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Part I – ‘The Storytelling Enterprise’ Promise: Conversation-Centric Selling

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This is the first of a four post series on The Storytelling Enterprise. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced and mastered.

‘Selling’ Stories Are Key to Good Selling

Companies hire salespeople to have influential conversations that compel prospects to consider — and ultimately buy – their offering.

When a good salesperson is having a conversation with a prospect, they are usually asking thoughtful questions, listening actively, and telling relevant stories. These “selling” stories are typically short (no longer than three minutes—think four to six bullet points) and are usually about the salesperson’s industry, company, customers, competitors, or offering. They are often told in response to a prospect’s question or objection (stated or implied).

Relevant Selling Stories Are Hard to Get

Typically, a rep’s stories come from their own experience or the experience of colleagues or other people in the industry. Unfortunately, it can take years for a salesperson to build a repertoire of stories that add any significant perspective to an executive-level prospect conversation.
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Part II – The “Story Deck”

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This is the second of a four part series on The Storytelling Enterprise. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced and mastered.

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Enterprise selling rushing headlong into the 1930s!

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There are many parallels between the state of enterprise selling today and the state of civil aviation in the 1930s. Edwin Link invented the first flight simulator in 1934 and helped pull aviation out of its dark ages, when pilots were “winging it” and crashing and burning at an alarming rate. Understanding how he did it helps us see how we can pull ourselves out of our current selling dark age.

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Build a Story Library

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Front-line salespeople are desperate for new and varied stories. For them, compelling stories are ammunition, used to address prospects’ ever-shifting priorities and objections. Unfortunately, most sales teams don’t have a story library; they rarely collect and document stories for reps to use.

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Crowdsource Stories

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See the Whole Picture. Systematically sharing stories across departments generates healthy workplace communication, and gets folks talking about the right things.You’ve heard the story of the blind men who touched different parts of an elephant, and how they argued about what they’d discovered. (It’s a spear! No, a snake! A tree trunk! A wall!) Many sales teams have similarly incomplete views of their markets.

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Case Studies Don’t Work for Sales

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Great customer insights are born out by watching customers use your offerings and during the product development and delivery process. Both give managers a solid, in-depth understanding of real-world user stories. Once product marketing gets involved, they collect those experiences and transform them into case studies – a time-tested classic output of B2B marketers. Even in a world of social media and brand publishing, the case study lives on, produced now in more formats (video, animation, paper and digital form) and across many more channels (twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube).

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