Better Selling Through Storytelling – in Just 7 Minutes with John Livesay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:33 — 2.8MB) | Embed

Related Links and Resources:

The free gift is my eBook "Better Selling Through Storytelling" where I share all my top storytelling tips to help everybody become a 'black belt' in storytelling. And the website, you can go to www.johnlivesay.com/freepdf and you'll get it right away. On your phone, you can text the word 'pitch' to 66866 and type in the word pitch and you can get it that way as well if you don't like to go to URLs.

Summary:

John Livesay, aka The Pitch Whisperer, is a sales keynote speaker where he shows companies’ sales teams how to turn mundane case studies into compelling case stories so they win more new business. From John’s award-winning career at Conde Nast, he shares the lessons he learned that turns sales teams into revenue rock stars. His TEDx talk: Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life has over 1,000,000 views.

Clients love working with John because of his ongoing support after his talk which includes implementing the storytelling skills from his best-selling book and online course “Better Selling Through Storytelling.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:36 John’s ideal Client: My ideal client is anybody who has to pitch against competitors to win new business. It could be a small law firm, financial company, could be a big tech healthcare company, we all have to sell ourselves all the time, but typically it's a company that has 20 or more sales teams. People on their team that they need them to start winning when they're competing against competition. And the problem is, they're not telling stories, they're pushing out information.

2:25 Problem John helps solve: The biggest problem is, they believe that everybody has to 'get-to-know, like and trust them' before they buy. So, that belief causes a behavior of pushing out information, "you want me and my company now to buy?" and the problem is, people buy emotionally and then back it up with logic. And the (sales) rep are pushing out information. That is the problem I solve. How to figure out how to tell something that pulls you in as opposed to pushing out.

3:16 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to John: A lot of them say "urgh, I'm just so tired of coming in second place" or "I wish I didn't have to feel so pushy? or "this whole process is not feeling good; I don't know what I'm doing wrong, what the missing link is, and people are forgetting what I say after I hang up."

4:05 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding John and his solution: Well, the biggest problem is, they get stuck in what I called the 'friendzone at work' where they get all excited and tell their boss "oh, someone said they're interested it means someone is going to buy, right? They asked me to send them some stuffs" and almost everyone that I ever talked to at any industry goes "urgh, I've been there." And the problem is, just because someone says they're interested doesn't mean they're ready to buy. You haven't 'intrigue' them enough, you haven't target those 'heart-strings' to get people to open their 'purse' strings.

4:52 John’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): The biggest thing that you can do to improve your game if you will, is to learn how to tell a better story. Because whoever tells the best story, is the one that gets the sale. I literally would say now 'the sale is in the TALE'. And if you can learn to become a better storyteller, people would want to take your calls, people remember what you said, they then become your brand ambassadors because they can repeat the story. Nobody repeats a bunch of information. So, the biggest thing that you can do is realize that a story needs to have an 'emotional hook' and when you start looking at the stories you remember or that you like, and start putting yourself in a story as the ‘sherpa’ not the hero, the client that you helped is the hero not you. And once you can learn how to tell a story of someone you helped, then other people see themselves in that story and they want to go in that journey with you.   

6:11 John’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): The free gift is my eBook "Better Selling Through Storytelling" where I share all my top storytelling tips to help everybody become a 'black belt' in storytelling. And the website, you can go to johnlivesay.com/freepdf and you'll get it right away. On your phone, you can text the word 'pitch' to 66866 and type in the word pitch and you can get it that way as well if you don't like to go to URLs.

7:09 Is this only for big sales teams that have hundreds of sales people? In fact, it's not. It could just for an individual entrepreneur, or it could be for a company that's got 20 or more sales people. Anybody who needs to learn how to tell a better story can learn how to do it and when that happens, you go from being pushy to being persuasive and you no longer have to push out a bunch of information. The good news is, everyone can learn how to become a storyteller and it's a game changer in your revenue bottom line.