Storytelling is a practice as old as commerce itself. It’s a versatile and powerful tool used in various contexts: 

• Education: Teachers use storytelling to make lessons more engaging and memorable. It helps students understand complex concepts and retain information better. 
• Entertainment: From books and movies to theater and video games, storytelling is at the heart of many forms of entertainment. It captivates audiences and evokes emotions. 
• Cultural Preservation: Many cultures use storytelling to pass down traditions, values and history from one generation to the next. This helps preserve cultural identity and heritage. 
• Marketing and Advertising: Brands use storytelling to connect with their audience on an emotional level, making their products or services more relatable and memorable. 
• Therapy and Counseling: Storytelling can be a therapeutic tool, helping individuals process their experiences and emotions. It allows people to share their stories and find meaning in their lives.  
• Leadership and Business: Leaders use storytelling to inspire and motivate their teams, communicate vision and values and foster a strong organizational culture. And yes, it’s even used in sales.  

For sales, when done well, storytelling remains one of the most effective ways to influence buying decisions, deepen trust, strengthen relationships and shape meaningful outcomes. At its core, storytelling taps into the human psyche, aligning with how we naturally process information and connect emotionally with ideas. For sellers, this provides a powerful tool to convey value, establish trust and inspire action when wielded ethically. 

Building a Foundation: Buyer Acumen and the Situation Assessment 

To craft compelling and relevant stories, sellers must first understand what matters most to buyers. This begins with developing Buyer Acumen, which includes a deep understanding of buyer personas, archetypes and the unique challenges and priorities they face. Armed with this insight, sellers can tailor their approach to resonate with the individual buyer. 

Buyer Acumen 

Buyer Acumen goes beyond superficial demographics, delving deep into roles, goals, behaviors, preferences and common situational factors. It’s the roadmap that guides you toward understanding your ideal customer. When you get this right, everything that cascades out from it is more effective. The Buyer Acumen Wheel shows the many things it can impact: 

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the cornerstone of your new business development strategy and can even help improve current relationships and account management. This profile sets the stage for more effective targeting and messaging.  

This work doesn’t sit on the shoulders of your sellers, of course. It should be done by Marketing and other GTM leaders in support of your market and sales force.  

If you haven’t done this before, think about the problems that you solve for your customers and what roles they affect.  

Boiled down to its simplest form, selling is about finding people who have problems that you can solve, who want to solve them and have the means to do so. If you think about it that way, it gets easier to identify your ICP.  

“Selling is about finding people who have problems that you can solve, who want to solve them and have the means to do so.”  – Mike Kunkle

Personify Your ICP with Buyer Personas/Archetypes & COIN-OP  

With your ICP in mind, the next step is to personify your ideal customers through Buyer Personas and/or Archetypes. This step allows you to gain invaluable insights into their roles and goals.  

Going deeper than labeling a persona “Purchasing Pete” or “Charles the CFO,” my COIN-OP model proves instrumental here, documenting the most common Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts, Needs, Outcomes and Priorities of your target buyers. Here’s an example of what that might look like: 

You may be wondering how this relates to storytelling. It’s simple. The first step in effective storytelling is understanding your audience. The above Buyer Acumen and the below Situation Assessment Framework are typically used for discovery, after you earn an appointment, but they are also helpful for gathering and putting Buyer Acumen and COIN-OP into context to fully understand your buyers.  

Situation Assessment Framework 

A crucial next step is conducting a Situation Assessment guided by the COIN-OP framework. This can be done at the higher-level market level to create a library of stories to draw from, but it should be done at the individual company and buyer level to further personalize relevant and compelling stories.  

CURRENT STATE  

• Challenges: These are the buyer’s primary obstacles and difficulties that prevent them from achieving their goals and objectives.  
• Opportunities: These are positive things the buyer can accomplish or capitalize on, typically within a limited window of time, to achieve significant gains or advantages 
• Impacts: These are the consequences of the status quo or ignoring the Challenges and/or Opportunities. 

BRIDGE (Needs Analysis) 

• Needs: This includes whatever is required to move from their current state to their desired future state.  

DESIRED FUTURE STATE 

• Outcomes: The measurable results that the buyer aims to accomplish or achieve. 
• Priorities: How the buyer priorities the needs and outcomes.  

By using this framework, sellers gain a comprehensive understanding of the buyer’s context. This insight helps determine whether there is Need And Solution Alignment (NASA) – verifying that the solution the seller can offer would genuinely address the buyer’s needs. If NASA exists, sellers know they are operating in the buyer’s best interest, paving the way for ethical influence and persuasion.  

When there is Need And Solution Alignment, sellers know they are acting in the buyer’s best interest, paving the way for ethical influence and persuasion. 

The seller can also conduct an Impact Analysis to gauge or forecast the impact of moving from the Current to Desired Future State. If they can dollarize this impact and know the costs associated with the solution, they can even forecast an ROI. This helps the seller develop a compelling business case — all part of building an exceptional story. 

Crafting Stories with POSE Value Stories 

With Buyer Acumen, a Situation Assessment with COIN-OP in place, and assurance of NASA, sellers are equipped to create POSE Value Stories (Problem, Outcome, Solution, Explore). This storytelling framework ensures that narratives are structured and impactful. We’ll start with POSE as the foundation and then layer some other concepts to make the stories even more influential.  

• Problem: Clearly articulate the buyer’s key challenges, often positioned as a problem another similar buyer (your current customer) experienced.  
  • Check: Confirm that the problem is relevant.  
• Outcome: Highlight the specific results and measurable outcomes that the buyer was able to achieve with your help.  
  • Check: Confirm that those outcomes are desired.  
• Solution: Briefly share the solution that helped your other customer solve the problem and achieve the outcomes.  
• Explore: Simply ask the buyer you’re speaking with if it would make sense to explore further.  

POSE Value Stories help sellers connect on a deeper level by addressing the buyer’s unique situation and aligning with their priorities. These stories are most effective when NASA is established, ensuring they are grounded in authenticity and ethical persuasion. 

Enhancing POSE Stories with Ethos, Pathos and Logos 

POSE Value Stories are impactful on their own, but they can also be enhanced with a few other methods. To elevate POSE Value Stories to be even more influential, sellers can integrate Aristotle’s principles of Ethos, Pathos and Logos:  

• Ethos (Credibility): Build trust by demonstrating expertise and integrity. This can be strengthened by using research and other data or case studies and testimonials.  
• Pathos (Emotion): Make an emotional appeal to create a personal connection and inspire action.  
• Logos (Logic): Justify your recommendation by presenting logical arguments that support it. 

When layering these principles into POSE Value Stories, it’s essential to weave in the emotions (stress, frustration, concern, pressure) the buyer experienced while facing the Problem and the positive emotions they felt (relief, satisfaction, gratitude, excitement) after achieving the Outcomes that the Solution delivered. For instance, a buyer who struggled with inefficiencies may feel frustration, stress or anxiety during the Problem phase. Highlighting how the Solution alleviates these feelings and replaces them with relief, confidence or excitement reinforces the emotional impact of the story.  

This integration ensures that narratives are engaging, persuasive and grounded in the buyer’s best interests, further solidifying the ethical foundation provided by NASA. 

Layering the Four Value Drivers into Stories 

To further personalize and enhance storytelling, sellers can incorporate the Four Value Drivers, or the things that matter most to each decision maker. Different people define value differently. Some have just one Value Driver while others may care about multiple (although one is often primary):  

• Business: Driven by a desire for financial or operational metric improvement. 
• Experiential: Driven by a desire for improvement in a process or experience.  
• Aspirational: Driven by a desire for alignment with mission, vision, values or aspirations (e.g., DEI or sustainability). 
• Personal: Driven by a mix of personal motivators, political work factors and/or impacts on career, family or personal situations.  

Everyone has Personal Value Drivers, even if unspoken. Most people also have at least one other primary Value Driver, though they may exhibit elements of all four. Identifying the Value Drivers of the individual buyer or team enables sellers to adjust the language and focus of their story to align with what matters most to their audience. I often refer to this as “multilingual selling.” It’s the ability to describe the benefits or outcomes of one solution in diverse ways, based on what matters most to a specific decision maker– “speaking their language,” in the figurative sense.  

For example, a financially driven buyer (Business Value) may prioritize cost savings and ROI, while an Experiential-driven buyer focuses on ease of use and efficiency. An Aspirational-driven buyer might emphasize alignment with sustainability goals, while a buyer influenced by Personal Value Drivers might prioritize career advancement or work-life balance. Tailoring your POSE Value Stories to these drivers ensures maximum relevance and impact. 

Putting It All Together: A VP of Sales Example 

Imagine a Vice President of Sales at an industrial distributor struggling with inconsistent sales performance across their team. Through a Situation Assessment with COIN-OP, the seller identifies: 

• Challenges: High variability in sales methodology execution leading to missed revenue targets. 
• Opportunities: Creating an aligned and unified sales approach based on best practices to improve consistency and outcomes. 
• Impacts: The free-for-all inconsistency has led to market share erosion and slippage on the revenue plan. In the current month, they should be at $20.4MM, but they’re at $16.3MM– a more-than-$4MM shortfall. If things continue at the current rate, they’ll fall short of the revenue plan by $7MM, achieving only 80% of the target.  
• Needs: A scalable solution to standardize best practices (sales methodology) and drive predictable results. 
• Outcomes: Achieving a 35% increase in revenue within the remaining 5 months to revive the lagging revenue plan.  
• Priorities: Immediate implementation of a solution to address gaps. 

Using this insight, the seller crafts a POSE Value Story: 

• Problem: “One of our clients, also an industrial distributor, faced inconsistent sales performance that was costing them major Made To Order (MTO) deals and creating frustration across their leadership team. It was just one month into Q3, and they were already $7MM behind plan, year-to-date. Their VP of Sales was feeling significant pressure from his CEO. Is this something that resonates with you?” 
• Outcome: “They implemented our full-scale sales methodology, which resulted in a 35% revenue overall increase and a 30% reduction in sales cycle times for Made To Order solutions. It wasn’t easy, but when they made up the shortfall, you can imagine the relief they felt. The VP of Sales told me it completely changed his relationship with his CEO and fellow executive team leaders, and that multiple clients mentioned how much easier it was to buy from them. Would those types of outcomes align with your goals?” 
• Solution: “We helped them achieve those results by adopting a completely buyer-centric, consultative sales methodology focused on delivering value and outcomes, and by implementing a coaching framework designed to support adoption and mastery of the methodology and get into a cadence of continuous improvement.” 
• Explore: “Is this approach something that might make sense for you to explore further, to see if it could work for your team?” 

The seller enhanced the story with Ethos by sharing relevant expertise, Pathos by describing the stress and relief experienced by the other VP of Sales and Logos by presenting the steps they took to deliver measurable outcomes. The seller further personalizes the narrative by focusing on the buyer’s primary Value Drivers—such as Business Value (revenue increase), Experiential Value (improved buying process for customers) and Personal Value (demonstrating leadership success to internal stakeholders). 

Closing Thoughts 

Storytelling in sales carries immense influence, but it must always be wielded ethically. Sellers must avoid exaggeration or manipulation, focusing instead on transparency and alignment with the buyer’s needs. When NASA is in place, storytelling becomes a value-adding service rather than a persuasion tactic. 

By grounding POSE Value Stories in Buyer Acumen, leveraging COIN-OP insights, weaving in Ethos, Pathos and Logos and aligning with the four Value Drivers, sellers can build trust, inspire action and drive meaningful outcomes. The integration of these elements further ensures that narratives are engaging, persuasive and buyer-centric. 

When working with a prospective customer, some of the elements of the story may be built on your pre-call research and your best educated guesses (which you’ll confirm along the way). When you are working with known customers, you should build your stories from confirmed information.  

To unlock the full potential of storytelling, sales organizations must invest in training and coaching that equips sellers with these skills. By embracing ethical, buyer-focused storytelling, sellers can transform the sales process into an even more meaningful exchange that benefits both buyer and seller alike. When done well, storytelling has the power to connect, persuade and inspire, making it one of the most valuable tools in a seller’s toolkit.