A book recommendation from Dan Beaulieu:
Sell With a Story: How to Catch Attention, Build Trust and Close the Sale
By Paul Smith
Copyright 2016 (September 2016) Amacom
Price $24.95
Pages: 274 with Index
There is nothing that sells like a story
The author tells a story (of course) of two people selling identical products on E-Bay. The products with a story attached to them sold for literally up to 30 times more than the same products that just had a simple product description. Not a bad return on a story and a rather graphic proof of how stories sell products.
The authors also talks about how people will never remember bare statistics but they will always remember a story. Just take a moment and think of your own family and remember the stories you were told about great uncle Alphonse who warmed in his beer in a sauce pan before drinking it. Or your step grandfather who was a convicted bootlegger. You’re never going to forget those stories are you? Right and neither is anyone you tell them to.
Now apply this phenomenom to business. Would you rather hear a great story about the used car you are buying (Maybe it was Jon Voight’s car?), or just buy it cold off the lot?
Okay you get the point, stories sell. So now you have to read this book and find out the best way to tell the right stories at the right times.
Author Paul Smith does an excellent job of breaking down the art of story-telling form how to choose the right story and telling it the right away. What I liked about the book and found particularly useful is how he showed me how to use stories to make my product more interesting and how to use stories to build an instant rapport with my customer.
You can tell and story or you can make a story great by telling it in the right way. Yes we all assume we can tell a story, we call assume that we can get it across as believable to our audience, but can we really? Mr. Smith shows the reader through vivid examples how to make any story more interesting; how to tell a story in a way that it will have the right amount of drama to make it unfold in a way that the listener will never forget.
He also advises us on how to use a story to make a point. He shows us how to make a story interesting and yes how to keep a story on point.
He even goes into the long and short of story guiding the reader when it comes to how long or short a story should be.
Finally he makes the reader realize that story telling is a craft, one that has to be studied and learned by any person who desires to be a great story teller.
I have to confess that I found this book extremely useful not only for story telling for business but in everyday story telling as well.
This is a book you are not going to want to miss.
This book will be published in September 2016
