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Selling the Imagination – Why Great Storytellers Make Great Salespeople (8/8)

And last by not least… The final tip for becoming a GREAT storyteller - Practice, practice, practice.  Storytelling is both an art and a craft. Part of storytellers’ success lies in their intuitive ability to read an audience and optimize their delivery accordingly. But the lion’s share of storytelling skill is earned through diligence.

  Great storytellers rehearse beforehand, testing their anecdotes on others to gauge whether they’re speaking too quickly or not quickly enough, whether their humor elicits appropriate laughter or falls dead, and whether they have sufficient command of their material to maintain eye contact and effectively connect with their audience.

  Now whichever story you pull out of your hat… be sure to practice! 

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Selling the Imagination – Why Great Storytellers Make Great Salespeople (7/8)

Tips for Becoming a Better Storyteller

  No matter what your present level of storytelling ability may be, you can always stand to improve. But for those who are new to this whole idea of using storytelling as a business development technique, here are a few suggestions for getting started:

Begin collecting story fragments. Storytellers are sponges. They soak up bits and pieces of anecdotal drama taking place around them and file them away—sometimes literally—for future use in crafting appropriate tales as the need arises. They also surround themselves with other successful storytellers, appraising their deliveries and appropriating for themselves any technique that elicits results.

Master the art of the arc. All great stories involve drama, because conflict is the engine that drives a compelling tale. Good storytellers pay close attention to seemingly everyday occurrences, making note of the dramatic elements. When it comes time to share one these anecdotes with an audience, they leverage the drama for maximum effect—setting the stage with appropriately-paced exposition, creating suspense by introducing conflict, then inspiring hope as they describe a satisfying resolution.

  The key ingredient to a successful story is a likeable hero who encounters roadblocks and emerges transformed. You should apply this when casting a vision of a customer’s future after you come into the picture: the client is the likeable hero who encounters daily roadblocks such as lost productivity and inefficient work-flow, but after implementing your solution, the client solves a number of his most vexing problems and discovers new avenues of profitability.

  Be entertaining. 

  People respond far more positively to your ideas when they enjoy listening to your presentation. Stories are already inherently more enjoyable than factual monologues, but great storytellers recognize that the manner in which stories are told makes all the difference. An audience wants to be placed at ease by the storyteller’s sense of congeniality. Even top executives want permission to laugh, appreciating that the storyteller has a sense of humor to go along with his business acumen.

  You may not be a professional entertainer, but if you want to be the kind of business leader that others are talking about after your presentation is over, then you want to at least make sure your stories are rich with detail, livened up with a healthy dose of humor, and delivered with a measure of dramatic flair. 

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Selling the Imagination – Why Great Storytellers Make Great Salespeople (6/8)

Let’s take a look at some broad categories of stories that you’re likely to find useful in your sales pitches and business networking:

3/3: Stories to inspire. 

  This is the ��meat and potatoes” of your storytelling. Once you’ve built an intellectually compelling case for yourself, it’s time to share experiences that will tap into the emotional energy of the room and drive them to respond to your call to action.

  You might cast a vision of the firm’s future after your solution is implemented, or you might tell the story of a similar client who has become a major player in its industry subsequent to their partnership with you. You might wax philosophical, telling the stories of individual people whose lives will be transformed for the better as a result of your company’s offering—or better still, tell about the sympathetic person you already know whose life could be different if you managed to achieve your vision.

  Success at this point is all about getting someone who’s still on the fence about your idea to take ownership of the solution and act on it.

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Selling the Imagination – Why Great Storytellers Make Great Salespeople (5/8)

Let’s take a look at some broad categories of stories that you’re likely to find useful in your sales pitches and business networking:

2/3: Stories to educate.

  Sometimes explanatory facts and figures only go so far. When your audience’s eyes begin to glaze over from information overload, often it helps to drive your point home with a real-life example of that data in action. When touting your customer service statistics, make sure you talk about that time one of your associates turned a grumbling customer into one of your biggest accounts.

  If a customer inquires into the scalability of your solution, describe how you’ve already overcome implementation obstacles with similar clients. Help your audience appreciate the value of your product by describing your personal experience with the problem you’re out to solve.

  The goal is to demonstrate competence and get your audience on the same page about what you have to offer.

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Selling the Imagination – Why Great Storytellers Make Great Salespeople (4/8)

Let’s take a look at some broad categories of stories that you’re likely to find useful in your sales pitches and business networking:

1/3: Stories to connect. 

  These are the kinds of anecdotes that let your audience see who you really are and better understand why you’re in front of them. They help disarm skepticism and position you as a sympathetic human being interested in solving others’ problems. If you’re pitching before a rural chamber of commerce, for instance, a story about growing up in a small town might win identity points and lend credence to your understanding of prospective customers’ needs.

  If you’re talking with a lead who has experienced negative customer service from a previous organization, you might inject a story about a time you were equally frustrated when a supplier let you down. Or perhaps you just need to break the ice, and a humorous story about your experiences arriving in town that morning could set the room at ease.

  The idea is to invite your audience to see you as someone they can trust—an approachable, down-to-earth individual they can relate to.

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Selling the Imagination – Why Great Storytellers Make Great Salespeople (3/8)

Why do great story tellers make great sales people… reason 2:

Choosing the Right Story for the Occasion

Take note:  Start developing a “minimum inventory” of three stories: one that describes the companies you represent, one that discusses your previous success with another customer, and one that paints a personal picture of yourself—including flaws and vulnerabilities and how you overcame them. This is a good starting framework for entrepreneurs too... We need stories that cast a vision for the kind of company and market culture we’re looking to establish. We may or may not have previous client successes to talk about, but we at least need stories that help others understand our burden for bringing a particular solution to market in the first place. And since we’re in the unique position of trying to sell ourselves alongside our product ideas, we always need fresh new stories that illustrate our core values, our personalities, and our perseverance in the face of obstacles.

  Storytellers need a diverse inventory of anecdotes because storytelling is not a one-size-fits-all exercise. Nor does storytelling substitute for the “hard skills” of entrepreneurship—things like market analysis, product development, personnel training, etc. (Stories must have substance, after all!) But it’s vitally important for business-people to be able to recognize where and how an artfully placed and skillfully delivered story can make the difference between leaving an audience yawning and leaving with them energized to act.

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Selling the Imagination – Why Great Storytellers Make Great Salespeople (2/8)

Why do great storytellers make great salespeople… reason 1: A Lost Art in Business

Perhaps we’re unaccustomed to thinking of great business leaders this way. We call them marketing strategists, solutions engineers, even social pioneers; but rarely do we label them storytellers. That’s a shame, because refined storytelling ability ranks among a salespersons most valuable assets. The fact is - storytellers have a better sense of the customer and are better able to connect with the customer’s emotions about purchasing. This is an especially important observation because humans don’t always make rational decisions. And it’s ironic because most people care about the things that touch, move, and inspire them. Salespeople know how to connect with users’ needs and develop solutions to their problems, but if they aren’t also out to inspire their customers and move them to action, then they aren’t out to make much money either.

Whether you’re courting prospective customers or pitching to a group of potential investors, you want to arm yourself with more than an intellectually persuasive case. Sure, you need to have your facts and figures lined up to answer the hard questions, and you need to demonstrate superior command of the technical and logistical details involved in your product delivery; but above and beyond all that, you need to make a lasting emotional impact upon your audience in order to hold their attention and motivate them to act.

  Stories are considerably more powerful than a laundry list of impressive bullet points during a PowerPoint presentation. Because they activate both sides of the brain—the logical and the emotional—stories affect audiences at a far more visceral level than arguments and statistics do. They humanize the storyteller while engaging and sustaining the audience’s attention. They create memorable impressions that travel further because they are more easily recalled and more accurately recounted after the fact (a particularly salient point for those pitching to an audience who will subsequently attempt to sell the idea to their superiors).

  But, perhaps most importantly, stories have a way of inviting the audience to internalize the information and make it their own—to see themselves as participants in the story, with a genuine investment in the outcome.

  The overwhelming thrust of these considerations is that people would rather listen to a compelling story than a canned sales pitch, and they’re way more likely to act on an emotional appeal than an intellectual presentation. That’s why great storytellers make great salespeople: they captivate customers, effectively communicate product value, and inspire them to buy.

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Selling the Imagination – Why Great Storytellers Make Great Salespeople (1/8)

What key business skill did the late Steve Jobs and the folk legend Scheherazade have in common? GREAT storytelling ability. Applying the same cunning with which the Persian queen persuaded a jealous king to spare her life, the Apple visionary won over thousands of users, captivating them with his version of a better future, leaving them practically drooling in anticipation of his next big product announcement. 

Let’s talk about why great storytellers make great salespeople…

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (10/10)

We’ve heard you reference Tim Ferris, but who else do you look for guidance in this space? Well… Robert Kiyosaki for one. Who’s Robert Kiyosaki (in high pitch screaming voices… weird that’s what I think of as I write this)? I digress - Financial mogul Robert Kiyosaki emphasizes how rich-minded individuals are constantly learning new things. They know their personal education is ultimately their most important asset—the one thing that consistently strengthens their portfolio while simultaneously reducing long-term risk exposure.

  Kiyosaki also stresses the importance of productive learning however.

  For the rich, education is less about mastering theory than discovering what works, translating learning into action. That means lots of trial and error and capitalizing on the experiences of others who have gone before.

  Resist the temptation to simply talk endlessly with interesting people; get out there and put their interesting ideas to work!

  Keep your eyes and ears open, but spend the bulk of your time closing deals and finding ways to deliver a better product more efficiently than you are right now.

This is how the rich operate, and it’s how determined entrepreneurs gradually migrate their earnings from a full-time “day job” working for someone else to a portfolio of low-engagement endeavors that free them to work for themselves.

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (9/10)

And guess what… Millions of users are now selling physical goods through online marketplaces like Etsy and Amazon Webstore. If you’re good at crafting something that sells, even if only on a very modest scale, such tools can provide powerful merchant services for very reasonable rates, and they allow you specialized access to a diverse customer base with minimal marketing on your part. But remember to evaluate your time investment. Do the math and consider what your potential hourly return is before opening an online storefront. If it only takes you a few minutes to create a $10.00 product, then you could potentially reap an effective hourly rate of $30.00 or more; but if it takes you several hours to craft something you can only sell for $19.95, then your effective pay rate after cost of sales approaches minimum wage.

No matter what you do…

Above all, remember that it’s okay to make mistakes. 

Your natural proclivity for risk-taking should inspire adventuresome creativity, because even if you hit a wall somewhere along the line, you know how to turn that stumbling block into a stepping stone.

Failure is just a learning opportunity, after all, and this energizes rather than deflates your confidence. Since you’re already employed full-time, you can afford to take a few hits while exploring your best ideas and diversifying your portfolio.

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (8/10)

Real estate, monetizing assets – anything else? YES!!!!!!

Low-Engagement Start-ups – Unleash Your Creativity Online

Another route for passive income involves generating a compelling product that customers can purchase online and receive with minimal effort on your part. Once you’ve set the business up, in other words, you let it run on autopilot and the cash simply starts rolling in.

There are at least two key factors in creating such a business:

1. You have to have a specific good to sell, not a service. Services tend to require your personal engagement in delivery. If someone pays you to clean their house, you have to either do it yourself or find a way to get someone else to do it for you. Neither option is ideal if you’re trying to make more money while working fewer hours.

  1. You have to find a niche market that will respond well to automated delivery methods. You want to craft a product that digital customers will happily buy online, with limited access to phone-in customer service. Ideally, the product itself is a digital good (such as an ebook) that can be instantly and automatically delivered without any effort on your part whatsoever.

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (7/10)

Keep in mind, too, that not all assets are physical property; your intellectual property is perhaps even more valuable!

Browse some of the featured products at ClickBank and you’ll begin to see how dozens of determined “infopreneurs” are monetizing their professional expertise, social connections, and work experience through salable products like digital publications and membership sites (where users pay a modest fee to obtain instant access to a library of information and other resources such as instructional videos).

Perhaps you’ve never considered yourself an expert before, but that might only be because you’re thinking too small. Ask yourself: “What do I do really well? What would others be willing to pay me to teach them about?”

An exceptional billiards player with a digital camera and modest video-editing skills, for instance, might easily generate a library of pro tips videos for serious hobbyists. He might offer the first lesson for free and charge a flat $9.95 for unlimited access to the rest.

With some creative self-marketing, this guy could have a low-overhead, highly profitable “side business” with unlimited income potential.

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (6/10)

You might also have some real assets that you’ve never even considered monetizing.

Perhaps you have access to public transportation and only need to drive that fully-paid-off car in your driveway on rare occasions (I almost did this – HELL if I haven’t be obvious, I’ve tried everyone of these things). Your vehicle might not sell for much, but if you live in a city that regularly attracts out-of-towners for special events, you might consider renting it out at times of peak demand for extra cash.

Or perhaps if you creatively rearranged your personal belongings, you could convert your garage into a single-room efficiency apartment that you could rent out to nearby community college students. Such possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (5/10)

But what if you’re not interested in real estate – any other options? YES!

Monetize Your Assets – Let Your Possessions and Expertise Work for You

In his highly acclaimed book The 4-Hour Workweek, lifestyle innovator Tim Ferriss critiques the way most of us associate success with working hard so that someday we can retire from our efforts and finally enjoy ourselves. He encourages readers to shift paradigms and think the way the “new rich” think: with the constant goal of working less while earning more, taking risks to discover and meet niche market needs rather than settling for the illusion of security that comes with a full-time job. One such paradigm shift involves re-framing the way we think about our lifestyle “needs.”

Ferriss argues that we spend too much time buying things like big houses and fancy furniture that we think of as assets, but which are actually long-term liabilities we then have to work hard to hold onto. Instead, he says, we should be looking for ways to monetize our belongings in order to free up capital we can put to work for us.

Take a hard look at the things you own and begin considering which of your so-called “assets” are really just extra bills you could do without. Start conservatively. Perhaps you could make better use of the time you spend streaming Netflix videos and the $15.00 you pay each month for the service. Or, if you’re ready to take more drastic measures, consider liquidating your more valuable belongings on eBay or Amazon and then moving into a smaller apartment so you can tap some of your monthly budget for other pursuits. Remember, it’s not that you can’t afford these luxuries. It’s just that entrepreneurs are constantly looking for resources they can mobilize in pursuit of larger aspirations.

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (4/10)

Speaking of Real Estate…

Some real estate investors make their money by flipping houses. They buy fixer-uppers and foreclosures for bargain prices, creatively improve them (thereby increasing their market value), and then turn around and sell them again for a substantial gain. Unless you have a lot of capital to play with, or unless you’re just really passionate about home improvement, you’re probably not ready to jump into the house-flipping business right now; but there is a similar dynamic playing out all the time in the digital real estate market.

Pay a visit to Flippa sometime, and you’ll discover that people are regularly buying and selling websites. That’s because in today’s digital culture, popular addresses along the Information Superhighway are prime commodities. Website owners sell their domains for operating cash, while investors buy them in hopes of reselling them later at a higher price. The concept is similar to buying up a piece of land in a low-income neighborhood that is in the process of being “gentrified.”

For the person with the means to acquire it at today’s price, the property becomes an unrealized but steadily growing source of passive income. With a bit of experimentation and a few good deals, website flipping could be a gainful, low-engagement option for the busy entrepreneur.

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (3/10)

If its a buyers market… I bet you want to know where to look, huh? 

Some of the most attractive rental markets are in college towns like Boston and New York (both listed among the top 20 markets to watch in the 2012 Urban Land Institute’s Emerging Trends in Real Estate), where large universities routinely attract a sizable student population looking for off-campus housing. A recent Forbesfeature compared average rental rates in top university cities to estimated mortgage payments based on median property list prices.

In Princeton, for instance, the average rental rate was $2,056, but the median estimated mortgage payment was only $980—a potential profit margin better than 50% for the most attractive properties.

But don’t rely on media statistics to fire up your enthusiasm.

Spend some time browsing Realtor.com to begin familiarizing yourself with typical list prices in your area (buying close to home facilitates property maintenance and customer service), and then use the mortgage calculator at Lending Tree to determine what kind of monthly mortgage payments you would be looking at.

Finally, you can use a tool like Rentometer to determine whether the amount you would need to charge in rent to recover your mortgage payment leaves room for you to still make some profit in that area of town. If all the pieces seem to line up, you can use tools at Lending Tree and Realtor.com to begin the pre-qualification process for a home loan and hire yourself an agent to begin negotiating the market.

The bottom line here is that adding a rental property to your portfolio is a terrific (and highly entrepreneurial) way to boost your monthly income. If you do your homework and find the right kind of property at the right price, put the right amount of up-front work into the property and then lease it out to the right kinds of tenants, you stand to profit several hundred dollars each month while having to do relatively little to keep your customers happy. Of course, not everyone is cut out to be a landlord, so before taking the plunge on a tangible asset like this, be sure you’ve carefully considered the inherent risks associated with real estate investments and be confident in your ability to administer—or delegate—the property management side of the package as well.

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Building Your Income Portfolio on the Hustle (2/10)

Let’s start with…

Real Estate – It’s Still a Good Game

The national housing market is still reeling from the economic recession, and it will clearly take many years to recover. But there are some exciting income possibilities out there for savvy investors because at least two important dynamics presently work in an investor’s favor.

For one, while the economic turbulence of the past several years has generally cooled demand for new homes, it has also stimulated interest in rentals. Today’s would-be homeowners seem wary of taking on 30-year mortgage commitments for fear of being unable to sell at a later time—perhaps even owing more than their properties are worth.

This is good news for prospective landlords who intend to hold their properties for many years. The opportunist who scores an attractively-located small house could easily offset her mortgage payments, property taxes, and maintenance costs simply by renting the house out at prevailing rates. And then she can afford to wait for a more economically beneficent time to sell, if necessary.

A second dynamic to consider: it’s a buyer’s market! Even though home prices are slowly beginning to rise, by and large there are still more properties for sale than there are buyers, so there are plenty of good deals to be found. Moreover, for well-qualified borrowers, fixed mortgage rates are at historically low levels, making it a potentially lucrative time for those with appropriate credit and entrepreneurial drive to snatch up rental properties and turn them into passive income streams. Once the market recovers and interest rates begin to rise, the potential profit margin for new landlords will shrink significantly. Next post on locations…