Know Your Success Stories

In previous Time To Wins I’ve highlighted storytelling through our customers’ messages and how to tell your story through your “elevator speech“. When you’re selling to customers, another important form of storytelling is success stories or evidence based selling. A success story is important in giving a potential customer a glimpse into how working with you will help them achieve their objectives. What is a success story?

  There are three necessary elements to a success story:

  • The customer determines and communicates an objective to reach their business goals.
  • You build a solution to reach that customer’s objective.
  • The determined objective is achieved and hopefully exceeded.

I would like to give an example of this concept by highlighted a success story in our business. The business I would like to highlight is Bookman & Son Fine Jewelry. Their objective was to gain more customers looking to buy engagement rings or other jewelry for their significant others. They hadn’t done much advertising in the past but since starting to do live endorsements with Aaron Goldhammer on 850 ESPN Cleveland, they have seen their business grow by 60%!  This Radio Ink article goes into greater detail about their story.

 How did we help Bookman and Son Fine Jewelers achieve success? Let’s review the framework we discussed in our previous storytelling post:

  1. Develop Your Story. Tell it right. Tell it tight.
  2. Identify the threat – The main threat for Bookman (and many of our customers) is that they will invest in marketing and receive no ROI.
  3. Identify the villain(s) – Other salespeople selling with the objective to hit their personal sales numbers and not accurately pairing the customer’s objectives and solutions to reach the customer’s goals.
  4. Identify the solution – Live reads
  5. Reveal the Hero – Good Karma Brands marketing solutions and local talent at ESPN Cleveland.
  6. Develop Your Story. Tell it right. Tell it tight.

Use the storytelling model to create success stories for your customers or future customers and continue to tell those success stories as models for the future.