How using stories can help increase your sales

Graham McGregor is a marketing adviser. You can get his free marketing guide ‘The Plan B Sales Solution’ at simplemarketinganswers.com.

OPINION: In selling you often need to get your customers thinking differently before you can make a sale. And stories can be a very powerful way to do this.

Example 1: In his excellent book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about how you can change your actions and even your feelings based on how you think about a certain situation. Stephen then uses a wonderful personal story to illustrate his point.

Stephen was enjoying a peaceful suburban train ride on a Saturday morning. At the next stop a man got on the train with a number of children. The children began running around the carriage, making a lot of noise and yet the man sat there and did nothing about it. Stephen could see the other passengers were getting irritated with the disturbance and so he went over to the man.

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He asked the man if it would be possible to do something about his noisy children as they were disturbing everyone in the carriage. The man looked up and apologised. He told Stephen that the children and he had just come from the hospital and their mother had just died an hour ago.

He said that neither he nor the children were coping that well. Everyone in the carriage heard the man explain his situation. Suddenly no-one was irritated with his noisy children. They all offered sympathy and asked how they could be of help.

As Stephen explained, the situation was still the same. In other words, the children were still running around and making a noise. However, the people were no longer concerned about this because they saw the situation differently.

And it’s the same in selling. Sometimes all your client needs is for you to tell them a good story to get them thinking differently.

I remember speaking to a real estate sales team many years ago. One thing I wanted them to think differently about was the importance of asking other top salespeople in their company for advice on how to improve sales.

So I asked the question: “Who is the top salesperson in your company?” They all knew who it was. Out of nearly 500 salespeople a gentleman named Barry had been number one for several years.

“Great,” I said. “Now how many of you in the last 12 months have rung up Barry and asked if you could spend a couple of minutes with him to get some ideas to improve sales?” Out of 13 salespeople, not a single one had talked to Barry in the last year.

I then told them a story about a friend I had called Lance who was working for an opposition real estate company in the same suburb as Barry. Lance had rung Barry a few weeks earlier and asked him if he would mind giving him some advice on a tricky real estate sale.

And Barry gladly gave him one hour of his time (for free) to help my friend. I explained that top salespeople in most industries are quite happy to give advice.

The big problem is they are rarely asked. This story was very useful to get this sales team thinking differently about asking the top sales people in their company for advice. (After all if an opposition salesperson could ask for advice and get it, maybe they should ask as well.)

Example 3: Around 30 years ago I sold sales training courses. One of my clients was a young lady in her early 20s. When I met this young lady she had no job and was on an unemployment benefit. She was keen to get into selling and realised that doing a sales seminar would really help.

The snag was the seminar was $500 and she had no money at the time. So she sold her sewing machine and used the money to pay for the sales seminar.

She completed the seminar and within three weeks she had a great sales job at a company selling jewellery. Her starting salary was three times the value of the unemployment benefit she had been on.

One of the reasons she got this sales job was the manager of the jewellery company was very impressed that she had not let a lack of money stop her from taking action and learning some key sales skills.

I used the story of this young lady dozens of times when I was selling my sales training seminars. And this one story got a lot of people thinking differently about investing money in a sales training seminar. And it made me a lot of sales.

What things do you need your potential customer to think differently about before they can make a buying decision for your product or service? What stories can you tell that would help them to think along these lines?