Episode #137: Storytelling In Sales For Fun and Profit

Salespeople are brilliant on telling the client the detail of the product or service. When you think about how we train salespeople, that is a very natural outcome. Product knowledge is drummed into the heads of salespeople when they first join the company. The product or service lines are updated at some point, so again the product knowledge component of the training reigns supreme. No wonder they default to waxing lyrical about the spec. These discussions however, tend to be technical, dry, unemotional and rather boring. We know we buy on emotion and justify with logic. If we know that, then why are we spending so much time on the logic bits?

Finding relevant stories to wrap the product or service up inside is the answer to getting clients emotionally involved. For example, I could say, “Dale Carnegie has an excellent sales programme that is very complete and comprehensive”. All true but very dry in the telling. Or I could say, “In 1939 Dale Carnegie decided to revolutionise sale straining. In those days, if your company provided sales training you were trained but if they didn’t, you had to work it all out for yourself. Dale Carnegie introduced the first public training classes for salespeople. He created the material with Percy Whiting, one of the top securities salesmen in America at that time”.

The second telling is a story and more engaging. It adds impressive elements about Dale Carnegie’s thought leadership about sales training, his partnership with an expert salesman to create the programme and the longevity of the training methodology. These are all USPs or unique selling propositions wrapped together in a story. In this way they are more easily absorbed by the listener. We think in pictures, so we need word pictures to be employed in our storytelling.

When we read books we tend to best remember the stories being told. We all grow up listening to stories so our brains are hard wired to remember them with just one exposure. A famous American sales trainer Charlie Cullen in the 1950s was one of the first to record his sales training on vinyl LPs. His recommendations on what salespeople should do, were all backed up by examples conveyed through stories.

In more modern times, Zig Ziglar’s whole approach to sales training was telling a series of parables for sales. Growing up in America’s Bible Belt, perhaps lessons communicated through parables came natural to him because of the culture of bible study in those regions. Brian Tracy, another great sales trainer is constantly mixing science and psychology with story telling to get his point across. Gary Vaynerchuk the modern marketing guru is a master story teller. They are almost exclusively about himself, but that is his style – supremely confident, self-opinionated, self-absorbed and constantly drawing on his own experience. He has a huge following of fans, including me. What he teaches is easy to follow because of the way he employs stories to get his key messages across.

So look into your line-up of products or services and pick out the stories that go with each item. It may come from the history. Or it may be the technology. It may be client stories about users and we relate what happened to them. We need to look for an angle that will make the story interesting for the buyer. It should bolster the USPs of the offering and project pots of value. We don’t necessarily need a Hollywood production here in the storytelling. It doesn't have to be War and Peace either. Let’s keep them brief and to the point. If we can engage the listener’s emotions and bring them into the story, then we are succeeding. This takes some work and some creativity. This is why it is often a good practice to involve everyone in the sales team to work together to brainstorm some great stories.

There is no doubt stories work. When I record my own sales talk I realise how many stories I am employing. When I listen to the gurus of sales training their whole underpinning platform is built on stories. They work, so let’s start creating them and using them with our buyers.