Are you effectively using stories for selling your LNC services?
You’ve just finished reading a set of medical records and you think about the story they reveal. Do you ever have trouble sleeping after you read about a person who suffered? I do.
One of my coaching clients has an opportunity to work on a pediatric case. I think about some of the pediatric cases I have worked on:
- A child who drank caustic fluid at the hair dressers because the cabinet was not locked
- A child who became quadriplegic in a car crash
- Two children who were burned when the stove tipped over and poured boiling water on them
- A baby who was brain damaged at birth due to a ruptured uterus
- A child who had a heart tumor that was missed
There are stories in all kinds of cases. In my previous blog post I shared an example of using a story to prevent incompatible blood transfusions.
Stories in Every Case
A lot of legal nurse consultants work on personal injury and medical malpractice cases, but there are stories in every type of litigation. Think of these as you use stories for selling your services.
The defective product that is used by an uninformed consumer is a story. The factory that pumps toxic chemicals into the air for 25 years and a person ends up living in a neighborhood where there is a very high rate of lung cancer – there’s a story there. The CEO who knows that a drug is potentially defective but there’s so much money invested in pumping a new drug out onto the market – there’s a powerful incentive to hide those results.
Know, Like, Trust
Attorneys connect with legal nurse consultants when they know, like and trust them. That know, like and trust factor is the central point of every online interaction, and every in-person interaction. It’s the basis of creating relationships that pay you for a long time.
Every preacher who stands in front of his church on Sunday mornings is building a know, like and trust with that congregation. It’s one of the reasons he has the Sunday night dinners, the Saturday afternoon events or whatever it is to create that know, like and trust. He’s not necessarily getting money out of that, but he’s getting paid.
We all get paid in different ways. The key to know, like and trust factors is to be able to walk people through a process where attorneys absolutely relate to you. They relate to you because you empathize with them and that’s the trick in story telling –it is persuasive story telling.
Stories for Selling Your LNC Services
You’re telling a story to make a point that you understand their situation. You know their needs, which you address through your services. By sharing a story about a similar case, you show your expertise and experience. You then turn it around to offer your services – to be the solution for the attorney.
People have always loved stories, but too many business leaders and entrepreneurs fail to take advantage of this guaranteed way to win clients’ and customers’ hearts and minds.
Do you want to drive home a point? Make your content easy to understand? Provide a model of new behavior? Make a sale? Tell a story.
You don’t need to write or tell a literary classic. Your story needs a personal focus and the ability to evoke an emotional response that leads to identification with the writer. It can be simple.
Interested in learning more about using stories for selling your services?
Once upon a time . . .
As an expert medical witness, I had to convey to juries the pain and suffering a victim of medical malpractice experienced. I integrated the storytelling skills I developed in my career as an editor, ghostwriter, writing coach, and the author of more than 60 books.
In addition, I interviewed storytelling experts with their own perspective on the art of telling a story and assembled their collective wisdom in Powerful Storytelling in Business: How to Captivate Your Clients.
In this book, you’ll learn how to:
• Tell stories about your experiences while keeping the focus on your audience,
• Show your learning points by engaging your audience with a memorable story instead of boring them with a recitation of dry facts,
• Increase your ability to persuade others through a variety of story frameworks,
• Practice studying the construction of these frameworks through spotting them in the stories included in the book,
• Outline your stories so that you can make sure you’ve constructed them in a way that makes your message clear and powerful,
• Make your stories more powerful by weeding out redundant and weak words in your stories, adding emotions, and appealing to the senses,
• Collect useful stories from your family history, your life, sources like Reader’s Digest, People magazine, and newspaper and online sources.
When you become comfortable with writing and sharing stories, you enjoy watching people lean in to hear more, and you appreciate fan messages. You realize the power of stories to changes lives.