Donald Miller
Most companies cannot explain what they sell in a sentence a customer will repeat. Internal language creeps into external messaging, websites get cluttered, sales teams improvise, and the cost shows up in conversion rates and wasted media spend. The tension is not creative, it is operational: every day without a clear message is a day competitors look easier to buy from.
Donald Miller is the CEO of StoryBrand and the author of Building a StoryBrand, and he helps organisations rewrite how they talk about what they sell so customers actually buy.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Donald Miller
- He built the most widely adopted messaging framework in the market. Over a million business leaders have used the StoryBrand SB7 model, and companies including Chick-fil-A, Intel, TOMS Shoes, Tempur Sealy, and Trek Bicycles have applied it to live commercial work.
- He gives marketing and sales teams a shared vocabulary. The hero, guide, plan, and call-to-action structure gets a CMO, a founder, and a field rep aligned on the same customer story inside one session.
- He is a practitioner, not a consultant-at-a-distance. Miller runs StoryBrand, Business Made Simple, and Coach Builder, and the frameworks he teaches from stage are the ones his own companies run on.
- He translates narrative theory into revenue mechanics. The work connects story structure directly to website copy, sales emails, and lead generation assets that teams can ship the week after the keynote.
- He is a New York Times bestselling author whose books have stayed on the list collectively for more than a year, which means a room of senior marketers arrives already familiar with the thesis.
Biography highlights
- CEO of StoryBrand, Business Made Simple, and Coach Builder.
- Author of Building a StoryBrand (2017) and Building a StoryBrand 2.0 (HarperCollins Leadership, 2025).
- Author of Marketing Made Simple and How to Grow Your Small Business: A 6-Step Plan.
- New York Times bestselling author; books have sold millions of copies and spent more than a year on the list collectively.
- StoryBrand framework adopted by Chick-fil-A, Intel, TOMS Shoes, Trek Bicycles, Tempur Sealy, Pantene, Zaxby’s, and Ford/Lincoln.
- Earlier bestselling memoirs include Blue Like Jazz, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and Scary Close; Blue Like Jazz was adapted for film and premiered at SXSW.
Biography
Most companies talk about themselves when they should be talking about their customer. The StoryBrand framework, built by Donald Miller and laid out in Building a StoryBrand and its 2025 revision, forces that correction by borrowing the mechanics of narrative: a hero with a problem, a guide with a plan, a call to action, and stakes on both sides of the decision.
The framework is now standard equipment in growth teams. More than a million leaders have run their messaging through the SB7 model, and named companies including Chick-fil-A, Intel, TOMS Shoes, Trek Bicycles, and Tempur Sealy have used it on live commercial work. What distinguishes the approach is not the use of story as metaphor, it is that the output is operational: a BrandScript that rewrites a homepage, a sales email, and a lead magnet in the same language.
Miller runs the companies that teach it. He is CEO of StoryBrand, Business Made Simple, and Coach Builder, and the playbooks he takes to the stage are the ones his own businesses use to acquire customers. That closes the gap between theory and execution that most marketing speakers leave open.
Before StoryBrand, Miller wrote the New York Times bestsellers Blue Like Jazz, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and Scary Close. Blue Like Jazz was adapted for film and premiered at SXSW. The craft training those books represent is what makes the business work land: a CEO learning StoryBrand is being taught by someone who spent two decades writing narrative for general readers before applying it to commercial messaging.
Key speaking topics
- StoryBrand messaging framework
- Marketing and customer acquisition
- Sales communication and conversion
- Brand clarity
- Small business growth
- Narrative in commercial strategy
Ideal for
- CMOs, marketing directors, and brand leads responsible for messaging across a product or service portfolio
- Founders and CEOs of small and mid-sized businesses where the leader still owns the brand voice
- Sales leaders whose teams need a shared structure for prospect conversations and follow-up
- Agency and consulting networks who want a common framework across client engagements
Audience outcomes
- A working vocabulary, hero, guide, problem, plan, stakes, for diagnosing any piece of marketing that is not converting
- A clear view of why customer-centric messaging outperforms feature-led messaging in measurable sales terms
- Practical editing instincts that apply immediately to websites, email sequences, and sales scripts
- A shared internal language that aligns marketing, sales, and leadership on the same customer story
- Confidence to cut the clutter from existing brand assets rather than adding more of it
Talks
A working session on the StoryBrand SB7 framework and how to apply it to existing marketing assets.
Key takeaways:
- How to position the customer as the hero and the brand as the guide
- How to write a one-liner that a salesperson, a website, and a customer can all repeat
- How to audit a homepage, an email, and a sales deck against the same messaging spine
A keynote drawn from Miller’s six-step operating plan for small and mid-sized businesses.
Key takeaways:
- The six parts of a business that every owner needs to manage deliberately
- How to sequence leadership, marketing, sales, product, overhead, and cash
- Where growth stalls in businesses between one and twenty million in revenue, and what to fix first
A sales-focused session on narrative-driven written conversion.
Key takeaways:
- The structure of a follow-up sequence that moves prospects from interest to decision
- How to write subject lines and openers that get opened by senior buyers
- Where most sales teams lose deals in writing, and how to fix it