Sell your personal story

So far you have developed multiple tools to attract and retain customers, which will serve as a foundation to minimize the fear of failure in your advertising efforts. Without this stable foundation, it will be more difficult to attract your audience.

As you have worked and grown as an entrepreneur you have gained invaluable experience that you can use as a means of promoting yourself and your business. People respond very positively to personal and empathetic stories. When you show your customers your personal journey and the obstacles you have had to overcome through an engaging and well-told story, they begin to see you as someone to follow and replicate.

How to sell through a story?

Selling through a story or "storytelling" is a communicative tool that helps the entrepreneur to transmit his speech more effectively through stories, usually from a personal point of view, which serve to create empathy and an emotional response from the listener.

Using a personal story, with which customers, investors and others can identify, allows us to connect on a deeper level with them. Emotions are the basis of our basic response to stimuli, and through this method you incite this type of response to connect on multiple levels.

For your story to make sense and not feel disconnected from reality I advise you to follow this structure:

• Firstly, a premise that we must demonstrate at the end of our story.

• Always include content of human value that serves to emotionally engage the customer.

• It must have a protagonist or hero with whom people can identify and invest in their success.

• You must also include a clear and precise purpose for the hero and obstacles he must overcome to ultimately achieve his goal.

Types of stories you can use

You can use many types of stories to achieve an emotional response from your audience, it is up to you to choose one that best suits your personal style and sales objectives. Some types of stories you can tell are:

• The story of the creation of your product or service.

• Your own personal experience that inspired you to market your product or service.

• A related anecdote.

• Use a customer's experience of using your products or services.

Example of a story

"The best-known store in the whole world has more than 60 years of history. It all started in the forests of southern Sweden in 1943, when its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, was 17 years old, selling matches to his neighbors as a child, and realized that buying them wholesale, even if he sold them at low prices, would make him a profit."

This is the story of how the founder of the famous IKEA furniture store started in the world of entrepreneurship. It is an abridged version, but it has all the basic characteristics of a good personal story.