“Figure out what works best for you, but do not allow an idea to escape.” – Stephen Harvill in today’s Tip 764
How do you capture stories?
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Creative Ventures
Steve Harvill on LinkedIn
21 Secrets of Million-Dollar Sellers Book
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today my friend Steve Harvill is self introducing, so I’m just going to let him take it away:
Stephen Harvill: Hi everybody, I’m Steve Harvill President of the Strategic Consultant Company, Creative Ventures and author of the bestselling sales book, “The 21 Secrets of Million-Dollar Sellers.” Today I want to give you a little tip around the ideas that we discovered while interviewing over $300 million producers. Now, this is an idea that’s getting, you’ll hear many, many times, and it’s the power that story presents in the sales process. And I don’t want to give you a tip around the narrative arc or being able to craft and tell, or following a beginning, middle and end. Instead, I want to give you a short tip around where do stories come from? What’s their origin and Genesis point and the key element that allows you to leverage that Genesis point into a story that will help you connect emotion to your client relationship.
So the first thing is that ideas are all around us. They come at us at a speed and volume that’s unheard of, and here’s the key tip. And the thing that we’re weak on is capturing story. You see a great story idea is a cereal. It’s like fog. It comes and goes rapidly. And if you’re not capturing it, you’re losing it. You see the brain is a great source for creating an idea, but it’s a horrible source for storing the idea. So having a methodology of capturing a story when you hear it, that you’ll later be able to develop into something that attaches directly to the value and impact of what you do is critical.
Now, I don’t care how you do it. It doesn’t matter how you capture it. Maybe you’re going to capture it on your iPad, or maybe you’re going to capture it on your I phone somehow on your iPhone. It doesn’t matter. At Creative Ventures, we’re old-school analog pen and pencil to paper, and we’ve gone through a wide variety of methodologies trying to figure out what the best one is. We’ve gone through small little notebooks. We’ve increased it to note cards. We’ve had a scale of a notebook you could carry in your pocket. We’ve gotten a little bigger to allow us to draw and sketch. We’ve gone all the way up to folio size during the process of our company. But we settled on a number of years ago on the idea of an index card. And that’s what we use to capture all of our stories. We carry them in our pockets. We use them to design and develop story. We use them to capture story.
So it doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter what tool you use, but if you’re not writing something down, if you’re not capitalizing on the neurology of the brain that says writing something down is critical to the memory process. You’re going to lose some of the great stories that you can leverage to connect your product and your service and you to your client.
So here’s the tip. Figure out what works best for you, but do not allow an idea to escape. Create a methodology of connecting and you’ll develop an inventory of stories that you’ll be able to use strategically throughout the entire sales process. So that’s it from Steve Harvill on Creative Ventures. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share the tip. And by the way, write it down
Scott Ingram: To see Steve in the video version of this tip, and for a link to get your copy of his book: 21 Secrets of Million-Dollar Sellers, just click over to DailySales.Tips/764
Then, come on back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!