Challenge & Selection

Being an entrepreneur means that you have a series of challenges and obstacles you must tackle daily,  no doubt. Perhaps one of the most obvious and yet difficult one is to get your audience (whether it is an  investor, or a client, or even a distributor) to believe in you, in your company and in your product. You  have no known brand, your product is making its way through its designing, prototyping and launching.  You are basically starting from zero. This is when you realize that, at the time being, the most powerful  tool that you have is storytelling. You need your audience to believe you, to somehow engage with you  and with your company/product.

Luckily enough, last summer we devoted ourselves in our startup to develop pilot programs that would  not only allow us to prototype, experiment and launch our product, but to also provided us with a series  of interesting stories that, without acknowledging it at the time, later became the basis for our  storytelling.

Application

Instead of overwhelming (or should I say, burying) my audience with what I could have thought was  interesting analytical data, I took on the challenge of reaching out through storytelling. I had a meeting  with a potential new client, which consisted on a medium sized furniture company. They were a bit  skeptical on what our company could do for them and on how our proprietary technology could be of  any value for their goals. They were having a hard time engaging with tech companies and how could  this type of companies help their business grow.

I then told them the story of how one of our pilots was made for one of the U.S. largest furniture and  deco companies. With sales over US $ 1B a year, this very large company was facing the exact same  problems that they were. Through hard facts and structured logic, my audience realized that this very  large company and their problems and needs were the same. Moreover, I was able to make my  audience aware of some needs that, at first, were hidden even to them.

Through my storytelling I also listened to my audience, thus engaging emotionally with them through  understanding.

Insight & Approach

I realized that storytelling is not about me and what I felt comfortable doing. It was no longer about  being self-centered in the sense of me speaking about what I felt was interesting. It was rather about my  audience and its interests and needs, and what I needed to deliver to fulfill them. I figured that through  delivering a story that I could engage with my audience even at an emotional level, I could achieve a real  connection and thus understand the true needs of my audience and even discover the hidden ones.

It does take a lot of work, of course. Even as from the very beginning, you must approach your audience  by knowing thoroughly who they are, what are their interests and needs. This kind of research may  involve a considerable amount of time, resources and effort, but it is, for me, the first sign of  commitment into delivering a compelling and sense-making storytelling.

In addition, I also learned that storytelling must be a mixture of well selected data and a clear logic to  the series of event you want to tell your audience about. It all sums up to really knowing what your  audience is about. It is about really caring and committing to both delivering a story that will help  someone else by creating an impact and at the same time discovering hidden needs. It is a two-way  street of both speaking and listening.

