Get Customers Excited And Sell More Right NOW!

What makes people different than robots and metal boxes?

Well, we have emotions.

Quite right. And we have a brain, which robots lack. They have an electronic memory, but not the rational and emotional intellect of a human. So if a computer program is able to analyze a potential sale on the basis of the delivery dates and on whether the product meets the necessary requirements, then the robot can calculate whether to buy or not. It’s that simple.

How is it, then, that people who use a computer for such calculations and comparisons reject your data, facts, and figures, even though your product clearly provides the best performance and meets all of their requirements perfectly?

We will find the answers to these questions in this section, and, of course, we'll discover what that means for our sales pitch.

In my seminars I often begin with a lecture on quantum physics. Surprisingly enough, though the audience may not know anything about quantum physics, they manage to follow my points from beginning to end simply because I use techniques that will allow them to.

Though it may seem hopelessly boring, please give a listen to this lecture, too. I promise it will actually be a lot of fun. At the end, not only will you have a bit of parlor knowledge to entertain your friends, but you´ll also learn how to sell better and more.

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Well, not really. I thought you need to know why I am qualified to teach you about this sensitive and very important subject. Well, because I can, and because I have learned over the years that these strategies create success.

My seminars and live courses are attended by people of all ages, industries, and experience-level. I do a lot of work with startup companies to help them pitch to investors and secure funding. I work with young companies who are ready to launch their new products and services to help them build a compelling sales story. I work with more established companies to help them re-work their sales material and campaigns. I work with established companies of all sizes in every industry. We redefine sales strategies and build stories around their products and services. Sometimes we even develop the whole corporate story which is the internal driver and the backbone of the company, sometimes redefining the strategy, sometimes reinforcing exciting strategies.

I help them and show them that a well crafted story is the best strategy to success. Most of the time, their previous identity was built on traditional fact-based presentations or a sophisticated mission and/or vision statement.

That worked to a certain extent, but none of these words have really moved people like a well-sculpted story does. And there is not a single client of mine who would disagree that a) the StorySculptor strategies are new and unusual but highly successful. And no one has ever reverted back to the old sales pitches or the old material.

Have you ever mowed a lawn,

landscaped a golf course, or harvested a field of grain? Each of these tasks obviously requires different, specialized tools. For example, a lawnmower that works on a small domestic yard will be ineffective on a farm. Of course, for a golf course you might even need more than one machine. And this is what I do: not mowing grass, but analyzing what people need to “mow” or “cultivate” and what machine is best for the job. I don’t stop there, either. I also deliver the equipment and train the employees who will be using it to reap the harvest. It sounds fantastic, but there is no stronger analogy. After all, I am the StorySculptor!

Every salesperson works in a target market composed of individuals. I want to stress the idea of individuals here, as I frequently hear people use the phrase “target market” to refer to a hypothetical economic entity independent of it’s people. This is a grave error, but we’re here to talk about my work, not my pet peeves. I analyze markets and determine what products should be sold to which people. This is where I determine what needs to be “cultivated”: a lawn, a golf course, or a farm. I then develop an appropriate sales story that introduces the product or service in question. The story is crafted to enter the customer’s subconscious and live there for a long time. These are the stories that sell!

The next step is training the salespeople to convey this story perfectly, convincingly, and comfortably. They then start to gain new clients and book orders like never before, and their customers come away from the transaction more excited and satisfied, which means they are more likely to talk about it and encouraged their friends, neighbors, and/or colleagues to make the purchase, too.

Am I a sales trainer? A professor? A rhetorician? No! I’m a storyteller. Sales trainers teach selling techniques, rhetoricians know how to persuade with words, and sales consultants are mainly concerned with the structure of the sale and the best methods for controlling distribution. These aren’t optimal sales approaches. Think of it this way: Suppose that you taught your employees how to build a simple lawnmower with a screwdriver, a hammer, and a welding torch. It might take you a while, but eventually you’d have a working lawnmower and your employees would probably be able to build one without your help. Great. Now ask them to build a combine harvester. Can they do it? No! The sad reality is that knowing one skill doesn’t mean that you will automatically understand a related one

The stories that I provide are carefully developed, precisely designed, and can be used with great success by any trained salesperson. With them, you and your employees can bring in a bountiful harvest year after year. That is my goal: to give you the perfect strategy to ensure your harvest is plentiful.

From this book, you will learn why it is better to sell via storytelling than by bombarding potential clients with facts and numbers. It will teach you some basic techniques that you need to produce that effective sales story. If you use this approach, you will instantly improve your sales performance. I invite you to explore this storytelling technique, visit my blog for more detailed suggestions, and even get quick tips from me in real time on Twitter. To subscribe to my blog and get notified about new posts, go to www.storysculptor.net .

My Twitter handle is @StorySculptor

I am also happy to help you create the perfect sales story to meet your sales goals. Simply write me an email: jg@storysculptor.net

Storytellers tell stories, but StorySculptors create them!

A customer once asked me why I’m a StorySculptor. I replied, “Because I develop sales stories.” The customer was nonplussed and responded,

“But then you’re a storyteller.” Then I understood the problem.

Storytellers tell stories, but StorySculptors create them!

You, dear readers, along with your friends, colleagues, or employees are the Storytellers.

You may be thinking, "But I want to learn how to

develop stories too!"

Well, here I can help you. I regularly organize and present seminars and workshops in which I offer personalized, hands-on training in story creation. It is not a difficult skill to develop, and anyone can learn it. This book provides an excellent starting point and is the basis for everything I present in these workshops. Holding this book in your hands, dear readers, means that you have all of the basic principles at your fingertips. As always, the road to perfection is long and winding. My most heartfelt advice is simply this: practice, practice, practice.

The strong opening is intended to ensure that the potential customer directs his attention to you, he isn’t distracted, and he truly wants to know what you’re going to reveal next.

Here you´ll learn how important a strong opening is and how it can determine the success or failure of your sales attempt. You´ll also learn how to create a strong opening and get some examples.

In Hollywood, a movie producer named Peter Gruber was looking for funding for his next film. He requested an appointment with Terry Semel, the head of Warner Bros. Semel agreed to see him, but Gruber knew he would only have a few minutes for his pitch. Ordinarily, it would have been better to reschedule the meeting for a later date, but Gruber didn’t have that kind of time. He knew that he needed to impress the producer from the minute he walked in the door.

Learn how he was able to catch the investor's attention and made a killer sale utilizing the strong opening.

„Last week, a clerk auditing a Fortune 500 company accidentally sent an internal balance draft to the wrong email address. The file ended up with a journalist from the Chicago Tribune. This cannot happen with PadCloud."

-Nikolai Ladanyi a StorySculptor client

It´s always the same strategy, just different content. You always, always, always want to open any sales pitch with a strong opening to grab the customers attention.

You always need something to focus your audience’s attention and make them curious about your product. Something which forces them to give you their undivided attention; something which refocuses them and makes them forget about everything else going on around them.

That is what we call the "strong opening" and it makes all the difference in the world to the beginning of a sales pitch. You want the customer to listen to you and only to you, don´t you?

Imagine the story of Little Red Ridding Hood explained how she had a nice walk in the park and stopped somewhere along the way to have a picnic. Then she went home.

Would you, or anybody for that matter, ever remember the story?

Think about it. Does your customer remember your sales pitch after you leave?

My 25+ years of experience tells me that most of the time they haven't. Learn here how the inventors of Little Red Ridding Hood made that story stick for ... well... ever after :-)

Now try this exercise. Close your eyes and try to see the Bond films in your mind. Call up the scenes with Dr. No. Or imagine any other story, be it an espionage thriller or even an animal movie like Jaws. Whatever it is, you will find a villain.

This chapter will explain why you do need a villain in every sales pitch.

Well, I am proud of you. You are going the extra mile and I very much appreciate that. You could be at the beach by now or in front of the TV, but you´re not. Instead, you are here with me, learning the best sales strategies in the world, and that is great!

Well done!

This is your homework. Go out and ask your friends and family, your colleagues or even strangers and get excited how easy you can frame someone's expectations.

Did you ever wonder how those TV shopping networks make so much money? In this chapter you can learn how, and also how you can utilize these tactics to sell more with little added effort on your part.

You're driving home. Your mind is wandering. You are thinking about something really nice. You are not paying attention to the traffic as well as you should. Regardless, somehow you still arrive home without anything bad happening. Despite your wandering mind, you are quite sure that you stopped at all the red lights and stop signs along the way without even consciously knowing it.

This auto-pilot reflex can be extremely useful in sales, too. Learn how to use it here.

Just as Pavlov trained his dogs, we can train our customers. Sounds bad, but it’s true.

Wow! Customers can be trained - learn here the most powerful strategy in sales and understand how and when to use it.

Everything that evokes an automatic feeling or emotion is an anchor. You think about sports the minute you see the Nike Swoosh, right? Maybe it reminds us to exercise more or causes us to think about the time when we ran in the New York Marathon because we did it in Nike sneakers. Songs can also remind us of products, which is why jingles and theme songs are so important. Play the music and make a sale. Show the picture and make another sale! Brands are anchors.

Trademarks are anchors too, even if they only trigger feelings rather than the urge to buy a specific product. Trademarks form our expectations and conjure up mental images. Every parent of a teenager fights the battle of the brands. If your jeans aren’t made by whatever the trendy brand is at the moment, you’re unbearably uncool.

There are so many more kinds of anchors which you can use for recall. Learn about how to form and use them in this chapter.

Songs, trademarks, logos, colors, locations, words, headlines, shapes, jingles, and many other things act as a very powerful "recall tool," or anchor, but the feelings evoked can be BAD feelings, too!

PROCEED WITH CAUTION!!!

Is it also possible to trigger an anchor unintentionally?

Yes, unfortunately. That’s why there’s always a danger in using well-known, omnipresent anchors, like an athlete, a song, a movie title, or colors. They’re known to almost everyone already, yet the emotions a certain athlete triggers can be very different depending on who you are and where you come from. Regional differences can often result in unintentionally triggered anchors. This happens a lot with colors.

This is where many salespeople fail. They’re afraid because they don’t know how to respond if the customer says no, and they’re afraid that their magical fairy tale will be dashed by that one little word. The root of the problem is that these salespeople don’t truly believe that they are helping their customers and that what they are offering is the best solution. These are the salespeople who would rather adjourn a meeting than take a risk by asking the customer to buy. Remember that salespeople are people too! Customers ask themselves what negative consequences they may face as a result of the purchase, but salespeople also ask themselves, ‘What do I have to lose? How risky is this for me?'

I have see many sales people that submitted pitch reports saying, 'Customers were very impressed. Good pitch. Next appointment scheduled in four weeks’ time.' This is a common tactic salespeople used to keep their sales report clean. Customers who agreed to a future meeting could not yet be classified as a failed sale, thereby allowing the salesperson to avoid any blemishes on their record. When these sellers did finally make a sale, then their record appears, superficially, to be only successes. Of course, the reality is that their sales aren’t consistent.

So closing the sale with your closing is critical, and in this chapter you'll learn how to do exactly this.

Riddle me this: What do you think is the biggest mistake a salesperson can make after a seemingly perfect presentation which has clearly excited the customer?

I see this all the time and it takes every ounce of my self control to not jump in and save them from their error, even with the best storytellers in the business. When I see it, I can’t believe it, but then it happens again in the next sales pitch and looks like there is nothing that can stop it.

All of these storytelling techniques come to nothing if the salesperson doesn’t know when to stop talking. It’s like baking a beautiful cake and then dropping it on the way into the dining room. You need to create your masterpiece, then you need to be silent and enjoy the cake.

You simply need to anchor the strongest argument, complete the story, and then stop talking. This is absolutely critical!

When we make a strong opening, we garner the client’s undivided attention. Then we tell our tale, anchoring its strongest element. Then we fire that anchor and ask for a conclusion. We ask the customer to buy!

We ask for the signature!

That's it!

You've learned that facts and numbers do not matter much in most cases. So what matters? Not getting eaten by the wolf is certainly one of most people's concerns. But buried deep in the human psychology there are some motivators that determine if the customer will buy or not.

Learn about these hidden motivational forces and how to use them to your benefit.

There are some crucial questions. These are the question the customers will always ask themselves. Always unconsciously, of course, unless the salesperson starts to get on their nerves, then they will most likely ask it directly to your face. These are the questions we always need to answer before they are asked.

In this chapter your will not only find these questions but also 2 more compelling reasons why you really should use stories in your sales activity.

The speed? The price? Delivery date? These are all important things that should not be forgotten, because people do value them. If you can't provide the food in time for the birthday party, you will most likely lose the sale for that simple reason.

But this is all really just surface noise. Just like an iceberg the mast majority is unseen. Ask the captain of the Titanic.

Learn here what people really care about.

This is very important! Please review this at the end of the course and be fully aware of the potential and the risk associated with leveraging stories in sales. I put this warning up because you will fail in your sales efforts if you are not aware of this misunderstanding a lot of people have.

I have addressed the issue before but I cannot emphasize enough how important this understanding is. Therefore I have decided to present this chapter to you. After all your work I want to be sure that you not only become a master in sculpting stories, but that you also apply the art of using a perfectly sculpted story successfully.

In this chapter I will explain how you start sculpting a story. It's not that easy at first. When I first started, I felt like I was standing in front of a road block as big as Mount Everest, but then I had this amazing insight which helped me to start. Using this strategy, it's now easy for me to get a story developed and sculpted. And we all know we need a story at this point, right? Because...

NO STORY - NO BUSINESS

The strategy I will explain in this section will show you why you need to have a story in order to have a business. It's a realization which came to me when I was stuck and it is the solution to all your business problems at once.

Watch it now and you´ll understand almost intuitively how it works.