Four Components of a Great Sales Story

There’s four components that we look at in the story. And we’ll talk about ideal and then okay. A great story has to have an opening that is compelling and demonstrates value, or in an outcome oriented opening. So I’m going to use the example that I started with

Increase the percentage of visitors to your site that actually buy by 15% with our search technology. So that outcome gives that opening gives an outcome, 15% in increasing conversions and context through our search technology. Then you want to get people the situation without you.

When buyers come to e-commerce sites and actually executed search, they are even less likely to buy anything than if they just know what they’re looking for. The reason, most search engines aren’t designed for commerce searches, and they end up confusing the buyers, giving them too many choices, they’re overwhelmed and they depart.

As a result, most sites are experiencing a significant lower rate of conversion and many abandonment’s and they had before. So I have a situation and an impact. And if I’m a commerce manager and if you’re talking to me and if I’m looking at my stats and saying yeah, that’s happening, now I’m ready to listen. Then I can describe the solution.

We taken a different approach to our search technology, we actually combined not just the search terms but we look at the buyers transaction history. We do click stream in analysis, we do sentiment analysis, and we can bind all of that together to deliver search results that are more likely to buy.

And when we cross our customer base, on average we are seeing a 15% increase in buyers who actually visit and search versus buyers that don’t without the technology. So I’ve had a resolution to describe how do I solved the problem and then the impact that that has. A great story has all of those components. An outcome, a situation, and impact, a resolution, and then circle back and close with the outcomes. That can be a very short story, it can be a very detailed story that tells the story of an implementation but that’s what makes a great story.

Let’s do a final contrast of how most people would tell that story. Typically you will hear them say, we have a great search engine. It combines clickstream analysis, transactional history, and sentiment analysis to produce better search results, don’t you want it?

No emotions, a bunch of technical details, all the facts, no connection why I should care about it, that’s a bad story, the other ones good story.