Bob Apollo is


the founder and principal consultant behind Inflexion- Point Strategy Partners, one of the


UK’s leading B2B sales and marketing performance improvement specialists. Bob is often asked to help clients improve the quality of the conversations that their sales people are having with their prospects, and has become convinced of the persuasive power of storytelling. He can be reached at 07802 313300, by email, or though the Inflexion-Point website.


bob.apollo@inflexion-point.com www.inflexion-point.com


conversations revolve around the contrast between the prospect’s current situation and a desired future state. Top sales performers add another dimension - they help the prospect to acknowledge the potential issues associated with simply sticking with the statusquo. When we looked at winning sales behaviours - and in particular how top performers helped to reduce the chances of otherwise well-qualified sales opportunities ending in “no decision”, we found they invested more time at the start of the sales cycle exploring the consequences of the prospect’s current situation, and on helping the prospect to elevate their own awareness of the potential costs and consequences of inaction.


Build up Your Anecdote Collection


Your top performing sales people will almost certainly have a fund of stories - a pool of anecdotes - that they use, sometimes without thinking, to put their point across and advance the sales conversation. One of the first steps in improving the storytelling skills of the rest of your sales people is to gather up these anecdotes, and record them in a form that can be shared with others.


There’s a natural narrative flow to many of the best anecdotes - they:


• Describe the customer, and their situation • Share the symptoms they were suffering from, and the consequences


• Explain how the vendor helped the customer to solve the problem


• Share some of the most important lessons learned along the way


• Highlight the outcomes, and the business benefits achieved


The idea is not to force your all other sales people to tell these stories word-for-word, but to equip them to tell consistent and relevant stories in a way that is natural to their own style of conversation. As you build up your collection of anecdotes, you’ll want to make them available through your sales enablement or CRM system, and to tag them so that sales people can quickly find stories that are relevant to particular offerings, industries and customer situations.


Role Play the Stories


We’ve found that having group role playing sessions can help sales people practice their storytelling skills and learn from the techniques of others. We often find that the anecdotes are improved as a result. If accompanied by a storytelling skills workshop, these


35 entrepreneurcountry


anecdote-sharing sessions frequently rank amongst the highest-rated sessions in any sales training programme.


The Unexpected Benefit


I hope that I have convinced you of the importance of storytelling skills, and persuaded you that they can be learned. But I thought I’d leave one successful storytelling tip to the last: the unexpected benefit.


I’ve described a five point narrative framework when talking about building up your anecdote collection. The story doesn’t end there. If your sales people, after highlighting the benefits achieved, round off the story by saying something along the lines of “and on top of that, the unexpected benefit was....”, they will find that their anecdotes are even more memorable.


So here’s my unexpected benefit: if you adopt this approach, not only will your sales people be more effective, they will feel more engaged and involved - because the materials they are using will have been created as a joint effort with their peers. Compare that, if you will, to the typical sales reaction to the latest marketing-created datasheet...


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