Sell, sell, sell.

If you know it or not, you are always selling something. If you have a job, you’re selling your time, skill and dedication. Besides that, if you’re a manager you might be selling a vision to your team. If you’re an engineer, you might be selling confidence to your stakeholders that your system is well engineered. If you want to be successful in what you do, you need to sell.  

But as everybody knows, nobody likes to be sold to—people naturally don’t want to listen to sales pitches.  

On the other hand, people love listening to stories. Just think of what you’ve been doing with your free time since the pandemic started. It’s probably quite likely you watched Tiger King and listened to a new audiobook. In fact, it’s probably quite likely you’ve watched and listened a whole lot more stories than that.  

People naturally like listening to stories. People love listening to really good stories. As it turns out, good stories are actually good devices to help you sell. When you tell a story, you bring your audience along on a ride to understand how you got to where you are. You are making people truly understand why you believe they need to buy whatever it is you are selling. Stories appeal to people’s emotions and convince them at a deeper level that they should buy. 

Besides, people remember stories, but they don’t remember sales pitches.  

So next time you find yourself trying to convince someone of something, remember to tell a story.