The speaker should have read this article
As we saw in Part 1, stories can be a powerful way to sell products or ideas. In this post, we will look at five suggestions to choose, craft and tell your stories for maximum persuasive effectiveness.
Bring out the conflict
Screenwriter Robert McKee, interviewed in the Harvard Business Review, said, “Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes.” He goes on to say that all great story tellers “dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality.”[1]
Stories are such a natural fit with solution selling because they share the same aim. They both begin with a situation and then introduce some gap, or conflict that introduces tension or conflict. They then ratchet up the tension enough so that the listener is more than ready for some resolution. That sequence of situation-conflict-resolution is at the heart of a good story, and if you think of it, is also the essence of sales questioning or conversational techniques that get the customer to sell themselves.
When everything is good and there are no problems, there is no story—and no sale.
