Sell With a Story

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

EXERCISES 1. What are the three most common objections you get during sales calls? For each objection, think of an occasion involving a current or previous customer (or even another prospect) that demonstrates the fallaciousness of the objection. Ask your customers or other salespeople in your office for help identifying such an occasion. 2. Think

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

Even if you haven’t yet come across a problem they have that you can’t solve, you can instill in them a sense of confidence that you would tell them if that situation does arise. You can’t accomplish that by just telling them, “Of course, I’ll always tell you when I’m not the best option for you.” But you can do that through a story about a time yo

(1) a time, (2) a place, (3) a main character, (4) an obstacle, (5) a goal, and (6) events.

the app Refresh. It accesses your online calendar, identifies the people you have upcoming meetings with, puts together a dossier on their background and interests, and sends it to you prior to your meeting. Based on their public social media profiles, it can tell you what their interests are, pull recent headlines about the company they work for a

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

One of my earliest clients was a midsize city government in central Florida. They’d been paying $250,000 a year for a contractor to remove sludge from a wastewater treatment plant when they hired us to do a reverse auction. We found several sludge removal companies to compete for the contract and invited them all to a pre-bid meeting so we could ex

a 10-story quiz at www.thestorytest.com to help people practice identifying general business stories from nonstories.