One tactic that should be utilized by both large and small companies for B2B sales is story telling.
A good story helps a prospect envision how they could utilize your services. Sometimes it is hard for a client to imagine how they could utilize your solution within their firm and a well-articulated story or two can help with that. This as you can imagine is not “once upon a time”, it is rather a way to convey to your prospect how you and your company are helping others and the value they are receiving based on a real-life example.
If you are a start-up and don’t have many clients that can be utilized in such a manner, then you may have to build a theoretical story but be sure to keep it as realistic as possible and be clear with the client that it is theoretical. Having a strong base value proposition is always a necessity but then being able to help articulate how someone benefited from the key points in the value proposition solidifies how real it is. For more information on building a strong value proposition see our blog post on building an elevator pitch.
Here are the 4 key points to include in your story.
1. The Situation
This can include a background on the client’s industry, state of the market, competitive landscape and client business cycle.
2. The Challenge
This is the challenge or the business pain the client is or was having and is directly related to how your solution or service can help solve it. The business pain can be related to challenges with productivity, cost or resources.
3. The Answer
This is how your service or product were able to help them solve their business pain. You can mention an overview of how it was implemented and over what time period.
4. The Result
This outlines how successful you were and be as quantitative as possible. For one of our clients, they were able to help their customer save over $200,000 per annum by going with their solution versus their current way of business.
Ultimately be sure to add this into your sales presentation and where applicable build up a larger client case study.
If you are looking for additional sales tactics or sales strategy information, please feel free to visit our blog.
