Why you should be telling your customers a story

Recently I was working with a large group of motor product managers for a premium manufacturer.

I was simultaneously impressed at their encyclopaedic technical knowledge of their brand and their metal products and a bit mortified at their ability, or maybe difficulty, in communicating their knowledge to us mere mortals.

It was done in a way that was easy to follow, easy to absorb and indeed in some places that vaguely even resembled English. I spent some time working with the guys to explain that this is the critical ingredient that our front of house teams do for us as a business on a day to day basis. To take a vast knowledge, distil it down to some salient facts, and then build a chain of communication that follows a simple format: feature, function, benefit.

The team of product managers were, in a single heartbeat, able to reel off a plethora of product features that they were rightly proud of. However, when asked they really struggled to put those features into any semblance of personal use or need.

Follow the formula

I work predominantly in the F&I field and in the main with business managers, typically discussing intangible paper products not physical metal ones, and usually having to work around resistance if they are second facing a deal when the sales exec hands the customer over to complete the admin of the deal, and specifically to discuss those feature rich paper products.

To do this, most F&I sales people will follow the formula above, but only after they have comprehensively qualified the customer’s needs and wants. Following qualification, the specialist will then select an appropriate product, with a key feature that is important to the customer and their ownership of the vehicle. Let’s say for the purposes of this article an insured mechanical breakdown policy.

The next step for the specialist is to then translate that cold, hard scientific feature into a function for that specific customer, designed to match their needs and satisfy their potential requirements in the future. Then we need to bring a specific need or requirement into the sale process, a fact, concern or opinion shared by the customer, that will allow the specialist to move to the next stage of illustrating the benefit of that feature.

In our example we could possibly use the family holiday or long-distance journey to encourage the customer to give some thinking and feeling time about what could go wrong, and indeed the function of our feature and how it would take the pain of that potential outcome away.

Keep it exciting

But the bit we all tend to forget is the emotion, the excitement of making a good choice, and the bit my lovely product managers simply couldn’t do was to engage all of this into an anecdote or story – and as every junior sales executive knows – stories sell. We can make this a personal anecdote based on personal experience, or we can make it purely anecdotal around what we heard.

But it’s important not to forget, in this current culture of honesty, integrity and transparency, the extended chain of ‘Feature, Function, Benefit, Emotion and Excitement’.

To stay with our example, the feature is an extended warranty, the function is to pay the bill for parts and labour when things go wrong. The benefit is that there are no traumatic shocks or nightmare cashflow issues during your ownership of this car. The last stage is the illustration that brings this to life, how having a warranty saved us, or a customer form a large bill perhaps, or maybe explaining the benefits rationally but specific to the customers needs, or perhaps even more powerfully to explain how a previous customer wasn’t sure whether they should buy their warranty, trusted your judgment, bought and was thankful they did when the need arose.

Whatever you choose, you have to do this professionally and with commitment – people are listening to your words and watching for the non-verbal communications to see if they match, and if they don’t match, they won’t buy.

By Andy Tong, managing director, Profit Training