Creating Your Unique Sales Story. The Three Key Elements

Here's the beginning of a very successful sales story

. Marshall Coltrain gazed at the shattered window from which now protruded a branch that had until most recently housed his 8-year old daughter's swing. With a sigh of frustration and fear he contemplated the wreckage and mused to himself, "I hope this is covered."

Here's another example of a sales story opening: Although the casual observer would never guess, Vice President of Operations, Dan Townsend emerged from his staff meeting in a rage. "What is wrong with these people? They can't get along for two minutes without adult supervision. There's no way I'll get the process control system implemented by July if this back-biting and petty sniping doesn't come to halt. I wish I could just fire the lot of them."

It's often been said that most important sentence in a sales letter is the first one. Its goal is to get you to read the second sentence. There is a similar thought process when developing your unique sales story. The goal of the first paragraph is to hook your reader. To engage them in the story that is about to follow. Arguably the opening paragraph is the most important section of your unique sales story.

Great sales stories revolve around a problem. The gap that exists between the current and desired state. However, when creating sales stories we need to do more than just state what the problem is. That is seldom enough to draw the attention of our reader or listener. There are two other elements that need to be introduced along with the problem.

The first of these are characters. All stories need characters and in sales stories they need to be people that your prospects can relate to. If you're selling insurance, a good character would be the victim of a flood or storm. If you're in the leadership advice business, the main character would most likely be an executive who is frustrated with internal communications, organizational silos or overt corporate politics. In other words, the main character, the person who suffers from the problem, needs to closely resemble the prospect you're targeting.

Secondly we need to combine the problem with what is referred to by writers as "context". This is the place in which the story occurs. Leave this out and the chances of losing the attention of your reader or listener substantially increases. It's important to remember that in the opening moments of your story the reader is not only digesting what you are communicating, but also making a decision about whether she wants to continue reading or listening. This is the reason why an effective opening hook is layered with more details than one might initially assume.

Let's take a look at how these three elements, Problem, Character and Context blend together to create a strong opening for your sales story. In order to do that I'll refer to the examples at the beginning of this chapter as illustrative examples.

When you read the two opening story lines one point becomes immediately apparent; they're very specific. One is obviously a sales story that is focused on home owners insurance. The other is perhaps a bit less obvious to the general observer, but the target audience would recognize it as a story that will focus on leadership. Very specific messages to very specific markets.

This is important and spells the difference between stories that command attention and those that get ignored. Given the fact that time is limited, it would be ideal to be able to write one story that appeals to everyone. Unfortunately that is extremely hard to do and the fields are littered with the carcasses of sales stories that never worked for precisely that reason.

This commonly occurs if you define your market as small businesses. Unfortunately, this is a bit like saying, "Let's go eat American food." You just haven't narrowed down the options enough. From a practical perspective small businesses usually don't think of themselves that way. Rather, they define themselves as a consultant, a manufacturer, a retailer or something far more specific. In order for your sales story to ultimately do it's job it needs to be targeted to a very specific niche. The world is just too crowded and noisy. If the message isn't specific, it's not it is evaluated and rejected, it's simply ignored. Thus, defining a niche market is the crucial first step.

Let's examine the opening sentence from the first example: Marshall Coltrain gazed at the shattered window from which no protruded a branch that had until most recently housed his 8-year old daughters swing.

There are a few points to take away from this opening sentence that will help you in the development of your sales stories. First, name your characters. If your story is a composite, simply put an asterisk next to the name. That leads to a disclaimer box at the bottom your page. Although I claim no legal expertise on this, I use language such as The following consists of an illustrative example and no representation of any real person, living or dead is intended.

Naming your character makes your reader or listener care about the problem they face. They need to be able to relate to the person if they are eventually to buy into your recommended solution. As those in fund raising know, tell me about 1,000,000 people who are dying in Africa and I'll turn a blind eye. It's just not something I can relate to. However, tell me the story about Orphan Sam who is forced to live on the streets and eat bugs to survive, and I'll whip out my checkbook.

We also want to provide as much background context as possible. Is he married? Single? Kids? The answer is immediately apparent by telling your reader that the tree branch until recently housed his daughters swing.

Here's a tip for writing context into your sales story. Start by just writing the descriptive sentence. "The tree crashed through the window." Now ask yourself, how can I make this more interesting? We know now that the first step is to name the character. What else? Picture the event in your mind. Visualization is key for writing effective stories. What part of the tree came through the window. The trunk? A branch? What was on the branch? You get the idea.

Let's take a look at the second sentence. With a sigh of frustration and fear he contemplated the wreckage and mused to himself, "Damn I hope this is covered."

Two helpful points to keep in mind. First try to use emotion when you are writing. Words such as "frustration" and "fear" let us know about the state of mind of our main character. Again this is important in order to have our reader relate to the story.

(As an aside, I suggest that you first write out all of your sales stories. You'll find that it's easy to convert stories from the printed page into the spoken word. Plus, the discipline that it takes to actually write out a sales story will ensure that yours have the appropriate amount of context and detail.)

Secondly, particularly in your written sales stories, you want to include dialogue. This will make your stories come alive. The dialogue can take the form of both conversations between characters as well as internal thoughts. , "Damn I hope this is covered.", brings our character to live and serves to highlight the specific problem that is being faced. In fact with just 6 words we've effectively zeroed in the subject of the rest of the story.

If we look at the second example we see that it also includes character, context and problem. Although the casual observer would never guess, Vice President of Operations, Dan Townsend emerged from his staff meeting in a rage. "What is wrong with these people? They can't get along for two minutes without adult supervision. There's no way I'll get the process control system implemented by July if this back-biting and petty snipping doesn't come to halt. I wish I could just fire the lot of them."

If you are creating sales stories in the business to business market, it's often a good idea to give an organizational title to your character. This not only adds a layer of context to the story but it also sends a clear message as to who your target market is.

In this example, there is more detail provided about the specifics of the problem. Dan is under a deadline to get a project complete and his staff is continually fighting among themselves. Certainly a scenario that many project leaders in organizations both large and small can relate to. If this sales story is marketed to senior level executives it is likely one that will capture their attention. Again the combination of character, context and problem, when combined together in the opening paragraph, serve as an excellent hook to draw our reader in.

by: Mark Satterfield

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