Sales teams understand the value of storytelling when navigating the sales process. It’s well-known within the sales community that customers make purchasing decisions because of something emotional that happens below the surface: maybe they were inspired, they like the salesperson, or someone else they know made that decision too. Obviously, a salesperson also knows that they need to arm the potential customer with all the data and information to justify their choice, but in a lot of cases, it’s the emotional connection that makes the sale.
And one of the best ways to create an emotional connection is through story.
Recently we delivered our Influential Storytelling program to a sales team that was interested in the content for two reasons: They understood the value of storytelling in their sales process and wanted to bone up their skillset, but they also saw storytelling as a crucial part of developing internal institutional knowledge about the product, their customer success stories, and more. As the company grew, the sales team was experiencing a lot of turnover. The Director of Sales wanted to capture and codify the institutional stories that everyone on the team should be familiar with and leverage in the sales process
With this objective in mind, we recommended they establish two routines after exploring our Influential Storytelling content. The first was to create a recurring agenda item during the monthly all-sales review where team members could volunteer to tell a customer success story, and receive actionable feedback. The feedback would focus on two simple questions:
- What was compelling and worked about the story?
- What could the storyteller experiment with to make it more influential?
This ongoing routine helps to reinforce the Influential Storytelling concepts, creates recurring opportunities to practice storytelling, and has been crucial in shifting the mindset of the salespeople from feature-based and fee-based selling to story-based selling.
The second routine focused on increasing the team’s collective resources; team members who had stories that were considered relevant and shareable pieces of institutional knowledge were encouraged to record their stories for a video library. Over time, this “story library” has grown and continues to become more valuable as a resource for people across the company—not just the sales team!
As you think about your own organization, consider the value of capturing stories for institutional knowledge that can be leveraged by several employees. If a video library presents too many barriers, these alternatives may make more sense as a starting point:
- A shared file with quick one-liners and a note about who to talk to for more information
- A shared file of written anecdotes
- A folder of audio files of recorded stories
- Internal podcast of recorded interviews with those who lived the stories
Whatever you decide works for you, what’s important is you make the choice to build your library, and continue to revisit it over time. The value of the resource will increase with every story.
