It’s a cold, hard truth that customers don’t care so much about the product you’re offering as much as they care about what you can do to improve their bottom line. The facts you list are the “what”, while the story you’re telling about the product is the “why”. The “why” helps to engage the customer in how they will actually improve and benefit by adopting your product. Potential customers are likely to ask how your product will or service increase my clients’ total net revenue.
The story of why you’re offering what you’re products/services will help your clients decide why to choose you as a vendor or growth partner instead of different competitor’s options. If you can tell a story tying the “why” and “how” their revenue will grow, it could be the difference between closing the deal and unfortunately losing your client’s attention. By showing how your offering can raise revenue by a positive margin such as 10% growth probability (and simultaneously not adding a burdensome expense), then what company wouldn’t want increased revenue at a fair market cost?
“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”— Erin Morgenstern
Sell Your Story
Sales is all about making connections and creating meaning. Story telling in sales allows the audience to slow down and savior the value a little more through context and emotions.
First start with your target audience, assume that your clients have certain desires that are not being met and assess what they need by conducting a market study. You can only help them if your product or service actually fills their needs and potential gaps. Your job as a company is to offer a product which gets them to their desired sought after state. A captivating way to sell them is to present a story on how your offering can get them there in the fastest time possible. You want to sell easy, fast and simple whenever possible and truthful.
“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”— Brandon Sanderson
What Makes Your Product Offering Unique?
Your marketing story should name the exact qualities of what makes your brand unique. Every marketplace is crowded with competitors, so there needs to be something special about your brand that sets it apart. Whatever benefits your company offers, integrate it into your story to make sure you’re seen as having a unique competitive advantage. You can leverage the following competitive strategies:
- Overall cost leadership: (yield above-average return)
- Differentiation: Promote a product/service perceived industry-wide as unique, e.g. certain design, style, brand (yield above-average return)
- Focus: Promote specialization on particular markets, social groups (yield above-average return)
Towards the end of your sales demonstration, try to communicate the genius behind what your company has to offer. Express how your brand is special and what the benefits are for an individual to become your customer. What matters most is how it resolve the client needs and resolve his/her current issues.
“To hell with facts! We need stories!”—Ken Kesey
Not Facts Rather Emotions
The power of using a story is how it makes the boring facts of your product or service more palpably appealing. It’s easier for people to emotionally feel what you’re offering than it is to parse a dry list of facts. To help sell your product or service, the story that you use has to be in some way relatable to your audience. Unless it’s something they can identify with, your story might strike the wrong notes in your potential clients. In that case, they will instead ignore it as something that doesn’t apply to them. The solution is to have an adaptable story that fits a wide array of client emotions. You should always pay attention to your audience communication cues during your delivery and adjust your music according to their wants.
“The history of storytelling isn’t one of simply entertaining the masses but of also advising, instructing, challenging the status quo.”– Therese Fowler
A Memorable Story Pays for Itself
The story you use to sell your product has to be memorable. In the age of the ubiquitous re-marketing pixel, companies now feel that they can get multiple chances at convincing a potential customer. But the problem with re-marketing is that it costs money for each repeat engagement. By making your story memorable, your marketing message will stick in the minds of potential clients without you having to explicitly remind them about it. In order to be memorable, use a combination of texts, images and even video to help people recall your message. By identifying at the outset the values that you want your brand to convey, these values can more clearly ring out in your marketing and make your message memorable. Craft your marketing story to clearly express your brand in a way that communicates its benefits to your potential clients
Make Your Potential Customer The Hero
Every story has a hero and you’ll want to place your client at the center of your marketing story. You can place your target audience in the center of your marketing message – instead of your company – by telling your story from the perspective of your customer. This allows them to imagine using your product from their own perspective, instead of having them endure an advertisement where you are at the center talking down to the customer. You selling have to trigger your clients imagination, they need to visualize themselves enjoying the benefit derives from your business solution. Buying is always driven by emotions and justified later with cerebral facts that reinforce the emotional buying decision.
Keep Selling your story…