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storytelling

Selling ice to Eskimos and your return policy

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It’s a familiar compliment, but it benefits no one. The Eskimo ends up with buyer’s remorse and we get our ice back while earning a bad reputation among Eskimos.

If the first step is determining if there’s a fit, let’s figure it out as quickly as possible. Why take three conversations when it can be done in one? If it’s not a good match, we can move on to more promising opportunities and our customer will be more inclined to see us the next time we call.

Most of our tools are designed to help our salespeople sell, but consider adding some that first assess fit. Simple checklists, case study comparisons, and interactive surveys can qualify a prospect and inform both parties about how to best work together.

Spend a little more time assessing fit and you’ll spend less time explaining your return policy.

Content needs innovation too

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It’s ironic that much of the discussion about marketing using technology circles back to the importance of content. Now that our information is available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, our customers expect to feel like they’re the only ones that matter at the exact moment they choose to engage.

The good news is that content does and always will matter.  The bad news is that broad-brush approaches designed for all occasions are no longer sufficient.

As we embrace technology and optimize tools for our specific objectives, we can’t stop there.  Our customers will give us high marks for being progressive, but only if the stories we tell are at least as innovative as the tools we use to tell them.

How credible are you?

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Your offering is rock solid. You’ve done a really nice job of designing and executing your product or service. Seriously. Well done.

Once I establish that you’re in the running for my business, on what other criteria do I make my decision? To some degree I make it on the credibility of the salesperson sitting across the table and the company she represents. Is she able to persuade me that she knows what she’s talking about? Do I agree that her company stands behind everything said so far?

We’d like to think that our product accounts for the majority of our credibility, but if our sales force turns over often or if we’re headquartered in the east and selling in the west, there may be many non-product obstacles making us less credible.

Picture your newest, most remote salesperson. Is he equipped with the right stories and mobile tools to build credibility?

I’m not ready for the punchline

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Any joke, story, or marketing angle ultimately arrives at a punchline. The ‘aha’ moment at the end when it all becomes clear and we laugh, or cry, or buy.

But telling the punchline before our story has been fully grasped has little impact. In some long sales cycles, our punchline won’t create that ‘aha’ moment for years even though we repeat it over and over.

So take a fresh look at your marketing strategy, materials, and tools. Are they built around telling stories?  Or built around telling punchlines?

Lawnmowing

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A story about mowing your lawn

I cut your lawn in precise diagonals…this direction today, the other direction next week. Your old service was wearing ruts in the same place week after week. And did you see how I aimed my lawnmower so that the grass blows away from your garage instead of into it? You got my note about that new patch of weeds over by the mailbox, right?

Your service charges $30. I charge $45 and make twice the profit.  And you’re happy to pay it.

Surely your business has a story at least as good as that to win and keep customers.  Is it being told?

Apples to apples, actually

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It may be an exaggeration to say that our offering is so different from our competitor’s that it’s like comparing apples to oranges. If we concede that we’re both selling apples, then winning the sale often depends on our ability to communicate specific differences. Highlight the subtleties and tell the story with tools that lead customers through a close comparison:

+ Show a video of a customer that tried both and liked yours better

+ Contrast images of product construction. Point out which features are related to your patented technology

+ Present an explanation of how you’ll support the purchase. The products may seem similar, but it’s your service that will make them happy they chose you

We can win the sale by embracing an apples to apples comparison. If asserting that your competitors are picking from the wrong orchard is unrealistic, make sure your people are equipped and willing to compare your apples to any other apples out there.

Make my risk smaller

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Every change in buying habits entails risk, so proposing that our solution is completely risk-free can hurt our credibility. Our offering may be fantastic, our support top-notch, and our pricing a bargain for the value we deliver, but we’re always asking the customer to take a risk.

Stories about how things can go wrong, therefore, are just as important as stories about how things can go right. Tell me what happens if we miscalculated. How will you help me recover? Show me pictures of projects and customers that ran into obstacles and ended up with even better results than expected. Explain how your safeguards mean that you’ll never, ever, leave me hanging.

We all know things rarely go as planned. Tell me a story about those times, too, and the risk you’re asking me to take will seem smaller and smaller.

Capturing the stories that customers tell

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It’s obvious that if we make our salespeople into better storytellers, it can only mean good things for sales, profits and our brand.

Less obvious is that the stories our customers tell us can have a huge impact, too, as long as not too much gets lost in translation. Do your customers ask questions that only a subject matter expert can answer? How certain are you that both the question and its context are being conveyed from customer to salesperson to company?

Use mobile technology to capture customer sentiment at the source. Video, audio, or an annotation made on a drawing can accurately convey the stories that our customers are desperately trying to tell us, with all of the subtleties needed to serve them better and fine tune our approach to the market.

Putting it on slides doesn’t make it a presentation

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Take a look at the slide decks you use most often. If you can email them to someone without explanation, it’s not a presentation. It may be a brilliant, beautiful document, but it’s not a presentation.

A client recently created several new decks to include in their StorySlab sales app. Each presentation was a dozen images, two or three words on each. At the deployment meeting, a salesperson was asked to present the slides with virtually no advance preparation. A wonderful (and rare) thing happened: the salesperson made them interesting. Of course he knew the product well and knew the customer problems and pain that he could solve, but he wove in personal experience and style and enthusiasm. He was selling, not just delivering someone else’s message.

Experiment with putting less on your slides. You’ll be pleasantly surprised with how much more your salespeople can do with them.

Grandma leapfrogged us

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It was inevitable. She is less and less mobile, so her devices were bound to become more so.

Just promise me one thing: Don’t let grandma ride the mobile wave ahead of your company. She doesn’t need the productivity gains. She doesn’t need to demonstrate a culture of innovation to customers. She doesn’t need to reference her marketing content on the fly.

Cindy, who listened to a talk I gave a few months ago, took the first step and bought herself a tablet. Then she called me and asked where she should start. Five minutes later she was poised to overtake grandma.

Call me for free advice or to discuss a specific project, and let’s make a plan to leapfrog grandma.