Stories are the best way to get our point across. In fact, we are schooled on how to tell stories and recently you are seeing more and more presentations handled in story fashion. An Ancient North American Proverb states,
Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe.
But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.
As salespeople, we should all learn to tell stories, right? Wrong, you should not learn how to tell stories but rather how to solicit stories from your customers. Selling is about discovering the customer’s story. If you give them the chance they will tell you all kinds of details, challenges, problems and even solutions that you would never get otherwise.
What might you find if you listen to the customer’s story?
- Their perceptions of the situation
- Rules of thumbs they have devised
- The types of decisions they have to make
- What makes a tough decision?
- The people that are involved
- What makes a situation normal
- What make a situation abnormal
We could go on and on about what you might learn, and you may believe that you already are soliciting stories from a customer. We do this by asking open ended questions that is how we are trained. We might ask a question how they do what they do. Or, what’s involved in doing this? These types of questions can serve a purpose but seldom turn out to be very informative. An interesting perspective is how often do you find the problems of individual customers that much different. If you don’t, you are not asking the right questions.
The first step in asking better questions is to frame typical problems separating situations from normal and abnormal. When you delve into a non-routine event, you will uncover the skills within the organization, decision-makers and influencers that otherwise may go completely undetected. How a customer gets a non-routine job accomplished is seldom about standard procedures, it is about people.
The way I seek out stories:
1. I ask for the customer to tell me about an incident based on the situation we are discussing where things did not quite go right or when they performed something exceptional. Give them a few parameters so that you don’t get a story that is not applicable. I may ask for the best and worst case scenario. I will then pick the one they are most enthused about and seem to be willing to discuss more.
2. Leave them proceed at their own pace and gathering as much information as you can. You may have to ask a few questions or repeat back what they say to clarify to move the story along. If they wander off subject, you can always bring them back to center. Pay particular attention to the scene changes (practice by watching a TV show or movie). This will assist you in dividing the story into meaningful parts. Always probe on what happen that caused the situation to become abnormal and maybe even what happen right before that. Make sure you get the ending to the story and know how the situation ultimately turn out.
3. Review the scene changes or segment the story with the customer creating a timeline of the event. Many times people will overlook this detail. As you create the framework, often times, more depth is put into the story, and key decision points surface or a major shift in the situation occurs. This process develops the structure of the story.
4. The next step is where you really get into the head of the storyteller. You take the person back through the process asking probing questions about confusions, uncertainties, and judgments that were made. Work through the individual segments. Find out others who could contribute to the story. If you have constructed and framed the story appropriately, the storyteller is more than willing to explain the story in more depth.
5. The final step is the “What if” probes. This is an area that can be useful representing any concept that you want to get reactions to. Many salespeople will “solutionize” the process here, but I stay away from this. This is where we can explore together, and if I have gone this far, typically there has been a great deal of trust obtained.
Does this process work all the time? Many times if you are dealing with someone that lacks the expertise in the area of discussion this process will prove unsuccessful. Other times, there may just be situations that do not offer the comparison you desire. If you have facilitated a storyboarding session, you can use many of the same techniques used in this interview process.
I cannot think of a more productive way of selling than having your customers tell you a story, can you?
Leave the customer win your heart!
Reference for the post: Working Minds: A Practitioner’s Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis (Bradford Books)
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