Create Stronger Connections Through Story
This past week I conducted a follow up training workshop in Chicago for a Client's sales organization I have worked with previously.
As part of the program, we reviewed their progress since our last training session. Happily, they have done extremely well. Last year, their sales were 6% over a very aggressive budget, and 17% above their sales the previous year.
Their sales manager had done an excellent job of reinforcing our training, and insuring that the lessons were applied in the field. The results speak for themselves. However, he is not easily satisfied and recognizes the great potential for many more sales in his region. As a result, we were providing additional training to his team to enable them to take their sales to an even higher level this coming year.
As part of the training, we reviewed some of the ideas from the last program we did together, nearly two years ago. They remembered the principles very well. Understandably, they didn't remember a lot of the details. However, when I reminded them of a story I had told them only one time, nearly two years ago, they began laughing as they recited the smallest details of that story.
A few salespeople who had been added to the team since I had last worked with them had no idea what was going on, but they were awed by the specifics that were being recited in response to my questions. The people who remembered the story were in awe, too.
They all got the point: People Forget Facts But They Remember Stories, and The Job Of The Salesperson Is To Be Remembered, And Remembered In A Favorable Way.
Why is this so? Two years ago the sales professionals in my Chicago audience experienced a phenomenon known as "disclosure matching", whereby they unconsciously searched their personal memory banks for matching experiences in their own lives. This was a subconscious response to my disclosure of personal information through the art form of story. As a result, last week, two years after the fact, their memory resonated in harmony with the recollection of my story, and the powerful, almost mystical connection between us was restored.
According to recent research by a well-known professor of neurophysiology, the oldest hardwired neural pathway in the human brain is for stories. Nothing is more compelling than the subconscious relationship created between people connected by the human race's unconscious commonality of shared experiences revealed through the art form of story.
Dear Reader, are you using your personal stories to connect with your customers and prospects? If not, you are missing one of the most effective means of creating trust and confidence with them. They are missing a large part of your authenticity you could be sharing with them, and you are missing a large part of the business they could be sharing with you.
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For more information on the use of stories to help you close more sales, see Chapter 24 "Don't Just Show Up and Throw Up; Make Memorable Presentations" in my best-selling book: "Close More Sales! Persuasion Skills That Boost Your Selling Power". Published by Amacom, New York. European Distribution by McGraw-Hill. Published in China by Shanghai People's Publishing Company.
Mike Stewart, CSP
Stewart & Stewart, Inc.
Sales Boosters™
Break-Away™ is a proprietary trademark of Stewart & Stewart, Inc. when used in conjunction with a business skills or personal improvement topic description.
