Effective Storytelling Techniques in Insurance Sales Presentations

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A great story pulls you in at the beginning, takes you through a few twists and turns, and gets you thinking at the end. Stories move us, which is why they’re such a valuable tool in insurance sales.

Insurance can be a dry topic. Would your prospects say your sales presentations are memorable?  

Jennifer Aaker, Stanford Marketing Professor, says research shows that stories are 22 times more memorable than facts alone. 

Storytelling sets the stage to build emotional connections and make complex solutions relatable. In this post, we’ll uncover the psychology behind storytelling, review the core elements of a compelling sales story, and provide tips on structuring stories for maximum impact. You’ll also learn about storytelling tools and how they work to tailor stories to your audience. Lastly, we’ll tip you off to some common storytelling mistakes salespeople make, and describe how to confidently deliver stories.

Shortcuts:

The Psychology Behind Storytelling in Insurance Sales

Core Elements of an Effective Insurance Sales Story

Yellow Pages Canada: The Transformation Story

Types of Stories That Work in Insurance Sales

Visual and Verbal Storytelling Tools

Common Mistakes to Avoid In Storytelling for Insurance Sales

Tips for Practicing and Delivering Stories Confidently

Drive Insurance Conversions With Effective Storytelling

The Psychology Behind Storytelling in Insurance Sales

Stories engage your audience emotionally and intellectually, particularly when you support them with facts and figures. While facts and figures give your story validity, it’s best not to overwhelm your audience with too many of them.

Stories Evoke Emotions

Imagine all the emotions you could evoke in your audience:

  • Anticipation 
  • Sadness
  • Frustration
  • Happiness
  • Surprise
  • Fear
  • Excitement
  • Calmness
  • Contentment

There are many more emotions than we listed here, but you get the picture. 

Stories Impact Cognition and Incite Trust

Stories activate multiple areas of the brain – cognitive, sensory, and emotional, which is why they get people thinking. Stories resonate with us, as they make information relatable and easy to understand.

The relatability factor of a story lowers your audience’s resistance and incites trust. 

Aaker also says stories are effective for marketing for three reasons:

  1. They shape how others see you, which influences whether they want to buy from you. 
  2. Listening is a form of power, making it an effective sales tool.
  3. Stories are persuasive, enabling you to effectively advocate for your ideas and motivate listeners to take action. 

Storytelling vs. Data-Laden Presentations

You want your audience to take valuable information away from your presentation. Yet, data-filled presentations can overwhelm the most attentive listener, causing them to disengage. 

That’s the last thing you want when you’re trying to make an insurance sale. When you tell stories in an informative and balanced way, it eases the decision-making process for your audience. 

The best approach is to consider the facts and statistics you want to use, and make sure they’re relevant to the sale. Keep this rule in mind, “When in doubt, leave it out”.

Core Elements of an Effective Insurance Sales Story

In an effective insurance sales story, the elements of character, conflict resolution, emotion, and transformation work together to intrigue your audience and compel them to action. 

Here’s how each functions:

Character

Every story needs a protagonist, who is the leading character. The protagonist in your story should reflect your ideal insurance customer. 

When it all comes together, your customers will envision themselves in the role of the protagonist, who gets the same or better outcome. 

Conflict

You could think of the conflict as the customer’s main pain point. What was it that got them to contact you? What product or service do you provide that could solve their problems?

A good insurance sales story frames the conflict so that it naturally leads to the value you bring to the table.

Resolution

The resolution in your story should depict how your product or service directly solved the customer’s problems. It’s the culmination of events that brings about a happy ending. 

Emotion

The customer should feel a sense of urgency at the start of the story. Your story should stimulate the customer’s emotions. Bring out the feels – frustration, optimism, relief, and hope. 

By the end of the story, the customer’s emotions should calm, and the solution should feel rewarding. 

Transformation

After the end of the story, take a minute to describe the scenario before the customer came to you and how their insurance changed things for the better afterward. 

A transformative section helps to wrap things up. When you sense the timing is right, go in for the close and sell it.

Yellow Pages Canada: The Transformation Story

Let’s look at a case study involving Yellow Pages Canada. 

The salespeople working for 411.ca were having trouble getting a second appointment with businesses to close deals. The low conversion rate was impacting their sales targets. 

Customers usually wanted the salesperson to send over a sales sheet before scheduling the second appointment, causing a delay in the sales process. Customers cooled off in the interim, causing salespeople to lose customers between the first and second calls. 

411.ca implemented CrankWheel’s screen sharing tool, which allowed them to share documents in real-time and close the deal on the first call. 

Mike Giamprini, Vice President of Strategy & Corporate Development, paints the picture of the transformation:

“Before using CrankWheel, we were a two-call-close business; getting prospects on the second call was painful. We needed to move the needle and make it a one-call-close business. It didn’t happen overnight: training the sales teams, building a culture around CrankWheel, with weekly KPIs, that made a huge difference. As part of that, we coined a phrase that said “sending ain’t selling”. You need to present it to them. That was a mantra.

The beauty of it is the simplicity. From onboarding to ensuring that sales and customer service agents used it every day. Once we started using it, we saw a turnaround in our business. Sales went up. 411.ca went from being a two-call close business to new customers saying yes in only one call, thanks to CrankWheel.”

See these other success stories of customers who used CrankWheel.

Types of Stories That Work in Insurance Sales

Before considering how to craft your story, you need to decide what kind of story you want to tell your insurance customers. 

Depending on the product or service you’re selling, one of the following types of stories may work for your sales teams:

Customer Success Stories

Think about who your happiest customers are. How can you describe their journey in an emotional way? How was your product or service the bridge to their success?

Origin Stories

How did your company or product get its start? An origin story presents the history of where it all began. Was it formed out of a need that had no solution? Was it the product of the owner’s dream? 

Your next customer may want to be part of your company’s journey after hearing how it got started. 

Vision Stories

What will your product or service do for your customers after they have it? How will it change their lives and make them happier? A vision story paints a picture of the life they could have once the sale is closed. 

Obstacle Stories

What challenges has your company overcome? Be transparent about them. 

Part of your company’s success story is how it has persevered despite hardships and challenges. Your customers will surely be impressed by your company’s resilience. It tells them the company will continue to grow and prosper in the future. 

Adjust the story’s tone and detail to the proper sales stage. Evoke the customer’s emotions in the early stages and focus more heavily on data and outcomes as the customer goes into the decision-making phase. 

Visual and Verbal Storytelling Tools

Visual and verbal tools can help bring your message to life. 

Slides aren’t intended to do all the talking for you. That said, you can use them effectively to reinforce the most important concepts you present. 

Use images, photos, and videos to add to your story. Metaphors and analogies can also simplify information, making it easier to understand. 

Here are some examples:

  • Metaphor: Insurance is like a safety net to catch you from falling if you have a catastrophe, such as a home fire. 
  • Analogy: An umbrella policy covers your underlying home and auto policies, much like an umbrella protects you from the rain. 

In addition to what you’re showing your customers, be aware of how you present your story to your clients. Your tone should match the emotion in your story. You shouldn’t be smiling if it starts out sad, but you’ll want to sport a giant grin for the win at the end. 

Keep in mind that momentum is key to storytelling. If you’re having to pause your story because a client has trouble seeing your visuals, it can derail the entire effort! Use tools like CrankWheel to bring your story to life, without having to have your prospect download and install a clumsy application. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid In Storytelling for Insurance Sales

Without realizing it, common storytelling mistakes can undermine your impact. You can get into the weeds with a story by losing the story’s focus, focusing on yourself, being impersonal, and sounding disingenuous. 

 Here are some ways to keep your stories on point:

  • Maintain your focus: Don’t overcomplicate the story and risk the customer getting lost in the details. Keep it simple, clear, and centered on the transformation. 
  • Make the customer the hero: Take yourself out of the spotlight. Highlight the customer’s journey using your product or service as the ultimate solution. 
  • Be mindful of the customer’s emotions: Refrain from relying too heavily on facts without regard to how your customer feels.
  • Tell the story with genuine intent: Customers can sense if your story sounds insincere or salesy. Use a conversational tone, everyday language, and believable characters. This approach will help maintain your credibility. 

The stories that sell combine emotion and insight while focusing on the customer’s transformation. 

Tips for Practicing and Delivering Stories Confidently

Successful insurance salespeople know how to confidently deliver their sales pitch while sounding natural. 

Don’t try to memorize a script word for word. You’ll likely end up stumbling over your words and getting lost in your presentation. 

Use your slides to help keep you on track. As you move to the next slide, focus on the most important concepts you’re trying to portray. The key is to hit the highlights, just as you would in having a conversation with anyone about the same topic. 

Pause naturally to allow the customer to ask questions or make comments. Keep it conversational. Keep bringing the topic back to the customer’s needs and pain points. 

Here are some other tips to enhance your storytelling:

  • Maintain eye contact with all participants
  • Use inclusive language
  • Personalize your comments
  • Encourage interaction
  • Ask questions where appropriate
  • Take note of the “aha moment”

With CrankWheel’s screen sharing solution, you can encourage interaction by giving the prospects remote control of the slides. You can also share documents to get signatures during the appointment to close the deal. 

Lastly, test your story with people you know. You may just make a client out of them. 

Excellent salespeople know how to strike a balance between knowing their script without sounding rehearsed or robotic. 

Drive Insurance Conversions With Effective Storytelling

The perfect insurance sales engagement strategy includes storytelling.

Trust is the key to a longstanding business relationship. When customers can connect with you and whatever you’re selling, your conversions will increase. 

When you can tell an impactful story well, it transforms abstract features into real-world benefits. Passive, bored listeners become engaged prospects as they begin to relate and envision themselves in a similar story. 

When you incorporate relatable characters, a clear structure, and move their emotions, your message automatically becomes memorable and persuasive. 

Start with one story to prevent being overwhelmed. Your goal should be to build a story bank, which is essentially a collection of customer success stories, origin tales, and stories that helped your customers overcome challenges using your products or services. 

Draw from these stories and keep modifying them to suit your audience. You’ll always have a good story to tell. 

Try adding just one new storytelling technique, and watch how it changes the energy of your presentation. With the right intentions and a little practice, storytelling will soon become one of your greatest talents. 

CrankWheel’s screen sharing tool and its many features make a great companion to your storytelling expertise. Start your free trial of CrankWheel today and see for yourself how it can take your insurance sales presentations to the next level.