The Science of Storyselling [Infographic]

By Tal Vinnik | May 24, 2016

Everyone loves a good story. It doesn’t matter the format—whether it’s a 30 second ad on TV or a thousand page novel, people engage with a compelling yarn. When you put storytelling front and center in the selling experience, what you get is called storyselling. So while storytelling should be a crucial part of the sales pitch, storyselling gets cut in favor of PowerPoint presentations that seemingly stretch on forever with an assault of facts and figures instead.

Nobody’s saying that PowerPoints can’t assist in storyselling, but as ethos3 tells us in their infographic, facts and figures will only do so much. Let’s start by looking at which parts of the brain facts and figures activate:

Compare that to the areas that stories can activate:

That suggests that stories can have the same effect as facts and figures and then some. Turning on parts of the brain is one thing, but what about the actual purchasing decision? The numbers are what matters for salespeople, right? The numbers actually show that facts and figures tend to lose out to emotions in actual decision-making as well.

The centerpiece of your sales pitch should be the story. Specifically, it should be your customer’s story (and not your company’s). One way to do this is to set aside all of your sales content, and start with your customer’s pain points and how you’re going to solve them. Everything else—PowerPoint slides, videos, case studies, and, yes, all the numbers—gets broken down into small chunks that act as supportive elements, with your conversation as the storyselling centerpiece.

Without storyselling and a just-the-facts approach? The prospect ends up having to put together the story in their own mind, and if they take the time to do the work themselves, it might not be the story that gets them another meeting with the salesperson.

Storyselling with a conversational focus also makes sure that you’re not telling the same story every time. You’re empowered to co-author something unique in every interaction with the help of the customer and your marketing department.

Scroll down to get more tips on telling stories in your presentations from ethos3’s full infographic. Interested in storyselling? Click below to learn how interactive content can fuel connections between salespeople and their prospects.

Storyselling is made easy with Mediafly Interactive Content.

Image credit: book by Daniel Wehner | Creative Commons

Tal Vinnik s Mediafly’s Senior Marketing Manager. You can find him spreading the good word about Mediafly on every corner of the web, writing blogs, looking for GIFs or explaining gibberish on whiteboards. Connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

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