The Power of Your Business’s Story: Know It, Tell It, Sell It
“People buy people” goes the saying, and as business growth coaches we have seen time and again that the most successful people are those who communicate their offering and their differentiators through compelling stories, not simply through facts, info, and brain dumps.
This is deeply primeval stuff. The importance of storytelling in human gatherings is as old as humanity itself, and every gathering you will ever communicate or promote yourself or your business to will be a human one – from the boardroom to the company briefing, the sales pitch to the funding application meeting, the takeover bid to the exit negotiations.
But sometimes, business owners really struggle to get this “personal touch” surrounding their individual and their business story straight, and to tell it effectively. That can leave a sorry tale in its wake - from poor employee engagement and low morale, to reduced productivity and weak financial performance.
This is where we at Lesley Jones come in.
A story people can relate to
Let’s be clear, we’re not going to be in every meeting or presentation with you, spinning a good yarn on your behalf. But we will help you to “nail” your and your business’s story, so you’ve got more to share with audiences both within and outside the business than just an avalanche of facts and unleavened information.
There is solid psychology behind this. It’s been proven that the more information you expose an audience to, the less likely they are to absorb it, so facts will very often be forgotten.
Research by both the London School of Business and Stanford University in the US bears this out. In the former, it was found that people retain only 5% to 10% of information if it consists of statistics alone - but when they hear a story, they remember 65% to 70%.
In the latter, 63% of an audience remembered the stories told by a presenter, while only 5% could remember a single statistic from the same presentation.
Hardly surprising, then, that famed cognitive scientist Jerome Bruner found that the human mind is about 22 times more likely to remember facts if those facts are part of a story!
At Lesley Jones, by sitting down with you, identifying and teasing out your and the business’s backstory, your reason for starting the business in the first place, and your vision for its future, we can help you build these powerful, people-friendly narratives, internal and external, to support every phase of your and your business’s development – from start-up, to growth, to exit.
Your irresistible “secret sauce”
In many ways, as we wrote in a previous article, this is about our understanding what your “secret sauce” is – what makes you good at what you do, including everything from where you grew up, to your education, to your career history, and much more besides.
By gleaning this information, combining it with insight from customer testimonials and colleagues’ feedback, and applying tools like motivational maps, we act as the ultimate patient listener and mentor.
Through our business acceleration solution, Club, and our training sessions, we distil and shape your and your business’s unique stories, so that you, in turn, can communicate them effectively and persuasively to others - whether it’s those who buy your products and services, those who help run your operation, or external players potentially looking to you as the source of a strategic relationship.
Success driven by the human touch
What this brings home is the absolute criticality of human contact and human insight in the process of building, running, growing, and exiting a business.
Yes, connections and accountability are key. Yes, commercial strategy and finance fundamentals are a must-have. Yes, technology and data resources are indispensable. You’d never hear us say the contrary, particularly as our work with our clients very often covers those areas too.
But whilst it’s important to be alive to these disciplines, the human touch has never had more primacy than it does today. In fact, against a backdrop of increasing reliance on smart automation in many businesses, the ability to tell one’s story in terms humans empathise with – not merely decipher – represents a real competitive edge.
As Harvard Business Publishing put it in one memorable blog, “Storytelling is essential. If you’re trying to engage, influence, teach, or inspire others, you should be telling or listening to a story, and encouraging others to tell a story with you. You’ll have plenty of science to back you up.”
To find out more about how we can put the human touch at the heart of your business and enable you to tell the stories that inspire, influence, and convert, get in touch today.