Powerful Business Storytelling: 5 Tactics to Make Your Case [Refreshed Episode!]

Join Victoria Meyer, president of Progressio Global and host of the chemical show. As she speaks with executives across the industry and learns how they are leading their companies to grow, transform, and push industry boundaries on all frontiers. Here's your host, Victoria Meyer.

As I'm publishing this, and as you're listening to this, it's a big couple of weeks for trade shows and conferences across the chemical industry. We've got NYSCC Suppliers Day, where I'll actually be on site this week. ACS American Coatings Show and NPE The Plastic Show.

Each one of these conferences and trade shows is unique in that it's both a combination of speed dating, you know, Having these fast moving meetings with current and future business partners, as well as an opportunity for companies to be introducing new products, new innovations, and new solutions to their customers and their business partners. The challenge and the challenge with these shows, and again, which will have thousands of exhibitors is: How do you stand out?

And how do you help your customers, current and future, understand you and understand your products and do it in a way that's compelling and do so in a way that when they get back to the office this week, next week, the following week, they'll remember what distinguishes you, your company, and the products or solutions that you are bringing to market.

Ultimately so that they return your phone call; that they set up a meeting; that you develop a project together, which helps you place your products and services, do business together, make a formulation change, et cetera. All of the things that you're hoping will happen. Cause again, companies go into these conferences, spending thousands of dollars, just in setting up booths and spaces thousands of dollars, thousands of hours of their people's time. By the time you start adding it up, right?

When you put all the, the people into it, that have done the preparation work and that are there on site. And you want to ensure that you're creating value. You want to ensure that the investment that you're making in time and resources and people is really critical. And to me, the biggest piece of this is around storytelling. And so I think I'm going to challenge you. I'm going to challenge myself to observe. What kind of storytelling do you see at these conferences?

And the key with storytelling, and I'm going to get into this as we go further into this episode, it's really shifting from just the facts, right? Okay. Facts, figures, data, which are definitely important, but are also assumed to be available to storytelling, which captures your listeners. Captures your customers in your audience, helps them remember you and compels them to take action. And the solution to all of this is powerful business storytelling.

As you listen along to today's episode, you're going to get five key action steps, as well as some examples and some other facts and figures. You're going to get the story. That is going to help you remember this and hopefully help you to implement this. Now, I do have a challenge for you. I would like to hear your best example of a story that either you used, somebody in business used and that really stood out for you.

And it's the way in the use of storytelling to create that compelling value proposition. To really create the hook and the insight and the use of that as opposed to just facts and figures. In the show notes here today of this episode, there is a link to speak pipe. And what I want you to do is to hit the link from your mobile phone and then just record it. Give me one minute of a story that you heard and what made it stand out for you. And for those listeners that submit that story.

I'm going to give you a chance. I'm actually going to probably put it on a future episode, one of the next episodes or publish it on the website so that we can share your insights on storytelling. Cause that's absolutely what I want to hear. Now onto today's episode, today's topic, the importance of excellent business storytelling. Storytelling in business is critical. It's not about fairy tales.

It's not about making up It's really about controlling the narrative on your business or aspects of your business. We do it every day. I mean, I think humans in general are storytellers and if you look through history, a lot of our history is oral history and it's through passed on through storytelling and we do a lot of it in business, but it's not always as deliberately, it's not always as deliberately as we could. Or should I've talked about this before?

It is really critical for companies and leaders to own the narrative. Um, and as I like to say, if you don't tell your story, someone else will, and they're going to tell it in their way, embellishing details that support their point of view. And not yours. So what stories are we talking about? These are stories about business performance. It's about your products and your company. It's about ESG and sustainability, right?

There's a multitude of places that we can be telling stories and should be telling stories and really owning that narrative. So Um, on episode 106, I spoke with Kevin Itry of Grace Matthews about M& A for chemicals and material companies. And if you listen to that episode, you'll recall that Kevin talked about when a company is in a deal making process, let's just say potentially selling their business.

It is Absolutely critical to articulate that business story in a compelling manner, where you are today, where your business is going, managing the story, the narrative, the optics, and really creating value in the eyes of the beholder, whether it be the buyer or the seller. Right. This is also supported by a recent Harvard business school study about economics, not about storytelling. This was about economics.

What that study found is if you want your target audience to remember the message the next day. Tell a story. So Thomas Graber, who's a professor at Harvard business school, conducted this study entitled stories, statistics, and memory, and he found that people were more likely to recall information over a much longer period when it's wrapped in an anecdote as opposed to statistics, right? And I think across the industry, we are number lovers.

Um, and it's easy to say, well, the numbers tell the story. I'm sorry, the numbers don't tell the story. The numbers tell us something and it relies on us as individuals and as leaders to wrap a story around it and make sure that when people are looking at the numbers, understanding the numbers, that we help them use using a story. We help them get to the answer. For simplicity, when we talk about business storytelling, I'm breaking this into two broad categories.

One is the brand story and variations of it, right? Your company, your people, your products, and the value they create. There's a multitude of stories that need to be told around that. The second type of story that it's really critical to manage and own is the results story. Your business performance. Your business strategy and vision, the direction that you're going, heck stories around negotiations and how that needs to take place, right?

There's again, when you think about the results story, there's multitude of places that stories need to be told. How do you tell a good story about your business though? Right? So when you think about that, what is critical in telling that story? So number one, the storytelling, when we think about business. It's really about interpreting the facts, storytelling, not just about business, but about life is about interpreting the facts, right?

So you and I have both had the experience where you're telling a story and you're about an experience that you had with a friend and your friend is telling the same story. Completely differently, right? They experience differently. They narrate the story differently. Stories can be told in a multitude of ways. And that's really because storytelling in many ways is interpreting the facts.

It's creating the emotional connection and helping cement that event, the facts, et cetera, in somebody's mind. When you're getting ready to tell a story and really deliberately thinking about the story that you're telling. There are a few things that a few pointers that I've got to help with business storytelling. Number one, start with the end in mind. We've heard the Stephen Covey Statement of start with the end in mind. This is true. Storytelling, what response are you trying to drive?

Are you trying to gain support, understanding, anger, alignment, hope, belief, understanding. I'm bringing that understanding back again. What is it that you want your audience? Whether it's an audience of one or an audience of many to walk away with right choosing the right information and timeframe. We talk about this in the context of business reporting business storytelling my example with Kevin Yttre when a company is getting ready to sell its business.

Telling the right story, picking the right information, picking the right timeframe as part of your setup for your story, right? Visual support, right? Visuals are so critical, whether it be a chart, whether it be an actual image, a picture paints a thousand words, or maybe it's a, I'm going to talk to you in just a moment about the use of props and storytelling and how powerful that can be. And then word choice, word choice matters. Having strong words. Having words that invoke the response.

That you're hoping for. We all have instinctive responses to words. When you are crafting your business story, where choice matters, pick the right ones. And then really bringing that story in and making it personal. Whether it be a narrative around a situation, whether making it very specific, right? Bringing in a specific customer or an individual location, right?

So I've had those experiences and you guys have to, where you can make your business case when you can talk about company X told me this, and that's critical, right? Making it personal and specific, making it relatable. Relatable to the individual relatable to the business relatable to the situation that you're in. Here's a storytelling example I want to share with you.

Several years ago, an executive from CP Chem spoke at a conference in Houston that I was attending and the talk was really about growth, the investment that they were making in the U. S. Gulf Coast. And as it turned out, it was really about emphasizing the importance of plastics. And of course, CP Chem is a large polyethylene producer, and they're heavily investing and have invested and continue to invest in plastics and that value chain.

But the importance of plastics in the role that sustainability plays in it. So imagine this, it's a business conference, several hundred people are there. This executive takes the stage and he's got a prop. That prop is a loaf of bread. I'm just going to tell you, I have never seen a loaf of bread on stage before, right? That was a new one to me. That loaf of bread was really relatable and he utilized that prop as part of the story. Right?

So the, the story being, you know, bread and plastic packaging, very common, familiar to most of us. When you look at the store shelves, maybe what you have in your pantry and. A loaf of bread in a plastic bag lasts twice, 3 times, 4 times as long as a loaf of bread that maybe is just sitting on the counter or a loaf of bread. That's in paper. Right? Number 1, it's a great prop to it's really relatable. We all understand loaves of bread.

We've had the experience that with it going bad with it getting hard and drying out, et cetera, and recognition that to that plastic bag. For that very simple loaf of bread made it last longer. Number two, really strong word choice, right? So this individual, he talked about the complex and sophisticated technology that went into that multi layer plastic bag for that, the for the bread loaf of bread, right? So very deliberate word choice, very strong word choice, right?

Because plastic bags are actually really complex, carefully engineered products. Something that you didn't, wouldn't necessarily think of, right? We've all got plastic bags around our house being used in various ways, shapes, and forms. Very, but this, he used very deliberate word choice. To evoke the sense that, Hey, this is actually, while it may be cheap, it is really sophisticated. It is critically important and it's well thought out what the product is and how it's used. Right?

So simple prop loaf of bread, very relatable, strong words. And then he brought in the numbers and part of the story was around how plastics help reduced food waste. So. The story of the loaf of bread, how much longer it lasts in plastic, right? Two to three weeks versus two to three days and food waste contributes to approximately 8 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. And if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter. I'm ending that story there.

That was powerful. It was supremely powerful, simple, relatable, strong word choice, bringing in facts and frankly bringing that narrative to bear in the way that it created and connected an emotional response. Okay. How relatable was it? Five years later, I still remember this. I also remember Going back to my office after this event and saying, is that really true? Let me look up the facts. Oh yeah. Sure enough.

Food waste, if it were a country would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter. I'm actually going to link something to it just so that you guys know as well. Compelling story, the power of business storytelling to build support, to create your narrative, to instill your point of view. And elicit some understanding, empathy, emotion in your business, your facts, your economics, your data, your story. So go out and tell a story today.

Next time you're presenting information about boring facts or information, think about the story you can tell and how you're going to weave your narrative in a way that makes that emotional connection and brings support to your point of view. Remember, if you have a great example of business storytelling, I want to hear about it, head over to the show notes to the speak pipe link. And that'll be right there. It'll be obvious.

You go from your mobile phone, hit that link and leave me a recording of your favorite business, storytelling example, and why it captivated you and what the hook was and what it made it stand out. And we will be sharing some of those stories in The Chemical Community. We may be sharing some of those stories on a future episode and would certainly I'll be enjoying and appreciating and sharing and listening to those stories. Thanks for joining us today on the chemical show.

Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk to you again very soon.