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Before you begin to sell to earn, a book to read is Tell to Win by Peter Guber (www.vivagroupindia.com). For too long the business world has ignored or belittled the power of oral narrative, preferring soulless PowerPoint slides, facts, figures, and data, rues the author. He reminds that, as the noise level of modern life has become a cacophony, the ability to tell a purposeful story that can truly be heard is increasingly in demand.
Much like the Trojan Horse, ‘purposeful stories' are delivery vehicles in disguise, describes Guber. Such stories, he adds, cleverly contain information, ideas, emotional prompts, and value propositions that the teller wants to sneak inside the listener's heart and mind. “Thanks to their magical construction and appeal, stories emotionally transport the audience so they don't even realise they're receiving a hidden message. They only know after the story is told that they've heard and felt the teller's call to action.”
Call to action
The call to action, as listed in the book, can be varied. For instance, if you are a salesperson, your goal might be to persuade your customer to buy more products; and if you are a HR manager, the goal may be to get employees to embrace the company's culture, the author notes.
Emotions have to be aroused
To Dan Siegel, a neuroscientist, the author poses the question why people are so enthralled by drama, and gets the response that emotions do not occur spontaneously, nor can they be summoned at will. Emotions have to be aroused, explains Siegel. He elaborates that the arousal gets heightened when there is tension between expectation and uncertainty, with the tension driving you to think it might go this way, but it might go that way, and wonder what would happen next. “The more you wonder what will happen next, the more you pay attention. And the more attention you pay, the more you hear, notice, and retain.”
Another valuable insight in the book is credited to Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University. In Wesch's view, telling and listening to stories ignites the regions of the brain that process meaning.
Connections, the hidden cargo
Stating that it is not just about taking in information, and that we cannot remember anything without giving meaning to it, Wesch presents an equation: ‘Meaning + memory = knowledge-ability.' Meaning happens when we make connections between bits of information, Guber informs. “Why did we lose $200,000 in the last quarter? How does the new CEO differ from the last one? How come we made $12 million more on this product than on that one? Those sorts of connections are the cargo hidden inside purposeful narratives.”
D. Murali
BookPeek.blogspot.com
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