The art of sales is far more than a product demonstration and a feature dump. The best sellers position their product or service without talking about their offering much at all. These sellers use storytelling to captivate their audience, stir emotion, and sometimes create urgency with a tasteful amount of fear. These stories are only effective when they are delivered in a natural and relevant way. To tell the story and tell it well, sellers must set the stage, dance around pitfalls, and carefully guide the customer or prospect to find the moral of the story for themselves.

Good storytelling requires that you step out of the sales role and into that of the customer. Great storytelling requires this and practice. Practicing each component of an effective story individually, the characters, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution. Practicing how each component and part of the story flows into the next, and finally practicing the entire story start-to-finish. Great storytellers practice well beyond delivering each scripted word flawlessly, they practice until they tell it naturally, even with unexpected interruptions or any adaptations necessary.

Practice is at the heart of everything great, even storytelling.