When used during a sales presentation, telling stories to clients can be a powerful relationship-building tool or they can explode 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 by citing both ways.
Let’s say you decide to tell a story that you think will break the ice between you and your potential client. If you can remember that you told the story and the answer was, “You know something like that happened to me, except I had twice as many cars on the road that crashed.”
So your story didn’t mean anything, or worse, it 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 you communicate it. People often tell stories at a sale because they aren’t sure what is 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 build relationships or try to sell to a client, stories humanize you, especially if you tell a story that is especially relevant to the person and is often self-critical in humor.
In other words, fuck yourself!
I tell a story and if it bothers me; I must confess that this is how I did 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, narrow, two-minute stories. Shorter stories make the listener less likely to get bored, especially if they have really cute and cool finishes, all very true and very real.
If you, as a marketing consultant, want a quick way to build rapport with clients, learn to tell a good story. You will move well ahead of the competition and may even build a relationship for life.