ONCE UPON A TIME

Today we live in a world of information. We can go online and read about any topic we can imagine. For those of us that are slightly more comfortable with technology we can also watch videos and hear sound bites on most of the topics. However, it is almost impossible to read or hear stories about these subjects.

Story telling has become a lost art. Stories are one of the most compelling ways to transfer information. The use of stories stirs emotions, creates mental images and stimulates our imaginations better than any other way of communications.

If you have ever been watching a movie and cried, or laughed, gotten angry, or felt pride it was more likely the story than it was the dialog the acting or the special effects.

Last year I was fortunate to be able to go on an Alaskan Cruise with my wife. As we stopped at the ports of call along the Alaskan coast we went to many shows produced by the natives. In every case they message was presented as a story not a documentary. The natives use stories to pass along their history and culture.

The company you work for has its own history and culture. When making a sales call and explaining your company to a prospect, you can tell it like a documentary, only providing the hard facts. You can’t get in trouble telling the truth. But you can also present the information in stories, giving the same information but doing it not as a list of facts but as a story explaining how the facts have affected you, other customers, and will affect the prospect if they get onboard.

Read these presentations and make up your own mind which is a more compelling story;

1)      “We work with all the leading consumer goods companies. Our six-sigma and lean manufacturing services can save you at least 10% of your operating costs and cut 20% from your lead times”

or

2)      “We recently worked with John Smith, the CEO of BigPack. John’s problem was that because of the long changeover times, his production was very inflexible and he couldn’t respond quickly to the needs of some of his best customers and so he was losing market share hand-over-fist. By working with us using our lean manufacturing and six sigma methodology, he was able to offer the sort of flexibility his customers were crying out for – and as an added bonus, he found that running costs were 10% lower than before.”

I think it is clear, putting facts into a story will make you more affective at what you do every day, TALK!

Lorin