There are so many articles or selling strategies that your head might be spinning. Should you be following the Challenger Sales method that burst on the scene almost a decade ago, the Sandler Selling System from the late 1960s, or should you follow a solution sales model? Is SPIN training for you, or is your approach more transactional? Any one of these sales strategies can work for your organization, but they won’t work in a vacuum!

Whichever of the many sales methods you adopt, and even if you don’t settle on one of the common sales methodologies, you will need supporting stories to enable your sales journey. No marketing persona, elevator speech, or PowerPoint presentation is a substitute for a briefcase (does anyone carry these anymore?) full of stories and supporting samples that will help a prospect or existing customer understand how you are going to help them make money.

Building a book of stories is a process that begins with understanding what stories will resonate with the customers you have and the customers you want. Pulling out a stack of samples with no provenance doesn’t give anyone an opportunity to understand what you can do for them. Sure, you can quote on a job, the same as everyone else. But, the path to winning starts with differentiating what your team can do to produce the print the customer wants and perhaps lead them to features and options they may not have considered.