Want More Sales? Tell Better Stories!

STORY = information, knowledge, context and emotion

When facts are so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.

So stories and sales go together! Stories connect us. They can be your differentiator in a crowded, chaotic, commoditized marketplace. That’s because your story is unique. No one else has your founding myth, your organization’s DNA. Stories will help your current or potential clients and customers listen longer and buy quicker.

However, you – or your products or services – can’t be the hero of your own story. Your “stories” can’t be thinly veiled sales pitches, as many are.

That’s because we know people are substantially more motivated by an organization’s transcendent purpose (how it improves lives) than by its transactional purpose (how it sells or what it sells).

For a brilliant tutorial – or refresher – on this, check out Simon Sinek’s Why Ted Talk? With 60 million plus views – and counting – I can’t imagine too many people reading this haven’t seen it, but it’s worth noting regardless.

Character-driven stories produce changes in the brain

Paul J. Zak is an American neuroeconomist who uses neuroscience to build high performance organizations and to understand consumer decisions. He discovered through his lab’s research that a story must first sustain attention – a scarce resource in the brain – by developing tension during the narrative.

“If the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters.” How does that apply to your corporate storytelling and brand journalism? “My experiments show that character-driven stories with emotional content result in a better understanding of the key points a speaker wishes to make and enable better recall of these points weeks later,” says Zak. “In terms of making impact, this blows the standard PowerPoint presentation to bits.”

Character-driven stories with emotional content result in a better understanding of the key points a speaker wishes to make.

Take a critical look at your content

What does the home page on your website look like, or your blog pieces, and social media posts? Now how about your sales and marketing collateral and the words that come out of the mouths of your sales force?

Do your stories feature a dramatic arc in which a character struggles and eventually finds heretofore unknown abilities and uses these to triumph over adversity? Or is your content mostly about features and specs and your company and your solutions?

If you belong to the second camp you’re in the majority. In fact, research shows about 80% of our marketing is about us, and what we do and what we sell. As a result, the majority of companies are not making the most of the opportunity to show up differently and create a competitive advantage through better storytelling.

Apply these storytelling principles and structure to engage your audience:

• Feature transformation
• Have a clear beginning/middle/end
• Provide a framework for a case study
• Remember you are not the hero in the story but the mentor
• Be customer-centric

When your audience empathizes with the pain the customer experienced in the absence of your solution they will also feel the pleasure of its resolution and how the world improves with you in it

We are hard-wired for stories

Now, for the science. When we read or hear a bunch of facts, only certain parts in the brain get activated. Scientists call these Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing else happens.

When we are being told a story, though, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too. So stories put our whole brain to work.

In his best selling book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink says stories represent a pathway to understanding that don’t run through the left (analytical) side of the brain.

“We have a hunger for what stories provide – context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters. The Conceptual Age can remind us of what has always been true but rarely acted upon – that we must listen to each other’s stories and that we are each the authors of our own lives.”

In one study, people remembered stories 22 times more often than facts and data.

So stop trying to drive someone to a decision by feeding the analytical – and skeptical – side of their brain with information. Instead, create an emotional connection with the right side of your prospect’s brain, the part that ultimately makes the buying decision anyway, with a well crafted, audience-appropriate story of struggle and triumph that is unique to you. That’s a true differentiator.