How Sales Reps Can Leverage the Power of Storytelling to Persuade Buyers and Win More Deals (Tips + Examples)
An effective sales pitch should gain your customer's attention and build trust to create long-lasting relationships. Stories help you exactly do that. Stories are a powerful tool in helping you connect with your buyers and influence their emotions in remembering you as a brand. Facts tell but stories sell, still relevant to this day and time, as stories are 22% more effective than stats. And as a salesperson, time is money for you. You always look for ways to close a deal. If you could weave stories in your sales pitch, it is a guaranteed win for you.
Need proof? A salesman tried selling various antiques on eBay. However, none of them turned up to buy it. So, he added beautiful stories to it. And again, he put them on eBay for sale. Did the stories make any difference? He bought a cat head antique for 0.99 cents but sold it for over $69.82. He totally spent around $121 to buy the objects and sold them for over $8000 along with the stories. He earned a whopping gross profit of 6511% just by weaving beautiful stories to it. Leveraging the power of storytelling in your sales pitch can easily persuade your audience to sell more products.
So let us see how to draft a powerful sales pitch with 3 simple strategies to convince and persuade your buyers.
Commence with questions
The first step in weaving stories into your sales pitch is to ask the right questions to your potential prospects and build a relatable narrative from it. Let us see an example.
Without asking questions: Hello, I'm calling from XYZ CRM solutions. Am I speaking to Serina? Thanks for your interest in evaluating our solution. As you are from the real estate domain, we have a lot of real estate agents using our CRM. Any industry can customize and implement our CRM solution in seconds
Asking the right questions: Hello, I'm calling from XYZ CRM solutions. Am I speaking to Serina? Thanks for your interest in evaluating our solution, Serina. Before we proceed, I'd like to know how long you've been in this industry and if you have been using any other solutions so far. This information will help me suggest the right solution for your business.
Why these two questions?
The answer to the first question tells you whether the prospect is an expert or a novice. Based on the answer, you can vary the pitch with respect to their experience.
The answer to the second question tells you about their expertise on using the product. If they are starting off, you can assist them with the benefits. If they have used various tools in the past, explain what your solution has to offer in addition to what the potential buyer already knows.
Tips:
- Questions help you engage and strike an insightful conversation with the prospects. It paves the way to understand more about your customer and to position your story accordingly.
- Don't exhaust the users with too many questions. Try not to exceed more than 4 questions.
Challenges
After gathering the information about the user, the next step is to summarize the problems and challenges that your prospect is struggling with.
Without using the challenge: XYZ CRM is the best solution for all your problems. Whether it is to automate your business operations or to manage your day-to-day critical tasks - XYZ CRM, with its robust and powerful technology, optimises your business seamlessly
Enunciating the challenges: As a budding solopreuneur in the real estate industry, I believe that you have to perform various taxing tasks- from listing thousands of properties to invoice generation. It's, not an easy feat. Due to this, you might have to shuffle between multiple tools and spreadsheets to update the information periodically, leaving you very less time to sell.
Tips:
- When addressing their challenges, always be specific and engage them with their real-life day-to-day problems.
- Never fan your buyer's negative emotions by over emphasizing the problem and its consequences. A classic example would be a particular clip from the Tommy boy movie where Tommy tries to convince the dealer to use his car brakes but, he gave way too much priority to the problem that ended up in him losing the deal. His approach intimidated the dealer and fed his negative emotions.
Conclusion
After the challenge is explained briefly, conclude your pitch with your product, and how it will solve their business problems.. Leave them with a positive thought on how it would make their lives better.
Without conclusion: So, can we schedule a free demo to walk you through the product?
Proper conclusion: It must be challenging and very time-consuming for you to stay on top of all the operations. We have a solution to automate the whole process and make it less time and resource-intensive for you. We'll be more than happy to schedule a free demo and walk you through the product.
Tips:
- Adding supportive stats builds credibility on your brand.
- Empathizing with your audience creates the most needed human touch.
The next time when you are pitching to a potential, do weave a beautiful story using the "3C" strategy. Here are some bonus tips to help you deliver an exceptional pitch
- Listening is the key. Don't be a monologue but strike a conversation with the buyers. There is a preconception that talking more will make the sale. But it is the other way around. Letting your buyers speak about their challenges helps you to build meaningful connections and to create a story that is more relevant to them.
- To deliver the pitch exceptionally well? You need to practice, practice and practice until you can't get it wrong.
- Being empathic is the golden rule. And that's what makes us human.
- Control your emotions if the buyer disagrees with you. Don't find ways to prove them wrong, instead, figure out ways to find a common ground.
- Don't affect your customer's emotions or cause any emotional pain that might cause cognitive dissonance.
A lot of businesses have started embracing storytelling as part of their brand identity. Sales reps have challenged the conventional sales pitch by prioritising customer connections leveraging storytelling. Comment below, how are you utilising storytelling in your sales pitch.
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Shaveethira G
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