Best storytelling template for B2B sales and fundraising

If I am making a sales presentation, this is my favourite storytelling template. If I am making an investor pitch, I still prefer this many times. This template works.

What is the 'customer story' template?

A real customer story is the base of this template. Pick a customer who has purchased your service. Build the story (and the pitch) around that company.

Here is an example. Let us assume your company makes apps for schools. App which helps the school with its ERP and Accounts. This is how you can start your presentation:

• Elantris International is a school in Chennai which has 3,000 students across 2 campuses.
• They were having lots of problems when it came to ERP and Accounts. Fees reconciliation was a huge pain point. Collection, tally and reminders were manual. Even salary payments to teachers, drivers, staff and vendors was being handled manually.
• Overall, the school was wasting a lot of time and resources and was worried about wrong payments and delayed tuition fee receipts.
• Elantris tried our app.
• We installed the ERP and accounts solution within 4 weeks by tweaking our existing application to suit their needs. This installation is super quick because any other competitor would have taken 8-12 weeks!
• We did not even charge the client for the installation. We only take money on actual usage.
• We provided the finance team with a desktop version with dashboard and notifications
• Every stakeholder now has an app access too
• The time taken to handle fee collection, reconciliation and reminder is down 80% as the app highlights all discrepancies and sends auto alerts to the finance team and auto reminders to parents.
• We are able to offer benefits of time and cost saving through automation because we have a lean software in the cloud which can be easily tweaked for each school
• We charge the school on a software as a service model (SaaS). They pay INR 100 per student per month.

Using just one example, of a good client where you have delivered a lot of value, you can build an effective presentation. You can use this 'customer story' template for a B2B sales pitch and an investor pitch.

Why does this storytelling template work?

Because, it makes your pitch easy to understand and credible. The two things that you need the most when 'selling' anything to a stranger - comprehension and trust.

Instead of saying, 'you sell ERP software to schools' and talking about the features, you 'show' what exactly you do. You help the audience visualise the customer, their problem, your solution and the benefit. Everything becomes easy to understand. And because you use a real name, you also build trust.

Have you tried this template before? What has been your experience? If you want to use this template, what concerns and doubts do you foresee?