The Story

In 2014, Mike Adams co-founded a business consulting company with Sue Findlay and David Black. Our objective, vaguely stated, was to solve the unprofessional mess that is the sales ‘profession’. We wanted to see if we could get salespeople to say the right thing.

We tried all sorts of services; conversation skills training, prospecting skills training, voice tone training, sales strategy consulting and even CRM software consulting…

The results were underwhelming. A post service six-month check was all it took to see that our impact had been minimal. Our students reported that our programs had been ‘enjoyable’ and ‘valuable’ but skill retention and recurring benefit was not apparent. Some even reported on things we hadn’t even taught!

Then in late 2015, we narrowed our focus to teaching storytelling. Mike had told and taught many stories in his sales career and they’d had incredible power but we hadn’t considered storytelling as the primary service.

The results were amazing! The follow-up six-month check revealed that the stories were remembered and they were doing important work. We started hearing how stories were winning deals. It turns out that storytelling is the perfect intervention for sales teams

It wasn’t just salespeople reporting success. Our public story workshops were attended by technical and professional service people and storytelling was just as effective for them!

In 2019, Mike joined Anecdote, the world’s largest business storytelling consultancy to drive their sales program. Anecdote’s mission is to bring humanity back to business conversations with story work.

Today Mike’s sales story techniques are driving sales in some of the world’s largest corporations including Allianz, Generali, AMEX, Waste Management, Teradata and Gartner.

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