We recently ran a Pitch fine tuning event at Indian Institute Of Management, Bangalore, India and while the participants did OK, I realized that we seem to have forgotten how to tell a story .... quoting the celebrated entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk ...“People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.”
Storytelling is a powerful strategy for building personal relationships, as well as building relationships with your customers and potential customers, and for providing these customers with positive experiences. Storytelling is an age-old concept that brings people together and keeps them engaged.
Person-to-person connections are at the center of any successful business and interpersonal relationships and connections are basic needs. Even in business, we need to know and feel that we are dealing with a real person. No matter what business you are in or what kind of personal goals you have, your pursuits will involve dealing with people. One way or another, your business and life will involve solving problems, alleviating pain points/problem areas, and providing happy customer experiences.
Telling a strong story is the first and most important part of connecting with someone. Whether it be with a friend, potential customer or investor. People identify with stories and engage emotionally with stories — and this is how people will start to engage with you personally.
Harvard Business Review published research on how storytelling impacts the brain - “We discovered that, in order to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first sustain attention — a scarce resource in the brain — by developing tension during the narrative. If the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters.”
Creating a connection and sustaining the tension is key to your narrative. Creating a narrative, whether in storytelling to an audience or in creating a new story for your own self, is an important skill for your life and your business.
Your stories create connection with your target audience, but also tells them why they should care about what you are doing, or in the case of business, what you are selling. You will never be able to create strong connections with people just by sharing facts and you know we cannot be better at sharing information than Google. The only way to make a strong connection in today’s world is to share YOUR story.
If you really analyze closely, you will find that persuasion is the centerpiece of business activity. Customers must be convinced to buy your company’s products or services, employees and colleagues to go along with a new strategic plan etc. etc. Despite the critical importance of persuasion, most leaders and managers struggle to communicate, let alone inspire.
Stories are typically profoundly human, personal experiences and are not an intellectual exercise. To influence, you need to be able to do deep down a person’s ethos. You must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is a story.
There are typically two ways to persuade people. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most of us are trained in. It is typically a PowerPoint slide presentation in which you say, “Here is our company’s biggest opportunity and here is our challenge, and here is what we need to do”. And you build your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes. But there are two problems with rhetoric. First, the people you are talking to have their own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences. While you are trying to persuade them that this is the way forward, they are arguing with you in their heads. Secondly, if you do succeed in persuading them, you have done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough since people are not inspired to act by reason alone.
The other way to persuade people – and ultimately a much more powerful way – is by uniting an idea with emotions by telling a compelling story. In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener’s emotions and energy. Persuading with a story is hard. Story telling demands key insights into the audience as well as yourself to present an idea that packs enough emotional power to be memorable. If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people to follow you instead of yawning and ignoring you.
As a storyteller, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you have overcome them, audiences always love the nastiness of the challenge and the endurance which went into overcoming odds. They typically do not like a even keeled story since the dark side of challenges brings a high emotive impact to the story and forms a bond with the receiver of the story.
A storyteller creates all characters by living the story and the more you understand that, the better is your pitch and your message.
So here’s wishing you a good week ahead and happy pitching and story telling
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