
Oftentimes, the decision to purchase a home is driven by emotions. In the sales process, tapping into a prospective buyer’s emotions to understand motivation for moving as well as necessary elements of the home can help differentiate and enhance the sales experience. “Storygetter,” the new book from Ryan Taft, a certified trainer with Shore Consulting, highlights the importance of curiosity in the sales process. In the book, Taft discusses how curiosity can be leveraged to build deeper relationships and earn more sales.
BUILDER spoke with Taft to discuss the inspiration for the book, the role of curiosity in the sales process, and how getting stories is an invaluable tool for any salesperson. Some responses are lightly edited for length.
Can you share the inspiration behind “Storygetter,” as well what readers can expect to take away from the book?
I’ve been hearing for my whole career that people buy emotionally. I believe that to be true. The problem is that most of the trainings I’ve ever been in and most of the stuff I’ve attended were as far away from what the buyer’s emotion actually was and more [focused] on what I can sell them. Or it was about how to fabricate some sort of emotion or trick them into emotion or get them to agree to the emotion you wanted them to have. That always felt kind of icky to me. I knew there was a gap there.
[The inspiration for the book] goes back to 2015 when we did a sales leadership summit in Chicago. Jeff Shore and I were in the airport waiting for our respective flights back home. There was a group of veterans sitting on the opposite side of a planter in the American Airlines lounge goofing around and joking. All of a sudden, they started to cry, and the tone of the group shifted. What triggered that was they were telling stories about one of their buddies who didn’t make it out of Desert Storm. It reminded me of an uncle that I had who was a World War II veteran, and we had a rule in our house when he came to visit that we didn’t ask about the war. It would trigger all of the emotions. That really was the inspiration for the idea of how emotion is uncovered in the sales process.
[Often] when you go into a sales environment, you have a game plan of how to get away because we’re afraid they are going to use manipulation techniques on us. Salespeople do that, not just in new homes but in sales in general. It’s what got taught for years. I looked at that example in the airport and thought, ”How did we get to such an emotional shift from joking around to crying in a public space?” It was through the telling of stories. I’ve been telling people for years that if I could re-title their jobs from “new-home counselor” or “sales counselor,” I’d title it “professional storygetter.” Then the inspiration for the book came, and I knew it needed to be on curiosity, because I believe curiosity is the best skill you can develop in life in general, not just in sales. Then the title hit me: ”Storygetter.” That’s how you get emotion. When people retell their stories, they time-travel and go back to those times. If you ask enough questions, you literally relive those moments, and, when you relive it, you refeel those emotions from it. That’s where those emotions are hitting. Stories, it’s why we watch movies, it’s why we read books, it’s why we do this, because it elicits emotion. I just saw a big need and a gap. Everyone says people buy emotionally, but nobody was really getting to it.
Why is curiosity one of the most important sales skills in today’s housing environment?
In “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Dale Carnegie says to be interesting you first have to be interested. He talks about putting your attention on other people. He says it’s one of the most basic human needs that we desire: attention and connection from other people. So much so that if you don’t get it, you will create an alternate fictitious personality. It’s such a huge need, but the problem I’ve seen is that even though technology is great, you just watch people at the airport and everybody is buried in their phone. You’re seeing people even in your own household texting and ignoring their spouses. The person who can actually give their attention through curiosity—genuine curiosity—that fills a need that’s probably not being filled anywhere else. That’s the first aspect of it.
The other aspect of it is this. When you look at what’s going on in the world right now as far as reasons not to purchase. We look at interest rates freaking people out. You’ve got war, another war, an election year. All of these things are causing people to say maybe I shouldn’t do this. But on the opposite side of why not to buy are the emotional reasons to purchase. I believe that people don’t stop their lives because interest rates are looming near 8%. On one hand, the world is saying don’t buy anything. On the other hand, their life is saying I need to move. The salesperson who is curious is able to unpack what that mission is, that motivation, that story that counters why they wouldn’t move. If they don’t get that, then they wind up in a conversation about payment, price, [and] interest rates. It’s focused on the cost and fear of things. What you focus on gets magnified. Curiosity gets the emotional reasons to move. So it’s arguably one of the best skills right now.
How does an approach of leading with curiosity differ from traditional sales practices that are taught?
All of [the questions sales professionals are typically taught to ask] are focused on where the buyer is moving to and what they want. So, it’s very product focused and what can I sell you. It’s very transactional, there’s no emotion in that. When someone says three bedrooms—they’ve never said I need three bedrooms and gone into emotion. It’s a non-emotional question and a non-emotional conversation. But people buy emotionally.
When we look at it, we ask [about] your story, why are you looking at moving? Out of all the things you could be doing today, you came here. Why is now the time? They’ll say they’re renting, and you’ll see this facial expression happen. You might say, “You’ve been renting for a while, did something happen specifically recently?” [The customer will say], “Well, my landlord is a jerk.” Now all of a sudden, we’ve got characters. The beginning of a story. Now you get the scene: ”Well, what did your landlord do?” What happens is that the retell, relive, refeel concept comes in. “Well, last Thursday, he came in unannounced. My wife was getting out of the shower, and she freaked out. Now she wants me to put a restraining order on him.” The more they talk about it, the more they feel it. Which illustrates why it’s so important to be curious. If they don’t tell the story, we don’t tend to see the emotion.
How can sales professionals convey genuine curiosity?
I say this in the book a lot: It’s not about you. That’s the hardest thing. … The secret to this whole thing is to realize it isn’t about you. You have one of two mindsets going into a sales conversation: You’re either on a customer mission, or you’re on your commission. One of them will sound like a sales conversation, the other one will sound like you’re genuinely interested and curious. It begins with that mindset right out of the gate.
You could start out great with a curious mindset. But you really need to practice that, and you need to practice it not being about you when you’ve got the pressure on. When you’ve gone three weeks without a sale and your manager calls and says, “What’s going on?” [In that situation], we move away from curiosity, and we move toward commission breath (what can I sell you, here’s what we have, these are our discounts, etc.). Having these conversations that people don’t want to have, that's why they're called pushy salespeople.

What is your message to someone who does not want to change their approach because they have had success with the approach they have been taught?
New homes are an interesting animal because, depending on the market, you might make sales in spite of yourself. When it comes to it being a difficult market, we find that the downside of “what I’ve been doing has been working” might be true, you may be making a ton of sales. But what I would look at is the holistic experience. It’s not just how good it is for me as a salesperson, what I’m looking at is how good of an experience it was for the customer. … Going back to that need to have attention and connection with other people and knowing that is diminished with texting and technology, you will have better retention of your customer when times get tough. I look at this and say if I put my curiosity on you and genuinely want to know your story and be on your mission, then what happens when the storms hit—markets are tough, interest rates go up, there’s a challenge with your close of escrow—the curiosity helps build that relationship. It’s like watering deep roots. If I know your story and know your mission, all of my communication is about you and how I can serve that via getting your stories. Then what happens is every time I do that, without the intention to do it, that’s like deep watering, and now we have a relationship. The better the relationship, the deeper the roots, the more storms we can weather.
Your book discusses the “art and science” of emotional purchases. Can you unpack both aspects of emotional purchases?
It’s one thing to say I do this in my normal life without scripting, without practicing. The art of that is really about how do you find your authentic voice and how do you not sound scripted. I’m not a script guy. I think people’s BS radar is so in tune to inauthenticity, and they don’t want that. They want [an] authentic voice, they want a human being talking to them, not someone to pitch them a script. If you’re 17 years old and you’re a telemarketer and you have no communication skills, you probably need a script. At this level, with this important of a purchase, I want to know I’ve got someone on the other side who gets me and understands me. There’s an art to that where you need to find your authentic voice. It can’t be told to me, it’s something that I have to find my style.
The science part of the emotional purchase is a little bit different. To be able to show that people do in fact buy emotionally and how that emotion actually works. There’s some studies in the book that talk about this and the reason people buy certain things. There’s always a “why” behind the “what.” In the book I talk about when I was a kid how the Night Stalker was this big story. One of the victims was 20 minutes away from my house. I was 9 years old and remember that being a big thing, and I went out and bought epoxy and glued all of the windows shut. I was terrified, and years later I decided to get into tactical training, home defense. When people asked why I was doing this, I didn’t have an answer. Then it hit me: I had major things happen in my life that made me think I should probably get good at protection.
Can you talk about customer communication clues, how they may manifest, and what to do once you have identified them?
My dad was an actor, and he would host acting classes in our living room when I was a kid. He would talk about characters and how a character would act and move. As I started to get into coaching and training, what I noticed was that buyers would do something when there was something emotional. I call them customer communication clues because they are very slight and most people miss them. The reason most people miss them is because they are too busy thinking about their next question. They are focused on themselves versus paying attention. If you ask a customer why they are thinking of moving and if they say they are downsizing and you see a little crunch in their face, that’s a clue that there is probably something wrong with what’s going on with where they are now. I believe the root word of emotion is motion. It could be body language movement, or sometimes it’s a tonality shift. I’m paying attention to see where there’s a notifiable shift in volume, pacing, tonality, body language. The other [clue] is words. When someone says, “My home is a little too small,” most salespeople will go, “OK, so a big home is important to you.” They have no idea what they are talking about. One of the clues is when you hear words and don’t know their definition. Those are the communication clues where the story lives. That’s what I look for.
How do you navigate an environment where buyers are increasingly educated and informed entering a sales situation?
I don’t even go to a restaurant without looking at the menu online. There’s a really good chance I already know what I’m going to order before I walk through the door. I think that the question is this: Do you think new-home salespeople are going to be necessary in the future? We’re looking at AI and virtual reality and all these tools. My answer is it depends. Are you an information-getting salesperson? Bedroom count [and] timeframe? Or are you a storygetting salesperson who connects to the emotion and gets on that buyer’s mission? One is far more valuable than the other in my opinion. I could put an iPad on a table and get your bedroom count, timeframe, etc. It could calculate it and say “second model, go look at it.” If people buy emotionally, that’s the benefit and the reason why being curious is so important. They don’t want to tell you their story, they think you are going to be pushy. But when you actually show them that it’s about them and not about you and you are genuinely curious, they open up and share their story with you. I think people do want to tell their story, I think they are just waiting for someone to actually be genuinely interested in it.
How can leading with curiosity undo some of the stereotypes people have about the typical sales experience?
I teach people to tell people that it’s going to be a different experience. You can tell, a buyer will walk in and start to answer the questions they know you’re going to ask. “Our timeframe is this, our budget is this, can we just go see your model?” They are anticipating it because if you’ve already had three or four interactions that feel the same, it’s like Groundhog Day. I believe that there is an opportunity to say, “You look like you’ve seen a bunch of homes and talked to a bunch of salespeople. We do things radically different. Instead of figuring out what to sell you, we’d like to get on your mission and figure out how we can serve. To do that, we’ve got a couple of quick questions to figure out how we can come alongside that. Is it alright if I ask a few questions? I want to know your story.” Already that feels different. There are too many competing factors. If I am selling in a master-planned community, what is the differentiator? You have a flag pole in front of your model complex, I have a flag pole. You have a parking lot, I have a parking lot. You have models, I have models. You have a name badge, I have a name tag. It’s too similar. The experience is what helps differentiate that. I have no problem saying this is going to be different right out of the gate.
I do believe one of the most important things you can do is connect. I think the pandemic has screwed this up a little bit. Instead of saying, ”Great weather out there” and assuming that you’ve connected with them because you’ve talked about the weather for 10 seconds, I would argue that people are only going to share stories with people they actually like first—not trust first. Being interested, not interesting, is the key to that. … My advice is for people to have a dozen go-to questions to figure out some sort of commonality or that I can learn from you.
What is the starting point to becoming a storygetter?
It’s really a mindset, too. I talk in the first chapter about killing sacred cows. I got taught manipulation like crazy when I first got started. It was all about how to manipulate people and how to create emotion. That mindset of it’s not about you is really crucial. That’s one piece. The second part of it is we want [salespeople] to be thinking that if you had to choose one side or the other of what the customer is moving to or what they are coming from. We would argue that what they are coming from is more important for one reason: People buy emotionally. Where is the emotion easier to access, in imagination or memory? The answer is memory. I don’t have to contemplate what it would be like, I’ve already lived it, I just have to access it. If I can get you to focus more on what they are coming from and not what they are going to, that’s half the battle.
What is another element of “Storygetter” that is important for readers to understand?
Interestingly enough, I didn’t think about how this would be one of the biggest chapters in the book. It’s the chapter on closing that I didn’t anticipate to be the lengthiest chapter. The reason it’s the longest chapter is because what I’ll see happen is people will be curious and they’ll be interested and they’ll get stories, but then when it comes to asking a buyer to make a purchase decision, oftentimes I’ll see people yield. The point I make in the book is what is the point of getting all these stories and the customer mission if you’re not going to ask for the sale. If I find out your mission and why you’re moving, it fuels me to want to help you. The way I help you is to ask you to purchase. That was maybe one of the more surprising things. This is a book on how to get more sales. The subtitle is “How to leverage the power of curiosity to make more sales and build deeper relationships.” That’s something that people need to get from this. Storygetting is about getting more sales, which in turn improves more lives. I believe that to be true, and I’ve seen it play out.