Uncovering Desire: The Story Structure That Sells Before You Ever Pitch
You send the email. You explain the opportunity clearly, stack the benefits, answer the objections before anyone even asks them, and hit send. Silence. Not one reply, not one click, nothing. You did everything the training told you to do, and the room went cold anyway.
The problem was never the wording of the pitch. The problem is the order you pitched in, the order almost everyone uses: here’s the thing, here’s what it does, here’s why you should want it. That order builds a case. It does not build a desire, and a case, no matter how airtight, does not make anyone reach for their wallet.
As someone trying to build an audience or a downline without turning every conversation into a sales call, you already feel this gap. Dave Wood built a lesson inside the Classic Masters Course around the mechanism that creates desire before an offer is ever mentioned, using his own life, including a debt letter he genuinely didn’t know how to pay, as the working example.
Why does explaining the opportunity kill the desire to buy it?
Every good story, Dave points out, starts the same way. Not with a résumé. With a desire, a single spark that pulls a person out of the world they already understand and into a new one. He walks through his own version of it: sitting in a seminar watching someone talk about internet marketing and knowing instantly he had to figure it out, going home, and searching until he landed on a course he could barely make himself buy because the price felt outrageous for what was just a PDF.
That’s the part most pitches skip. They open with the offer instead of opening with the moment desire got created. Skip that moment and you’re asking someone to want something before you’ve given them a reason to want anything at all. The desire has to exist first. The offer is just the door someone eventually walks through once they already want what’s on the other side of it.
What has to happen before you ever mention the offer?
Once desire exists, the story has to move the person into a new world with its own rules, then attach a real, tangible goal instead of a vague one. Not a generic promise about making money online. A specific target, tied to a specific reason. In his own retelling, the goal Dave set at that early seminar was concrete enough to repeat, and repeating it more than once inside the story isn’t an accident. It’s the moment a listener commits the goal to memory alongside him.
From there, the story has to show real progress toward that goal before anything goes wrong. Skip the progress and the crisis that follows has no weight, because nobody believes the person was ever actually winning in the first place. This is where most pitches get the order backwards. They open with the pain and the frustration, the generic tired of your situation opener, because it’s easier to write, and they never earn the progress that would make the crisis land.
Why does the story need a point where there’s no way out?
Dave calls the next beat the point of no return, the moment a hero has to choose to keep going or go home. In his telling, that moment was specific: living in Maui, watching the traffic source that fed his entire business get cut off, the business he’d built up to that point disappearing along with it, and a real decision to make about what he still had left. He didn’t summarize it into a lesson first. He told it as a moment and let the room sit inside it.
Right after that comes what he calls the insurmountable object, the part of the story where it looks like there is genuinely no way to win. Dave says this beat does more work than any other part of a story, and he builds the entire lesson around one from his own life. The specific version here is a letter from the IRS, informing him he owed just under a million dollars at a point when he didn’t have anywhere close to it.
I go to the mailbox and I open my mail and I get this letter from the IRS that says you owe us nine hundred and eighty three thousand dollars now I just stabilized my business the government’s telling me I have all this money that I owe them I don’t have it there’s no way right that’s in that moment right there is the most compelling part of any story that’s where ultimate identification happens that’s where people are like they’re in it with right they want to know how you got out of it and at that moment if you can this is really where you can implant it in a pivot a moment and a thought that people will say I get it
Notice what that moment doesn’t do. It doesn’t mention a product, a comp plan, or a link. It just puts the listener inside a wall with no visible door, which is exactly why the next thing Dave says, the one idea that got him through it, lands as hard as it does.
Why does the idea have to be more valuable than you are?
The way out of Dave’s wall wasn’t a new tactic. It was a realization sitting inside an invoice he’d been paying for two straight years to a newsletter company for ad space, the kind of overlooked, specific detail a real story needs instead of a vague wave at the moment it clicked. The realization was that once you become a source of traffic instead of a buyer of it, you stop needing anyone else’s permission to grow. That’s the epiphany. Everything after it, in the story and in the pitch, is just the visible proof that the epiphany was true.
None of this requires a dramatic result to work either. Dave points to a student from one of his workshops who’d moved to a new state after a divorce, ended up working the counter at McDonald’s when the teaching job she expected didn’t come through, then found a small, repeatable stream of income online and used it to hand in her notice. The wall in that story is just as real to the person who lived it as an IRS letter is to Dave, and a room responds to it the same way. The structure doesn’t need a hero with everything on the line. It needs a wall that was genuinely real to whoever is telling it.
Here’s the part that actually changes how you build anything with this: Dave is explicit that the story should sell the idea, never the company. Getting someone to want the idea of having their own products, without ever having to create them, is a concept a person can fall in love with on its own. Getting them to want one specific company by name is a much smaller ask, and a much easier no.
As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Masters Course, “But it has nothing to do with saying Empower Network or anything else. It’s just the idea. And then Empower Network is like the door to get in.”
How do you turn a real objection into the reason someone says yes?
Once someone wants the idea, Dave layers in two more moves before he ever hands over a link. The first is proof that isn’t about him. He points out that sharing your own results, however good, only proves the idea worked for you specifically. Share a stack of other people using the same idea, and the idea itself becomes the thing people believe in, independent of who happens to be telling the story that day.
As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Masters Course, “If you share case studies after progress, what that does is it detaches the simple concept or idea from you or from me and makes it the valuable thing.”
- Your own results prove the idea worked once, for you, which is easy for a listener to write off as luck or special circumstances.
- A pattern of other ordinary people getting the same result proves the idea itself is what’s doing the work, which is much harder to dismiss.
The second move is what he does with objections, and it’s the reverse of what most people are trained to do. Rather than reassure an objection away, he turns it into the reason to act. His example is a person who says they can’t run a co-op because they don’t have a team yet. Instead of soothing that concern, he flips it: not having a team yet is exactly why learning to run one is worth something, because that single skill is something they can offer an upline in exchange for a cut, whether or not anyone is under them at all. The objection becomes the pitch.
That reframe only works because of everything that came before it. A person who’s already been walked through a desire, a goal, real stakes, a wall with no way out, and one idea that broke through it, isn’t looking for a reason to say no anymore. They’re looking for permission to say yes, and a resolved objection is usually all the permission they need. Do this in the right order and you stop feeling like someone begging for a sale and start feeling like someone showing people a door they already wanted to walk through.
What’s above is the structure. The full lesson runs the rest of it out in real time: how Dave uses this same shape inside an email sequence, why he leaves loops open on purpose instead of closing every one, the benefits-behind-the-benefits move that takes a surface-level reason and finds the deeper one underneath it, and a full walkthrough of turning a personal story into a multi-day sequence that sells a concept before it ever names an offer. That complete video and transcript are part of the Classic Masters Course.
If you’re new to it, the entire course, this lesson and everything built around it, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course. Go build one story around one real wall you’ve actually gotten through, and stop leading with the offer.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
There's a story that's called the hero's journey. If you really want to compel people to do something, you should tell your story in this format. Super simple, it's just a matter of steps. This is basically what it looks like. All good movies follow this hero's journey format. The beginning of the hero's journey starts with desire. Some tangible desire is sparked. So for me, we could go back to my story, and I would say as soon as I saw this guy standing on stage talking about stories, I knew that I needed to learn how to tell stories. That's what sucked me in, and now there's a desire.
We could do one of a million ways. Start with design. After we have some desire, we come into a new world. So this would be the storytelling world, if I'm going to do this example, and that's where you learn the rules. This storytelling stuff is not like the regular world. Let me just repeat it. Let me do it actually just internet marketing as my story. So I'm at this seminar, and I see this guy tell the story about real estate and all these people buy. Then this other guy comes up on stage and he starts talking about internet marketing, and I fall in love, hook line and sinker. I need to go, I need to figure this thing out. It's just the most compelling thing in the world to me. I go home and I start searching for make money stuff online. I find this book called Google Cash. So you see, this is where the desire was created. You just create a desire that gets you into some new place. So now I'm in this online world. Once in the online world, you learn the rules.
I find this book called Google Cash, and it's about affiliate marketing, and I sat there in front of this page for like three hours because I couldn't get myself to buy it, because this thing costs sixty-seven dollars, and I could not get my head around paying someone sixty-seven dollars for some PDF document. A book at the bookstore doesn't cost sixty-seven dollars, right? So I'm learning the rules, this world works different than the regular world. And we would just tell some stories like this. Ultimately you create a real goal. Desire gets you in the game, but the goal puts you on the path to success, and we share this tangibly. I would share, when I was at that event with John Alanis, I wanted to learn how to make a million dollars a week from just a little idea, and that was my goal. I needed to figure out how to do that. So we go from a desire to a tangible goal, and this is the next step. So maybe you have a tangible goal, something, some experience in life.
From there, progress. So you start making, taking steps towards that goal. I create my first product, I create my second product, I get John ten thousand dollars to learn more stuff from him, then my business doubles. Progress after progress, we hit a certain point, and actually this is it, down here, called the point of no return. Something bad happens and you have to choose to either go forward or not go forward. I'm living in Maui, Hawaii, and all our traffic is taken away, and our million dollar business is about to be taken away from us. I'm about to go bankrupt. At that moment I have to decide what I'm going to do with my final thirty thousand dollars in the bank account. Am I going to move back home and not do something, or am I going to actually do something with it that's going to make our business better? You're the hero, so your hero always chooses the courageous action. All right, so at that point of no return, you always decide to move forward. You've kind of stabilized things, get a little bit better, then something happens, then you hit what's called the insurmountable object. It's that point in every movie where it looks like there's no way the hero can win.
I stabilize my business a little bit. I go to the mailbox and I open my mail, and I get this letter from the IRS that says you owe us nine hundred and eighty-three thousand dollars. Now I just stabilized my business, the government's telling me I have all this money that I owe them, I don't have it. There's no way, right? That moment right there is the most compelling part of any story. That's where ultimate identification happens. That's where people are like, they're in it with you, right? They want to know how you got out of it. And at that moment, if you can, this is really where you can implant a pivot, a moment and a thought that people will say, I get it.
So I want to tell my story at that moment. I'll say, I didn't know what to do, but I remember we were there going through all of our accounting and figuring all this stuff out, and I saw this one day, there's one thing I felt so stupid, it had been there all along. And if I'm, when we go to this part I'm going to doll it up and make it a little bit sexier, I saw this, the invoice for this company called Arcamax. It was a newsletter publishing company, and in the years of 2008 and 2009, both years, I paid these guys thirty thousand dollars for ads. Now I don't have any customers that have ever paid me thirty thousand dollars. My businesses go through ups and downs and whatever, but this company, each and every year, I just kept giving the money. You know what I realized? When you transform your business to the source of traffic, when your business transforms to the source of traffic, then you instantly create a never-ending cash machine. See, when you become the source of traffic, everyone needs you, right?
And so we have some simple little thing happen that's like, oh, now I get it, I get it. And you explain, when this happens, all these great things happen, boom, now you've kind of installed a new little belief, a new idea in them. Then, if you want to really get this up, you artfully kind of play with it so it's badass, and then it's the best idea they've ever had. Does this make sense? About that moment, something almost insurmountable happens, and everyone has a story, which is awesome, and either someone, you know, some thought comes to your mind, or something you see gives you a solution, and it's ultimately what saves the day. You taking that action, and that solution is what saves the day.
Then the last part is just the reward, and the reward is just you coming back and telling the story. If I had just known about this before, if I had just thought about this thing this way before, my life would have been totally different. So that's why, when I share with you tomorrow how to create instant 100% commissions just like I do, it's going to be the day that changes your life. You see, so if we tell the story like this, and it comes to that moment, all they want is whatever that thing is. This cool, we'll go a couple questions and I'll go through this last part. Is that okay? Is this good? Okay, all right, you're hypnotized. Hell yeah, all right, give me money, everyone give me money, give me money, just throw it out, everyone throw their credit cards down here, I can process the orders. Just kidding. What do we got? We'll just go for two or two to four questions and then I'll move on to the last part.
Yeah, hi. Yeah, Dagan Ross, Lincoln, from Brisbane, Australia. Yeah, I really appreciate that, that's a great methodology there. Can I just ask, say you're building a list fairly rapidly, and you've got, you know, just high hundreds, few thousand people on your list, how would you recreate that again a little bit down the track when you've got more people that missed out on that daily email sequence?
So when I tell the story I'll just attach yesterday's episode. So today is this part of the story, yesterday happened, and here's yesterday's episode. So by day seven, it's whatever happens on day seven, the end of the story, with the invitation to do whatever I want to do, and all the other six episodes below.
Okay, but say a month, two months time, rather than retelling the story to your whole list again, how would you work that?
You're making things more complicated than they need to be. Just do it, honestly. Just do it, and then when you want to redo it, just do it again. Okay, it's literally what you do.
Quick question, on the sale along the way, I think it's a five day email process, just want to make sure that I understand, you want to even say anything about the offer, that your life will become better, during the first, second, third, and fourth day, or you want to wait to do that on the fifth day, they never even know what it is?
So that's a great question. For a long time I would write sales letters and write all this copy and stuff, and we're always starting at around two or three, but you got like thirty. And it would always get awkward for me at that moment where I had to go from my story to saying, here's why I created this cool thing. So if I could take the story stuff and make it about a concept, as opposed to whatever I might have to offer, then a concept is easier for a person to consume and want than to join me in any business. If I can get people to understand and believe that having their own products is like the coolest thing in the world, and that if they don't even have to create those products it's even better, that's what they want. And then all I have to do is say, well, here's where to get it. But it has nothing to do with saying Empower Network or anything else. It's just the idea, and then Empower Network is like the door to get in.
Yep, I like to romance. So, yes, ma'am.
The end of the story. So you realize that you've paid this company, you want to know, you want to know, go on.
Tell the end of the story. See, this is good, this is another good lesson. If you open loops, so this is an open loop for her, she's like, I need to know. You don't ever have to close them.
People just keep paying attention. I always pay attention anyway. Can we end the story? Maybe later, maybe later.
So it's okay to do this. There's no right or wrong. You can't break this stuff. It's just cool stuff that gets results. All right.
So here's the last. Hey, Dagan, it's Dee. Oh, we got one more. What's up?
What's up? I didn't want to ask a question, I told you last night I'm not really into that. I just wanted to say thank you.
Because the basis of the storytelling is something, when you met me last night, you were like, what's your story? I was like, I'm just his wife, like, that's all I knew. So to be able to see it broken down, for me, I don't look at it in the business terms.
I just look at it like, how can I use it in my daily life? Yeah, so to be able to recognize that you really do have a story, and there is a process of telling it, and maybe I'm not going to market it, but it can help me, you know, advance myself to the type of person that I want to be. So I just wanted to thank you for sharing it.
You're welcome, you're welcome. And there's one thing I want to make sure I say to everyone. You don't have to have big results or anything like that in order for the stuff to be successful, or for you to use it in a very persuasive way. I've been doing small workshops where I've been teaching this stuff.
And one of the most compelling stories that we had out of the entire, now we had, you know, guys that were making tens of millions of dollars a year coming to this deal, and people that were just starting. And one of the most compelling stories was this woman that moved to a different state to start her life over after a failed marriage. And thinking that as a teacher she could get a new job, not finding a job, and ending up having to work at McDonald's. And then finding internet marketing.
And just putting in her two-week notice because she's not going to work at McDonald's anymore. You know, so that sort of realization of just, here's how I'm coming out of my situation, is just as compelling to most people as here's all these big results. My life sucks, you know, I'm not happy about it, I'm working at McDonald's.
But I'm doing it to pay the bills. Meanwhile, I find the internet and I start playing around.
And I realize once I start using paid traffic, here's what happens the first time I did it, and you have to understand that for me that's a ton of money. Now that I finally get it, there's all these great ideas that come to mind, every single month. And right now, I'm proud to share with you, I just put in my two weeks notice at McDonald's, I've found my way out of this scenario.
Inspiring, right? So your story doesn't have to be king of all kings to be really compelling. All right, so here's the last piece of this deal, story selling. Basically, if you want to have the most impact, and this is advanced stuff, so I don't expect you guys to just get this and do this, but I wanted to share it real quick.
This is a secret. Should I even tell them the secret, or just leave it here and let them figure it out? All right, all right, we're done. Yeah, you can do that.
You want to go do that? This is their show, they can be as devious, you guys can be as devious as you want, to the edge of your seats. And so right here, this is the most impactful moment.
And this is just magnifying that impactful moment. And so we start our story in a place of extreme high drama. Objective, an insurmountable objective, or whatever you call it, we come to this moment of epiphany, something happens, we don't share it, we say, I'm going to, before I tell you the one thing that changed everything for me, let me tell you a little bit of my backstory, so you can see why this was so big. So then you step back, you share the problem, the big wall of a problem you're having, that you can't get over, under, around, or through. And then you come back.
And you share that one thing that obliterates the wall. And now your audience says, oh, I get it. So now they can have that moment of epiphany with you. From there, you basically just share your idea explosion. Man, when I have this, when I start doing this, all this, this is going to happen, that's going to happen, I'm not going to have this problem anymore, I'm going to be able to go on this vacation, all the exciting things that come to mind.
Ultimately, when we have a new good idea, we also still have that negative, the negative guy on our shoulder saying, but yeah, what if this is like everything else? So even though we have the conception of a great idea, our hero has to ultimately choose to say yes. You say yes, you choose, and you have to share that moment, because that's what led them into this whole deal. Then you just share the first sign of success.
After I had this idea, I chose to do it, I went home and I did this, and then this happens, and it was different than before. Now they know it's going to fly. They know what it's going to feel like to have that same moment. Progress, things continue to get better. You share case studies, but you guys got a million freaking case studies.
I was thinking about this thing right here as I was listening to all the stories yesterday. If you share case studies after progress, what that does is it detaches the simple concept or idea from you or from me, and makes it the valuable thing. If I tell you that running co-ops as a network marketer is going to create duplication in your business, and I share my story of how that actually created a lot of duplication, you'll say, yeah, that's cool, and I get it, and maybe I should. But if I share a bunch of case studies with other people who also use the exact same process, now all of a sudden it's not me or them, it's the idea.
Does this make sense? So everyone's starting to get 100% commissions, and you see, it's not me, it's not them, it's literally just this idea. You've got to latch onto it, too, right?
Case studies, then you move to benefits behind the benefits. So if I share with you all the cool reasons why you should be getting 100% commissions, that are surface level, what will happen is everyone will say, yeah, I get that, and they'll feel like they're smart, too. So if we take it a level deeper, and we say, but here's a couple of things you never even thought about.
And they're things that are ultimately a higher level, more badass than they ever could have thought about, getting 100% commissions, in this example. All of a sudden this idea is like, holy shit, this is the best thing ever. But because people are people, what happens at that moment is they start going, yeah, but, right? The objections come up. And so this is where you handle those objections, and turn them, if you can, transform them into reasons why they need to do what you're doing anyway.
So if you can tell a couple stories about people who have had, yeah but, you know Dagan, with my co-op example, this is easy because I've used this one a lot, yeah but I don't have anyone on my team so I can't run co-ops.
Does anyone here not know what a co-op is, as I say this? A co-op is just when people pull their money together and advertise as a team, right? Yeah but I don't have anyone on my team Dagan, so how can I do a co-op? Well, this is exactly why, if you don't have anyone on your team, that's exactly why you should learn to run co-ops, because as soon as you know how, you can go to your upline, or your upline's upline, and say, I know how to run co-ops, would you like me to do one? Ultimately someone's going to say yes, and when that happens, what you've just done is you've created a path for yourself to either pay yourself in leads, or literally just get a commission.
Yeah, charge 10%. So just having this skill alone is your doorway into being successful in business. It's more powerful, it's more valuable than anything else. It is the asset, right? So if we can transform an objection into a powerful asset, they're in at that moment.
No one can not be in. Allude to some ultimate solution, so we're doing this, so things are awesome, but there's something that I didn't share with you, right? Like that little twist. Before I share with you something that you won't believe, let me make sure you don't make the mistakes I made before I knew how to get 100% commissions. So go through some mistakes that people would normally make, then you come back here and you share the surprise, which might be, if I was to do this for Empower Network, it would be, having your own product would be the idea.
Right here the surprise would be, remember all that stuff and all those stories I told you? What I didn't tell you is none of those products were mine, and I still made all the money. Imagine if that happened for you. When I show you tomorrow how to have that happen, it's going to be the best day of your life. Look for the email in the morning where I give you your invitation, and then people are like, all they want to do is get that invitation.
Cool? So this is email story selling, and again, I don't expect you guys to just get that off the back, but it is a cool idea and you guys can play with it as you like. First of all, thank you. What you're saying is awesome because I've never heard somebody break down storytelling like this, and really the art of telling stories. So thank you for what you're putting out here right now.
But where did you learn this? I'm really curious about that. I don't know if you came up with it, or if this is something you learned somewhere, just because, you know, I'm curious about that. I told you in 2003 or 2004 I became an internet marketing expert. How did you learn all this?
What was the story? This all comes from reading tons of books, adding marketing ideas. I could tell you that the benefits behind the benefits part came from learning something from Rich Schefren, right? But this story right here came from reading a book called The Writer's Journey, right? And then reading a couple other books about storytelling.
So everything came from different places, and then it was figuring out, after writing a bunch of sales letters and figuring out why it wasn't right, and getting that I can just get people to believe in a concept, then it makes selling superfluous, because we'll just create instant desire, they'll say, I want that, I want to do co-ops now, because it's going to give me that big result or whatever it is that they wanted. So whenever I do introduce what I have as a resource, it's like they've been waiting for it all day. Having that was really what let me put all these pieces into place for me, so I think hard and I think a lot, and that's where this came from.
Hey guys, give Dave a hand for how he thinks. He gave me a book when we were in Vegas together about the drawing thing, remember? And I don't know if this was a result of you wanting to sketch things out, but I think it's cool to point out that you are the analytical type that likes to go out and read and stuff, and I know that one of the most recent books that you read was that little drawing book, about how to help people understand things through pictures, and I don't know if that's why you did that, but I'm interested if that's why you drew everything out, to help people get visual.
Yeah, I mean the visual storytelling, it's been around since humans have been around. Yeah, and especially when you teach groups of people, it's not, if I just sit here and I try to tell you what I told you, it's probably too quick for you guys to even get all this right now, but if I just try to tell this to you, it wouldn't make any sense. But if I can give a certain construct, and you can visualize it, now it makes sense.
Yeah, now I can see that telling a story is just like walking down a road to a pot of gold, right? So that's another thing to point out, is that one thing that I noticed Dagan do while he was teaching, and, like, for example, if Dagan had obviously made an offer right now, he was cool enough to come down here and just teach, but if he had made an offer, obviously he gave so much value and everybody understood it so well that I know I would have bought, right? But what I was doing was watching how he, and I still, I know I might just send you something, but what I was noticing is that everybody learns differently, so he was verbal and visual there, and letting, and kind of painting it out for people. Has anybody ever seen the people who kind of write things out and draw things on the internet? It's super compelling, even if it's scribbled. So I don't know if you guys picked that up, but it was super compelling, and I understood what you were saying better because you had pictures of it.
Cool, so the book is called Back of the Napkin, have you read it? Yeah, I'm reading it, actually was reading it on the way down here. Yeah, there's a lot of info in it, but I mean the bottom line concept is what I just said, which is it's so much easier to understand something when you can see it. Yeah, it's just about visual problem solving, and what I found after reading it and starting to apply it is it's one of those things that I wish I learned like in the third grade, because you start to see and work through issues in a totally different context. Yeah, you can use pictures and images to find novel solutions in ways that you can't with writing in a journal, or talking to your head. Yeah, so it's just a really valuable sort of skill to use for yourself if you want to.
Yeah, I found it helpful, guys. So give them one more huge round of applause. Great, so I want to point something out, I just got to be the bearer of just kind of bad news here for a second. There's a lot of video cameras going on here, I want to make sure you guys are happy to be here, and we'll see you guys next time. Guys, use those responsibly, they're not, you can't use them for marketing, because of course you know, we're turning this into a product and selling it, you guys don't have the ability to be able to resell that. So just a side note, you guys are all super badass and I know you'll totally be cool with that, but I just wanted to say it out loud.
We're going to break for lunch. Do you have any final thoughts, D, before we go? No, I'm good, I'm good, I liked it. So that was some badass stuff, so thank you for coming down, Dagan, appreciate you. Yeah, so guys, in an hour we're sharing the secret, exactly then, and so anybody who's late, you'll have to miss out and go come to the next retreat. Hey guys, great morning, make some noise.
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