How can a marketing coach use storytelling to close a sale?
If used during a sales presentation, telling customers stories can be a powerful rapport-building tool or it can blow up in your face.
Read on to find out why…
Storytelling is a powerful tool for building relationships with potential customers. The reason most people don’t make the most of it is because most people tell horrible stories that they think are really interesting.
I’ll give you a quick example quoting both ways.
Let’s say you decide to tell a story that you think will break the ice between you and your prospect. If you can recall telling the story and the response was, “You know something like that happened to me, except I had twice as many cars on the road that collided.”
So her story meant nothing, or worse, did more harm than good.
Most likely they weren’t even listening.
That’s the kind of story: the story that you haven’t tried in front of someone, trying to communicate, how do you communicate it. People often tell stories at a sale because they’re not sure what’s necessary for the sales presentation.
On the other hand, stories can work to your advantage.
Storytelling dates back to tribal culture, when before recorded history, storytelling was used to teach lessons, entertain, and preserve historical accounts.
Even in contemporary times, most people love a good story.
When you’re building relationships or trying to make a sale to a customer, stories humanize them, especially if you tell a story that’s especially relevant to the person and is often self-deprecating in humor.
In other words, put yourself in!
I tell a story and if it bothers me; I have to confess that this is how I made a lot of sales when I was in face-to-face sales for advertising. I did a lot of self-critical stories.
They were very short stories, tight, 2 minutes. Shorter stories make the listener less likely to get bored, especially if they have really cute and great endings, all very true and very real.
If you, as a marketing consultant, want a quick way to build rapport with customers, learn how to tell a good story. You will move far ahead of the competition, and may even build a lifelong relationship.