Storytelling Outcomes influence Post Sale Customer Expectations

Storytelling outcomes influence post-sale customer expectations about long-term experiences with products, services and solutions. In addition, the stories you tell impact investor, customer, and co-worker expectations of how it is going to be: working with you, yourself.

Is there an experience gap between pre-sale promises and post-sale customer and co-worker experiences?

Consider the length of duration of storytelling outcomes.

When storytelling outcomes are based on job function, the stories you tell have a short duration. You only know what you know. Do your stories stop once you throw a signed contract over the wall to the next functional department in charge of handling that customer?

What happens next? Not your job, so you do not care? C’mon, you are better than that.

Realistically, an army of often nameless, faceless colleagues exist in your organization. Functionally, these colleagues are responsible for customer success and retention throughout each customer’s lifecycle. Purposefully, their stories have a far longer duration, and bigger long-term consequences, than the pre-sale stories you tell.

Ultimately, the outcomes and experiences your post-sale colleagues implement are interconnected with the pre-sale customer expectations you create. Consider the value of connecting your stories to one another.

Customers expect their post-sale experiences will be impacted by the quality of how well pre-sale storytelling outcomes are connected to post-sale outcomes.

While everyone in your organization thinks they do a great job communicating storytelling outcomes to customers, that customer remains the true judge of how well all of you deliver. Often, the best way to influence post-sale customer expectations of, and experiences with, your deliverables is by connecting your stories to one another.

1. When employees connect “what they do” to “what everyone else does” in serving customers, you expand the duration of the stories you tell and outcomes you produce.
2. Creating storytelling continuity impacts both employee and customer pre-sale and post-sale expectations and experiences.
3. When these stories become the common thread across the organization, holes are poked in functional silos.
4. In better serving each other, you and your colleagues better serve your customers.

Consider the efficiency, value and credibility of co-creating storytelling outcomes which connect employee stories throughout your organization or association. Then, take the next steps.

• Planning your next corporate or association meeting? Engage me to present one of my Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers speaking programs, workshops or moderated facilitation services. Contact me here. 
• Download my new checklist and worksheet: Six Professional Development Targets to Hit each Month.
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Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling Programs leverage storytelling for STEM professionals and left brain thinkers to catalyze employee and customer success and retention. She motivates individuals and teams to combine courage, curiosity and critical thinking skills to co-create compelling stories which inspire trust in one another. Especially in industries with STEM and left-brain stakeholders.

Find out more about Babette’s professional story here. Babette is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of communication hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Babette’s speaker profile is on the espeakers platform. Contact Babette here.

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