Give me your money or I will eat you

The Story

I went to the zoo with my family the other week – and I noticed something very interesting when I paid for admission.

When the cashier handed me my tickets and credit card back, she also dropped three shiny coins in my hand.

I was puzzled at first. She explained that these coins – not real money, nor vending machine tokens – were meant for a donation box just inside the zoo.

Each donation coin, she said, represented 25 cents of the ticket price I paid to get in to the zoo. The zoo was returning those quarters to me so I could donate it to a conservation cause.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

There were six different conservation causes that I could support. Here’s a picture of one side of the donation kiosk.

That choice was the key, because it invited me to get involved.

The zoo didn’t just ask for donations. To be honest, I would have shrugged it off. (After all, there were gorillas to see!)

And the zoo could have “given” me a token. Sure, I would have tossed it into one of the boxes, but I wouldn’t have been invested as much.

Clever non-profit devils that they are, the zoo sliced out a portion of the money I had already plunked down, so I felt that much more ownership in the donation decision.

These were my dollars at work. (And just in case you’re interested, I supported local endangered predators, like wolves. Because predators have big teeth and are scary and are just plain cool. Plus, they might come and eat me if I hadn’t.)

In essence, the zoo engaged me into their donation experience.

And that’s exactly what a good story does.

A story well told plunges us into the action, so we’re not worrying about whether we’re being sold or pressured. Instead, we just wanna see what happens next.

It’s the difference between consuming information and participating in an experience.

Experiences are fun.

And they’re actually a darn good way to deliver information in the way brains like to consume it: piece by piece, and most importantly — as an answer to a question.

That question is: what happens next?

After all, it’s a common complaint that we are awash in information.

“Information overload!” sounds the cry.

But I don’t see too many people cutting their cord to the web or setting up a wifi scrambling shield around their houses. (And even those that do still hungrily consume newspapers or the oldest stories around – neighborhood gossip.)

No, we still want information – but we want it delivered in tasty bites.

We want to eat it when we’re hungry. And that hunger comes in the form of curiosity.

That’s what the 60 Second Sales Hook does. When you tell your struggle, you create an immediate hunger in your listener to know What Happened Next.

Then you quickly nourish her with the tale of your Discovery and Results.

Instead of shrugging it off, she’ll gobble it up and want more:

Like where she can learn to get the same results you did.

The MORAL

Tell a story that pulls your prospects into an experience (rather than forcing them to face an information firing squad).

Stay Tuned For Next Week

In which I follow a sob story