{#21 in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories, from Sell with a Story}

Every salesperson worth their salt does their best to get in front of the ultimate decision-maker. But we all know that’s not always possible. Usually, that’s because the decision is being made too far up the hierarchy for the salesperson to get access (like by the president or CEO or even the Board of Directors).

 

When that’s the case, good salespeople find an internal sponsor to champion their cause. Then they arm that sponsor with all the information they need to make the sale on their behalf.

 

But the more creative salespeople also include a story. And they do that because they know the story is more likely to be remembered and repeated in the meeting than the sales pitch. Nobody wants to sound like a shill for a supplier. But they do want to sound insightful, and that’s what the story does for them (and you).

 

They also know a story is their most reliable way to inspire the sponsor with a similar sense of passion for the cause. Here’s an example of what that might look like from Tia Finn, global learning specialist at the publishing and education company, Pearson PLC, in London. 

 

Arming Your Sponsor

 

One of the things you learn quickly when you’re selling textbooks and other educational solutions to schools is that the final decision is often made by the school board in a closed session.

 

In those situations, Tia likes to tell a “future state” or “feeling” story. Let’s say she’s talking to the superintendent of a struggling school district. The district’s biggest problem is that the students aren’t making the minimum scores on standardized tests to get into college. Tia has two programs she knows can help, and she’s already showed the superintendent all the data documenting the results. She’s hoping he’ll represent those two programs on her behalf at the next school board meeting. 

 

In her last meeting with the superintendent prior to the board meeting, she might say something like this: 

 

I really wish you could meet Mary Lou at Rover High School across town. You’re familiar with that school, right? Well, she’s just like you. Her students are very similar to yours, and they’re struggling with the exact same issues. In fact, they’ve been facing it longer than you—more than a decade. Well, I got a call from her a few weeks ago and she said, “Tia, you won’t believe it! Go get a copy of today’s newspaper. There’s an article about our school!” She was so excited. 

 

Then she told me about the article. “It showed our newest test scores, and they’re amazing! We’re up fifteen percent since last year, and we had sixty more students placed in colleges. The programs you helped us put in place in the fall are really working. This is the biggest news about our school in a decade!” 

Then Tia closes the story by asking this question: “Would you like to be able to make that phone call a year from now?” 

 

The answer, of course, is always a resounding yes. And it sends her champion off to the school board meeting with an inspired purpose and a story to tell. 

 

Why it works

 

But why does such a simple story work so well? After all, it’s less than 170 words long and can be told in about a minute. How is this story any different from just telling the prospect about the results at Rover High School—the fifteen percent increase in scores and the sixty additional college admissions?

 

Software demos are broken, and everyone who sells software knows it.

Greg Dickenson realized that when his boys came home from college for a visit. They needed to keep up with their online courses while they were home, so they pulled up a 90-minute video that claimed to cover the topic they needed to study, but most of it was about something else. They asked Dad how to find the part they needed and he said, “Well, just do a search for it.”

They both looked at him like he had two heads and said,

How do you search a video?”

That’s when the light bulb went off.

Greg was in the business of doing software demos and realized he had the same problem.

I spoke with Greg on my podcast this week and learned more about the problems with software demos and the solutions his company Omedym solves. You can listen to that conversation aobve. But here are a few highlights:

Problem #1: 96% of all companies selling software have a button on their website to request a demo. But when you click that button, most of them require that you give them your name and email address first, so they can contact you later. 86% of people will not fill in that information, and therefore won’t get to see the demo. That’s a problem. Companies are turning away interested buyers.

Problem #2: 60% of demo requests are for times outside normal business hours. You need a video people can watch when your sales department isn’t open.

Problem #3: The average watch time of a video on Youtube is 2 minutes and 37 seconds. But the typical software demo might be 30 minutes long. Most buyers aren’t going to watch the whole video. You need a way for them to watch just the part they’re most interested in.

Problem #4: Buyers spend 95% of their time learning on their own about a solution to a problem they have, and only 5% with a salesperson. Demo videos need to work harder for the buyer (and the salesperson).

The Solution

What’s Greg’s solution? A demo video that is accessible 24/7 and completely searchable the way a website is searchable. Just type in a keyword or ask a question, and you’re directed to the precise moment in the demo video that addresses your question.

Then the salesperson gets a summary of what parts of the video were watched, what keywords were searched for and what questions were asked, so they’re better able to talk about what the prospects are interested in.

And now it makes sense why Greg’s company name is Omedym. It’s MyDemo spelled backward.

Now, in the spirit of finding the exact right place, if you’ll go to the 11:40 mark in the podcast, you can hear Greg talk you through how the process works to get your demo or sales presentation turned into a video that’s completely searchable.

Learn more about Greg and his solution at www.omedym.com.

Click these links to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher, or Podbean.

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Paul Smith is one of the worl...

Has this ever happened to you? You finish what seems like a great sales call. The buyer says that they definitely need what you’re selling, and the price and quality are both fine. They’ll definitely place an order.

“But,” they say, “now’s just not the right time. Come back in six months.”

Of course it has. It happens to every salesperson. So, what do you do in that situation?

Well, too often we just end up reiterating, in vain, the same benefits we already explained earlier.

But what a lot of great salespeople find more effective is helping the prospect understand the unique problem created by waiting.

Here’s an example. . .

Tiffany Lopez, is a Senior Account Executive at DataServ where they sell Accounts Payable and Receivable software as a service. In late 2013, she closed a sale with a prospect she’d been working with for almost two years—or at least she thought she closed the sale.

The prospect agreed to buy DataServ’s accounts payable software solution, but they didn’t want to start implementation until the following March. They told Tiffany that December and January were busy months when they’re closing the books, and February is audit season. So March would be the earliest the A/P staff would be freed up for an installation like this. “Come back in January and we’ll sign all the paperwork, and then start work in March,” they said.

Well, January came, and Tiffany called the client. And called. And called. No response. Then she figured out why. She saw a news report that the company had just announced an acquisition of one of their competitors and were beginning work immediately to consolidate the new company. And she knew what that meant.

As she explains, “Typically in an acquisition, the acquiring company takes over the accounts payables for the acquired company. That means they might double the volume of payments they have to make, but with the same staffing. Plus, there’s a big onetime effort needed to set all those new vendors up in their A/P system.”

That’s why Tiffany’s calls weren’t getting returned. They were swamped, working overtime on nights and weekends to keep up. In fact, to make matters worse, she found out that one of their key A/P managers had quit in the middle of it all, probably as a result of her excessive workload. That just increased the burden on the remaining staff. They had to hire more than one person to replace her, and training them was a job in itself.

It’s a vicious cycle Tiffany has seen before. Workload goes up, morale goes down, people quit, so workload goes up, etc.

When Tiffany finally heard from her client, it was no surprise that they couldn’t even begin to consider taking on the implementation of the new A/P software now. They were just too busy and had no relief in sight.

The Lesson

The unfortunate and ironic thing about this story is that if they’d implemented Tiffany’s solution when they originally discussed it the previous year, they’d be in a much better position now. The new system is much more efficient than their current system, so when the acquisition happened, they wouldn’t have had to put in nearly as much overtime to keep up. That meant their best A/P manager might not have quit, which also meant they wouldn’t have had to hire and train any new people. Delaying was a decision they were certainly regretting now.

Tiffany shares this story with prospects when they start to drag their feet. It creates exactly the sense of urgency you might expect it to, and not just for prospects that see an acquisition looming in their future. They know that any unexpected project that drops in their lap can result in the same series of unfortunate events, and that they’ll be happier if they install the new system now and not wait.

Whatever your product or service is, there’s likely a similar example of the unfortunate consequences of delay for ...

{The 19th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories}

Wouldn’t it be great if you could resolve your buyer’s objections before they’re even brought up?

Turns out you can. And, believe it or not, the best example I’ve ever seen of that was in the hip-hop movie 8 Mile, starring rapper Eminem.

Lesson from 8 Mile

In the movie, the main character’s name is B-Rabbit (played by Eminem). And he signs up for a rap battle. If you’re unfamiliar with how a rap battle actually works, it’s like this: each competitor gets on stage and performs a rap, but with these two extra features: 1) the lyrics are supposed to be largely made up on the spot, and 2) the subject of the lyrics are insults that they’re hurling at their competitors. Whoever has the most clever insults, wins.

So, back to the movie — the main character, Rabbit, is upset when he gets to the finals of this particular rap battle and realizes his opponent, Papa Doc, is the leader of a gang that recently beat him up and intimidated his best friend into shooting himself in the leg with his own gun.

Rabbit knows that kind of embarrassing information gives Papa Doc an advantage in a battle of insults. But then Rabbit has an epiphany just before walking on stage. Instead of launching into his insults, he starts his rap by unashamedly telling his own humbling life story, including: “I know everything he’s ’bout to say against me . . . I do live in a trailer with my mom . . . I do got a dumb friend named Cheddar Bob who shoots himself in his leg with his own gun . . . I did get jumped by all six of you chumps.”

By the time he was done, Rabbit had left his opponent with no ammunition. When it was his turn, Papa Doc simply hands the microphone to the emcee and walks off stage in defeat.

What that looks like in a sales context

So, while the context might be unusual, Rabbit’s strategy is a brilliant one that can also be used in sales calls. Here’s an example from a guy named Ben Koberna, the CEO of the reverse auction company, EASI. That’s a company that gets suppliers to compete and bid on contracts to do business with his clients.

As Ben explains, “Prospective clients always ask the same question, ‘Do vendors like reverse auctions?’” His response always gets a laugh. He said, “Well, we’ve run the numbers. And vendors get mad in about 100 percent of the cases.”

Even though the humor diffuses some of the tension, it doesn’t resolve the underlying objection. His prospects don’t relish the thought of hiring him because of the adverse reaction they know it will bring out of their suppliers. Nobody wants to piss off the people they’ve been working with for years.

So, after getting that objection in lots of sales calls, now Ben uses the following story preemptively:

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 explain the process. The incumbent, accompanied by his lawyer, showed up with a tirade. He started yelling and screaming and at one point kicked over a chair. He insisted the whole process was illegal and claimed my team was going to be arrested.

We eventually got him settled down and started the bidding process. His first bid was $250,000, of course. When more aggressive bids started coming in, he lowered his to $240,000, then $200,000, then $150,000. The next bid we saw from him was for $0. Obviously, that was a mistake. Somebody must have clicked the wrong button. So we paused the auction and called him on the phone. We explained his mistake and offered to delete that bid before we...

{The 19th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} One powerful use of storytelling in sales is to resolve your buyers’ objections before they’re even brought up. I’ve come across two different methods to do this, so I’ll cover one in this post and the other in the next. The first technique [read more]

{The 18th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} One of the final, and most common objections buyers have to what you’re selling is price. So, if you’re at the point that you’re negotiating price, congratulations. You’ve got a prospect interested in what you’re selling, and you’ve probably resolved every other objection [read more]

{#17 in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} As most salespeople have learned, the real selling doesn’t start until the buyer says no. That’s why there are all kinds of methods salespeople use for handling objections. Some of the more popular ones are:   LAIR: Listen, Acknowledge, Identify Objection, Reverse It) LACE: Listen, [read more]

{Number 16 in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories.} Value-adding stories are stories that actually add to the attractiveness of the product. They literally make people willing to pay more money for your product than they would without the story. One example of that is the Pig Island story I told on [read more]

{The 15th in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories.} “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” That’s the opening line of one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems, The Road Not Taken. It describes a difficult choice the narrator has to make between two different paths, and how important it was that [read more]

Customer success stories are probably the most common type of sales story. And they deserve to be. That’s because buyers trust what other customers have to say much more than what a salesperson says. So, your customer success story, even if you’re the one telling it, is far more credible than just your opinion. But, [read more]