The Truth About Using Story Templates To Grow Your Business

Business storytelling doesn’t always benefit from story templates. Do this instead.

Image adapted from Depositphotos.

Story templates provide a structure for your story. You answer a series of questions or provide a series of phrases. Now you have a story! For instance, you might have questions about the hero’s goal, obstacles, first steps, key insight, and final outcome, victory or success.

You’ll see lots of offers for story templates, especially this time of year. I’ve been asked if I’ve considered creating story templates. So far, the closest you’ll find from me is my popular course — From StoryTelling to StorySelling. In this course, you get a recipe — not a template — for a story you can use for selling.

Here are 3 points to consider whether you want to work with templates or develop your own story from scratch.

(1) There’s no one-size-fits-all structure for all your stories.

You might share a story to get more clients (a selling story). You might be promoting your expertise with a case study or success story.

If you’re a Role Model archetype, you might share a story to build rapport with your audience. We discussed this on my podcasts with Cindy Bidar and Ellen Finkelstein. (Good for listening if…