5
don’t sell—tell
(STEP FOUR: STORY-BASED SELLING)
We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.
Richard Hurley teaches piano to autistic children.
If that one sentence alone doesn’t tug at your heartstrings, you must be made of sterner stuff than I am. Once I met the man after an event I spoke at, I thought he immediately qualified for some kind of sainthood. What an incredible mission to commit your life to.
Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished. While Richard loved what he did personally, professionally the business was a challenge. In fact, he’d convinced himself that business was supposed to be a struggle—that what he faced was just a normal part of it.
Believe it or not, the problem wasn’t finding potential students. Richard operated in a defined geographic location (Austin metro) in a fairly well connected community of target clients (schools, support groups, activity groups, and more for autistic children and their families).
Nor was the problem reaching those families. Email lists, group threads, and sponsoring events put him in touch with nearly all the parents of potential students.
There wasn’t a disconnect in people understanding what he offered. Children have been taking piano lessons since pianos were invented.
Credibility wasn’t an issue. Richard had written a book, Baby Cheetah Plays Piano, and even developed an iPhone app, Chroma Cat. He was well connected and well regarded in the Austin special needs community. Price wasn’t the primary problem; those same parents spent the same amount or more on other activities for their children.
“Okay, Richard, so it sounds like you don’t have any issues getting people on the phone or even getting them into your music room. So, what do you say at that point?” I asked.
“I . . . I don’t know what else to say. I teach autistic kids piano. That’s what I do.”
Again, sell the sizzle, not the steak: Don’t sell the feature (what it is), but the benefit (what it does). This goes back to Theodore Levitt’s line about buying a quarter-inch drill bit versus a quarter-inch hole. But listing the benefits of an autistic child learning the piano—they will enjoy it, it gives them an outlet, it’s rewarding—fails to capture the imagination. It all sounds well and good, but you have to put yourself in the shoes of the parent. Depending on the child’s unique needs, introducing something new and potentially stressful into their routine can be upsetting. It’s not just the decision of whether to enroll their child in piano lessons. It’s a family decision that requires a lot of planning, commitment, and yet more disruptions in their schedule. It’s not a decision his students’ parents took lightly.
Weighing the benefits Richard presented against the cost—financial and emotional—of piano lessons, most parents chose to forgo the toil and continue with their child’s life as-is.
Even for those who were willing to make the changes, it was hard for them to justify the cost. Why was he so much more expensive than the average piano teacher? It’s “just” piano, right? Sure, they were referred, but a referral is nothing more than “I think you should try this” or “My child gets a lot out of it.” Not enough to sell it.
After hearing this, I told Richard that we needed to figure out why his longtime students stayed enrolled. What was it those parents saw or experienced that made them feel the costs were worth it? But instead of just listing what that might be, I asked Richard to tell me a story.
“Well, they all talk about how uncommunicative their child is and how difficult it is to draw them out. But one mother, after watching her son play ‘The Minute Waltz’ by Chopin at home . . . it was like she suddenly saw the real person inside her son. Most parents with autistic children feel isolated. They work tirelessly to create a good life for their child, but many people around them think they’re crazy. Their friends and family often mistakenly believe that an autistic child isn’t fully aware of the world around them. But when he played that piece of music—all of a sudden, there was validation there. Alice saw the human being behind his severe autism. It was one of the most beautiful moments of her life.”
I said, “Richard! That’s it! Tell them that story! Don’t tell parents that it’s rewarding or that it draws the child out. Let them feel that emotional connection. Let them experience what it’s like.”
After seeing where I was going, Richard began recalling other stories: how one student’s physical therapist was amazed at his progress and newfound cooperation; how another mother showed off her son’s musical talents at a family Christmas party; how a father bridged the isolation between him and his son through sharing the piano.
I said, “That’s perfect! Just do this: When talking to parents, ask them what drew them to you. When they say, ‘I heard you do piano for autistic children,’ you say, ‘Yes, and I love to do it. It’s such a great experience for both the child and their parents. So many parents feel isolated, trying their best to make a great life for their child, and yet so many people around them don’t get it—they think the parents are crazy for putting in all the time and money. But when they see that child beautifully express himself through piano, they see him in a whole new light. Let me give you an example. A recent client of mine, Alice . . .’ and then you tell them the same story you just told me.”
Don’t you feel the emotional connection? Even for just the briefest of moments, didn’t your heart open up a little bit? Can you not see how parents hearing this story would want this for their child? If you had an autistic child, wouldn’t you want what Alice experienced? If you had a special needs child and you heard these heartrending stories of how learning the piano had changed these children’s and parents’ lives, how could you say no?
Do you see how we short-circuited a logical response to benefit versus price and turned it into an emotional driver behind the decision? That’s what you need to do. Don’t sell features and benefits. Tell a story.
EMBED THE SOLUTION IN A STORY
Here we are, at the heart of the sale.
Everything in a sales system combines to make it work overall, but stories are the main engine. If you’ve established rapport and credibility, set the agenda, gotten in front of the decision-maker, and asked insightful questions, great—but you still haven’t proposed anything. You haven’t put an offer on the table. You haven’t told them how you can make their life better, their bank account jingle, or their mother-in-law love them more. All you’ve done is figured out that they have a problem you can solve.
Problem: The parents want more for their child.
Solution feature: “I teach autistic kids piano.”
Solution benefit: “They enjoy it. It gives them an outlet. It’s fulfilling for parent and child.”
See? None of that really captures the beautiful essence of what Richard Hurley offers. To capture the emotional benefit, he needed the space to tell a story: a before and after, with a happy ending.
Now, what if you sell weather protectors for windows and doors, like my client Trey? Hard to get emotional about paying for something you won’t even notice under your windowsill.
But once you hear the story of one of Trey’s customers, you can’t help but be moved. The man scrimped and saved to build his dream home. He didn’t realize that the windows and doors weren’t installed with the proper metal flashing around them.
About three years later, he noticed some bubbling around the trim of his home. He thought nothing of it, chalking it up to perhaps the weather, and just painted over it. After another two years, he discovered that the bubbling came from his windows and doors constantly leaking rainwater down the inside of his walls and into his foundation.
He found out that his home—his castle—was full of mold.
He had to move his family out, hire people in hazmat suits to clean up the mold, and repair or replace the damaged areas. The water damage cost more than what he’d originally paid to build the entire house!
Millions of Americans have been victims of similar misfortune, most of whose homes have been built by professional contractors. Trey himself had something similar happen to his own dream home. After the first big rain, water was everywhere. It turns out that the contractors hadn’t properly installed the flashing on his own windows and doors. Trey wanted to make sure that what had happened to him wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
He invented an easy-to-install water protector for windowsills and doorsills to prevent the nightmare that he and so many others had endured from happening to other homeowners.
See? You don’t have to tell your life story. It can be quite short. The piano story clocks in at seventy-seven words. Trey’s comes in at a hundred and thirty. The stories take three minutes to say out loud, yet pack more punch than an hour of simply listing features and benefits.
THE SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING
When I first began using stories in my sales pitches, I could see that they worked, though I didn’t know why. Years later, I learned of the academic research (including neuroscience) on the differences between receiving pure information and listening to a story.
The physiological differences amaze me. For example, researchers in Spain found that when participants read words that evoke a sense of smell (e.g., perfume and coffee), different areas of the brain light up than when those same people read non-sensory words (e.g., chair and key). In other words, the more sensory the words, the more the brain engages.
Psychologist Raymond Mar’s 2011 neuroscience study provides evidence that we use the same parts of the brain to understand stories as we do to understand other people. To translate his research into sales speak: Stories help the receiver empathize with the storyteller and better understand their “who,” “what,” and “why.”
Perhaps one of the most comprehensive approaches to investigating the power of story to move people comes from Dr. Paul Zak, a colleague of the late management guru Peter Drucker and whose research has been funded by no less than DARPA (the legendary Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). His studies on the effect of oxytocin (a natural chemical that, among other things, helps us empathize with other people) and storytelling show a direct correlation between stories and trust. He’s even coined the term neuromanagement to describe how managers can use stories to create a workplace culture of trust.
And then there’s Significant Objects.
In 2009, Josh Glenn and Rob Walker devised an experiment. They bought or gathered two hundred objects: tchotchkes, trinkets, thingamajigs, knickknacks, knockoffs, and bric-a-brac. They didn’t pay more than $1.50 for any one item. Then they gathered nearly a hundred writers to write short stories somehow relevant to the individual objects. With the stories in hand, they posted each object for sale on eBay with the short story as the object’s description. They made sure it didn’t appear that the story described the object—they didn’t lie, deceive, or mislead the potential buyers. Sometimes, the stories were pure fantasy and clearly unreal, like a child getting trapped inside a tiny snow globe.
A plastic toy hot dog in a bun had a story about the seller recalling the fairy tale of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca finding a fake feast in a dollhouse. The closing line of the description said, “I keep the hot dog to remind myself that food does not have to be beautiful.”
There’s nothing special about the hot dog. You could probably go to the dollar store and find a whole set of plastic toy foods. Yet this plastic hot dog—bought for 12¢—sold on eBay for $3.58.
In the Significant Objects Project’s first experiment, $128.74 worth of junk sold for an astonishing $3,612.51. They did it again. It worked again. They did it a third time. Sold a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of junk for thousands (all donated to charity and the contributing writers).
Let’s review. The buyers of the plastic hot dog or plastic snow globe clearly knew they weren’t buying anything special. They could find something similar (if not the exact item) at any yard sale or thrift store. The story only tangentially involved the object, at best. And yet two hundred people were willing to buy something nearly worthless for, on average, 2,800 percent more than what it originally sold for . . . all because they read a good story. If stories could sell junk like this, just imagine what they could do to sell an awesome product or service like yours!
CRAFTING YOUR FIRST STORY
You have stories, even if you don’t know it.
Even if you just started your business yesterday, you’ve seen, heard, and read about other people. You have personal experiences you can relate. You have stories from your previous employer. And honestly, to get started, you need only one good story.
It’s easier for us introverts to tell stories than to sell benefits. Benefits are a list of things you say that you believe the prospect wants to hear. They lack heart and soul. Listing them feels unnatural and inauthentic. Plus, remembering benefits in order is incredibly hard to do, especially in the middle of a sales meeting. When I tried to learn a list, I’d get tongue-tied and inevitably forget at least one component.
Let’s say I gave you a list of three things: food, chair, bed. If I came back in one year and asked you to repeat that list to me in order, you might not even remember the conversation, much less the list.
Yet right now, you could tell me the story of “Goldilocks and Three Bears.” What did she do? She ate their food, broke their chairs, and slept in their beds. You have no trouble remembering this same sequence of things as on my list, from a bedtime story you might not have heard for years.
Professor Jennifer Aaker at Stanford discovered that people are twenty-two times more likely to recall information delivered in the form of a story than listed as just plain facts. And Dr. Uri Hasson at Princeton uncovered evidence of what’s called “neural coupling”: When we listen to a story, our brains begin to synchronize with the storyteller’s; the same parts of our brains become active at the same time. Telling a story is as close to telepathy as you can get.
Stories flow naturally. We’re all used to telling stories, from the time we fell in the mud as a child to a crazy family holiday. What’s more, you’ve told those same stories countless times. The more you tell it, the better you get.
Think about the story of how you met your significant other. The first time you ever told it, it probably felt a bit bulky. After telling it over and over, you probably noticed that at some parts, people’s eyes glazed over, but at other parts their eyes shone with interest. Naturally, you probably started running through the parts where your story got bogged down or skipping them altogether. You might have even started dramatizing or embellishing the interesting parts to make it funnier or more exciting. Do this enough and you wind up with a theatrical masterpiece.
Why should your customer stories be any different? All you have to do is find one or two stories that somehow convey the value of what you sell, and tell them well.
Undoubtedly, by now, you have a voice inside your head protesting, “But I don’t want to sound like a robot!” Think back to your favorite movie and your favorite actor in it. You didn’t love their portrayal of their character because they seemed inauthentic or robotic, did you? Yet their words came from a script.
You may be thinking that sales scripts are robotic because you have heard telemarketers and salespeople sound scripted. I’m sure that you’ve seen bad actors do the same thing. But what separates the good actors from the bad, just like the good salespeople from the bad, is their diligence to script mastery. They make the script their own. To achieve this, just like a professional actor, you must start by learning the words of the script to 100 percent accuracy.
You can’t sit there and read from your script. That’s why telemarketers always sound robotic. They’re just reading out loud. A good salesperson memorizes their script and practices it over and over again until it sounds natural.
I had one salesman who followed my training religiously. He recorded me going through the team’s script and then played it during his morning treadmill run and then in his tape deck on the way to meetings. No surprise—his sales were consistently among the best.
If you don’t know where to start, I’ve broken it down for you. The structure below gives you a working idea of what to focus on, about how long the elements should be, and the components your story should include.
But don’t just tell them off the cuff. This is your livelihood we’re dealing with here—the difference between you pursuing your dream and having to find another job. Write it down and practice, practice, practice.
1. The problem: the lead-in to the story. Start with where the person was: This was their problem, this was their situation, and this was their emotional state (the “before” picture). You want to describe what’s going on so that your customer sees that you really do understand what they’re facing. Highlight the concern, personal stress, anxiety, and frustration, such as the fear of losing it all or the hope of connecting with your child. Use sensory words: the rich smell of coffee, the wet stink of mold. You want them to feel and see themselves in the story with the same pain or desires.
2. Analysis and implementation: You want to outline how you went about analyzing their situation and what you suggested would fix the problem. State their aha! moment: They now see that they were getting in their own way or that they didn’t have the correct perspective on their challenge. Next, talk about what they had to do to achieve the solution—that is, they worked for three months solid. Above all, do not teach. The moment you sound like a teacher, you automatically place the listener in the role of the student. Nobody likes to feel they’re back in grade school. You’re not there to lecture; you’re there to motivate and inspire (like all good stories do) while sharing a moral that speaks to their needs.
3. Outcome: Here, you tell the “after” part of the story: They had this return, changed their outlook, lost forty pounds, reconnected with their long-lost brother. In doing so, reestablish where they came from to where they are now: “So Alex went from being underwater with credit card debt and spending hours and hours writing monstrous proposals that nobody ever read to growing his business to seven figures with nothing more than an initial meeting and a few bullet points in an email.”
4. The moral of the story: why the prospect needs that implementation. Here’s where you say, “That’s why it’s so vitally important to spend time learning the sales process. Many people would’ve said, ‘Well, that’s a lot of work,’ but when you take into account all the networking events Alex went to in order to get an appointment, going to those meetings, writing those long proposals, and the extensive follow-up—sometimes over weeks and months, and what all those activities cost him, only to wind up with a net result of ‘not interested’ . . . if you think about it, it’s not a lot of work to learn the sales process, but it is a lot of work to continue to avoid it.”
That’s important enough to say again: It’s not a lot of work to learn how to sell. It is, however, a lot of work if you continue to avoid it.