Storyselling: Is Your Brand Story Getting You More Sales?

Everyone loves a good story. Whether it’s a thousand-page novel or a short ad on TV, people engage with a compelling story.

But how can you convert your storytelling into storyselling?

When you concentrate on storytelling as the centerpiece of your sales pitch, the result is storyselling. Marketers use this influential tool to help boost sales growth and increase demand generation. If storyselling isn’t a term you’re familiar with, never fear. Here’s what you need to know about storyselling.

What are the Elements of a Good Story?

Your sales stories need to give “soul” to your products and services. You can do this by sharing stories of past customers who’ve encountered similar challenges as those of your target audience. This helps your target audience become so engaged that they see themselves in the story development and make it their own.

A compelling sales story should have the following elements:

• Flow: Your sales stories must have an established introduction, body, and call to action.

• Goal orientation: It must carry a specific message that urges your customers to take the desired action.
• Details: The story must be detailed so that your audience can virtually envision, hear, even smell your product or services.
• Relevance: It must show value to your target audience.

Benefits of Strategic Storytelling for Sales

When delivered right, storytelling for sales helps customers increase their practical knowledge of other clients’ experiences and know whether they’d enjoy using your product or working with your business.

Other benefits of storytelling for sales are:

Addressing Insights That Resonate

If you give valuable information within an engaging story, your customers will remember it easily. This is especially true if they see themselves as the triumphant main character.

Subduing Resistance

You can check doubts of your customers by answering their questions and uncertainties through sales stories. Within the story, it’s easy to explain why they have such doubts and how your business solves those problems.

Creating Credibility

Highlight your previous works in your sales stories to show customers your company has a track record of successfully addressing their problems.

Differentiating Your BrandFrom Competitors

Storyselling allows you to show your target audience how you do business. You can mention what your business does well and elaborate on what makes you different from your competitors.

Building Trust and Rapport

Your sales story should evoke an emotional connection from your customers by showing your human side. If your company engages in charitable giving or is grounded in purpose, you can create a compelling sales story at its core. This will make the stories more relatable.

Encouraging Creativity

When creating your sales story, you can have a free-flowing brainstorming session with your sales team to spark new ideas. You can also ask your audience what they want to hear from you. This will foster a feeling of team spirit among your prospects and employees.

How to Turn Your Storytelling Into Storyselling

Storytelling on its own doesn’t compel your customers to perform any action. On the other hand, storyselling is like full circle branding where the story ends with a meaningful conclusion that’s a mixture of reasoning and sentiment to create trust and evoke a response or action.

The following tips will help you turn your storytelling into storyselling:

1. Start With a Hook That Incites Interest

The purpose of a hook is to grab the attention of your audience and give them a reason to invest their energy and time into your story.

You can make your hook catchy by:

• Stating a relevant mind-blowing statistic
• Describing an emotion (frustration, excitement, desire, etc.)
• Identifying their pain points
• Promising something that the reader may want

2. Be Transparent

Proper storyselling should reveal where the idea for a product/service came from, how it’s made, its ingredients, the people behind it, and more. This will supplement the credibility of your brand as it won’t appear like a sales pitch.

Admitting missteps along the way and how you addressed them makes the brand even more trusted and honest. Additionally, it offsets the potential of bad press.

3. Give Your Products a Personality

What does your product represent? What does it stand for? The product should show the unique characteristics, values, and interests of the team behind it. The tone of your story will be based on this product character.

To give your product a character, look at the demographics of your target audience such as age group, gender, or interest. For example, if you sell razors for women, the voice of your sales story should be from a woman’s point of view.

4.  Ensure Your Story is Unique

Your story should be true and not copied from another source. Search engines like Google penalize duplicate content. In addition, your potential customer base will see you as untrustworthy when they discover that your content isn’t original. Original storyselling drives organic traffic that will prove valuable in the long haul.

Contact Televerde to Help Your Business Storysell Successfully

Few people can narrate an interesting sales story. However, everyone can learn how to do so. Providing your marketing team with the necessary tools for storyselling will enable them to create the best lead generation strategies while also forging long-lasting customer relations.