4 Tips for Storytelling as a Business Case

Storytelling
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05 Sep 2021

It’s noisy out there! How do you cut through the clutter?  Good storytelling techniques rely on a knowledge of your insights, but more importantly you need to understand your audience and their needs.  Good stories land because the audience WANTS or NEEDs to hear what you have to say.

4 ways to create a better business story that lands:
  1. Who is your audience?
    • List the primary groups or individuals to whom you’ll be communicating.
    • If you had to narrow that to a single person, who would that be?
    • Do you already have established credibility, or do you need to build it? If so, how will you do that?
    • What does your audience care about? How can you persuade them?
    • What action does your audience need to take?
    • – The single message that the whole story needs to convey. This is really, really hard to find and write!
  2. What is at stake for them?
    1. What are the benefits to your business if your audience acts in the way that you want them to?
    2. What are the risks if they do not?
    3. What biases might exist?  Can you control for these?
    4. Will they respond favourably or unfavourably to your offer?
  3. Get out of the data
    1. Write no more than 3 ideas on post it notes and arrange them in order
    2. Arrange your key points and keep it low on context unless it is critical
    3. Use emotional segment headlines – Busy mums hate… or Weekend Warriors worry…
    4. What tensions can you magnify?
    5. Use visuals with impact to punch through points
  4. What are your Takeaway messages
    1. What 3 things do you want them to remember?
    2. What critical number or insight will burn into their brains?
    3. What actions or next steps do you want them to take?
Tips for executing the story: 
  • Be brave: as long as you know the pre-conceptions you’re up against, you can say find a way to say anything
  • Edit ruthlessly: find the few points you need to make and ditch everything else
  • Make your points memorable and salient
  • Integrate everything: make the most of all the tools and methods at our disposal. Link things and explain things. Don’t add to
What we should be aiming for:
  • A clear knowledge of the customer needs over your own.
  • A simple, concise and compelling moment of truty
  • Highlight the tensions as life and death matters to magnify the emotion and the call the action.
Tips for delivery: 
  • What questions are we trying to answer? Before starting, we need to know where we’re going – go back to the brief / proposal, stakeholder question.
  • Put your key points on post it notes to remove the clutter.
  • Arrange the flow in a storyboard and test it.
  • Pick your story building vehicle: do you need PowerPoint, or handouts or other tools?
  • If you do use PowerPoint – one chart, one point!
  • Create ‘visual currency’ to build the narrative – audiences remember compelling images over a mass of words or numbers on a chart

Looking for help with your own research? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with our expert team here at Ruby Cha Cha. Or call us on +6120946800.

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