Example Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge

I am a Technical Salesman. I usually have a lot of meetings with customers for introducing our  technical solutions and services to IT persons and Business users on the customer side. Even  though we are selling very popurlar brand names like Microsoft, Google or Amazon... but  customers always have big concerts in the making decision process. Most IT people are  interested in learning new technologies, and have much understanding after some training  sessions, but they still don’t agree to move to the next steps of the project. It is more difficult  on the Business users side, they don’t have much technical understanding, so always refuse to  make final decisions for investment. It takes a lot of time in our selling process and has a low  winning ratio.

Selection

We spend time and resources to know why. Ninety percent of the selected case, customers had  understood how we solve their paint-points, see the benefits and better ROI. But after some  analysis and testing, we found in those cases, customers did not make sure that the solutions  we offered were the best solution for them. Then we apply a Storytelling method to help  improve those cases.  The showing of successful case study helps customers be more confident  in making investment for our project.

Application

In each customer, we discuss to have a plan how apply Storytelling to. We try to understand  the situation of this customer as much as we can. And then we select the most related success  story to deliver this purpose, and plan how to tell this story to customer. First, we list down  clearly purpose to easily follow. It may be the pain-point was solved, how our solution  improved the business, how the solution help to saving the cost, or how customer leveraged  advanced technology to have and advantage competitive…Second, we plan to adress this  purpose to each person in customer, it may be the IT team, Business users or C level.

After planning, we deliver it. The skill of the storyteller determines a large part of the success  to drive the effectively of the meeting. This person have to create the connection between the  story and current customer, using the customer language to help audience have deeply  understand the story as their view. Storyteller should ask more questions to get feedback from  audience and let them be a part of this story. Sometime storyteller just ask a open question that  build suspense, build intrigue, get more interesting for this meeting, and let audience answer it  to get more interactive.

Slide presentation, note board and meeting minutes after discussion is another tool to make the  Storytelling meeting more effective, including next actions to follow after it. But the most  importance thing is following the directions and purpose of the meeting, the storyteller have to  focus and finish it.

Insight and Approach

Storytelling helped us shorten our sales cycle faster from this time, it helped increase two time  on closing deal. Via some big powerfull questions, we make reflection of leader from customer  side, it help leaders figure out some challenge inside their orgnization, even some challenge  they maybe face in future. Storytelling merthod help ourseflves and customer undertanding  more things happen in digital tranformation journey. Not only good for technical selling like  our company, this tool aslo can be good for appling to another industries selling, or may be a  nother business activities not only selling.

