To qualify and win deals through value selling, engaging with customers’ emotions proves as an effective tactic, as explained in Ecosystems’ whitepaper, More Than Meets the AI: Commercial Empathy Equals Commercial Success. According to recent research reported by Oracle, when a company makes customers feel appreciated, they are 80% more likely to always buy from the brand, and those who are emotionally engaged are 70% more likely to spend up to two to three times more on said brand. Thus, creating a powerful story message that appeals to the emotions of your customers has a strong impact on sales.
In a recent Customer Value Community Value Disruptor discussion led by Dan Sixsmith, Head of Customer Success at Ecosystems, community members explored the components of storytelling in sales and how to engage your customers to create loyalty and increase sales. To help you fully understand the strategies they shared around good stories, you must first understand ethos, pathos, and logos and how they connect.
Ethos, pathos, and logos are three ways to persuade an audience:
- Ethos: Appeals to credibility/authority. This looks at whether you can trust the person who is telling you the story.
- Pathos: Appeals to emotion. This looks at your company’s vision.
- Logos: Appeals to logic and is rooted in fact. This looks at tangible business value.
When utilizing each of these three elements, you are able to create a compelling story that ties into Ecosystems’ Value Trinity:
- Corporate Value, adapted from logos: This focuses on the financial benefit of a solution, such as revenue generation, cost reduction, and risk mitigation.
- Job Value, adapted from pathos: This focuses on one’s emotions, such as will this solution make your job easier?
- Personal Value, adapted from ethos: This focuses on building credibility around intangible benefits to the person, such as what will convince this person to trust you?
Now, how does all of this connect into storytelling in sales as discussed at our recent Customer Value Community Value Disruptor Discussion? Keep reading to learn more.
1. Making an Emotional Connection
When engaging with a customer, you can show them endless ROI models, but if you are failing to connect with them on an emotional level, you fail to tap into that brand loyalty and emotional engagement which makes customers more likely to buy from your organization. In order to create an emotional connection, you will need to engage in pathos to create job value for your customer. The first thing you need to do is think about who your seller is and what goals they want to achieve. Tap into how each of your individual stakeholders will benefit in their jobs from purchasing your solution. Tap into their pain points. This not only ensures customers feel like you know them but also makes your value story feel more relatable to them, which is key for an emotional connection.
2. Trust & Credibility
Creating an emotional connection is only the first step for storytelling in sales. To get potential customers to buy from you, they need to feel confident in their ability to trust you and your credibility. This is where ethos and personal value come into play.
To build trust, you need to show up to each conversation with two components in mind: empathy and success stories. First, focus on empathy. Customers will be less likely to trust you if they do not feel heard or understood during the sales conversation. They need to feel confident that you understand their problem and what they are trying to solve. Without a basis of understanding, it will be difficult for a customer to trust your ability to solve their challenges.
From here, you need to build your credibility by giving them specific examples of how you can achieve their business outcomes and have achieved them in the past. This will help build their confidence that you understand how to achieve their goals. It is key to remember that trust should be woven throughout the entire customer journey. It starts with the first interaction with your brand, such as interacting with a piece of content on your website, all the way to the final sale and into the customer relationship.
3. Communicating Value & Differentiation
Communicating value in the sales conversation is all about sharing examples. Sharing facts or figures is one thing, but what potential customers are often after is what other customers like them are doing. They want to see tangible examples of others in their situation and what they are doing to solve their problems. This is where logos and corporate value are tied into your value-selling story. Come to each conversation armed with customer success stories, as well as tangible numbers and data to help you communicate your value to your customers and differentiate yourself from your competitors. Sharing real examples will help make you more credible when sharing value realized.
4. Overcoming Objections
To create a narrative that helps overcome common objections a potential customer may have, utilize the Cost of Inaction, which is the idea that when presented with two options, we tend to play it safe and stay the course to protect ourselves rather than risk it all, leading to inaction. The Cost of Inaction becomes useful in storytelling when you apply it to the risk you are taking by not making a purchasing decision and going against the status quo. Create a narrative story that demonstrates the risk customers are taking by not acting now and making a change in their organization.
Ecosystems SaaS platform and our best practice business cases help you to create a narrative story when value selling that creates an emotional connection while building trust and credibility. This is done by aligning with your customers on tactics, metrics, targets, and timelines to achieve value realization. Contact our team to learn more.
