Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Story Telling
Story Telling
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When used effectively, storytelling offers numerous advantages over more traditional
organisational communication techniques:
V Stories communicate ideas holistically, conveying a rich yet clear message, and so they
are an excellent way of communicating complicated ideas and concepts in an easy-to-
understand form. Stories therefore allow people to convey tacit knowledge that might
otherwise be difficult to articulate; in addition, because stories are told with feeling, they
can allow people to communicate more than they realise they know.
V Storytelling provides the context in which knowledge arises as well as the knowledge
itself, and hence can increase the likelihood of accurate and meaningful knowledge
transfer.
V Stories are an excellent vehicle for learning, as true learning requires interest, which
abstract principles and impersonal procedures rarely provide.
V Stories are memorable - their messages tend to µstick¶ and they get passed on.
V Stories can provide a µliving, breathing¶ example of how to do something and why it
works rather than telling people what to do, hence people are more open to their
lessons.
V Stories therefore often lead to direct action - they can help to close the µknowing-doing
gap¶ (the difference between knowing how to do something and actually doing it).
V Storytelling can help to make organisational communication more µhuman¶ ± not only do
they use natural day-to-day language, but they also elicit an emotional response as well
as thoughts and actions.
V Stories can nurture a sense of community and help to build relationships.
1. Clearly illustrates the product¶s unique value ± A great story that illustrates the value of
any product in your segment isn¶t all that useful. It needs to highlight the differentiating
value of your product.
2. Short, and easy to tell and memorable ± You want sales folks, marketers, and
customers to tell the story. They won¶t be able to do that if it is difficult to understand or
overly long. Keep it short and to the point and people will be more likely to remember it.
3. Relevant to your target customers ± The story needs to be highly relevant to your target
customers. Telling a great story about a customer outside of your segment isn¶t all that
valuable.
4. Illustrates measurable, concrete results ± The results or the ³what happened´ part of the
story needs to be concrete and ideally quantifiable. General statement like ³improved
productivity´ don¶t have the punch of ³saved a million dollars´.
There are a lot of different kinds of stories that can be told about a product. Most companies
think of customer success stories first but there are a lot of other great stories I have heard that
work well to illustrate value and are very memorable.
V Customer Success ± I¶ve read a lot of bad, boring customer case studies that have clearly
been written because someone somewhere had a case study quota to meet. One great
story is worth a dozen sleepy case studies in irrelevant segments with ho hum results
where the customer says things like ³we were satisfied with our choice of product x´. I once
had a customer say (on video no less) that our product was saving his company ³A million
dollars a day´. That story was used more than all of the other stories I produced the rest of
the year. If you have a clear idea of what kind of story you want you will be more likely to
find it. Making sure that you have regular customer contact will also help increase the
likelihood you¶ll come across a great one.
V Competitive Win ± These are great stories to highlight how you are better than others in the
segment. They also tend to be memorable because there is a bit of drama built into the ³Us
vs Them´ storyline particularly if you won over a much bigger competitor. I generally don¶t
use a competitor¶s name directly in the story but see no issue in naming names in a face to
face meeting. At one startup I worked at, one of the best stories we had was around a deal
that we won, then we lost (our competitor brought in their famous CEO to kill the deal), and
then we won it back (the competitors product didn¶t work as promised). This was not a
story that we could put down in paper but you better believe the sales reps told it every time
they came across that competitor in a deal.
V Product Creation ± These are often great stories to answer the question ³why buy this
solution from us?´ These stories let you showcase your knowledge of the segment and how
you identified an unmet customer need. It also gives you a chance to showcase how your
company works with customers and your company values.
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The Leader¶s Guideto Storytelling
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