PDF Summary:Business Made Simple, by Donald Miller

If you’ve ever asked yourself why you aren’t making as much progress in your business career as you’d like, business and marketing expert Donald Miller says he knows the answer: You’re not adding enough value to your company. Businesses always have the bottom line in mind, and they’re much more likely to notice and promote people who quantifiably bring more money into the company than people who simply do what’s in their job description and nothing more. Therefore, Miller argues that you should see yourself not as a mere employee, but as an investment of your organization, and he provides 11 steps that can help you become an investment that provides an excellent return.

We’ll examine these steps, and we’ll also supplement Miller’s recommendations with advice from other business thinkers, psychological background on some of his ideas, and ideas from his other works.

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The Pilot Is the Leader. Some compare the airplane pilot to its leader. Pilots must possess experience and skill to maneuver the plane safely, in the same way that a CEO must have business acumen to successfully lead a new company.

The Crew Are the Employees. Miller sees the salaries you pay employees merely as part of overhead. In other words, for him, employees are just a cost. But others view your team as actively contributing to your business success. Because of this, you must invest in training them and keeping them happy.

The Fuselage Is the Culture. Miller sees the fuselage (the body of a plane) as the overhead that must be supported, but others perceive the fuselage as the culture that keeps the organization together. For this reason, you must carefully create a culture that can gel your organization.

The Passengers Are the Customers. In your company, your employees are responsible for ensuring the comfort of customers, in the same way a flight crew ensures the comfort of passengers.

This interpretation of the plane analogy illustrates how a business works in general, while Miller focuses on how to balance the parts of the plane to ensure your plane can stay airborne (in other words, to ensure the company brings in enough revenue to support itself). For this reason, Miller doesn’t take into account culture, customers, or leadership, which don’t, at least directly, have anything to do with strategic revenue maximization.

Step 5: Base Your Messaging on a Story the Customer Can Star In

Let’s move on to marketing messaging, the fifth step toward adding value to your organization. Miller stresses that the best way to grab a customer’s attention is to tell them a story they’re the star of. He provides a story template into which you can plug the elements of your business to create a compelling story. You can then use that story whenever marketing or selling your product: in collateral, ads, and so on. Let’s examine these elements:

The customer is the hero and has a goal: Position the customer as a hero because the hero of any story is always on a journey of growth, and this is what customers identify with. Their goal must be related to something your product helps them achieve. For instance, your customer is a hero business executive who wants to organize their schedule more effectively.

The customer faces an obstacle to their goal: In every story, the hero must encounter an obstacle, otherwise the audience loses interest. In a marketing context, the obstacle is the problem your product solves. In our example, the obstacle would be the inflexible and inadequate free calendar software the customer’s currently using.

You are the guide who can help the hero overcome their obstacle: The guide of a story is wise, empathetic, and knows how to help the hero reach their goal. By positioning yourself as the guide, you become someone whose help the hero wants. In our example, you tell the customer you understand their frustration with the obstacle and that you have a solution: a calendar software that’s easy to use and totally customizable.

You give the hero a plan to overcome their obstacle: Show the customer the simple steps they can take to overcome their obstacle by buying your product. You might tell your customer they simply have to schedule a consultation on your website, pay for the product, and then download and customize it.

You challenge the hero to take action: If you don’t ask your customer to take action to overcome their obstacle by buying your product, they won’t buy it. Tell the customer to act now and perhaps even include an incentive, like a discount.

The hero will gain something if they succeed and lose something if they fail: Explain how the customer will benefit by taking the action of buying your product. Similarly, explain what they stand to lose if they don’t take action to buy your product. Without an idea of the stakes of not taking action, customers won’t feel urgency to buy. To conclude our example message, you might say that the customer will become more efficient and that their business might even grow due to their superior organization. Conversely, if they don’t buy your product, they’ll be stuck in a state of sub-par organization and perpetual confusion.

Drawing on Story Lessons From Building a StoryBrand

In Building a StoryBrand, Miller goes into more detail on story creation for marketing purposes. Here are some additional lessons about story-based marketing Miller doesn’t cover in Business Made Simple.

The story must come first. Not only should you tell a story about the customer, you must also omit any marketing information that isn’t directly related to that story. Often, companies are tempted to include details in their marketing about the origin of the business or their company values. While companies should have these written down somewhere, they should not be in their marketing collateral.

The hero’s goals must be related to survival needs. Miller also elaborates in Building a StoryBrand that your hero’s goals (and therefore the goals your product fulfills) must be related to their survival. He argues that the human brain only pays attention to inputs that help it survive, therefore all marketing messaging must explain how a product helps someone survive. This might be by providing nourishment, safety, connections, and existential meaning.

You can personify the obstacle as a villain. When establishing the obstacle standing between your hero and their goal, consider turning it into a living being the customer can have negative feelings toward. For instance, you might depict the obstacle of an out-of-date software as an evil talking computer.

Show your confidence as a guide through your website. To convince the customer that you, the guide, are competent, you can use testimonials, statistics, awards, and logos of clients on your website.

Give your plan a title. Miller specifically recommends giving the plan you present to the customer a memorable title. This makes the plan seem more official and thus trustworthy.

Consider two types of calls to action. Miller elaborates in Building a StoryBrand that there are two types of calls to action: direct and transitional. A direct call to action asks the customer to take action now to buy. A transitional call to action builds rapport between the customer and your brand, priming them to think of you when they later need to make a purchase. Depending on your customer, one call to action might work better than the other.

Remember that people fear losing something more than they desire acquiring something. When considering what positive and negative stakes to include in your marketing story, be aware that people are usually more motivated by a fear of losing something than the possibility of gaining something. For this reason, you might stress the negative stakes over the positive ones—emphasize that if they don’t buy your product, customers will suffer inconvenience, reduced productivity or health, and so on.

Step 6: Develop a Three-Step Sales Funnel That Builds Customer Trust

Now it’s time to learn the mechanics of marketing in your effort to become a value-driven team member. Miller believes the most important element of a marketing strategy is a strong sales funnel. A sales funnel lets you stay in touch with customers, which builds trust and, eventually, sales.

According to Miller, a sales funnel must take the prospect through three phases: curiosity, understanding, and purchase.

(Shortform note: Though he describes it, Miller doesn’t define what a sales funnel is outright. According to another source, a sales funnel is a representation of a customer’s shift from merely being aware of a product to buying it. In addition to letting you maintain contact and track customers, it also helps you determine a target group of customers so you can focus your efforts. What’s more, you can visualize the sales funnel in different ways than what Miller recommends. For instance, you could view the sales funnel as having four phases: awareness of the product, interaction with the brand (by requesting more information, for instance), continued interest in the product, and action to buy.)

To engage a prospective customer’s curiosity, craft a simple sentence that contains: 1) a problem, 2) the solution that is your product, and 3) the result of solving the problem using your product.

(Shortform note: It’s occasionally unclear in his book where Miller recommends using pitches and marketing materials like the above sentence to pique the customer’s curiosity. Based on Building a StoryBrand, we might infer that he wants you to use such pitches across all marketing platforms and collateral.)

Once the prospective customer is curious about your product, enhance their understanding of it by explaining how it helps them survive. For instance, you might describe the features of the product and show how these improve the customer’s life. The best way to help the prospect understand your product is through a lead generator. This is a free product you offer—often a PDF, video, or other media—in exchange for your prospective customer’s email address (thus, the product generates a “lead” or new customer for the company). The content of this lead generator must help the prospective customer solve a problem and therefore be of real value to them.

(Shortform note: Miller notes some additional tips in Building a StoryBrand on how to create a great lead generator. First, always give your lead generator a title (for example: “Six mistakes marketers make.” This makes it more interesting and memorable for the reader. Further, have the lead generator appear as a pop-up on your website 10 seconds after the customer opens the page. Finally, don’t be afraid to include more information and value in the lead generator than might feel comfortable at first—it will strengthen trust because you’re helping the customer better understand how the product helps them survive.)

Only once you’ve completed the first two steps can you ask a customer for a purchase. This is because the first two steps establish a relationship with the customer that generates faith in your product and primes them to buy.

(Shortform note: We can link Miller’s belief that you must establish a relationship with your customer before asking them to buy to Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of priming. Priming is the act of exposing someone to a stimulus that prompts a specific response to a later stimulus. In this way, you might prime your customer to buy from your brand by first exposing them to marketing stimuli about your brand that appeal to them.)

Step 7: Communicate in a Story Format so Others Listen

Beyond being an effective marketer, to add value to your company, you must also excel at basic communication—and especially presentations, claims Miller.

When making a sales presentation, Miller recommends following the story structure we discussed earlier: Immediately state what problem you’ll help the customer solve and your proposed solution (your product or service). Explain how your product will change the customer’s life, what next steps they should take, and the key takeaways they must remember.

Additionally, for any type of presentation, decide what the main point of your presentation is and connect every subpoint to that main point. If you don’t show how the subpoints feed into your main point, audiences won’t follow them and will become confused. Miller recommends having only three or four subpoints in a presentation.

Additional Tips on Public Speaking From the World of TED Talks

Miller’s advice on how to deliver an effective presentation is useful but relatively basic. However, if you want to craft a unique and memorable presentation, consider following some advice from Carmine Gallo based on the TED talk format.

First, if you have time, consider weaving in stories other than the one about your product. Gallo agrees with Miller that stories engage people more than any other form of communication, and he suggests you tell your audience a story about your life (perhaps your journey to becoming a business owner) or a story about another person (perhaps a happy customer).

What’s more, in addition to connecting subpoints to your main point to keep your presentation logical, Gallo also stresses that your presentation should be short—no more than 18 minutes. If it’s longer than that, your audience will tune out, and no matter how logical and well-organized it is, your presentation won’t make an impact.

Step 8: Make the Sale by Qualifying Leads, Telling a Story, and Sending Proposals

Now that you’ve mastered messaging, marketing, and communication, let’s move on to how to add value to your company through sales. Miller recommends three actions to take when selling: qualifying leads, pitching in a story format, and sending physical proposals to prospects.

To avoid wasting company time and money on people who won’t buy your product, qualify leads (verify a potential customer’s likelihood of buying) before engaging further with them. Do this by answering the following questions about them: 1) Do they have a problem your product can solve? 2) Is your product within their budget? 3) Do they have permission from their boss, spouse, or other authority, to buy the product? You can determine these answers by talking to the lead and understanding their situation.

(Shortform note: For other sales professionals, asking questions is not only key to qualifying leads but is also key to making the sale itself. Instead of pushing your pitch and product onto the customer, ask questions that let the customer decide for themselves that they want the product, writes Jeffrey Gitomer in the Little Red Book of Selling. But it’s important to ask the right questions. These shouldn’t try to uncover how the customer’s currently doing things but rather should make the customer think about how your product could be a better solution. For instance, you might ask: “If you needed to schedule a video call with team members from all over the world in the next hour, would that be easy?”)

Miller states that your sales pitch should be made in a story format similar to the one we discussed in Step 7: First state the customer’s problem and articulate the irritation the prospect feels as a result. Then, explain your proposed solution, followed by a reference to the other clients you’ve helped with the same problem and their testimonials. End by explaining your plan to solve the problem.

(Shortform note: Carmine Gallo suggests another reason, beyond their ability to engage, that stories are extremely effective communication and sales tools: When hearing a story, the audiences’ brains go through the same neurological patterns as the storyteller’s. This means that if you, as the salesperson, are enthusiastic about your product and its ability to solve the customer’s problem, the listener will become so, too.)

Finally, after you’ve delivered your pitch, give your prospect a document or video that succinctly explains what you’re offering. This way, the prospect has all the details they need to make a decision even if they’ve forgotten your pitch.

(Shortform note: Science backs Miller’s recommendation to give listeners a written summary of your presentation—studies show that people retain only a fraction of the content of any presentation. For instance, when students listen to a 15-minute lecture, they retain 41% of its content. When they listen to a 40-minute presentation, that percentage goes down to 20%. Either way, listeners don’t retain even half the materials in a presentation.)

Step 9: Negotiate Effectively by Determining the Other Party’s Negotiating Style

Your ninth step in adding value is to learn how to become a confident negotiator. Miller writes that the most important lesson to learn is that there are two types of negotiation: cooperative and adversarial. In a cooperative negotiation, both parties want each other to leave the negotiation happy. In an adversarial negotiation, one or both parties want to win and see the other party fail.

(Shortform note: Someone’s negotiation style might correlate to their reciprocity style, a concept Adam Grant describes in Give and Take. He describes the “giver” style as applying to people who give more to others than they receive. Meanwhile “takers” want to receive more than they give, and they feel others must lose for them to be able to gain. If you’re a cooperative negotiator, you might be a giver, while if you’re an adversarial one, you might be a taker.)

The key is to know what kind of negotiators you and the other party are and to become adversarial if the other party is adversarial. To end the negotiation when you’re satisfied, pretend you’re dissatisfied with the outcome: This signals to the other party that they’ve won.

(Shortform note: To convincingly feign dissatisfaction at the end of a negotiation, you might take a page out of Jordan Belfort’s The Way of the Wolf. He recommends playing with vocal tonalities to better deliver a pitch, and you can do the same in a negotiation. For instance, inflecting statements as if they were questions makes you seem agreeable but also demands the other party confirm what you’ve just said. You might use this to your advantage by saying, “This is far more money than I was expecting to pay” with a questioning inflection, which prompts the other party to confirm this and makes them feel satisfied they’ve won.)

Additionally, think about what factors other than money influence the other party’s decision, and capitalize on those. You’re more likely to seal a deal when you also speak to the other party’s emotional—not just financial—needs. For instance, when negotiating the sale of a used car on your lot, think about what other facets of the car the buyer might care about. Perhaps the buyer wants to look good when driving, in which case you might point out the sleek leather interior.

(Shortform note: To understand what other factors a buyer is considering, develop empathy as a salesperson. Zig Ziglar believes empathy is key in salespeople because it lets them understand how the customer feels and tailor their pitch to those feelings. Further, when customers feel their needs are understood, they’re more likely to buy.)

Step 10: Manage Teams Effectively Using Metrics

Let’s now turn to effective management of people, the 10th step of becoming a good company investment. Miller contends that a value-driven manager relies on input and output metrics as their guiding light because these indicate concretely what they’re doing well and what they could be doing better. An input metric (what Miller refers to as a lead indicator) is a measure of how much work goes into producing an output. An output metric (what Miller calls a lag indicator) is a measure of how much output was produced by the input.

For instance, three weekly social media posts (input metric) lead to 300 new followers through your social media page (output metric).

Use these metrics to make decisions that increase the value your department adds to the company. For instance, you might decide that relative to competitors, accruing 300 followers a week isn’t enough, and you might then increase the input metric to garner more followers.

Avoid Tracking “Vanity” Metrics

While tracking metrics is a common and accepted facet of growing a business, it’s critical that you track the right metrics. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries warns against tracking “vanity metrics”: metrics that make the picture of your company look rosy but don’t actually reflect positive change.

Such vanity metrics are numbers that always increase, without intervention on your part. This could be the number of social media posts you make a year: By the end of the year, you might have 300 more social media posts than you had at the start of the year, which you might perceive as a success. But if you’ve simply consistently produced six posts a week all year, those 300 new posts don’t indicate progress. They just indicate you’ve been doing things the same as last year.

Conversely, if you were to track the rate at which you produce posts, you’d see the rate was stagnant at six posts a week, and you could decide to increase that rate. Often, the right metrics to track are input metrics because these reflect what you’re doing on a daily or weekly basis and are more within your control to change.

Tracking only vanity metrics keeps you from making important changes to your business because they give you the false impression you’re doing everything perfectly already.

Step 11: Execute Well Using a Plan

The final step of becoming a value-adding employee is being able to execute a project or idea. Miller breaks successful execution of a new project into three steps:

1. Have a launch meeting to discuss a project. Decide what the successful execution of the product will look like, who’s involved, what you’ll need to execute it (people and resources), and what the timeline will be.
2. Check in with the team weekly. This should be brief and only ensure everyone knows what their next step is.
3. Keep track of your progress. Do this publicly and measure input metrics—the efforts going into producing an output—rather than output metrics (which you can’t positively impact because the output’s already been produced). This will encourage your team to push themselves.

Launch Projects Effectively by Limiting Inefficiencies

When launching a new project, it’s easy to become bogged down in communication and minor, unimportant tasks that draw your attention away from the final aim of the project. In A World Without Email, Cal Newport proposes ways to manage your communication and check-ins so that they don’t interfere with your progress.

To track your progress effectively, Newport recommends using task boards: physical or digital boards with columns that represent stages of a project and cards that represent tasks. You can move tasks between stages and even relabel the stages to accommodate a new type of project. Newport even advises bringing this board to your regular team meeting. This way, everyone can see what others’ progress is and can better visualize what their next step is.

Finally, Newport recommends devising an effective process for scheduling irregular meetings, like a launch meeting. Scheduling such large meetings can be time-consuming and is a task better handled by an administrator or scheduling service than by the person leading the project.