Episode #328: Avoiding The Single Dimension In Persuasion

I am constantly amazed at the lack of thinking about seizing opportunities for storytelling to be more persuasive in business. Most interactions are one dimensional. We want to buy something and the seller supplies it and that is the end of the transaction. This is particularly so in the retail environment. What is ironic is that vast swathes of products have huge budgets devoted to creating the story behind the product or service. Somehow it doesn’t leap across to infect the staff who are selling it. They just operate at the transactional level and don’t make any effort to go beyond that. Why would one part of the organisation be ploughing big money into storytelling at the marketing level and not be making use of that same effort at the point of purchase?

Mindset and training are obviously the issues. It is up to the company to work on the thinking of the staff and educate them why this is a gamechanger for the business. The people taking the dough off the buyer are not trained to think holistically about the brand or the business. Every company has amazing stories about the origins of the firm, the amazing clients they have served and the fantastic results they have secured. Sadly, they keep all of this stuff to themselves and we never hear about it. Let me prompt some re-thinking here.

Imagine when someone is making a retail enquiry, that the salesperson was well trained and able to go beyond telling the client they are “there to answer any questions they might have”. By the way, at least in Japan, there are staff there to serve you. With the green eye shade bean counting crew running riot in big Western retailers, there is always that constant search for finding someone to serve you or to answer a question. I was in Brisbane recently shopping at a major department store and there was stock everywhere on the floor and very people to process the sale. Anyway, the person serving can become a storyteller as well as a transactor.

They could approach you and say, “Thank you for shopping today and thanks to you and our other valued clients, we are celebrating out sixtieth year in business. If you have any questions, I am right here to answer them for you”. That simple additional statement adds credibility to what is being sold because it says this company has stood the test of time and as a consequence, must be reliable.

When explaining the good or service they can tell a brief story about the provenance of the solution. How did this solution come into existence, who was involved and when did it happen. There are so many rich stories tied up there and they are all known, but often not collected or promulgated.

In a B2B example, if a client was looking for sales training, we could just say we have various training courses available and then go through the detail. Or we could say, “the roots of our sales training stretch back to 1939 when Dale Carnegie had reached global fame with his best selling book How To Win Friends And Influence People and responded to requests for public training classes in sales. Prior to that time, if your company provided training you were looked after, otherwise you were on your own. Dale Carnegie really democratised the process and made it available for everyone. What we have today is the product of 80 plus years of experience, research and kaizen”. That little story takes about 25 seconds to tell, which means it is rich enough and compact enough to give the client a solid impression of our credibility as a supplier of sales training.

Buyers, be they retail or B2B want to know who they are dealing with. None of us want to make a mistake, so we are all looking for risk reduction. One of the most visited pages on our website is the section called “About Dale Carnegie Training”. People want to know the backstory.

Another common interest part of website is the “About Us” segment. We are all looking for reassurance that we are dealing with the right people and that these are people we can trust. So in our case, we have a section on the company, Frank Mochizuki who started the business in Japan, me as the President and then brief histories of our leadership, sales, presentations and communications core courses. We are telling stories to persuade buyers that they are making a good decision to buy from us. How about your website, what stories are you telling about your solutions?

This is the easy part of course and the hard part is training the team to both know the stories and to be able to communicate them concisely and powerfully in front of the buyer. We need to create the content and then the time to teach people what they can say. The key part is shifting gears away from a passive approach of serving, to a proactive approach of really serving the buyer, by going the extra mile to assure them you are a safe supplier they can trust.

This is a major mindset shift and if that is all that is achieved, it will still put you far in front of the competition. It is up to the firm of course, to do the backfill and give the team the tools and training to be more effective in their storytelling. The cost is minimal in the big scheme of things and the outputs will be disproportionate to the effort to organise the inputs.