1- Puts the customer’s ego to sleep
With an insight scenario, you can deliver insights that will only challenge the customer’s thinking, and not the customer. Because insight scenarios are about someone else, the customer does not feel under attack. A story simply presents a scenario that allows the customer to draw their own conclusions. Without feeling pressured, the customer can now relax and listen to your message, and possibly gain enough insight that they start to tell themselves a new story, where new choices make more sense.
2- Makes the customer care
Facts and figures are too abstract. You cannot see them or feel them, so they do not feel like they affect you either directly or indirectly. Without context, the customer is left to try to figure out why it makes sense to buy, or worse, why they should care.
3- Generates Value
Before your salespeople can close the value gap for your product, they first have to open it. An Insight Scenario does this by providing a clear word picture of what the buyer’s circumstances are before ownership, and what they are after ownership. Because customers generally discount claims for gains, the salesperson must help the customer to realize that they are not ankle deep in problems, but that they’re really drowning in the middle of the lake before the customer is ready to see the value of being rescued by your product.
4- Memorable
A fact, wrapped in an emotional Insight Scenario story, is 20 times more memorable than the same fact presented simply as a matter of fact. Even if a salesperson persuades a customer how great their offering is with facts, they only did so on an intellectual basis, and buyers are not inspired to act on reason alone. To drive through a buying cycle, the customer needs not only logic as the steering wheel, but also emotion as the gas pedal.
5- Hard wired into our DNA
Humans have told insight based stories visually for 100,000 years, orally for 10,000 years, and in writing for 6,000 years. All the way back to early man, stories were the technology that we used to share information vital to our survival. Early man, for example, might have said, “You better not eat those berries, because John, your uncle, ate them, and here’s what happened…”
6- Sharpens the saw
Insight Scenario sales coaching will allow you to find and fill the customer knowledge gaps in your sales team. Because an insight scenario presents a clear before and after picture of owning your product, knowledge gaps are immediately exposed when the picture is out of focus.stories trump facts
Proof
70% of executive buyers in a recent Gartner study said that the best way for salespeople to deliver differentiation that they trust is by sharing a customer story.