Stephen Steers: Four Questions to Ask Before You Tell a Story That Sells

Differentiating your products or services is the key to scaling sales and becoming the dominant player in your market. But how do you do it? Storytelling, that’s how.

There are 4 fundamental questions that founders need to answer in order to tell a story that makes your company stand out, attracts an audience, and converts customers.

In this session, Stephen covers the 4 questions you need to answer before telling a story, the 3 types of stories that you already have and where to deploy them in your business for results immediately.

You’ll learn:

How to emotionally connect with your audience using stories that reflect their goals and fears.
The four key questions to answer before telling a story that drives action.
Why storytelling can shorten your sales cycle and boost conversion rates.
How to tailor stories to resonate with prospects, teams, and public audiences.
How to handle objections and qualify leads using story-driven sales techniques.

Slides

BoSUSA24 | Stephen Steers | Four Questions to Ask Before You Tell a Story That Sells from Business of Software Conference

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Transcript

Stephen Steers

So today, what we’re going to talk about is what you see on the screen. Four questions to ask before you tell a story that sells. Let’s kick this off.

A Brush with Sales Insight

This is Istanbul, Turkey. The year is 2020, I was fortunate enough to be invited by a university in Turkey to teach some sales workshops to their local entrepreneurs. I met with about 30 different companies., had an incredible time, and was jet lagged worse than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I worked Turkish hours and I worked New York hours, because when you’re an entrepreneur, the time does not stop.

But on one of the rare days that I got off, I was in this historic city, and I made a bargain with myself, you’re going to see as much as you possibly can. And what you see on the screen is a place called the Galata Tower, named after the neighborhood which bears its name. It’s one of the few peaks in the Istanbul sky that pierces very highly and has been around for an incredibly long time.

This building was the tallest building in the region when it was built in the 1300s. It was built by the Ottomans as a lookout post to see who was coming on the water to potentially attack their city. And over the years and through the history, more and more people came into the region and took it over. It became a prison, at one point, during the Suleiman the great. And was even a lookout post for fires in the city, because back in those days, once something started burning, it burned for a very long time. Perhaps though, the most interesting part about this particular building in Istanbul was something that was done by a guy named Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi. If anybody’s not heard of him, don’t worry, I’ll tell you what he is.

In the 1600s, he was the first person to fly. He built a set of wooden wings, climbed to the top of the tower and jumped. Successfully completing a journey of 3500 meters on wooden wings, which predates the Wright Brothers by some 200 years. I bet you didn’t know that.

So I’m somewhat of a history buff, and I was super, super excited to go and check out this area because of all the history. So on this very same day off that I got, I roll up to the area with great excitement. And if you’ve never been to Istanbul, this area is particularly old. Remember, 1300s it was built. So I get to this area, and the streets are very thin. I don’t even think a car could pass through with without much effort. There’s a lot of people walking up and down, and it’s very, very hilly. So I’m at the bottom of this hill, making my way up towards the tower, and coming past me, I see a gentleman holding something that looks like this. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry, I will tell you – it is a shoe shining box. So as I’m walking up the hill, this gentleman is coming in the opposite direction and passes within five feet of me and on the street, clatters his shoe shining brush, and he continues on past me.

Now, I’m kind of in a rush, right? I’m tired. I want to see some stuff. I got to get back and get back to work. But I had a conundrum. I said, Well, if I drop something, I’d want somebody to tell me. Golden rule, right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So I sat there for a little bit. I looked down. I looked up. I looked back at him. He kept walking, and I said, You know what? Let me, let me help this guy out.

So I don’t know much Turkish. I think I learned two words before I traveled. And I said, what I think is Hello. And I said, Merhaba to the guy. And he turns around on a dime and looks at me, and I point to his brush. I said, you dropped. You dropped. And he looks at me with a with a crest fallen face and almost in tears, says, You saved my family because you’ve given me back my brush. I feed my family with the shoe shines. I was like, Okay, nice man, have fun with that, and I could try to go on my way. He’s like, No, I will shine your shoes as a thank you. And I was like, Nah, I’m okay, man, I’m on my way. He’s like, No, I insist you do me the honor of letting me shine your shoes. And I didn’t want my shoes shined because I was wearing vans. Kind of weird. So he kind of corners me again and insists on shining my vans.

So I’m working on my way to get away from him, and literally at that exact same moment, four stories up on the kitty corner directly in front of us, someone happens to be out on their balcony and yells at this gentleman in English, no less, which I thought was very strange. You always drop your brush and try to get the tourist to pay you for a shoe shine. Stop doing this. And as he was yelling at I made my hasty escape up the hill.

What’s Your “Drop the Brush” Moment?

But I’ll tell you, my sales brain was ticking over massively. I was excited. I was completely in awe of this tactic, because if you think about this, this is how this guy generates leads for his business, right?

Now, I think it’s pretty dishonest, a little bit messy how he’s doing it, but nonetheless, the bones of it are very, very good. And that just had my brain going in all these crazy directions. Because what I want you all to think about, right? Why this story? As entrepreneurs, as people who have companies, as leaders, our job is to set the tone of what happens. So I want you to ask yourself a question, what is your drop the brush moment in your business?

Again, I can’t answer that for you. I don’t know what your business is enough to be able to tell you, hey, that’s the one. But think about it. This guy dropped a brush and enabled a potential customer to come towards him to start a conversation so he could make a pitch or move his business forward. Now, this guy should do a little more research. I’m not his ideal client profile with vans on but nonetheless, I thought the bones were very strong, and that inspired me a great deal. Because I think that’s some of the coolest street vendor storytelling that happened. Now, why? He was able to play on the story I tell myself about being a good person. Now, a little messed up and manipulative, but nonetheless, he was able to help me do what storytelling is designed to do.

It’s designed to help your audience, the people who are listening to your prospects, your team members, whoever you are sharing a story with. It’s designed to better help them tell their own story, and this guy helped me believe I was a good person by helping him with his brush. And I still think I’m a good person because I gave it back to him and then I got on my way. But that’s the thing I want you to think about. What is your drop the brush moment? If nothing else you remember from today’s talk, think about that for your business. How do you get in front of the people who matter, who you can serve, and put the brush down so they can come pick it up and bring it back to you.

Why We’re Here Today

We are here because you want to understand how to stand out confidently in your market. We all have competitors, some of whom we can’t stand and we want to do better than and demonstrate how much better we are than them. But how can we stand out more than our competitors?

We want to generate high quality leads, if possible. We want to talk to people who are the right people with the right need at the right time so we can make a sale and grow our business and build good relationships.
We want to speed up our sales cycle. How many of you want to speed up your sales cycle? Every hand in the room should be up if you sell something, but that’s telling in itself.
How do you create a sales process that is aligned with your values?

So I’m going to talk a little bit about all of these things today. Which is why, in this session, what we’re going to cover are the following things we’re going to cover.

Why tell stories at all? What’s the point? Why should you do this? Is it worth doing your business?
The Magnificent seven reasons why people buy anything at all.
The four questions that you need to ask or answer before you tell a story that sells.
Three stories that you each of you already have that you can use and deploy in your business or your work to be more human.
Tactical stuff that will be useful for you to leave this session with something you can put in your business today. So that’s my promise to you, and I hope you hold me to it.

So who am I and why am I up here? So I’m Steven Steers, and yes, that is a picture of me just after I put a down payment on Jurassic Park.

I’m a sales consultant and a sales coach, and I built a method called Context Selling. So I help people with things like SKOs sales team training, call reviews and building out sales playbooks. If you have questions on any of that, stop me at any point in the hall. I’ve led and workshops for more than 1000 companies from over 35 countries, from some places you may have heard of. And I am a graduate of Wake Forest University, so I’m kind of local in a way. I lived here for about four and a half years, about 15 years ago, so I’m old. I might not look it, but my knees feel it, I can tell you. And it’s good to be back here in the triangle, because it’s been a long time and have a lot of good memories here. So thanks for having me back.

And then over here, I’m the author of a book called superpower storytelling. So a lot of the stuff we’re going to cover today are vignettes from said book. I thought was inspired enough by what street vendors do and what people are doing and how people move and how they sell, and the lack of storytelling in a lot of businesses, especially in software, that I said, Hey, you know what? I think there’s a there, there. Let me share this with some folks so that they can use some of the skills that I’ve learned and have helped me to move some software product.

And then finally, probably the easiest and most fun, conversational bit about me. I was once in a Beyonce music video. Okay, so if you pay attention to the top of your screen, if you look at the top of the left, you’ll see my hair and my face right there, Beyonce. Add hair, Beyonce and hair. There it is. So I have point one seconds of fame. So I’ve got 14 plus minutes left. So holler at me if you have any other places I can go, but that’s a little fun one. Ask me about that in the lobby I can it’s a fun story.

Why Tell Stories At All?

So why tell stories at all? What’s the point? Why are they useful? Who cares about stories? Well, a couple of really important things happen with stories, and they are chemical in nature.

Chemicals are released when stories happen. So we have oxytocin, we have cortisol, we have dopamine, and all of the release of these chemicals helps people retain information. What a crazy concept. When your brain is producing drugs, it helps you keep things moving forward into your brain so you remember them. Further, it helps you create empathy. I know that sounds a little weird, and you may start to see some of the threads that we’re going for with creating this chemical release in a person, but I’m going to cover this a little bit later, but I want to stick the point here.

Buying decisions only happen emotionally, and they must happen emotionally first. The logic of whatever we do comes after you’ve bridged the emotional gap with people. So stories are one of the first and fastest ways for us to get that emotional response out of a person to where we can get them in a buying frame of mind. So pay special attention that. That’s one of the reasons one of the reasons.

Stories can be recalled up to 22X better than facts alone.

The next thing here is stories can be recalled. Yes, you see it. Twenty-two times more than just stats alone, twenty-two times more likely to remember a story. So if that doesn’t convince you, let’s continue to go down the line for why it’s important.

So here we have why is it important? It’ll help you make better business decisions. I know that sounds crazy, but think about it. If you have a guiding story that helps your company be unified and aligned, like I’ve had a number of conversations with folks, and we’ll cover this a little bit later, but your story is what keeps people to a standard inside of the company. So again, I’m going to mention this a little bit later, but my mentor always says this, and it sticks with me very well. He says, Does this make the boat go faster? And if anybody’s ever asking a question, Am I doing the right thing in a company? Is this the right course of action? Always point to that standard and say, Does this help this boat go faster? That’s what a story can do. It can help you make very clear business decisions, because this is the standard we want to uphold.

The next thing, it humanizes your sales process. Why is this important? Well, until the AI overlords take over everything, it’s still humans solving human problems in a business context. And if that is still the case, we still need to humanize our process, so that when people do come to us, they feel welcome and at home with what we have to offer.

The next thing over here as well, you become more memorable and differentiated. Because I’m willing to bet your competitors do pretty similar things to each of you. And wouldn’t it be nice to be the standout person or business in your marketplace.

Storytelling can boost conversion rates by 30%.

And then finally, it increases conversion rates. Wild stat, it increases conversion rates. How much so it increases them in a moment, I’ll tell you. But here it’s 80% of sales interactions between suppliers and buyers are going to be digital, which is pretty nuts. Which means the fact that storytelling can increase conversions by 30% is something you should pay attention to. I’m going to cover a little bit more of this in a second, but I want to make that really, really clear point. The fact that people, how many of you use landing pages to sell? How many of you are straight ahead on the phone, B2B, talking to folks? Okay, a little bit fewer.

A story is what’s going to get someone interested and help them stay and then it’s your job to walk them through the rest of the story so they can be the hero in it, with the outcome that your company can help them get to.

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The Magnificent 7 Reasons Why People Buy

So the magnificent seven reasons why people buy anything. There are seven of them. There’s a couple different ways you can use this, but I want to call attention to one first thing. Who’s B2B here, by the way? Okay, the majority of you now whether you sell online or you’re selling over the phone. But especially if you have to get on the phone with your prospects, and you’re selling to a company that is over 100 people in size, there are going to be seven people involved in a buying decision, at least seven people.

Now this statistic does not include incumbents, so if you have a competitive software that’s currently embedded in the company you want to sell to. You still have to convince all of those people who are using that or make an argument about why you are a better fit than otherwise. So at least inside of the company, at seven, it may be as many as 12 or more, if you have an incumbent software placed inside.

50-90% of the (buyers) journey is complete before a buyer interacts with a sales rep. – Spotio

The other thing here is 50 to 90% of the buying process takes place outside of your control, because people don’t talk to a salesperson until they’re 50 to 90% there. So it’s your job to craft the right story to tell people, to get them excited about the problem you solve, but then by the time they get to a salesperson, if you do have a salesperson, the narrative that you’ve moved them through should be commensurate with the experience when they get on the phone with you.

So this week, I’ve had the fortune to meet Jim and Velvet, who are awesome. If you haven’t met them, please go say hi. They’re lovely. They were telling me a story about when they signed up for a sales training and they got on the phone after they were sold very well by the VSL, they were like, I’m bought in. And the rep was terrible. It was so bad that they almost didn’t buy but they said, Hey, I like this, and I need it. And they even made a comment about it. Imagine all that work. You got someone 90% there, and then they meet you and they’re disappointed. The story and narrative need to carry through the entire way. So please pay attention to that. So magnificent.

Seven reasons why people buy:

The first is to make money. Your solution probably can help someone make Mo Money, Darling. Make more money.
The second is you’re going to help them save money.
The third is you’re going to increase their efficiency.
And the fourth is that you’re going to mitigate their risk.

Why are these important? Each of these is a measurable outcome. You can say we increased x by x, we decreased y by y, we did x, y, z. And one of the best parts about this, if you do this well, in your discovery, your forms, or your content, you can get something very unique. So there’s a there’s a sales trainer I love. His name is Tom Hopkins. He’s one of these OG guys I’ve been going towards source material, like, where do people get their stuff? Like, before all the gurus happened. This guy was one of the first people to go on the road doing sales training, before all the internet stuff. And his claim to fame was he sold one house a day for a year at the age of 26 and he has a quote that I love, and he says, If the customer says it, it is true.

So if you are asking questions around these types of measurable situations, and you get some numbers? Those are the numbers you can use to show how much opportunity or opportunity cost of someone taking or not taking action with your solutions.

Now, another thing to add here is, anybody familiar with the concepts above the line and below the line sales? Okay, we have a couple of hands for those that don’t know. No trick questions with me. Not yet anyway. Super quickly, above the line is people who are decision makers in the purchase but may not be using your product or service. Below the line are the people who would be using your product or service may have an influence on the buying decision, but they’re probably not writing the check.

So with each of these four things, here’s your first bit of homework for you, something to take home. Have a story for how each of these things happens inside of your company. You have seven people, you probably need to convince to buy what you have talk about how your thing helps make money. Let me give you an example.

The CEO, her metric is getting more money to the shareholders. You want to be able to speak her language and talk about how what you do gets more money to the shareholders. The CFO may be more concerned about saving money. How do we talk about what we do saves money for what the CFO is going to move? The folks who are using your product or service will probably see the increase in efficiency, which is the thing that they care most about. That’s how you sell to them. And then across the board, especially for publicly traded companies, risk mitigation. Is there legislation coming down that’s going to be difficult? Is there compliance? Is there something they should really be worried about that you can quantify and show them that they need to take some action? These are how you sell directly into stakeholders, and it makes it much easier, because you’re speaking their language.

The next three over here. So this is how to sell directly to people. So who here has a consumer product? A few lesser folks, but still, nonetheless, these both come together, and I’ll share how.

The first thing that consumers care about is better health. So if you can help them get better health, they’re going to be interested, potentially. The next is more wealth. And then what good is better health and more wealth if you don’t have good people to share it with – strong relationships.

So one thing to think about as well, if you’re in a business context and you figured out how your solution can help the business make money, save money, increase efficiency or mitigate risk. Now what you can do is talk to the person on the other side. What are they doing? Did the CFO just have a baby? And now they’re stuck at the office till midnight, but you can increase the efficiency of their team in reporting that you can get them home at five or six to be back home with their baby. That’s a story that they’re compelled to potentially want to be the hero in, for sure. That’s how you can bridge some of those gaps.

So I would encourage everybody take a moment, if you have, and sit down with yourself and say, how do we help people make money, save money, increase efficiency, mitigate risk, and what are some of the things I’ve heard from the people I’ve been on the phone with or inside of my company that we sell to? Where they’re looking for better health, more wealth or stronger relationships.

The Superpower Storytelling Framework

This is called the superpower storytelling framework. This is one of the things my book is built on. The first thing is, it’s built on three really important things. And I wanted to simplify this as much as humanly possible, because a lot of folks think storytelling is cool. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to do it. I’m just not gonna bother. And I think that’s a missed opportunity. So I want to make it really simple for everybody.

First part is the three audiences that you should have stories ready for. We’re gonna cover what these are.
The second piece is the four questions, the title of the talk today, the four questions you need to ask or answer before you tell a story that sells.
And then the final piece here are the three stories you already have right now that you can use inside of your business to build that bridge.

3 Audiences

So let’s start with the three audiences. The first one is your prospects. Okay, every this is pretty obvious, but think of this in a couple different ways. It’s you getting on the phone with people, right? It’s you talking to your investors. How many of you have investors? Okay, a few of you. You need to tell your investors narrative. You need to. They need to see the picture of where we’re going together, to be able to potentially get more money, or to be able to exit or whatever else. You need to be able to craft that story so that they’re still bought in and not saying, Hey, we’re going to replace the CEO or the founders, that type of stuff.

The next tier, in your marketing. Tell stories in your marketing. Stories are the things that get people to see themselves as the victor, as the hero, as the person or people who can benefit the most from the outcome your company can provide. So that’s the first audience is your prospects.

The second one is your team. So I’ve had a number of conversations with folks over the past couple days. I want to shout out my guy, Ignacio from Spain. He came to one of my sessions the other day, and his question was, how do I make sure the mindset is there? How do I lock in the mindset with the rest of my team? And so having a story that guides the company is a great way to always push it back on someone, to hold the standard to the highest level of accountability that you have. And that can make it a lot easier for people to answer their own question on if they’re helping, as I said earlier, the boat go faster.

So think about your team as obviously, your co founders, your coworkers. These are your employees, and these are also your vendors. People who provide services to you are also part of your team. They’re helping you do your job the best that you can do it. They also need the right type of stories. Maybe you’re late on a payment. They need to understand the right story that you have so you can get that little extra time to be able to make it up.

Yesterday, we talked about cutting hours down to four hours a week for some of the companies. If we had to. Some of you have had to do that. You had to tell them the right story, and you had to have enough confidence and relationship built where they would trust that you would pay them back. And some of you did that successfully. That is trust, that is a story and a guiding principle of accountability that helps the boat go faster.

And then the final audience is your life and the stage, this is obviously keynotes, workshops, podcasts, whenever you’re in front of people, this is you asking and answering that silly question. Oh, so what do you do? You could have a story for that. That’s so much more fun. And then finally, over here, it helps you be the most interesting person in the room. You go to more conferences, you go to more rooms, you can tell stories, and a story can become one of your business cards.

4 Questions

So let’s jump into it. This is the meat of things, and we’re going to work on this together. We’re going to take a small break in between, so be ready for it. We’re going to talk about the four questions you need to answer before you tell a story that sells.

What’s at Stake?

In everything there is a winner, there is a loser, who’s gonna win, who’s gonna lose. What is the cost of an action? What happens here? Why are we doing this? What is the thing that’s scary for everybody? And from some of the conversations I’ve had, I’m not the only person who has a little bit of, dare I say, existential dread for AI.

So as the quick example, in keeping with some of the theme of the conversations I’ve been having this week, and maybe some of you have as well. And per Guy’s talk yesterday, which left out the existential stuff, but nonetheless, it’s there. Everybody is thinking about AI. Every single business owner is wondering what’s going to happen. Is it going to bring us to this utopia? Where our businesses run smoothly, we make a ton of profit, or is it going to destroy everything? No one knows yet, but that’s something that’s got everybody paying attention. That’s the example I want to set for you. What’s at stake if we do not do something with AI because it’s disruptive. Anybody in any line of business is going to pay attention to that and has that thought on their mind, and if they don’t, that’s a big worry as well. That’s question one. What is at stake? There needs to be some stakes for people to take action. That’s how we unlock urgency.

What does your prospect want to learn or achieve?

So there’s stakes, but what do I do with this? Who’s going to win, who’s going to lose? What steps should I take? How can I take advantage of what’s happening here? Where do I go? Who do I talk to? How should I be thinking about these issues? You need to be able to answer that question in order to know which story to tell somebody so that they can see themselves in that action. And here’s the question to think about – how to leverage AI to grow my software business? How can I do this the right way?

What do you want them to feel?

The next question. So just in case anyone’s wondering, yes, I put into chatGPT, show me Santa’s workshop, corporate bro style, and that’s what you get when you do that. That’s pretty fun. But the question is, how do you want your audience to feel your prospects? What feeling do you want? Remember emotions drive the sale. How much so? 95% of buying decisions take place in the subconscious, 95%. So if you don’t create an emotion in your buyer, you probably have a 5% chance of winning them over every time they interact with your company, your content, or you. 95% – so remember, we back into it with that logic. And I want to say this. I mean this in the most complimentary way.

You, a lot of the technologists in here are brilliant at building the products you built. I can’t even begin to understand but because you’re so brilliant, you expect folks to understand the brilliance of what you built, versus to understand the brilliance of the outcome what you’ve built can help them to have. And that’s the difference between what a story can do and just sharing what your product is and how it was built.

So for feelings, for example, those that don’t make the necessary changes will be left behind. That’s kind of creating a little bit of FOMO in a world, right? Like that type of thing. You want to create a little bit of drama to get people’s backup and have them paying attention. And again, I don’t mean this in any manipulative way, but remember, 3% of the markets ready to buy right now. 50% will never buy. 47% could be convinced with the right content and the right nurture, that’s where your storytelling is going to go. It’s geared towards that 47% of the market that could be convinced one way or the other if they understand the right information. And a narrative is the fastest way to get them into the door for that.

What do you want them to do next?

Now let’s move on to the final question here, the fourth one, and this is where everybody gets it wrong. I’ve seen this go wrong so many times, and I myself included, until I started to figure it out. But a little bit better is just because people know what’s at stake. You taught them what they want to learn, and you’ve given them a feeling to feel. If you don’t tell them what to do next, they get this thing called confusion. Anybody heard of confusion, right? And what do? Confused people do? Nothing. They don’t buy anything. And we want to avoid that as much as possible. So be very clear about what you want someone to do now that they have the information, the story and the narrative you put in front of them, direct them what to do, direct them.

So quick example here as well, 65% of information is retained when shared in the form of a story. Let’s run this back again, seven people inside of a company need to make a buying decision. If you tell it in the form of a story, it’s much easier for me to tell that story to somebody else, because I’ll remember it. That helps drive it forward and shorten your sales cycle. Because the exchange of information is easy for me to grasp, easy for me to remember, and easy for me to disseminate as well. You shortcut the logic and get into the emotion and make sharing easy and fun

So a quick example of what you would ask someone to do next here. We have three slots for AI business readiness audits will be will benchmark your organization against your competition for AI adoption and build you a plan to increase your market share. That’s an invitation. That’s something that says, Oh, you understand what I’m worried about. You know, what I need to learn about it. I’m really scared of this, and you’ve built something that can help me take this fear and put it to work to grow my business. That can sound like something that you can trust potentially, right? Does that make sense to everybody? Okie dokie, so here’s what we’re going to do.

We’re going to take three to five minutes. You can work with your neighbor. You can work for yourself. And I’m going to ask for some volunteers to share what they uncover. I want you to answer these four questions if you’re able to. Give me your best shot. And I’m going to put them back on the screen for you. I want you to answer these the best of your ability, and then we’ll jump back in with the three stories you already have that you can use in these contexts. Is that cool with everybody? All right, see you back here in about a minute or two. Let’s get it. Any questions on that? Y’all good. Okey doke.

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Anybody willing to come up here and share and answer to one of the questions? Can I get a raise a hand raise here, anybody? Don’t be scared. Come on up. Appreciate you. Let’s make a round of applause for the volunteer out here.

Audience Member #1

So should I answer all four of them? So what’s at stake? So we are CMS vendor, so what’s at stake? Your website can be hacked because you are on some old technology. What I want them to learn is, what’s the cost to their business of being hacked? What’s the reputation business impact? And so on and so on. The emotion which I want to create is that I want them to be scared that this actually can happen, yeah, even though it’s not like, super negative, super positive, right?

And then the next step is that I would like to verify, then the facts right, that they are really running on some old technology, that this is really real, like, what we usually run into is that our clients typically running on some old WordPress installations. So it’s like very easy just to pull up the list of all the vulnerabilities of their WordPress instance, and that ultimately should push them like to really think about switching the technology.

Stephen Steers

Love it. Give them a round of applause for Dominic for coming up here. Thank you very much. Anybody else want to share? Don’t all come at once. Come on down. You can come on stage or not. I’m not going to force you to. Yeah. Let’s give a round of applause for him, and please introduce yourself.

Audience Member #2

Hi everyone. I’m Ryan. Where to start? Well, what’s at stake? So we build software that helps public defenders represent their clients. So what’s at stake your client’s life? At the end of the day, like it’s a high stakes, high stakes world. So that’s number one, okay.

Number two, a lot of public defenders have a kind of defeatist mentality. They get beat up in court a lot. So what we came up with was, like, you have to decide if you want to provide, like, high quality rep or the bare minimum. And like, introduce that as, like, a conscious choice that you have to actually make and, like, help them realize like you can actually achieve, like, high quality legal representation, like, that’s possible, which maybe some people don’t necessarily believe.

What I want you to feel? Yeah, I just want you to feel like you can win. Hey, I want you to feel like you can injure day and not have to drink away your sorrows. Talk to a lot of public defenders, they like to drink, fortunately, but like, imagine skipping into court. That’s a different feeling that most public defenders have never seen before.

And how do you actually take action? We came up with lines, let technology help. You don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, which is what a lot of public defenders like. They feel the weight of their client’s life on them, and they often like, don’t ask for help. So we’re just like, just let us. Help. Let us send you those text reminders, let us automate some of your workflows so you don’t have to do everything on your own.

Stephen Steers

Love it. Make some round of applause for Ryan. Thanks for sharing. Ryan. Anybody else want to come up? If we get one more, that’d be amazing. Come on up. Wayne. Make a round of applause for Wayne. What we got, Wayne?

Audience Member #3

All right, so let’s see here. What’s at stake? So what’s at stake is the ability to scale effectively and efficiently and focus on innovation business value, right? So without leveraging an application platform like ours. SaaS businesses risk being bogged down by operational complexities and unpredictable costs which could slow down revenue growth and stifle innovation.

So what does your prospect want to learn or achieve? Basically, they want to learn how they can shift their focus from managing infrastructure, DevOps and all of those undifferentiated things to driving business value and growth and to understand how they can, like scale revenue without scaling costs. Basically, cool. And what do I want them to feel? I want them to be confident that their business can grow without being weighted down by like that DevOps, operational overhead stuff, and relieved from the unpredictable costs and effort of maintaining the platform themselves. And I also want them to be empowered. Feel empowered that they can go and focus 100% on like driving business value.

Stephen Steers

Love it, and then what are they going to do?

Audience Member #3

What are they going to do next? Well, I want to engage them for a conversation so that we can help them understand how the platform can actually specifically address their unique needs and challenges and help them actually scale and like, do it?

Stephen Steers

Love it. Make a round of applause for Wayne.

All right. Could everybody see how, in each of those examples, you felt some emotion? Did everybody feel something a little weird, right? That little tingle? Something’s like, oh, what’s happening here? I gotta pay a little more attention. And that was just with a five minute exercise of people thinking about it. So imagine you spend a little bit of time, and you dive in, you talk to your customers, get a little clear on how you’ve made them feel about this. That’s the stuff that drives and differentiates you right there. And we haven’t even covered the stories you can tell yet. So thank you everybody for getting up on stage and sharing. I really appreciate it. Each of you is getting a book. If you don’t, you already have it, so I’m gonna give it to somebody else Wayne. But I really appreciate everybody for coming up here. All right, to the stories.

The 3 Stories You Need to Lead

So there’s three stories I think are super effective for each of you to leverage to move forward and deal into that convert. So the first is mission. I’m going to read this email to you, don’t worry, but I want you to think about mission differently. Everybody says our company’s goal is to help X do Y in Z time. Great, amazing. But no, that’s not what I mean by mission. Why are you doing that? Why that? That’s the emotional input I need to know. To shout out to Jim and Velvet, again, they’re working with folks in Kenya and Philippines because they want to create opportunity for those folks. That gets me here. Now I can listen to the rest of the value they add for me. What is the thing? Why are you doing this? That’s what I care about. Because everybody else is doing the same thing as you in a lot of places. Why are you better? Why did you choose this?

So for me, this is an email I got on a Monday after I got laid off. So the best part, does anybody know the best part about getting fired on a Monday? You get the whole rest of the week to be sad about it. It’s pretty cool. But so here’s what happened. I got an email on a Sunday night for a surprise meeting with my VP of sales, and I said, Oh, and there was no context, no email, no nothing else. And I was like, Oh man, I’m probably getting chopped and which was weird, because I came off my best quarter ever. I sold the biggest deal that quarter. It was a four business line deal with Gartner, global deal. And I was riding really high. And I get this email, or sorry, this invite.

So I get into the office, and I go into the meeting room at the scheduled time, and in comes the HR lady. So I knew what was happening. We have our conversation, blah, blah, blah, severance, this, that and the other thing. And so I was like, All right, I’m out. It’s cool. So as I’m walking out of the conference room, I see one of the founders of the company, and I go to shake his hand and say thank you. He blows me off. And I was like, Well, I guess I’m out of here. And I leave to go to pick up the rest of my life.

About 10 minutes later, this is in New York City, where I was living at the time. I’m walking towards the J train, if you’ve been in Soho, I lived in bush with Brooklyn. Shout out to Bushwick. And I’m walking to the train, I hear my phone buzz, and I look and it’s an email from this founder on my personal email, and I’ll read this to you. You can’t read it. It says I just brushed past you on the way out. I spilled coffee all over myself right before, so I was not particularly in the present. Sorry about that. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that you got the short end of the stick a lot here, with respect to territory, vertical and management, too little too late, for sure. But apologies nonetheless. I hope your experience here was generally good outside of that. I think with the right support, you can and will be an excellent seller should you choose to continue in that capacity. In any case, good luck with whatever comes next. I’m happy to be a reference for you. Should you need one.

Stephen Steers

Now, what a ridiculous email to send as well, but what a crazy one to receive. And so why this on my mission slide? This is why I get up in the morning and why I do what I do. Because I want to defeat this mindset for founders, I think it’s toxic. I think it’s absolutely terrible that people don’t train their people and don’t take accountability for what they’re building. So that’s why I get up. That’s my mission. It’s not about who I help. It’s what I want to defeat. That’s my enemy, that mindset. And by each of you sitting here and having a story and telling people why you do what you do, that’s what gets people moving and saying, I need to work with you. You get it. You have something bigger than just software. So that’s me. That’s my thing.

But again, I want to, I want to point that out to you. I think, I hope I’ve imparted on you. You want people to feel something when they come around what you’re doing. Gravity is what gets people to point towards you and pulls people down the funnel. You can create it with a story. So what does that mean? Where’d you get started? What’s the moment you knew you had to share this message and build and solve this problem? What was the time you knew you had to do it? That’s what I want to know. That’s what I mean by mission.

The other one here is, where do your well known traits come from? Maybe you’re super stubborn. You don’t quit, even when you should have quit. I want to hear about that. I want to meet you first, because you are the most interesting thing about what you do, and not enough of us share that. Everybody with me?

All right, let’s move on to the second story.

So this is your vision? So what? What do you want to bring into the world? We know why you’re doing it, but what’s the thing you want to bring into the world? What does it look like when your mission is completed? What does it look like? What does that feel like? The bigger your vision, the bigger of a crowd you can draw to it, because people want to see what happens. And if you’re really going to do what you said, you’re going to do.
Who do you want to empower? Who do you want to give power to? Whose unsung story are you sharing and telling and helping build good outcomes for? Tell me that. Share that with me that is interesting and useful and powerful.

And then the final one, these are some of the best ones here. These are milestones. Okay, these can work in a couple different ways. For you as an entrepreneur, what’s the most challenging situation you’ve ever been in? Did you miss payroll one month and didn’t know how you were gonna get it back? But you got it back. That shows me how invested you are in this company. You didn’t take salary for six months to pay your employees. That’s trust, that’s management, that’s leadership, that’s the stuff that gets me to say, hey, you know what? I want to work with this this woman, this man, I want to work with them. They get it. They’re willing to do what it takes. How did you overcome it? Because the fact that you’re still here is testament that your story is still moving and that you’ve overcome something. And again, like everything else we’re talking about, stories are about helping the person better tell their own. So if you’ve been through something hard, I can probably achieve it as well, because you’ve been through it, and you can be my inspiration for that.

The next here is, what did you learn? What’s the lesson? What did you take away from that? That’s something we can always easily share. Now, these in particular can be exactly, exactly the best pieces to use for two reasons. You could talk about yourself as the entrepreneur, the founder. You could also talk about things you’ve done for your clients, what are the milestones that they’ve been to?

So for example, with the public defender, example from Ryan, we’ve helped a public defender who was drinking six days a week to deal with the stress, get back to going out into the park and spending time with his daughter by using the software, because he let software help. Again, maybe you don’t want to put that in your marketing necessarily, but you get what I’m going for. That’s a conversation you can have with somebody if you can open up the channels of emotion inside of the sales process.

All right, let’s jump into where we can use it. And we’re heading towards the back quarter of this thing, and we’re almost done here, and I promise I will open it up for questions. But let’s jump into tactical storytelling.

Tactical Storytelling

Where does this stuff live? What is the use of it, and how can we use it better? So I work in B2B mostly, and that is usually with folks who get on the phone. So a little bit of this will be more inclined towards that, but I still think it’s important, if you have people that sell for you, how to think about this.

So I specifically like to work in the sales call because of the following reasons. First, it is the clearest indications of the specifics of your selling process. This is the trenches. This is where you actually talk to your customer. Remember, 50 – 90% of the sales process takes place before someone gets on the phone with you. By the time they get on the phone, they’ve pretty much kind of made their decision about what they’re going to do or not. It’s you’re up to you to guide them home.

The sales call is a clear indication of the specifics of how your customers talk about their problems, how they show what they’re interested in and what your team is doing to help guide those people home. That’s the best place to play. That’s one of the best places for storytelling. Once we figured that out and we know where there’s a gap, we know what skills we need to teach our team to be better at receiving these folks once they come in, and that informs the systems that we build to sell and increase conversions, which informs the overarching, biggest piece, which is the strategy that guides our company towards whatever ends we want to build it towards.

3 Objections

And then where else to use storytelling? One of my favorite places is in the objection handling. Who likes sales objections? All right, I didn’t see a single hand. You’re on my team. That’s awesome. All right, so quickly. Here some statistics. 44% of sales deals fail due to objections. We can’t answer them very well. It’s tough. The next, only 27% of salespeople are able to overcome objections successfully, which is scary. And then 13% of customers believe a salesperson can actually understand their needs, which is wild. But again, stories could be an incredible way to handle objections.

So what I’m going to share now, and I promise we’re almost finished, here are three objections that you experience and where you can kind of start to head off some of them, and then I’ll open it up for questions. So there’s three objections. They couch themselves in many different phrases and ways, but they boil down to three simple ones. The first is, you’ve probably heard it. It’s too expensive. People don’t want to spend the money, right? It’s too expensive for us. The second, is this going to work for me? And the third, is now the right time? Okay.

The OCGC Model

One of the methods that I teach folks is something I call the OCGC model, which stands for opening, creating the gap and closing. And there’s two places within it that a story will work immediately. And you could do this right now, right after this, if you have a sales call. So the first is what I call a Kryptonite question. Anybody like Superman? Okay, I like Superman. He’s from the planet Krypton, and the one thing that can hit him is if there’s a small bit of Kryptonian right there in the room, and he’s just the weakest person ever. And I call it the kryptonite question, because it’s a really simple one you can ask early on in the call that gives you all the answers you need. And that question is, So what made you hop on the phone with us today? Why is this really good? I call it the open book test of questions. So this takes me back to history class with Mr. Eckert, where he said, one time, bring your textbook to class, and this is when textbook weighed, like 15 pounds. You had to carry it around all the way, and I had him at six period after lunch, so I was furious that had to carry this, but I listened.

And when I got to the class, I was the only one with the textbook, and he’s like, open book test today, so I got a great grade on it. And this question is the equivalent in sales, because it gives you all of the context for the call immediately. You can qualify a person in or out, generally speaking, with that single question, very, very fast. What are they looking for? Why are they here? What’s happening? What made you reach out? Kind of what product or service you can offer very quickly, and generally speaking, what size of a contract you might be able to close very quickly with that question. But the best part is, this is a storytelling opportunity. This is a storytelling opportunity.

So very quickly, here you can share an example of a client that had similar needs. So what made you hop on the phone with us today? Well, I was looking to get a new piece of software because we’ve downsized recently and we’re just not hitting our numbers. So you would say something to the effect of, hey, I’m sorry to hear that. It makes a lot of sense, though we’re hearing similar things from a lot of the clients we’re working with right now. I’m going to share a little bit more about that later, but I wanted to let you know we’ve heard it before, and we’re working with a number of agencies that also experience a problem. So you’re in the right place. Not much, but gave them a thing that says, Hey, I see you. You are seeing we’re here in the right place. We’re going to talk about it very quick, very easy.

Next part is you can kind of preview the case study you’re going to share later with actually, how you did that work.

Last piece, you can transition into your discovery. You got context. You can formulate the right questions to start to get the size of the gap, of the opportunity, how much money, how much time, how much risk, whatever it is, and you can start to quantify and the larger the gap is, the easier for you to land the plane for your services or products inside, and then summarize. This is one of my big pet peeves on a sales call. It’s a huge missed opportunity if you don’t summarize the needs of a person, because we didn’t close out, and then we can’t transition to the next phase.

So a summary is something like, you really want x, but y is holding you back. You’ve tried a and b, but haven’t been able to make it work, and x is happening, which is hurting you with all the Y. Did I get that right? And when they say yes or say no, you can then unpack the additional objection that they may have or something else you missed. And then from there, you say, hey, so based on those needs, I think we can actually help you, here’s how. We worked with another agency that experienced the same problems, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, and here’s exactly what we’re able to do for them. And then you drop into your little bit of a case study and show some of the numbers and metrics you’ve been able to affect.

The other thing is, you end that statement with would similar results work well for your business? What’s the magic of that question? We’ve solved one objection. We’ve solved the is this a fit objection? Because they said yes, that will work for me. And then we’re left with pricing, which is obviously going to be something we’re going to have to talk through. And then it’s a discussion of time, which I have questions, which I can share after this if you want to ask. And that is where you can use storytelling, my friends. So now each and every one of you know why bother with storytelling at all? You know the magnificent seven reasons why people buy anything. You now know and have seen examples of from the three people who have been generous enough to come on stage and share their business with us, the four questions you need to ask before you tell a story that sells. You also know the three types of stories that convert mission, vision and milestones, and you also understand some tactical storytelling.

So with that, what I have for everybody, if you’re curious or interested, right here, if you scan that code, you can get the call script that I built that you can take and you can use it. It has all the indications for where a story goes in. And if you like 100% $0 I will review a sales call for you if you fill out the form. I did it for some folks previously, so you can grab that. I’ll review a call. I’ll go over it, I’ll tell you where there’s some room and gaps for you, and you could be on the way to telling stories that convert.

Thanks for your time, everybody.

Stephen Steers

Founder, Steers Consulting Group

Stephen Steers is a storyteller, stand up comedian and author of Superpower Storytelling. He’s advised more than 1000 companies from 35 countries including teams from Google, Nike, HEC Paris Business School and Entrepreneurs Organization.

Starting as an SDR in a software company, Stephen moved into account management and then as a sales consultant helping venture backed SaaS companies building sales processes and training sales people to scale repeatable, predictable sales teams.

He believes stories close the sale, never the conversation.

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