Mastering Sales Storytelling, Ep #513

Sales Reinvented Podcast, episode number 513. Hi, this is Paul Watts from the Sales Reinvented Podcast. Here at Sales Reinvented, we're on a mission to change the negative perception of salespeople with a vision of making selling a profession to be proud of. Hi, this is Paul Watts from the Sales Reinvented Podcast.

Welcome to the Best Of series, brought to you by Base Over Apex. In today's episode, we have Mary Jane Copps, Paul Smith, and Roy Furr And we will be sharing some of our favourite do's and don'ts First up, Mary Jane Copps Now, this is my favourite part of the show, Mary Jane And this is in fact our audience's favourite part of the show But this is where we're going to ask you to share with our listeners your top three storytelling do's and your top three storytelling don'ts? Very difficult question.

I really had to think hard about this. So I think humor is very important. I think that once people are laughing, that you know, first of all, that you have their full attention, but also that they're enjoying themselves in this conversation they're having with you. And that's so important when we are selling, that the other person is engaged and they're enjoying the conversation.

So humor is good. You do want to allow yourself to be vulnerable as a storyteller. You know, if the story's about you, then you want to be able to tell it truthfully. Maybe you're going to share a success, but maybe you're going to share something that didn't go so well, but that you fixed.

So being vulnerable as part of that storytelling, again, allows you to build a really strong foundation of trust and really solidify that relationship you want in terms of selling. And I've mentioned this before, and I think it's really key, is to match the story to the audience. Pulling a story in for the sake of a story, but that doesn't really match what this prospect or this customer expects or what is important to this prospect or customer, that can throw off your whole sales process completely.

So you can't tell the story for the sake of telling the story. You really want to make it match the audience you're speaking to. Those are a great list of do's. They really are.

Use or incorporate humor, be vulnerable, and match your story to your audience. Those are a great list of do's, Mary Jane. So what are the don'ts? Now, the don'ts, don't be boastful.

So, you know, when we're selling, of course, we share our successes with other clients in the same industry, etc. And we should do that. That's important as part of growing a business and creating revenue. But we don't want to do it in a boastful manner.

We want to keep that humility I mentioned earlier as part of how we're presenting our success. You don't want to make your story a novel. It's a story. And, you know, if we think about in pre-COVID times when we were going to a lot of networking events, maybe in your life you went to a lot of cocktail parties, all those things.

it's always terrible to get stuck with somebody who's telling a story and doesn't know when to talk so you want to make them pithy you want them to be like this podcast you want them to be easy to listen to but not take over the entire conversation and you don't want to go off topic so again that's the idea of stories are great but don't suddenly throw in a story that you enjoy but doesn't have anything to do with the conversation at hand. I love that. That is a great list of do's and don'ts.

I really do like those last two don'ts. Don't deliver a novel. Don't make your story too long. And don't go off topic.

Because it's amazing how many times you hear somebody telling you a story and then they go off down a tangent and tell a different story that's kind of related to the previous one. And you've just lost interest. You've lost my interest and you've lost the customer's interest. Great advice, Mary Jane.

Now, Mary Jane, I can't believe we're here already, but we are actually at the last question. So what I'm going to ask you to do, please, is to share with our listeners your favorite sales storytelling story. We'd like you to tell us what was the challenge that had to be overcome? How did storytelling help to overcome this challenge?

What was the result? and most importantly, what is the lesson that you would like our listeners to take away from your story? Okay. So again, these are great questions and I really struggle with this.

So I'm going to land on one of my favorite sales topics, which is following up. And I'm going to tell you the story of an entrepreneur who has a very busy young family, three, maybe four children, and she owns three franchises. And so she is busy. And one day she happened to be home and a young person representing a lawn maintenance company knocked on her door And she answered And they said to her well we love to give you a quote on maintaining your lawn this year And she was like, yeah, I would love that.

Because as having a busy young family, three franchises on the go, anything she could delegate, she wanted to delegate. That's what happened. that person went away. They delivered the quote by putting it in her mailbox and she never heard from them again.

They never followed up. And when she shared this story with me, what she said, I will never forget. She said, look, I have this young family. I have three franchises.

If you want my business, you call me. It doesn't matter how much I need the help this person offered me. If they didn't have the time to follow up with me, they weren't going to get my business. And one of the things that I encounter with the majority of my clients is they don't follow up.

They stop up maybe one follow-up call after a proposal, maybe two. They confuse persistence with pastoring. It's not the same thing. And we really want to follow up to show our prospects.

We want their business. We understand they're very busy and we're taking responsibility for making this relationship happen. Wow. What a great story and what a great lesson as well.

I mean, follow up and follow through is so important in sales. And I would agree with you. I think it's an area where many salespeople fall down. And that story that you just shared really highlights just how important follow up is.

So a wonderful story and a wonderful lesson for our listeners. Next, Paul Smith. So Paul, we're actually at my favorite part of the show. This is our audience's favorite part of the show.

And this is where we're going to ask you to share with our listeners your top three storytelling do's and your top three storytelling don'ts. Yeah, well, let me start with the don'ts because I see these mistakes happen way too often. So the first two are never apologize or ask permission to tell a sales story. And you see this happen all the time.

You've probably done it. I know that I have. You know, you'll be in a meeting with a prospect or something and you interrupt and say, oh, sorry to interrupt, but can I just tell a quick story? I promise it'll just take a minute.

Now, what do you think that communicates to the audience about how important your story is? And the answer is, well, it communicates that it's not very important at all, right? If you're apologizing and asking permission to tell it, clearly you don't think it is as important as what was going to be said anyway. and if you don't think it's as important, well, don't say it, right?

Just get back to the bullet points on slide 72 or whatever but if you do think your story is important, just tell it. No apology and no asking permission. The third one of the don'ts is don't use the word story. Like never tell your buyer, let me tell you a story.

Now that sounds like something that's exciting and captivating to say but it almost always turns them off. You know, they're thinking, oh, geez, here it comes. It's gonna be some long, boring, 15-minute, an irrelevant story. Can you just answer my question?

Nobody in a business meeting thinks that they want to hear a story. But if you tell them a great story, they won't even recognize that you're telling them a story and they'll just be fascinated by it and they'll learn from it. So don't ruin your story by announcing that you're going to tell a story. What you should do, my three do's would be, first of all, make a wish list, a list of the stories that you wish you had.

And that sheet that I'm going to send you for you to have your folks download. We'll give you a list of 25 to start with, but you need more than that. But if you don't know what stories you're looking for, you're never going to find them. So start by making a list.

And then number two, find those stories and craft them so that they sound great. And then thirdly, keep it to two minutes or less. These stories are not supposed to be long epics. Sales stories should be two minutes and no longer.

Sometimes they're 30 seconds. Okay. Leadership stories tend to be three, four, five minutes long because the leader can, you know, command an audience with his or her people. But in sales, you don't have that luxury.

So third do is two minutes or less. That's a fantastic list of do's and don'ts. And I really like the don't about don't announce that it's a story. Tell them that you've got an example that you want to share with them, but don't say that you've got a story to tell.

Exactly. Let me give you an example. That's a great way to start out a story. Yeah, I love it.

A great list of do's and don'ts, Paul. So with your final do, which was to keep your stories to two minutes or less. We're going to try you out now, Paul. We're going to test you out because what we're going to ask you to do is to share with our listeners your favorite sales storytelling story.

What we'd like you to do is tell us what was the challenge that had to be overcome? How did storytelling help your customer overcome this challenge? What was the result? And most importantly, what is the lesson that you would like our listeners to take away from that story?

Yeah. So this is one that actually happened to me personally. My wife and I were at an art fair in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was looking for some art for our kids' bathroom at home.

And we get to this booth of this one guy, this guy named Chris Guglielmello. He's an underwater photographer, just takes these mesmerizing underwater pictures of sea anemones and coral reefs and whatnot. And anyway, she's just flipping through his pictures and gets attached to this one picture that was, to me, looked about as out of place as a pig in the ocean. And Paul, the reason is because it literally was a picture of a pig swimming in the ocean, which I just thought, well, that's the silliest thing, right?

Pigs don't swim. They don't live in the ocean. And, but the artist himself was there in the booth and he came out. So I asked him, dude, what's with the pig in the ocean?

And that's when the magic started. Cause that's when he told me the story. He said that picture was taken off the coast of this island in the Bahamas called Big Major K And apparently what happened was a few years earlier some local entrepreneur decided to raise a pig farm for bacon I guess And so he found out there was this uninhabited island where he could keep the pigs for free. Well, he's no dummy, so he's going to keep them in the free place, right?

But he said, look in the picture there, look back behind the pig, look up on the beach, what kind of vegetation do you see growing there? And I kind of squinted and looked and I said, well, the only thing I recognize up there is cactus. And he said, yeah, that's a problem. Pigs don't like cactus.

Literally, there's nothing for them to eat on the island. So the entrepreneur wasn't that smart after all anyway. But anyway, he said, fortunately for the pigs and the entrepreneur, some local restaurant owner on a neighboring island started boating what was already boating his kitchen refuse over to Big Major K and dumping it overboard a few dozen yards offshore just to get rid of their kitchen scraps. Well, these pigs can obviously see and smell this food floating out in the ocean.

And even though pigs don't normally swim, you get hungry enough, you'll do anything, right? So first it was one little piggy and then two little piggies. And he said, what happened is here it is three generations later and all the pigs on Big Major K can swim. And that's why.

And he said, in fact, when I got there to take the pictures, I didn't even have to get out of my boat. He said, normally I have to get all my scuba equipment on and go underwater and wait for something interesting to happen. It usually is a two or three hour ordeal. I boated up there and these pigs swam out to my boat.

I mean, I guess they thought I was the guy from the restaurant, right? I just leaned over my, my, the side of the boat and snapped the pictures. Easiest picture I ever took in one of my best sellers. And so at that moment, Paul, of course, I'm sold.

We'll take it cash right now. So I had to have it. And I mean, and the lesson, I guess, in that is look two minutes earlier, that picture was worth nothing to me. It was just some stupid picture that made no sense to me at all.

But two minutes later, I had to have it and I had to have it because I like the story. I like hearing the story. I like telling the story. If you come to my house and go to the bathroom, you're going to hear me tell the story again because that picture's up there.

The story made the art so much more interesting that I had to have it. And he could have sold that to me all kinds of ways. He could have said, well, look, it's the right price range. It's the right color to match your bathroom.

It's the right size to fit on the wall where your wife wants to put it. He could have given me rational sales pitchy reasons for wanting to buy it, but he just told me a story. And there are probably dozens of pictures that that aren't fair that met all three of those sales pitch reasons, you know, but it's, that's the only one that had an interesting story attached to it. And that's why that's the one hanging in my bathroom upstairs.

I love it. Well, what a great story. And you know what, it'd be great if we could actually see a picture of that picture, maybe even include that on the website as well, but a wonderful story and a wonderful lesson for all of our listeners as well, Paul. So thank you for sharing that.

And finally, Roy Furr. Roy, we're actually at my favorite part of the show. This is our audience's favorite part of the show, but this is where we're going to ask you to share with our listeners your top three storytelling do's and your top three storytelling don'ts. I'm going to do it backwards just because.

Number one, don't. is don't think just because you tell a story, someone will buy. You still have to do all your other sales jobs. You have to have a great offer.

You still have to make sure the offer matches with your audience. Don't think that just because, oh, I told an interesting story that somebody's going to buy. In fact, if your story doesn't do those other jobs of building the characters such that they trust you and serving the selling message such that it's actually connected to getting them to take action, they're not going to buy. So don't think that just because you tell a story, someone will buy.

Number two, don't forget that your job is to move the sale forward. So an individual story may not actually close the deal, but an individual story has to take the customer a little bit further down that process of making a purchasing decision. So it could just be, I'm trying to make the sale of getting the person's attention. It could be, I'm trying to make the sale of getting this person to commit to the next phone call.

It could be that I'm trying to make the sale of getting this person to believe that my product is worth it. None of those is necessarily enough to close the sale by itself, but an individual story could serve one of those purposes or many others. And then number three don't is don't just wing it and tell a story without a purpose. I suppose you'll find a lot of my advice builds on the other advice, but if your story doesn't really have a sales purpose, then it's not doing that job to move the sale forward.

And it could just be making the prospect feel like, geez, why the heck am I even listening to this person? That's three don'ts. Let's move to the do's. Start in the middle of the action instead of at the beginning.

This is something from just general storytelling. If you want to start your selling story with, okay, I got into this business way back in my day because it was a family. No, your prospect doesn't care that much about it. You have to start in the context of this is what's going on in this moment that's closest to that point of decision or at that peak excitement.

There's a classic copywriter, Eugene Schwartz, who wrote a book called Breakthrough Advertising. At one point in a speech, he talked about every good sales message should open like an action movie with like a hail of bullets. And you want that excitement starting your selling story. Also do consider how the story serves the buying decision-making process.

So your prospect has to make a whole sequence of decisions that lead to them eventually making the purchase. And so you really want to always fit these things together like puzzle pieces until, or like laying out the bricks in a pathway until your prospect is able to walk all the way down the pathway to that point where they are making their buying decision. And finally, another more general storytelling tip that works in sales storytelling is do include conflict in the story to make it interesting So taking an idea out of improv if you do a scene where everybody is just agreeing yes there a principle of improv that is yes and That you have to agree with what the person brought to the scene and you have to build on it That does not mean you have to agree with the characters.

The characters don't have to agree with each other. You just have to acknowledge that this thing now exists in the scene. So if you do an improv scene and the characters are just, hey, you're a great person. Oh, you're a great person too.

There's no interesting story in that. but if the characters both bring some level of maybe animosity, like I know what you did to my sister. And then the other person has to accept it. Oh, I only did it because she wanted it.

And we're not going to go any further into that scene, but there is a sense of conflict there that makes it far more compelling. So you want to include conflict and that, that conflict can really feed into that agitation, the invalidation, all that emotional stuff that I talked about in the context of the Paisa formula. I love it. That is a phenomenal list of do's and don'ts.

It really is. And you're absolutely right. That conflict draws you in. We all want to know what you did to that person's sister, right?

We all want to know that, but we're not going to find out. Roy, a wonderful list of do's and don'ts. So I can't believe we're here already, but we're actually at the last question. So what I'm going to ask you to do, please, is to share with our listeners your favorite sales storytelling story.

What we'd like you to do is tell us what was the challenge that you had to overcome? How did storytelling help you to overcome this challenge? What was the result? And most importantly, what was the lesson that you would like our listeners to take away from your story?

Okay. So one of the individual marketing campaigns that I'm best known for is working with a gentleman named Brian Kurtz on an event called the Titans of Direct Response. And you may know like Dan Kennedy, very big in the sales world. He actually co-hosted this with Brian.

It was this big memorial event that was going to bring together many of the best people in our industry for a single event. And Brian on a Sunday afternoon sent this to me and said, Hey, Roy, I put together some information about the speakers who are going to be there. But my friend David Dorage says that you should like, or that I should actually get a better copywriter to write it for me because I'm not a copywriter. Can you help me out?

And I said, yes, it was like opportunity of a lifetime to work with Brian and having Dan involved. And like Greg Rinker from Guthy Rinker was one of the people who's on stage and some very big names. And one of the things that you might assume that you needed to do in a situation like this is just like tell the most compelling version of what the speakers are going to be talking about. But that's not how we opened it.

Yes, we talked about all these speakers are going to be there, but we opened it that Marty Edelstein, who had founded Boardroom Inc., a gigantic direct mail company, over $150 million a year at its peak. Marty Edelstein had just passed away and Marty had always wanted to bring together these people to teach in the industry. And Brian had worked as Marty's second right-hand man for 30 years.

And so Brian was doing a special event to commemorate Marty. And Dan Kennedy got involved because of his reverence for Marty. And so I found this really compelling emotional story of why this event was taking place, why all these people would come together for one time only, why Gary Ben Savingo, one of the world's greatest copywriters, was breaking his retirement vow of silence to come speak for his friend Marty. And all of these different story aspects that contributed to this being this super special event above and beyond just the content that you would get by attending another seminar.

And actually, I mentioned the Story Selling Masterclass. I even did an hour and 45 minute line by line breakdown of all the stories in this inside that story selling masterclass. But the net result was we brought hundreds of the world's best marketers into the room for this event based on this story based promotion for the seminar. And my lesson for you here, the takeaway, the key takeaway is tell the most compelling true story that you can find.

So find like that human, that emotionally compelling human story that is tied to the offer, whether it's a product, a service, whatever. Tell the reason why, tell all of that. And then have that be the justification for all of the features and benefits of what they're actually going to get. And so find the most compelling true story and tell it in your sales message, whether it's one-to-one, one-to-many, whatever.

That's what's going to work. I love it. What a great story. And I have to, of course, this event, it was a one-time event, Roy, because of course, you were never, ever going to get that group of people together again.

What a wonderful story. What a wonderful takeaway for our listeners. Today's episode was made possible with the support of Base Over Apex, a Calgary headquartered professional sales training company helping technical sales teams in the heavy equipment, industrial distribution, and manufacturing sectors achieve exceptional results. If you're looking to advance your sales team and elevate sales performance, visit www.

base-over-apex.com to learn more. Thank you for listening and please join us on our next podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions for the show, please go to our website, salesreinvented.

com. Until next time, remember the ABCs of selling. Always be consultative. I'm Paul Watts and you have been listening to the Sales Reinvented Podcast.