StorySelling: Say Less. Sell More.

So I am super pumped to be here today. We've been talking about AI. I have loved the conversations, especially that last one with that debate with Bryn Tillman. But what I want to start and tell you is in a world where AI can write your pitch, as Bryn said, your content, your email and your case study in seconds, what's the one thing AI still can't do? AI can't tell your story. So I'm going to be talking today about how the sellers who win in an age of AI won't be the ones with the best data and the best pitch decks, they'll be the ones with the best story. Now, of course, I need to start today with a story. And this is how I got so enthralled with story selling or storytelling in sales. Now, a few years ago I was asked to be on a reality show. I was really pumped. I thought I was gonna be a star. And if you wanna see the show now, I think it's on at 2am on Roku in Beijing. Show didn't do well, but I got a great story. Now this reality show, I want you to think Shark Tank with heart. And, and what I was doing is I was coaching entrepreneurs before they went to try and get funding in front of the sharks. And this was my entrepreneur. His name was Aaron. And Aaron had left a six figure job as an engineer to be an entrepreneur and create an app for opioid addiction. Now, as I talked to Aaron, he had all the facts, he had all the roi, he had all the graphs, he even had his first customers. Then I asked Aaron a question. I said, aaron, why did you leave a six figure job to start an AI app company? And that's when Aaron's entire demeanor changed. He said, well, you see, my grandfather was an addict. And when he was on his deathbed, he asked my father, who's a physician, to dedicate at least a portion of his private practice to help his brothers and sisters in Narcotics Anonymous fight opioid addiction. And Aaron said, my father did that. And then he completely broke and started crying. A grown man. He said, two years ago, my father's son, my own brother, died of an opioid overdose. And that's when I decided to, to commit my life to my grandfather's final wish. I said, aaron, I want you to go on the shark stage and I want you to lead with that story. Oh, no, no, no, no. He said, I've got to show the roi. I've got to show the data, I've got to show the case studies. I said, aaron, trust me, lead with a story. And he did. And I got to tell you from the audience this. There was not a dry eye in the house. Not the cameraman, not the televised audience, and not the sharks. And the meanest shark, the toughest shark stood up and said, I'm in a quarter million dollars. And every other one followed. And there was a man who couldn't get funding for years, who got it all because of a single story. Now, I tell you that because in my experience, our salespeople are a lot like Aaron before they learned to tell story. So what I'm asking you today is what's your story and do your salespeople have one? Do they know how to tell it and do they know where to tell it? Because I've got to tell you, as I have scoured through thousands of AI call reports, I am telling you, our salespeople not only don't know how to tell a good story, they don't know where to use it and when to use it. They've got decks, they've got data dumps, feature comparisons, ROI models, and they're wondering, why do their deals take, according to research and according to what we see, 40% longer to close because they don't have a good story. I believe your sellers have access to the most powerful persuasion tool the human brain responds to, and most of them aren't using it. So let's begin. What we're going to do in the next little while is this. We're going to look at why stories beat facts, especially in a time of AI. Now we need both, but we're going to look at that. We're going to look at where to tell the five specific stories, depending on where the customer is in their buyer's journey. We match how we sell to how customers actually buy. Then we're going to look very quickly at a five part story framework. I'm also going to offer you all some free prompts and a free ebook. And then I'm going to show you a killer AI prompt so you can work with your team to develop your own AI stories. So we're using human connection, but we're going to use AI in order to make a better story story. So let's go ahead and get started. And what I want to do first is I want to go to you, the audience, and ask you to put in the chat. I have a simple question for you. Why do you feel that stories are even more convincing and even more now in a time of AI? What's going on in our world today. Why is that? And I'm going to go ahead and look in this chat. So go ahead and write it in for me, if you will. Why are stories more convincing than facts? And why, in a time of AI, is that so important? Why are they more impactful? Okay, so let's go ahead. I'm not able to see the chat, it looks like, so I'm going to go ahead and answer my own question. How's that? So here's the three reasons, and there's probably even more than that. But number one is they just create more trust. Now, there was a concept that NPR came out with years ago called driveway moments. And for those of you who are in my generation, you might remember, maybe you were listening to a news show, a radio show. For those of you today, TikTok, Instagram. We, what happens is we're listening to a story, and we're so engaged with that story that maybe we're in our car and we won't even get out of our car to have dinner because we can't wait to see how that story ends. Why is that? Well, there's actually neuroscience as to why that is. And what happens is when we tell a good story, we're releasing oxytocin, the trust hormone. And so customers really care about that main character. They want to see how that story is going to end. But if it's a good story and it's not too long, we're also releasing cortisol or the urgency hormone. So what's happening is when we tell story, customers trust us more and there's more urgency to act and to engage. I like to say AI can generate 1000 words, but it can't make someone sit in their driveway and care. So, number one, stories told, right, create trust and urgency to act. So number two, why are stories even more impactful than facts? Well, let's face it, we're in a time of fake news. We don't believe each other, we don't trust each other. It's sad, but true. Somehow people, people still trust a story. Next stories are more memorable. And I love this statistic. And when I was listening to Jesse this morning, he was talking about adult learning theory. It is the same when we're talking to our customers. Only 5% of our buyers remember a statistic after a presentation. Think about that for a minute. Yet 63% of our prospects remember a story. In fact, stories are 22% more memorable than facts alone. Now, here's why this matters so much. I was listening to Gerhardt yesterday talk about how many stakeholders there are. He was asking that question in the enablement session. And here's the deal. With 10, 15 stakeholders today, we don't want our champion to just talking about the facts of why our products and services are better. We want them telling a story so that they can relate to it. So the buying committees say, yes, we want that. And finally, another reason that stories are so important in a time of AI, let's face it, they're less combative. I'm going to tell you a quick story. This is a story I used to tell when I was selling a real estate product 30 years ago when I first got into sales, this very couple, this is an actual picture. I was in Orlando with a colleague. This was probably 25 years ago, it was Christmas time and in walks about 65 seniors, all with red hats on. And this one couple sat right next to us as we were having our brunch. And what happened is I looked over and, and this couple starts smooching. Yeah, this 80 something couple, they are like making out for real. I couldn't help myself and I had to ask and I said to the gentleman, can you tell me the secret to a happy marriage? And he says to me, well, you may not believe this, but back in the day, 65 years ago, I was quite a looker. And Marilyn here, she kept pestering me to marry her. And I kept saying, no, I need to think about it. Well, about the third time she pestered me, I said, I need to think about it. And then she said, you know, you're not going to know what it's like to marry me until you do it. Why don't you think about it while we're married 65 years later, he said, I'm still thinking about it. And they laughed their way through their cheesecake. Now, I used to tell that story to customers. Why don't you just start with something small? Why don't you think about it while you own it? Now, of course, this worked well for a B2C product. But there's other stories we can tell that are less combative. What most sellers do when they get resistance, when they get objections, rather than having a great objection story to I want to think about it. The price is too high. Now is not a good time. You see, we should be creating story banks for every possible objection we get. When I told that story, I got to tell you, I made millions of dollars as a young seller. And your sellers can too, if they know how to tell the right story. At the Right time. So let's go ahead and look at where we should tell stories now that we know why stories work. Again, particularly in a time of AI, where do we tell the story? And I'm going to run through this really quickly, but again, at the end, I'm going to give you an opportunity to get an entire ebook at no charge to you, so you can start implementing this with your team. Every buyer makes five commitments before they say yes. And there's a story that unlocks each one and helps our customers move through that buyer's journey. The first and maybe the most obvious is why listen? That's our curiosity hook. That's when we're cold calling or when we just meet somebody at a networking event or using LinkedIn. We got 30 seconds to intrigue them enough so that they will listen. Okay, so that is your why should I listen Story. The second, and this is the biggest why change? What problems does your solution solve for? And one of the things we do when we're working with sales teams is we will say, I want you to write down all the problems you solve for, and then I want you to have a story for each and every one of them. But we've got to convince our customers as to why change. That's the most important sales story we'll ever tell, getting customers off the status quo. The third commitment every customer must make is why this type of solution? Now, this is really important today because very often we convince our customers to listen. We convince them that they have a problem, but then they think, yeah, but I could build it myself. I could build my own GPT, I could build my own software. So the third commitment that a customer needs to make is perhaps why to use an outside vendor. We often miss that. The fourth story is, why us? Why us and our company? What is our unique value proposition? What makes us better than the competition? So this is our differentiation story. And finally, the why now story. Why should I act now? This is where we get resistance or objections, and we need a story for each one. But here's what I see again as I look at your transcripts. We are not always telling the story that matches where the customer is in their buyer's journey. A lot of sellers tell one or two stories that they're most comfortable telling. And I will tell you, if we tell the wrong story at the wrong time, we actually hinder our sales. Now, I'm going to show you a quick video of what I would consider the best B2B ad of all time. And you may have seen it at the super bowl just a few weeks ago, Anthropic told the right story at the right time. I want you to watch this for the next 60 seconds and then let's unpack why it worked. Let's go ahead and show that now. How do I communicate better with my mom? Great question. Improved communication with your mom can bring you closer. Here are some techniques you can try. Start by listening. Really hear what she's trying to say underneath her words. Build conversation from points of agreement. Find a connection through shared activity, perhaps a nature walk. Or if the relationship can't be fixed, find emotional connection with other older women on Golden Encounters, the mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars. What would you like me to create? Your profile? What's the difference between me and you? Me and you.

Me and you.

Oh my God. And I gotta tell you, anthropic got 25% more views during the Super bowl than ChatGPT. And oh, by the way, then they got like several billion dollars in investment capital. Now why did it work? Because by 2025, most of the market had already decided why listen and why change? We were all using AI, so the story they told was why switch? And here's why this is so important. If instead Anthropic had showed that ad two and a half years earlier, it wouldn't have worked. People hadn't even decided that they needed to change yet and use AI. We were still using Google, but they showed the right ad at the right time and boy, was that powerful. Now I tell you that because unfortunately, most salespeople are telling the wrong story at the wrong time. They start with why us? Why our company? Why we're so great? That's the fourth story. You haven't even built a connection yet. You haven't even talked your customer into why change yet? So we need to tell the right story at the right time. Next, let's go ahead and look now at something underneath all of this and that is this. I just want to throw this out. Something even more important than telling the right story at the right time. And it's the thing a lot of sellers also don't do. Before we know the right story, the right why change story, the right why us Story. We have to do a discovery and uncover the customers story. All right, let's go ahead and look at a very simple five part structure. Now as my mentor said, it's simple, but if we're not doing it, it's advanced. Now we teach seven different structures, but this is one that we usually use for the why change story and the why us story. And it's very, very effective. Now why do we use it? Because if we don't have a structure, I find sellers go on way too long. I'm a seller. We love to talk. So what ends up happening is they're eight minute stories and the reason those don't work is because then there's no cortisol, there's no urgency. You're wondering when will this ever end? Until instead of I can't wait to hear the ending. So very important. We also talk a lot about a good story is a little bit like a joke. We want to begin with the end in mind and we want to talk about why we're telling this story as a punchline. So any good story has a punchline a little bit like a meme. You want to start with why you're telling the story, who you're telling it to and have an ending that's like I said, very much like a punchline. I'm going to tell you a quick story now that follows this five part framework and it's obviously a true story and a story that we mined working with a company called Nuance Communications, now Microsoft. Now Nuance brought us in. They had a very powerful software called PowerScribe. Incredible. It saved radiologists time and more importantly saved patients lives with more accurate data. So voice activated software rather than having to write out data. Now the salespeople had great case studies, great roi. The deals were stalling. So before we did this workshop with them, I went to the local hospital where they had just implemented the product. I wanted to find the story. And that's when I met Doug. See Doug was the lead radiologist, Irish guy, great laugh. And I asked him what had changed since they started the software. He said, before we used this product, I was working till 9 o' clock every night. He said I never got a chance to see my kids, never saw a ball game, never helped my daughter Emma with her homework. He said, now I'm home at 5, 6 o', clock, I get to spend time with my kids. And he said, and Emma just got accepted to an Ivy League school. And that's when he said, I used to have a job, now I have a life. Well, what Nuance did is they started telling that story to radiologists to break through to the other stakeholders. And what happened is doors opened and they started listening because they wanted to be like Doug. What used to take salespeople 25, 30, 30 minutes in a deck was accomplished in three minutes with the Right story at the right time. Now I'm going to give you a prompt that you can use so that you can take your stories in your company and put them in a five part structure. So I'm going to ask you to take a picture of this. So let's go ahead and do that now and again. I am going to make this available to you because I know that it's pretty small, but this is a prompt that you can use with Claude, with GPT, with perplexity. If you have your own GPT, what you want to do is give this prompt. Because here's how stories usually come to us when we do these workshops. It's like a big blah that looks something like this. And once we use a simple prompt to mine these stories, we get it in a very usable framework and where we can make sure we have an actual protagonist, where we can make sure that it's short enough, that it's got a great punchline and it's a story that will convert. So as we wrap up here and time goes so quickly, There we go. That is the five part structure you can see right here. And you can also alternate the punch line there. Two things you can do right now, scan this code. As I said, I'm happy to give you this five part framework, AI prompt and an entire ebook. So for those of you that are training, that are sales leaders, you can use this workbook about story with your team. If you're thinking, I want what nuance got, I want someone to come in to mine our customer stories. We don't make up stories, we mine them in your offices and, and build a story bank for my entire team. That's what we do. Feel free to book a call with me and we'd love to talk to you about how we can create a story selling culture with your team so that you have a story bank that you can use for onboarding for new hires that answers every problem you solve for and every objection your customers may give you. And with that, I want to just say your company has dougs. Your sellers just don't have all the stories yet. Only a human can make someone sit in their driveway and miss dinner. AI can generate a thousand words. Say it, don't read it. Learn your stories. And when you have a good story, you will say less. And I promise you, you will sell more. Thank you very much.

Beautiful.

Let's do a Q and A.

All right. I've been telling stories all my life and now I realize I've still got some growing to do. I'm going to start following your model. I love that because you. Well, first off, you made it real for us by telling stories and then you showed us the structure behind it and then you gave us a way to make that personal development path even easier. So. Bravo. And I tell you, seriously, one of the comments in the chat was, you look like a regular TV show. This truly is a highly professional presentation. And it looked to me like it was done in a major broadcast network and that you were a regular TV show host.

Bravo. Do we have any questions? We've got a few minutes. And Jim, that's just because I never made it on that reality show. You know, I was a flop on that. The reality show flopped.

People love you. Love this. Great job, Jerry. Awesome. Amazing. Thumbs up. I learned so much. Here it is. It blows me away that I, like, like Jim, grew up in a, in a culture where storytelling was norm. The norm. I think that I grew up in, in Austria and my grandmother ran a country in. And everybody that came in shared stories. There was no radio in that room. There was no tv. There were just people talking about their daily lives and, and having a good time listening to each other. And I think that that culture where, you know, the oral tradition of communicating is so much more effective than getting exposed to electronic media and getting information from TV or iPhones. People are creating that human element and that spark, that emotion that is embedded in the story and that makes it memorable. You did a phenomenal job, Sherry.

Thank you, Gerhardt. I would like to address one really important question here. Somebody said on a sales discovery call, I'm assuming we should tell a why me Story. Maybe you might tell a connection story as to why you're in the company. But I will tell you, the most important story you can tell on a discovery call isn't a story you tell at all. It's asking the right questions so that your customer tells you their story.

Absolutely.

And I cannot emphasize that enough. And particularly if you have multiple stakeholders, you want to find the common ingredient in the customer's story. What problems are you solving for? What do they hope to achieve? And so you want to ask the right questions to get their story and then repeat it back to them. So that was just a great question I really wanted to answer.

That's one of the biggest mistakes salespeople make is that and executives make in a sales role is assuming it's all on them, that they've got to do the whole thing. But this is perfect. I was, I did an all day seminar in Malaysia for about 800 people through an interpreter. And all the audience were Chinese speaking. And I stepped into the middle of the audience and had them give me the moving parts. And from that we created a story together that was the highlight of the whole day of six hours of training to them.

That's beautiful. That's just great. Jim. I've been following you for a long time, Jim. You're a legend, man.

Well, now you got me following you,

Sherry. How do you elicit stories from the customer? Give me some examples.

Well, that's why you want a structure, some kind of a methodology for doing discovery. So it doesn't. Whether it's spin selling or whether it's. You know, somebody mentioned Keenan, obviously. At Leviton Group, we have a methodology. You've heard me talk about our skin, bone, heart methodology. So we have people ask fact questions, which we call skin bone questions, which uncover the problem, heart questions, which uncover the emotional reason they would move forward and then connective tissue. How does your organization make decisions? And so their story is really whatever they say, whatever information we get us telling them back their story and getting confirmation that we got it right.

So give me a question for the hot story. Doing a sale.

Well, let's say. Let's say I'm selling coaching software. I might say, you know, tell me a little bit about your coaching culture now. How many managers do you have and do you currently have coaching in your company? That's a fact question. How long have you been in business? You might ask, do you have SDRs? Do you have AES? Do you have both? Those are all facts. But then I might ask a question. I might say, so wait a minute. If I understand correctly, each one of your frontline managers has 25 direct reports. Now that you've had to go through, you know, some firings, you know, due to the economy, how do they have time to coach every single salesperson, knowing that that's the number one lever for improvement? How do you do that and have they learned how to do that? So that's your problem question or your bone question. And then, of course, your heart question would be, how would you feel if you could increase the production of every single seller on your team by 10% through a great coaching program? What would that mean to you personally? Because we're selling to humans, not to organizations. So that would be an example of skin, bone, heart question.

I've got another example for you. This came to me from Don Hudson, sales trainer and author that we all know and respect. He said, if a customer says what Sherry what if I train all my salespeople and then they leave? Here's the response. What if you don't train them and they stay.

Amazing. Our time is up, unfortunately. Sherry, you did a phenomenal job.

That was great.

How do people get in touch with you?

Certainly follow me on LinkedIn. I post content for free every single day. Like we said, if you're interested in finding about story selling for your team, just email us@sherryherrylevatin.com and someone will get back to you. And other than that, Instagram, TikTok, we're kind of all over the place telling stories.

And your assistant just dropped a link. So people can book a 30 minute complimentary call with Sherry and get a free assessment. Very.

That's her story and she's sticking to it, Right?

All right.

And we'll talk story.

Thanks, Sherry.

Thanks, Gerhardt. Thank you, Jim.

You bet.