Storytelling focuses on influencing the right side of the client’s brain. Why? Because that is where decisions get made, where people picture and buy into what we are telling. This technique will help you to exponentially improve your ability to articulate, clarify and persuade about financial concepts and products. This technique will literally double the impact your presentations are having on your clients because the technique is based on brain science that demonstrates how to engage the whole brain in our presentations.
How do you mesmerize your client’s interest? How is trust developed? the answers to these questions are evident once you see the discoveries of modern brain science and how these discoveries relate to storytelling.
Ned Herrmann in his book The Whole Brain Business Book offers the concept of ‘Our Four Different Selves’ that shows the different shades of personality we display from the two sides of our brain:
- Our rational self
- Our safekeeping self
- Our experimental self
- Our feeling self
As is customary in our culture, we pay an inordinate amount of attention to the left brain issues of rationale and safekeeping and often neglect the experimental and feeling side of ourselves. We direct clients to volumes of numbers, statistics and small print. Many of these clients give the materials a cursory glance or ignore it. They want you to illuminate them and relate to them on a personal basis. They want you to discover the individuals that they are. They want you to tailor a program that is specific for their unique circumstances. Their circumstances may not seem unique to you, but clients feel that they are in specifically unique circumstances.
Note that speculation and risk taking are actions that come from the right brain experimental self What is investing if it is not about speculating and taking risks? To properly communicate to those right brain functions, we need to speak a language the right side of the brain can relate to. Statistics, numbers and prospectuses are not that language! Yes, they play a role – a supporting role, not a leading one.
What is my point? The materials and presentation style many professionals use is a half brained approach to selling because it only engages 50 percent of the potential attention the client has to give. Half the client’s brain remains asleep.
Read on for a detailed breakdown of Telling the Financial Story.
What Can I Expect?
Here’s an outline of Telling the Financial Story
Journey Outline
PART I HOW TO PUT HALF OF YOUR CLIENT’S BRAIN TO SLEEP
- Why Statistics Don’ t Sell and Stories Do
- Science & Art
- The Map of Your Brain
- The Roots of Story Selling
- Capturing Your Client’s Attention
- Risks and Decisions
- Learning to Speak the Language of the Right Brain
- Story Selling Triggers
- Visual Storytelling
- Emotional Affirmation
- What is your Gut Feeling? How Decisions Really Get Made
PART II BECOMING A BETTER STORYTELLER
- Reading and Leading Others
- Getting Others to Tell their Story
- How Humor Get You Further than Self Promotion
- Making The Intuitive Leap with Your Client
- Using Analogies and Metaphors to Move Your Clients and Products
PART III STORYTELLING IN DESIRABLE MARKETS
- Telling the Story of the Affluent
- Telling the Story of the 65+
- Telling the Woman’ s Story
- Let Me Tell You A Story
About Peter de Kuster
Peter de Kuster is the founder of The Heroine’s Journey & Hero’s Journey project, a storyteller which helps professionals to create careers and lives based on whatever story is most integral to their lives and careers (values, traits, skills and experiences). Peter’s approach combines in-depth storytelling and marketing expertise, and for over 20 years clients have found it effective with a wide range of creative business issues.
Peter is writer of the series The Heroine’s Journey and Hero’s Journey books, he has an MBA in Marketing, MBA in Financial Economics and graduated at university in Sociology and Communication Sciences.
To book your place in the “Telling the Financial Story” mail peter at theherojourneyquestionnaires@gmail.com