What Role Do Stories Have?
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Brooke Greening: it is more important to discover the great stories of your potential client than to tell your stories.
So the fact that they actually went through it and are talking to you face to face. That is a big deal. There is something that is driving them and motivating them to have that conversation, otherwise they would not be doing it.
And the best way we will get that information is when they start to share their story with us.
We need to have this mindset of curiosity, not because we're like, okay, how can I like find out the right answer so then I can like buy this? No, none of that. But truly how can, if you wanna be able to help people, we can't help them if we don't know what's going on.
If they've just started to like kind of open that door and share something and then we barge in with what we wanna say, boom, door shut done.
Scott Greening: The effective, meaningful, uh, human strategy in sales is to discover. Others' stories rather than focusing on telling your own.
Welcome back to another episode of Sippin' Matcha and Helping You Make More Sales, where we take anonymous sales questions that have been shared with us and give advice that'll help all of your companies and businesses and sales efforts move forward. If you'd like to share a question to be featured on a future episode, you can do that at buildingmomentum.Info/matcha, and Brooke, our resident sales coach, consultant, trainer and matcha drinker will love to, to give you an answer let's I don't,
Brooke Greening: how many titles am I have in here?
Scott Greening: That's right. We'll just keep adding them on. Guru, Sage, no. Oh,
Brooke Greening: goodness. Always appreciate your support, Scott. Hey, before we even go, I'm not entirely sure when this one is going to air, but everybody who watches this, all the millions of you.
All you need to know is that my husband is getting his doctorate on October 10th.
Scott Greening: Woo. There, there we go. Yep. So he
Brooke Greening: finishes it October 10th, and then you can just imagine all of the more episodes that we're going to be doing after that with all of the free time that we have. But he has worked incredibly hard.
He is getting his doctorate in pipeline leadership training, different things like that at Liberty, and I'm very proud of him and I just have to share that. There you go.
Scott Greening: Yeah. Leadership pipeline and volunteer recruitment has kind of been my focus with my studies, so
Brooke Greening: Awesome. For
Scott Greening: those of you that are interested in that, let's talk.
Brooke Greening: Yes. Yes. But awesome.
Scott Greening: Alright, so we have another question today, Brooke, for you. Thank you. That's very kind and I am looking forward to mm-hmm. To that day. Mm-hmm. So we have a question today that, that kind of comes up again, because partially you are a StoryBrand marketing guide. And so then people ask you about stories or that type of thing.
Like what role do. Do stories have in sales? So what role do stories have in sales?
Brooke Greening: I would say stories have a massive role in sales. It's not exactly the way that we think it is though. There's a bit of a paradigm shift that goes on. So I wanna encourage, let
Scott Greening: me hold on, hold on. I gotta jump in. Like it's gonna be a hot take alert here.
So that's Brook's polite way of saying everything you've heard is wrong. I'm going to tell you the right way. Okay. Sorry. Okay, go on. He,
Brooke Greening: it's possible he knows my buttons. And this is one of 'em. So. This is the, this is, just think about it in this way. So it is more important to discover the great stories of your potential client than to tell your stories.
Let me say that again. It is more important to discover your client's stories instead of telling your great stories. There is a time and a place when we will start to talk about how we can incorporate our experiences, testimonials, different things like that. But it needs to be known. It's much more important to understand theirs instead of us trying to tell them ours.
That's the very first piece.
Scott Greening: Yeah, and again, we're talking about sales and in, in marketing it's a little bit of a different answer. Like the You do have to tell Yes, tell stories to get people's attention in that, because you're sending out mass messages to many people at once. But in sales, when you're talking to people it's more important to discover people's stories then tell your own.
Brooke Greening: Mm-hmm.
Scott Greening: So how do we do that? 'cause most people don't, most people don't approach sales that way. Like this is a different way that you approach sales.
Brooke Greening: Yes. Most people don't. And in good humans don't they're just like, okay, I need to get, I need to know what I'm gonna say and I have to have it all set up and I'm ready to go.
So the very first thing I would say is you actually just need to pause before you go into your sales conversation. 'cause it is going to be our natural tendency to start talking about ourselves and asking questions. Before we do that, we just wanna be able to pause. For me, as we've shared before, my faith is very important to me.
So it's literally like a Jesus take the wheel type of situation where anytime I've actually prayed before I walk into a sales meeting always goes better than when I don't. And I'm not saying he's like a lamp that I get to rub and he like blesses everything that I ask him to, but I'm just saying it helps me to remember, help me to serve them, help me to think about how I can be able to help make their life better. Whether they choose to work with me or not. Help me to be aware and to be wise in regards to how to be able to move this conversation forward. So whether you pray, whatever you're going to do, just take a moment in, remind yourself, this is not about me, this is about them, and that's gonna start us on the right foot.
Scott Greening: Yeah, there's a verse that in Philippians that says look, not only to your interests, but also to the interests of others. And this is what you're saying okay, pause, remind yourself and say, okay, this isn't just about me, this is about the other person. And maybe even more important than it being about me.
It's more about them.
Brooke Greening: A hundred percent. Then.
Scott Greening: Alright, so we've reminded ourselves, we've paused. Jesus has taken the wheel. What do we do?
Brooke Greening: All right, so then the next one is remind yourself that when we start asking questions, we do not want to focus on just questions that are going to benefit us.
So as an example, knowing what their timeline is, knowing their budget, knowing what they're looking for, all of those actually benefit us. And then they walk away feeling like, well, I already knew all of that. So you, those questions are not bad, but we cannot stay there. We cannot just ask questions that are gonna benefit us and more of those diagnostic questions that is not going to help us to get to their story.
Scott Greening: All right. So what kind of questions do we like? We, so there are some questions that we have just to get the details, but yes. What kind of questions do we ask?
Brooke Greening: So one of the very first questions I ever asked, this started like 15 years ago, is I'll just ask, I'll say, Hey, if you don't mind me asking, what actually caused you to wanna talk to me today?
It opens it up. It's not like, why are you here? What, but it's just saying, Hey what's caused you to wanna talk to me today? And you would be surprised how many times if you genuinely want to know that. And that's not just some line or a script that you're saying, how many times people will, that wall will start to go down and they will start sharing with you what's going on.
Like truly the reason they were talking to you. And if I can just encourage you, if we are talking about having those sales conversations, that's about the last thing they wanna do. So the fact that they actually went through it and are talking to you face to face. That is a big deal. There is something that is driving them and motivating them to have that conversation, otherwise they would not be doing it.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And I hear you do that from the other room sometime. I see you do that. Not exactly the same in social situations, but I know our kids are always like. How is like mom having this big heart to heart? I'm like, it's just what she does. But it's not just what you do.
It's 'cause you ask an intentional question that opens the door up to a more meaningful or thoughtful dialogue than just What's going on? Like what's the what's your sales, what's the weather like? Yeah. What's
Brooke Greening: this going on? Yeah. Yeah. None of the, again, none of those are bad, but that's not dr.
That's not gonna get to what's driving them and moti motivating them. So we're wanting to know what are the circumstances around what's happening, what's motivating them? Those are the types of questions we're trying to understand. And the best way we will get that information is when they start to share their story with us.
When they start giving you examples and they start going more into well, I'm having problems with. So-and-so, or this didn't get done the way that it needed to, but like it's expanded. And they're talking about their problem for more than one sentence. Now we know we're beginning to understand what's truly going to decide whether they're going to make a buying decision or not, and not in a manipulative way.
Like we need to know where they're coming from and what's truly helping them make those decisions so we as good humans can be able to respond and say, Hey. I, this is something I can help you with and this is what it looks like. This is the investment. Or, you know what, as we're talking, this doesn't seem like something I'm gonna be able to give you the support that you're looking for, but I have other people that I could be able to introduce you to.
That is truly the point. So we wanna be able to encourage them and what they're sharing, and then we're just gonna keep exploring more and asking more questions to benefit them, not us.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And to think about it a different way, like a good mark that you've gotten to this point is like if you were filling out a form based on their answers, like you've shifted from the single line
Brooke Greening: Yes.
Scott Greening: Box to the paragraph. It can be as long. Like they're telling you stories, they're telling you Yes. Not just the short answers, but they're engaging and they're saying, well, this is, you know what put me, I've been thinking about this for a long time. This is what happened that. Put me over the edge.
Brooke Greening: Mm-hmm.
Scott Greening: And maybe that's a problem that got really bad. Maybe that's a, our budget was like, I've been watching you and I've, the budget's finally approved. I am ready to go. And so now we're gonna, you know, and all of that helps you inform how you can best serve your customers in that moment.
So, yeah. Were you gonna say more?
Brooke Greening: I was just talking to someone and they just shared with me the other day where they were saying the final like straw in regards to starting to work with me and reaching out was that they were working like with their business coach and things that were happening, and they just said, they're like this piece has to get solved.
We have to figure out what's going on in sales or it's not gonna go in the direction that you want it to. And so by them being able to share those stories and helping me to understand, then we can start to figure out, okay, how can we be able to help them? Along with that, what's the type of like urgency that they're needing, those types of things.
Not in a way to manipulate, but truly to be able to help to say, okay, these are the things that you're coming to me with now. Let me see how I can be able to give you direction and hope with that.
Scott Greening: So most people when they start to have these conversations, don't immediately go from nothing to here's all the deepest motivations and that like, you kind of have to build the trust in that, in the conversation.
So how can somebody, like when somebody begins to share some of the circumstances, some of the motivations, how can you like, cultivate that conversation? To keep finding it out, to keep it going?
Brooke Greening: Yeah. So there are three steps that I would encourage. The first one is just encourage them. That's the first one.
Encourage. So whatever they're telling you, you're going to agree with it, you're going to encourage them to keep being able to share. So if they're like, well, such and such happened and it was really frustrating, like, oh I'm really sorry. How did that affect da da da? We're just, we're encouraging, but right along with it, then we're exploring.
We need to have this mindset of curiosity, not because we're like, okay, how can I like find out the right answer so then I can like buy this? No, none of that. But truly how can, if you wanna be able to help people, we can't help them if we don't know what's going on. And so you have to have that mindset of curiosity asking questions.
So we encourage, we explore through curiosity. And then the second, the third piece is we zip it like that's, we do not try to solve their problem. So many times people will be like, my sales are down. And that's, it's easy for me to slip in and be like, oh, oh, oh, that is so frustrating. I'm so sorry.
I've created this sales accelerator lab and we've done this and this, and these are the things that have happened. And then we just like launch in. To what we can do and we have missed it. If they've just started to like kind of open that door and share something and then we barge in with what we wanna say, boom, door shut done.
Then at that point it's like, oh, okay. And in their mind they're like, this is like every other thing. Nobody is actually listening to what we need for our business. That's literally the types of things that are going on in their head. So you have to. Encourage, explore with curiosity and zip it.
Scott Greening: Yeah.
And another way to say encourage, 'cause I had all these jokes lined up, would be support. So support, explore, and zip it. And so I had, like Brook says, Simon says there was gonna be an allusion to that great movie that Dennis Rodman starred in the late nineties. Simon says it was. It was going to be beautiful and you were gonna die laughing.
All the people that listen, were gonna thought aw, whatever, three steps, I'm sorry. Whatever, three steps you choose, support, explore, zip it, or encourage, we could do ease. Explore, encourage, explore, zip it the principle remains true.
Brooke Greening: We could do ease. We could be like, how do you understand your customer's problems?
It's easy.
Scott Greening: And you thought my jokes about Simon says we're bad. So, alright. After that rabbit trail.
Brooke Greening: But no, I do wanna, I do want to say, I know we're joking, but like when I'm coaching, people literally put like the little things that I say, they post it on their computer so that when they're having those conversations, when they're having those zooms, they're like, oh, this 1, 2, 3.
This is what I'm trying to do. And so we're gonna, that's what it is. It's easy.
Scott Greening: All right.
Brooke Greening: Except there's no why. Right?
Scott Greening: We may have some work to do. We'll keep work, we'll keep shopping that one. But
Brooke Greening: I think it's a little confusing in our messaging right now.
Scott Greening: Hopefully despite the train wreck that it's turned into that you've No, no, no, no.
I'm now, I'm being mean. No, it's been really helpful. Really good. And, all that to say if we come back to the original question of what role do stories have? Mm-hmm. They play a big part in sales. They're a huge role. But the trick in sales, not that, not trick. Yeah. You don't like, I don't like that.
Like that word. The effective, meaningful, uh, human strategy in sales is to discover. Others' stories rather than focusing on telling your own. Now, we're gonna come back at some point in the future and we're gonna have another episode. Maybe it'll be the next episode on how to tell your own stories in a way that resonates and compliments this.
But the most important thing is hear their stories before you start telling your own
Brooke Greening: Yes, exactly. Wonderful.
Scott Greening: Alright. If this has been valuable for you, we'd love it if you if you like it, if you share it, if you give us a review, if you subscribe, if you watch on YouTube and hit the little bell icon so that you can know when another episode comes up and all those things, we'd really appreciate it.
We hope that you enjoy a good cup of matcha and make some more sales because of this. Have a great day.
Brooke Greening: Bye guys. See you soon.
