Your Buyer Is A Storyteller
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One of my favorite things to do is people watch.
If I’m out at a park or a restaurant I look at the people around me, a young couple talking, a woman walking her dog, an old guy taking his time with a sandwich, etc.
One of the things that happens when you watch people is you imagine what their lives are like, or what they did before arriving here, or where they’re going next. You tell yourself a story about them.
Is that story accurate? Probably not, but you tell yourself it anyway.
Humans think in stories. They create them all the time.
Some of your buyers have stories about you, fair or not!
I promise you’re going to be able to help them the most when you learn their stories.
Here’s a recap of everything in this episode of 5 Minute Sales Training:
Does your buyer have a story to tell?
Oh yeah. And it’s a good story indeed.
Buyers are people and because they are people, they are storytellers. Humans tell stories. We can’t help it.
We’re more comfortable when we think we understand the world around us. We tell stories to make sense of a complicated world.
The psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, says that one of the great flaws of man is that he thinks he understands the world.
We tell stories to give us a narrative. It grounds us.
Everyone has stories. The question is, do you want to know your customer’s story?
As a sales professional, you are the Chief Story Investigator. You need to lean into your customer’s stories. You need to be deeply curious.
To help, start your discovery sentences with the words, “Tell me.”
You learn so much about your buyer’s story with the “Tell me” technique.
“Tell me more about that.”
“Tell me why you feel that way.”
“Tell me why that’s important to you.”
“Tell me” statements elicit stories. Because the story is going to give us what we really need to know about them.
One of the most important things that a sales professional can do is to be very, very curious.
Get curious, use the “Tell me” technique, get inside your customer’s head and learn their stories.
Until next time, learn more to earn more.
