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{Number 16 in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories.} Value-adding stories are stories that actually add to the attractiveness of the product. They literally make people willing to pay more money for your product than they would without the story. One example of that is the Pig Island story I told on [read more]

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{The 15th in a series of the 25 Most Useful Sales Stories.} “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” That’s the opening line of one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems, The Road Not Taken. It describes a difficult choice the narrator has to make between two different paths, and how important it was that [read more]

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Customer success stories are probably the most common type of sales story. And they deserve to be. That’s because buyers trust what other customers have to say much more than what a salesperson says. So, your customer success story, even if you’re the one telling it, is far more credible than just your opinion. But, [read more]

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My guest this week was Stewart Samkange in Kenya. Stewart is a sales professional who’s worked at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. And he’s in the process of relocating from Kenya to Dublin, Ireland to take a job working for LinkedIn. Stewart is a regular listener of the podcast and reached out to me with [read more]

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For some reason, when you’re in the speaking business you’re constantly asked to work for free. I don’t imagine school teachers or farmers or physicists are often asked to travel across the country to teach children, grow crops, or uncover the hidden mysteries of the universe without pay. But in my line of work, and [read more]

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[The 13th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories.] One of the most important stories you’ll ever tell as a salesperson is about someone who encountered exactly the kind of problem your product or service is designed to solve. It lets buyers understand the problem in a more personal, visceral way than [read more]

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A recently got a chance to chat with Alex Goldfayn, CEO of the Evangelist Marketing Institute. He’s one of the top-rated and most requested sales speakers in the world, and the author of several books, including his most recent one, Selling Boldly: Applying The New Science of Positive Psychology To Dramatically Increase Your Confidence, Happiness [read more]

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{The 12th in a series of the 25 most useful sales stories.} This story marks our transition from the rapport building phase of the sales process to the actual sales pitch itself. And for most salespeople, this is the heart of the matter—this where most of the traditional selling is done, and where most of [read more]

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Professional buyers will tell you (like they told me) that competitors in just about every space are so similar that it’s hard to tell them apart. They need a differentiation story—which means you need a differentiation story. One of my favorite examples of that comes from Sharad Madison, CEO of United Building Maintenance. UBM is a [read more]

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Who knew you could learn so much about running a business and understanding your customers from a professional photographer and a candle? I didn’t. But then I had a chat with Jeffrey Shaw, former photographer turned business coach and author. He spent three decades as highly-sought after portrait photographer. Now he’s the host of business [read more]