How can storytelling be incorporated into your sales pitch presentation?

I teach storytelling to senior executives selling ideas, making sales pitches, and interviewing for jobs including many other areas. A great hook is like clickbait. After I hear the hook, I want to hear the rest of the story. It creates focus, and focus creates interest in a compelling way that the listener can’t look away. I think a good hook talks about the pain and pain avoided in the story journey.

Setting the Scene Background Information Characters Introducing the Solution -Solution Description Benefits and Impact. Overcoming Obstacles

Using emotion in the story is the easiest way to create an emotional resonance and a transference of energy. The mirror neurons in someone else activate when they sent emotion. You can trigger their subconscious by using this successfully. When I work with executives the key to this is authenticity. It’s hard to project motion if you’re not feeling it yourself. Here’s why emotion is critical in storytelling. A buying, hiring or other decisions are truly an emotional decision in the meal part of the brain, supported by technical fact in the neo cortex. The Neo cortex takes credit for the emotional decision and this is what makes us human. When you understand how to activate this in yourself and others it’s very powerful.

A good story simplifies the situation, journey, and challenge that you want to convey. This means that even with a complex situation an eighth grader should be able to understand it. One of the powerful ways to do this is to use metaphor. Overlaying your business situation on metaphor allows for the listener to quickly grasp and situation through an association, as to what you’re trying to explain.

I teach the executives that I coach the following concept. The power is with the listener. own problems. This is done by creating memorable messaging.

When I’ve taught master classes in storytelling related to sales, it’s inevitable you will get to a call to action. What I think is most important is that you’re setting up the call to action from the very beginning of the presentation. This means you’re creating compelling relatable problems that the listener can relate to, and you’re dealing with objections before they even get to raise them. By the time you get to the call to action they’ve already figured out in their mind that they want to talk to you and figured out how to move forward. This should all be laid out in advance.