CHAPTER 36

Are Your Stories Worth Repeating?

Your sales stories have to be memorable and worth repeating. This means that they have to be easy for someone to retell. How do you make that happen?

Let’s start with the story itself. You have to remember that the exclusive audience for your story is not the person to whom you initially tell it, even if that person is the final decision maker. Every sales story you tell has multiple audiences.

It is always possible that your customer is an autocratic organization with only one decision maker who doesn’t solicit input or advice before making a purchase. But it is far more likely that your customers are normal companies with multiple people and departments involved in identifying potential solutions, qualifying vendors, making recommendations, and reaching decisions. Some companies may have multiple layers of approval that need to occur before the final decision is made at the C-level. Whatever the situation, you want to make sure that everyone who participates in the decision-making process hears your stories.

You may only have one opportunity to tell a story, but that doesn’t mean that other people inside your customer’s organization don’t need to hear it. Your objective is to have your stories retold throughout your customer’s company.

The person most likely to initiate the telling and retelling of your stories throughout your customer’s organization will be your internal sales advocate(s). This is your sponsor—the person who believes that you have the solution that best meets the organization’s requirements and will work on your behalf to help colleagues arrive at the same conclusion. Most likely it was one of your sales stories that helped win the sale with this individual and convince him to act as your internal salesperson.

For your internal advocates to successfully work on your behalf, you have to give them the tools that make their job easy. Working internally they will have exactly the same challenge that you have when you sell. Their colleagues are busy with their own responsibilities, and they will likely not have the time to invest in becoming as familiar with all of the details of your product’s features and benefits as your advocate. And even if they did, dry facts and figures are not very interesting or memorable in the context of a competitive sales situation.

Your advocates have to be able to simply and easily communicate the value of your product, service, and company to multiple audiences throughout their organizations. The best and most effective advocacy tool you can provide them are your sales stories. What you hope is that these new audiences will in turn be moved to retell your stories to other internal audiences.

The more memorable your story, the more often it will be retold. When this happens, your value, features, benefits, and reputation invariably are amplified and solidified. This is the so-called telephone effect kicking in and working to your advantage.

What’s the telephone effect? When you were a young kid, do you remember playing the game called Telephone?

The rules were pretty simple. You and your friends sat on the floor in a big circle. One person started the game by whispering a short piece of gossip or fiction, usually something slanderous about one of the kids in the circle, into the ear of the kid sitting to his left. That kid in turn whispered what she had heard into the ear of the kid sitting to her left. And on and around the story traveled from ear to ear until the last kid to have heard the telephone message stood up and repeated what he thought he’d heard. What started out as, say, “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water” invariably turns into “Jill hijacked a pill truck with Gayle, her daughter.”

This same dynamic is in play with the stories and the presentations you tell your prospects. You need to harness the power of the telephone dynamic to your sales advantage. The value of your solution and the value it provided to the customer who was the subject of the story will be amplified as it is retold. This is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of winning the business. (In Chapter 39, I’ll show you how to manage customer expectations after you win the order.)

Think about the advantage that your internal advocate will enjoy compared to that of a competitor who doesn’t have sales stories to tell. Competitors’ advocates are left to show data sheets to colleagues. It takes the advocate longer to communicate the value of your competitor’s solutions, and the decision cycle for that product begins to lengthen and slow down.

However, armed with compelling stories, your value and credibility grow as your stories pass through multiple hands. With each retelling, one more person takes the mental test drive and envisions the value and benefits of using your product. A story compresses the amount of time required to communicate and understand your value proposition, shortening the decision cycle. That is the power of story.

So what can you do to increase the memorability of your stories?

Follow the four-question structure from the previous chapter. The key to repeatable stories is to make certain they follow a common structure that quickly answers the four simple questions in logical order. These questions should become your mantra. (In fact, it will become the common form you use during the discovery phase of your sales cycle to understand why your prospect made the decision to purchase the product or service that you are going to replace.)

   What problems were they trying to solve?

   Why was your expertise relevant to the problem they were trying to solve?

   Why did they select your company and product/service?

   What value did the customer receive from your product/service?

Use memorable detail to draw in the prospect. To make your stories more relatable and memorable, use characters with a name and include dialog. Don’t start a story by saying, “We have this customer who has used our product for two years and our main point of contact there is a big supporter of the system.” Instead say, “Kevin is VP of Finance at KJ Technologies and has been a customer for two years. When we first met, he said to me, ‘Andy, I’ve got a problem, and I saw that you helped my competitor.’” Details like these draw in listeners and get them to visualize themselves in the story. The dialog humanizes the story and makes it more real. It is no longer just you telling a random story. Kevin’s story resonates with your buyer, who is dealing with the same problem now.

If your current customer doesn’t want the company name used in the story, just omit it. Using the first name and title of your point of contact will be sufficient.

Practice, practice, practice. As the old joke goes, the only way to get to Carnegie Hall is to “Practice, man, practice!”

The same applies to your sales stories. How are you going to get to an order with your stories? Practice. Practice. Practice. You have to memorize and rehearse your stories so thoroughly that their telling becomes second nature to you.

To facilitate the memorization of your stories, as discussed in the previous chapter, write down all of your sales stories just as you would tell them, using complete sentences.

Then memorize them word for word. Don’t sort of memorize them or treat them as bullet points to guide you. Telling a story is not the moment for improvisation. This is one of the most powerful tools you have to communicate your value to a customer. Don’t wing it. Be prepared.

Once they are memorized, rehearse your stories in front of your colleagues. Every week in your sales meeting, set aside a few minutes to stand up in front of your peers and rehearse your presentation. Have someone record you on a smartphone so you can study your telling of the story and improve your presentation.

Why is it so important to memorize and rehearse your stories?

First, you have to keep them short to increase their impact. If you have a story that is 120 words long and takes 45 seconds to tell, it will always be that length if you memorize and retell it word for word. However, if you just treat the script as a guideline you will turn a 45-second story into a five-minute epic as you add extraneous and unnecessary filler during the telling.

Second, you have to keep stories short so that they can be remembered and retold. This is one of their primary powers. You have to make it easy for your internal advocate. If necessary, give your advocate some assistance. One salesperson I’ve coached sends the 150-word script for her sales stories to her advocates so that they can actually memorize them.

The power of stories to communicate insights and value is undeniable. If they are used correctly, sales stories are a powerful tool that can be retold to help spread your sales message and help you close orders.