It is summer 1986 and an extraordinary new character is about to burst into the staid, panelled room...
It is summer 1986 and an extraordinary new character is about to burst into the staid, panelled rooms of the City of London. Two decades later, Sid, the mysterious character created by Saatchi and Saatchi, who was exhorted by his mates to buy shares in the privatisation of British Gas has turned into something of an enduring - if ghostly - presence.
Sid's arrival marked a new era for selling financial services - the day popular capitalism turned investor communications into a mainstream marketing activity.
The truth is that Sid stuck. People who would not bother with a privatisation were talking about Sid.
Sid had a powerful lesson to teach us all working in financial services. The simple power of storytelling can engage people's hearts and minds. Stories can even bring to life subjects as dry as initial public offering parchment. And you do not need even one Saatchi - let alone the pair - to reap the revenue and reputation rewards that storytelling can bring.
Although financial firms recognise that advisers need to be storytellers - knowing how to spot, tell and sell a good yarn is a key skill. The yarn may be a great product or a special situations swashbuckler like Anthony Bolton, but it is storytelling all the same.
But where advisory firms miss out is failing to recognise that a formal approach to storytelling, by developing case studies, can help win new customers, grow existing clients, and start to share best practice among advisers.
So, here are my five top tips for gathering, refining and applying case studies that will help you grow and develop your business.
Tip one: appoint one person as your part-time story gatherer. Get them to keep a list of all case studies in an excel sheet. Two a month should do it. When an adviser has done a great job, get them into the habit of asking customers if they are happy to be used as a testimonial or case study for the press.
Tip two: make the story gathering process automatic. Set up an internal email address at your firm. Call it: great stories@your companyname.com. Promote it to all your advisers and award a bottle of champagne each month to the adviser who comes up with the best case study. The benefit of a dedicated in box is that when one story gatherer moves on - the story gathering habit is still alive at your firm.
Tip three: develop a relationship with a professional writer or journalist. A bright business feature writer or editor working at your local newspaper or trade press will be happy to moonlight for you at a reasonable rate. Get them to set up some templates for you. But do not give them everything to write.
Tip four: find someone who wants to write at your firm and give them some basic training. Not only will this save you money in the long run, writing skills will help when you come to looking at your sales and proposal letters. And this writing activity will not be too onerous, if they are only working on two pieces a month. Every now and then pay your moonlighting journalist to edit or look over the work they have done.
Tip five: when you have got enough case studies - 20 or so will do it - put your professional writer together with a designer and get them to edit a short collection of problems solved for happy customers. As your story gathering process picks up steam, this could even grow to become a quarterly newsletter. Even an annual newsletter will prove to be an incredibly useful leave behind for new customer visits - as well as a nice attention tickler to send to journalists. You never know - they may start to see you in a new light.
So there you have it, a five-step programme for putting stories to work for you. But a word of warning: never give up gathering those stories. The secret to building any successful business is having the capacity not just to articulate what you do well - but also to prove it.
And that is where the power of the case study - gathered, refined and applied well - can become one of the most powerful business building tools you have got. Ignore them at your commercial peril.
Martin Hennessey, managing director, www.thewriter.co.uk
