We’ve all heard it: “Storytelling is powerful.”
And it’s true—stories can captivate, connect, and inspire. But if you’re using stories in your business, there’s a more pointed question you should be asking:

Do stories make you money?

Because in business, likes and follows are great—but they don’t pay the bills. So let’s get real.

Why Most Business Stories Miss the Mark

Too often, business owners focus on two kinds of stories:

• Stories that are fun (or emotional) to tell
• Stories that reveal something about you

There’s nothing wrong with that—until your story turns into a memoir instead of a marketing tool.

If your stories aren’t aligned with your strategy, you’re telling bedtime stories to a business audience. And those don’t convert.

Stories Can Make You Money—If You Use Them Right

Here’s how it works. Stories drive revenue in two distinct ways:

1. Indirectly: Stories as a Marketing Power Tool

Think of stories as high-performance tools in your marketing toolbox. When used strategically, they help you:

• Plan better. You’re not just checking boxes—you’re giving your plans texture and purpose. I even created a workbook to help business owners do just that.
• Clarify your strategy. The stories you tell (or don’t tell) reveal how you position your brand. Want to show you’re client-focused? Share a story where a client succeeded because of your process.
• Explain a concept. Abstract services can feel slippery—until you anchor them in a story. For instance, if you offer a space-booking app, tell a story about someone trying to find a last-minute birthday venue that wasn’t a hotel or a restaurant.
• Understand your client’s world. When you build your client’s “before” story, you speak their language. You write copy with empathy, not ego.

2. Directly: Stories That Sell

Now let’s talk ROI—Return On Story.

Yes, a great story can lead directly to a sale. But it’s not just any story. It has to be:

• Relatable. Your audience sees themselves in it.
• Emotional. Not sappy—just resonant.
• Visionary. It casts a picture of what’s possible.

One business coach I know sells high-end VIP days. She doesn’t start by listing deliverables. She starts with this:

“Imagine yourself having breakfast on a sunlit terrace. No distractions. Then we dive into your business challenge with fresh clarity…”

That story creates space. It isn’t pushy. It invites the listener to step into a better version of their day—and their business.

That’s the power of a well-told sales story.

So… Are Your Stories Making You Money?

If you’re not using stories yet, you’re probably leaving money—and connection—on the table.

If you are using stories but they aren’t converting, it might be time to rethink your approach. Are you telling stories that entertain…or stories that sell?

Strategic stories do more than sound good. They drive results.

Use stories to sharpen your strategy.
Use stories to build connection and open the door to a sale.
And always, always ask: What’s the purpose of this story?

Want a second set of eyes on your story?

If you’re not sure whether your homepage, about page, or landing page is telling the right story, I offer video reviews that give you personalized, honest feedback—with a marketing strategy lens. Click here to learn more and sign up.

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If you’ve been on the planet in the last few years, you probably why you need to use stories in business. Humans are hard-wired to create narratives. Stories engage your readers and keep them listening. You can’t be a business owner without telling stories.

You’ve probably also heard that the most powerful form of storytelling is the hero’s journey. In this journey, you show how you faced a problem you desperately needed to solve.

Maybe you …

… had been on a dozen diets that failed till you discovered this one.

… had lost jobs and dating opportunities until you learned how to dress for success.

… had hit bottom in your business till you discovered one strategy that brought you wealth (as well as more time to enjoy it).

These stories can be incredibly compelling, but they rarely make you sales.

For one thing, you may not have one of these stories to share.

… you just don’t have a great story or maybe a story at all. What if you’re a great cardiologist who never had a heart attack?

… you’re a coach, not a player. You coach teams to championships but you were a bench player with limited minutes.

… you can’t afford the risk of telling your story. The details might embarrass your family. Your lawyer and accountant advise you to keep quiet.

I’m in this category myself. I’m a coach rather than a player. I don’t always share the details of my life. And people rarely relate to my own life stories. Luckily, I’ve discovered they’re often the least useful type of story for your marketing strategy.

So what kinds of stories will bring you clients and sales?

Some people actually make up stories.

“Dorothy” claims she was going bankrupt three years ago–until she found the secret that turned her business around.

Alas, I remember Dorothy. I looked back in my emails and confirmed my memories: she was doing very well. She’d just sold a business for a sizeable sum. One of her big-ticket products was selling from a sales page, week after week. Dorothy loses credibility every time she shares her pseudo-journey.

There’s a better way. These 3 types of stories will build your brand, your business, and your base of clients.

Tell stories of success.

How did you help that client? How did you turn around that business? These stories focus on your client – not you. They actually help brand you by demonstrating how you work and what you deliver.

I encourage all my clients to come up with at least 3 success stories that will become the foundation of their marketing and their brand.

Show how your passion makes you uniquely qualified to help others.

You might have become extremely frustrated when you saw clients who were harmed by their experiences with more common cookie-cutter solutions.  You tossed the cookie cutter and carved out a new program.

For instance, I became frustrated with stories of solopreneurs who paid large sums for “branding programs” that took three months and gave them colors and fonts.

Or you realized many people were suffering needlessly because they didn’t realize solutions were available.  They lost money, time, or energy for no good reason.

For instance, a financial planner realized newly-divorced women were often clueless about money. They often signed up with sharks who were all too eager to devour every dime.

So this planner created a business specializing in meeting the needs of divorced women–a combination of sensitivity, deep knowledge of financial instruments, and ability to work with each individual’s risk tolerance and lifestyle.

Or you might have built a successful business.  You focused on helping people manage their lives, not their money or business.

Soon people began asking you, “How did you build a client base in a competitive industry?” You were so passionate about helping, you began delivering help for free. Now you’re a business coach who helps others build successful practices.

Tell stories to explain what you offer.

It’s not always easy to explain what you do, especially since many services we offer simply didn’t exist ten or twenty years ago.

A web developer might tell a story of a home decorator who found new ways to show off the owner’s personality, find places to hold all the important stuff after they downsized, and knew where to go to find one-of-a-kind furnishings at a reasonable price. “That’s what I do for your home on the web,” he might say.

Or suppose you’re helping clients build marketing funnels. You tell a story of a handyman who showed up asking for work. He first hung a few pictures for a very small sum. Then he painted a room. In just a few weeks, he was building a deck. That’s how a funnel might work, you say.

Choosing a story to support your strategy isn’t always easy.

If your inbox is anything like mine, I’m betting you find many stories truly cringe-worthy.

On the other hand,   every so often I hear a story that’s so spot-on, I 2\want to learn more. I want access to whatever that business owner’s clients are enjoying.

Most importantly, I remember that business owner. Their story has become their brand, in a way that colors and fonts can never accomplish.

Join me in a one-to-one consultation to discover the best story to simplify your marketing and get more results with less effort. Click here to learn more and sign up.

“Yet I’m getting invited to hold workshops in large companies and executives are coming to me for coaching.”  That’s how a client I’ll call “Rita” began a consultation a while back.

“I haven’t walked in their shoes,” Rita continued. “My coach told me to market to people like myself. But in this case, I’m not marketing to me! Why would someone believe I can help them?”

Rita had fallen for the widely reported myth of, “You must tell your story. You’re qualified because you are just like the people you help. You know what they’re going through. You can help them.”

Rita was fully qualified. She just needed a new story. 

Rita had a story that resonated with her audience of solopreneur creatives. She could share her experience of moving from a struggling solopreneur to a confident, profitable business owner. But she couldn’t tell an origin story about moving from frustrated corporate executive to confident, fulfilled professional.

Rita’s dilemma will be familiar to business owners who experience a shift, or pivot, as they grow. They start to attract clients in new markets, so they need new marketing strategies, new copy, and of course, new stories.

These shifts are inevitable. You change. Your market changes. You discover new solutions. You get invited to take on new challenges.

When business owners call me, they often believe they need to start with the common definition of a rebrand, i.e., a new website, color scheme, images, and slogan.

Actually, your first step calls for telling a new story — 3 stories, in fact:

Story #1 – answers the question “Why did you make this shift?”

Story #2 – answers the question “Why are you qualified to perform the new role?”

Story # 3 – the new sales story you tell so people think “I want what she’s having”

Do me a favor: Stay tuned for more information. And reply to this message if you’d like to learn more. I’m working on a guide (free or very low cost) and would like to know what questions you have.

And if you’d like to get the lowdown on the different stories you can use during a pivot, check out my book on Amazon – Grow Your Business One Story At A Time. It’s currently in kindle form but you don’t need a kindle to read it — just a computer or smartphone.

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If you’re like most business owners I know, you have a secret wish. You also have a very long not-so-secret “To Do” list. And your secret wish is for someone to come along and magically wipe out your entire list.

Let’s face it: a lot of problems, in all arenas, are solved by everyday slogging it out. If we want to save money, we cut back on expenses. If we want to lose weight, we cut back on calories and eat food that (let’s be frank here) isn’t as much fun. A blueberry muffin or a serving of broccoli? No contest.

In business, a lot of problems are solved by boring, repetitive tasks. I have on my “to do” list an item to move some of my courses to a new platform. Others are even more boring, like learning new software. It’s about as much fun as learning to use a new toaster.

So when you tell a story, your hero is a client with a problem. The client doesn’t know how to solve the problem. Enter the guide — you.

But you’re not performing magic in the traditional sense. You offer a repeatable, proven process to solve the problem. Almost always you involve the client. The client has to prepare, study, or work. Even if you’re consulting, the client will work closely with you on the solution to the problem.

Let’s compare this to stories like Cinderella. She’s sitting by the hearthside, feeling sad because she couldn’t go to the ball. Enter the fairy godmother. She appears: Cinderella doesn’t check her credentials or compare a long list of candidates. She waves her wand. And the problem is solved.

And now let’s rewrite the story. The godmother is now a life coach who’s been chosen by this young woman. Note that Cinderella has to have some sort of agency here: she has to want to see the problem solved. She has to be able to call around to find the right godmother.

And the godmother helps Cinderella find her own way to go to the ball. She helps Cindy help herself. Maybe she’ll help Cinderella start a little side hustle to earn extra money so she can move out and buy her own way to the ball!

And that’s probably a lot closer to what you do as the guide. You don’t just appear; you’re invited. You help the client help herself or at least avoid repeatable problems in the future. Your plumber doesn’t teach you how to unclog a drain but you do get advice on how to avoid doing this in the future.

When you tell the story, you choose the characters carefully so your reader will identify with them. You don’t promise magic (at least I hope you don’t). You make sure the hero (your client) has highly desirable qualities; you don’t want to present a hero who’s stupid or helpless.

So can you promise magic?

Sometimes the suggestion of a coach or consultant can feel magical, because you’re so transformed.

1 – The process is repeatable. If you do x, you get y. If you just show up every day, good things will happen. It will be different for each person. A coach who has thousands of followers can recommend her process and it won’t work for you. If you’re providing a service in an urban area, a rural solution won’t work. For instance, inviting people to breakfast at your home…no way. But if you CAN do this you’ll be really lucky.

2 – The process transforms you in some way. You learn to walk or talk a new way. You have a new method for saving money or investing or going on vacation. You go to an exercise class and realize you now walk differently. I knew someone who said her yoga class let her get out of a car more easily.

3 – You get an aha moment. Someone says something about your business or your mindset and you say OMG.

If you’d like to learn more about casting the characters in your selling story, I’ve put together a low-cost workbook. It’s got details for assigning qualities to the characters. It’s got fill-in-the-blank worksheets. And it includes characters who can add to make the story more fun: the cheerleaders and the villain. Learn more here.

We know how fairy tales end: they live happily ever after.

We know murder mysteries end with “case closed.”

In romance novels, two people become a couple. Never mind political correctness. It’s what the audience wants.

These are genres.

Business stories also fit into a genre, which means they follow a structure. As with other genre stories, readers and listeners expect to find this structure, consciously or unconsciously. If you violate the structure, they complain.

Your selling story ends with a  transformation. A good selling story moves FROM a starting point TO a transformation.

==> Check out the Strategic Storytelling podcast episode #99 for more examples of transformation in stories.

Start with the goal.

Look at Cinderella. I’ve talked elsewhere about how Cinderella isn’t a good marketing story. But let’s make a few revisions.

Cinderella really wants to go to the ball.

To make this a marketing story it has to be from the godmother’s perspective…She’s positioning herself as someone who helps clients reach their goals. So she would talk about how much Cinderella wanted to go to the ball. She’d talk about using her special powers to get Cinderella the horse-drawn coach, slippers, and gown.

And the story would end with her success at the ball – she made it, she caught the eye of a prince, she achieved her goal.

If her goal was to meet the prince we’d tell the story differently. We’d have more about how she went, she met the prince and she achieved her goal of marrying royalty to escape her home. She was transformed from a drudge to a princess…and a confident young woman. 

More realistically, let’s consider a life coach who wants more clients. Does she want more clients or does she want to sell more products? Does she want to be more productive with her time?

Does a financial advisor want more clients? Or more clients with a certain net worth?

Does a therapist want more high-end clients who can self-pay without insurance? 

Make it a TO not a FROM.

Think of the transformation as creating a vision board for the client and saying you’ll help them get there. 

I hate stories about retirement…because it’s all about FROM. Leaving work. No more commuting. It’s not about what they’ve left behind.

When you tell a selling story … you don’t end with “and now they don’t have to put up with demanding clients, working late hours and loss of sleep.”

You emphasize how they’re working with good clients and the rewards…increased revenue, time with family.

Make the story come alive.

Share specific details. One business consultant set up her business to take 3 months off in summer. She shares details of her time at the beach and her playtime with the children. You can imagine yourself there, near the water, splashing away.

Many business owners find themselves drowning in content creation. We don’t just write: we have to come up with ideas on a regular basis.

Like anyone else, I’m always keeping an eye out for ways to be more productive. One suggestion that keeps coming up is, “Start with a big idea and break it up into pieces.”

For instance, I may have a concept of branding for storytelling mistakes. I’d start with an overview – maybe 7 common mistakes. Then you’d see an article on each of the mistakes. So far we’re up to 8 articles.

We could go even further, with a couple of stories to illustrate each mistake. 22 articles!

And so on.

That’s an excellent approach and many people use it successfully. If it’s new to you, definitely give it a try!

My problem is, I find myself staring at the blank page, trying to come up with ideas. Writing up the ideas feels like filling an order…a chore.

So over time, I’ve evolved the bottom-up strategy. I write articles on specific topics that seem interesting and timely. I particularly like writing articles that are generated by a question from a subscriber or a point that’s raised in a forum. (Yes, that’s a hint – please share your questions anytime.)

If you do this, you’ll probably notice themes in your own articles.

For instance, my next course (a work-in-progress), will be presented as a live 90-minute workshop: “Stellar Storytelling.”

If you’ve ever told a story – in writing or in front of a live audience – you know it’s not enough to have a good story. You have to know how to present the story to create an experience for your audience…even if you’re an introvert. (Coming soon – watch my emails!)

While pulling the course together, I began looking through past articles, blog posts, and podcast episodes. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle – taking pieces from my articles and assembling them into a bigger picture. That’s the payoff of a bottom-up approach: seeing new patterns from the scattered pieces.

One tip: When you post articles to your blog, use categories so you’ll easily collect ideas later, when you’re ready to write a book or create a course. Your post may have multiple topics. For instance, I might have a couple of paragraphs about story archetypes and other paragraphs about the qualities of a selling story. I’d use the categories “story archetypes” and “selling stories” if I wanted to recall them later.

Try both these methods – top down and bottom up. You’ll likely gravitate to one or the other as you continue writing.

Speaking of big projects…you may not know I can help you implement your Next Big Thing – a project you’d like to finish in the next 90 days. It might be a course, a website, a product launch, or even a book.

Calculate what you’re losing by not getting the project done (and done well) and then see if it makes sense to work with me. You’ll get no-fluff support with a “get it done” focus. Details here. Feel free to reply to this message with questions.

You’ve probably been told to be sure your colors, fonts, and graphic symbols need to be consistent. So you choose a color palette, an image style, a set of fonts, and more.

If you go deeper you won’t just choose the visual components. You’ll ask, “Are my choices consistent with my brand?”

Anita was a lawyer who needed some online content to build her practice. She helped clients collect on past due debt and also, taking the other side, defend themselves from overly zealous collection practices.

Looking for inspiration, she explored websites designed for spas and fashion — businesses targeting women in a playful, feminine way. Those websites appealed to her as a customer.

She needed to switch gears to ask, “What are my clients looking for?”  She knew the answer: They sought a tough, tenacious advocate who would fearlessly confront angry opponents who used bullying and intimidation tactics.

Anita needed an authoritative, confident website. Her clients were less concerned with her personal style than with her ability to win cases. At the same time she needed to show that she was warm and approachable.

The best way to do this would be to tell a story. 

A Stronger Example From Another Lawyer

Judy, a criminal defense lawyer. got a call from Richard, a bank officer. Richard had just received a surprise visit from federal investigators. He wasn’t concerned. He knew he was innocent.

Fortunately, Richard’s girlfriend wasn’t so sure.  She immediately told Richard, “Get a lawyer – now.”

Judy began working with government officials to find out why they were visiting Richard. She made calls to insiders on her contact list, so she could identify exactly how the investigation got started. What tipped them off? How far along were they? Were they committed to action or was there room for negotiation?

Once she had this information, she knew exactly how to make a convincing case that would encourage the officials to move on. She could demonstrate that they were wasting their time with Richard.

“It’s absolutely critical to avoid getting indicted,” Judy explains when she tells the story. “If you can get to the investigators early, you avoid a lot of misery — not to mention legal fees.”

Judy’s story works on several levels. She shows what she does. She lets her audience know when they might need a lawyer. She shows the importance of choosing a lawyer who’s experienced and who knows the ropes. 

She could use this story at networking meetings, in blog posts, and even as an introduction to a seminar or speech. It’s a model branding story for an independent professional. 

A lot of independent professionals report they’re nervous about promoting themselves. This short affordable course helps you develop your personal brand by telling stories – and avoid sabotaging yourself with Fear of Bragging. Click here to learn more. 

If you’d like to move a project from the “under construction” stage to the “producing revenue” stage, the 90-day “get it done”   program might be the answer. You might need to plan a website, get more sizzle into a sales letter, strengthen your business message or get answers to half a dozen clients.  Check it out here.