18 months ago I posted a very popular article on Selling With Stories where I described how stories and anecdotes can be used to great effect by professionals to provide more meaningful, resonant descriptions of what we do and how we work.
Stories are also particularly effective when we’re asked those tricky questions that clients like to throw at us when we’re pitching for business.
Faced with “what would you do if…” and “how would you handle…” questions, there’s a great temptation for professionals to try to demonstrate their expertise by trotting out management, legal, accounting or other theory for how situations should be handled.
But that’s not what clients actually want to hear. They want the confidence that you have handled these situations and that you will be able to deal with them in practice, not in theory.
The best way to handle these questions is with a short story or anecdote about a client situation where you faced such an issue and were able to address it.
When I sold and delivered large consulting change management programmes, I had a series of stories about overcoming resistance, stories about programme management, stories about delivering results and stories about culture change. Each of these gave me credibility when a client asked how we could address the organisational obstacles to change, or how we could make sure they really achieved the benefits they were looking for from the programme, etc.
Some stories are reusable for multiple situations. One of my overcoming resistance stories about a senior executive in a client organisation who had been overlooked for the CEO role and initially wanted to obstruct any initiative launched by the CEO also doubled as a story about how to address executive politics.
Sometimes the story doesn’t even have to be of a great success to be effective. About 5 years ago I won a rather nice multi-million Euro sales process implementation project for the consulting firm I was working for. We’d had a tricky relationship with the client and found out later we were in last place coming up to our final presentation. The turning point came when the senior client executive told us that all previous sales process projects he’d known had failed because the consultants hadn’t engaged with the front-line staff. I was able to tell a story about how I’d learned the hard way in a previous project where we hadn’t involved the key salespeople and first line managers early enough and so had struggled with implementation until we eventually got them on board. It wasn’t a story about a great success we’d had – but it told the executive that I’d been in that situation before and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. We won the project, and in a debrief meeting later the client told us that had been the key moment when they knew we had the right practical experience to work with them.
These “early lessons” stories can be even more effective than success stories as they’re highly believable, don’t come across as pompous or “show offy”, and really send a clear message that because of that hard lesson you’ve known what to do right ever since.
Of course, the “early lesson” type story has to be set a decent distance in the past – it can’t be a mistake you made the previous week!
Most professionals should be able to create a list of tricky questions they often get asked and prepare example stories to address them. They’re best not replayed verbatim as stock answers, but stored away as an easy-to-recall memory to build on.
And using stories to answer tough questions is not only more believable – it’s much more interesting than a dry theoretical answer too.
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- It Never Happens to Me…
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We all like stories and our minds switch into a different mode and we pay more attention when we’re listening to stories which is great to break through barriers prospects hold and to get your point through a whole lot easier. Theory is boring and a lot of people are unenthusiastic but when you talk about your own experiences you are a lot more expressive and variation in vocal tone.
I’ve never thought about using stories really to answer questions but this has made me think. Really really interesting Ian.
It’s a technique I learnt from a number of very experienced consultants Blaine. They just had a knack of being able to pull out an anecdote or story to make a point in a much more compelling and believeable way that a more direct or theoretical answer.
Good post. I have a big reportair of stories I use. The ones that seems to work best (for me) is stories I’ve gotten from satisfied customers in the past. Add that up with at little touch of humour, and it works like a charm
I have just recently started my consulting business, I am from S.A. I have joined quite a few networking groups, having read your comments about ask first, and recounting experiences of helping clients, this is a real eye opener for me. This is the way, thanks.
Greye
Love this article – absolutely spot on. The insight in para 4 about what clients are REALLY wanting when they ask those sorts of tricky questions is so, so true. Working with many execs on public speaking skills, I do get the sense that the mood is shifting – the true power of storytelling in business is now starting to be recognised and appreciated by the corporate world. For too long, it’s been dismissed as all a bit fluffy! Onwards, the business storytellers!
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