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The Definitive Guide to Business Storytelling

Why is Business Storytelling Important?

For a business to progress and meet its goals, the people in that business need the right information. But more than that, they need to receive the information in a way that interests them and engages them. Projects, investments, risk management, and innovation are just some of the areas that can benefit. Data, insights, conclusions – all these need to flow naturally and productively from the people giving them to the people receiving them.

These notions are at the heart of business storytelling and storytelling in general. One way or another, storytelling affects almost everything that we do. After all, stories are part of our everyday lives. From talking about our activities and our days, watching the news on TV, listening to the radio, and reading blogs, articles, and books, stories are everywhere. They are how we interact with the world and with each other, at home, at work or anywhere else.

“Getting senior leadership attention and enabling the organisation to understand and manage the risks of achieving our objectives; for me SharpCloud is priceless.”

David Shipp
Network Rail

Stories and storytelling skills have been handed down from decade to decade, century to century. The ones that have left the biggest marks are the ones that have been the most gripping, the most entertaining, the most memorable, and the most inspiring. Good business storytelling is based on these qualities. It is one of the most powerful ways of focusing colleagues, partners, and customers on an objective or a need to act or change.

Take project or portfolio management, for example. Most people need more than a timeline and a spreadsheet to appreciate why it’s important to meet a target or change direction. Telling the right story around the planning and the figures can make the topic come alive for them. They feel involved. They feel that they have a stake in the outcome.

So, it makes sense to figure out what makes a great business story. To know what makes an audience pay attention. To understand what makes people want to retell and share a story, and what stays in their memory to guide them.

First things first. It’s not enough to just want to tell a story. It’s not even enough to just have something to say. For a business story to have real impact it must be built with the audience at the centre.

The 5 Fundamental Elements of a Great Business Story

Here are some of the crucial elements that make up a great story and will help any budding business storytellers on their way to success.

1

Use a big hook

Grab your audience’s attention immediately. An instant connection is very important. Think about your audience’s centres of interest and lock onto them. Then wake your audience up! For example, if you need to get your enterprise to take a new stance on innovation, you might start with a statistic that shows that businesses that are the most resilient are the ones that invent their own future. Or conversely, examples of those who didn’t innovate and didn’t survive!

2

Make it sticky

After you’ve grabbed their attention with your opening hook, you need to keep the interest of the people in your audience. Move towards your conclusion while sticking to their centres of interest. Remember also that the bigger your audience is, the more you’ll need to keep it simple. Without being condescending, make your story easy to understand, to digest, and to remember. If you’re showing how new product strategies compare in terms of risk, using simple “high-medium-low” ratings may be more effective than throwing out percentages to four decimal places.

3

Get Personal

Get your audience involved, personally. Find out about the challenges and aspirations of the different people listening to you before you start your business story. Then link your story to things that touch them individually. For instance, if you want to change the portfolio strategy of your company, sprinkle in some examples of positive impacts on parts of the business that they know and that are important to them personally. While business logic is essential for people to rationalise what they’re seeing and hearing, emotion is what will spur them to act.

4

Be truthful

Honesty is the best policy. Get the facts that support your story. Be prepared to back them up by stating your sources. Hearsay just isn’t enough and fictitious data is a no-no. Don’t skimp on the truth either. Your audience also needs to know all the main pros and cons, including how a decision in one domain can affect performance or operations in another.

5

Draw a conclusion

The people in your audience are not just there for a good time. They want a return on the time they spend listening to your story. Something they can act on or use. You might choose to make this a “takeaway”, such as a business lesson learned or a best practice for others to use. Or you could make it a recommendation or a call to action. Just make sure that at the end of your story, your audience knows why you told it and what you want to happen as a result.

All the above can be used as a simple and easy checklist for your next business presentation. Just because you’re talking business doesn’t mean you can’t tell a great story.

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Tell a Great Story... and Tell it Well

We’ve discussed the key elements of a great story. You know what you want to get across. Now you need to bring it to life – for both you and, most importantly, your audience. Here’s some advice.

Be prepared: Be clear on where you want to take your audience. You can be flexible about how you tell the story but map out the critical stepping stones and get comfortable with them before you meet your audience. If you have a colleague on whom you can rely to give you sincere, relevant, constructive feedback, try a practice session together to help your story be the best it can be when you tell it afterwards.

Find a model: If you are in an audience listening or watching a business story, take a moment to think about what you are hearing or seeing. Did it have a hook? Is it keeping your interest? Is it taking you on a useful journey? Pick out the things that are making those positive things happen. Whether it’s someone in your company, an article on the web, or a documentary on TV, see how they do it and use that information to your advantage!

Talk to the audience, not at them: Engage with your audience; look at them, make eye contact, survey the entire crowd. When people see that you are paying attention to them both individually and collectively, they will stay more focused on your story. Keep in mind that for a diverse audience, like a large audience, keeping your story simple is important.

Pace your story: You’re taking your audience on a journey when you tell them a business story. Keep the line taut. Don’t have all the excitement in the opening paragraph or leave all the best bits until the end. Make sure it’s engaging all the way the through – at each stage, keep them motivated to continue the journey with you.

Humour can be good: Making your audience laugh in a positive way can help lighten the atmosphere and engage people. Humour, if you use it, should be natural and appropriate – but avoid the temptation to turn your story into a standup comedy act! If humour isn’t your strong suit, don’t worry. Great stories can also work perfectly well without it.

Be confident: Confidence comes from preparation and practice. This is so important that we’ll say it again. Confidence comes from preparation and practice. If the thought of talking to a crowd makes you nervous (which is natural), then practice your story beforehand. Get your facts, your storyline, and your conclusion clear and familiar to you in advance, so that you have a solid base in front of your audience. And remember, your audience is giving up its time for you and wants you to succeed!

What role do Visual Elements Play in Storytelling?

We remember 30% of what we hear, but 80% of what we see.

A business story cannot consist of just talking. Visuals are key. However, the visuals cannot just be a script of the words you’re saying. That adds no value and does not engage an audience. You need to enhance what you’re saying and increase the audience’s ability to fully understand your ideas with well-chosen, relevant visuals.

When communicating complex data, such as a risk analysis or a sales forecast for example, it’s all too easy to just throw a graph, chart or list of numbers up on the screen, talk over the top of them and expect the people in your audience to do the work of joining the dots for you. But they won’t. You’ll quickly find yourself alone on your journey and that’s not good.

What’s needed is to bring relevant, ideally interactive visuals that are intuitively easy to understand. They need to live in harmony with the content of your story – not overpower it.

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Visuals communicate

Visuals instantly emphasise and help to communicate a point in a more powerful and accessible way.

Imagine you’re trying to communicate the relationship between two or more areas of a business. Perhaps how the impact of a project running behind schedule will affect the budget of another project and slow down the progression of another entirely different project.

Being able to display this visually, maybe with a static image like an infographic, will already help to clarify what you are presenting.

Better still would be an interactive visual - one that displays the high-level information of the three projects first, then allowing you to drill down and explore the relationships, but also letting you immediately return to your previous point and continue the journey.

Interactive visuals also free you from the constraints of linear presentations with their rigid, fixed sequences. Instead, you can respond and adapt to people’s interest and questions while you’re telling your story, taking your audience with you on a journey you ultimately define together.

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Studies show that when facts are presented in the form of a story, people are 22 times more likely to remember them.

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Nearly 9 out of 10 respondents surveyed said a strong narrative behind a presentation is critical in maintaining audience engagement

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65% of the population are 'visual learners,' meaning they learn and remember best through visual communication  

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Visuals keep things moving

Well-placed and thoroughly researched visuals that naturally reflect the agenda of your presentation help to keep the story moving. You can think of them as chapter headings, scenes or simply plot points.

Visuals engage

People can quickly become overloaded with blocks of spoken Information. Using visuals to break up large sections of speech, will help to keep an audience engaged – especially when used to simplify – or amplify – the message.

Visuals add credibility

Having an image to reiterate, confirm, or prove what you are saying is a very powerful aspect of storytelling and presenting.

Perhaps you’re trying to sell a product or service to a potential customer or introduce a new business plan to board members. Displaying evidence of past successes – a direct quote from a current customer, how a specific business thrived after adapting a new way of working, increased sales figures – as proof is invaluable.

“SharpCloud has helped us to save time and money and be more efficient in identifying achievable innovations, using this open channel of communication, collaboration and transparency.”

Michael Barry
BMT

How to Get Started with Storytelling

Keeping in mind everything covered in the previous sections of this eBook, it’s now time to start creating your first presentation using the principles of storytelling.

Below is a simple checklist to help get you started:

 

1

Decide what you want to talk about

2

Know what your point is

3

Do your research

4

Prepare your visuals

5

Be confident - remember, practice makes confident as well as perfect!

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