Sales is telling a story to your customer. For every product or service there is a story to tell your customer. If you are a good story teller you get the business.
agree with jayakumar, simple stories will not convince customer but a successful salesperson who always tells stories those are actually extraordinary & always with some new content in old stories By
Pranab Banerjee, Sr.Sales Officer, L & T EBG(ESP)
| 07 08 2010 04:52:19 +0000
Its true....the successful salesperson is that whos tells better story to buyer.....basically story convince the buyer to buy product or services......Good story tetter can be the Great salesman... :)
sales is not only telling a story to customer but it is the process of educating customer towards product and differentiate our product from others competitor present in the market. By
manish kumar tripathi, Marketing Manager, Bollywood Blog Magazine
| 06 07 2010 13:38:52 +0000
If we look only to the Sales function, most of the times deal is made by convincing the customer based on some facts and some spoken words. Most of the times fact and data makes more impact when it is better represented through a good story. Sales is therefore indeed a story telling act.
As long as you are not reading out the white paper, selling is always about story telling. Understanding the customers need is the first and foremost requirement for a selling to actually start. If the customer were so sure what they actually want they would go to internet and order, a sales guy would not even be required and i wish all customers knew what they exactly want. However, and i speak only from an IT selling perspective, you need to emphatise with the customer, speak to them as if their pain is your own and show them how you would solve their problem,at the end you are telling them your product story but customized for their ears only.
Adding more to it, sales is just solving problems and pain areas of client,customers making them happy by giving what they were looking for revealing their pain area,Sales is joy making, meeting people of diverse background & Experiences.
Sales is selling your self, the product or the services would only be bought if the person associated has a good rapport..So its much more then telling a story.... By
Amulya , Manager - Training & Development, AEGIS Ltd.
| 07 08 2010 08:26:36 +0000
SALES COULD NEVER BE DONE BY TELLING STORIES ALONE.MAY BE TO A VERY LIMITED EXTENT THIS APPLIES TO VERY FEW SITUATIONS AND CAN NOT BE FOR EVER.OF COURSE A SWEET COATED PRESENTATION CONVINCES THE BUYER AND THAT ALONE IS NOT SUFFICIENT TO COMPLETE A SALE.SALES IS ALWAYS A RECURRING PROCESS AND NOT AN ONE TIME TRANSACTION BY A HAWKER WHOM WE MEET ONCE IN A BLUE MOON.
Sales is nothing but buying and selling of any products. Hence good sales involves the proper channel of distribution, good customer base for the products, and the availability of products at competitive prices with quality & differentiation from others. Story telling will not help in sales, but how you present yourself & about the products' features.
I don’t agree.............sales is purely based on facts....a sales person should realise if he/she going to buy a products weather they look for stories about their buying products...usually we watch adds with different views but we only attract if only we realise whatever the ads have come up its trust worthy to buy.....so its unpleasant to say sales is nothing but telling story.... By
Manjunatha Venkata Prasad, Associate Professor, Target India
| 07 03 2010 17:52:53 +0000
Stories may be fact or fiction. Sales cannot survive on fiction. It is based on facts.
It is all about finding how the product can be a solution to the customers' unaddressed problem or need and then communicating with him about it.
In this era of high competition , where each competitor is trying to sell the product benefits of his product , he will not miss an opportunity to punch holes in arguments which are not based on facts.
When we talk of CUSTOMER DELIGHT, we imply a high level of satisfaction with the product. It is not meant to imply the delight he gets on hearing a delightful story.
If there is a dissonance in his mind between what is offered and what is required , he will not buy the product.
If story telling is sales,then each product can offer one CD with latest story,and sell the product!Instead of appointing marketing and sales personnels, companies can appoint story writers and story tellers to sell products.Sales is not an art it is a special skill specially acquired after prolonged market experience.A sales man will know the product scientifically well, and he narrates the scientific reasioning while selling and also uses his knowledge of understanding customer's needs and their feelings and this trend changes every day ,from place to place,culture to culture.In my opinion selling is not story telling, otherwise why so many school of business management would have come up with so many scientific methods of selling?
The argument that sales is nothing but telling a story if accepted would take us back to the selling era when the reality is that we have come a long way since then - through the marketing, societal marketing, green marketing and sustainable marketing eras. Weaving a nice story around a product or service worked when oligopolistic competition was the norm, markets were driven by sellers and not buyers, and information availability was poor. Today, in most categories, we have saturation competition, buyers have lots of choice, and thanks to technology and the internet, buyers are well-informed. Against this background, trying to succeed merely on the basis of a story is a recipe for failure. Any sales pitch has to be based on facts, figures, comparisons and data that clearly demonstrate the superiority of what is being offered. A story by definition has a fictional element to it and hence does not wash with discerning customers. However, there is a sting in the tail. A remarkable and unprecedented marketing effort can become part of folklore. As an example, consider the case of the customer who walked into a NORDSTROM store with a damaged automobile tyre and demanded a refund. He was promptly given the amount he claimed he had paid for the tyre. Why is this significant? NORDSTROM does not sell automobile tyres. The salesperson could easily have told the customer this fact. Instead, based on the premise that the customer is always right, the salesperson returned the money that had not even been collected in the first place. Because of the remarkable behavior of the salesperson and the word-of-mouth publicity that the incident generated, the example has become a folklore in marketing management and many textbooks quote this to illustrate what customer-centricity is all about. Just think for a moment. If the salesperson had politely taken the customer inside the store and explained that they did not sell automobile tyres, would this have become a point of discussion at all? Therefore, by all means tell a story. But don't spin a yarn. If you can make out the difference between the two, you can surely succeed. By
B V Krishnamurthy, Chief Academic Advisor and Distinguished Professor, RIMS
| 06 07 2010 08:43:13 +0000
No nowadays its not like that. If your are still telling a story you a bound to fail. Today we need to understand the wants and need of people and give then what they want. If you take the right product to the right person you will top the sales.
So people forget telling stories and try to know your customers......
If celebrity endorsement is done with matching target market segment, it definitely produces result largely on a short term basis... and it works well in the less educated segment.
Media are used for communicating information..faster and quicker the information helps timely decesion...So..definitely mobile is going to lead the show in future .
