Series 6 – The Rise of Narrative Story Telling for Enhancing Sales Human Performance

We are working with our clients closely to explore how narrative story telling approaches can help improve the use and adoption of their investments in CRM Technologies, which continue to disappoint companies globally, despite what vendors are marketing.

Forrester Research has found that 49% of CRM Projects fail. And according to CSO Insights, less than 40% have full-scale end-user adoption. The reason CRM projects fail is not due to the technology, rather because of an organization’s culture, in particular the leadership and closed loop measurement and inspection practices.

One way to close this well-known gap is to bring more coaching tools to sales professionals that truly help them increase their productivity and win odds. A recent report issued by SalesForce confirmed that high performance sales organizations are 4x more likely to use predictive analytics. Their research also confirmed that:

  • Sales organizations plan to increase their use of sales analytics 58% from 2015 to 2016.
  • Smart selling fueled by predictive analytics will jump 77% among high performing sales organizations in the next 12 – 18 months.

We are very confident that as Sales results continue to decline in B2B approaches that more companies will increasingly turn to advanced data sciences that are made easy to interpret but also have a “fun and engaging style “of interaction will also be appealing, especially leveraging mobile forms of communication. One of the most powerful ways, and unique to humans is narrative story telling. Combining the power of stories into CRM tools with powerful forms or analytics will is set to be a game changing strategy to improve CRM adoption rates, but more importantly help increase the declining productivity of sales professionals.

We have already found that in our clients a nominal investment of $65.00/sales professional can improve productivity by 30-50% in sales performance. The ROI for us this is a no brainer. Of course, data quality and strong sales inspection practices need to be core to the culture adopting advanced Data Science methods (AI/and Machine Learning and Predictive methods). The companies that recognize that their CRM investments can be optimized more with Predictive Analytics solutions, that are also leveraging advanced narrative story telling into their solution designs and appreciate how adults naturally learn are poised to be great winners.

Reach out to us for a personal coaching session on the value of narrative story telling with predictive analytics. Note: Our solutions currently are only available on SalesForce, and we are a certified ISV partner of SalesForce in the AppExchange (www.saleschoice.com).

REFERENCES:

David Bjoe. Perspectives on impact of stories creating culture. (Source : http://www.jstor.org/stable/2393432?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

Thomas Davenport, Expert on Analytics and Big Data. (Source: http://www.tomdavenport.com/about/)

LeAnna Kent. Data StoryTelling: Bringing Life to your Data (Source: http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/patimes/data-story-telling-bringing-life-data/8278/).

Thaler Pecker. A Storyteller expert-discussing story attributes, (Source: http://thalerpekar.com/sharing/).

David Snowden, Expert in Cognitive Sciences and StoryTelling. (Source: http://cognitive-edge.com/).

Berkeley Warburton, The Age of Distraction: Accenture White Paper, Fall 2016. (Source: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-selling-high-tech-age-distraction)