One of the biggest challenges for the L&D teams in sales-driven organizations is that employees often feel that training does not effectively help them grab buyers’ attention or deal with the practical problems of the market.
Training for sales personnel is always a high priority for sales-driven organizations. According to ATD research, most new sales recruits are trained for more than 15 days each year. By the third year, however, sales professionals average only three to six days of sales training annually. This decline creates a learning gap, which leads to a situation where training is not effective.
In addition to increasing learning opportunities, L&D team also need to employ strategies to sustain the effects of training. Sales personnel often employ stories to make their sales conversations stronger and more effective. Here are five tips for using the power of storytelling in sales training to help sales professionals achieve better targets.
Emphasize the Customer
Most of the training materials created for salespeople are very informative and share a lot of details about product features and functions. It’s no wonder that most sales professionals feel comfortable talking about the product nitty-gritties.
However, for successful salespeople, it is also important to have in-depth business conversations that create lasting relationships. Training content should share not only product details but the details of the customers’ businesses as well. Once the learner understands a customer’s business and, therefore, their needs, they can share relevant experiences in the form of stories that will help customers trust them more and create a lasting professional bond.
Three-Layer Approach to Storytelling
Traditionally, storytelling is built with three main layers: background, challenge/conflict, and solution. When sharing stories, most salespeople start and end with the solution. Sales training should include stories that have all three layers, which work together to create a memorable story.
It’s important to share the background to create a believable context. Customers relate to the characters or setting of the story. Similarly, the challenge or conflict shares familiar problems and makes them curious about how other people in the same situations resolve problems and succeed. Finally, the solution should reveal how the products will help the customers solve their problem.
Inserting Personal Experiences
A story’s success depends on how well customers can relate to it. Including relatable characters and life-like situations will not just tell the customer what to do but suggest through examples and experiences the benefits of employing the solution. Nobody wants to be told what to do, and customers are no different. By adding details and emotions about the struggle that someone else experienced, salespeople can make the story personal for their audience.
The Solution: A Better Future
Stories empower people to make better decisions, because they help us envision a brighter tomorrow. If the customer is used to a certain product, and the salesperson’s pitch does not make them see the benefits in changing, then the salesperson needs to change their approach. Sharing stories that help people envision a better future through change may help. These types of stories work if customers are able to see themselves in the story and understand how they will profit from changing their behavior.
Last, but not Least: Practice
Storytelling for selling requires practice, which improves the salesperson’s comfort level. Adopt a blended training approach to help sales professionals master the art of storytelling. Provide an online inventory of materials that they can read and re-read, and use instructor-led sessions to sharpen storytelling skills.
Storytelling is a great strategy to help employees grab and sustain their customers’ attention and encourage them to make decisions faster. It is important to keep the stories relevant and impressive. There’s no wrong way to tell a story, but there is certainly a right one, and sales training can help employees learn it.
Arunima Majumdar, a senior marketing consultant at G-Cube, is an e-learning enthusiast who loves exploring and blogging about innovations in training and learning for the contemporary corporate sector.
