Kellogg on Marketing, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 19Sales as Storytelling

Craig Wortmann

Sales is a critical business function just like any other studied in business school: marketing, finance, leadership, operations, strategy. Sales has its own body of knowledge, its own set of skills, and requires tremendous discipline to become great at it. In addition, sales knowledge, skill, and discipline stand on the foundation of research into persuasion and influence drawn from neuroscience, social science, and psychology. We view sales as helping people make progress in their lives. Everything we do springs from that mindset.

Sales and Marketing

As a sister function of marketing, sales has a lot to learn from marketing and vice versa. While these functions are distinct, there is some important common ground. And one place where the Venn diagrams of sales and marketing overlap almost completely is storytelling. Marketers and salespeople are inherently storytellers, and both professions need to get much better at telling the right story at the right time for the right reasons. Therein lies the opportunity and the reason we decided to include this chapter in a book on marketing.

Marketing is best thought of as one‐to‐many, using multiple channels to build awareness and brand and attract the right customers. Marketing tells stories about the company, its value proposition, its solutions, and its customers—all of which are conveyed through many channels to reach as many of the right customers as possible.

Sales, on the other ...