When salespeople watch selling-story videos, they immediately learn ways to improve interactions with prospects. But owning those stories — knowing them authoritatively, and confidently weaving them into selling conversations — requires more effort.
Role-playing these stories is a fast and sure-fire way to own them. We’ve seen great success when teams leverage weekly Story Workshops to complement conventional sales meetings. Reps learn, deliver and refine stories “in role,” as if presenting to prospects.
In addition to learning selling stories, Story Workshops provide a great forum to deliver stories that address new selling situations that surfaced during the weekly sales meeting.
Two Story Workshop approaches work quite well:
All-in-one: The sales team learns a new story each week, presented by a guest — usually an expert from the organization. The team then collaborates to streamline it for impact and time (around two minutes).
After pacing and points are refined, the team then performs a “round robin” session of role-play, and records the best version. This valuable resource is then linked to the story deck and posted in the CRM library. (60 – 90 minutes / week)
Bright Spots: The team records and submits stories in advance. They then review the “bright spots” and “story of the week” in a weekly session. The next week’s stories are then assigned. (20 minutes / week) 
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Paul McGhee founded SharperAx in 2013. SharperAx develops role-play automation software.
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This article is the seventh excerpt from “10 Best Practices for a Great Storytelling Program,” an eBook written by Paul McGhee, based on years of research and practice in delivering great story programs. To download the entire eBook from Sharperax.com click here.
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