What is Corporate Storytelling?
What are you going to say when you get there? This is a fundamental question for any advocate. After all, an advocate wants to help the audience take action on their ideas. What they say will significantly influence the outcome.
Articulus trains people to become Corporate Storytellers. Corporate Storytellers are more engaging, memorable, and concise. To learn about how we create Corporate Storytellers, see our different services. To see what a Corporate Storyteller can achieve, see our results sections on each page.
A Corporate Storytelling Message
Benefits of Corporate Storytelling
Sales Staff
The better you advocate new ideas, products, and services to your customers, the more likely they are to make a decision in your favor.
Technical Staff
Your ideas can be complex. Have customers and internal champions really understand and embrace your ideas.
Management
Transformational leaders need to persuade people within their organization to take action on new ideas.
Marketing
The right message is a must in the information age. With Corporate Storytelling you will have a repeatable process for all your messages.
A Corporate Storytelling Message
What do you want your audience to do when you get done talking to them? Are you going to be asking for a decision such as a purchase, to support your idea, or to change a behavior? What do they need to know in order to make that decision?
Too many communications are blasts of PowerPoint information rather than well articulated messages. Decision makers are often overwhelmed with information and thus have a difficult time making choices. This can lead to the dreaded “no decision.â€Â
Corporate Storytellers design a better message aimed at getting a decision. They consider the decision first, and then advocate the idea so that the audience will take the action you are looking for. We call this Outcome Driven Messaging.
A Corporate Storytelling Message
How are these two computers different? They look similar,but if I was forced to choose one computer over the other I would have to know how they are different in order to make the decision?
If you want your audience to make a decision, you are going to have to show them how your idea is different than the alternative. For a salesperson, it might be showing how your idea is different than the competition. For a project manager or leader it might be showing how your idea is different than the old way of doing things.
Corporate Storytellers know how to differentiate their ideas from the alternatives.
A Corporate Storytelling Message is
Can you memorize everything you see here? Essentially, this is what you are asking from your audience in a typical presentation. Most people overload the audience and expect them to remember all the different, unconnected ideas.
You have key points that you would like to make. You want those key points to stick with the audience after they leave the room. To do so, you are going to have to work on creating memorable messages. You should make your message all about your key points, and make sure those ideas are clearly articulated. Forget about everything else because it is just going to be forgotten.
Corporate Storytellers create memories for their audience. The Articulus Storyboarding Process is designed to create a message that is concise and memorable, especially if your solution is complex or intangible.
A Corporate Storytelling Message is
How does this picture make you feel? It seems like such an odd question! After all, Corporate Storytelling is about business not the touchy-feely world of emotions. There are no feelings in business. Everything is perfectly logical, right? It would be nice if every decision was purely a calculation, but it is not.
In an ideal world people would make logical decisions, but research has found that the brain uses both logic and emotions to make decisions. Most messages and presentations are designed to support the logical decision. What about the emotional part of the equation?
Corporate Storytellers create messages that support both the logical and emotional decision. That leads people to action faster.
A Corporate Storytelling Message is
Is this person ready to listen? Have you ever had someone fall asleep in YOUR presentation? Maybe they are often checking email on their phone during your meeting? If a person is not mentally engaged in your message, they will not hear your key points. You can't expect an audience that isn't paying attention to give you the outcome you are looking for.
Most presentations are just plain boring. The sad thing is in business this seems to be accepted. Most communicators put the burden on the audience to be very active listeners. The problem is the audience's attention span is growing ever smaller, while at the same time the content is getting more complex.
Corporate Storytellers deliver interesting messages. They realize that people are overwhelmed with information. In order to help the audience take action, Corporate Storytellers create messages that engage the audience.
Corporate Storytellers follow a
Most people already have a process to create messages for their audience. It typically goes something like this:
- Open the folder on your computer that contains past presentations.
- Pick slides that have been effective in the past.
- Add new slides from the corporate overview presentation.
- Change the background and logos so the slides look similar.
- Present
This "build the deck" approach is a fundamentally flawed process! Where is the audience in this process? What if the right slide for this unique audience doesn't exist? What if the slides you do pick are boring (most are)? There are numerous issues with this approach. Why do you need slides at all? This is common practice in business that leads to predictably poor results.
Corporate Storytellers use the Articulus Storyboard Process to repeatedly deliver world-class messages. It is a process designed around how the audience makes decisions and it can help you consistently present better and more effective messages.
