Using Storytelling To Improve Your Sales Numbers

The usual tactics for sales have been worn down by generations of salespersons. Today, approaching potential customers requires more than facts and figures – marketers need to be selling not just the product but a story, a dream. The idea that needs to be sold is almost an alternative reality – where the customers find themselves free of their problems, turning into better people (or better companies).

Incorporating storytelling into sales may raise buyer confidence, reduce the sales cycle, improve customer retention, and, ultimately, increase revenue. This can happen in sales pitches, websites, video conversations, and emails. Contrary to popular belief, storytelling is not just a tool used by literary giants. Anyone can tell a compelling story. Through our research and experience, we have discovered the details that go into making sales more rewarding by storytelling.

Why Should You Use Storytelling?

Decades of sales and marketing efforts have happened by the traditional means of pitching. What makes storytelling stand out from the rest?

The answer is simple – human brains are wired to accept stories as the most engaging form of communication. Human history is nothing if not an example of the rich tradition of storytelling.

Because we learn information through stories, we are physiologically designed to store, index, and retrieve that information. According to research, brain chemicals that foster empathy and drive cooperation in others are produced when we hear stories. Potential customers become emotionally invested in a tale after it captures their attention for a long time – and that emotion serves as the brain’s expressway. It can alter attitudes, beliefs, and actions instantly.

Story-selling capitalizes on this reality. It is a successful sales method that balances the requirement to convey the product’s value and the desire to build an emotional bond. This holds weight today as it plays to our innate need to connect through stories. An intelligent salesperson can use it to their advantage, find themselves on top of all their targets, and even succeed beyond the same.

Using Stories Effectively: Getting The Timing Right

Stories must be used in the right context to have the most significant impact on sales. The following situations offer fantastic storytelling opportunities:

1. Conversational Sales Pitches: Facts, figures, and rote information-based sales pitches frequently fall short of engaging potential customers. Prospects frequently feel you speak at them rather than with them during sales presentations without cohesive stories. You can personalise the information you’re delivering, make data more intelligible, transform facts into compelling plot points, and help the details stick by turning sales tales into “hero’s journeys” with the prospect at their core.

As a result, sales pitches will become more of a discussion rather than a presentation.

1. Handling Objections: You’ll be one step closer to closing deals if you learn how to handle consumer doubt and override objections in sales. The “Feel, Felt, Found” storytelling style is a well-known method for resolving objections. This tactic entails:
   1. First, when a potential customer objects, you should acknowledge their feelings.
   2. Then, telling a tale of how a previous client had experienced the same thing
   3. Finish the narrative by describing how consumers purchased your product to solve their problems.

Because it provides a physical experience that feels useful and relevant, this sales tactic is effective. By removing the opposition from the objections, storytelling enables you to engage a cautious prospect in a cooperative conversation.

1. Establishing Credibility: Stories can do more than just make your customers more aware of the advantages of your goods. They are for assisting you in establishing yourself as an informed and reliable authority. After all, why would they entrust their business to you? Use narrative to demonstrate to clients that you have experience working with clients similar to them and that you have successfully guided clients through comparable circumstances. Include evidence in your story while trying to establish credibility. What was the problem? How did you find a solution? How did things turn out? Where are these grateful clients now, and how has your business benefited their lives?

Preparing a Powerful Story For Your Next Pitch:

Step1: Build Buyer Personas

Successful storytelling in sales begins and ends with an understanding of your buyer personas, just like any excellent sales tactic. People react to stories in different ways. If you don’t know who your prospect is and what drives them, you can’t use a narrative to move them closer to a purchase.

If you don’t have buyer personas created, this is the ideal opportunity.

Step 2: Use elements of a good story

You may start working on the framework of your narrative now that you know exactly who you are talking to. Using logic, emotion, or trust, great storytelling persuades audiences to take action (or, in this example, make a purchase).

Each of them needs to be addressed in actionable sales stories:

1. Trust (Ethos)- You must establish and keep your reputation as a storyteller. Every claim made by the salesperson is either confirmed or refuted by the customer’s impression of the storyteller. Build trust by:
   1. Making sure to speak in plain language.
   2. Being frank and truthful.
   3. Verifying that all of the characters in your story are comfortable with being discussed by using accurate and true facts.
2. Emotion (Pathos) – We now know that feelings have a lot of power. Your sales tales should elicit some kind of feeling in your prospects because, rather than precisely what you said, they will remember how you made them feel.

1. Logic (Logos) – Most salesmen do well when they appeal to the rational side of a potential customer. Ensure the tale you give a potential customer highlights a problem and offers a reasoned solution. To incorporate logic into your tale:
   1. Use a few numbers, percentages, and graphs.
   2. Cite evidence from logic or science using clear language.
   3. Cite trustworthy sources

Step 3: Transform inspiring case studies into captivating stories

Return to the problems you discovered when working with your buyer personas at this step. Try to relate them to former customer success stories where they used your product or service to address challenges that were similar to their own. For instance, the prospect you are speaking with might be having trouble coordinating their sales and marketing teams. This would be an excellent time to describe how X customer decided to use your technology for internal alignment and saw a 10x increase in sales and a 60% reduction in bounce rates. Everyone enjoys being understood. Make the success tales from your company’s case studies into relatable narratives for potential customers. They’ll recognize the possibility that your product can benefit them as well.

Step 4: Include your narratives in your pitch

You can’t just toss the precisely customized tale you spent so much time crafting into a sales pitch. Your sales presentations must use your stories to support the overarching narrative you’re attempting to develop.

Your goals should guide where you decide to place your tale in the sales dialogue. What do you want the reader to take away from the story? What do you want it to achieve? What emotions do you want the prospect to experience?

Step 5: Assess and Improve

Your storytelling strategy requires constant updation, just like any other sales technique. Are the stories as compelling as they once were? Can better stories be used in their place? Watch how stories are used to make sure they accomplish their intended goals.

Using Optimized Data with Storytelling

Your stories might have all the proof points you need to convert a prospect. However, the key lies in ensuring that your stories reach the right people. In this regard, streamlined and smart data can save your time and resources as you build a prospect pipeline to reach out to. Consider platforms like Apollo.io, that can organize and filter data on your prospects, in a way that optimizes who you reach out to based on your requirements. Weed out prospects that are unrelated or irrelevant, and you will have a stronger base of the right people in the right places, who will eventually become the audience to your storytelling strategies.

Key Takeaways

Nothing works better than telling a good old-fashioned story to stir the emotions, elicit urgency, or just lighten the mood. Whatever you are offering, using storytelling in your sales conversations will help you appeal to both reason and emotion, leaving your prospects with a lasting impression (and perhaps even a new client!).

(This article is authored by Apollo.io Team, and the views expressed in this article are their own)