Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge  I have been working in Consultive sales. One aspect I truly value is bringing value to Customers and finding excellent solutions to help Customers tackle problems and establish long positive partnership relationships. To be able to do my work, with positive impact, is extremely important to understand customer context: - his difficulties, - objectives, - thoughts, - emotions and - be empathetic with customer.

Sometimes Customers do not want to share their problems because they can be seen as weaknesses, or  the customer is not able to articulate problems and objectives in a straightforward way. Other times there  are customers who understand Sales People as just another seller, without any anything new to add. In this  context, customer is not open to share any ideas.

Selection When I have difficult customers whom do not want to share information, or that are not able to articulate  want they need, I use storytelling.  Storytelling is an excellent tool to use while interacting with customers, since: - Puts customer, as a human being and its experience in the center from our relation. - And helps us to take the customer as listener along on the journey.

Using stories and vivid examples, with a beginning, a development and a conclusion which relate to our  listener, helps establishing connection and building empathy.

Application Before speaking with a customer, I plan and collect new stories which I believe are related to his Company  context and the subject we are working on. When in front of the customer presenting a new solution, I plan and present the business idea like a story  line, it has to be a coherent and compelling story to grab attention, with examples from other customer’s  references which relate to the listener. The listener has to connect to the needs and advantages I am  communicating.  I start with the challenges and difficulties from similar customers, afterwards I present the solution features  and how they address the pain points, with vivid examples on how they tackle customer difficulties and  improve business. I have experience in using this “Sales” storytelling, to gather customer additional pain  points, empathy and help customer have the best solution for their context.  It is a win-win approach for both and a very rewarding approach, since I can add value to customer with  ideas to tackle their problems.

Insight I have learned storytelling is an excellent way to relate to others emotions, objectives and ideas which are  not articulated. Telling a story about other Companies tackling the same challenges or objectives, make  customers connect and start applying the experience to their context, and also gives a common ground to  have honest discussions on how to do help the customer evolving.

Storytelling applied in this way is an excellent tool to help get customer feedback about:

• what is – what are the customer pain points.

• what if – what happened if the Use Cases were applied to customer reality?

• what wows – what customer values in the solution?

• what works – what could work in customer context.

Approach Complementary to storytelling, I would use visualization. If we can present a mockup or a demo from a  similar problem customer has, which was tackled, the possibility to gather additional information from  customer context and objectives, increases. And with it, the possibility to gain competitive advantage in  answering with a correct solution.

