When it comes to customer acquisition, telemarketing services face an uphill battle. The overall perception of telesales campaigns among the public is generally on a downturn, and it takes innovation to keep people interested and listening. That is why storytelling has become such an essential tool for telemarketers looking to pitch people successfully, regardless of the product they are selling.
Why It Works
Narratives give people ways to identify with and dramatize the events of everyday life, and because of that, they allow for meaning to be constructed and shared between the listener and the storyteller. This narrative empathy is key to the reason why people find the stories they do particularly compelling, and learning to adapt in order to reach the listener is a prime skill that storytellers develop.
By empowering your agents to become storytellers for your brand, you give them the opportunity to close the relationship gap between the brand and themselves. This makes it easier for them to identify with it, and it opens up a range of indirect lifestyle pitches.
Ways of Constructing Stories Around Your Brand
There are four main ways to construct stories around your brand:
- Allow agents leeway to recount their personal histories
- Tell the history of the product
- Tell the history of the firm and its background
- Tell the stories of other customers.
By making room for these four techniques in your telesales campaign, you can empower your agents to perform better and close sales more quickly. Here is how.
Personal Stories
Allowing agents leeway to develop whatever personal stories they find fitting means taking a risk, that’s true. It also means inviting them to make earnest appeals to the customer based on their own experience with the company or the product, though. When your employees are happy and well adjusted, and when they have the right experience with your products, this can be a powerful way to connect to the listener by connecting the pitch to their needs on a more intimate level.
Product Histories
For products that represent a clear innovation or that have an interesting developmental backstory, giving the history of that product is another way that brands can get ahead. A product history gives customers an appreciation for the work that has gone into developing and refining the product, and it also answers practical questions like “Why do I need this?” without engaging with the formal pitches that customers have become resistant to.
Your Company or Firm’s Story
For brands whose marketing is intensely tied in to their brand personality, a firm history is another great way to connect to readers. Telling the story of how your company developed and why its employees are dedicated to the product in question gives readers a sense that this product represents the culmination of a longer-term goal.
Other Customers’ Stories
Last but not least, sharing reviews and feedback from other customers is a great way to let people know who your product appeals to and what they see in it, making it even easier for customers to imagine how they would use it in their own lives.
Cultivating any of these approaches has benefits, but the strongest program for customer acquisition will involve folding all four techniques together and using them each to appeal to customers with a variety of needs and mindsets.
This blog was first published on LinkedIn.
