See Carol’s bio, photo, and Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.
Q&A with Carol Mon (Question 4):
Q: One of the seminars you present is Tell Tales, Make Sales. How did you come to discover that storytelling is effective in sales? Do you have a story of a client that improved sales through storytelling?
A: Sadly, I stumbled upon this class. I belong to a Toastmasters group, and at the time there were several sales people also in the group. Knowing that I was a storyteller, one of them casually mentioned that he uses stories all the time in his sales process but that he didn’t feel he got all he could from the delivery. That got me thinking that maybe I had learned some techniques that sales people could benefit from. For one of the projects in the Toastmasters curriculum I put together a workshop for sales people. After receiving some good critique and glowing feedback for the presentation I developed it a bit more for the general sales population and started shopping it around.
I had one client who actually told stories fairly well but tended to go on too long and include far too much detail. After we spoke he trimmed the story to the essentials and noticed more people seemed to listen far more intently. We also talked about the need to listen to the customer’s story first so that the sales story chosen fits the need. I don’t have any figures of improved sales, but the sales person is far more confident when he tells his sales story.