Wouldn’t it be great if, when you spoke to prospects, you had the impact of a blockbuster movie trailer—grabbing their attention, sparking curiosity, and leaving them wanting more?
Then start using storytelling in sales.
Narratives, especially customer success stories, engage prospects.
They help them visualize how your solution will improve their business and life, and these visions evoke emotional reactions in them that make them want to buy.
Today, you’ll learn some tips for telling good stories throughout the sales process, from cold emails to sales pitches. You’ll also walk away with some core principles of storytelling in B2B sales.
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4 principles for effective storytelling in B2B sales
Below are some general rules that’ll help you consistently produce customer success stories that resonate with each new prospect.
1. Use a storytelling framework
A storytelling framework helps you quickly write new, custom-tailored stories that you can use in cold emails, presentations, and closing pitches.
In these stories, the protagonist is a previous customer (that’s similar to your prospect).
And you’re the wise wizard that helped them reach their goal.
With that in mind, here’s a framework that works well in B2B sales:
- The Challenge: Identify the problem the client faced before engaging with your solution. Explain the costs of not solving the problem — how was it hurting business?
- The Struggle: Detail the specific obstacles or frustrations they encountered while trying to overcome the problem on their own. What did they try? Why didn’t it work?
- The Solution: Highlight how your product or service addressed their pain point and what steps you took to implement it.
- The Transformation: Showcase the results or success the client experienced after using your solution, with measurable outcomes.
As long as you tailor the pain points and outcomes to each specific prospect, this structure is a surefire way to help buyers visualize their future journey and success with your solution.
| P.S. Incorporating customer success stories into your cold emails and pitches is easier when you have a tool like Mixmax. Save your tailored stories as templates or include them in automated multi-channel sequences, so you never miss an opportunity to resonate with prospects. |
2. Develop a mental library of anecdotes of past customers
The ability to prepare a story that you’ll use in a sales pitch is a superpower.
But you also want to be an agile storyteller.
Great sellers can freestyle, retrieving stories on the spot that relate to the subject of conversation, an objection, or a new pain the client reveals in conversation.
To become one of those sellers with a story for everything, collect anecdotes about past customers. You can do this by reviewing your own deals, by asking other sales reps, or even by asking your marketing team who might have interviewed customers.
Then, organize those anecdotes into a shared database, where reps can share anecdotes and give them tags so other reps can easily find the right stories for each sales situation.
Tags (or headings if you’re just using a Word or Docs) could be a client pain point, business type, client goal, industry, or objection type.
Lastly, memorize the anecdotes. That’s the best way to ensure you can bring up relevant anecdotes on the fly.
For example, here’s a seller using an anecdote to overcome an objection:
- Client: “We’re a bit worried about integrating this system with the rest of our tech stack.”
- Seller: “We actually had a Head of Marketing with the same fear. Like you, they were using five different tools for email marketing. What they found was that our solution was easy to integrate. But that’s not all. Our platform, as an all-in-one solution, allowed them to cancel three of their subscriptions. Want me to show you how easy integration is?”
By furnishing your mind with customer anecdotes, you come off as an industry insider with loads of experience and can consistently engage prospects.
3. Include specific details
Storytelling in sales is a rhetorical art form.
You’re trying to convince the prospect that what happened in your story actually happened, and could happen to them.
The best way to make your story feel real is to include specific details. An added benefit is that it immerses the reader deeper, making the story more resonant.
What does that look like in B2B sales conversations?
- Vague: “One of my clients came to us frustrated because their online sales had plateaued, despite all their efforts.”
- Specific: "One of my clients, a small wedding catering business owner, called me after losing out on a big wedding to a competitor. Frantic, she explained that online sales had dropped 53% over the last month, despite her spending $5,000 on a new landing page."
So, add specificity where you can — and don’t just take our word for it.
Take it of a renowned novelist:
“Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates". — Jacqueline Woodson
4. Ground setting in trends, backed by data
Giving your stories a sense of place makes them more immersive.
In B2B sales, the most pertinent aspect of your setting is not the social milieu or the landscape.
It’s the industry in which a business operates.
And the major tool you’ll use to describe this setting?
Current trends.
Why trends?
Because they have persuasive power.
Imagine a building operator is working in an industry where the government is handing out a lot of fines for non-compliance with housing regulations.
If a proptech company is trying to sell them on their compliance monitoring software, they should make this trend obvious in the stories about their customers.
“Our client, a property management company, was operating in NYC at a time when the Department of Housing was becoming increasingly frequent with its inspections and strict with its fines for non-compliance. Competitors that took no action were spending more time in court than the office.”
Now, simply citing the trend is one thing — backing it up with data is another.
Here’s an example of what we mean:
- Trend: “At the time, almost all the top businesses in the fashion space were marketing on Facebook and Instagram.”
- Data: “In fact, since then, social media has become even more important, with about 68% of new sales in fashion coming from social platforms, according to [source].”
As an added benefit, when you include data, your sales stories move those buyers who are more persuaded by hard facts than stories.
Examples of storytelling in sales
Below you’ll find some examples of effective storytelling in sales for cold email, discovery, and sales presentations.
Consider using them as models for your own client success stories.
Storytelling in cold email outreach
Below is an example cold email to a VP of sales that uses storytelling to make a case for the value of a sales engagement platform.
This image features Mixmax’s in-email polls
An email like this works best if the business in the story is highly similar to your prospect’s business, and suffering similar pain points.
| Want to write better cold emails? Check out our cold email best practices |
Storytelling on a discovery call
On a discovery call, your job is two-fold:
- Understand the prospect’s level of fit and needs.
- Make them feel that you understand their needs and are able to help them.
Stories are the best way to accomplish the second goal.
When you share anecdotes about working with clients who have had similar problems, you signal to the prospect that you listened to them and are well-suited to help them.
Here’s an example dialogue between a sales consulting firm and a Director of Sales at a small marketing agency:
Seller: “What do you think is the biggest obstacle holding your reps back from reaching quota?”
Prospect: “We just can’t seem to close deals with enterprise companies. It’s like our process is missing something. Does that make sense?”
Seller: “It does. It’s actually very common. A few months ago I worked with a boutique agency who was struggling to move from 1 million per year to 10 million per year because they couldn’t break into larger accounts.
The reason is, like you assume, that they were missing something.
They kept slightly adapting the sales approach they used for small businesses with one decision-maker, but these slight changes didn’t do much, aside from annoy their reps.
Once we taught their team the systems and methodologies that service companies use to sell to multiple decision-makers, their win rate shot up. So yes, I get you.”
| P.S. During discovery calls, Mixmax's seamless calendar integration allows you to easily book follow-ups while you share your success stories. |
Storytelling in the sales presentation / meeting
Storytelling is a great way to open any sales presentation. It immediately hooks the prospect and proves to them that you know how to help them. From then on, you’ll have a captive audience.
Here’s an example of a story a sales rep at a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency might tell to a Founder to win their business.
The character’s desire
“Mathew was the Founder of a new SaaS startup in the hospitality space.
He knew that writing LinkedIn posts about problems and trends in hospitality would boost his credibility and help him build a network of potential leads.
So, he did what any ambitious entrepreneur does.
Failed attempt to reach the desire
He started doing it himself.
Once a week, since that was all he had time for, he’d post some ideas he had. But since he wasn’t a professional writer, it took him a while to crank out a post, and they weren’t using structures that work on LinkedIn.
The result?
Crickets.
No one cared what he had to say. That’s the lie he told himself, at least. And so he decided to just focus on traditional marketing methods like PPC and SEO.
The emotional and business costs of failure to satisfy desire
But, every time he signed onto LinkedIn, his heart sank.
He’d see posts from CEOs getting tons of comments from ideal customers. And he’d get a gnawing feeling that he was missing a big chance to grow his business.
How your business saved the day
That’s when he got a cold email from our team.
Hesitant at first, he finally agreed to let us take over writing on social media for him.
We weren’t thinking for him, just transforming his ideas into posts.
We’d interview him twice a month for 30 minutes, then write up 3 posts per week on 3 topics he wanted to be known for.
How the character’s life and business changed for the better
The results?
Within just 6 months, his connections have grown from 1,000 to 10,000. He’s been offered speaking gigs at big hospitality conferences.
Almost every week he gets an inbound lead. Most of all, he feels like he’s helping people with his years of experience, instead of keeping it all trapped inside his head.”
Use Mixmax for storytelling at scale
Mixmax is a sales engagement platform that helps your sales team conduct personalized outreach at scale.
You can use its email templates to create and save customer success story emails.
Create a few for each audience segment.
That way, when reps need something interesting to say, they don’t have to write a new story from scratch. They can simply pick one of the pre-written emails, tweak it if needed, and send it to the prospect.
You can even include your best stories in multi-channel email sequences, allowing reps to send your stories to hundreds of prospects with the click of a button.
Sign up for a free trial below to learn more about how Mixmax can help your reps close more deals in less time.
