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Hey, I'm Kwame Christian, and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything, the number one negotiation podcast in the world where we teach you how to make difficult conversations easier while getting more of what you want in the process.
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Hey, everyone, it's Kwame Christian, host of Negotiate Anything, asking you to please do not skip forward because this is not a commercial.
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John, thanks for joining us today.
Thank you very much for having me, Kwame.
Man, it is my pleasure.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Excellent. My name is John Moore.
I am a senior representative of TechBank.
We focus on IT solutions and staff augmentation.
That's the main business of what I do.
So right now I am over marketing, business development, and talent acquisition.
And so the company has had no digital footprint really whatsoever beyond their website.
So I am trying to grow that from the ground up and organically starting with LinkedIn.
And that's kind of how my day goes.
Listen, listeners, John is the person to follow on LinkedIn.
Every post, every comment is like a masterclass in communication.
So we're gonna put links to all of his socials, the TechBank's website, but also John's personal LinkedIn page, because this is the guy that you wanna follow when it comes to communication online and of course storytelling, which is why we are here today.
And I was chatting with John before and I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit that it's been a while since we've had an episode on storytelling, so we're due and we have a storytelling master here.
So John, just get us started, set the stage when we're talking about storytelling, what are we talking about and why is it so valuable?
First off, you're too kind, thank you.
And the main reason why storytelling is valuable is that it covers everything you're looking for.
So everybody speaks the same way for the most part when they're reaching out to customers.
It sounds the same, everyone is very homogenized, I should say.
So if you're going out there with storytelling, you're definitely gonna stand out from the crown, you're gonna look different and the people who are reading are going to pay attention to you.
And what storytelling is just basically taking the bullet format and spreading it out.
So you're not going to make it look like a thick essay, we're not writing total story here.
It's still bullet point, but a little bit different.
You give it some color, you give it some flavor, some zhuzh if you will.
This makes so much sense, John, because again, there are a lot of people who comment on my posts and your comments always stand out because they are so well written and they're captivating.
And now it makes sense because it sounds like you have a replicable model for the way that you go into storytelling.
Am I getting that right?
A hundred percent. The way, and I learned this in the little bit of time I tried selling life insurance is you gotta come up with a system that's repeatable and scalable, something that you can do over and over and over again.
And that's what I do on LinkedIn.
I spend about 30 minutes ahead of time commenting on my normal people.
I have my core. And then I'll write my post and then I'll spend another hour reaching out to new people, commenting on their things, adding value on their posts.
And that's the trick too with storytelling is doing the value add.
It's not enough to just say, hey, great post.
Well, that's fine, but there's no context behind it.
What's the context behind great posts?
What made it a great post to you, the writer?
So I tell you what makes it a great post.
And then this is the trick that I always do.
I don't know if it's a trick, but it's what I always do is I always try to add even more value to the original post.
So you'll get the original post and then I'll look at what you wrote.
I say, okay, this is all excellent.
This is very great.
Here's some things that you might've missed.
I don't word it that way, but I'll do it as a value add.
So that people who are reading the comments section comes across what I've written, they see the value add.
Now they want to come to my page.
Does he add value on other things?
They'll look at my post.
Does he add value on other posts?
What kind of value am I adding into who?
This is so good. I'm sitting here taking all these notes.
And as you're saying it, I'm saying to myself, man, that's true.
That's exactly what I did.
It is great. And I love the fact that there is this replicable model because when you think about writing in general, writing is tough.
If you want to write well, it takes a lot of intentionality.
It takes a lot of time and a lot of thought.
And if you tell people, all right, tell incredible stories, that is hard to do.
And when you, it's almost like if you take all of the guardrails off of creativity, it becomes so overwhelming that you can't produce anything.
And so I really think that the listeners should focus on this part of the process where, hey, this is a process.
It is replicable because you're going to have different conversations in different contexts.
And if you can have this framework that you can keep going back to, then it's going to be much easier for you to communicate in this way using stories.
And the way the framework works, it starts off with the hook.
And then the hook, what I always tell people, and if you pay attention to my writing, it is always addressing the problem and telling people that I'm going to give them a solution right off the bat.
So like today, I wrote about how to find an ideal customer.
So I say, okay, are you a detective looking for your ideal customer?
Well, I'm about to tell you how to find the ideal customer.
That's the intro, basically.
And then I go into five things I do to find those customers.
And then I follow that up as once I find them, here are three things I do to address them.
So that's kind of how almost all of my storytelling goes.
It's solution problem, the step -by -step guide on how to do it, followed by final resolution and a call to action.
And that's every single post.
But I don't do it in the way that you would think that most people on LinkedIn do, because on LinkedIn, you just said it, was write incredible stories.
Now, I could do an entire, I could do it right now and tell you an entire post on how to do that, right?
How to write an incredible story.
And the thing is, do you absolutely have to have a passion about writing about?
No, absolutely not.
It helps, it really helps because people will feel it, but it's not absolutely necessary.
Think about when someone has writer's block, right?
Okay, I have a passion for something, but I can't think about what to write.
Well, now I have to do something to get myself out of that block.
So I'll take like this pen and I will write an entire story about this pen, about its journey and how it got to me.
The step -by -step from creation to getting to me and what it must've gone through to get here.
And then what it's like living with me and the things that I put it through, chewing on it, writing with it, the stories it sees and all that stuff.
So that's how I do it.
And another thing to make your stories absolutely engaging is fill those suckers up with analogies because people need to see what you're writing.
It's not enough to say, all right, insert this here, do that there.
You got to give people something that they can attach to, an emotion to it so they can see it, feel it and understand it.
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This is powerful and for me as a writer, I think one of the most powerful things you talked about was getting through writer's block because writer's block is such a frustrating thing, you allocate the time to write and then your brain isn't braining and it feels really disempowering.
It's like I'm trying to eat on a very full stomach.
It just doesn't work.
I love that example of taking your mind completely off of it, being playful, and then that creativity comes back.
And I love the hook too, solution, problem, and then giving people bullet points.
It makes it really easy to understand.
And I think that hook element is something that people often miss.
I want to drill in on this hook because if you don't get the hook, people don't even tune in to the story.
They might be there, but they're tuned in to a different channel in their brain.
Well, the hook is when people tell you, talk to your audience, what they're saying is the hook, right?
Everything else, if you get them with the hook, as long as everything else actually addresses their problems, you've got them already.
You got to pull them in.
So what it is, you address that problem right off the bat.
What is the pain point?
What are they feeling?
What do they want to be solved?
Whether they truly know what it is or not, address it right up front and they go, oh yeah.
So they're scrolling through.
Oh yeah. That makes sense.
But I also try to create eye popping images for my posts.
Don't just write a post, right?
Because people just see a bunch of words they're going to tune right out.
You got to give them something to see.
So bright colors, contrasting colors especially on words.
So if you post something, make sure like important words, the verbs especially are a different color than the nouns and all the other words in there.
So the verb almost always has to be a different color.
Now people will tell you the adjective, but I always go verb.
So if you try to be like, get exploding growth, right?
Don't ever write anything like that.
So people's eyes are on the verbs and then they'll go, okay, get using what?
So everybody's writing the same.
Short, quick, able, consume, move on, right?
It's doom scrolling to the max of what they created.
What I want you to do is sit and stay.
I don't want you to scroll.
I want you captivated.
You're my audience.
I'm selling. I got me to sell to you.
My words. I want you to be able to come to me, saying I want to talk to him.
Now I don't want you to go talk to all the people at the other bullet points.
There's tons of those.
There are a dime a dozen.
Talk to me because I'm different.
So I do pacing and spacing.
I try to keep it quick.
And I also try to keep my sentences to different lengths.
So three words, five words, seven words.
And then I'll also do it where, this is another thing if you ever pay attention to my writing, the hook is usually one, maybe two sentences.
The next line will be about two to three sentences.
The next one, a single sentence.
And then we're leading into the bullet points.
And then we're leading into a sentence followed by one or two, followed by whatever.
But is to keep, and then I'll use certain emojis sometimes at the beginning of the sentence.
Sometimes I'll put them at the end of the sentence.
The whole concept is to keep your eye interested because if you look standard PDF of a, like let's say a contract, you look at the contract, you're going to sleep.
It's not interesting.
No one cares. It's a legal document.
Same thing with LinkedIn.
The consumable stuff worked at first because it was just easy to get through.
I don't have to dig into anything.
Just tell me what I want to know so I can move on.
But the problem is everyone's doing that now.
So for me, it's not that I want to go, now I'm stuck here.
I want you to get there.
And then I want you to be engaged once you're there.
So the pacing, the spacing, the analogies, the keeping your eye moving at all times is never just going to be like, okay, here's a paragraph, paragraph, paragraph.
It's always moving and always guessing.
So you're always going to be interested by what you're seeing in addition to what you're reading.
Oh, this is good. This is really good because it shows the intentionality that goes into this, because what's interesting is that the person who's listening to this previously, they might've just been drawn to this post, but not understanding what it was that drew their attention to the post.
And now we have a little bit of an opportunity to peek behind the veil and understand the science and psychology that goes into this.
And what's really cool about what you do is that your LinkedIn presence is very, very strategic in that it helps you with what you're trying to do with tech bank.
And so what I want you to do now is really picture and draw a clear connection between how the storytelling starts the conversation, how that's a really strong beginning point for the actual negotiation and communication when you actually start to talk to the person in real time.
Sure, once the stories are out there and people start commenting on it, I've not developed social proof.
I also write every single day.
I have made an amendment to write every single day, at least on my page, not necessarily on the tech bank page, the business page.
I'll do that a couple of days a week, but on mine because I'm the face, right?
People are going to see me.
So what happens is with all of this information, when people go to tech bank, yes, they'll see a bunch of content there, but they will see, but that's all professional content.
They'll come to me and see the opinions, the style, what they're going to get when they start working with tech bank.
Now tech bank's a professional business.
We do what we do and we're darn good at it.
But they need a face.
They're gonna have a relationship with me, they're not gonna have a relationship with tech bank.
So they see how I conduct myself, how I, what my personality is in my right.
Now I'm reaching out to people in DMs.
Hey, I see that you work with so -and -so, I'd love to connect with you.
This is what I do. If you'd like, check out my page and let's have a conversation.
Something along those lines, I almost always go to my page first because they're not gonna just write back, oh, that's great.
I've been waiting for someone.
No, they go to my page.
They see my profile that's already been optimized.
It fits everything they do and what they're looking for.
And then they go to my content next.
All right, what does this guy do?
What's he all about?
Is this someone I truly want to work with?
And then they go to the comment section.
What are people saying?
Is he engaging with them?
How does he engage with them?
And then they say, okay, this is great.
Let's have a conversation.
Now we're talking about the reason why they reached out to me.
What's their motivation for reaching out to me?
What problem do you have that I can solve?
And so once we get to that point now, we say, okay, well, this is what the price would be to fix that.
Or if you've got a lot of people you need to hire, this is the price point of which I can bring these people into you.
And so that's how the negotiation goes.
And in our business, there's not as steep a negotiation.
There is negotiation, but it's not like high stakes lawyer negotiation.
I've read your profile.
I was married to an attorney at one time in my life.
I know what that looks like.
It's not that, it's something, but it's not that.
We have quite the reputation.
Oh man, this, John, I love how much intentionality you're putting behind this.
And I really want to focus on a couple of things here that I think are overlooked often when it comes to the negotiation process.
And that's social proof and showing your personality.
Because when people follow you, they get to get a vibe on who you are and what you're about.
Cause when we, this is our first time talking in real time.
I feel like I know you and this is exactly what I expect you to do to be like, because you're authentic, the personality shows.
And then we cannot deny the power of social proof.
You have this great personality and you're writing these great stories.
And then you go on LinkedIn and you have one follower, but then let's say it's the exact same thing.
And now you have as many followers as you have, right?
It gives you a little check of credibility.
And now we could say that this is shallow and maybe it is.
But what we should say as well is that it is a psychological reality.
And as a result of that, we should incorporate it into our strategy.
And so this helps us to understand there's a big nexus when it comes to our persuasive abilities and our online brand presence.
And so you've been able to marry that brand presence, social proof, personality, authenticity, storytelling.
And you have all of this positive momentum working for you even before you have the first conversation with the person.
Absolutely. Yeah. And that's the part that's great is I get to do all the things that I love, right?
I love writing and I love talking to people.
I love engaging. This reason why I've been in this particular business for so long.
And I've been in this field for about eight years.
Now I've had several careers before this, you know, managing big box retail, I've managed at the state government level, high education and I've been in here now for eight years.
So that kind of tells you how dated I am.
But seriously though, it's all of that.
And you're right, it is a psychological effect that it has on people when they look at you and they go, what is the reason why I should want to work with this person?
Like you said, they see someone with a bunch of information, but one follower, they'll say, what's wrong with this person?
Or they'll say, what is the reason this person isn't motivated enough to go seek followers or develop a following, cultivate something, show me that you can build something.
The reason why should I listen to you?
No one else is going to listen to you.
That's powerful. It is so real.
And now with the time that we have left, I wanna give you some time to talk about the use of humor because you do this really well.
I'm getting a taste of that now.
And you also do it really well online.
And the beautiful thing is obviously it creates a connection, but then if we just think about it from a more strategic perspective, what do you think is the value of humor when it comes to creating these connections and then also persuading?
Memorability, top, number one, end of discussion.
That's it. I want people to remember me.
Again, going back to people who use that easy to consume bullet point format, that's great and all.
You've got yourself a nice little following, but they don't always connect with you.
So, and they may not even remember you in say two years from now, three years from now.
I want people to look at my information and treat me like they would their favorite authors at a library.
I want people to remember me.
I want people, the way I look at it is, there's no such thing as a quick sale, right?
Everything takes time.
These future clients of mine, potential clients, are not gonna write me tomorrow.
They may not write me for another year and a half, but the reason why they wrote me in the future from now, a year and a half is because they remembered me.
And that's what I use humor for, is to flow into the story of what I'm writing, because we already know that solutions and problems are daunting enough, right?
The problem is daunting for the person who has the problem.
That's the reason why they're looking for a solution.
Developing the solution and making it actionable is also daunting because you don't wanna lose the customer, disappoint them, and you don't wanna ruin your own reputation.
So you gotta be perfect on this side to really manage the problem.
But in between that, my goodness, that's a lot of stress here and here.
So we gotta bridge that gap.
And the way I bridge that gap is through humor and levity.
Life is too short, man.
It's always gonna be hard, no matter what we're doing, whether it's developing a social presence, like I'm doing for my company, which has none, negotiation, which is your line of work, doesn't matter.
As long as we can find a way to bridge that gap with humor, it lightens the mood for everyone.
It makes everything so much easier.
It makes you stand out because through all of this chaos that you're going through, you're able to sit pat and actually make people giggle.
And sometimes people just need that break.
Now I'm not saying stand there and juggle like a clown.
That's not your job.
You gotta be professional.
But every now and then chime in and say something funny.
Make it enjoyable. That's how I do it.
And when you do that, people will remember you.
They'll come back to you because you enlisted an emotion from them.
And that emotion is a very powerful one.
Anything that makes a person laugh is powerful.
I agree. I think this is great advice because I think a lot of times when people think about what it takes to be professional, and I'm using air quotes here for the people who are audio -only, professional, right?
A lot of times they just put their personality just on the shelf and leave it at home.
You can still be a person and be professional.
And I think that's really important.
And I really appreciate you giving people the license to be themselves and inject a little bit of levity into these conversations.
I think that's powerful.
A hundred percent. People I've noticed, especially in LinkedIn, have a tendency to be afraid of being themselves, where if you want someone to work with you, you want them to know you.
Now you'll never get 100 % to know anybody.
Your own spouse, you don't know their deep, dark secrets, whatever, but you want them to know your personality overall.
Who are you? Who are they gonna be working with?
And what's the reason they should come work with you?
So yeah, be yourself.
Don't be this stale generic version of everyone else.
This is another thing I always say to people.
This is triggered that, is especially when people try to emulate and it becomes all that white noise with all the bullet point format, is don't be a second rate someone else.
Be a first rate you.
I can replicate anybody else, but I can only be me.
And if you truly just use some of everybody else's stuff and incorporate it into your own, be the best version of you.
Use the information and knowledge you gather everywhere else but make it to where it just enhances you.
Oh, John, this is great.
This is great. And so I know a lot of the listeners are saying, okay, I need to follow John.
I need to get in touch with him.
I need to learn more.
So before you go, I wanted to give you an opportunity to let folks know the best way to follow you and get in touch.
Sure. The best way to follow me is going to be on LinkedIn.
That's the account I am on the absolute most.
Sure. I have Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, but right now I stick to one platform, it's LinkedIn.
That's where everyone is for what I need.
You can DM me there, follow me there.
Or if you want to have a conversation with me regarding either IT Solutions or developing storytelling methods, contact me at my work email, jmoren, letter J -M -O -O -R -E at techbank .net, T -E -K -B -A -N -K .net.
John, this was fantastic.
Really appreciate you joining us today.
Thank you for having Kwame.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Now, before you sign off, I have something to tell you that I've never told you before.
Just kidding. I've told you before about it.
You should listen to it again.
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I'll catch you later.
