfy the quarterly market share. They've got to make sure that their shareholders and their stakeholders and their executive leaders and their board are happy. So it all comes down to the money and a customer client can smell that from a million miles away. What they will always embrace is a brand that creates a story that connects to them. So for example, when people ask, well, what business have you asked people? What business is McDonald's in? McDonald's is in

the fast food business. Absolutely not. McDonald's is in the fast food business. Absolutely not. McDonald's is in the good times, the happiness business, and in the real estate business. That's their real business. They know what it is. Miller. Miller is not in the beer business. Everybody thinks they're in the beer business. Absolutely not. They're in the friendship and party

business. That's their business. The beer just happens to lead to all those things, right? The champagne of beer. The champagne of beer, baby. It's their business. The beer just happens to lead to all those things, right? The champagne of beer. The champagne of beer, baby. It's a party. Or was that Budweiser? I don't remember. I quit drinking a few years ago, so I don't remember drinking it anymore.

So now we know what's not in that mug of yours. There you go. No, no. But the idea of knowing your business. So a lot of what happens with a lot of corporations, and especially the larger they get and the farther from their founding they get, they get away from why the business was built in the first place, right? Every good business, whether it's a one-man operation

or whether it's a global brand which has 200,000 employees, they were all built initially for a reason. There was a gap in the market that the people who started this company say, I know what I want to do. I know what people are passionate and hungry for, and I want to fill that gap for them. I want to become their solution. And if you're successful, thank heavens, now time starts to go by and you get bigger and bigger and you scale and you scale and you scale.

And all of a sudden, those leaders who founded the company are no longer in charge of the company and the corporation, the brand gets farther and farther from its meaning, its purpose. A lot of what I do is I walk in the door and I work with a CMO to say, why was this brand founded? What did you want to accomplish? What was everybody super passionate and excited about back then? How do we get back in touch with that and start to tell that story, that human-based need story, as opposed to the please buy my product story. Whenever we make that shift, again, we're going to create a whole lot more success. And a lot of brands forget how to do it. They don't know what business they're in. They forgot why they started the business. And they're so busy selling product in order to keep

the doors of the business open that they can't make the connections with their clients, their customers. Those long-term relationships that we all know are what create real value and lasting success for a brand. There you go. So I'm sold. I love the book. I ordered it up. Let's get into what you do for your coaching, your training, and some of the different things. I'm looking over your website and taking a look at some of the stuff you do. Let's talk about what you do for people and what you can do for them if they're out there listening. Oh, thank you. So let's think about it on two fronts. Let's get the speaking part of it out of there, right? So I'm speaking for corporations and I do that on a regular basis and it's fantastic.

I love it. I'm a creative strategist for those corporations. I help them tell their stories. But when it comes to the humans, my favorite things to do on that front are the training programs that I offer and the coaching that I offer. So the training programs typically run an HR department, looks at the leadership, talks with them and says, okay, we've got to change the path of our sales team. We've got to get them all telling the same story, or we've got to change the nature of the outreach for the brand and start to slowly adapt our brand away from where we've been to where we really would love to be. I adore doing that. And some of these times, these are half day or full day programs. Sometimes they're weekend programs. Sometimes they're three and four

days programs. And I get to do that all over the world and I love it. So if you're one of those brands and you want to reach out and talk with me about what potentially we can do together in partnership, fantastic. The coaching is ridiculously rewarding. So there are a couple of organizations where I've been their event speaker coach for a long time, and I might work with literally 200 speakers for a single event. And it's both the internal company speakers, let's say it's a user group conference, I'll work with the internal company members. But the really smart event planners, they also give me as a gift as a service to their partners and their customers who want to deliver breakout sessions at those same event at that same event. And they'll say, Well, guess what, as a thank you for speaking at our event. Here's a

professional speaker coach. And then I get to work with people on their content because of course we all know the better the content the easier it is for us to be good communicators you can get the strongest speaker in the world and if the script is the pure shit if it's terrible the speaker falls apart they can't be good they're hamstrung by the words they're trying to force into their own mouths so i'll work with them on better content improving the structure and the storytelling delivery of the message they want to share and then i'll actually work with them on better content, improving the structure and the storytelling delivery of the message they want to share. And then I'll actually work with them on speaker skills as well. And I do love to do that because it's instant gratification for crap, look at what you've done in this tight period of time, just by opening your mind a bit, trying out different things, taking a few riffs and all of a sudden miles better communicators.

And man, I do love doing that. There you go. There you go. And then you do keynotes and workshops, any future upcoming workshops or keynotes, anything going on that people maybe can get involved in? Big bunches. So anybody who does go to the website, if you scale down on that, or if you scroll down on that homepage, you'll get to upcoming events and you'll see there's about seven or eight

of them right now over the next month or two of different places I'll be in different companies that I'm going to be representing on the keynote space. And if you're out there, please walk up, introduce yourself, say hi. My favorite thing is humans. You know, I get to hang out with Chris right now. I'd love to hang out with you as well over at the event. Don't feel intimidated. Be like, that dude, I saw him on

the Chris Voss show. I'm going to go say hi to him. And I promise I'm going to be really delighted and thrilled to say hi to you and get to know you. So yeah, crack me down, please. There you go. My audience says that to me. They run at me screaming know you. So yeah, crack me down, please. There you go. My audience says that to me, they run up me screaming at events and they go,

the Christmas show. I find you, man. You're, you're, you're done. You're not gonna be able to talk to anybody else. I'm going to totally commandeer your time.

I'm going to be rude about it. And I mean, like you remember the beer that was not in your mug? Oh yeah. We'll, we'll get a, we'll get an alcohol free. We'll do coffee instead. Yeah.

Yeah. It's too hard on my liver and kidneys at 55 that are covered. But coffee is good. I like really nice coffee. What's your favorite? What do you love? I like a lot of the JBC stuff. I go on coffeereview.com.

And if you go on there, you can buy coffee like I used to buy wine. You know, if you collect wine. Like a club kind of a deal where they send you like 12 different varieties? No, no, no, you don't want that. But no, like a wine thing. You know, I don't know if you ever got into wine speculation or wine purchasing or wine selling. Oh, not purchasing, no.

Yeah, but you go, you look for stuff that's like 90 to 100, 90, you know, and it's rated really high, so there's like, you know, 1 through 100 that they rate wines, and so you know, it'll go from go from you know you usually want to wine somewhere in the 90 to 100s well they do that with coffees and there's a coffee site called the coffeereview.com and you can go on there and find some of the best coffees that you'll ever have i have literally written it down i am gonna do i'm a nespresso guy i do do love a Nespresso. They'd make a great name. There's great Espresso as you search for them on there

I just ordered some 94 93 rated Espresso's JBC coffee roasters is one of my favorite roasters. They consistently yet JBC They consistently have really good coffee that they make and you can find Espresso's You can find everything you want all the variations between dark and light. And I got to tell you, sometimes you'll pay a lot for the coffee. I mean, they have some that they'll sell you, you know, 600 ounce or whatever the hell it is.

But it's not that crap you're going to get from Starbucks. It's going to be good stuff. I mean, why wouldn't you invest in a good cup of coffee as much as you would in a glass of wine or a good cocktail? I don't see the differentiation. It's an asset. It's hard to make. It's a craft product that a lot of people put a lot of time and a lot of expertise and energy and passion into.

So, of course, that deserves investment. I agree. And it's a pleasurable experience. It is. You'll love yourself. You'll be like, why have I been drinking this Starbucks crap or, you know, whatever you're getting out of the corporate coffee pot? It'll change your life and it'll just set everything off. So, Steve, as we go out, any final thoughts we haven't talked about? Final pitch to our audience as we go.

I've got a freebie for everybody who's interested in doing it. I encourage you, please go and make it happen. So, like I said, you can get to me at SteveMoulter.com or corporatestorytelling.com. If you go to corporatestorytelling.com slash guide and then put in the code, all lowercase, soldtold23. So right off the book, soldtold23. You can download a free e-guide. It's called Five Paths to Passionate Storytelling. And I wrote this thing to be like a really quick kit, easy five ways that anybody can instantly improve their

public speaking, their corporate communication, or their person-to-person human engagement. They're five things. It doesn't matter what your job title is on your business card or how much money you make or your socioeconomic status or what event or sphere or sector you work in, everybody can get benefit out of it. So go download that e-guide, put it to good use. And then if you want to sign up for it, every Tuesday, I release an up level. It's called Tuesday Tips and Tricks, but it's these little short hits on, again, how you can become a better and more effective communicator. And I'd love to see you there as well if you want to sign up. There you go. And Soul Told 23, is that all one word or there spaces between all one word lowercase?

So I just went from the nothing gets told until the story gets told and published in 2023. And I just went sold, told 23. There you go. There you go. Well, I'm excited to read your book,

Steve, and a very insightful stuff. We can talk for hours. You've got such great data and stories, stories, stories, story gets told. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it, Chris. Thanks to you. Thanks. Stories, baby. The story gets told. There you go.

Thank you very much, Steve, for coming on. Really appreciate it, Chris. Thanks to you. Thanks to all your listeners. It's been an honor, privilege, loads of fun. There you go. And as always, without my listeners, we couldn't do it without you. Go to iTunes.

Give us five-star reviews over there. Or else. No, I'm just kidding. Just do it. Go to goodreads.com for Chess Chris Voss. Go to YouTube.com for Chess Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com for Chess Chris Voss. And TikTok at ChrisVoss1.com go to youtube.com linkedin.com and tiktok thanks for tuning in

be good to each other stay safe and tell some good stories we'll see you next time