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This month, I’m reviewing “Sell With a Story” by Paul Smith. At its core, it’s a book about crafting stories and using previous experience to show prospective customers how you can help them in ways that align with what they’re asking.
The first step of the storytelling process is to actually listen to what the prospect needs and wants. This exercise provides a salesperson guidance on which type of story to use to help move the prospect along in the sales process.
Most of sales is about trust, and people are statistically more likely to buy from people they know and like than from someone who just promises to solve all of their challenges no matter how complex and unique they are.
The goal is to match the right story with the right example. If, say, a customer has a unique problem that requires outside-the-box thinking, it might be a perfect situation to tell a tale of a previous client problem that was also outside the box and how you were able to solve that.
An example from the book is someone who sold school curriculum and reached out to a school board member from the current client’s neighboring district. The existing client had such dramatically improved test scores, student morale and overall metrics for students that the progress ended up in the local news. The salesperson was able to use this win from a previous customer to start the conversation with the neighboring district.
The storytelling helped set the tone for the call. It signaled that the salesperson was familiar with the industry in question as well as the struggles the prospect had while also demonstrating previous success in this area.
As for extracting the information and applying it to day-to-day life, this book has that in spades. While there are plenty of examples of storytelling that works in various settings, those serve as the basic framework. There are also specific strategies for identifying the best stories for a given prospect, as well as managing the post-sales integration side of things.
The book does get a little repetitive as it continues to break down different storytelling techniques. Some stories build on themselves and others are refreshing. The interesting part of this is that Smith interviews and compiles stories from procurement professionals versus other salespeople. The purpose of this was to highlight what worked best and what didn’t based on people who were making the decisions to take the meetings.
Overall the book was solid. I’ll give it three out of five stars. It was good enough, if not quite a must read. If it’s already on your TBR list, keep it, but don’t move it to the top of the list. The author has two previous books on selling and storytelling: “Lead with a Story” and “Parent With a Story.”