{#25 in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories from Sell with a Story, by Paul Smith} One of the most productive uses of storytelling in sales isn’t found in a story you tell to the buyer, a story the buyer tells you, or even a story that you tell to yourself. It’s a story that you craft for the benefit of other salespeople who work at your company. And it tells the story of the successful sale you just closed or the unsuccessful one you just failed to close. The purpose...

Sales Hall of Fame president Steve Benson joins me to talk about a clever sales tool Badger Maps, as well as specific problems and solutions for salespeople during the pandemic. read more

Great at LinkedIn author Mike Sweigart joins me to talk about some of the best -- and worst -- things you can do on LinkedIn to help market you and your brand

The post No Regrets Selling and the Paradox of Choice appeared first on Paul Smith | Business Storytelling Coach.

{#24 in the series of the 25 most useful sales stories} “Hello. I’m Mark Bowser, and these are not my pants.” If you’d been in one of Mark Bowser‘s customer service training classes in Indianapolis in the late 1990s, those are the first words you would have heard him say as he introduced himself. His [read more]

{#23 in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} Just because you’ve closed the sale doesn’t mean the need for storytelling has ended. In fact, the best salespeople continue to use storytelling after the sale in three primary ways:     1. to deliver service after the sale,     2. to generate [read more]

Mike Weinberg is pissed off. And if you work in sales, you should be, too. And that very righteous anger is directed at people in his own industry — the sales coaching and training business. In particular, it’s directed at people holding themselves out as sales experts preaching that “everything in sales has changed. . [read more]

Mike Weinberg is pissed off. And if you work in sales, you should be, too. And that very righteous anger is directed at people in his own industry — the sales coaching and training business. In particular, it’s directed at people holding themselves out as sales experts preaching that “everything in sales has changed. . . nothing that used to work in sales works anymore. . . picking up the phone is for dinosaurs. . .” That anger prompted Mike to write his most recent book Sales Truth: Debunk...

[#22 of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories] This is the most creative use of storytelling in closing the sale that you’re ever likely to come across. It’s definitely not one I expected to find when I was doing the research on sales stories. But I did, from a guy we’ll call “Brad” who worked [read more]

Do you really need empathy to be a good sales rep? My podcast guest this week says no. He’s Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO of Chili Piper. Nicolas started his career selling newspapers in the streets of Paris in high school, studied math in undergrad, and then got an MBA from Stanford. He then started and sold [read more]

What’s the difference between ethical persuasion and manipulation? That was the primary topic of my conversation this week with Brian Ahearn. And it’s an important difference that any salesperson, marketer, or leader (all of whom influence people for a living) needs to be keenly aware of so they can stay on the right side of [read more]

{#21 in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories, from Sell with a Story} Every salesperson worth their salt does their best to get in front of the ultimate decision-maker. But we all know that’s not always possible. Usually, that’s because the decision is being made too far up the hierarchy for the [read more]

Software demos are broken, and everyone who sells software knows it. Greg Dickenson realized that when his boys came home from college for a visit. They needed to keep up with their online courses while they were home, so they pulled up a 90-minute video that claimed to cover the topic they needed to study, [read more]

Has this ever happened to you? You finish what seems like a great sales call. The buyer says that they definitely need what you’re selling, and the price and quality are both fine. They’ll definitely place an order. “But,” they say, “now’s just not the right time. Come back in six months.” Of course it [read more]

{The 19th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} Wouldn’t it be great if you could resolve your buyer’s objections before they’re even brought up? Turns out you can. And, believe it or not, the best example I’ve ever seen of that was in the hip-hop movie 8 Mile, starring rapper Eminem. [read more]

{The 19th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} One powerful use of storytelling in sales is to resolve your buyers’ objections before they’re even brought up. I’ve come across two different methods to do this, so I’ll cover one in this post and the other in the next. The first technique [read more]

{The 18th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} One of the final, and most common objections buyers have to what you’re selling is price. So, if you’re at the point that you’re negotiating price, congratulations. You’ve got a prospect interested in what you’re selling, and you’ve probably resolved every other objection [read more]

{#17 in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} As most salespeople have learned, the real selling doesn’t start until the buyer says no. That’s why there are all kinds of methods salespeople use for handling objections. Some of the more popular ones are:   LAIR: Listen, Acknowledge, Identify Objection, Reverse It) LACE: Listen, [read more]

{Number 16 in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories.} Value-adding stories are stories that actually add to the attractiveness of the product. They literally make people willing to pay more money for your product than they would without the story. One example of that is the Pig Island story I told on [read more]

{The 15th in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories.} “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” That’s the opening line of one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems, The Road Not Taken. It describes a difficult choice the narrator has to make between two different paths, and how important it was that [read more]

Customer success stories are probably the most common type of sales story. And they deserve to be. That’s because buyers trust what other customers have to say much more than what a salesperson says. So, your customer success story, even if you’re the one telling it, is far more credible than just your opinion. But, [read more]

My guest this week was Stewart Samkange in Kenya. Stewart is a sales professional who’s worked at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. And he’s in the process of relocating from Kenya to Dublin, Ireland to take a job working for LinkedIn. Stewart is a regular listener of the podcast and reached out to me with [read more]