Balancing Pitch with Purpose
"The industry has changed and it's just about money now."
"All my ELT cares about is hitting quarterly quotas."
"Leadership isn't interested in story, only numbers."
"Bottom line, if we don't sell, we don't keep our jobs."
As trainers and coaches we hear some version of these concerns any time we suggest adding #CorporateStorytelling into a speaker’s session content. The speaker knows that story will create a better talk, but when it seems the only things that actually matter to the higher-ups are dollar signs, story gets cast aside. And without story, the hard sell is all that’s left.
As Entrepreneur says, when you only care about the bottom line, you're likely hurting that bottom line.
Connection between brand and customer happens through story, not data. KPIs and statistics are arguments, not connectors. Storytelling creates mutual understanding and personal alignment between seller and buyer, company and marketplace, executive and employee. Combined, these two aspects of winning communication are known as data storytelling.
Medium defines data storytelling as "combin(ing) analytical thinking with creative communication (to) find patterns, trends, and relationships within data sets, then transforming them into meaningful stories that can be easily understood by both experts and non-experts alike." Let's break all that down into clear examples.
We can present data in linear narrative or sequential order that guides our audience through a journey, showing cause-and-effect relationships over time. We started with this number, then progressed to this number, and ended up at this number, and look at the incredible payoffs for every person who committed to the process.
Or we can deploy character-driven storytelling that shares data, then gives the human perspective on how real people are affected by that data. Rebecca's team invested X to achieve Y and built market share up to Z. These statistics create powerful, meaningful impacts for each member of her team – and will for you too.
A third approach is comparative storytelling where we contrast multiple data sets to uncover patterns and correlations that paint a vision of options and choice for our listeners. Here's data lake #1 which shows these metric results. We ran the same tests with data lakes #2, #3, and #4 and found these statistical benefits and faults. Side by side, which of these KPIs deliver the best fit for your unique organizational needs?
Notice how all these approaches start with numbers and end with people? One without the other is a recipe for weak communication. Combined, they tie the metric to the meaning and the statistic to the story.
Bottom Line
Whenever you get the sense that leadership only cares about the dollar sign or bottom line, remember that the path to those dollars begins and ends with personal connection.
Never sacrifice the storytelling in your talk because there's "no time" or because "the data is the only thing that really matters."
The more you story you include, the more your audience will connect with your data.
