Empathy and the art of business storytelling
If you want to persuade someone – you have to make them care.
I had a great example of the power of storytelling recently.
A friend was telling me about an unsuccessful pitch — she’d been trying to persuade a manager about this great new idea she had.
She’d put together an amazing presentation filled with facts and theories and all the right management speak, stats and beautiful infographics. And the manager had said – ‘that’s nice’ or words to that effect. And put the presentation aside.
He didn’t know much about the environment in which this would apply, really couldn’t see the point.
But as she was talking, I realised I was picturing the people who might benefit from her idea, seeing the person whose job might be made easier, whose life might even be saved.
Their stories were running through my head — and I was hooked. After that I needed the business case and all her careful analysis. But if I hadn’t bought into the story I may well have been like her intended audience, and never made it past the first numbers.
How did you make them feel?
I was already a fan of business story-telling. I’ve read The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling many times, and I’m pretty sure Bernadette Jiwa is right when she says that people don’t buy what you do, they buy how you make them feel.
After all, as every good copywriter knows – the key is to find the person to whom your site / product / copy matters, and try to understand why they feel good having engaged with you.
Is it because they feel safer? smarter? special? because they’ve helped someone?
When you know that, you can tell them that story.
What is the story?
But this really brought home to me that we have to find the story in every piece of communication — not just in our advertising copy, or recruitment brochures, but in every pitch, business case, presentation.
Who does this matter to?
And how have we made them feel?