Tweet

4 Point Plan: Use Your Stories To Sell More

Guest post by: Milly Sonneman

Article Overview: Far too many professionals focus on preparing slides, handouts and details of their speech. They forget to focus on preparing themselves for authentic, confident and masterful delivery. Sell more with this easy 4-point plan.

4 Point Plan: Use Your Stories To Sell More

Far too many professionals focus on preparing slides, handouts and details of their speech. They forget to focus on preparing themselves for authentic, confident and masterful delivery. Sell more with this easy 4-point plan.

To truly succeed in all kinds of business setting, you need to prepare your message and yourself. Whether you are presenting over lunch, in a conference, at a panel, or addressing a small group of decision makers, you’ll need to be ready for anything.

Let me tell you a story.

A few years ago, I was addressing a small group of training decision makers for a huge financial institution. The group agreed to meet with me over lunch. If you’ve ever competed with a racing clock and the magnetic pull of food, you know that I needed to come up with something of equal pull.

I asked the group to take a mini-vacation to their favorite beach. We imagined palm trees. Crystal clear water. And a warm breeze with not a care in the world. After the few minute escape, we returned to the boardroom.

We each drew a ‘postcard’ of the experience. Using this hands-on activity, everyone felt happy, refreshed and very good. They enjoyed the mini-retreat and sketching more than any other lunchtime event they’d had. Naturally, our company got the contract to train their trainers, speakers and professionals in interactive presentation skills.

There will be times in your career when you need a good story. Some stories illustrate a point. Others are teaching stories. Still others provide overviews, humor or relief from tension.

Use this quick 4-point checklist to prepare for success.

Tip 1. Evaluate Your Story

When you’re preparing your presentation, it pays to think through your personal treasure chest of stories. Which one will appeal to this audience? Which one do you want to have as a backup plan in case you need to make a special point?

The more stories you have, the better prepared you’ll be.

Tip 2. Share Emotion and Personal Experience

Now, keep in mind that stories are best when they are built for persuasion. You might love telling Story “X” because it reminds you of a fun time in your life. That’s a good start. But don’t stop there.

What is more important than how you feel? How your audience feels. Use your own emotions and personal experience to mirror feelings your audience may have. This is a fast way to engage people and add human touch to a business presentation.

Tip 3. Provide Evidence

Add data, proof points and examples. Pick specific facts that will appeal to each audience. Some of the best forms of evidence are ones that the audience interacts with. This may take the form of a product demo, interactive exercise, or hands-on activity.

Use your creativity to create opportunities to show evidence. Show physical models. Show examples. Show photos of people using your products. Create exercises where participants ‘create’ evidence.

Tip 4. Adapt To Each Audience

If you are speaking to training directors, speak their language. If you are speaking to financial directors, speak their numbers. The power of this cannot be underestimated.

What if you knew exactly how to tell stories, match your audience, satisfy with logical evidence and adapt on the spot? You’d have the power to unlock doors and open up new opportunity in every situation. You’d have the power to sell more with stories.

Want to get ahead in your career? If presenting to groups and speaking in public is part of how you sell ideas, products and solutions…build your storytelling skills. It’s the single most flexible tool in your presentation toolkit.

Related Articles
  Presentation Secret: Tell a story
  Selling With Stories
  Evaluate Traders by Their Stories
  Avoiding the #1 PR Pitfall
  Using PR to Generate Sales
  Why is a work at home business plan important?
  The Power of PR Make Yourself Newsworthy
  The Double Whammy Create a Personal Brand Together with Your Business Brand
  Check Out Your Money Stories
  4 Sure Fire Ways to Develop A Dynamite Media Pitch
  What are the elements of a good sales letter?
  Networking Saying Hello with Impact
  Story Telling Can Increase Sales
  Increase sales through Story Telling
  Press Release Review
  Sales Tip – Rock-A-Bye Salesperson, Tell Yourself a Better Bedtime Story
  Tell PSR Stories
  5 Lessons from a Master Storyteller
  An interview with a newspaper journalist
  How to Communicate with Traditional Media Effectively

Article Tags: business presentation skills, online presentation skills training, online presentation training, presentation skills, presentation skills online, presentation skills training, total presentation skills training, total training, whiteboard presentation skills online, whiteboard selling, whiteboard selling online



Related Forum Posts
Business Innovation - Hi Simon If you can finish off the Business Plan and think about your strategic direction or how you are going to use your product to convince people it's a great idea, it will set the foundation for your programming project. You see, when you are looking for funding you will need a Business Plan and Strategic Plan that will convince companies to invest into your new idea. Has anyone achieved this idea before using another industry besides health and fitness that you know of? You should also design some mockups as a "preview" for your programming project. This will also help reduce your programming costs as everyone will know exactly what you want if you have detailed mockups already completed including any functionality you require. Starting mockups for websites and software applications on paper is the best way if you're not a guru in graphic editing software.
Re: Join an inventor's group - This is a great list of inventors groups. Are online inventors meetings. We all try to protect our ideas and therefore are reluctant to talk about about ideas in the development phase in public. I'm interested in inventors Success Stories.
Re: New Homepage Layout! - Thanks for the feedback GT - I'm glad you enjoy the new layout! Point taken on the Forums Hot Topics - we'll see how it develops. Right now it shows topics that have over 1,000 views on them and it's sorted by the most recent at the top.
Re: NEW VIDEO - How to improve your business plan - Ask Evan - Thanks Evan, great intro into how the VC's see business plan. I will take a look, but hope that this video as number 1 in a series. It is unfortunate that these types of errors, the most basic of errors as you point out here are common to too many business plans, having reviewed a few hundred myself from both a development and funding perspective. As a mentor and workshop facilitator for Business Plan development for a number of start-up IT and multimedia companies, your presentation help support and show how the VC's see and evaluate a plan Shameful, that too many don't take the time to learn how to properly prepare, present and defend their plans. Over the years, I have enjoyed Business Plan competitions, and help re-work some of the winning proposals
Re: 10 More Ways To Get Business From Twitter - Point taken GT - Next week I'll post a couple examples of how I've used Twitter in the past week that has had an impact on my business (and anybody can copy). Stay tuned!


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

The Substance Abusing Employee

Here's a great ROI

Starting a Business a Brave Move or a NoBrainer

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.