Recommendation

A good story transforms your sales pitch and selling relationships. Corporate trainer Paul Smith explains why stories matter and how to create great ones. He concludes each chapter with activities to help readers identify, draft, develop and practice their stories. No matter your industry, Smith offers helpful guidance to making your sales calls more personal so your customers see who you are, what you offer and why they should work with you. getAbstract recommends these concrete, applicable lessons to help all salespeople add vitality to their sales presentations.

Take-Aways

  • Stories create trust by building relationships based on shared human experiences.
  • Just the process of developing stories about why your sales calls matter can help you see the value of the client services you provide.
  • Stories that introduce you and your company, and that explain what you do and how you do it help build stronger relationships.
  • Elicit your client’s experiences, positive and negative.
  • The main sales pitch is at the heart of sales; five types of stories make it memorable.
  • Business stories feature a hero, an obstacle, struggles to overcome the obstacle and a concluding lesson.
  • Know what you want your audience to “think, feel or do” at the end of your story.
  • Stories differ from presentations, memos or reports, which address findings; stories focus on a conflict and provide a satisfying resolution.
  • A successful story makes your audience feel the drama of the conflict.
  • If you invent stories, make sure your audience understands which stories are real and which you create.

Summary

Stories Work

A good story has six facets: time, place, main character, a goal, an obstacle and events. Stories build trust by sharing situations that everyone could face: Problems occur and get solved with effort. Most people make decisions from the subconscious and emotional parts of their brains; stories target those areas by guiding people to identify with a situation. A story lets a client relax and understand the value you and your product offer by considering it in a different context. An original story is memorable and sparks clients to remember you and your product.

Stories to Tell Yourself

Making sales calls is difficult, so salespeople need strong self-motivation. Knowing why your sales calls matter can help you be aware of how much client service you provide. Consider a time when you significantly improved a customer’s experience through your efforts and thoughtfulness. How did the difficulty you solved originally arise? What did you do? How did you do it? What was the clients’ response when you presented the solution? Use this as your motivation story to remind yourself why your sales calls are about providing service.

Stories You Need

Stories that introduce you and your company, and that explain what you do and how you do it help build stronger relationships. You can invent a typical person in your industry and imagine the situations he or she encounters. Present this story from the client’s point of view to showcase how you help. Prepare the following seven stories about yourself and the company:

  1. “Why I do what I do” – For people to trust your product, they need to know why you are passionate about it. This reveals the kind of person you are.
  2. “I’ll tell you when I can’t help you” – Professional buyers also want to know when you can’t help them. This makes them trust you. Tell a client when you need to think about how you would solve a problem rather than automatically saying “I can do that!”
  3. “I’ll tell you when I made a mistake” – Build trust by sharing a story of how you made a mistake, told the client about it and fixed it.
  4. “I’ll go to bat for you” – You represent a product and company, and you support your clients. Recognize situations where you can lobby on their behalf.
  5. “I’m not who you think I am” – People hold stereotypes about salespeople, so becoming an individual to your customers is important. Identify the most obvious negative idea people might have of you and your industry. Look back on your experiences and find a moment when you manifested the opposite characteristic.
  6. “Your company’s founding story” – Humanize your company by talking about the founder, the need the founder identified and how the company grew. Don’t worry about telling what the company does since this story is about presenting its values and drive.
  7. “How we’re different from our competitors” – Most people don’t see a difference among companies offering similar products. Find a story that reveals how you are unique. Highlight that the owner or employees are members of a specialty group, have a particular work ethic, or provide special offerings or values for employees.

Relationships

Relationships develop in three stages. First, you get to know people. Then you have a chance to build rapport and confidence while working together. Finally, over the years, you establish “a lasting relationship and friendship.” Stories help you get there.

Listen to Client Stories

Elicit client experiences – both positive and negative. Don’t fill in every silence; to learn more about their concerns, “shut up and listen.” Make sure you avoid yes or no questions. Instead, develop open-ended questions that require the clients to tell their own stories. Ask when they knew they were facing a real problem. Ask about “specific events in time,” such as how they came to the industry or to their current jobs or how they lost or gained a valuable customer.

“Stories sell. And the people who can tell a good sales story sell more than people who can’t.”

“Day in the life” questions reveal information about clients, as well as about their staff and customers. Though many industries now limit socializing time, a visit to a manufacturing plant or connecting at industry conferences changes the context and allows new interactions to occur.

Sales Pitch Stories

The sales pitch is at the heart of sales. Prepare this menu of five stories to weave into your pitch:

  1. “Invention or discovery story” – Much like the founding story, this focuses on the specifics of a product. Avoid the standard corporate narrative. Instead, find a personal narrative, such as the story of the product’s inventor.
  2. “Problem story” – If your product solves a specific problem, describe customers who had that dilemma and solved it. Emphasize the difficulty and any associated problems the situation created, so your product or service stands out as a clear solution.
  3. “Customer success stories” – These are not testimonials, wherein customers declare their loyalty and appreciation of the product. Instead they show potential clients how actual customers in similar situations found resolution by using your product. Make videos of clients describing their experience and share them with potential clients.
  4. “Two-roads stories” – This type of story cites a past client who experienced both a problem story and a success story. This highlights the utility of your product.
  5. “Value-adding stories” – These stories improve the appeal of the product by showing some unusual, unique or unexpected benefit.

Closing the Sale

Don’t let customers delay closing. Tell a story about clients who stalled and lost an opportunity or experienced a difficulty because they didn’t have your product. Ask established customers about the moment they knew your product was a success and how that made them feel. Use that story to help undecided clients realize why they must close soon.

Elements of a Great Story

Business stories need a hero, an obstacle, struggles to overcome the obstacle and a concluding lesson. Include the following “four foundational elements of an effective sales story”:

  1. “A worthy lesson” – Identify the lesson the story imparts and ensure its suitability. A simply entertaining story isn’t enough to create a sales reaction. Your client needs to draw a relevant lesson from the story.
  2. “A relatable hero” – The hero of a business story doesn’t wear a cape and save the world. The hero is someone similar to your audience members. They should relate to the hero so they can put themselves in his or her situation and draw the lesson from his or her actions. They will remember the story if they relate to it. If you create a hero who is too dazzling, the audience won’t relate.
  3. “A relevant challenge” – In sales stories, the challenge is often a competitor or a business situation. Highlight the obstacles so your audience sees the challenge the hero overcame. Simply saying that a situation was bad and the hero showed up and made it good doesn’t illuminate the challenge; it even implies that the hero was just lucky. The challenge should guide the audience to see why the hero is heroic.
  4. “An honest struggle” – The hero has to overcome the challenge by making a distinct effort. If the hero needs a specific tool to complete the job on time and reaches into a toolbox and gets it, you may have a hero, an obstacle and a lesson, but the lack of struggle makes the story unsatisfying. If the struggle is internal, describe the mental narrative with which the hero has to deal.
“Three things make a great story: a hero we care about, a villain we’re afraid of and an epic struggle between them.”

Choosing the right story is important. Identify what you want your audience to “think, feel or do” at the end of your story. List the stories that might provide that lesson and set up how they should feel. Don’t just pick the first story you find. Dig for the best story, one you can tell convincingly.

Story Structure

Stories differ from presentations, memos or reports, which discuss findings; stories focus on a conflict and provide a satisfying resolution. A hook at the beginning creates interest by telling audience members why they should listen.

“Don’t introduce the story by giving away too many of the details, or the ending, or even the specific lesson.”

Provide a context for when and where the story happened, introduce the hero with enough details to make the audience care, and describe what the hero wants so the audience relates. Then present the challenge. To show conflict, describe attempts at overcoming the obstacle. Conflict, the most important part of the story, reveals the tension for which your product provides a resolution.

“All storytelling boils down to conflict, and without a resolution, a story is unfinished at best.”

Don’t overdo extraneous details; go straight into the action of the conflict. The resolution reveals what happened, but – significantly for a sales story – it shows how the audience should feel about the story. At the end, your clients should have the emotional response you want them to have.

Story Order

Sequence the “spine” of your story by moving through these seven elements:

  1. “I think the best example I’ve seen of that was…”
  2. “Back in…, at…, there was…, and they were trying to….”
  3. “Then, one day….”
  4. “So they…, and then…, and so they…”
  5. “Eventually…”
  6. “What I learned from that was…”
  7. “And that’s why I think you should…”
“Storytelling humanizes us and therefore creates more meaningful bonds.”

At the end of your story, explain the lesson and the action you recommend. Take the time to listen to questions, concerns and responses to understand what help your client needs to close the sale.

Elements of a Story

A successful story makes your audience members feel its drama. Describe your hero and challenge in a way that helps your audience understand and relate to them. Include surprises at the beginning, middle and end by incorporating flashbacks, skipping an element that the audience will deduce later or shifting a pivotal piece of information from the introduction to the end. For example, tell a story about a series of business mistakes someone made and, at the end, reveal that they’re your mistakes. Using dialogue keeps your story human.

Delivering the Best Story

Most adults speak about 150 words per minute. Good business stories often range from 450 to 750 words, so they usually take three to five minutes to tell. They can be shorter, too, but many stories start off longer. That’s why you want to edit your stories. After you draft a story, review each section to cut anything that doesn’t serve that section. Unlike a presentation or sales pitch script, a story should feel natural. Let it change with each telling so it remains authentic.

“Most people don’t think of their best stories as ‘stories.’ They think of them as events in their lives.”

People don’t speak the way they write. The patterns of speech are significantly more informal than polished written prose. Draft your story as if you were telling it orally – that is, in a more conversational style. Don’t hesitate to show uncertainty and collegial familiarity – “a few filler words, an unfinished sentence, short pauses” and perhaps “a repeated phrase” – because that’s how most people talk when telling stories.

Truth Matters

You can invent stories, but make sure you tell your audience which stories are real and which are inventions. Be accurate about the elements of the story that matter. Don’t change important details like the lesson or the resolution. Modifying or tweaking less important elements of the conflict or challenge is fine, because whether you called someone five times or nine isn’t vital to a story about your persistence. Aim for “accuracy,” not “precision,” so you can satisfy your clients and remain true to yourself.

About the Author

Paul Smith, who had a 20-year executive career with Procter & Gamble and, earlier, with Arthur Andersen, is a speaker and corporate trainer in storytelling techniques. He also wrote Lead with a Story and Parenting with a Story.

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