Story-selling can help you more powerfully connect with your prospects.
Everyone loves a good story, whether we’re telling our children one or reading the newest thriller. And, today, storytelling (or, more accurately, story-selling) is the silver bullet your organization may be missing to help your sales thrive.
Stories make your sale more memorable
According to Quantified Communications, research shows that messages delivered as stories can be up to 22 times more memorable than just facts. Story-selling advocates selling through the power of narratives. With story-selling, you can more powerfully and memorably connect with your prospects—for bigger and better deals.
Tips for using story-selling to improve sales:
- Humanize your brand. Good stories make a brand come alive. Think of HP’s garage being the birthplace of Silicon Valley, for example. Use a good story about your company to connect with your customer and help them better understand and trust your brand. One of our clients, DataEndure, used their rebranding as an opportunity to tell their new story, one that they positioned around their differentiation in security. As their client base cared deeply about security, Sales could better tell a story that helped prospects to connect.
- Hit them where it hurts. Empathy is crucial to good story-selling. You need to know what matters to your client, so you can then re-package that information and give it back to them in a story format. And when they hear their own troubles in the form of your story? That’s when you get an excited, active listener—and, potentially, a future customer. And by combining facts with your narrative, you can appeal to both logic and emotion, making your story-sell especially compelling.
- Disown your disempowering stories. Part of story-selling is what you tell yourself, so don’t let it be an excuse. Think of the story you tell yourself about your sales capabilities and your potential, as a pair of eyeglasses. The more negative stories you tell yourself, the cloudier the glasses get, until the picture you see of the world is significantly distorted, if you see anything at all. For more on this, check out this post by Anthony Iannarino.
The takeaways
By selling with stories and disowning the stories keeping them down, sales execs can establish deeper, more powerful connections with their prospects. With these deeper connections come improved perceptions of your brand, more memorable sales conversations, and a higher probability of making a sale. Isn’t it time to see the difference story-selling could have in your organization?