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Over the last few weeks we have dug in deep into how storytelling complements the sales process.

Today we are going to look at how it influences arguably the most important step: the pitch. Over the past few months we’ve been helping a global property development firm put together pitches for several multi-million dollar opportunities. It’s been a great experience, and learning opportunity, to apply the power of storytelling to pitching big ideas.

Sales have changed a lot. Back when we were budding Sales Executives you were selling a product. You described its features and showed how it was superior to your competitors’ wares. But as Dan Pink argues convincingly in To Sell Is Human, now we are all salespeople because of the massive shift towards small entrepreneurial companies.

Selling solutions is now an established major trend in sales. But it has come at a cost. Many salespeople are just not doing well selling solutions. 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’s 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 value of using storytelling in sales situations is evident but it really works well when the stakes are high, such as in pitches of the aforementioned magnitude.

Here are some of the things we’ve learned. You might not end up pitching like Don Draper from the TV series Mad Men but it might make a difference.

This is about building connection and rapport

It helps if each person in the pitch team can weave into what they say, a small connection story that demonstrates who they are and why they care about the client outcomes. One example was in relation to a colleague of ours who put in a pitch for a University campus.

The designer had caught a taxi to listen to their brief for the design competition. He listened to it and was walking back to the taxi when he stopped to admire the campus.

“I was really taken by the beauty of the campus and the unique opportunity it provides for a really world class learning environment. I told the taxi to leave and spent the next three hours wandering the grounds, captivated by the opportunity it presented”.

Needless to say that the resultant pitch was full of colour and inspiration.