Business Storytelling: Four Practical Tips
This is Part 2. These are tips and tools that I've found helpful.
Previously we talked about professional storytelling. Here, we’ll steal ideas from the professionals and give you four practical tips for business storytelling.
First, use more examples1.
Examples are are great way to infuse mini-stories into your presentations. They bring life and add color to the presentations. They are easier to remember. They also encourage much more interaction and engagement— people know how to interact with stories than with generalities.
Most people are too hesitant to use examples in there presentations.
Examples come in many flavors. Here are some good ones from my recent time at Coupa.
An example can be a very short story.
When we were talking about our technology to find duplicate invoices, we used this short story: “At one large CPG customer, we found a duplicate invoice of $1.5 million within a few weeks of going live with Spend Guard. And, this invoice had already been approved through their previous processes.”
This short story was a better way to say that customers found good value and that our AI technology could find duplicate invoices that current processes missed.
An example can also show sample data to make the problem real.
If you have a large list of merchants in your business expense system, it a hard problem to figure out which ones are the same. To highlight the problem, we gave the following example of how “Uber” shows up in the database when it is coming from multiple systems and is also manually entered:
"uber trip tnla7 help.u"
"uber us jan30 abtod"
"uber technologies"
"uber trip"
"uber"
“uber eats”
This is like a mini-story: “wow, here is how people describe Uber and we have to sort this out.” It makes you feel like you are the bottom of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s graphs.
I would encourage you to use as many examples as possible.
Second, get to your examples quickly.
The book Storyworthy strongly encourages you to minimize (or skip) the introduction. I’ve noticed that Ted Talks do this too. Just get to the story. Get to the good examples. Long introductions kill business storytelling.
Third, make your charts into mini-stories.
I highly recommend storytelling with data. In a future post on visualization, I’ll come back to this this book.
Since so many business presentations show data and charts, it is worth some tips on how to make these charts come alive and tell a mini-story. This 5-minute YouTube interview gives three good highlights from the book:
Know your audience.
Use a lot of gray scale and use color to point the audience where you want them to look. Use colors sparingly and set up contrasts. This is using good design techniques to have the data start to tell the story.
Use words— the data doesn’t just speak for itself. We often think that just showing the data is enough. If we add the right words to the chart, it really helps turn it into a story.
Here is an example from her website showing a before and after:
Fourth, use the Challenger Model2— or at least what I think the Challenger Model is.
This is a good way to tell a more comprehensive business story. The tips above help can make any presentation or meeting better. The Challenger Model gives you a formula for telling a business story that closely follows Vonnegut’s “Man in the Hole” arc3.
The idea is that you start with the overall situation, how that situation is different, and its problems. You follow that with how the current processes won’t resolve the situation (this is the low point of the hole). Then, to climb out of the hole and give hope, you talk about what new capabilities are needed. And, finally, you can talk about your ideas for bringing those capabilities.
I think it is a much easier way to construct a business story— much easier than fitting your story to the professional storytelling narratives.
Since this idea came from people involved with Coupa’s Supply Chain Design and Planning solution4, I’ll use that as an example:
The start- slipping into the hole: The pandemic exposed the fragility and complexities of supply chains. In reality, this problem has only been growing and will continue to grow with natural disasters and political disruptions.
Falling deeper into the hole: The current process of modeling and designing your supply chain once every few years (or worse, relying on Excel) won’t allow you to react to all the disruptions. Relying on just the fastest or lowest cost supply chain won’t give you the resiliency that you need.
How to climb out: You need the capability for continuous design with data ready to use. As you make design decisions, you need to directly include supply chain resiliency as part of the solution.
Resolution: The good news is that there are products out there that help enable this. This requires work— but if you have the data ready, the modeling tools, and a team in place, you can quickly react to new disruptions. And, there will always be disruptions.
Edith Simchi-Levi deserves credit for this idea. In the early days of LogicTools she stressed the need to use good examples to tell our story.
I first heard this described by Bob Kyle and Toby Brzoznowski at LLamasoft. And, this style carries over to Coupa too. Bob called it the Challenger model. When I tried to find some sources for this, all I found were sites that wanted to give me sales training. So, hopefully I’m giving it a fair overview.
You can see Kurt Vonnegut’s video here or see it referenced in my previous post.
The story is much richer than what I can do here. I suggest you check out Coupa’s website for more information.