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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I'm going to make a huge claim that I've never made in this podcast's history over 1,000 episodes and I can confidently say that today's guest.
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As soon as our team landed on her website, we were unanimous in the fact that this is the best copy we've ever seen.
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If you read through her stuff, there's only one thing you're hoping for at the bottom of her page, and that is a buy now button, because today's guest is truly incredible with words and copywriting and, most importantly, above all of those things, what fuels it is stories and telling the right story.
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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Her name is Chris Jones and in Chris's bio I wanna read this to you because I think that this is immediately going to stoke those pain points that we all feel.
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You ready for this.
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Most business owners miss out on sales because their website copy isn't working.
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The truth is, being good at what you do is very different than being good at talking about what you do, very different than being good at talking about what you do.
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Chris's signature story selling system helps consultants, coaches and service providers replace all of their marketing with a single story so they can attract more clients, amplify revenue and enjoy more time freedom.
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Chris founded her company Red Door Stories in 2003 and was mentored by Donald Miller, who is the author of Building a Story Brand.
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She's worked with high-profile companies, including Nike and Adidas, but her favorite clients are self-employed service providers, because they struggle the most with copywriting and can experience the greatest benefits once they get their story right.
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Some of the extraordinary results she's helped them achieve include increasing revenue by 300%, scaling from 30K months to 300K months.
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I personally know how many of you listeners are interested in that sort of scale.
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Charging six times more for the same service, booking a record-breaking amount of lead calls All of this stuff that Chris is going to teach us today can transform not just your marketing but your business and how excited people are to work with you.
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I know that because I'm excited to learn from Chris here today, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Chris Jones.
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All right, chris, I'm so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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I'm happy to be here, heck yes, chris, I will transparently tell you this.
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I'm always excited to introduce our guests, but there was a little extra excitement in your intro today because the work you do is incredible.
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You've got to take us beyond the bio to kick things off.
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Who's Chris?
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How did you start doing all these amazing things?
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How?
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did you start doing all these amazing things?
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Oh, wow, that's a big question.
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Well, where do I begin with that?
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It's been a long and wonderful road.
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I started way back in the early 2000s.
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I got initially into brand design so I felt like my calling back then was really all about storytelling through visual storytelling, and I really cut my teeth in the industry doing that and working with larger companies around that.
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And as time went on, I really was drawn to the solopreneurs and the small business owners and the entrepreneurs and over time really the landscape online shifted.
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So I had been working with a lot of clients on designing beautiful websites and I would really ask my clients to provide me with the copy for those websites, and they would.
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I would watch them struggle with it.
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They might hire a copywriter, they might try and do it themselves.
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What would happen most often is they would call me and say I'm not going to reach this due date for when I need to hand my copy over to you so you can start the design of the website.
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And they would.
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If they hired a copywriter, they would feel like the copy just felt a little off.
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It didn't feel really aligned with their voice, so I watched that struggle happen enough that I just put my foot down and said I'm not going to let my clients go through this anymore.
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And that was about the same time that, like I should start here when I started, all you needed to be a legitimate business was to have a website online.
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This is like 2008.
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If you had a website, you were legit and you would get business.
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And then over the years that that really shifted and it became very clear to me that the words that you say on your website, the story that you tell on your website, is really the foundation of your brand, and the design is actually a secondary.
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And so once I realized that, I really just made it my mission to learn how to tell a really powerful story online for business owners, and I traveled across the country for workshops, I read books, I became one of the very first story brand guides, which was even before the book Building a Story Brand came out, so that really filled my toolbox with a lot more knowledge and wisdom around how to tell a really powerful story and how to turn your website into your most powerful sales employees.
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So, as I started to learn this new approach or these new tools in my toolbox and started implementing those.
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My clients started calling me with incredible results, like it was so affirming, because it was like, wow, this is working, and it's working immediately and at the same time, I was applying these same principles of storytelling to my own marketing and to my own website and the same thing was happening to me.
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I was getting clients like that were traveling to Portland to meet me because they wanted to work together on big projects, and my sales calls were getting booked out.
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My project calendar was getting booked out and I started to really have consistent revenue every month, and prior to that, I had been really relying a lot on referrals and as great as referrals are, they're not the most consistent from month to month and it's stressful to run a business on referrals.
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I really knew that I wanted to create an engine for my business that would really turn that website into a top sales employee, and I wanted to be able to really guarantee to my clients that I was going to set them up with the tools to do that too.
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Yeah, chris, I love that overview, especially because hearing you talk about it and really, when you took us into that part of the story about watching other people try to write website copy, it's something that all of us can relate to.
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Every single person who's hearing us right now can relate to that.
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Where we figure out what is our headline going to be Okay, perfect, what do we write underneath that headline?
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It doesn't sound like you're giving us a way to do that.
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It sounds like what you're telling us is a completely different alternative to the way that we've always viewed that.
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It seems different, not a different way to do it.
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So I want to start there.
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What is the difference when you talk about starting with that story?
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What does that even look like?
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Because most people probably haven't even seen that ever watched.
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A real story always begins with a hero that has a problem they don't know how to solve and they're stuck in that problem.
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That's why we get engaged in stories.
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That's why when we go to a movie, we sit in that chair for 90 minutes and we don't even check our phone.
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Nothing has the power to capture our attention like stories do.
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So I'll give you like the quick 20 second overview of what a story is and then I'll talk about how to apply that in your own business.
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So every story begins with a hero that has a problem they don't know how to solve.
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They're out and about on the internet asking their friends.
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They're looking for a guide who can help them solve that problem, and the guide shows up about a third of the way in the story and really has a plan to help that hero navigate their way to success.
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And the way that story works in marketing, when it's done well, is really positioning yourself as the guide in the story and your clients as the hero of the story, the hero that's really putting your potential clients first and foremost and letting them know that they matter, that you understand them.
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You help them feel seen and heard and then you enter into the story about a third of the way through.
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So it's a very different way of moving through a website and it feels I like to say it feels like when you come to a website that that really uses story in the right way.
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It feels like you're getting a hug, which is pretty cool.
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So the main thing here is that you are the guide in the story and your clients are the hero.
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Yeah, I love that overview, chris, especially because obviously there's so many things intricacies within each ingredient that you just went over for us.
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And I'm going to go here because I know that a lot of listeners we've obviously heard about storytelling and marketing and business before, but a lot of them will get caught up at that first obstacle, which is, chris, I don't have a story.
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You're talking about my clients being the heroes of a story.
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What if I don't even have any clients?
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How do I start uncovering this in order to find the right story?
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Yeah Well, the key is really honing in on who you work with or who you want to work with, and even if you have to kind of brainstorm it, if you don't have clients yet, you can do that.
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There are ways to find that information.
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But the top priority is to really hone in on what is that hero struggling with the most.
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And I ask my clients.
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I say, when you're on the phone with your clients, what are they complaining about?
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What are they waking up in the middle of the night and ruminating on?
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And if you don't have clients yet, you can find a book that talks about the type of work that you're doing or that's helping the same audience that you want to help, and you can look at the reviews of that book on Amazon and get language from there.
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When people talk about the book, they'll often talk about what they were struggling with and what the book solved for them.
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Yeah, definitely so many sources.
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At this point, I think that brainstorming and content should be the least of our excuses these days, because we've got AI, we've got product reviews on Amazon You're right the real life feedback conversations on Reddit and other social media platforms.
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It's just abundant that we can tap into that language, regardless of where we are inside of that circle or outside of it.
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So, Chris, I appreciate those insights.
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I wanna kick things up a notch, because I've gone so deep inside of your work and I love the way that you do everything, and I wanna iterate for listeners here today that we're not just talking, as I alluded to.
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We're not just talking about a way to do your marketing.
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We're talking about I'm just gonna read a headline from your website how I replaced almost all of my marketing with a single story.
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Chris, what does that mean?
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To actually replace our marketing with a story?
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So first I want to clarify your story, your marketing story.
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You are a character in that story.
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It's not your founder's story.
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It's not about the history of your business and how your business came to be.
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It's really a story, a narrative that you're going to craft, and this story invites your potential clients into a narrative with you, a narrative where they're the hero and you're the guide.
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And so when you take the time to craft your own story in this way, you you have a powerful way of communicating and connecting with people and really building trust, because no one wants to work with you if they don't trust you.
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So we want to really double down on authentic connection and trust there and really inspire them to take action action.
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I like to think of your signature story a lot like an accordion.
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So we write your signature story this is what I do with all my clients and it's the foundation of the work that we do.
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So we write the signature story, we get that on paper and then it works a lot like an accordion.
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So let's just say your main story is here.
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The longest version of your story is here on your website.
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A shorter version of your story is going to be like a video script and a shorter version of it is going to be what I call a one-liner, which is also kind of the answer to the question what do you do?
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It can also be used in all your social media profiles.
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So the idea is to have this one story and you have different lengths of it or different versions of it, but it's all the same story.
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So everywhere you show up is online and in person is very, very consistent.
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You're using the same language.
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Many people might look at it like this is too lazy, it should be harder.
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I should be reinventing my message and making it fresh, but actually people need to hear things eight times before they can commit it to memory.
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So it really serves you to be consistent with the same story over and over and over again, and that's the way you become really memorable and that you're top of mind.
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When somebody has that problem, they know that you're the person that solves it.
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Yeah, chris, I'll ask you this because I always think about the listeners and where they're at in their business journeys and probably the things that they're screaming at their speakers right now saying, brian, ask this one question.
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It is you seem so comfortable with the fact that you just made at the end there, which is we don't need to reinvent anything, and I would argue that entrepreneurs, it's almost a great thing, but to a fault is that we love creating things, we love putting the work in, and so a lot of entrepreneurs.
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They'll launch a new product or a new service.
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They'll create an entirely new course.
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They'll come up with 50 different social media post ideas rather than doubling down or 10xing or 100xing down on the thing that works.
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I see too many entrepreneurs think that new is always going to be the solution there.
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So I'm sure the critics might be thinking well, chris, do I vary the story?
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Do I?
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You know?
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If I'm on a podcast episode, do I talk about something slightly different when I'm doing a YouTube video or writing a blog post?
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Is it varied?
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How much variance is there versus no, this is the signature story that we're committing to and we're going to ride it.
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Yeah, I would recommend you stick with your signature story and write it.
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It doesn't mean that you can't be creative within it, but really it's a lot like guardrails or like those bumpers that they've got in bowling alleys.
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It's like it's really a filtration device to help you clear out the noise and really stay true to the core of your message the noise and really stay true to the core of your message.
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I think what happens as entrepreneurs is we wear a lot of hats and we have this underlying belief that the harder we work, the more likely we are to succeed or make more money, and it's just not the case.
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You have to be very strategic and your energy is so valuable, so you really want to like be able to put your marketing tools on autopilot and just know they're working for you, because you have plenty other hats to wear so you can focus on the work that you love.
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Nobody really becomes an entrepreneur because they love marketing.
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It's kind of like a necessary evil for most people, and so let you know, build a foundation, create a consistent story, let that work for you so you can focus on other things that are more important.
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Yeah, and listeners, I can tell you, having done the research on Chris's work, one of the terms that I saw keep popping up in her copy is simplify to amplify, and so if you've been looking for that sort of permission in your business, here Chris is giving it to all of us today.
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So I so appreciate that.
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Chris, I want to ask you this next question because I would imagine that part of your superpowers is that you talk about that noise.
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I would imagine you're incredible at stripping away that noise and asking the right questions to get at the stuff that matters.
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Talk to us about some of the questions that you ask your clients as part of that process, and I know a lot of it is your secret sauce, so you don't have to go too deep into it, but I'd love to hear some of those insights into where you at least start to uncover the signature story.
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Yeah, I call this process, it's step one in my process.
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I call it mining for gold because your story is inside of you, it's in there, it's in your head and your heart.
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It's just kind of cluttered up with a lot of different other ideas, so it's hard to decipher from inside your own brain which is the gold and which is the clutter.
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And so that's why I come in with a fresh perspective and an expertise in story and I can really identify that golden thread that is your story.
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The reason this is so hard for entrepreneurs to do is because of what I call the bottle effect, of what I call the bottle effect, and the bottle effect is really writing your own copy is really hard because you're inside of the bottle, you're so close to your own business and you're inside the bottle trying to read the label that can only be read from the outside.
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And so, no matter how hard we try to work on our own copy, we just can't get the perspective that we need to read that label clearly.
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And so I come in and I'm mine for that gold and I ask you those questions to pull your story out of you and, as you can imagine, we spend a fair amount of time really getting down the problem of what your clients are struggling with, and we take a lot of time with that.
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We also really take the time to envision a brighter future for our clients, like really showing them what's possible.
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That's a really important role as the guide.
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We become the guide in our story by showing up with really authenticity and authority, but above and beyond that, we show up with empathy.
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And so really just showing up and showing them a brighter future and really being clear on what's possible for them is a big part of it.
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I like to ask my clients underneath it all, what do your clients really want?
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What do they really want underneath it all?
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Often it's a core desire like freedom or abundance or wellness.
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So we kind of we dig deep but we go through all the layers together.
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It's a really, really wonderful process.
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The other thing that we do is answer important questions that people have when they come to your website.
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So what is it about you that makes you and your approach different from everybody else's?
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Most industries are just so crowded online, whether it's the coaching industry or wellness industry.
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It's just it's hard to really stand out from the crowd and what happens is a lot of entrepreneurs look at their competitors' websites for inspiration, and I totally understand why people do this, but the downside is your website ends up kind of looking like everybody else's, when we really want you to stand out.
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And the way to stand out is by telling a really powerful signature story, but also telling a really powerful visual story.
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When the written story and the visual story are really in alignment and supporting each other, that's when you really bubble up to the top of the internet and begin to stand out as a leader in your industry.
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Yeah, chris, I really appreciate these insights into your actual strategy and the process really in uncovering all of this important work, because, as someone who's seen what the end results look like, I just want to clarify that stuff for listeners, because I have the benefit of seeing your website beforehand and, obviously, while we're talking here today.
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But for listeners, I'll confess publicly that the one thing that stood out to me in the way that Chris's clients talk about the nature of this work is that it makes the hard decisions for them.
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So when you sit down to write copy, you're not thinking about it because you already have the answers.
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And, chris, I wanna go here with you even during our conversation today about the output, because you're talking about the process that you go through.
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But I love that what they end up with is your brand copy Bible, one document that contains all the words you'll ever need to market your business.
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No more struggling with what to say.
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Just copy and paste it from your brand Bible.
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Talk to us about what's within there, because on your website, I love how you lay it out, about how those impacts are going to trickle into your website, which you talked to us about, into your homepage video, into your lead magnet, your email marketing.
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Talk to us about how powerful that document is and where the magic of it really lies.
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Oh, it's incredibly powerful to have one document with everything in it.
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So, yeah, all the deliverables are within that brand copy Bible your video script, your website copy, your one liner, your unique way of doing your work, which is what I call like an infographic.
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So what's a visual that really shows your process and your unique way of doing your work, which is what I call like an infographic?
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So what's a visual that really shows your process and your unique way of doing things?
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And the beauty of the brand copy Bible is that we've broken down every aspect of your story.
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There are seven components to every story, and so we really delve deep into each of those components within the brand copy Bible so you can pop in there and use that copy and bring it into social media or bring it into if you're sharing, like a podcast introduction.
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If you're doing a podcast interview, I really recommend the one liner be put in your email signature.
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So every email that goes out that you send, really that repetition is key.
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It really repeats over and over what problem do you solve and what's the happy end result that your clients are getting.
00:23:50.615 --> 00:23:54.353
That's like that's core in the one liner work that we do.
00:23:54.353 --> 00:24:17.280
But all of that is baked into the brand copy Bible, along with other trainings that show you how to infuse this story into your social media, and I actually encourage my clients to turn their Instagram grid into a really powerful sales page and then take the year off of posting.
00:24:17.280 --> 00:24:20.954
That's what I've done and it's working beautifully.
00:24:22.278 --> 00:24:23.501
I love that perspective, chris.
00:24:23.501 --> 00:24:28.803
This goes counter to most advice that people will hear on business podcasts, and I'm here for it.
00:24:28.803 --> 00:24:35.955
Talk to us about that, because a lot of people are encouraged to create all these new things, as we talked about, and social media is at the core of that.
00:24:35.955 --> 00:24:40.164
But you've talked about so many different ways that this helps to grow our business.
00:24:40.164 --> 00:24:42.672
Obviously, I'm a raving fan of your business.
00:24:42.672 --> 00:24:57.782
I feel like you know, even unprompted, you and I didn't interact much before we hit record today, but already I'm a fan of the way that your business shows up and the impact that you bring for your clients, and it comes not because of something I saw on your social media, but because of the words.
00:24:57.782 --> 00:25:07.820
Talk to us about the power of that in a world where we're all pressured to make all these social media posts every day and heck, if we listen to Gary V, he'll tell us to make 30 of those posts a day.
00:25:08.670 --> 00:25:28.983
Right, right, yeah, I mean, in years past I've fallen into that kind of belief that we have to be posting all the time and ever present in order to you know, stay top of mind and be, you know, be visible and to get clients.
00:25:28.983 --> 00:25:58.545
But it just never felt really aligned with my approach to marketing and the way that I want to run my business and the time capacity that I have, which is fairly limited as a parent, and so I essentially what I did is took the story components and turned my Instagram grid into a really powerful sales page by telling a story.
00:25:58.545 --> 00:26:08.411
So when someone learns about you, whether it's online or through a podcast interview, I mean you still have to market your business.
00:26:08.411 --> 00:26:10.595
You just don't have to do everything.
00:26:11.938 --> 00:26:16.212
I like to think of marketing as hub and spoke visuals.
00:26:16.212 --> 00:26:33.441
So your website's in the middle of that, and everything you do around to market your business points to the website, because you just have trust and know that the website is the tool that's doing the most powerful work of selling for you.
00:26:33.441 --> 00:26:37.537
So there's all kinds of ways that you can market your business.
00:26:37.537 --> 00:26:41.794
I often market my business through podcast interviews.
00:26:41.794 --> 00:26:44.961
You can market your business through social media.
00:26:44.961 --> 00:26:47.232
You can market it through networking events.
00:26:47.232 --> 00:26:55.635
You can do all kinds of things, but whatever you do, I say, pick one or two that you actually really like to do.
00:26:55.635 --> 00:27:06.983
So my two are email marketing and podcast interviews, and then I point everybody to my website and then that does the converting for me.
00:27:08.549 --> 00:27:24.431
Yeah, I want to ask you this question then, because the deeper I went into your work, it seems like the real trickle down effect comes in that sales and that conversion, because you talk about your website doing a lot of that work for you, and it's how I felt as a consumer going to your website.
00:27:24.490 --> 00:27:28.192
I meant what I said in the intro, which is I wish there was a buy now button at the bottom.
00:27:28.192 --> 00:27:45.279
Chris, and I can understand how intimate your process is, working one-on-one with people, that it leads to a conversation, but I want to ask you about how different that means your sales process is, because it just seems to me from the outside, looking in, I'm making an assumption right now, but you view sales in the same way that I do, which is it's not pushy.
00:27:45.279 --> 00:27:56.979
You and I are not classically trained salespeople out of Grant Cardone University or whatever it is that he's out there pushing today, and so instead we believe in having a real conversation and doing it on a really human level.
00:27:56.979 --> 00:28:04.492
What have you found to be the impacts of the signature storytelling approach on those sales conversations?
00:28:04.492 --> 00:28:13.770
Because I would imagine that most of your sales conversations don't even revolve around sales and they probably feel like the first session in the two of you working together.
00:28:14.913 --> 00:28:25.145
Yeah, I think one of the biggest strategic byproducts of getting clear on your own story is that you've got the words internally for your story.
00:28:25.205 --> 00:28:46.343
They're also on your website, but you just show up on your sales calls with so much more confidence because you know the words to say and this is not about memorizing a script but you understand fundamentally the problem that you solve and really how you help your clients achieve success.
00:28:46.564 --> 00:28:49.175
And there's a lot of components in between there.
00:28:49.175 --> 00:28:58.104
But when you show up to those calls with confidence I mean my clients and I can vouch for this for myself I never feel like I'm selling.
00:28:58.104 --> 00:29:18.442
I'm just walking my clients through the process that I use and connecting with them around their struggle and helping reassure them that I can help them resolve it, and so it very much does not feel like a sales call which who wants to be sold to anyway.
00:29:18.442 --> 00:29:30.153
So it's a real gift to actually look forward to sales calls, which is what a lot of my clients do, and one client in particular her name's Andrea.
00:29:30.153 --> 00:29:56.955
She was closing about 25% of her sales calls, which is actually quite good, but once we got her story in place and she really knew on a cellular level how powerful the work that she did is she showed up to those sales calls with such confidence and such clarity that she began to close 95% of her sales calls.
00:29:56.955 --> 00:30:03.079
So every call that was booked she would close, and it was pretty incredible for her business.
00:30:03.809 --> 00:30:19.540
Yeah, chris, I knew that time would run by so quickly here today, but I wanna squeeze in two questions because part of your magic gosh I could pull out so many different things that make you so unique and incredible at all the things you do, but part of what stood out for me is your testimonials, chris.
00:30:19.540 --> 00:30:30.900
Not only do you do great work and not only can you articulate that work very clearly, but your clients genuinely love you and they love raving about the work that you do with them as well and the impacts that you deliver.
00:30:30.900 --> 00:30:37.111
So my question to you is business owner to business owner how are you getting such amazing testimonials from these clients?
00:30:37.111 --> 00:30:37.651
Owner to business owner?
00:30:37.671 --> 00:30:38.951
How are you getting such amazing testimonials from these clients.
00:30:38.951 --> 00:30:48.275
I am so glad you asked that question because for my clients they, you know they struggle with that and they come to me and they're like number one.
00:30:48.275 --> 00:30:56.357
They say I felt good about working with you because you have so many people raving about the work that you've done for them.
00:30:56.357 --> 00:30:58.943
So it really does help my business.
00:30:58.943 --> 00:31:03.362
But what I've done internally for that is it truly.
00:31:03.362 --> 00:31:06.148
It comes back to storytelling again.
00:31:06.148 --> 00:31:10.838
I what I do with my clients is I schedule a 10 minute.
00:31:10.838 --> 00:31:11.881
That's all it takes.
00:31:11.881 --> 00:31:19.055
It's a 10-minute wrap-up call about a month after our project is complete and I ask them four questions.
00:31:19.055 --> 00:31:27.150
The four questions I ask pull that story out of them and speak to the transformation that happened to them.
00:31:27.150 --> 00:31:39.096
And then I edit those interviews into script and I upload them interviews into script and I upload them.
00:31:39.096 --> 00:31:39.417
So it's it's.
00:31:39.417 --> 00:31:39.718
It's a really.
00:31:39.738 --> 00:31:43.244
I think it's a really important thing for entrepreneurs to ask their clients for testimonials.
00:31:43.244 --> 00:31:49.285
But even the best of clients they want to give us a raving review but they don't know what to say.
