The Power of Brand Storytelling

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can, too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. I go, look at this. There is a template to story that's been around since the very beginning. The very first recorded story of Gilgamesh follows this same pattern of story that you can see in the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars and anything Spielberg does. It's called The Heroes Journey and when I saw that and I started thinking about how you could work that into business communications, specifically branding. I'm like, well, here's the template, how come nobody has ever taught us about The Heroes Journey and how we could use this to help humanize a brand, tell the brand's story, but place the brand's customer at the center of that story. Hey, it's Jeff Zimfer, host of the Market to Marketing Radio podcast. Thanks for tuning in to this episode. Before I get into introducing my special guest, news flash, the market is shifted, but you already know that, don't you? The better question is, it's not what happens, right? It's what you do that matters. That's how you respond in life because, like Lou Holtz once said, if a wave isn't hitting you and he characterized life as like a series of waves, and if a wave isn't hitting you right now, well, one's on its way. Well, I think this past week, we all just get hit by a wave, right? The wave, of course, is the dramatic increase in interest rates and the shift that's happening across this country globally as well, but let's just face it, there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of turmoil, there's a lot of or lack of consumer confidence, right? And so in chaos, one of my favorite sayings, in chaos, what people seek is context, right? And how do they get context? They get context through education and content, and that is our call to arms as mortgage professionals is to show up in the chaos and provide context with our content. Now, look, I don't have to tell you that the ReFi market is shut off right now, right? We're all intents and purposes. So where's the business? It's purchase. And now many of you and your competitors have pivoted and the new focuses on purchase business and many are now chasing real estate agents. And you may be now pursuing real estate agents as well, but do you struggle with getting attention? Do you struggle with agents responding, getting engagement, driving those outbound efforts forward that lead to conversations and referrals? If that's you, then perhaps you'd like to consider showing up with content that delivers confidence in the world of chaos. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the new currency in today's world of information is ideas and then execution on those ideas. And what I mean is, is now is your opportunity to show up and differentiate yourself leading with an educational platform so that you can attract agents to you, right? And provide solutions to their chaos of what direction, what to do, how to respond and where to go. And if you're interested in learning more about that, please go to mortgagemarketing.pro. You've heard us talk long enough about the success stories we're having with our members who have a turnkey plugin play platform to quickly and easily scale their agent conversations and referrals by teaching agent classes in their local market, virtually and in person. How are they doing that? They're doing that simply and easily because we provide a plugin play platform that provides you the PowerPoint speaker notes, a video tutorial of me training you how to teach the class. We give you the social media images to promote it. We give you the customized flyers, the personalized branded landing pages. We even give you the completely turnkey email marketing system and event registration platform that will automate the outbound promotions, registrations, confirmation and follow-up of your class attendees and you'll attend our weekly live small group coaching calls where we'll take you through a process that will help you refine your agent marketing efforts to get more results more quickly. And we've got all the case studies and testimonials over at mortgagemarketing.pro. If you want to go check those out and I'm sure you'll hear an example of a case study at the end of today's podcast as well. So make sure you stay tuned for that. Okay, so my special guest for this week, Park Howell, just a wonderful human being and a bringing park on because it is a totally appropriate time in the market when there is chaos. Right? What differentiates us? If you ever struggled to get attention from a noisy market, have you ever struggled to differentiate yourself when you get on the phone with a potential prospect or a partner and their big question is why you, what's different about you? Right? Well, what the way to differentiate is with setting the context and frame of your communication, right? Otherwise said as telling a more powerful story, right, a brand story. And we've all heard about brand story, right? For some time, and there are certain nuances and challenges to telling a brand story. That's why I wanted to have Park on here today is because he is among the best for being able to articulate your brand story that makes it compelling for anyone who is listening. And you can have multiple brand stories for different people. It depends on the audience who we're speaking to, right? And so Park has just broken down a simple formula that Hollywood uses, right, to draw interest, to compel you to want to learn more, and to brain hack, right? Your limbic system, we're talking primal stuff here, you'll hear Park unpack this, but this is a proven persuasive process that psychologically, right, shortcuts and short circuits, the normal process of capturing attention and driving interest. And we're going to go through the formula that Park has here. I recently went through Park's one of his educational courses that he has. I actually hired him for a one hour consulting session, and he's been helping me work on my brand story and how to structure a framework for effective business communication and messaging. So I think you'll really enjoy this conversation we have today. And there are links into the show notes, everything we mentioned about Park Howell, his resources, his book, his website and blog, his podcast, so make sure you check those out. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Park, welcome to the show. Jeff, man, thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. It's good to reconnect, man. It's been a while, and I really enjoyed. First of all, when I saw you speak at social media and marketing world, I don't know how many years ago that is now, but it feels like five or six. And then secondly, since then, right, I got exposed to your material about the business of the story, and we're going to talk about that for sure. But why don't you, for the listeners, give your brief backgrounder. Absolutely. Well, again, it's great to be here. You know, I've been in the advertising branding, marketing world for 35 plus years. So I'm really dating myself here. I ran my own ad agency in Phoenix, Arizona for 20 of those years. It was called Park and Co. And really for the past 10 to 15 years, I have been completely focused on brand storytelling and the reason being, as I saw the old way we used to advertise in market, which was a blast, which was like funny TV spots, a great radio spots and prints and outdoor and so forth, completely get up ended by social media and technology, where it used to be that our clients own the influence of mass media. And as you know, and everybody watching this knows, the masses have become the media. And it is so fricking noisy out there. It's almost impossible to be heard. So I went looking for an answer and I found that in Hollywood, our son was going to film school there. I said, send me your books when you're done with them since I'm paying for them. So I want to know, how do they teach you to be a competitive storyteller in the most competitive market in the world? That's when I learned about Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey, started applying it in our work. And that's what took me down this road of storytelling. Now I got rid of my ad agency and I solely consult, speak, coach, and teach on the power of story to help executives and leaders and people just like who are watching this excel through the stories you tell. That's my abridged version. Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you. And as I recall, you can, you can set me on the right course here. If I recall, kind of as I read, you know, your book and you described how you kind of stumbled across this, you know, circling back to the Hollywood thing, am I correct? And like, there was kind of an epiphany when you dug into those materials and you saw that there was a formula and how it all starts, can you unpack that a little bit? Oh, gosh. I can take it to the exact moment it happened and I remember Parker was home for Christmas and he brought his book, Joseph Campbell's hero with a thousand faces, it's called. And I started reading through it. And then I go, this is fascinating. It's very arcane. It's a hard book to read. I recommend no one tried to read it. I got a ways through it, but it then prompted me to go online and started studying the hero's journey. There's a fabulous book put out by Bill Moyers from PBS after his six hour interview session with Campbell called the power of myth. I would direct people to that. Anyways, Jeff, when I saw that it hit me like a frying pan upside the head, I go look at this. It is a template to story that's been around since the very beginning. The very first recorded story of Gilgamesh follows this same pattern of story that you can see in the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars and anything Spielberg does. It's called the hero's journey. And when I saw that and I started thinking about how you could work that into business communications, specifically branding, I'm like, well, here's the template. How come nobody has ever taught us about the hero's journey and how we could use this to help humanize a brand, tell the brand's story, but place the brand, the brand's customer at the center of that story and tell the story from their perspective, no different than Hollywood. You know, when you're sitting in a theater and you're just buying into, I hear the new Top Gun movie is great. So we're going to go and see that. So why is it great is because people, man or woman sitting in that audience can relate to those characters and they take you on a journey. And isn't that what a brand should do? That was my aha moment, that one Christmas break when he came home, showed it to me and I saw it and I go, well, let's just map this to business. That's what I did with the 10 steps story cycle system. And we had a lot of great success with it. Has it evolved since that original kind of discovery? Yeah, you know, my discovery, like all discoveries go and you probably find this in your own career, you start by tackling the most complex because you don't know where to go. You don't know where to begin. Where's the little stuff? So we learn everything exactly backwards. We take the most complex stuff and try to make sense of it. That's what I did with the hero's journey. It was like 17 steps long and I would get lost on this journey. When I read the 15 beats, the story is written by the famous Blake Snyder in the screenwriting book called Save the Cat. Again, our son Parker said, here, dad, we're reading this in class. Get it for you. You know, read it. Well, I had to literally scratch and claw my way through Save the Cat. And it works, but it takes a while to get your head wrapped around that theory. Then people promote the Pixar way, which is seven or eight steps. And it looks simple when Pixar does it. But if you try it, it will not take you to infinity and beyond. It's hard. And so as I unpacked and really mastered all of these different things, then in fact, to teach them to people, I found every two complex, it was just simply too complicated. That's when I found the five primal elements of a short story for big impact. And even more importantly, what we'll be talking about today, I presume, is the three words that revolutionized everything in my thinking around storytelling. And that is the end, but therefore what we call the ABT. And so I learned it from the complex to the simple. Now I teach it from the simple to the complex because the ABT is where all powerful persuasive business storytelling begins. Hmm. Wow. Thank you. That's an interesting journey. So we're going to get to the ABT in just a moment. But I want to, as it sounds like, I agree with you, when I first kind of came across this whole, you know, business of telling a story and hero's journey and things like that, yeah, it was very complex and confusing and it was difficult to kind of break that down in a sales context, if you will, or in a branding positioning statement. And are you saying then that you, because when I think of like telling, you know, the brand story and storytelling, you know, words like in the Hollywood context of things, I just got my notes here. What I've got is like, you know, there's got to be a character and a villain and there's got to be, you know, the emotional ups and downs. So are you saying you went through all that as well, but are now simplifying that even more for us in a context of business? Exactly right. And if you boil down the hero's journey, you take that 12 to 17 steps depending on who you're reading about it. You can block it off into these three phases of Ann, but therefore the end is the statement of agreement or the setting up of the story. It's act one, if you will. You introduce your character, your protagonist. And in brand storytelling, that character protagonist is always your customer. It's not you. You as the brand play the more important role of mentor guide, the Obi-Wan Kenobi Taluk, Linda Goodwich of the North, you know, to Dorothy. You play the mentor guide and don't come into the story until a little bit later on. But if you break it down in the hero's journey, there's this call to adventure that pulls the protagonist, the central character of the story, out of their ordinary world into this grand adventure where they've got to fight all kinds of demons. Internal demons are own naysayer inside that's out to thwart their progress and literally external forces that are out to stress them out, you know, to put them through the trials and tests to see what they're made up. They fight through all that. They win. They return back home with what Campbell would call the boon, meaning they've been leveled up. They're stronger, faster, wiser, more nimble, or whatever. And they return back to their ordinary world again and that becomes our therefore. So the and but therefore is a way of capturing the overall three acts structure of any story. But more importantly, for people in business, you use the and but therefore to simplify your messaging and hook your audience in under 15 seconds using this setup problem resolution dynamic that our cause and effect, pattern seeking decision making, limbic, buying brain loves. Wow, man, how can anybody resist that? Well, that's what I found. I mean, like I said, Jeff, I came for the backwards. I came for the complex to the simple and I'm going to my goodness. Now, there are places for the complex that we use the story cycle system for long form communications and presentations. We use the five primal elements of a short story for big impact for a little anecdotal story. You can tell an under a minute that makes your business point for you, but they are all built on the foundation of this and but therefore that's why that's where we'll right start training it. All you have to remember is these three words and how to use them. Yeah. And for listeners, you should know I've been since Park and I met and I went through your course and actually signed up for a consultation with you. And ever since then, I've been working on this and haven't had the time. I've wanted to devote to it, but I'm coming back full circle, which is kind of why we're talking today. So where could people, all right, for the listeners now, you and I talked before we hit record, right, at the time before we're recording this is, you know, there's a lot of chaos in the marketplace, right, and with housing specifically, right, and people need some confidence, some context, some certainty, right? So on the lessons of ABTs, is there anything you want to kind of touch on there? Yeah. And let's just make this a quick little workshop that works for you for all your viewers. So grab a pen in the paper or a digital device or whatever. And here are the steps I want you to write down. And this is in relation to any sort of message that you might be wanting to deliver to an audience. Maybe it's an audience of one. It's a prospect sitting across from you. Or maybe it's a Facebook post or a LinkedIn post and you're trying to broadcast out to many. Here's what I want you to do. Step number one, identify your audience. Who is sitting in that chair, be as specific about that individual as you possibly can. Are you talking to a mother? Are you talking to a father? Are you talking to a head of household? I mean, are you talking to a lender? Who is that person? Then you ask yourself. What do they want in relation to your offering, but we're not worrying about your offering right now? Just what do they want in relation to your offering? And why is that important to them? That's your statement of agreement. That's where you're setting up act one. And here's the hardest thing about the statement of agreement, Jeff. You may have experienced this yourself as you're building them. Be positive with it. This is a positive statement of saying here's what a brighter tomorrow looks like to them. No often people will start writing their abt's with the problem right up front. We don't want to do that. We want to hold on that. We need to set the stage so that we get our audience nodding in agreement saying yes, you understand me. You know what I want and you know why that's important to me, but here's the problem. Here's act two in the hero's journey, but you don't currently have it because of this. Therefore your statement of agreement is just imagine I was going to feel when you get it because we're here to help you by doing this, this, and this. So you as the brand mentor or guy do not come in until the very end of this abt. You want to make it all about your audience. They are the center of your story and you don't even necessarily talk about what it is you make, but what it is you make happen, the outcomes that you can make happen for them. Let me give you a quick example. So I was doing a training for the internal sales team at Home Depot and one of their guys asked me is what's the shortest abt you've ever heard of park and I go that's easy. You communicate and care, but for therefore tell us story. Now that's my 10 word abt. You communicate and care, that's my statement of agreement. You're right. Park, I do communicate and by golly, I do care, but I hate to tell you. You're boring because no one's ever taught you how to do this stuff. Therefore tell us story. Now we could expand that abt because in and of itself that was the little parlor trick I did. Here's a 10 word story, if you will, using the story structure. Let's make it a little bit bigger. So you are a mortgage professional and you want to, and if you can connect deeply with that customer sitting across from them, then you know that you can get them the financing they want to buy their ideal home, but you're not connecting as deeply as you could because you're leading with logic and reason, data and numbers. Therefore, tell us story, to hack to the noise and hook the hearts of your prospect because you have such and such and such to offer to help them overcome that. So you've now, in this case, I'm talking to you, the viewer, the mortgage professional. And I'm saying, look, you want to connect deeply, but you're not connecting deeply. Therefore connect deeply by telling a story. That now, let's move it one more step and I'm going to bring you into this, Jeff. What given the chaos and wait, what was the great line that you shared with me before we went online? What I said is, in times of chaos, people seek context. That's great. That's wonderful. And I think you're so dead on because chaos is like, what the hell is going on? Because you and you ain't, you got the black side of the end of chaos, we need balance through context. Storytelling is the only way you give that context. So let's explore this together. What is a major problem that a homeowner is going through right now, that you as a mortgage lender, professional are going to help them overcome? So our audience here is what, a homeowner, a prospective mortgage buyer. So right now, it's uncertainty, it's fear, it's doubt, it's, you know, it's now the right time, right? With everything that's going on in the market. Okay. So let's back that up great. Let's start with the problem. The problem is, but you're uncertain what to do next. Let's just, let's just put that as our placeholder. Sure. Now we're going to jump ahead on our sheet. We've got our but you're uncertain. Now let's write the end statement that you're going to begin this whole thing with. And let's just say you're going to start with, all right. So you are, you're trying to buy a new home and or refinance the home you're in, right? And what do they want? What does that, what does that homeowner mortgage buyer want? They want to feel confident that they're making the right decision. And why is that important to them? Wow. That's good. Why is that important to them? So that they don't lose money so that they are, you know, investing in their dream home, right? I mean, it's obviously situational a little bit, but they want to make sure they're making the right decision. They want to feel confident about the right decision. So you want to buy a home, but you're confused about is now the right time, right? Or something like that. Yeah. And that's the funny thing is the emotion of buying a home. That's always the right time when you're fired up, right? To buy a home. That emotion doesn't, the motion knows no time. But now the logic comes in and the question is, I don't want to be foolish. Is this actually the right time, you know? And I like that idea about being foolish because now we're playing to the emotion of what people are looking for. They're ultimately looking for the best finance and making the best financial decision for them and their family, right? That's it. If they, and if they can find the right mortgage lender, then they can be confident moving on with their sale. But times are so uncertain right now because of the volatility of the interest rate, climbs, and the fear of looking foolish by acting, you know, rashly, therefore we can help you. Maybe it's not even buy that new home. Therefore, we can help you come to the realization if this is the right time for you now or not through our proven programs, that way your financial position in the market right now and what the market is doing, you know, give us a call. So maybe it's not even you're going for the kill and trying to sell a mortgage in that. You're just trying to sell confidence in yourself. Let's come in and let's talk and let's together determine if now is the right time for you or not. Yeah, I like that. And I know I've read that in your book about examples of a process, for example, right? If you have a process, then speak to that. Therefore, right, you know, I don't know how to articulate, this is really hard on the fly, but I do think that like I'm thinking in my industry, people use certain softwares or presentation platforms to take the complex and make it simple to understand, meaning which loan program is right for me and how does this affect the next 5, 10, 20 years of my financial future and things like that. So and if people have a process that they can help walk those people through, then that's the goal. They'll feel more confident about making an informed decision. Yeah. You know, and maybe even have this platform or this process, very similar to what everybody else has, but you rebranded a little bit. Maybe it's something and I'm completely winging this now. I do not know your industry. I'm the forum guy here. You're the content expert. But maybe what I might look at is taking them through a process and rename that process. Maybe it's the cost of emotion versus finance. You know, so you write down on one side of the ledger emotionally, why do you want this home? What is, what makes it the ideal residence for you? So now you're definitely into the heart, you know, you're in the creative part of it. And then you jump over the right part of that ledger and say, all right, now let's take a look at the finances of this. And once we get to the bottom of this, let's weigh the investment in emotion and the outcome, you know, the return on emotion and the return on investment. And maybe there you can find a multiplier that makes sense. I don't even know if multiplier is quite the right word, but an answer that can kind of index and help people balance this emotion of buying his value. I want to buy this now, even though it might cost me a little more than I need versus the reality. Maybe you don't want to buy that right now. Maybe you need to park that emotion or let's put your fears aside because it actually does make sense for you to buy that right now through our lending program and so forth. Kind of something I look at, but find a way to brand it so that that process does have a position in a person's mind. It becomes more tangible that way. Yeah. I know in one provider, I'll give a shout out to my buddy Dave Savage at the mortgage coach, one of the examples of a process, he calls it a total cost analysis. And then there's like a rent versus zone analysis, a cost of waiting analysis, right? So those are examples. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. For all our mortgage coach fans out there, if you're using that software, start using it and applying the ABT to because that is a process and it does get to the therefore, which is at the end, what we want is people feeling confident about making a choice, making a decision. Being a sore no. Yeah. You know, it comes down to that singular narrative is what you're looking for too when you're talking about this stuff. Quite often we get caught up in trying to offer two or three solutions all at one time, which leads to two or three narratives all at one time and we lose our audience. The ABT gets you totally focused so in this case, it's about confidence. Nothing in this story makes sense except in the light of confidence. You love this home and want to have confidence that you're buying at the right time, but you're uncertain. So the lack of, you know, the villain here is now uncertainty. You're uncertain. Therefore, let us help you find the peace of mind or another way of saying confidence through our process to do this. So it's all about confidence, uncertainty, peace of mind wrapped in there and then here's how you're going to do that for them. You've kept it to one singular narrative and that is finding the confidence in your decision whether you're going to buy it or whether you're not going to buy it. That's really what we're talking about in this particular instance. You can do one purely on finances. It's all about the money and so now it's a financial ABT. So you rewrite these depending on who your audience is, how well you know them and what is the number one biggest problem you are helping them overcome. Yep. I love that. Speaking of problem, I've been doing a little work in studying recently about brand, right? And you obviously have a lot of experience with brand. Do you think I went through this exercise recently where the suggestion of the exercise was to get your problem that you solve down to a one word problem for sake of clarity? Do you think that's a good process to go through? Whenever you can get anything down to one word for sake of clarity, yes, I'm all about it. That's why we talk about that. We call it the dojanski statement. It's like, what's that one word? What's that one thing we're really solving for here? I was just working with the guy yesterday that works in compliance training for large companies, you know, compliance and so forth. And we landed at this idea of it's about connection. It's about if you are losing value in a company because of fraud because of people not following beliefs and values of people just not doing it the right way means they are disconnected from the reality of this company and how you are here to not only build value, but then protect that value. And so we went through a lot of different things because it's kind of a complex message. And we really arrived at this idea of it's about connection. If you're if you're people are disconnected from how we do business, we are going to not protect the value we're creating. In a lot of cases, maybe even set us up for being liable in areas, we are going to take you through this training, connect you with this streamlined training that will connect you with these compliance, you know, and risk obligations and rules so that you can, you know, maintain the value of a company. We boil it down on that one word. So whenever you can boil it down to what is it all about, that one word, that's what you're trying to do. Yeah. Well, I think and I'm looking through your book here and we'll obviously talk about your resources in a moment and put links to all that stuff. But I think one of the big problems in our industry, mortgage specifically is that people have been conditioned to approach a mortgage professional with the context of rate. What's your rate, right? And so and a lot of people, you know, have that need your reaction to respond about a question around rates or whatnot. And that's why I like the fact that, you know, when I came across you, you've got this, by the way, very simple and easy to read book for salespeople who might have a short attention span, is if you do follow the formula and then it's really interesting what happens is when you start applying this and sitting down and filling in those blanks on the ABT, again, to your point about who you specifically are you speaking to, but I think it can be really powerful because we in a place where there's a commodity, right, you know this very well, is we people come in, you've obviously worked with this idea of frame, framing, right? People come in frame. And what the ABT does is help change or set the frame you want, right? Yeah. Exactly. It frames. You name it and you claim this problem that you were going to help solve for. And Jeff, when you're talking about, you know, people show up with rates, well, what are they doing? You're stuck in commodity, the primordial muck of being commoditized. If you are going to compete on rate, then you're going to compete in a low cost leader program. And what are the margins in that, you know, and now rates are really important. But if you are trying to get a little bit more for your service and be worth it, then you've got to tell a story of place it in context, what it is you deliver for your customers above and beyond good competitive rates of what are they getting from you? That's the trickiest thing about your business is it's a commoditized business. Right. But that's an ABT right there, right? I'm just looking at the works you see here. You want the lowest rate for your mortgage, right? For example, opening station and right to get the best loan for your situation, your future, blah, blah, blah. But there's a lot of noise and confusion out there and, you know, you don't know what choice to make, right? Therefore, right? We have this proven process, yet, yet, yet, yet, yet. Exactly. Yeah. That goes beyond just the lowest rate or the most competitive rate, but actually puts you in a financial package that honors your position in the world. I don't know. I'm just kind of winging it here, but yeah, you've got to expound on that, bring it into more context. Well, the listeners, that's a good amount for them to chew on to get started for sure. All right. I had a question four years. I was working through this with the word, therefore, I noticed some of the ABTs don't always have the word, therefore, so what's the coaching around that? Well, all you got to think about here is that these words are replaceable or you don't even need to use them. They're really meant to be sort of buoys to get you through setup, problem resolution, statement of agreement with the end, but here's the contradiction to that agreement, and therefore, here's the consequence of all that. That's kind of the, as much theory as you need to know about it. A lot of times, they're implied. Now, let's just take a look. Let me give you an example of, you can, let me ask you, Jeff, when you think of nursery rhymes, I'm going to totally throw you a curve. When I say nursery rhyme, what's the first nursery rhyme that pops to your mind? There's no right or wrong answer here. Which one pops into your head? Mary head a little lamb. Would you, can you recite that for us? Mary head a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, that's all I got. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. There you go. There it is. But then went, so there's your end statement, right? But then one day Mary went to school and something, something, something, therefore, here's what happens. And I don't remember. Let's, let's do one that I know, top of my head, so use the example all the time. Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds in way. Then what happened? Long came a spider sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away. So every nursery rhyme that is memorable is in the ABT format. Now the argument is, Park, there was no and but or therefore in Little Miss Muffet, but it was all implied. Was it not? Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet and she was eating her curds in way. Statement of agreement. Set up the act. Here's the complication. But along came a spider who sat down beside her, our limbic cause effect pattern seeking brain is now begging, what happened next? Therefore statement of agreement, therefore frightened Little Miss Muffet away. Set up problem resolution. So when you write these, you can use an and you don't even have to use an and sometimes I'll pull those out, but it's just their audience, what do they want and why is that important to them cause an effect. But we really recommend you use but you can use yet, you can use however you can use other words, but we have learned that the word but is the number one trigger word in the English language that is suggesting a change in direction of a story. We're going down here, but we got this problem. Now your brain is going, oh my god, what do we do about that? And then the therefore comes in quite often you'll use it, therefore out more colloquially people will say so, so do this, you know, or it's just simply implied. It's totally up to the writer, but what I really coach and recommend everyone watching this is when you start writing your first ABTs, use them and, but therefore put them there, write them in no matter how stupid it feels, your message will already be stronger than how you originally had it. Then you can always go in and tweak it. The one other thing I'd say on that, Jeff is people that I train on this and I hear this a lot. Well, gee park, it seems so stupid, won't my readers, won't my audiences know what I'm doing? They said no, they don't know it because they haven't learned the magic that you have that cast this spell that bewitches them on it. So use it. Nobody knows what you're doing. It'll become very obvious to you. The one last thing I'll say and you said earlier is that the ABT, the most confounding thing about it is it looks so simple and, but therefore, and it's, it's short, sweet and compelling, but it's tricky. So you got to practice them day in and day out, every day write an email with an ABT and it put them in your sales presentations, put them in your write-ups, use them over and over again and look for them in the wild. Now that you know about it, you're going to see them everywhere. How do you know when you have a good one? You feel it, really. I mean, when you read it, it's like, whoa, and I see this all the time. When I'm working with someone, I will take like a landing page that they've got a sales page. And I'll say, here's what you've currently have written. Let's ABT fight. Then I'll rewrite it as an ABT and you'll literally viscerally in the room. People go, wow, that's so much better. So when you get it down, you just know it from that writer and sometimes you got to write them and rewrite them and rewrite them. But man, once they're in there, you just know it. You just feel it. If you've seen people, now it makes sense on a sales page, landing page website, whatever where you're trying to, and by the way, an ABT could also be called a brand positioning statement, right? Well, you would use it to build a brand positioning statement. Yeah, you could also use it to build a unique value proposition. This framework really under is the chassis for all of that stuff. People will just semantically call a brand positioning statement. One thing, unique value proposition is usually much more of a shorter, more impactful line. I use the ABTs to help you arrive at all that stuff. Have you ever seen an ABT used in like a bio, LinkedIn bio, or more people are using them now than ever? The nice thing about that is a LinkedIn bio is all about me and all about you, right? We tend to just be completely focused. But if you write an ABT-ized LinkedIn bio, it makes you think of your audience. So you even start with your audience. What are you looking for? Why is that important to you? You don't currently have because of this. Therefore, Park Howell is here is the world's most industrial storyteller. And then the therefore is your bio, but you're actually setting up that bio by writing it from your reader's point of view. Why do they, why should they give a crap about reading your bio? Well, you got to make them give that crap up top in your first two sentences. That's that sentence of agreement where they want, why is it important to them? But here's the pain point, why don't they currently have it? Therefore, your bio is going to show them how you can help them get it. Interesting. And that's a good exercise to go through as well because you're capped, I don't know what it is on Instagram, but I'm sure there's a maxed limit. And that's a good exercise to build your muscles of brevity, you know? Or practice it on Twitter. Twitter is a fantastic place for ABTs. That's true. You know, Instagram, all of those. Oh, for sure. I think, yeah, like you ought to just also, by the way, that's what I thought of too. You can practice with ABTs with just your posts. Oh, yeah, yeah, you use it everywhere. I mean, absolutely everywhere. Here's one of the best places to use it. Say you work in a big company and you got an idea for something new initiative or something you really want to have done, but you got to get your boss to buy into it. The boss has been putting you off for three weeks, finally, relents and says, she says, yeah, come on in park. You got five minutes. Well, you get your act together. You walk into that room. You sit down and you say, hi, Cheryl. You know, great to be here. Boom, you roll out an ABT. You know, I know that from her perspective, the camaraderie of your team is like job number one. And Cheryl, if we can get people speaking the same story, you know, language around here, then we can build that camaraderie, which will lead to greater sales. But right now, we are completely disconnected because we don't have a framework to work from. Therefore, I believe we can pull our team together and 10X our sales by teaching them the power of story and sharing a framework or two to help them get in. Now, so I kind of rammed through that, but maybe I came in and I say that in under 15 seconds. Now I got Cheryl leaning in and she goes, gosh, you know, I think maybe you're right. Can you give me, for instance, and then I lead into the five primal elements of a short story. So I spend the next minute or less talking about an individual, what happened within the company, how miscommunication led to disaster and how we could overcome it by doing this, this, this. I have now used two frameworks on my boss and under 90 seconds to hook her limbic brain, getting her leaning in and then to illustrate my business point without ever making an opinion or assertion because I'm just showing it in real life. And now next thing, you know, she says, close the door. We need more time on this in your five minute meeting is now 30 minutes because you've hooked her and she's interested in and what are you going to do about this? If not, if you still only get that five minute window, you've been able to use two really powerful frameworks on her to hook her to become memorable. So she can picture what the problem is and know that she's got to get you back in here to help find a solution. Another great example of how you use these story frameworks to hack through the noise and hook the hearts of your audience, like I said earlier. Awesome. And let's, let's not leave out, of course, probably one of the best ABTs of all time that you feature in your book. And I'm talking about, of course, Carly Ray-Jepson, right? Oh, yeah. Can you sing that for us? I'm not going to sing it, but where is it right here? Where, where does she open up with? Hey, I just met you. This is crazy, but here's my number. So call me maybe the chorus of call me maybe Jeff. How many views does call me maybe have on YouTube? At last count, I have what is it? A billion, something like that? 1.3 billion. And I mean, it's probably higher than that. Now, now, is it the all time best song ever? Of course, now, is it incredibly powerful because they use the ABT in the chorus? Might be. It's pretty hooky, you know, as she's kind of a one hit wonderish, at least in my world. There you have it. And did they know they were using the ABT? No, they're just good, intuitive songwriters, storytellers. They know the power, a set of problem, resolution. And then they did it in what four lines? That's interesting. But back to what we opened up with with Hollywood, for example, some of the greatest storytellers ever, they know they're using a formula like this. Yeah, they didn't use to. I mean, there's a guy by name Christopher Vogler, who is the guy. He was a story script coach at Disney. And he was looking at Disney scripts in early 80s. And he came across Joseph Campbell's work and he started looking at the hero's journey. And then he started looking at Disney scripts. And he goes, oh my God, every one of our hit movies follows this exact same pattern. And these writers didn't even know they were doing it. It's this natural archetype for communication for storytelling that resides in all of our homo sapiens brains. He wrote an amazing book called The Writers Journey. I think it's in his fourth or fifth edition now. If you really want to understand the hero's journey and how it shows up in Hollywood and in our life and have a really fun, interesting read while you're at it, get Christopher Vogler's writer's journey. So he you could compare and I love doing this. You take the Wizard of Oz that I had mentioned earlier and you overlay it with Star Wars. No one knew of the hero's journey when Wizard of Oz was written and produced. Well, George Lucas absolutely followed the hero's journey when he created Star Wars. You can overlay those movies. It's the exact same story. Think about Dorothy grew up in the, you know, the planes of on a Texas in Kansas. Where did Luke grow up on those same planes of farmland on Tatooine? They both long to get out of the small town right and go and seek their adventure. Dorothy happened to be whisked away by a tornado. What was Luke whisked away on a land speeder? I think is that what they call it and the first place he ended up was in Mos Eisley, which was the equivalent to Oz. Remember all those crazy characters in there and the story continues. Well, here the, what am I trying to say, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, they didn't write that based on the hero's journey because they didn't know about the hero's journey back then. Campbell hadn't revealed it yet yet. It was just a pattern of story that naturally came out. Star Wars was very much written on that exact same pattern and based off of the hero's journey and they overlay beautifully. That was one of my aha moments when I was looking at this and said, if that works in Hollywood, why in the world do we not use that same formula in business? And it works. We're exceptionally well. It's just hard. Well, sure, but anything worth doing usually starts out. So yeah, for you listeners, think about how you can apply these lessons from today. Start working on your abt's for the first moment you talk to somebody, right? Because you want to set the frame, you want to bail a kind of control or adjust what their perception is. And then when you're meeting with your partners, your real estate agents and, you know, it's the commodity thing we're fighting against all the time. So how are you differentiating yourself with the tool like this? So before we wrap up, let's speaking of tools. Let's talk about how they can get more access to you, Park. Where do we want to send them to learn more about what you're doing? Well, come on over to businessofstory.com. And I've got two short online courses. You can take one of them or you can take both of them. One of them, abt's for selling is under 18 minutes long, three videos by me that takes you through. How do you use abt's in becoming a more persuasive and confident communicator? And then the other one is the abt's of branding. So if you want to really understand your brand better, how do you use the abt as Jeff said earlier, to understand your position, the marketplace and even arrive at that unique value proposition? You can find both of those courses on my website, businessofstory.com, forward slash abt. That easy. Yeah, thank you. I'll definitely put links in the show notes. And of course, also a link to your podcast, which is great. I was listening to that before this arc or any of you here today. So I'll put a link to that. But that podcast is the business of story available wherever fine podcasts are coming up on our seventh year anniversary. Got a new show every Monday for you. And it's all about helping listeners excel through the stories they tell. Awesome. So definitely go check it out because there's tons of resources. You have a blog. You're just like, I don't know how you you put out a lot of stuff. So I don't either. That's why I just had that brain fart right there when I was like, ah, where was I? I think I'm low on sugar now because I've been doing this all day long. All right. Well, once again, Park, wonderful to connect with you. I know we're going to be reconnecting in the coming weeks and months because I want to definitely go deeper on this. So once again, thank you. My pleasure, Jeff. Thank you. Hey, so I hope you enjoyed that episode and special guest. Most importantly, always remember to never leave the scene of an idea without putting it into action. So whenever the one big idea, one takeaway is from this episode, please make sure you create a plan around that, write it down, put a reminder in your calendar for you, follow through and get some of the resources that were shared and just make sure to take action so you can build momentum on your ideas. And then of course, if you're interested in more agent referrals and less time with less struggle and building a platform that attracts agents to you and helps you find the best agents in your local area that are actually doing the business and generating referrals on demand. Just like Liz Reyes LaFour has does is she recently hosted a class and had 39 agents registered for her class, 15 agents attended. Immediately following the class, she got three new purchase loan leads and scheduled two appointments immediately after the class. That's just within less than 24 hours of the class. If you want results like that for yourself, make sure to check out the majoring classes and mortgage marketing pro membership over at mortgage marketing.pro For more information and I'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey guys, what's up real quick? You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before and I just want to quickly remind you if that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchase loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news are mortgage marketing pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling done for you agent classes, expert training videos, a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you. Everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market, attracting convert agents into referral partners. Plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seeds, partnering with affiliates real easy, but that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top elbows, authors, speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere to from eight to 50 transactions in the last 12 months and we'll provide that list uploaded into our platform for you so you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents. So what are you waiting for? You can check out more at mortgage marketing.pro see more of the success stories there. And if you feel compelled to do so, book a call. We'll have a chat. We'll see if it's a fit. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your mortgage business to the next level right now. Head over to mortgage marketing.pro.