Could your salespeople become better storytellers to show their value and uniqueness to potential buyers? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team.

I watched that the storytelling of salespeople was a critical component of communicating both their value and their uniqueness to a buyer. The problem is most salespeople have had very little training on to tell a good story. This could be a great coaching opportunity for you as a manager, to work with them on what are the best stories, the best success stories from your other accounts that you want to have a salesperson communicate on a sales call.

There's a simple four-step structure of how to have a great story told by a sales rep. The first is to start off the story focused on the customer, which is the opposite of what most salespeople do. Most are talking about how great the product is and then what benefit the customer has had and going through and explaining it. We want to reverse that process. So the best they can start off with is start off with a customer benefit. "We were able to save this one customer over $10,000." That would be a great opening statement.

Then the second part to it is, how did you do that? We were able to increase their sales, or we were able to lower their cost by $10,000 because of the way we put in an improved order entry and inventory management system for the products they did use for us.

We're offering you that same kind of support is the third step, to affirm to the customer that you can offer the same kind of results you are promising on your story.

And then the fourth and final step is to make sure we ask the customer to qualify, to see where they are or to see if they thought that point was of interest.

The reality is, most salespeople have no idea of the structure of telling a good story. So they always tend to lead with their stuff first, and they might not even mention the customer talking about how great their company been helping somebody else.

What can you do to work with your sales team, getting them to role play and practice telling some of these stories to make sure they're brief, they're focused, and it follows these four steps of persuasive storytelling? Would love to know what you've done with your team to help improve their story selling skills. Would love to answer any of your questions.

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