How to Tell Stories That Actually Sell
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Brooke Greening: So many times when we feel like, okay, now I've gotta like prove myself, I gotta prove why they need to work with me. We make ourselves the hero. And in our story, we just start talking about all the amazing things we did for that client. That is not going to help. They need to see how you came alongside that client and how the client won the day.
Because if it's just about you that's not what you want. If it's just like, well, hey, I worked with this university and I grew up by 30%.
Scott Greening: Okay, that's nice, but more so like we were able to work with the team so that they could feel confident and continue to grow, which resulted. in growing it by 30%. The trick is don't make the stories all about you. Discover your customer's stories and what they're facing, and then tell stories that relate and that celebrate the successes other people have had and all the details of you and that are. Much less important.
Welcome to another episode of Sippin' Matcha and Helping You Make More Sales. I am your host and matcha maker, Scott Greening, and I bring anonymous sales questions to my wife and sales trainer, Brooke Greening, we're going to bring her in in just a moment, but I want to invite you into the conversation in two ways today.
First, you can always leave an anonymous sales question that we can use on a future episode, to help you out at buildingmomentum.info/matcha. And, you can leave your question there and we'll be happy to answer it. And get it on a future episode. And then secondly, if you would like to like, or review or share, that's always welcome.
And so we're excited about that. We're especially excited about that today as we bring in Brooke, because it is our 20th episode. Woo. You know, you start a pod, yay. You start a podcast and you're not sure where it's gonna go or what's involved in that. And we certainly did that at the beginning.
You can go all the way back to the very first episodes and see Brooke by herself. That didn't last very long. Now you get the joy of both of us. What's,
Brooke Greening: no, it did not last long. I did not like just. Staring into a camera and talking. Yeah,
Scott Greening: now you get to stare into a camera with me making snide remarks, along
Brooke Greening: the, it's like, I love it.
It's my favorite
Scott Greening: along the way. Yeah. we are excited and, we are appreciating those that are engaging and finding the stuff helpful. So here is today's question. We kind of teased this a little bit with our last episode. So for our, the first time in our podcast history on episode 20, we have a little bit of like, I don't know if you can call it a miniseries or, but we have a follow up, a back to back question.
So last week we talked about what role does story play in sales? And you, helped us remember that the most important stories to get are your customer's stories about what they're facing, not necessarily sharing your own. But there is a place for sharing your own stories and telling good stories.
And so today's question, the follow up to last week is this How do you tell stories that sell? How do you tell stories that sell? Like, I might be a great storyteller to our kids or to my daughter, Bizzy when I'm putting her to bed. But those stories probably aren't going to be selling a lot of business. They involve princesses named Bizzy and the rest of her classmates.
Brooke Greening: Yes, and you do great storytelling like when you're preaching and things like that. But again, that's not exactly what we're talking about, and I don't want people to feel like it's like this ping pong effect. It's like don't tell stories, do tell stories, don't tell stories, do tell stories.
It's not that we want to be able to tell stories in all of our sales conversations, but what I really wanted to emphasize last week is we do it too soon. We do it before we actually know what story is gonna be able to resonate with the person that we're talking to and that hurts us, and it also hurts them in regards to feeling like, if is this a good fit, should we be able to move forward?
So that's why we focused a lot last week. Just in regards to, we need to know their story first. We need to know the problems they're facing first before we come into play. That's really important. So that's how we're starting off this podcast. You need both, but you need to get the order right.
Scott Greening: Yeah. let's talk a little bit more about that. How did you figure out that these stories and getting them in the right order is the the right way to do and then the right types of stories to tell?
Brooke Greening: Yeah. So this reminds me a while back ago when I used to work at a place called Oxford Learning Center, and I became the director over there.
And what was happening is we were talking to families. Who were really overwhelmed and stressed because their child was struggling in school for a number of reasons. And so Oxford had this incredible assessment that they would do and help people to start figuring out like what are in regards to the executive functioning and all of that, how to be able to help them.
And so I would be talking with them and helping them to understand what that assessment looked like and truly walking through and seeing is it gonna be a good fit for them to be able to work with us in regards for us helping their child, for them to come to us after school, sometimes three to four times a week for years.
To be able to give them the support that they need. And so just showing them a pretty brochure or the assessment itself and just kind of going through it line by line by line, that was not going to make a very big difference for them. They needed to understand that I knew what they were going through.
They needed to know that I truly cared for their child and how we were going to be able to help them. Features and benefits don't do that as well as story can. Now I'm going to say this again. Features and benefits are very good. You need both. You need both things to be able to show them like so they can see visually, but they can also hear the stories behind it.
And so that's, that's how it came into play. When we are having those higher ticket sales conversations, just a brochure isn't going to cut it and us just walking them through that brochure just line by line. Is not going to cut it. We need to be able to use story.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And I think, like I had an experience this week where I was talking with a potential referral partner, that I had met and we were following up, we were at some meetings together a few weeks ago, and so I was talking to them and I had shared some of the materials.
He had looked at our website and all of that. And so he felt like I was credible enough to have the conversation with. But when we got on the call. I didn't need to go over all that stuff again. He had he was already convinced of that. Right. And so what he wanted to know was, hey, like, is this person trustworthy?
Does this person have some stories of how he's worked with people? And so we were mm-hmm. We were able to do that and at the appropriate time in the conversation have some of those stories to tell. Because the, yeah. The promotional material had done its job and now it was time to connect like person to person.
Alright, so how do we tell stories? Typically stories have a little bit of a framework and stories that sell probably have a little bit of a framework too. So what are the different pieces of stories that sell? Where would you start?
Brooke Greening: Yes. So the very first thing I would start with is the story has to have a problem, and more importantly, that problem needs to be the problem that they just shared with you.
So we talk about this in our SERVICE framework. This is the V and verbalizing the value. This is where this starts to come into play. We talk about a lot in regards that we're not talking about what we do, what we offer, how we can help until we truly know the problems that they're facing.
So that way it makes sense and we can build that bridge and connect the dots. Yeah. And so the first piece is we need to know the problem. We have to have the actual problem.
Scott Greening: Yeah. So like in your framework. So the R in SERVICE is recognize the problem, and then the V is verbalize the value. And so this is the transition point.
Mm-hmm. Right. Now help me under you breezed through that a little bit. Just come back and re and review the what do you mean when you say it has to be the problem that they talked about or that they, that shared?
Brooke Greening: Yes. So when we're talking and we're having the sales conversation and we're beginning to understand the problems that are driving them and motivating them, and that probably would be another episode that we would be talking about at some point.
But when we're understanding those, that's what our story is going to start to relate to. That is what that problem is going to be. If we bring in. An example of a customer that we've worked with before, or a family that we've worked with before, and it's not connecting to the problem they've just shared with us.
We are actually hurting ourselves because now in their mind they're thinking, that's not really me though. I don't really understand that. And so then they start to devalue what it is you're trying to offer them.
Scott Greening: Yeah, a lot of times I think it's easy to, we have a product or service and we know that this product in service in general relates to a certain set of problems or a certain set of issues, and those may be the most common.
But that, that doesn't mean that any particular customer is. Feeling those or is verbalizing those. Right. And even if they do ultimately have those problems, that's not the part that's keeping them up at night. Right. And so, so it's easy like, oh, we've done this. Like, I know, here's my, all the stuff.
But you're saying for it to be really important or really impactful and selling it has to relate to what they're thinking and feeling.
Brooke Greening: Yes, and specifically we don't have to make it up because we have been talking to them, and so we are just going to reiterate what they had already told us. That's where we get into.
I don't wanna say the world problem so many times, but that's where we will get stuck as the sales professional. As we're having that sales conversation, we start trying to fix something that they didn't even bring up, and that's not what we do. We are listening. We are understanding when we believe we found what's actually bothering them, because that's when they start telling us stories about the problem that they're having Now.
We're saying, okay. So what, who have I worked with in the past? What has happened in the past that can directly relate to the problem they just shared with me? Meaning you can't just have one story that you pull out of your pocket every single time because it may not actually be the problem they're facing.
Scott Greening: Yeah. So we need to collect a lot of good stories. And I would just highlight this is a moment where whether Brooke has been teaching at a conference or with her coaching, lots of peoples kind of have a. Light bulb type of moment with this, and they're like, oh, you mean like what they just said is what the story relates to?
And that, and so, Brooke gave you a little bit of insight there and you can always reach out to her and, think about, her sales accelerator lab or wherever, where you can learn all sorts of this stuff. So the first thing is recognize the problem. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The next part is what?
So our story has a problem.
Brooke Greening: Yes. Then the next piece is it needs to be relatable. So we just talked about how it needs to be the right problem, because I say this all the time. If we get the problem wrong, everything starts to fall apart. But now, we have the problem that they're sharing. So we do marketing, consulting and sales coaching. So let's just give an example of one of ours and they're saying, Hey, you know what? My sales are down. Okay, that's, that would be like a surface problem, but like what's actually going on underneath? As we continue to talk, the reason why they're hesitant to work with a sales trainer is they've done that before.
It didn't work. They didn't feel like they could connect to the team. They didn't feel like that they could, that they were getting the support that they needed. And then if we keep digging, they're like, not only that, they just never talked to me again. It was like. One and done. They talked and then it was gone, and then they didn't have any idea of how their team was doing or what was going on.
So that's what I mean when we start digging down a little bit deeper. So now we can start to share a story of how we were able to work with a client in regards to what was happening with the communication, because that's the main issue. The main issue is not my sales are down. The main issue is I know my sales are down.
I gotta do something about it. But the main issue of whether I wanna work with you or not is can I trust you to actually lead my team, and are you gonna communicate with me better than what happened before? Yeah, so that's when you bring that story in.
Scott Greening: And I was just thinking as you were talking about like sometimes those circumstances are from way long ago.
So as an example, and you may not even know this, but I took karate lessons when I was somewhere around seven to whatever years old at the YI did not know this right at the YMCA and my dad would take me and we'd sit in there and all the guy did was tell like stories about his karate exploits and he never really taught.
So then when our son like. 40 years later is thinking about joining karate. I come in and I am like, one of my things was, okay, we think this is good. Our neighbors had a good experience. I wanna make sure this guy isn't just gonna tell stories about he, how he won all these tournaments and, and all of that.
Brooke Greening: Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, you just peeled the curtain back and saw it into our marriage. That's right. I had no idea. Huh? Yeah. And now our son has a black belt. Yeah. He's worked really, really hard.
Scott Greening: Yeah. But that's the, that's awesome. When you find out like the real problem, then you can. You can tell the stories, and it's a lot of times the problems aren't like with you, they're stuff that No, no.
Or your offering. It's stuff that's happened in the past, maybe even a long time ago.
Brooke Greening: And that is so true. And that's how it comes back to it wouldn't have mattered to you if he sat you down and then he was giving you a brochure or walking through it. It's not that that was bad necessarily, but you still had that feeling inside of, I don't, I don't really know if this is gonna be a good experience for my son. Like I don't need him to be listening to a bunch of people just bragging on themselves all the time. And that was not it. And by them able to share what was going on, how they're working with the kids, all of that.
I mean, we decided to sign 'em up. So something worked.
Scott Greening: Yeah, it worked to the tune of six years of karate lessons, so, yeah. Yeah. Alright. That's,
Brooke Greening: that is a great example, Scott. So, yes. So it has to be relatable in regards to that They can see themselves and, and what's going on. And so again, we're relating it because they've just shared with us what's happening.
So we're beginning to make those connections. What you're doing though is you wanna be careful is you don't wanna just be thinking about what you're gonna be saying next while they're talking. This is something that would be helpful for you to do. Beforehand, like just start thinking about it and being like, okay, what are the main issues, those motivating issues for most of my customers, and what could be some stories that I've had in the past with other people that could help in regards to those issues that they were facing.
And I just wanna say it one more time. It is usually not the deliverable that they're having a problem with. It's because in regards to service-based industries, if they didn't have a problem with the person they worked with before, they would not be coming to you. So either what happened is it didn't work or that person just like maybe they left, maybe they moved, heaven forbid, maybe they died and that's why they had to find someone new.
No one looks for new help unless something is going wrong. And it's never really the deliverables. It's not actually the deliverables. Sometimes it can be, but then that's a really easy one to solve because it was like, well, that person was just kind of a complete fluke and they did not do anything that they said they were going to do.
And so then we go from there. But just to encourage yourself. As sales professionals, as we have these sales conversations, we tend to think it's our deliverables and it's our price. And it's usually not that is not the reason they're usually looking for somebody else.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And I think, the other part, and you mentioned it there, but just to, to drill into it a little bit more, you talk a lot about telling stories about motivations and people's thoughts and all of that and mm-hmm.
What that allows you to do is to use a lot of different circumstances that then become more relatable. So if you were, for example, if you were telling to like a solopreneur, a story about how you worked with this multinational million dollar, you know, like Multimillions. Yeah. The business they would like.
Click out and say, oh, that doesn't relate to me because that's not my business. But you can tell that same story and focus on the specific person that you are talking with and the frustrations and the fears that they have. And then all of a sudden it's a much more relatable story because. You focused on sort of the shared human experience, not getting lost in all the Hey, I worked with
Brooke Greening: Yeah.
Scott Greening: Nike, or you know, whatever.
Brooke Greening: No, no, that's absolutely true. Which then leads to like our third. Point. Okay, we have to have a problem in our story. It has to be relatable. And then the last piece is there has to be like a resolution, but in it, and this goes completely back to StoryBrand, you need the customer to be the hero in that.
So many times when we feel like, okay, now I've gotta like prove myself, I gotta prove why they need to work with me. We make ourselves the hero. And in our story, we just start talking about all the amazing things we did for that client. That is not going to help. They need to see how you came alongside that client and how the client won the day.
That is the most important, and that has to come across in that story. If it doesn't, it's just a, oh, well that's great. You're successful. I'm still stuck. What are we supposed to be doing? And you don't want that.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And the, the reality is you, if you want to call it a humble brag or, or whatever is when you tell those stories where your customers or where your clients were successful, it's mm-hmm.
Simultaneously showing, oh I actually know what I'm doing because there was Yeah. A result. But it's, you don't have to talk about that part so much. You can talk about No, the, the transformation that, that came from your client's, perspective And the help that was brought to them.
Brooke Greening: Yeah. And what they saw and how it helped them.
Not, there's nothing wrong because also in regards to service-based industries, sometimes a lot of times we talk about like the return of investment and those things. And so those are great things to be able to share. But again, you can share that. But always making sure that it's continuing to be directed towards how that customer won instead of how
you turned their business around or whatever the case is, you can still share how you were able to help, but also including how they were able to be successful. Because if it's just about you that's not what you want. If it's just like, well, hey, I worked with this university and I grew up by 30%.
Okay, that's nice, but more so like we were able to work with the team so that they could feel confident and continue to grow, which resulted. in growing it by 30%. that's what you're showing.
Scott Greening: All right, we've sort of got our framework, right? So, so make sure your story has a problem and that problem yes.
Comes from your customer. Yes. Literally the words that they spoke. Yes. Second, make the story relatable. And you can do that by focusing on the human motivations and emotions and that type of thing. And then thirdly, like there has to be a resolution. Mm-hmm. Typically, like in sales, it might be a good resolution of right.
of positive success and how you've done that, but focusing on not. Your greatness in this circumstance, but the right, the transformation, the improvement, the impact that what you did brought, how it changed another customer or client's life. So,
Brooke Greening: yes. Sorry, go ahead. And also, if I can just.
If I can just give a bonus, like details matter. We do not wanna bore someone with a story, but if it sounds really vague and they're like, oh, that could be anything, then that's not what we're looking for. So like you're, and we talk about this at StoryBrand and they give like a great framework in regards to how to get testimonials and what we want your testimonials to look like.
And it's very similar, like you wanna help them to see like. They were in this position first. This was a problem that they were facing. This is what happened when we started getting involved, and this is the result. That's how you wanna be able to bring it through so that it's specific enough that they can feel like, oh, this really happened.
She's not just saying something. She's not just trying to come up with something on the fly. So details matter.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And that's why we try to like, in our conversation, have specific stories and tell specific things. Because the reality is, is that even though it's different. When you're specific enough, you can tell, like I can almost guarantee that with the exception of maybe 15 other families in Springfield, Ohio in the 1980s that went to the YMCA for karate lessons you know, nobody else experienced that.
But I can also guarantee that probably people heard that story and were like, oh, yeah. Like, I see how that relates and how that that applies because it wasn't just so. Vanilla generic story. Yes. Uh, of that, so
Brooke Greening: exactly.
Scott Greening: Well, here's the, here's the, the bottom line, whether it was last week, if you haven't heard that episode, go back and and hear that one or this week.
The trick is don't make the stories all about you. Discover your customer's stories and what they're facing, and then tell stories that relate and that celebrate the successes other people have had and all the details of you and that are. Much less important. Mm-hmm. Well, that's it. We'll be back next week.
We're roaring into the, the Roaring Twenties. There we go. The Roaring Twenties Podcast, episode 21. we'll look forward to having you join us. Thanks. Have a great day. Yes.
Brooke Greening: But next week Scott won't be joining us. Dr. Reverend Scott Greening will be joining us.
Scott Greening: Yes, I will officially be done, so thank you all.
Okay. I'll expect, you know, I, I don't know what I'll expect, so my more of the same. Have a great day everybody.
Brooke Greening: Bye.
