“A picture is worth a thousand words.” – Many People

This famous quote has been attributed to several people from Napoleon Bonaparte and Russian author Ivan Turgenev all the way back to the Godfather of Chinese proverbs, Confucius.

The premise is that a single picture can say as much as a considerable amount of text. (But for those that are long winded, don’t get too excited, it does NOT mean that 1001 words are better than any single picture!)

Here’s my slant on this old adage. An orally painted picture is worth more than any brochure or PowerPoint you could ever present.

“An orally painted picture?” What the heck is that!? It is an emotionally enhance visual that your prospect or customer develops as you descriptively tell them a story about how your product or service will save their world – or at least provide the solution to their dilemma.

Why is this important? Because many people make their purchases either emotionally or on a gut feeling. Also, if the person you are trying to sell needs time to review the information before making a decision, they will remember the emotional visual they had while meeting with you more strongly than the actual information that you shared.

So how do you orally paint a picture? The first three ingredients are passion, passion and passion. If you want to be a top-notch salesperson, unless you can passionately speak about your product or service, you may as well leave a brochure and go home.

Next, you need to lead them, or encourage them to create their visual picture. Something as simple as “How would your day look if…” is a great start to get the visual juices flowing. Once you have them visualizing your story, be sure to use visually descriptive words while telling your story.

When telling your story, and orally painting your picture, also try to use descriptive words that covers multiple senses. Your goal now is to paint a visual picture that also includes sounds, smells, touch/textures and tastes. Now every picture you paint may not include all five senses, but the more you can include, the more memorable it will be and the more emotion they may create.

Let me share with you a personal example of one of my most successful stories I’ve told. It may not be as effective in written form because you can’t see my passion and excitement while telling the story, but I’ll describe the details the best I can. This story wasn’t told to sell a product or service, but it sold me and my abilities to my boss well enough to get a promotion after only one year to a position that typically requires five years of service to attain.

The story is about a foul ball I caught at a Detroit Tigers baseball game. It was a scorching hot Saturday afternoon and three of my friends and I decided to take in a ball game. We got into the stadium and found our seats – facing smack dab right into the early afternoon sun! After a couple innings of sitting in the oven, we looked around to find some empty seats in the shade.

It was a pretty crowded game but we eventually found a few seats in the upper deck about halfway between third base and the outfield wall. In old Tiger Stadium, these seats were perfect as the roof overhang not only shaded us from the sun, but felt noticeably cooler.

On the way to our new seats, we stopped off at a vendor for a snack. My treat was a vanilla sundae with chocolate syrup and crushed nuts served in a miniature Tigers baseball helmet – perfect for cooling off on such a hot day!

Soon after we settled into our new seats and about half way through my tasty treat, with the pop of the bat, Tony Phillips sliced a towering foul ball in our general direction. In what seemed like slow motion, one-by-one, everyone jumped to their feet in anticipation the ball would land in their vicinity. As the ball
started its decent, we rose to our feet as it was coming right at us. As it got right above us everyone began reaching for the heavens for a chance of catching the prize!

So picture this…I’m leaning forward with my thighs pressed tight against the seat in front of me, my right hand is stretched up as high as I can push it and my left hand is deftly cradling my delicious treat up close around my chest. The ball drops and hits the fingertips of first my buddy, then me and the next thing I know, chocolate and ice cream is splattering all over my arm and face! I look down and discover that I “caught” that foul ball in the very helmet that once contained my sundae!

If you couldn’t tell from a couple of the Tiger references (Tony Phillips and Tiger Stadium), this story happened about 15 years ago. Some of the details are a little more fuzzy than they were the Monday after it happened while telling my boss, but five descriptive paragraphs paint a heck of a better picture of what happened than a couple sentences that anyone would forget about a minute after hearing it.

Your challenge now is to look at how you present your product and service and develop a way to present it, or part of it, with an emotion eliciting story that orally paints a picture that will stick with your prospect and compel them to buy from you.

Now Go Get ‘Em!!