Sell With a Story

your first homework assignment is to develop this kind of story for yourself. Here’s how. Start by inventing a main character who’s in a typical industry you serve (“Suppose you’re in the chicken business”). Then describe a plausible series of events (“get the chicken from the farm to the retail store”) that results in the problem your product or s

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”

“We’re going to work hard, but we’re going to have fun doing it.”

being

The major premise of Simon Sinek’s bestselling book Start with Why can be summarized in his statement “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”1 It should make sense, then, that in order to know you well enough to trust you, a buyer needs to understand why you do what you do for a living. What drew you to the profession or the company

Stanford University Professor Chip Heath asked his students to give one-minute speeches about crime. The average student used 2.5 statistics in his speech, while only one in ten students told a story. But when students were asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remembered details of stories. Only 5 percent remembered any individual statistic.5

“First, tell me when you cannot help me. And second, tell me when you made a mistake before I find out from someone else.”

salespeople use a number of time-tested models for handling objections, such as LAIR (Listen, Acknowledge, Identify Objection, Reverse It), LACE (Listen, Accept, Commit, Explicit Action), LAARC (Listen, Acknowledge, Assess, Respond, Confirm), and Feel-Felt-Found.1 Some sales experts swear that if you just stay quiet for a few seconds, prospects wil

1. Invent a “What I do, simply” story. a. Use the “Suppose you’re in the chicken business” story from earlier in this chapter as a guide to model your story after. b. Choose a fictional main character in a typical industry you serve. c. List a plausible series of events that leads to the problem your product or service is designed to fix. d. Briefly d