Stories That Sell
Turn Satisfied Customers into Your Most Powerful Sales and Marketing Asset
By: Casey Hibbard
Published: January 5, 2009
Format: Paperback, 253 pages
ISBN-10: 061518300X
ISBN-13: 978-0615183008
Publisher: AIM Publishers
"If it seems as though you're seeing more customer stories than ever, you are. And not just the age-old customer testimonial, but actual stories of how a product, service, or organization solved a problem", writes founder and President of Compelling Cases, Inc., Casey Hibbard in her practical and comprehensive guide to creating and utilizing compelling stories from customers, Stories That Sell: Turn Satisfied Customers into Your Most Powerful Sales and Marketing Asset. The author describes how to leverage the powerful human desire for storytelling to build sales, improve brand image, and develop trust in businesses and non profit organizations.
Casey Hibbard recognizes that throughout history, stories have been used to share information, to teach, and to help learn and remember important and valuable knowledge. Stories help to personalize information and to bring it alive in a way that engages the listener. Casey Hibbard demonstrates how this powerful desire to both tell and listen to stories can become an integral part of any sales, marketing, branding, and public relations campaign. The author teaches business people how to find their best and most successful customers, and through a thoughtful interviewing process, draw out the customer's most compelling and intriguing stories. Through leveraging these wonderful stories, a buyer is drawn into the the customer's experience, and wants to share it as well.
Casey Hibbard (photo left) not only understands the power of telling and hearing stories on a deep human psychological level, but she describes the tools for helping customers become enthralling storytellers. The author presents her Seven-Step Customer-Story System as a road map to planning, uncovering and sharing customer stories to enhance credibility far beyond the standard customer testimonial. The seven steps are:
* Strategic story planning
* Uncovering customer candidates
* Securing customer permission
* Intelligence gathering
* Creating compelling stories
* Story sign off
* Leveraging customer stories
Each of these seven steps are illustrated in detail, and with real world examples of other customer success stories, to bring the concepts to life.
For me, the power of the book is how Casey Hibbard demonstrates the power and relative simplicity of customer story telling as an organizational credibility building technique. The author shows the reader step by step, how to utilize stories to transform everyday sales and marketing programs to great ones, that really connect with the customer on a personal level. Not only does Casey Hibbard point out the many benefits of customer success stories, but she also describes some pitfalls and mistakes that can be made through using the customer story concept incorrectly.
One of the really great features of the book is the sample case studies of real world customer success stories. These examples, of success stories written in different formats and used in different ways, gives the reader a sense of the versatility of the customer success story. The author also provides a handy checklist at the back of the book to ensure that all seven steps in the system are applied correctly.
I highly recommend the innovative and results oriented book Stories That Sell: Turn Satisfied Customers into Your Most Powerful Sales and Marketing Asset by Casey Hibbard, to anyone seeking a more personalized approach to sales, marketing, branding, and public relations for their organization. The author shares proven ideas and methods for helping satisfied customers share their success stories with others. At the same time, the seven step system ensures that the stories are presented in the best possible manner, and to the satisfaction of both the storyteller and the company.
Read the essential guide to customer storytelling Stories That Sell: Turn Satisfied Customers into Your Most Powerful Sales and Marketing Asset by Casey Hibbard, and let the power of narrative stories increase your company's profits or your cause's profile. Your success will form the basis of a truly engaging story that sells.
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