Let me Preface this...

Recently, you received an email or notification about STORYSeekers.us, and our upcoming webinar with New York Times Best Selling Author Mike Bosworth, as well as future STORYSeeker workshops. In all our excitement, we left out just one little, but very important, piece of information. We forgot to introduce ourselves and tell you what we are all about! Maybe a story will help correct this oversight....and so it begins.

In a former position, I was part of a committee tasked with choosing a consulting company to help my company with some marketing. We had whittled the list down to three different companies and asked them to provide us with a face-to-face meeting for presentations. They all had a high-level understanding of our needs, so, as a sales guy, I was really interested to see how each company would determine our needs at a deeper level so they could then provide us with a well thought out proposal. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? I would have thought so too.

The first company team comes in and their main representative starts his presentation by informing us as to who they are, how long they have been in business, a list of their largest big-name clients, what their company does, etc. You know right off the bat; it’s going to be a boring presentation. All this representative did was dump information, facts and figures, and tell us how great his consulting firm performed for their clients. Would I expect him to say they underperformed? He didn’t ask a question, attempt to engage us during the entire presentation, (yet started out stating that he wanted out time to be a conversation), never provided an opportunity for anyone on our team to talk. Then, near the end of his presentation, which he called a “pitch” (hint: stop calling your presentation a “pitch”) he launched into his company’s solution to our problem. Finally, at the end, asked the team if we had any questions.

Sounds painful, right? And, at this point, I am thinking things can’t get any worse than losing an hour of my life to this type of excruciatingly painful presentation. The boredom that set in was almost too much to bear. I could hardly keep my eyes open listening to this person drone on-and-on about how great his company is and all the solutions they have provided to clients. But then, to my surprise, it did get worse! I ended up sitting through not one, but two more meetings with consultant teams that followed the same presentation format! I was astonished! How could these “consultants” be experts in their field, which they were, but have little to no understanding as to the best way to create and deliver an engaging presentation to a prospective client that would influence?

So, let me ask you this; How many times have you been the salesperson, like the ones above, providing the presentation to a potential buyer, or group of buyers? You know you have lost your audience, maybe tried to engage them with questions, or worse yet, you kept talking to try and get them back to paying attention. Not a fun question to answer, is it?

Worse than that, you have seen salespeople try to re-engage their audience by saying something like; “Well, now that you have a general overview of my company, I’d like to find why you took this meeting, know more about your needs and how you see using our solution within your organization.”

Wow, lots going on there, and it’s all wrong. If you don’t know why a potential client took a meeting to listen to you give your “pitch” you might want to re-think that meeting. When you are provided a chance to present to a company, you better know what their needs are and how working with you will make their lives better, help them reach a goal or objective, or satisfy a need. Better yet, how about all three?!! You want to be in alignment with your potential customer. If you’re not, in the end, it means no sale.

If you want to avoid being like the presenters above, you might want consider becoming a STORYSeeker. What is a STORYSeeker? A person who builds relationships by searching for meaningful events in a person’s life which they willingly share in the form of a story.

We believe that better business outcomes are a result of better connection and trust between people. We devote our work in making this learnable, coachable and measurable for everyone.

If you are a leader who desires to achieve breakthrough business results for your
organization in the areas of sales, marketing, leadership and your customer’s experience, consider first architecting your framework for connection and building trust. Most companies today overlook the fact that influence can only happen when people feel heard, understood and ‘gotten.’ STORYSeekers is a human-to-human communications framework built on the science of emotional connection and the power of story. A STORYSeeker first seeks to understand and connect before attempting to influence, inspire, lead or move others to action. We build experiential learning programs for the learner to contextually apply the skills of story building, storytelling and story seeking, based on his/her job role and challenges.