What is storytelling?
Rather than stating facts and figures in a conventional presentation, which is rarely effective, storytelling is about creating a story about your project that leads the audience to project themselves and take action. The aim is to trigger empathy for your project, so as to secure buy-in from teams and win over decisions. It's a radically different angle to storytelling.
Why use it?
The ultimate goal is to trigger a reaction, to push people into action, to get them to buy into your project.
B2C yes, but B2B too?
Storytelling has been made popular by advertising: a good ad is like a mini-movie, a short story told to get you to buy the product. However, good advertising doesn't tell you to buy a product, it makes you adhere to its story. And if you buy it, you'll buy it. Take Nike's "Just do it", for example: the ad doesn't focus on sportswear (comfortable, hard-wearing, breathable, etc.), but on the notion of overcoming and even - in this case - emancipation. It's a long way from talking about shoes, and this has translated into a public infatuation with the brand.
It's a very similar story in the corporate world: project feature X or process feature Y won't arouse the joy and enthusiasm of your teams. On the other hand, if you're able to put your target audience (the team, management, stakeholders) center stage and show how the project will help solve problems... then it's very different: you tell them "I understand you and I'm going to help you. I'm going to help you move forward, manage change, strengthen mobilization and so on.
That's the power of storytelling in business: it helps people retain information, embrace change, understand complex concepts, and generally feel part of the company.
The ingredients of good storytelling
For your audience to become part of the story, it all starts with a thorough understanding of your persona - the portrait of your target audience - and its context. The context of your project is made up of several elements. One of these is the pain point your project seeks to eliminate, an irritating problem it faces.
Your project must serve to reduce, or even solve, this irritating problem, and answer the question "what benefits does my project bring to my target audience?"
These three elements - the knowledge of your persona, the context and the benefits of your project - are the "inputs" to your story.
Next comes the definition of the emotional triggers that need to be integrated into the story: these are stimuli or situations that provoke an emotional response in an individual. These are unique to each of us, depending on our experiences and values.
When emotional triggers are close to our persona's experience, two important things happen in the brain: the individual projects himself into the story (this is known as neuronal coupling), and feels the persona's experience as his own (the mirror effect). As a result, they pay attention to how the story unfolds, even remembering it weeks later, and end up taking action.
In short, storytelling is half science (how the brain works) and half art (the choice of angle, tone, format, etc.). The right combination of these two factors produces the right story.
To conclude
In business, telling a story is more effective than a factual analysis of the situation because, if it's well thought-out, it will arouse emotion. And emotion can stimulate our audience to memorize the story and act on it. However, emotional elements alone are not enough. You need to have a clear idea of your audience's needs and irritants, and an equally clear idea of the solution you propose to eliminate these irritants. The challenge lies in taking the story data and bringing it to life in a context that speaks to your audience.
To find out more:
Storytelling in business: inform, convince and lead to action