Storytelling is an emotional investment that you make with your customer

Storytelling is an emotional investment that you make with your customer in a way that you either prepare an “Angel’s Cocktail” or a “Devil’s Cocktail” for the customers. The Angels Cocktail will take your storytelling session with the customer towards a sale and the Devil’d cocktail will take your customer away from the sale.

What is Angel’s Cocktail?

It is a cocktail of the following hormones in the minds of the customer viz. Oxytocin, Dopamine, and Endorphin.
Oxytocin helps you become generous, more trustworthy and more bonding. All this leads to more empathy.
Dopamine is induced with a cliff hanger suspense in your story.
Endorphin is induced with a humor that makes you laugh.

What is Devil’s cocktail?

It is a cocktail of hormones like Cortisone and Adrenalin in the minds of the customer.
Cortisone makes you very intolerant, critical and noisy.
Adrenalin excites one towards an action.

3 Parts to any good Sales Story: Setup, Content, Resolution

Setup is the art of building a context. For example, if I want to tell a story about a customer of mine who always bought the cheapest stuff in the market and repented later on for its poor quality, I will build the set up as follows:

Let me tell you about his very close friend as well a customer of mine who was a master in buying things which were really cheap. Sometimes I wondered how he could do this always.

Content is the meat of the story wherein you relate the plot of your story. Continuing with the example above, this is how I will build the content of my story:

This customer that I was talking about would understand everything about my product. He would ensure that he talks to every competitor of mine and last but not the least, he will go and sit on the yellow pages directory available online. He would invite some unknown players in the market from the Internet and end up doing a cheap deal with one of them. While doing the deal he never imagined that the product may spoil and would need a service engineer to repair.

Resolution is the conclusion of the story with a moral.

Continuing with the story above, I will continue to build a resolution as follows:

The customer always did the mistake of buying a product and not a solution. He would buy a product cheap but by the time he owned the product as a user, his cost of the solution will go up. Let us buy solutions and not products!

5 Techniques to tell a good story in Sales

Think like a movie maker.

• Add scenes
• Talk in First person
• Create Roller coaster moments
• Master non-verbal communication (Sometimes silence is more powerful than dialogues)
• Raise questions in a good story
• End the story with a lesson/moral

Determine the structure of your story 

• Hierarchial: The story builds from top to bottom or vice versa. In sales, you try to tell hierarchial stories when you want to take your prospect to the root of a problem.
• Network: The story weaves a necklace out of multiple parallel facts. In sales, you try to tell a network type of story when you wish to build parallel facts( quality, service, training, upgradability) into one USP for your product.
• Stack:  The story is a cumulation of facts that sits on top of each other. In Sales, you use this technique of storytelling when you want to build a sequence of facts that happened one after the other and finally resulted in a cliff hanger.

Paint your story like a picture

• Each scene in your story is a different emotion
• Random incidents but one plot
• Vivid and emotive language
• Emotions and Empathy with modulation of voice
• Timing of punches

In a nutshell

1. Story Sells more than the features of your product or service.
2. The customer does not listen to you till he secretes dopamine, endorphin or oxytocin in good proportions. Cortisone is negative for sale transactions to happen.
3. The science of storytelling is practiced with art of storytelling that involves painting a picture like a moviemaker would weave a necklace out of incidents(scenes) and conclude with an impactful lesson.

Questions to Ask yourself

1. How do you serve the customer with "The Angels Cocktail" during a sales call?
2. Do you know how to create the 3 parts which build a good story in sales?
3. Try and build a story each of hierarchial, network and stack type?