How to enhance your storytelling skills

How to enhance your storytelling skills

Want to sell more product? Encourage prospects to try a broader range of your services? You might want to pay attention to what Bob Podgorski tells jobseekers, which essentially is to wrap their accomplishments into a compelling story that will set them apart from everyone else in the I-need-a-job marketplace.

But as off kilter as that advice might seem to a business owner seeking to boost sales, Podgorski's ideas are worth reviewing: Principal of RPP Enterprises, Hoffman Estates, Podgorski has helped jobseekers find employment for more than 30 years.

And if you can enhance your sales pitch with a short - 60 seconds or less - video on your tablet or phone that enriches your sales story even more, then your message can become more effective. Consider, for example, a dance studio whose owner shows parents a brief video of beginning dancers and those same dancers a few months later - still young, still in the beginning class but confident and proud.

The video might be an especially nice touch, and it is something you can do with your cellphone. What matters, says Manny du Mont, president, du Mont Communications Inc., Winfield, is that Americans have become a video-learning people - preferring, he says, to learn via 6-7 second visual bites than paragraphs and pages, which take more chewing.

First, let's put the story together.

"Storytelling," Podgorski writes in a current LinkedIn article, "is a great way to beat out the competition." Assume for discussion that you've found a potential customer for your company's new line of widgets.

Paint a verbal picture of your widget-making process. For example, begin with where the raw material is found; how your business assures the raw material meets your quality standards; talk about how your designers, and then production crew, turn raw widget material into the type of finished product your prospect will be able to use proudly.

Of course you'll have a sample to show. But, depending on your business and your personal history, you may want to enhance your story by noting how your father founded the business; what intrigued you enough so that you wanted to become involved; the steps you and your team take to assure quality.

Widgets are pretty generic, but note Podgorski's suggestion that your storytelling approach should involve (as appropriate) the product; customers; processes and procedures; innovation; teamwork and company leadership; and continuing research and development. Personalized, your story can become compelling.

Now think about how a brief video enhances the story: The site where your raw material is found; the design and production process; the care that your staff proudly takes.

In one sense, adaption of Podgorski's story telling is simply an improvement on the traditional sales pitch - except this version of the story is more personal, more likely to wrap the prospect into the process and establish a connection that leads to a strong provider-customer relationship.

• © 2018 Kendall Communications Inc. Follow Jim Kendall on LinkedIn and Twitter. Write him at Jim@kendallcom.com. Read Jim's Business Owners' Blog at www.kendallcom.com.