Toshiba puts dealers in the director’s chair with its StoryTeller presentation platform.
Luck favors the prepared, the adage goes. When the global pandemic hit, every company in the industry knew their top priority would be finding ways to maintain a connection with the clients that they could no longer meet with in person. FaceTime is no replacement for actual face time, and the rapport between rep and client—in many cases the result of years of hard work and outreach—was suddenly at risk of blowing away like so many discarded face masks.
In times of crisis, it pays to be forward-thinking. While other brands did their best with slide decks and Zoom calls, Toshiba expanded the adoption of a software solution it already had in development before the pandemic spread worldwide. StoryTeller, Toshiba’s web-based platform for building sales presentations, has turned out to be the perfect communication tool for, as seemingly every headline reminds us, times like these.
“I don’t want to call it luck,” said Bill Melo, Toshiba America Business Solutions’ vice president of marketing. “I don’t think anyone would call the situation we’re in lucky, but it is good that we had the platform already baked as this stuff came into being.”
T.J. DeBello, vice president of marketing for Stargel Office Solutions in Houston, Texas, is grateful for the fortuitous timing in any case.
“It’s funny, it’s one of those things we saw right before the pandemic, and all of a sudden the pandemic happens and we’re trying to figure out how to do a Zoom call and all the other stuff, and it just fell in our laps with perfect timing.”
DeBello’s dozen-plus team of sales reps all switched to using StoryTeller as their main presentation tool, and even in remote meetings, the advantage is clear.
“We actually got feedback from one of the clients we were meeting with,” said DeBello. “She had gone from having a Zoom meeting with a competitor to us, and she complimented us on how much more professional we were. Part of that was because we used StoryTeller, and the other ones didn’t.”
StoryTeller is essentially an online asset library with fully produced videos, animations, slide templates, and other resources that have all been created and polished by Toshiba’s marketing team. A user at a dealership drops assets into a timeline just like someone might rearrange slides in PowerPoint, customizes on-screen text, pops in their company logo, and StoryTeller creates a cohesive, cinematic presentation that can be viewed online, downloaded as a video file, or exported to other presentation formats such as PowerPoint or PDF. With a regularly updated asset library that ranges from full video product tours to deep-dives into specific technical features, StoryTeller lets any dealership, no matter how small, generate professional-looking presentations that feel more like a slick TV commercial than an ordinary slide deck.
Developing a tool like StoryTeller—let alone the assets that go into it—was no small undertaking, but Melo sees it as a vital part of making sure Toshiba continues to lead in an ever-more-competitive market.
“We had to be more contemporary,” said Melo. “This notion of storytelling is really what we find to be the most effective way of communicating information, which is not running on about facts and specs, but giving a prospective client a quick and impactful idea of how we can help them, in a way that’s entertaining.”
It’s an undeniable trend across the industry: Sales conversations are getting more complex. Part of that is just that technology itself is naturally becoming more complex, and markets are getting larger. At the same time, clients are becoming more sophisticated and well-informed, which puts pressure on sales reps at dealerships like Stargel to stay ahead of the game.
“We’ve seen over the last five years or so that it’s important to make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date because they’ll look you up,” said Stargel’s DeBello. “The clients come in probably 70% down the road already. You’re just trying to get them across the finish line. It makes it a bit harder because if they feel like they’ve already done their research, then it becomes more of a commodity conversation, more about price versus value.”
The value aspect, for DeBello, comes back into the fore when the client meeting becomes human-centric again. While competitors might just make do with audio-only calls, DeBello insists that all his reps turn on their cameras for every meeting with clients, showing their faces and making the meeting more social and more fun. StoryTeller encourages this kind of engagement because it’s a more cinematic experience, with music and lush production values that, as DeBello can attest, makes meetings interactive and enjoyable.
“We didn’t just want it to look like a PowerPoint,” said Toshiba’s Melo. “People like seeing big, beautiful pictures and moving images. It’s aimed at being visually impactful and helping a sales rep tell their story quickly and effectively.”
Much like the Toshiba solutions reps are selling to clients, the magic of StoryTeller happens under the surface, thanks to a development focus on user-friendliness for presentation creator and audience alike.
“Motion is much more attention-grabbing than static imagery, but trying to embed a video into a PowerPoint is clunky at best, and it’s not very transportable either,” said Melo. “We wanted visually sophisticated material that was easy to use, and bandwidth-friendly too. The last thing you want to do is have this great-looking presentation that hiccups or gets stuck. And that always seems to happen!”
Toshiba based StoryTeller’s interface on one already familiar to most people, especially in the era of everyone sitting at home, streaming media from their couches: Netflix. Multimedia assets appear as thumbnails in the library, previewable, draggable, and editable.
“We have a tutorial online, but most people don’t need it,” said Melo. “It’s very intuitive.”
DeBello agreed and noted that it wasn’t just the younger members of his team adapting to StoryTeller easily, but even his more old-school reps who may have gotten their starts when slide decks really did use slides.
“I thought it was very simple,” said DeBello, “A typical PowerPoint presentation, it can take you a few hours to get something down. But literally, if you need to throw this together in 15 minutes before a presentation, you can definitely do that.”
Though Melo insists that Toshiba wasn’t predicting the future when the company decided to develop a tool perfectly adapted to remote sales meetings, he does take pride in how well StoryTeller is suited to the current business world.
“Any time the apple cart gets upset, there are winners and losers, and I think that’s especially true in our business because one of the things that’s undoubtedly going to change is what the office looks like and who shows up, and that’s where we make our money,” said Melo. “There’s going to be big winners and losers, and hopefully, we’re on the right side of that.”
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