Podcast #120: Seven Stories for Successful Salespeople

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Can you believe that just by telling stories you can achieve sales success?

Let me introduce you to our fascinating guest in today’s Winning Team’s Podcast, Mike Adams, who uses this sales process of great storytelling. He first started as an engineer then, turned into a successful salesperson. Mike has sold and managed sales teams from all over the world, including UK, Russia, India, Vietnam, Australia, and other places for various big organizations like Siemens, Nokia, and Halliburton. He’s also the author and publisher of the book, ‘Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell’. Very impressive, isn’t he?

According to Mike, his career was an unplanned one. He studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Tasmania and got a job in the oil and gas industry. However, an opportunity came – a job in Norway he was interested but it was a sale job which he didn’t want to do. He consulted with his wife who was pregnant at that time. His wife told him that she wanted to have a go and from there on, his sales career started. Of course, there were ups and downs but Mike feels he has had a lot of good fortune. It was enough to make him stay in sales.

In this episode, Mike speaks about:

• A brief history of his career
• “The missing ingredient in sales success is the ability to tell stories”
• What are the seven stories and how to incorporate them into the buying cycle/ sales process?
• The Seven Stories:
  • Connection Phase/ Hook Phase
    • Personal story
    • Company story
    • Key Staff story
  • Fight Phase
    • Insight story
    • Success story
  • Closing/ landing the deal Phase
    • Value story
    • Sales Manager story
• Parts of a Success Story
  • Successful client
  • Problem
  • Guide
  • Plan
  • Called to action
  • Failure scenario
• Storytelling is a Know, Like and Trust me foundation and sequence.
• People remember stories more than a load of stats.
• Is storytelling a skill?

For many salespeople, the real challenge is not getting the first meeting, the second meeting, but actually closing the sales.

The “Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell” book is a great manual for any salesperson and sales manager to have and you can buy it in Amazon.

Book Recommendation, Habits and Where to Get in Touch:

Mike highly recommends a book that really challenged the way he thought about selling. Its title is Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa.

He starts his day with an espresso coffee from his super coffee machine from Milan that he lovingly cleans and looks after every day. He absolutely loves coffee! Mike also generally pre-commits himself to ensure that that commitment is there to get something specific completed. He actually paid someone to help him write his book not because he needed the help but it was so he becomes committed to finishing it. He describes it as knowing himself well enough to give something he can’t get around so he has no choice but to finish what he started.

You can get in touch with Mike Adams through his LinkedIn and his company Growth in Focus. He also has a YouTube channel called Seven Sales Stories with Mike Adams where he has a lot of videos of these stories.

 

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Thanks to Jodey Smith, my podcasting technical genius, who does all the bits I don’t
like –the editing, the uploading etc. He is a gem and can be contacted at JodeySmith.com.

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