Your weekly disruption

For the last few newsletters we have brought to life the Superior Integrated Way. This culminated last week with the blog: ‘Challenges to Effective Execution’.

A key component of this is the ability of Salespeople to sell stories – to guide the sales force through the detailed execution plans. Equally Customer Selling Stories are developed to facilitate communication between the sales force and the customer to create buy-in and understanding. Like we did with the Superior Integrated Way we will take a deep dive into the world of Storytelling as we believe it is such a powerful way for Salespeople to obtain rapport, credibility, influence and value.

One Sales Manager told us that the top 20% of her staff were natural storytellers. She said, “imagine how our sales could be if we helped the next 20 or 30%. We know that the very best sellers are storytellers. We also know that the very best sellers get their prospects to share their own stories. The third piece of the storytelling puzzle is how to trigger stories that the prospect will tell about you and your company.

Sales has changed a lot in recent times. Back in the day, you were focused on just selling a product. You described its features and showed how it was superior to your competitors’ wares. It was a transaction. Now, our customers know more about the prospect than the seller because they can research it on the web. The power has shifted.

Selling solutions is now an established approach in sales. But it has come at a cost. Many salespeople are just not doing well at it. The research firm CEB has shown that the gap between average-performing salespeople and star performers is close to 200% for solution sales, while it is only 59% for transaction sales.

There is a valuable opportunity here for companies to help their average performers improve their skills and close this gap. The opportunity is made even greater by the fact that sales is no longer the exclusive domain of professional sellers. As Dan Pink argues convincingly in To Sell Is Human, we are now all salespeople because of the massive shift towards small entrepreneurial companies.

People buy from people. Specifically, they buy from people they like and trust. This is especially true of large, complex sales. The buyer wants to understand the seller’s motives, to know if they’re there to help the buyer or just for the money. They want evidence that the seller cares that they can be trusted. The strongest indication of this comes from what the seller does – their actions. But the next-best way of getting this evidence is to hear the seller’s stories.

Buying is, after all, emotional. We all like to think that decision-making is a rational process, but research shows that we can’t make a decision without emotion.

Also remember that it’s one thing to assert that your product or service is successful, but buyers really only believe it when they see it happening. Success stories that are specific, visual and memorable not only influence whoever you are speaking to, but provide the information in a format a person can easily repeat to whoever else needs to be influenced inside the organization.