CHAPTER 35

Four Questions to Build Compelling Sales Stories

Well-crafted and polished sales stories are the most effective method for quickly and powerfully conveying to a prospect why an existing customer decided to purchase your product and got value from its use. Well-told stories create an indelible impact on a customer. Stories are an essential sales tool to differentiate you and your offering in the mind of your customer.

Since the dawn of humankind, stories have been used to provide information and insights. Before written alphabets existed, stories were used to communicate the traditions of a society from one generation to another. Some philosophers believe that stories, such as cultural mythologies, have become embedded in our DNA through thousands of years and countless generations of retelling. Just look at our popular culture to see that our most popular modes of entertainment are forms of storytelling. TV shows, movies, books, music, and even video games are all about telling a story. Stories are popular because of their power to sweep up listeners or viewers into worlds other than their own.

Perhaps this is why Plato proposed banning storytellers in ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago. In the rational society that Plato envisioned, stories didn’t appeal to the logical or rational side of listeners but to their feelings and emotions. Emotions are not rational, so Plato wanted stories banned. But it is the emotions and feelings that will make your sales stories so powerful.

Unfortunately, for most salespeople, the “story” they have to tell is a rather boring recitation that stars the features and benefits of their products and services, instead of a crisp, concise tale that conveys the tangible value a customer received.

Let’s set aside business for a minute. If I were to ask you, “What’s your story?” how would you answer? If you were like most people, you would recite a history of your life. “I’m 45 years old. I was born and raised in Bozeman, Montana. I have two sisters and a brother. I went to college in Wisconsin and studied electrical engineering. I work as a sales account executive for a chip manufacturer. I’m married and have two sons.” A factual recitation of your life’s milestones is not a story. If that were a script for a TV show, it would be about as riveting as the phone book.

How about this story instead? “My wife and I are lifelong baseball fans. We play in a softball league, and between us we coach and manage our two sons’ Little League teams. Our dream is to attend a baseball game in each of the major league ballparks. Every summer since the boys were in school, we pack up our SUV and spend two weeks on a driving and camping trip to a different ballpark. This year it’s Southern California. Angel Stadium. Dodger Stadium. I can smell the grilled Dodger Dogs now. And at Petco Park in San Diego? Fish tacos!”

How can you divorce yourself from an overreliance on facts and features and put the power of the story into your selling?

Let’s start with an overview of some basic ground rules about effective sales stories.

   Keep it simple and short. The key to a great story is to keep it simple and short. If you try to accomplish too much with a story, or if you make it too complex or too long, then the prospect won’t be able to understand it, let alone remember it. And neither will you.

   Use simple detail to draw the prospect into the picture. Stories become memorable when they draw your buyer into them. (Why does a TV series attract and retain your interest? Because part of you identifies with the challenges faced by the story’s protagonist.) Your stories must relate to your prospects’ most common challenges and pain points. To help your customers identify with the subjects of your stories, it’s helpful to employ a little detail. Always give the characters in your stories a first name. Use their company’s name (or a pseudonym if they object to your using their real name).

   Illustrate a defining moment of value. Sales stories should communicate your value proposition by illustrating the defining moments that existing customers experience with your product or service. You have to show the insight that the subjects of your story gained about their business or the problem they were attempting to solve by using your product or service. As a prospect listens to your story of how customers like them worked with you to solve a problem like theirs, they will picture in their mind what it would be like if they used your product or service. It’s like taking a mental test drive of what you’re offering. This mental test drive, in which customers envision themselves using your product, is a distinct and important step in their buying processes.

   Use a story to provide insight and context. Salespeople can fill prospects to the brim with raw facts and figures about the features and benefits of their products and services. It’s what they do best. But your customers are searching for some context to digest and make sense of the content they have consumed. A concise story about why a current customer made the decision to purchase your solution and how that customer is using it to solve problems and eliminate pain points is one of the most effective sources of context for a new prospect to use in decision making.

Before we build some sales stories, allow me to answer the questions that every salesperson has about them.

Where do the stories come from? Sales stories come from you and your experiences or from your colleagues and their experiences. These stories should be freely shared among all salespeople on your team. They are company assets. Once you have created a story, write it down and share it with your peers.

In an ideal world marketing and sales would collaborate to create customer stories with the broadest relevance to your current sales opportunities. But last I checked, many of us don’t live in that world. So you, the salesperson, need to take responsibility for creating these stories. As you’ll soon see, it’s easy to do.

How long should my stories be? Each of your sales stories should take no more than one minute to present. Shorter is better, so 30 to 45 seconds would have more impact. Let me put that in context for you. The average American native English speaker will speak about 150 words per minute (and usually less). This means that your effective sales story will be less than half a page long. In fact, this paragraph and the next, combined, are only about 150 words long.

There are two reasons for this time limit. First, if the stories are any longer, they will become too complex and difficult for you to remember. Which means that you won’t use them. Second, if your story drags on for longer than one minute, your prospect will stop hearing your words and start hearing, “blah-blah-blah.” “Blah” is not how you want the prospect to remember you, your product, or your company.

How many stories do I need? You need a core of at least three stories. This is enough to cover a wide array of potential customers. If you need more, ask your colleagues to share some of theirs with you. Play nice and reciprocate.

Now let’s begin crafting your compelling sales stories.

The first step is to identify a current customer whose story will have broad appeal to potential buyers.

The second step involves answering four simple questions:

1. What problem was your customer trying to solve? What was the primary pain point the customer had to resolve? You have to be specific and to the point. You can’t be overly broad in your description of the problem because that will make it difficult for your prospect to identify with what the current customer was experiencing before purchasing your product.

2. Why was your expertise relevant to your customer? Why did the customer reach out to you or your company to solve the problem? What reason were you given? Did the customer go on your website and research your company and product before engaging with you? What did the customer learn about your company that led to a talk with you? For instance, maybe the customer wanted to expand into Latin America and downloaded a case study from your website that detailed your experience setting up operations for another client in Brazil.

3. Why did the customer buy from you? What were the specific decision criteria the customer used to select your product? Why were you chosen over all the competitors? Or why did the customer choose to buy a new system from you instead of staying with an existing system? Be specific about the customer’s rationale for selecting you. If you don’t know for certain, call and ask.

4. What value has the customer received from your product/service? This should be easy to answer. What tangible and quantifiable value has the customer received from your product or service? This is the capper to the story. You can’t finish a story with an everyone-lived-happily-ever-after fairytale ending. It needs to be specific. Buyers remember numbers and forget generalities.

Once you’ve gathered the information from answering the four questions, write down your story. This gives you a script from which to practice. (I’ll talk about presenting your stories in the next chapter.) Here’s a sample:

Larry is VP of Ops at a large multinational widget manufacturer. He said to me, “Andy, we have a problem increasing throughput on our main production line, and we’re missing our forecast by 10 percent every month.” He read an article in Forbes about our process control software and our experience working with similarly sized manufacturers to maximize their output. Ultimately, Larry bought from us because we were able to demonstrate to him how our system would decrease downtime and increase his manufacturing yield by 30 percent over the first 12 months. In fact, he hit that target in eight months and earned a 15 percent rate of return on his investment in our system in the first year alone.

That’s 120 words. 45 seconds. Boom!

Remember: Simple, well-crafted stories will be more memorable than any facts or figures you can provide to your prospects.