Month: April 2015

You wouldn’t dream about going on a blind date without preparing yourself, wouldn’t you? You’ll get information from every available social network, and if possible from your contact person, and finally, you’ll get dressed and make sure you look effortlessly perfect. And yet, what seems so obvious when it’s meant to attract potential relationships in our personal lives is many times overlooked and underprepared when it comes to our professional lives.

Every meeting, presentation or random interaction, in front of every audience, is a relationship in different contexts. It needs the same amount of preparation and awareness since it falls under the same category of first impression and its implications.

A lot of us rely on our ability to communicate and establish a good dynamic with our audience, whether it’s a single person or a crowd of 80 people at a convention, once we feel comfortable and confident. The bad news is it usually takes a few minutes for our strengths to shine and for us to establish our confidence. We can’t rely on our ability to save the day; at the end of a session, most people will lose interest and attention, leaving you with slim chances of influencing them or motivating them into action. Your first impression is your window of opportunity to create an impact in a way that will engage whoever is in front of you, but will also send a strong signal about who you are.

From the second people lay their eyes on you, all you have is a few short minutes (30 seconds – 4 minutes) to make an impression that serves your targets from this interaction in the best way. The trick about first impression is knowing that what will serve you best has to be in correlation with your audience’s agenda. That means that if you’re going to a job interview, a meeting with an investor or you have to deliver a presentation in front of management and you wish to get the job, the investment or get them on board, you need to know your audience and how to approach them from the beginning in an effective way.

What does that mean and how do you prepare to make an effective first impression? Let’s divide this into 2 sections:

The first one is your non-verbal messages, your body language. People will figure out everything about you and whether they will cooperate with you long before you open your mouth. That’s why you need to prepare in terms of appearance: what should you wear that looks professional in a way that best suits the occasion and the audience, but also helps you feel on top of your game? There’s a lot of power for posture, you should always enter any given space and stand with your shoulders drawn back – it’s all about how you carry yourself in a way that shows confidence and sometimes even ownership. A big part of non-verbal is the tone of your voice and eye contact. Your ability to sound clear and energetic will send a covert signal about your passion, knowledge and confidence.

The second aspect is content, which focuses on the very few sentences that come out of your mouth when you start speaking. Your opening should always be powerful, whether it’s a formal presentation or a sales meeting, always prepare an opening that will grab the audience’s attention and send a signal that you’re worthwhile listening to.

There are many different ways to get the results you want out of diverse situations. What they all have in common is the way people perceive you at the first moments. That takes preparation and sometimes practice, but once you master the art of first impression your chances of getting those results increase dramatically.

Now that we’ve established what Business Storytelling is and why it can benefit your business, it’s time to focus on the how: how do I effectively tell my story?

3 models for building a business story

Not all people naturally tell a story like the brothers Grimm, and not all audiences are reachable through only a story. Think of storytelling as a spectrum ranging from the incorporation of anecdotes in a presentation, through the building of a main theme that is present throughout, to turning the whole presentation into a story.

1. Incorporating anecdotes in the presentation: The idea is to embed short stories in the presentation as routine breakers. It’s just like cooking rice; without salt and pepper, it would still be edible and nourishing – but tasty? Probably not. What makes rice taste good are the added spices; it changes completely if we choose one spice or another, and the same goes for our message. If we spice it up with anecdotes, scattered proportionately over dry data and facts, we can boost audience attention and create a positive stimulation towards us and our message. From here on out, our chances of engaging and persuading our audience are much higher.

Our stories must:

• Be short
• Be relevant directly or indirectly to our message
• Have a surprising, exciting or moving punch line
• End with a concluding sentence which connects to our message

How do we know where to incorporate the stories?

• There are 2 critical, essential points: beginning and end
• According to the audience’s attention positions
• Based on our familiarity with the message and its complexity
• Based on our familiarity with the audience

 2. Our story as a main theme: The first thing we need to do is find a main simile, metaphor or analogy that serves the main value at the basis of our message and encompasses the entire idea. This means interweaving elements such as anecdotes, pictures and videos throughout the presentation, all taken from the same metaphorical world, and making the audience link symbiotically between our message and the chosen metaphor. Finding the main theme allows the audience to understand your message from a different, less conventional point of view, and intensifies its sense of identification. When the message is presented as a main theme, it is perceived as more creative, more innovative and especially more unique and memorable.

 3. The whole presentation as a story: You start by creating a complete, yet short, story around your business – your product, project or idea. This story should describe how your business was born, by whom it was founded, what hardships it encountered, how it almost collapsed, what eventually saved it and so on… the goal is to tell the story of your business instead of the banal “who we are, what we do, who are our clients”. Give your audience a sneak peek behind the scenes; who pulls the strings, how it all began. This model is based upon the literary element of personification, while giving your business/product/idea/ a life of its own and in effect turning it into an admirable protagonist, the real star of your story. Some sales experts claim this to be the most effective formula for conveying a promotional message, and they predict that in the near future this model will replace the elevator pitch.

In fact, every business has more than one story: who they are, how they got there, what made them successful, their brand’s story, their employees’ story and more. Alongside these stories, there are those of the consumers: what the consumer really needs and what you can do for them that no other business can.

The most common business stories are:

• The company story
• The product story
• The “who I am” story
• The strategy & vision story
• The employees story
• The customers story

Watch this video to get a better idea of how a business story should be told:

“Follow the Frog” – The customers story

5 Elements to building a good story:

1. Setting: Putting the story within a certain context, including a time and place.
2. Characterization: The process of crowning the story’s hero, which must include a full name, role and a personal / professional trait.
3. Plot: A sequence of events, which demonstrate progress or change throughout the story.
4. Conflict: Every story has to have a conflict or problem, whether internal or external, in order to create interest. Often, the story touches pain or difficulty familiar to the audience.
5. Relevance: A short link between the story and the current circumstances – the reason we chose to tell it. Usually, this reasoning is also the resolution to the conflict – and it has to be relevant to our presentation and audience.

Put the WOW factor in your story:

1. Atmosphere: the process of creating emotion, closeness and affinity between the listeners and your story. We create atmosphere by using:

• The non-verbal level: tone of voice, body gestures, face expressions etc.
• Descriptions: this helps the listener visualize the story and sympathize with the characters. It is important not to overdue this; descriptions are wrapping paper, not the actual present. How do we know the right amount of descriptions? We’ll make sure every sentence we say somehow advances the plot or reveals one of the characters.

These two elements are easier to convey when recalling the situation and experiencing it again while telling about it.

2. Point of view: It is important to create focus and cohesion by choosing to narrate it as either first or third person, and by using names in order to mention a change of perspective.

3. Connecting with the characters (depending on audience): give the listeners at least one character with whom they can identify, someone similar to them who is facing the same challenges, someone they will root for. You know that feeling, when a friend tells you a story and two weeks later you tell him the same story as if it was your own? This is not only normal, but also one of the most powerful ways to sway people with your ideas and thoughts. According to Professor Uri Hasson of Princeton University, storytelling is the only way to activate the parts in our brain that make us absorb the story as if we actually experienced it. So the next time you’re struggling to get people to join your project or embrace your ideas just tell them a story – and make sure that story leads your listeners to an understanding of your message.

 

The year is 1748; British Aristocrat John Montague, who was the 4th Earl of Sandwich, Kent, invested the majority of his leisure time to play cards. He loved gambling so much that he didn’t want to stop and lay down his cards, not even to eat; but he enjoyed eating a snack using one hand whilst playing. One day, his servants called him for dinner, but he refused to come and yelled at them: “put meat between two pieces of bread and bring it to me!”… and this is how the idea of the sandwich was born. To be accurate, the sandwich existed beforehand, but was considered to be lower-class food. It was the Earl who gave it its noble status and its name.

Do you know what the interesting thing about this story is? You are almost certain to remember how the sandwich was invented, and it will be much easier for you to do so after learning about it through a story, and not through a bullet-point presentation.

During 65% of our time, we speak informatively about who did what and why. In other words, we tell stories. Even when we update a colleague who was abroad about the board meeting they missed, our tendency is to tell them who said what, who replied, who dared to ask… why? Because it is the best way for our brain to encode the message as experiential and remember it for the long term.
For over 27,000 years, since the discovery of the first cave paintings, storytelling serves as one of the basic interpersonal communication methods. This was the way information traveled between people and over generations. The last decade brought a new understanding to the business world: effective interpersonal communication lies at the way in which information is transmitted. This is how the “business storytelling” technique was born.

So what is “business storytelling” anyway?

Business storytelling is a method for delivering messages, whether to potential clients, board members or employees, in a way that presents events alongside facts, numbers and data while still emphasizing imagery that the audience can imagine and feel. The essential elements of business storytelling are plot, characters and the point of view of a main narrative. Additionally, every story should be made out of 3 parts: an opening, a middle and an ending. The idea is to be the director of our own message and turn it into a movie in our listener’s mind. Not just any movie, but a blockbuster; one they won’t forget and will recommend to all their friends. By doing so, we will succeed in connecting our audience to our message and assist them in identifying with it. From this point forward, the road to internalizing and implementing the message is much shorter.

What are the advantages of business storytelling? How does it benefit us?

One would assume that in a world driven by technology, in which success is measured by the ability to predict the next trend, the value of a story would be lost. In reality, however, storytelling is gaining stronger momentum than ever before. It is precisely because of this information overload we experience at any given moment, that stories become more memorable, unique and worth our time.

• More memorable: Studies show that a story is 22 times more effective for memorizing details than a dry presentation of facts (according to Shawn Callahan, a pioneer and leader of the business storytelling technique). Have you seen Steve Jobs’ famous commencement speech at Stanford University? What do you remember? The stories! The one about him being adopted and his parents wanting a daughter, the one about dropping out of college and being broke, the one about getting fired from Apple, the company he himself started, the one about his illness… you get the point.

• In a competitive market, a story helps you highlight what you have that your competitors don’t. No business / product has the same story as yours; it gives you personality and your own DNA. Your story helps your audience to learn about you, get to know you and feel more involved – which leads to a higher sense of belonging and commitment.

• 95% of decision-making processes are based upon the irrational level. Touching stories, which create an emotional connection, are better able to persuade and affect than can facts and numbers.

• One of the main challenges in delivering business content is explaining complex ideas or procedures in a simple, easy to understand manner even to those who come from a different professional field. Storytelling allows simplification of complex ideas or products by the use of personification and universal details, such as time, circumstances, plot, conflict and resolution.

Next in our blog – Business Storytelling, Part 2:

• The 3 models for building a business story
• The most common business stories
• The 5 elements for building a good story
• Putting the WOW factor in your story