Storytelling is the New Selling. Here’s Why:
People hate being sold to.
Nobody wants to hear how effective your product is or how your service is unlike anything on the market. They don’t care that your company is “unique,” “innovative,” and “disrupting a $2 billion industry.” And when I say they hate it, I mean, hate it.
You know why?
Because there are a million+ people doing the same thing.
Using buzzwords doesn’t put you at the forefront of anything.
People are so sick of hearing misleading key-phrases like the ones mentioned above, it’s second nature to scroll on passed.
Can you blame them?
I mean, think about how many ads are thrown at you on a daily basis. We literally have to bob-and-weave through content just to get to wherever it is we’re going—be it an actual, physical destination or a destination online. And since everything is competing for consumer attention, it’s literally a content war-zone.
When everything screams “buy, buy, buy!” it can get a bit irritating.
Through the explosion of marketing and advertising, we’ve developed mental ad-blockers; ignoring anything that even whispers, “buy me.”
That’s why your approach needs to be different.
If at any point it sounds like you’re giving a pitch when selling, your audience is going to tune out.
People have gotten good at identifying when being sold to and using those so-called “flavorful” buzzwords to describe your product or service is going to sound like a pitch. Even sounding the teenie, tiniest bit “sales-y” can rub someone the wrong way, losing you another potential customer or client.
Remember—hate being sold to.
So how do you sell with out selling?
You need to share what you know.
It’s something my boss, friend and mentor, Nicolas Cole, preaches all the time.
Actually, it’s the reason why he and Drew Reggie co-founded Digital Press—for CEOs, founders, serial entrepreneurs to share their insights, mistakes-made, lessons learned and more.
Storytelling is the new selling.
Instead of “selling” to people in the traditional sense, sell them on your story.
After all, business—and in essence, sales—is built on trust. If you’re a founder or CEO of a successful company, people want to know how you got to where you are, how long it took you to get there, how many times you were knocked down and got back up. They want to know what it feels like to be running a successful company and they want to know directly from you.
Being an active member of your industry—an industry that you’re operating a successful in—will inherently help you build trust.
That’s what’s going to get you sales.
