{#25 in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories from Sell with a Story, by Paul Smith} One of the most productive uses of storytelling in sales isn’t found in a story you tell to the buyer, a story the buyer tells you, or even a story that you tell to yourself. It’s a story that you craft for the benefit of other salespeople who work at your company. And it tells the story of the successful sale you just closed or the unsuccessful one you just failed to close. The purpose is to capture the wisdom you just gained in the call for your boss, your peers, or the next generation of salespeople ..read more

Sales Hall of Fame president Steve Benson joins me to talk about a clever sales tool Badger Maps, as well as specific problems and solutions for salespeople during the pandemic. read more The post Sales Hall of Fame President on Selling Well During a Pandemic appeared first on Paul Smith | Business Storytelling Coach ..read more

Sales Hall of Fame president Steve Benson joins me to talk about a clever sales tool Badger Maps, as well as specific problems and solutions for salespeople during the pandemic. read more The post Sales Hall of Fame President on Selling Well During a Pandemic appeared first on Paul Smith | Business Storytelling Coach ..read more

Great at LinkedIn author Mike Sweigart joins me to talk about some of the best -- and worst -- things you can do on LinkedIn to help market you and your brand read more The post How NOT to Sell Yourself on LinkedIn appeared first on Paul Smith | Business Storytelling Coach ..read more

Today, Jason Cutter is a sales success architect who coaches and trains successful salespeople. But in his past, he had several sales jobs in the trenches where he made the same kind of mistakes most of us make early in sales. Jason joined me this week to share two of h read more The post No Regrets Selling and the Paradox of Choice appeared first on Paul Smith | Business Storytelling Coach ..read more

{#24 in the series of the 25 most useful sales stories} “Hello. I’m Mark Bowser, and these are not my pants.” If you’d been in one of Mark Bowser‘s customer service training classes in Indianapolis in the late 1990s, those are the first words you would have heard him say as he introduced himself. His explanation was just as entertaining. To hear Mark tell the story himself, click the play button above. Short on time? Read the summary of our conversation below.  Mark’s seminar was being held in the Hyatt Regency hotel, so naturally that’s where he stayed the night before. Well, sometime t ..read more

{#23 in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories} Just because you’ve closed the sale doesn’t mean the need for storytelling has ended. In fact, the best salespeople continue to use storytelling after the sale in three primary ways:     1. to deliver service after the sale,     2. to generate loyalty, and     3. to summarize learnings from the sales call. In this episode, we’ll talk about the first of those ways — to deliver better service after the sale. We’ll tackle the other two in future articles. Depending on the type of product or service you have, a lo ..read more

Mike Weinberg is pissed off. And if you work in sales, you should be, too. And that very righteous anger is directed at people in his own industry — the sales coaching and training business. In particular, it’s directed at people holding themselves out as sales experts preaching that “everything in sales has changed. . . nothing that used to work in sales works anymore. . . picking up the phone is for dinosaurs. . .” That anger prompted Mike to write his most recent book Sales Truth: Debunk the Myths. Apply Powerful Principles. Win More New Sales. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever laughed so ha ..read more

[#22 of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories] This is the most creative use of storytelling in closing the sale that you’re ever likely to come across. It’s definitely not one I expected to find when I was doing the research on sales stories. But I did, from a guy we’ll call “Brad” who worked for a company that published high school yearbooks. The Situation So, imagine you’re a high school English teacher and the adviser to the student yearbook committee. One of your jobs is to decide which publisher to produce your school’s yearbook, and you’ve worked with the same one for years. Their sales re ..read more

Do you really need empathy to be a good sales rep? My podcast guest this week says no. He’s Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO of Chili Piper. Nicolas started his career selling newspapers in the streets of Paris in high school, studied math in undergrad, and then got an MBA from Stanford. He then started and sold 3 tech companies, and also ran sales for a $2B telecom firm. Today he runs Chili Piper which provides companies a brilliant solution to a sales problem they probably don’t even know they have. You can hear Nicolas talk about all of this and more in our conversation above. A few highlights of ..read more