Selling with Stories, Part 1: What Makes a Great Story?

- Stories sell, and the people who can tell a good sales story will sell more than people who can't. Having a great product and a good sales pitch just isn't enough anymore. You need great stories to go with them, and that's what this course will do. Help you find, craft, and deliver more compelling sales stories. Hi, my name is Paul Smith, and I'm a speaker, leadership, and storytelling trainer and the author of the bestselling book, Sell With A Story: How To Capture Attention, Build Trust, and Close The Sale.

I've interviewed professional salespeople at over 50 major companies around the world to uncover what sales stories you need and how they should be told. Companies like Hewlett Packard, Costco, Abercrombie and Fitch, Microsoft, Huntington Bank, Children's Hospital, and dozens of others. More importantly, I interviewed professional buyers as well. I figured, who better to tell me which sales stories work and which don't than the professional buyers who decide which salespeople to give million dollar contracts to and which ones to send away disappointed.

In this course, we'll start by understanding what a sales story is and why storytelling works so well as a selling tool. Then, we'll explore the 25 most useful types of sales stories. Plus, how to get your buyers to tell you the stories you need to hear. But we'll spend most of our time in this course exploring how to craft these stories, which stories to tell, where to find them, and all the elements that make a story great. It's structure, emotion, surprise, dialogue and details.

This course will help you tell better sales stories. Let's get started.