Self Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge

I am working in the consultancy industry and a on my level I send a significant part of my time in  business development and sales activities. While there are some clear cases where the client is  asking for a certain specific service, a lot of times my work is related to identify problems and  challenges that the client is either not aware or not able to fully grasp.

Once a challenge identified it still needs to be pitched to the client and in most cases there is a very  diverse group of stakeholders involved here. So not everyone is technical or business focused,  different seniority and educational background and of course even different language background,  make it most of the time very challenging to describe the challenge in a way that everyone has the  right (not necessarily the same) understanding and sense of urgency.

Selection & Application

A lot of times I use the approach of storytelling as the medium of choice to bring my message across.  Storytelling is for me a way to describe the challenge, the issue, the approach simply the whole topic  in a way that resonates with the audience. Instead of focusing on the pure facts, I build a story  around what the challenge is, how it affects the stakeholder, what are the impacts and then but a lot  of focus on the description of how a solution could look like.

Storytelling helps that everyone in the audience get a sense of the challenge that is relevant for  him/her. They are able to connect the dots, the bigger picture of the issue and also see how a  challenge in an area that might not be directly in their area of responsibility might affect them and  why it is important to tackle it. Storytelling helps me to connect the dots and get message across.

People start to pay more attention if they feel engaged in the story and not just see it as another  standard business activity. I sometimes see later that my client use the same or a similar story  internally to continue to talk about it, they make it their own story.

Insight

My eye opening experience was when I once heard my sales pitch story a few weeks later directly  from my client when they explained to me in a weekly status meeting how they tackled a challenge.  While in the past most of the times my storytelling ends once I win or loose a pitch. But this time I  saw how everyone made it their own story, they connected it with their own contribution and how  the approach of storytelling also helped them internally to speak about their contribution instead of  just talking about a few facts on a dashboard.

Approach

My key takeaway from the course and my past experience is that combining storytelling with the  right level of visualization might even increase the power of story. While so far I considered myself  also as one that can not draw and of course during a live pitch I feel much more comfortable with

prepared slides and notes, but my learning here is that there are juts a few basic drawings that you  need to know and applying them with help to even more overcome the challenges that I face daily  when bringing a story across to people with so diverse backgrounds in terms of seniority, culture,  language, experience etc.

A few first attempts of starting drawing directly in a live pitch in front of my client turned out quite  well, even a not so perfect drawing is always good for a joke and for sure it helps to keep the  attention much better then just looking at a standard slide with some facts.

