How to Improve your Sales Speech? Thanks to the storytelling, says Andrew Raskin, Sales Strategy Consultant. Storytelling, or the art of narration in French, is the principle of integrating a story into your sales pitch. And sales pitch is the backbone of a company’s strategy.
Why Incorporate Narration into your Sales Speech?
Today, the seller-client relationship is often compared to the doctor-patient relationship. The customer arrives with a problem, to which the seller prescribes a solution – the product. Except that the patient trusts the doctor from the first appointment, while the customer generally is suspicious of the seller. The challenge is to build that trust right from the start and that is why you need to incorporate a narrative into your commercial speech.
Business Speech and Types of Business Speech
To build confidence, no secret: you have to integrate a story in the sales speech. And this story is simply the one you live or have lived with your clients.
How to Integrate Narration with your Sales Speech?
Customer case, customer testimonial or case study, the name of this practice is not salesman, and it is a climax. Why not start by changing this name to “Success Story” for example? The English version of “Success Story” is beginning to spread more and more. In any case, it would be more faithful: you want to highlight the success of your previous operations.
Staging a project’s success is a relevant way to engage a prospect. Rather than following the traditional “stakes, solution, results”, here are the questions you can ask yourself to build the story of success with a client:
- Who was this customer that you helped, what was his personality and what was his need?
- Why did he accept your help and why at that time?
- What was the expectation of this person?
- What were the obstacles on the road to success? Have there been any failures?
- How has your product or service helped to overcome these barriers?
- Once goals are met, how has the client’s life changed?
- What is your relationship now?
Finally, the sales pitch is constructed as a narrative: initial situation, trigger, vicissitudes and resolution. All that remains is to give your speech a touch of narration: personal elements.
Personal Narration
To build trust with your sales speech, you can also introduce elements of your personal story. Where do you come from, why do you do this job, in this enterprise? Then share the story of a failure that you or the company has overcome. Indeed, confessing its imperfections pushes the interlocutor to sympathize, then to open in his turn.
There is nothing to include authentic elements in commercial discourse in order to give it a force of conviction that is otherwise superior to that of a classical and impersonal discourse.
Do not forget that posture goes hand in hand with speech. By presenting your sales pitch, you position yourself as a partner rather than as a salesperson. And as a partner, your goal is common: to accelerate the performance of your customer. Thus, trust can be established naturally.
To build such a commercial discourse, training sessions, sharing workshops and field tests are needed in order to make the sales people think and train them on these specific points. The key is then to share and disseminate good practices within the company.
Hello everyone! This is Richard Daniels, a full-time passionate researcher & blogger. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics. He loves to write about economics, e-commerce, and business-related topics for students to assist them in their studies. That's the sole purpose of Business Study Notes.
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