The Power of Storytelling in Sales

Craig Valentine remembers when he was a teenager going to buy his first car. He walked onto the lot and found the model he was interested in, but then a salesman approached.

“He said, ‘Are you looking at this car? Let me tell you about it,’” Valentine says. “He said, ‘This car has this type of windows, this type of motor, this type of tires’—he was trying to sell me the car. And I said, ‘Thank you, I’m not interested.’”

Valentine soon found himself at another dealership, where the salesman took a different approach: “He said, ‘Are you looking at that car? Oh, you’re going to look good in that one. You’re going to be flying down the road, the wind will be blowing through your hair, and the girls will be all over you.’ Well, what do you think I did?”

Valentine, a member of Randallstown Network Toastmasters in Pikesville, Maryland, and the 1999 World Champion of Public Speaking, bought the car from the second dealership. What made the difference, he says, was the story that brought the experience of the car to life and created an emotional connection to it.

“When I give speeches now, I tell that story and always say to my audience, ‘He lied. I was lonely in that car.’ I get a big laugh out of it,” Valentine says. “But I think it’s important for the audience to realize—don’t sell the product, don’t sell the service. Always sell the result.”

And the best way to do that, Valentine says, is through stories. Adding a story to your sales pitch can hook an audience, create an emotional connection, and enable listeners to remember your main points weeks after the presentation.

“I always say, ‘Good speakers speak to be remembered; great speakers speak to be repeated,’” Valentine says. “And the way you get repeated is by sharing stories. It’s important to be able to share stories that [the audience] can walk away with and repeat.”

Types of Stories

Steven D. Cohen, Ph.D., professor of practice at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Maryland, is also an advocate of using storytelling in sales. It’s the best way, he says, to make an emotional connection with an audience.

“If you can share a story that’s revelatory, that’s insightful, that helps you connect authentically with your audience, then listeners are going to respond in kind emotionally, and they’re going to be more attached to you and your message,” he says.

Among the stories that resonate most with audiences, Cohen says, are origin stories and client success stories.

Origin stories explain how and why a company got its start. They often focus on the founder of the business and how they got their brilliant idea on which to base their company.

Client success stories put audience members in the shoes of someone who benefited from a product or service. “Maybe it’s about a time that a customer or client was a little resistant to what you were selling, and then they became a believer, or they bought in to the idea,” Cohen explains. “Why did that happen? Where did the transformation occur? What moment moved the needle? That’s a great type of story to use in a sales pitch.”

Aspirational stories are Valentine’s favorite, and they take client success stories one step further by switching up the flow into a format he calls “then, now, and how.”

“You tell a story about where your customer was before they met you—they probably weren’t in a very good place,” he says. “Then you fast-forward to where they are now, doing really well. And of course, what the audience wants to know is how? And the how is your product or service.”

4 Elements of a Good Sales Story

Cohen says a good sales story has four elements:

1. A vivid and memorable setting.
2. A relatable character.
3. A plot where the character encounters a challenge and makes a choice that leads to a resolution.
4. A moral or conclusion that reinforces the message.
   

Think, for example, of someone on vacation in Hawaii who is frustrated by their inability to stand up on a paddleboard. They decide to sketch out an idea for a device to help, and work with a manufacturing company to create and market the device. The next time they are on vacation, they are finally able to experience the joy of stand-up paddleboarding.

“What we’re trying to do is help people develop an emotional attachment to that product, service, or company, and that’s where stories and anecdotes come in,” Cohen says. “They create that magic, that connection, that emotion that’s so critical in sales to deepen the bond between company and customer, or between service and client.”

Using sensory details like sights, sounds, and smells can help bring a story to life, Cohen says. In the case of the paddleboarder, you could describe the sunlight on the water, the smell of sunscreen, and the cry of the seagulls to help your audience visualize the scene.

Tell It at Toastmasters

Cohen and Valentine both say a great place to hone your storytelling skills is at Toastmasters meetings, where you get feedback on your presentations and have a low-stakes venue to see what works and what doesn’t.

Cohen, who started Toastmasters right after college, says the feedback he received from those meetings provided an incredible opportunity to learn effective speaking early in his career. “I ended up going into storytelling and speechmaking as a professor of business communication, and I think that Toastmasters played an early role in inspiring me and motivating me to push the boundaries of what was possible, both for myself and for others,” Cohen says.

By crafting relatable, motivating stories and practicing telling them to an audience, you can enhance your sales pitches by making them more engaging and more likely to be repeated.

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