28 How to Use Storytelling to Sell

How to Use Storytelling to Sell

Welcome back. This week we're gonna be talking about the power of stories and how using stories in your sales process will compel your prospects to want to work with you.

I like this quote.

Great salespeople don't do different things. They do things, differently.

What do I mean by that? Well, when you look at the top salespeople, you watch what they do, there's nothing really too magical about the mechanics and the process that they follow. You can emulate it, you can codify it, you can write it down, you can even train in it.

But to bring it to its true value, what those great rainmakers do is they apply an art form to that mechanical process to the science of sales. They add theater performance. So sales is no longer a process. It is pure theater and in engaging with the client, they harness the power of the emotional connection and engagement and they inspire and compel clients to go forward.

 They don't give sales presentations, they conjure up sales performances.

I've sat in so many sales presentations where the salesperson is going through their pitch deck, their presentations, their PowerPoint slides with bullets. Don't use bullets. Bullets kill people, PowerPoint presentations. Endless PowerPoint presentations  are also very damaging.

I'm not against PowerPoint presentations, but PowerPoint was originally designed to  convey the power of story. If you actually look at your PowerPoint, you can set it up so that the titles of each slide will appear on the left hand side in the PowerPoint application. The idea was, is the headline of the PowerPoint would be the description of what was on that page.

And if you  just read those points it would reveal a story, a story arc, and an outcome, and a call to action. Sadly, many people just try and overload things on PowerPoints and just go through that deck by rote and it's mind numbingly boring. your clients switch off, start looking at their phones, start thinking about other things.

 If you are gonna do  a powerPoint presentation, I would advocate stopping the PowerPoint, stepping forward or speaking, turning the PowerPoint slides off, and then getting into the art of conveying a powerful story to underpin the benefits of your service, how it will help your client, and how it will transform their business and future going forward.

Storytelling is a  very powerful art form and you need it in your portfolio. And I go back to my initial training. Let's talk about it. Storytelling. We all tell stories. I come from the UK and one of the things that I miss most about being in the UK is the

the culture where we would go down the pub and we would tell jokes. Those jokes could be very, very long. Some jokes they could take 10, 15 minutes, but it was the way in which those jokes were told, the theater, the emotion, the laughter that got everybody engaged. So we've all got some innate storytelling capability.

You tell stories to your kids, for example, you read them stories and you can see how it engages them.

my first job as a salesperson was back in the UK and I was a medical rep and I'd had lots of training, or it was an eight week, nine week training to learn the products that I was about to sell to general practitioners.

My product line was a series of antidepressants. So I would learn about the pathology of that disease, how it manifested itself, and the mechanics, the chemistry of how that drug would inhibit the uptake of neurotransmitters so it would increase the amount of neurotransmitters in the brain and it would increase the amount of activity and it would elevate mood. So there was a science behind it and I had some charts and some graphics that we would, we would call it detailing. You'd go in and see a doctor and you'd probably have five to 10 minutes, and your mission was to detail three products. And the antidepressant was the first product, and then he'd have a secondary product and the third product to be able to get through.

 I was very versed in all of the features and the chemistry, and I would sit with the gps. And asked them at the end of it,  if, if they would try it on some of their patients. That was the call to action.

I had a, a boss, his name was John, John Denton and in those days they would meet up with you on your route somewhere, usually on the first call of the day and travel with you and you'd have windshield time.

Sadly. very few salespeople get windshield time with mentors. Where have all the sales mentors gone?  Hopefully I can be your sales mentor, at least give you some insights from my 40 odd year career in sales.

 Back then John would come out with me. He would sit in the call, he would watch the call, and then we'd sit back down in the car. And we would debrief and he said you clearly know the product, but that that GP general practitioner is not gonna prescribe the product in all likelihood.

You didn't really convince him. You didn't compel him.

You need to tell some stories. And I didn't quite understand. This is said, yeah, you need  to paint patient pictures so when that person comes into the surgery, they're immediately gonna be thinking about you and the product that you detailed.

So he went through a few role plays. I would advocate very, very strongly that you do role-playing every day to be able to tell your stories and to be able to overcome objections, that's for another day.

We can do some role playing and we'll build your skills.  Sales skills are like muscles.

You can't just go on a sales training course and think you've handled it unless you practice it every day and you reinforce those skills. But anyway, I digress.

We're on the subject of storytelling. So I would walk into  the surgery and I would describe to the doctor:

Well, doctor, our product treats depression and the kind of patient you've seen them. They come in very, very slowly. They shuffle in, they drop down into a heap in the chair, and they. speak very, very slowly. They tell you that they're listless and that their life doesn't have meaning and they're feeling very down. They don't have any friends. And the other thing is, this is the fourth time that you've seen them.

You've tried giving them other products, but they haven't worked and they keep coming back and, and coming back to your surgery, and you are getting frustrated that you can't solve their problem. So when that person comes in,  try this product. And it will elevate their mood. It will give them joy, it will give them purpose. It will allow them to come out of that fog of depression and start reaching out to people, making connections and being whole, feeling connected with humanity again, and they won't be coming back because they're, they're healthy and they've been treated.

Now what happens is, is when that type of patient walks in they think about That picture.  The brain saves pictures.

The brain doesn't save data about the efficacy of that antidepressant. It doesn't save the details about the half-life of that drug in the bloodstream. It doesn't tell you which neurotransmitters it's gonna be acting on, dopamine, serotonin. It doesn't talk about the mechanism.

They just see, oh, I see that picture that Mick was talking about, that's the patient he was talking about. They're sitting there right in front of me. I must prescribe this product.

Once the patient had been prescribed that antidepressant, they would go to the local pharmacy. My job was to make that sure that the local pharmacy stocked the product. I would also go and meet with the consultant who dealt with the more challenging patients in the hospital and, and talk to them so that when a patient was referred by a doctor, they also would have this compelling image of the type of person we could serve and, and make sure that that community of people understood the product.

 The pharmaceutical company would know how many prescriptions were written for that product and you can see the timeframe. They could even track it to the individual  GP. So they would know and would give me a report every month about my sales performance. And once I started mastering the art of  storytelling, I wasn't doing different things.

I was still detailing product A, product B. Product c I was still making sure that I, highlighted the requirements right? As a medical representative, I had to make sure that I have to list the side effects, here are some of the people that it's not,  indicated for. Here are some of the conditions that it won't work for.

So you've gotta make sure that you are compliant with all of those things. So you follow the the process and you detailed the products.

I was doing the same things that the other reps were doing, but I was doing it, differently.

 Let's take a moment now to put together some simple structure you can use to build your sales stories.

The great Greek philosopher Aristotle had a structure for putting together a good story or good speech, and he said he had three components:

logos, ethos and pathos.

So logos is the logic. It is the data and the words that you would use.

Ethos is your credibility, your,  moral standing, your character and

Pathos is the empathy, the sympathy that you would bring, the emotion that you would bring to the story. So when you're telling a sales story, you want to convey that you can help your prospect  and you create some kind of transformation, some kind of journey.

An example would be if  I can help roofing companies improve their overall profitability. They would ask me, how do you do that.

So well I was working with a roofing contractor on the west coast, been in business for, , 20 years. He'd entered the family, learned the business. He didn't really want to go into the roofing business, but they needed him and his skills to be able to take the company to the next level. And he shared with me, Mick,  I really don't like being in this business. I find it very stressful on a day-to-day basis because,  I'm always worried about cash flow.

We're getting bigger and bigger, but I don't seem to be making any more money. In fact, on a daily basis, I have to decide who I'm not gonna pay -one of my employees or one of my suppliers to get materials in it. It's very, very difficult. So what I did was I worked with him over a period of 12 months to put in the systems and disciplines to enable him to

get the right clients who paid more quickly at higher margins, and we were able to free up a million dollars in cash, $1 million of cash, which enabled him to pay down debt. Got predictable cash flow, day-to-day operations of the business were very, very successful and he started enjoying his work and had a much more profitable and enduring company.

You can see from that story I'm painting a picture of somebody that the prospect might be able to identify with growing business struggling with cash, family, multi-generational, not feeling accomplished. , really wanted to get outta the business and the transformation to an easier way of working, more relaxed, more credible, more disciplined business with systems to underpin cash flow no longer a problem.

 If your client has a  cash flow problem, you can tell that particular story and it conveys a much more emotional message. I could have started with. Yes we work with, companies, and on average, we save them $500,000 in profitability and we improve their cash flow by $750,000 in working with them over a 12 month period.

It's factually true. There's a lot of logos in there, a lot of logic, a lot of data, but there's no emotional ethos associated with it that would compel that prospect to engage with you and to truly understand  the problems that they're dealing with.

So what I want you to do is, and you only need

two or three key stories that you can tell, and you can tell them again and again. And the more that you tell 'em, it's like a great joke. The more that you tell that joke, the more emotional, the more invested you get into it and the more powerful the delivery.

So I want to take, um, two or three customer success stories that you've had, problems that you have dealt with and turn them into a story.  You describe the starting point. They give them a few data points, not too many. And you describe that emotional translation,  transformation and the impact that it has so that  you are communicating, you are saying to your prospect, we can do the same thing to you.

And that subliminal transfer, that experience is gonna add,  credibility is gonna create a compelling desire on your prospect to want that same kind of outcome.

So storytelling. Got to be be part of your arsenal. Got to  be something that you practice.

You only need two or three stories. Build those emotional stories, case studies into your arsenal and use them in every sales situation. Have fun with that.

You've got any questions, you can always reach out to me.

Well, we've come to the end of another great episode. Hope you enjoyed that.  Please, if you enjoyed the show, go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review.

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