Business Storytelling Training

Liz Gordon, Senior Director of Analytic Services at Barton Cotton, faced a difficult task. At a Leadership Story Lab training, she and her group had to distill 65 slides down to just 30 words. 

Everyone on her team struggled with the activity. 

That was part of the point, in fact. Every day in the workplace, most of us find ourselves awash in a sea of information. We then have to deliver this information to audiences that—quite frankly—don’t have a whole lot of capacity for holding all of the information we’d like to pour on them. We have to find ways to get our point across clearly and quickly.

That’s what Liz and her team did. Eventually, they found a story that contained all of their main points and was just 30 words long!

Through business storytelling, they learned to restrain the instinct to tell their audience everything they knew. Liz realized, “You can just have the information in your back pocket,” ready when your audience asks. The most important task is to intrigue them. Then, if they want the data dump, rest assured they will ask for it!

How do you convince a healthcare customer that your product can cover everything they need in order to capture and calculate daily Covid screenings for their entire staff? And how do you present this data visually for their leadership? And then finally, how do you share meaningful data with government agencies to get funding?

Mike Maiorisi, a customer success manager for a collaborative work management company, knew that to accomplish this feat, he would have to thoroughly understand the customer’s pain points. He used skills he had used in business storytelling to understand their pain points, and then shared the story of a much larger client who was in a very similar situation. This enabled his customers to envision “a future state in which they had this implemented,” says Maiorisi.

The result? “They trusted us,” he says.

The customer has been using his product since, gathering metrics and generating reports.

“Being able to tell an effective story led to increased collaboration,” says Maiorisi, “and a more effective partnership because they trusted us and we built on a foundation of trust.”

Business storytelling means thoroughly understanding your audience. Leadership Story Lab’s online storytelling workshops give participants tools for telling the right stories to motivate and inspire their target audience.

Do these numbers make any sense to you? 5:48, 6:06, 6:16, and 7:12.

No? Not to worry.

They will make immediate sense once you get to know what happened to Karma Auden, who participated in an online Story Lab workshop with us and is now in our Certified Story Facilitator training program.

Auden, Director of Finance and Business Services at University of Canberra, often tells the story of being awakened at 5:48 a.m. by a hotel fire alarm the morning of an important conference. Over the loudspeaker, the hotel manager instructed everyone to stay put.

At 6:06, she heard a siren… and then nothing.

At 6:16, an announcement instructed everyone to evacuate the building. Auden complied, but on her way downstairs, she met people coming back up! They were following the fire brigade’s instructions, they said.

So, Auden returned to her room and continued getting ready. For almost an hour, she heard nothing—waiting inside the building, as instructed, while the fire was being investigated.

Finally, at 7:12, the hotel manager announced that everything was fine. And it was.

Auden left for the conference. When there were technical difficulties during the first ten minutes of her presentation, she decided to share the story of the fire alarm.

Why did it connect with her “Storytelling for Accountants” presentation? Because the audience could remember the numbers she shared. 

The data had meaning.

The thing is, all data has a story behind it. It’s just easy to forget the stories. When we use business storytelling to highlight the meaning behind the data, we make it easier for audiences to process data.

Business storytelling is the art and science of using stories to make data stick. We can help you do this, just as we’ve helped countless others.

Often, says Liz Gordon, we know acquaintances as “the person who told that story.” 

In fact, Gordon told me that eight months after her team attended our training, she still remembered the stories her teammates shared. 

Leadership Story Lab workshops provide a forum for teams to share stories about themselves and their work, which means they create space to deepen workplace relationships.

Mastering business storytelling techniques gives you tools to continue building genuine connections with everyone you meet. These connections breed the kind of trust that forms the foundation for collaboration and innovation.

Learn more in Esther’s article, “Use Storytelling to Connect with Everyone.”