STORYTELLING IS A MUST-HAVE TOOL

Challenge & Selection

I work as a presale consultant at an IT company. My job is to consult our customers on software  solutions needed to improve their business and to sell our products. Our software is a high value  investment, very often the decision maker is CXO level. How can I convince them to buy our  solutions instead of competitors’? There are tons of software out there with minor difference  between them. Talking about all the system’s functions will not work. The CXO level does not  understand and don’t bother much about the technical stuffs, rather they want to know which  value the solution brings to their business, how it helps to smooth operation, increase efficiency  and revenue. Over time, I found out that story telling is a great and must-have tool to win the  customer.

Application

Regardless of who my audiences are or which product I am selling, using storytelling during my  presentations allows me to easily share message and got my audience engaged and interested.  As shared in the “Storytelling tool” video of Week 2, it's about the connection that I give to people  about a piece of information that I’m trying to share. An engaging story helps to increase my  prospect’s trust in me, my company and the pitched product or service. The customer wants to  hear a story about others who have the same challenges as they face and how my solution has  helped them to overcome those. Storytelling is not only relevant but easy to follow, engage and  therefore more convincing.

Storytelling had helped me to win a big first deal for one large customer to use Workplace by  Facebook. Workplace is a social network like Facebook but restricted in the company’s border. It  has all the same functions as Facebook, it’s no need and ineffective to talk about functionalities  to convince our customer to buy. Provided that, I had chosen stories of 3 other customers who  had used Workplace in a very innovative way to operate their business. One of them had used  Workplace as a platform to collect sample voice from 30,000 employees to develop their voice  recognition engine which was claimed better than Google’s one in term of recognizing North  Vietnamese. Virgin Airway had saved million dollars thanks to an idea from a cleaning staff  replying to a simple post from the CEO on their Workplace “How can we save cost?”. When  cleaning the airplane after each flight, he noticed that most customers have half a bottle of water  left over so he proposed to cut size of the bottle in half. Very simple idea, coming from a very low- level staff in the organization hierarchy, saves tons of dollar for the company. Without a completely  open, easy to use and “flat” platform like Workplace, it might have never happened. These stories  had really got my customer interest as it has actual application, easy to do and bring real money  to the companies.

Insight & Approach  Through those stories, storytelling has built my customer’s trust in me and Workplace. But not  only that, by telling others’ stories, I had also uncovered the real pain points that my customer is  facing as they have the same challenge as the other illustrated companies. They are a large  corporation with branches located all over the country. They do not have a fast and effective  channel to spread news across organization. They want to encourage employees to innovate but  do not have tool, which is friendly, simple, and secure to do that. Or the training cost is very high  because of travelling costs with many repeated courses. I had shared with them how Starbuck

changed their menu in days for more than 40 shops in different states by learning from a post on  Workplace from a shop in attempt to response to their customer’s reference. I had told a story of  a global non-profit organization using Workplace to livestream their training to staffs all over the  world, not only to save time and money but also be able to save the course on the platform for  later reuse.

The customer was completely convinced so they decided to sign the contract and implement  Workplace to all their 21,000 employees. Not meeting after meeting, no need to demo or proof of  concept, storytelling had helped me to win the deal for only one pitch. This course had helped to  make me more confident in using storytelling in my job to present my ideas and best illustrate  them to my audience.

