Career Sales Training: Tell Me A Sales Story

You love a good story, I love a good story, everyone loves a good story. Stories are how we learn and how we remember things. Stories simplify the complicated and support our beliefs. And stories are one of the most powerful tools you can use in a sales conversation if you know how to tell a good story.

A good story must be engaging and brief. Your prospects don’t want to hear some protracted story, and they certainly don’t want to hear a long story that doesn’t seem to have a point to it. Rather than having one big story you’ll want to be prepare several succinct and powerful stories to use throughout the sales conversation when they’re pertinent to the conversation.

A good sales story contains one or more of the 5 key elements to a good sales story:

1. it supports or reinforces a commonly shared belief
2. it communicates the actions and behaviors you want the prospect to demonstrate
3. it points out and overcomes objections
4. it answers questions a prospect will have
5. it removes other choices as viable options.

Some of the most powerful stories are about a seemingly unrelated story that clearly makes a point. Stories about the reluctance of and subsequence benefit received by a previous client can be powerful. Stories sprinkled appropriately throughout a sales conversation increase your connection, and get the prospect to open up and commit sooner.

Top producers are usually good story tellers. You may realize that stories are a great tool for your sales conversations, but you think you aren’t a good story teller. You only feel that way because you haven’t developed your stories and then practiced using them.