Selling With a Story
Yesterday I talked about clients and customers who explain what they want by telling a story. I guess that, in a low-key way I was trying to suggest that we shouldn’t become angry or frustrated with people who take time getting to the point of why they might be standing in front of us.
By telling a story, instead of just giving us the facts, they are dealing with something that they don’t understand and can’t explain in the language that you and I might use to describe a problem that we do understand.
That was yesterday, today I want to suggest that telling a story works the other way as well. Telling a story allows us to explain something that might be quite technical to a client or customer who might not otherwise understand.
I saw it in action last Thursday when we were down at our friend’s computer shop. An older couple came in and they wanted to purchase their first computer. They knew nothing about computers but they were savvy shoppers. They had been to just about every computer retailer in town and they had printed quotes from each of them.
Our friend sat them down and a gently questioned them about what they might want to do with their computer and he explained that he needed to know the answer to that question so that he could decide what level of components to include in his quote.
He also asked them what the other quotes had been and they willingly showed him all those pages that they had brought with them. The lowest quote that they had received was around $1200 and the highest was $1500.
We work with our friend from time to time – when we need to get out of the house and do something different – so I knew that there was no way he could match those quotes and I thought he was probably just wasting his time.
But I was wrong. For about 20 minutes he sat there and quietly told them the story of why quality parts and individual components in a new computer are better than cheap parts and components that share resources.
He told them the truth; he didn’t embellish the facts in any way. He was able to draw on a well known story here in Australia of a CDROM sent out with a gardening magazine that simply could not be played by any computer with an on-board graphic card because it pulled too much memory from the processor when it wanted to play the CDROM.
And he told it like a story is told – in language that people can understand. When he was finished they handed over $2200 and asked him to build their computer.
Seth Godin once said that marketing was telling a story and I didn’t understand until I saw it in action.
