Storyleaders

Back in 2008, Storyleaders began as a journey to see what else was out there.

Back in 2008, Storyleaders began as a journey to see what else was out there, to try to demystify what the most influential salespeople and leaders were doing that was so much different than anyone else. We started to ask questions: Why is it that only a small % of salespeople are able to develop mutual trust and respect with customers? Why do only the very few get other people to open up to them? Why do only a few reach the high level of connection that fosters collaboration, the reciprocal sharing of ideas and beliefs that can move people to change and why haven’t we, in the sales training industry, been pursuing these questions more aggressively? It’s ironic: somewhere along the line, a profession whose prevailing model that is based on questions, stopped asking questions about itself. So we did it. We began challenging our own beliefs, starting with, “Is there a better way?” This led to more and more questions, a domino effect, and soon we found our- selves in fields of study that had been previously off limits to us—fields that explored the mysteries of communication that we’d written off as unteachable because they fell out- side the purview of our models and industry research. We had been training salespeople for a combined 40 years and we thought we had all the answers. For most of that time, our definition of selling has been some variation of “helping people solve problems.” The definition was based on the belief that the decision to “buy” is like problem solving, logical and rational. For our Solution Selling and CustomerCentric Selling methodologies, we taught salespeople to ask buyers a series of logic-oriented questions designed to lead the buyer to conclude the seller’s product was the logical, right answer. As it turns out, a lot of our basic assumptions were wrong. People are not logical and rational when making the decision to buy. Furthermore, asking buyers questions—at least the kinds of questions we were training salespeople to ask— is not an effective means of connection or persuasion. In fact, the way we conditioned salespeople to ask questions has proven to be often counterproductive. We missed the mark: we wildly misinterpreted what the most influential salespeople were actually doing. They weren’t just asking buyers questions; they were establishing emotional connections. They were inspiring other people to follow their beliefs. They were influencing people to change minds. They were doing things that weren’t being taught in sales training classes, and they weren’t doing the things we were teaching. This is an especially hard pill for us to swallow, because we’re the ones who created the solution selling training paradigms. What we soon learned was that we should have been looking for answers outside the sales productivity industry all along. People in other disciplines already understood a lot more about sales and influence than the sales training industry did. We’ve come out the other end of this journey with a profoundly new understanding of sales effectiveness: how people get other people to change minds. And we’re sharing this understanding in our Storyleaders workshops. These are for sales professionals and for anyone else—executives, politicians, teachers, attorneys, consultants, and so on—whose work involves influencing others, whether one is “selling” products, services, ideas, advice, or beliefs. By demystifying what great salespeople do, we believe we ourselves have learned to better influence change, develop deeper relationships with our customers, and find greater meaning in selling.