Want to Be Interesting and Memorable? Don’t Hire an Acting Coach to Teach storytelling
On the surface, the “storytelling” market looks like a crowded space. There are countless drama teachers, improv performers, comedians, and public speakers out there who claim to train business executives in the art of storytelling. We even lost a deal to one of those “storytellers” a couple of years ago.
In 2018, “Rick” (names changed to protect the innocent) reached out to Go Narrative for some storytelling help. He wanted his product marketers to create better presentations for customer briefings and to be more confident in delivering them. We offered to not only create content but to coach the team to craft and tell stories in a repeatable way.
Rick said, “As the briefings are so important, we decided to take an approach based on acting training.”
One year later, I reconnected with Rick and asked how their storytelling consultation panned out. His response?
“It was OK.”
As it turns out, the skills and approaches the acting professional taught didn’t quite stick with the whole team. That’s because, like most “storytelling trainers,” the person Rick hired offered a crash course in presentation skills and how to sprinkle in anecdotes and metaphors to engage an audience.
It’s not that those skills aren’t necessary: successful business executives should know how to deliver captivating presentations. But that’s not the storytelling support most brands genuinely need, because storytelling isn’t that simple.
Giving a presentation – i.e., literally telling your story to an audience – is just one piece of the storytelling puzzle, and it’s one that comes at the very end of the process. That drama teacher or comedian “storyteller” you hired might teach you some tricks to connect with your listeners and interestingly convey material, but they won’t necessarily prepare you how to build storytelling into your business’s culture or get your team to understand and apply storytelling, repeatedly. They might instill the benefits of improv, like flexible and creative thinking. But that’s not the same as helping you leverage the power of storytelling to create your own impactful messaging and communications, long after the consulting ends.
It’s like dating: People who use cheesy pick-up lines might get a date or two, but the people who connect through listening and genuine interest are the ones who build lasting relationships. In other words, hacks – in dating and storytelling – will only get you so far.
What is storytelling, anyway?
At its most basic level, storytelling conveys essential information so that it can be retained, passed on, and acted upon. But it’s so, so much more than that. It’s about brain science for memory and retention and replaying of information. If you learn the language of storytelling, you can use it again and again in crafting content that is interesting, memorable, entertaining, inspirational, evolutionary, and powerful.
Do you, or do you not, want to be interesting? Memorable? Inspirational? Powerful?
If you, like our friend Rick, want your brand to be all these things and more, you must learn how to tell stories.
Here’s a closer look at what makes a story effective:
Interesting. Stories must grab and retain the listener’s attention.
Memorable. Good stories are “sticky” and stand out as something of value to your audience – something worth remembering. They become your legacy.
Entertaining. We enjoy stories, and enjoyment is a good thing. People should enjoy listening to stories about your company and its employees because people share what they enjoy.
Inspirational. Stories, when told properly, inspire and drive people to action.
Evolutionary. Stories came about because of human evolution. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, the author of “Sapiens,” cites the Cognitive Revolution as the event that kickstarted history about 70,000 years ago. This massive evolution of our brains is the thing that defines us as humans. The Cognitive Revolution, in turn, spurred the development of language, which allowed us to start communicating with each other about abstract concepts, like religion, that bond us together and encourage cooperation. In other words, we humans evolved to facilitate this communication and bonding through stories. It just so happens that stories themselves are about transition, change, growth... evolution.
Power. When you provide something of value through your stories, you earn the power to influence your audience.
For your stories to encapsulate all these elements, you must also learn to tell the right stories. This is where narrative comes in. Stories are most powerful when they align with a larger cultural narrative with which humans can understand and relate. People remember the story of the Founding Fathers because it accrues up to the broader narrative of America being a land of freedom and prosperity. People remember the countless individual stories in religious texts like the Bible and the Quran because they accrue up to a cohesive narrative about living a good and virtuous life.
The bottom line? Storytelling works best when you’ve taken the time to pass your stories through a narrative “filter,” so to speak, and align them not only with your audience’s needs but your business’s needs, too.
Why traditional ‘storytelling consulting’ isn’t always enough for businesses
Part of the reason that the “acting coach” brand of storytelling consulting is so hit or miss is that it doesn’t always help you meet all of those needs.
If you’re simply looking to improve your executives’ presentation skills and get them ready to give a keynote or lead a shareholder meeting, then, by all means, hire an actor or comedian to teach your team presentation skills. These types of professionals are well-suited for helping you achieve this goal and will likely offer some useful insights on how to adapt to difficult situations with a live audience.
But let’s keep in mind that presentations are only a small part of the storytelling your business regularly does. storytelling plays a role in persona research, customer decision journey mapping, brand narratives, value proposition and positioning development, customer service, and even internal corporate communications. If you want to get all your departments aligned around a core narrative that can influence the way they communicate with and serve your customers, then you need solid storytelling skills and repeatable processes and frameworks that will keep your storytelling engine running.
Now is the time to get help with your storytelling.
Every business has felt the impact of the current global pandemic and racial justice protests and conversations happening around the world. We’re living in a very different world than we were at the beginning of 2020. The businesses that will make it to 2021 are the ones that can adapt and shift their messaging to the changing sands with which we are all dealing.
Now is the perfect, most relevant moment to start thinking critically about how your brand can proceed in the current environment. Rick’s team are not even doing their in-person “stand up routines” anymore – it’s all online. Is their message, their story, strong enough to be remembered and acted upon?
Like many leaders right now, Rick is likely asking himself how he and his team can adjust their communications. How can they get their team aligned on that strategy? How do they create campaigns that convert at a time when so many consumers and businesses are struggling to stay afloat?
One big piece of the puzzle is investing in storytelling. While storytelling alone won’t help your business thrive, it is an essential ingredient in the overall recipe for success.
Your business needs to understand the morals, essential emotions, and truths that your customers are living out right now. When you do that, you can develop intentional stories that get to the core of your customer’s desires and difficulties, so you can unravel the knot for them (denouement, as the French say) and show them a path forward that solves their problems and shapes their personal stories for the better. And because you were memorable, entertaining, and inspirational, combined with your customer’s success, they will tell stories that include you.
How to hire a storytelling consultant
So, you’re ready to explore storytelling options and retool messaging for success, for now, and for the future. How can you be sure you’re getting the tools and support your brand needs for sustainable storytelling? How can you be sure you have the right ingredients for a successful and “delicious” business communications strategy?
There are some key differences between a “storytelling” (presentation) coach and that of a storytelling consultant.
A presentation coach might look at your current messaging and give you pointers on how to convey or present that message to your audience. A storytelling consultant, on the other hand, can take a deep dive into your brand and connect the core tenets of storytelling to your team’s broader goals. The point is getting someone who can do the legwork and help you develop a strategic narrative that both informs all communications and guides your decisions.
I wrote a piece in 2015 about how to hire a chief storyteller. While the world and business environment has undoubtedly changed since then, the elements of a great storyteller have not.
Here are a few questions to ask your potential brand storytelling consultant so you can identify the best person or agency for the job:
1. Can you deliver end-to-end storytelling guidance and core content that will impact our overall business culture and success?
They should be able to guide and build a strategic narrative that accrues back to and adds value to the corporate brand and strategy. They must identify and harness the stories of employees, partners, and customers, so you can tell those stories in a way that contributes to a healthy culture. These stories should influence loyalty and affinity for the company and its products/services. Ultimately, your storyteller’s deliverables should help fuel the heart and soul of what the company represents, in a way that resonates with both employees and customers.
2. Will you work closely with our leadership team to develop brave, ambitious narratives?
They should work closely with leaders, business owners, and product/service development teams to harvest and craft messaging and frame the strategy in a consistent, repeatable structure. They should bridge the past, present, and future by harmonizing the required elements of history and culture into the forward-looking strategic path that the company seeks to take. The messaging, narratives, stories, and content they create should be tailored for different audiences and result in action.
3. Do you have a deep understanding of story structure, history of storytelling, and the use of storytelling across cultures?
It is not enough for your storyteller to know how to hold an audience’s attention. They should have a rich knowledge of storytelling formats and frameworks. They should understand the origins of storytelling’s historical and contemporary use. These elements will help you adopt and use the frameworks yourself. The storytelling consultant should not only give you a fish (story) but teach you to fish so that you can sustain your strategy long into the future.
4. Can you guide us not only in storytelling but also in story-making?
A great storytelling consultant will create a company narrative to shape everything from engineering decisions to outbound marketing messages. And will do so in a way that shapes new, desirable realities for your customers. Without this, you will have inconsistent messages across the customer journey. Worse yet, your company’s content will be fighting with itself for attention, and it not be harnessed in a unified manner. And let’s be frank, you need those limited budgets pulling in one direction.
Proficiency in story-making ensures consistency of your messaging, which should always accrue to company brand and strategy. A storytelling expert can help you build consistent narratives that transverse paid advertising into social amplification, maximizing conversions, and engagement rates. They should be the source of storytelling frameworks, approaches, and best practices that will teach your entire organization to become story makers.
The above guide can help you tremendously when seeking a storyteller’s expertise. Still, if you only base your hire on one factor, it’s this: Find yourself a storytelling expert who can provide tools, training, and guidance that ultimately result in repeatable, scalable storytelling processes.
Right now, every business needs a process for creating, selecting, and telling the right stories, to the right people, at the right time, through the right channels. If your storytelling consultant can’t help you do this, they’re not the one you need.
Get attention. Be Heard. Build Trust.
Of course, we’d love to help, why not book a complimentary 30-minute consultation to discover how to craft the stories your customers want and need to hear.
Go Narrative is a Seattle Based marketing firm that assists business leaders in technology companies build and implement advanced marketing strategies. Our secret sauce is storytelling for business growth and transformation. We can help you cut through the noise and improve your reputation. We love helping business leaders understand, use, and apply storytelling in business via writing, presentations, video, strategy, and actionable plans. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.
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