Business Storytelling For Dummies
Overview
Ready to hone your storytelling skills and craft a compelling business narrative?
Professionals of all types -- marketing managers, sales reps, senior leaders, supervisors, creatives, account executives -- have to write. Whether you're writing an internal email or a social media post, a video script or a blog post, being able to tell a good story can help ensure your content resonates with your intended audience.
Storytelling is an art, but there’s a method behind it that anyone can learn. Full of practical advice and real-world case studies, Business Storytelling For Dummies is a friendly, no-nonsense guide that will help you tell more engaging stories in your business presentations, internal communications, marketing collateral, and sales assets.
Connecting
with customers through storytelling can help you build trust with your audience, strengthen your brand, and increase sales. Look to Business Storytelling For Dummies to
- Learn the elements of storytelling and how to use them effectively
- Become a better listener to become a better storyteller
- Make your stories come to life with relatable details
- Back up your story with data points
- Use the power of storytelling to effect change
- Choose the perfect format to tell your story
Startups, small businesses, creative agencies, non-profits, and enterprises all have a story to tell. Get the book to explore examples, templates, and step-by-step instruction and create your own compelling narrative to tell your story to the world.
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About The Author
Karen Dietz, PhD, is a 25-year veteran in business storytelling consulting, training, and leadership, and organizational development.
Lori L. Silverman offers business storytelling training, keynotes, and consulting. For 26 years, she's advised enterprises on strategic planning and organizational change.
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business storytelling for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Successful businesses have discovered the power of storytelling and its ability to affect the bottom line. A good way to start building your business stories is to use the time-honored storyboarding technique.There are usually a few ways to tell the same story — the one you choose may depend on the circumstances of the telling, the audience, your intent and goal in telling it, and other factors.
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General Business
Many situations in business call for the use of compelling stories: Training workshops. Talks at company or industry events. Presentations to prospective and current customers or clients. Keynotes at conferences. Stories are the secret sauce between good and great — and truly awesome speakers.
Here are some tips that will help you with any storytelling opportunity you may have:
Identify your signature stories
Any personal hip pocket story can become a signature story.
General Business
You and you alone have total control over using storied approaches in your daily interactions with others, whether at work or in other social interactions. Here are ten easy things you can do to incorporate them into your work, no matter what you do.
Replace questions with story prompts
When you desire more specific information than a yes/no response, transform the questions you were planning to ask into story prompts to gain richer context around an issue, problem, or need and to more deeply and quickly develop rapport.
General Business
If you want to develop and deliver a memorable story to your business audience — whether your listeners be employees, stockholders, or customers — you need to consider how to shape your storytelling. Here are some ways in which you might build your business story for maximum impact.
Name
Structure
Comments
“I’m Better Off”
Main character gets in trouble, then gets out of trouble, and
ends up better off for the experience.
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Getting someone to tell you a story that you can use in your business can be a challenge. Story modeling and story triggers are two methods you can use to help people share their experiences.
Prime the pump: Story modeling
One way to get the full story with your story prompt is to tell a story before you ask for one in return.
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The first step in measuring the results of a business story project is to lay out your objective and what you seek to accomplish. Do you want more loyal customers, more engaged employees, increased sales, improved leadership, better performing teams, and the like? The methods you use to collect or validate evidence also define your measures.
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Effective storytelling is crucial to businesses seeking to raise significant funds from donors. For project managers seeking internal resources, entrepreneurs needing capital, or nonprofit leaders searching for funds, the power of story in fundraising is unequivocal.
Before starting your next fundraising efforts, determine your answers to four strategic questions:
What problem will various stakeholders be able to solve?
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Two critical listening behaviors are: Giving your total attention to the person who’s telling you a story and not interrupting the flow of the story as it’s being told to you, even if it’s unclear or the details seem out of order. Here are a few more listening tips:
Stay away from disrupting the story
“Most conversations are just alternating monologues.
General Business
Rarely will you hear the first rendition of a business’s story and say, “Wow. That’s well crafted.” If you’re truly serious about sharing stories from others that compel people to action, then you’ll need to spend time capturing them and exploring their various facets.
Attend to legal/ethical issues
Before you can use anyone’s story, except your own, you need to get permission in writing to obtain and use it.
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After spending some time practicing your business story with a partner and getting feedback, tell your story repeatedly in informal settings. Here are five ways to do that:
Try the story out on others. If you'll be telling the story to a varied audience, find people who are similar to those who'll hear it. This is the optimal way to take your story to the next level.
General Business
Having top management in your business support a story initiative is critical to long-term success. Yet storytelling initiatives have also been successfully birthed from grassroots efforts. So where's the easiest place to start infusing story into strategy? You can attach it to the implementation of another strategy or introduce it during strategy work— both are great opportunities.
General Business
Successful businesses have discovered the power of storytelling and its ability to affect the bottom line. A good way to start building your business stories is to use the time-honored storyboarding technique.There are usually a few ways to tell the same story — the one you choose may depend on the circumstances of the telling, the audience, your intent and goal in telling it, and other factors.
Telecommuting and working virtually across the country or even the globe are popular and often necessary today in many workplaces. You can use storytelling to reduce the distance among virtual team members. Story prompts and triggers can be useful in bringing out these stories. Here’s how:
Get to know each other.
General Business
Business storytelling and fundraising pair up naturally. You should know about four unique twists and turns when working with stories to raise funds. (And you thought this was going to be easy. Ha!) Dig into these storytelling methods:
Spark desired emotions in others
Emotion plays a large role in stories. The words motivation and emotion come from the same Latin root movere, which means "to move.
General Business
As business marketer Dominic Payling says in “Social Storytelling: How Brands Are Streaming Stories,” “. . . being able to listen and engage with audiences about their own personal stories is the first step to being a competitive, 21st century company.
“The most forward thinking organisations go a step further and are building marketing and communications strategies that actively encourage, amplify, and reward customers’ stories, rather than assuming that the company is the only entity capable of telling stories about a product.
General Business
Characters are very important when you want to engage listeners in your story. To add more zing to a story, detail some of the characteristics and motivations of your characters using lots of sensory information (LOTS). Before you do so, determine where it’s important for you to provide these details to listeners.
General Business
The third draft of your business story is almost three pages long — still too lengthy for the website use originally stated or for a short presentation beyond this. There are certain questions that are helpful when collapsing a story. They help you think strategically, keep you and the story on target, and cut editing time.
General Business
In the third draft of your business story, it’s time to address the themes that the story brings forth, the focus (direction) it needs to take, and its key message. Follow these steps:
What themes are in the story?
Several themes immediately come to mind for the SDG situation: working collaboratively, strength in numbers, power of philanthropy, leveraging resources, new possibilities, forging partnerships, and stronger communications.
General Business
Because stories inherently need to have a plot and conflict, heightened drama and tension are key. This means early on you’ll want to reveal feelings around the troublesome situation. These might include fear, despondency, frustration, anxiety, or anger.
Because we live in a world where we’re bombarded with so much stimuli that we frequently tune out, our brains also hunt for — and delight in — novelty and surprises.
General Business
When crafting a story for business use, it’s common to be literal in your word choices, which can produce some uninteresting results. Inserting oxymorons, metaphors and similes, analogies, and aphorisms can make your stories more lively, interesting, and entertaining. Figures of speech can help communicate a great deal with just a few words or a phrase.
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There’s no reason to try to be funny or entertaining in your business story just because you believe that’s what people want to hear. Make sure the humor fits with the setting, is respectful, and actually enhances your story.
Sometimes in the darkest of moments, humor can jump in and relieve the intensity of a situation.
General Business
There are two ways your business or organization can develop stories about consumers. The first is to gain a deep understanding of market segments through crafting representative consumer personas. The second is to uncover stories and ways to promote heroes and underdogs within each segment.
Develop personas and archetypes
Your organization has a persona embedded in its brand image.
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Based on the story’s key message of make something happen, what is the transition from it to an action statement and what specific actions need to follow from this? Like many stories, action steps depend on audience. For each audience, here’s how to weave the action steps into the key message:
Government agencies and other organizations: “You, too, can make it happen.
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Sometimes business-focused stories don’t quite fit these more dramatic types of structures. When this happens, try using the components of business-focused story structures we’ve identified here, which are also powerful and easy to use. Keep in mind that the complexion of the story will change based on the arrangement of the elements that you choose.
General Business
Organizations use and tell lots of different types of stories, many of which are listed here. Each type is appropriate for various unique uses and applications. Story prompts are things you say to someone else in order to draw out the story.
Name and Definition
Possible Story Prompts or Steps to Craft These Stories
“Your founding” stories: Moments in your life that
made a huge difference in who you are today.
General Business
You most often see stories used to entertain – Hollywood often uses a narrow selection of story structures that would also be useful for your business stories.
As you become familiar with these three story structures, reflect on how they fit with your professional and personal experiences. These structures, which are dramatic in nature, make for fabulous business stories when they’re tied to a business purpose and include a call to action.
General Business
Highly technical audiences like to know the science behind storytelling before accepting it as a core business practice. Sharing all kinds of data with them may be tempting, but would defeat your purpose of demonstrating how powerful stories can be. It’s not that you don’t want to share data — but you want to do it in a way that reinforces the fact that stories not only create understanding, they also create meaning and knowledge transfer.
General Business
You have many opportunities to use stories in marketing your business. Figuring out what to share and where to share it are tactical feats. But tactics will only take you so far. Better to first think strategically and then build a story strategy that includes these tactics. Base the strategy on these four interconnected I’s: immersion, interactivity, integration, and impact.
General Business
You’ve likely heard the idioms There are two sides to every story and There are two sides to every question. Some people suggest there are actually three sides: Yours, theirs, and the truth. When it comes to stories, there are as many sides as the number of people who’ve been touched by the situation — which in some cases, means a seemingly limitless number of perspectives.
General Business
A future story revolves around an image of a possible, attractive, and desirable state not yet realized. Articulating the future in a tangible manner makes it more real and can help to overcome the inertia that people experience when asked to change.
Personal vision stories
How does a personal vision story come to be?
General Business
What a challenge you have when crafting a business story, especially if all you have is data. First, you have to aggregate the data together and then you have to assemble it into meaningful information. After that, you have to figure out what knowledge — concepts — it communicates and how to bring about enhanced understanding.
General Business
The gold standard for leveraging a story for advertising is whether it goes viral through word-of-mouth. That’s everyone’s dream. There’s an art and science to creating a story that will go viral. Today it’s mostly art, but more science is coming forth.
Chip and Dan Heath are best known for their book Made To Stick (Random House, 2007), which focuses on what makes people remember information.
General Business
A compelling story is critical for any change effort in a business. But a great story from the C-suite isn’t enough. One big mistake leaders make is thinking that what motivates them is what motivates their staff. That’s far from the truth.
Before crafting a compelling story, change efforts start with listening for, evoking, and gathering stories from all levels of the organization.
General Business
For over 40 years (yes — a long time) 90% of my selling technique was “story telling” and 10% was closing the sale. I had already done my “prospecting” to find the client and now it was time for my “presentation” (prior to the close) and while my competition would try to sell the “we are great” concept, I sold “the story.
General Business
No one can fight with a personal dream story you share about the future of a project, a business, a product or service, or an enterprise. It's yours. You own it. However, creating a dream story for your business must be a process that includes many team members so that as many people buy into this vision as possible.
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Here are eight criteria for deciding which media to use for sharing a story. You can use them on your business organization’s stories and your own.
Audience experience: How engaged or passive will the audience be when consuming the story?
Availability of connection: The kind of link the story will have — will it be to you, the company, a piece of technology?
General Business
Sometimes the key message for your business easily pops out of the story. Most times it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, start by identifying all the themes that the raw story covers. Themes are the subjects or topics covered by the story. Here are a few examples of story themes:
Creativity and innovation
Revenge
Courage
Leadership
Assertiveness
Teamwork and collaboration
Perseverance
Helpfulness
Now identify the themes in the raw story you selected.
General Business
To move people to action, a future story (also called a vision story) needs to be based in imagery, not business speak and highfalutin’ concepts. This imagery must create a picture in the mind that connects both emotionally and to the human spirit.
There are several ways to generate a future story. In The Story of the Future, Told in a Day: Building the Energy to Achieve the Future, executive management consultant Madelyn Blair, PhD, shares a group process that links the past to the present and then the future.
General Business
No one can fight with a personal dream story you share about the future of a project, a business, a product or service, or an enterprise. It’s yours. You own it. However, they can always fight a future story that’s created by a group of people because they weren’t involved in creating it or it doesn’t jibe with what they think it should be.
General Business
Creating a story around your data is key to helping your audience engage with the data. Imagine a group of physicians and medical staff from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs who were tasked with traveling around the country to train other VA physicians and staff in new ways of delivering patient care.
This multi-day training was one continuous PowerPoint presentation.
General Business
Enhancing your storytelling skills involves more than listening, valuing your stories, being vulnerable, and knowing the difference between transactional and transformational storytelling. It’s also about reading your audience and delivering the stories well.
Know when to speed up and slow down
Rhythm in storytelling occurs through pacing and pausing (for example, fast–pause–slow–pause–fast) and repetition (“around and around they went .
General Business
Evoking stories is the deliberate process of sparking specific stories in others that you have a hunch will be beneficial to hear because of the perspective and message they convey and their multiple potential uses. Asking simple questions rarely, if ever, provokes a story.
For example, these are the responses interviewers often receive to questions:
What drew you to this organization?
General Business
You’ve whittled your business story’s themes down to the vital few, but they’re likely still too general. Now it’s time to figure out your story’s key message — what you want to leave people with that will move them to action and inspire them to do something different.
To do so, ask yourself the following questions and add your responses to the information you’ve already documented.
General Business
One-on-one listening helps you establish a solid relationship and understand what makes a person tick in order to tell his or her story. But what if you want to take this further and listen to stories with a group of eight to ten people? Follow these steps:
Set aside two hours.
This gives everyone time to share.
General Business
There’s one thing you can do right away to improve your storytelling skills. It’s the most important quality in being able to be a fabulous storyteller. That single most important element is to listen.
The word storytelling is really inaccurate when talking about applying stories to your professional life. Storytelling creates a picture in our minds of someone standing up in front of a group of people in a presentation or meeting setting and telling a story.
General Business
Quantum physics teaches that we live in a connected universe where everything is linked. Let’s apply this notion to storytelling: a person tells a story, the audience hears it, and both audience and storyteller co-create the experience — which melds it all together.
Once the event is over and everyone leaves, that exact experience will never happen again.
General Business
What do you do when you absolutely must include data with your business story? Recognize that both need context. Context is more than background information. It also answers the question, “What does this mean?” The purpose of data is to inform people. You have the job of interpreting it and telling your audience about the data’s impact — creating meaning from it.
General Business
Like a treasure chest, here’s how your business’s core stories can enhance websites, e-mails, social media, and any other print and online marketing and promotional materials you need.
Integrate story into websites
To successfully build a website in a storied format requires these inputs: the organization’s brand, the organization’s persona embedded in this brand, along with those personas that represent various market segments, and the narrative to be shared on the site.
General Business
If you have enough flexibility in how the sales proposal is crafted, here are a variety of ways you can incorporate stories into the document:
Stories from the prospect: You need to show the prospect you’ve heard what’s been shared with you.
How could you start out the proposal with a story or two that highlight the problem/need?
There are various ways to deliver a key message and its associated actions in order to make your business story more memorable. Tag lines and tangible story triggers within a story are some ways to do this.
Fix the key message and action
To embellish a story’s key message, there are several options you can use to share it and move from the transition to the action statement (see bolded text):
Do you as narrator want to deliver the key message or do you want your character to deliver it?
General Business
Storytelling is a creative act. How you craft and embellish a story is all about conveying your experience in imaginative ways. The purpose for practicing a story out loud in a group setting is to get in tune with saying it in front of an audience and experiencing co-creation, as well as learning what works best in the delivery of the story.
General Business
As you’ve just experienced, a single story in your business can have multiple themes and potential key messages. Those are called layers of meaning. Where do these emanate from?
Characters can embody different meanings because of how they act and transform.
The conflict (problem/struggle/trouble) can convey different meanings depending on how many obstacles are included and how they’re overcome.
What about those tough stories — the ones you may think you should avoid? Often, you should tell them anyways. Do you want to tell stories that aren’t your own? You need to know a few things before you do so.
How to make the most of your personal stories
Not all of your stories will shake the foundations of the universe.
General Business
Why do some people persevere and others give up? What is it that makes some businesses or organizations succeed against all odds? These are stories of overcoming barriers and obstacles. People love to feast on this type of story because they give us courage, hope, and heart to do the same ourselves.
Your stories of overcoming barriers
On September 2, 2010, the New York Times reported the story of Ms.
General Business
What you do. What I do. What we do. All are important business stories to have in your hip pocket for those moments when you’re asked about them.
Stories about what you do
What you do stories are memorable moments in your work life that define how you spend your time. Telling stories about that isn’t as easy as it may seem.
General Business
What we stand for stories are about core values of a business and the work ethics that surround them. These stories relay non-negotiable principles that guide how you or the organization choose to lead your life and/or conduct business.
Stories about what you stand for
Stories about what you personally stand for communicate what you value and prize the most.
General Business
Everywhere you go, you have the opportunity to connect with possible prospects. There are many ways you can leverage these situations through story. Here are some of your options:
Use story when meeting face-to-face
Where do you go to meet new contacts face-to-face in ways that you know will pay off for you? Chamber of Commerce meetings or local networking and charity events?
General Business
In 2012, Edelman Berland found that consumers want businesses to tell stories. He surveyed 1,250 adults in the U.S, 18 years of age or older (1,000 in the general population, 250 marketing decision-makers), about the state of online advertising.
This market research firm asked them to rate 17 statements that included phrases such as “people buy what celebrities wear or like,” “advertising works better on men than women,” and “in-store experiences trump online experiences.
General Business
There is a time-honored (because it’s often successful) sales process in business that is remarkably similar to the storytelling process. It goes something like this:
What to do prior to prospecting to prepare yourself and your prospects
The act of prospecting
Calling on a prospect (in person, over the phone, or through an electronic connection)
Asking for the sale
What needs to happen post-sale to keep the buyer coming back for more
You know the marketplace is changing.
General Business
You as an individual have a founding story and so does the business that you’re a part of. It’s not unusual for these stories of origin to morph over time as you or your firm evolves.
Your founding stories
Your stories of origin are those moments in your life that made a huge difference in who you are today. Although these significant milestones may be separated by time, they’re interconnected because they all define “you” as a person.
General Business
Everyone has stories of situations where they’re an in-person or online customer of a business. They’re also often in situations where others are our customers, whether they’re internal or external to the organization. And everyone talks about these situations. So it’s in your best interest to figure out which are the very best to have in your hip pocket.
General Business
Photo novellas and graphic novellas (a type of comic book) have been used with great success to tell stories in public health campaigns in various countries to effect change. Photo novellas are mini-books that tell a story through photos, along with character conversation and thought bubbles.
Graphic novellas are similar but use drawn images instead of photos.
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Infographics designed as a story or that use many story elements can be quite helpful for your business. So are stories created from a series of photos or images — much like what’s on SlideShare or in a photo collage. These media let your imagination and creativity soar.
Technology such as Stipple allows you to take a photo and add text to it to transform it into a story.
General Business
An organization’s future story is the story of the future that you and your business’s customers, by being in relationship with each other, create to bring about a difference in the world. It’s a story of the better future that you’re advancing together, along with what you’re doing now to achieve it.
Here’s how Karen’s future story for her firm Just Story It came to be:
For many years I’ve helped individuals and companies find, craft, and tell their future story.
General Business
One single story (or meta-story) can never fully reflect all of your business. In fact, a meta-story consists of a whole host of smaller stories. If you work in branding, your role is to first recognize that all these stories coexist side-by-side — and then manage the dynamic and informing that happens between the meta-story and these smaller stories.
General Business
The good news is, everyone has success stories to tell (and most businesses do, too). These appear to be the most prevalent type of stories found in hip pockets. Quite often success stories are authored as profiles or testimonials rather than stories. Many of them don’t have the heightened level of impact that they could.
General Business
Why should you care about the title for a story? For oral storytelling, it really doesn’t matter because the title is mainly a memory aid for you only. Probably most story titles are thought up solely for this purpose.
On the other hand, if you’re a blogger, journalist, professional writer, small business owner, or a branding or marketing expert who’s responsible for placing stories into a story bank or into various media, what you use as the title for a story is very important.
Storyboarding is a nonlinear way to craft and learn your business stories. Here are the steps to creating an effective one. If you’ve been crafting your stories in other ways, try this approach for variety. It may stimulate a more creative flow.
Steps
Instructions
Comments
Step 1
Grab a pad of Post-It notes, a stack of 3 × 5 cards, and
something to write with.
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