Storytelling

Challenge

I am working in technology company and providing software solutions to the retail banks. My role is sales and  relationship management with key accounts in the Eastern Europe region. Being in technology company we  often need to launch new solution to the market, where for that particular client it may be challenging and  are afraid of changes and new technologies.

Even though my clients are eager to try new things but they want to have a proof that it already works and  what is the implementation journey for them. It is always difficult when launching new solution to the market,  for several reasons. Implementation team on the client side doesn’t have experience and knowledge how to  handle certain situations. They are skeptical of efficiency that this particular solution will work and how it will  be maintained. For this reason, I very often use storytelling approach to share the experience from the other  markets on particular cases which might be relevant for my clients.

Application

I am regional sales manager for the Eastern Europe and responsible for the client relationship management,  I have access to the knowledge and information how my peers are implementing certain products and what  are lessons learned from these implementations.

I wanted to launch new module of risk scoring solution for the Credit cards in one particular market. The  solution is relatively new however, it is very efficient in managing risk scoring for the Credit card portfolio and  recent implementation in other markets demonstrated excellent results. Even though, I wasn’t directly  involved in the implementation process, I had quite a lot insight.

When I was discussing credit scoring solution implementation with my clients, they were very interested but  shared their concerns regarding managing certain workstream with the system. Luckily, I recalled previous  experience on the different market and I explained and told them the story how the implementation was held  there, how this issue was managed and resolved.

Insight

Storytelling was very efficient in my particular case. The bank who shared their concerns regarding the  implementation process and thought it would be unique to their particular case, wasn’t so. As I had a similar  story for them to share, which other clients had experienced and discussed the implications and experience  of other to them. This helped a lot to everyone. First, bank became relatively optimistic and certain that they  needed the solution. Secondly, they realized its not only them who have such concerns, but others and they  can leverage and learn from others experience.

I discussed this matter with my manager and what was the outcome of this situation. There are couple of  sales manager in my regional team who work with the clients implementations. We agreed that we would  prepare case studies and share on-going basis our experiences with the clients, sharing experiences will help  us in the future to support our clients and share the stories of other client from different region and best  practices.

I am working in technology business focus on retail banking. This course helped me understand that every  business foundation is human to human interaction and all the approach we take doing our jobs, we should  be coming from the human centered and what would be suitable for them and comforting their minds.

The tools I have learned, will help me understand and deepen in to the issue and problems I am trying to solve  on the daily basis, by interacting with my clients.

I usually use story telling technique which is closer to my business and more needed.

