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- Why most “storytelling advice” is quietly killing your sales
Why most “storytelling advice” is quietly killing your sales
Why polished storytelling is quietly killing your leads.
Stephen Stanberry
December 22nd, 2025
In partnership with
Hey friend!
If you spend more than five minutes on social media…
You’ve probably noticed something mildly infuriating.
Everyone is suddenly a storytelling expert.
Seven-step frameworks.
Hero’s journey diagrams.
Pixar formulas.
“Just be vulnerable and the sales will come.”
And yet…
Most of the people preaching this stuff haven’t sold anything meaningful with a story in a long time.
Some never have.
They don’t sell with stories.
They talk about stories.
Which is kind of the problem.
Because the fastest way to drain the power out of storytelling…
Is to turn it into a formula.
That’s the part nobody likes to admit.
Real storytelling in marketing was never meant to be neat.
It wasn’t built for carousels.
It wasn’t designed for Notion templates.
It definitely wasn’t meant to be reverse-engineered into “slides.”
Stories work because they create friction.
They make people squirm a little.
They surface tension.
They say things most people are too polite to say out loud.
But that’s uncomfortable.
So most marketers avoid it.
Instead, they explain.
They soften the edges.
They summarize the lesson instead of showing the moment.
And the result?
Content that’s technically “good”…
But completely forgettable.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most storytelling advice won’t tell you:
It teaches you how to sound safe, not persuasive.
It trains you to explain what happened…
Instead of letting people feel it.
Which is why so much content today feels thoughtful, polished, and dead on arrival.
No pulse.
No edge.
No reaction.
Just vibes.
And if you’ve ever wondered why your stories get likes but not leads…
Why people say “this really resonated” and then disappear…
It’s usually not because your story is bad.
It’s because you removed the only part that made it matter.
The tension.
Tomorrow, I’ll show you the smallest shift I made that fixed this for me.
One line.
One decision.
One uncomfortable choice.
And it changed how people responded to my content almost overnight.
Till tomorrow…
Stephen
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