There’s a story in there – I just know it…
I was reading an article from Nancy Duarte about Strengthening Culture with Storytelling, and it made me think about how important a skill story telling can be in business, and how it can be far more effective than just presenting facts / data. These are just a few examples – I’m sure that you have many of your own.
One of the best sales people that I’ve ever known wasn’t a sales person at all. It is Jon Vice, former CEO of the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. Jon is very personable and has the ability to make each person feel like they are the most important person in the room (quite a skill in itself). Jon would talk to a room of people and tell a story. Mid-story you were hooked. You completely bought what he was selling, often without knowing what the “ask” was. It was amazing to experience.
Years ago when my company was funding medical research projects, my oldest daughter (then only four years old) and I watched a presentation on the mid-term findings of one of the projects. The MD/Ph.D. giving the presentation was impressive, but what he showed was slide after slide of data. After 10-15 minutes my daughter held her Curious George stuffed animal up in front of her (where the shadow would be seen on the screen) and proclaimed, “Boring!”
Six months later that same person gave his wrap-up presentation. It was short, told an interesting story that explained why these findings were important, laying the groundwork for a follow-on project. A few years later he commented that this was a very valuable lesson because the story with data was far more compelling than just the data itself.
A few years ago the company I work for introduced a high-performance analytics database. We touted that our product was 100 times faster than other products, which happened to be a similar message used by a handful of competitors. In my region we created a “Why Fast Matters” webinar series and told the stories of our early Proof of Value efforts. This helped my team make the first few sales of this new product. People understood our value proposition because these success stories made it tangible.
What I tell my team is to weave the thread of our value proposition into the fabric of a prospect’s story. This both makes us part of the story, and also makes this new story their own (as opposed to being our story). This simple approach has been effective, and also helps you qualify out sooner if you can’t improve the story.
What if you not selling anything? Your data has a story to tell – even more so with big data. Whether you are analyzing data from a single source (such as audit or log data), or correlating data from multiple sources, the data is telling you a story. Whether patterns, trends, or correlated events – the story is there. And once you find it there is so much you can do to build it out.
Whether you are selling, managing, teaching, coaching, analyzing, or just hanging out with friends or colleagues, being able to entertain with a story is a valuable skill. This is a great way to make a lot of things in business even more interesting and memorable. So, give it a try.
Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect 