Storytelling - Sales Asset

Challenge: So, the place where I work is called Tata  Group’s, where I work as an Admissions Counselor helping  people in enrolling into our education programs. Now, as a counselor, my job is to make sure that the  learners are really able to understand the USP of the program, where they can connect it to their career  and can really see its value. But apparently, I used to be like a chatbot(website), just telling the data  which was already present on the website. Thus, my conversion ratio (lead to sales) was less since not  many learners could identify the benefits of enrolling into the program.

Selection: I understood that I will have to change the way I counsel and add more meaning and value to  it. The tool which I used was story-telling. I could understand that for a learner to completely relate to  our program(product), it is important that I share relevant examples which he could easily relate to. And  thus, he would get the underlying value addition of the program.

Application: So, moving forward, in all my counselling, I used to tell two stories where in the first  case(let’s say X), the learner who took the program and then, explained her career growth after few  years, how she could moved up the corporate ladder, how she managed to apply her learnings into  various work activities, how she used to networking for better opportunities etc. In the second  case(consider Y), the learner did not enroll into the program and thereby lead to a flat trajectory of  career growth and where she missed on various opportunities to scale up.

Insight: By doing this, there were three clear insights viz. 1) There is more engagement with the learner  during the counselling. 2) I am able to build more trust with the learner. 3) The conversion of lead to  sales has increased phenomenally.

Approach: In future, I am looking to innovate with various styles of storytelling; one of which is the  prompting where I keep on continuously asking questions regarding their future and whether they are  taking active steps in that direction. The moment I find an answer where they aren’t prepared would be  my gateway to explain the benefit of our program linking to that question in a storytelling manner.

