In today’s world, there are a few realities that every sales professional is acutely aware of. The first is that there are many alternatives available for every prospect you have. Not only are there alternatives that are competitive to your solution, but you are often fighting for capital to even have your solution on the purchasing agenda in the first place. The second reality is that in most cases, our prospects are beginning their “buying process” without us. They are searching the web for alternatives and researching viable options without a sales person getting involved.
This poses a challenge for many sales professionals: How do we establish our credibility online?
Effective sales professionals have always been effective communicators. One way to communicate is through storytelling. We use well-crafted stories that build our credibility with prospects, and we capture not only their interest, but also their belief in our capabilities and our ability to relate to their world. Telling stories is a valuable way to connect with prospects and illustrate how our products or services can positively impact their business. We want to share stories that communicate our credibility and expertise in the field, whether they are in the form of an email, social media post, or webpage. Today, we not only need to be able to tell our stories in a conversation, we also need to be able to tell our stories online to capture the interest of our prospects.
Let’s dig into the best practices for telling stories that establish credibility.
1. It’s not about us. It’s not about our products, our services, or our company. It’s about the prospects’ world, their challenges, and their business challenges. Our stories should start and end by focusing on the prospects’ situation, with our solutions playing a supporting role to them. What are the prospects’ current situations? What business objectives or imperatives can we contribute to? How will things be better when we’ve helped them fix their problems? Putting prospects in the starring role of our stories helps them see how our solutions can make a difference in their unique situation.
2. Reasons to do business. The best stories we can tell are ones that resonate with prospects and show them how we can solve their business issues. By knowing our prospects and their needs, we can adapt our stories from working with past clients to highlight similar circumstances in the present situation: what business issues did we solve in the past that the current prospect is facing now? What led the past client to select us? We need to work these reasons into the story.
3. Core components. What turns good stories great is delivering key story elements that resonate with prospects and establish credibility every step of the way. Remember that we need to change what stories we share with what prospects, depending on their situation and needs. To ensure we’re telling great stories, we need to ask ourselves:
- High level of emotion: Do our stories capture prospects’ attention with a high level of detail and rich description? Does our story not only have a business message, but also resonate at an emotional level? Examples of these emotions can include fear, anxiety, doubt, frustration, or excitement.
- Summary of challenges: Have we effectively summarized the business issues our prospects face in this story? What changed in the customer’s business as a result of partnering with us? Keep in mind that if we expect a prospect to agree that our solution is the right one, we should first gain an agreement on the problems that our solution will address. We need to use the story to surface the likely problems we can solve.
- Uniqueness: What sets this story apart from other stories our prospects are hearing? Our stories should highlight our differentiation from other products and services on the market. Why you and you alone are the best alternative.
- Measurable impact: Can we prove the impact that we have had? Numbers resonate, and big numbers get a business professional’s attention. What was the measurable impact, the result, the bottom line? Why is your story so impressive?
We need to include all of these components and best practices to take our stories from good to great – from clicked-away to credible. In this social-selling world, credibility trumps flashy every time, and credibility will ultimately seal the deal.
To gain people’s interest, we must be interesting! Where can you tell your story today to attract a potential buyer? Does your online profile and footprint demonstrate the value you can bring to your potential prospects? Now is a great time to fine-tune your personal message online.