Every salesperson needs to learn how to tell and sell. Simply put, you need to know how to tell better stories to increase your sales numbers. I consider myself a storyteller, not a sales guy.
Why stories are a primary way of building trust in sales.
Sales professionals tend to rely on their data and slide decks far too much when they should be learning to tell stories of successful clients, of difficult scenarios their company has worked through, and of preferable futures their clients want to attain. That’s because stories are one of the primary ways human beings build trust between each other – and sales is all about building trust.
If you don’t learn to tell you won’t be able to sell.
Many times a sales presentation goes sideways when the slide deck is put away and all the stats and figures have already been said. That’s because the prospect throws out a scenario they foresee happening and asks the salesperson what their company would do in that situation. If the salesperson doesn’t know how to tell a compelling story about a time the company faced a similar problem and overcame in spite of the difficulties, they’re going to come across as too good to be true and inauthentic. The possibility of trust will be lost. Sales professionals need to have hundreds of company stories in their sales arsenal.
Do media and technology help us tell better sales stories?
It used to be that the only thing you had at your disposal to weave a compelling story was your own voice and ideas. But today we have so much more. Video, audio, images, animation – the list of potential tools we can use to tell good sales stories seems limitless. But we can become too dependent on a flashy new technology when what we really need is a better understanding of what makes a good story and how to tell it in a compelling way.
If you learn to tell a good story you can actually sell things for more.
There are stories circulating on the internet about virtually worthless items being sold on eBay and other marketplaces for thousands of dollars. What caused the buyer to imbue the worthless item with so much value? It was the story that accompanied the item. Situations like that show us that sometimes the value of a thing or service has more to do with the way the benefits of it are described and woven into a real life scenario by the salesperson. When people can picture the setting and feel the emotion of what it would be like to experience the product or service in action, the deal is sealed.
Garret Norris
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