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Storytelling Tips for Entrepreneurs
Storytelling tips for entrepreneurs. Sounds like one more thing to do on what is already a very long to-do list.
But Donna Griffit, today’s guest, says it can educate people about your business in ways that accelerate your success. And she’s got some practical tips on how to do that.
What You’ll Discover About Storytelling Tips for Entrepreneurs:
- Why storytelling skills are necessary for startups
- The 3 mistakes startups make when talking about their business
- How storytelling is like a 4 act play
- The factors that separate a great pitch from a so-so pitch
- AND much MORE
Guest: Donna Griffit
Donna Griffit, author of STICKING TO MY STORY: The Alchemy Of Storytelling For Startups, is a world-renowned Corporate Storyteller and Pitch Alchemist.
She has helped over 1000 startups, corporates and investors raise over one billion dollars and accelerate their sales with a personal touch and unmatched messaging savvy, in any industry, at any phase.
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Essential Storytelling Tips for Entrepreneurs
Storytelling tips for entrepreneurs. Sounds like one more thing to do on what is already a very long to-do list. But today’s guest says it can educate people about your business in ways that accelerate your success. And she’s got some practical tips on how to do that. Stay tuned.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner; helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I’ve got an amazing guest for you today with some important information. She’s Donna Griffit, the author of Sticking to My Story: The Alchemy of Storytelling for Startups.
Donna is a world-renowned corporate storyteller and pitch alchemist who knows a thing or two about effective storytelling. She’s helped over a thousand startups, corporations, and investors raise over $1 billion and accelerate their sales with personal touch and unmatched messaging savvy. And she’s done it in any industry and at any phase of their development. So I can’t wait to hear more.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Donna.
Hi there. Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be with you today.
Great to have you. I am super excited about storytelling tips for entrepreneurs, and I love your title as a pitch alchemist, spinning coal into gold – lead into gold, I love it, but…
Absolutely, into diamonds. Well, somebody actually called me the polisher of diamonds.
Polisher of diamonds. Well, that’s good, too.
It’s so true. And you have an audience of diamonds out there, and some of them might be a little bit rough around the edges, and that’s exactly what we can do for them.
Well, that’s great, but I do want to start by being a little contrary. Why is storytelling necessary? Stories sound like fairy tales, like spin. The – can’t the business, the product, or the service just speak for itself? Why do we need storytelling tips for entrepreneurs?
See, that’s what people would ask me when I first started calling myself a corporate storyteller back in around 2008, 2009, because the only storytelling people could wrap their head around was like, “What is this like, a librarian? What is this, story hour? This is so weird. This is not business, this is fluff.”
But I think, especially over the past five, maybe even ten years, people have come to realize that storytelling is really taking all the bits and bytes and data and wrapping them up in a way that is accessible, exciting, memorable, and also fits with the structure of how our brains are used to receiving information. And we’re talking tens of thousands of years of information.
So it really has become very much embraced in many different business worlds.
Well, that makes a lot of sense. But again, how do we do it? I mean, I think it’s really hard for someone who’s in the weeds about their business to be able to effectively distill it in an elevator pitch or a pitch to potential investors. What are the biggest mistakes you’ve seen people make as they’re trying to, as you say, wrap all this data around and make it exciting and memorable?
Unfortunately, they end up doing the opposite because there’s this kind of innate fear that if we don’t shove absolutely every single detail on our slides or on our documents, then we’re going to look like we don’t know what we’re talking about. So founders tend to like overinform; just throw countless data points and numbers and gosh, just the other day I was working with a team and they had like at least four slides that were spreadsheets.
And I’m like, “Seriously, are you trying to kill me here, guys?” Nobody wants to read your spreadsheets. Nobody wants to sift through your mounds of data. They want you to extract the moment and give them meaning, and that’s what storytelling does.
Nobody has the patience to look through these things. It’s just like your brain checks out when you see it. So that’s one big mistake, overinforming, overdetailing.
The other thing is not remembering that not the rest of the world knows your business as well as you do, and kind of like assuming that they get it or assuming that they understand what it is that you do and why it is that you do it without motivating the pain and showing an understanding of your audience that really needs your solution, your technology, your product.
So making assumptions about what the other side knows instead of just including them into this. And again, that’s what storytelling can solve because there’s a very intentional structure to it which I highlight in the book.
And then the other one is being argumentative. So an investor or a potential customer or someone sitting across from you when you’re trying to tell your story and either sell or get funded will either be contrarian or will be – challenge you or say something that’s opposite of the truth. And sometimes, it’s just in a way to see how you’ll respond. And it pushes your buttons and you get defensive and you then turn into offensively defensive.
So you kind of go on this rampage. That’s not going to get you anywhere except out the door really fast. So those three things I think are the biggest mistakes I see founders make.
All right. Well, I can understand how they could turn people off, especially on a slide. I mean, who can even read some of those little numbers on a spreadsheet? It’s just way too tight, just graphically. Never mind in terms of information overload.
Definitely.
But let’s talk about these three mistakes that you’ve just mentioned; the information overload, making assumptions about people understanding what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re trying to help them, and being argumentative. What kind of storytelling tips for entrepreneurs could help solve those problems?
Okay. So first of all, let’s talk about structure. When we talk about storytelling, and this kind of pertains to your previous question about why do we need storytelling, do we really need it done? So storytelling is an ancient art that started somewhere about 36,000 years ago was the first recorded stories when they were in the form of cave paintings.
This was the first time in history people were able to say, “Hey, here’s what happened to us. Remember us. Preserve us for years to come here. Here – we were here,” like somebody writes – carves in on a wall, “Donna was here.” That was the first evidence of like, “Hey, we’re people. We’re humans. Or we’ve evolved from the Neanderthals and we’re actually living life.” How about that?
And then we went into hieroglyphics telling a story, and then we went into actual recorded stories like Aesop’s Fables and Gilgamesh and the Iliad into Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, Molière, Chekhov, and all the way to the printing press and broadcast. And here we are having come full circle with those cave paintings in our stories on Instagram and TikTok, which are mesmerizing people, and videos have become the most consumed content anywhere.
So we’ve kind of come back to our basic early days of cave paintings, but now they’re on our phones. And what’s so magnificent about stories is that they stick, right? There’s a reason I called my book Sticking to My Story. They truly stick. People remember stories.
They remember images. They don’t remember bits and bytes and numbers and spreadsheets. Stories have a way of the way they’re told if they’re told in the right way, they’re easy to retell. It’s like going to a family vacation and everybody’s sitting down to dinner and you hear stories from your grandmother and you hear stories from your aunts and uncles and things that you probably have heard again and again.
But they resonate and they stick because they become alive in our brains and in our minds and in our bodies. So when we’re talking to business people, if us as humans have been through this incredible evolution that has stayed with us and our brains are the same brains that they were back then, the same form and the same neural pathways to how we take in information.
Then doesn’t it make sense to then take it and use a story form? So the first thing is it’s like a play, an act. I put it down as a four-act play.
Whether you have an investor deck or a sales deck, there’s four acts or four chunks of data that you are bringing together and putting it in that structure. And once you’ve got that structure in place, you can be as creative as you want to be with your content, but you’re helping their poor, overworked, overloaded, overinformed brains process the stories. So structure is the first piece to it.
All right, well, what’s this four-act play? What do we need to – because it’s so hard I think when people are so deep into their business and the nooks and crannies to be able to step back and put themselves in the position of their audience to make something mesmerizing, especially somebody that’s like really techie, it’s mesmerizing to them.
I mean, think of Young Sheldon, the show. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it.
Yeah.
But somebody who’s, like, really geeky, oh, they’re thrilled. Everybody else is rolling their eyes. So how do you –
Oh, my God. Exactly.
Yeah.
You nailed it. I watched the Big Bang, not young Sheldon, but it’s so true because we’re so in love – and we’re all geeks. Okay? We’re in love with what we’re in love with, whether it’s science or computers or AI or even whatever it is that we have. That’s our baby. And to us, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world, and we just don’t get why other people don’t get that, and they don’t.
So it’s about turning our focus 180 degrees to taking a little walk in the shoes of our listeners and thinking, “What do they want to hear? What’s important to them? What’s meaningful to them? What are they in – looking for?” And basing our story around their questions, and that’s what the four acts do.
So the four acts are basically the problem or the need or the opportunity ahead of us. Then the second act is the solution, how it works, the demo of it. The third part is the business data to back it up, so numbers and market analysis and competitive landscape. And then the fourth act is the vision for the future.
Okay, great. Now you’ve convinced us. Where will this go? How big will this get? What’s the funding that you need to get to it? So this structure is structured around your audience’s questions and concerns, and you will answer these questions that are chunked together in these acts on slides, hopefully one slide per question or per issue. Don’t crowd them too much.
So basically what you’re doing is you’re building trust because you are structuring a message around what they actually want to hear. How remarkable is that? It feels like somebody made this just for me. They care. They get it. It’s like they’re reading my mind.
All right. Well, I can see how that’s really powerful for pitching investors, pitching customers, pitching clients. Definitely. Like they come in, they have a problem. Maybe they haven’t fleshed it out as well as you have to help them realize, “Hey, here’s what happens if you don’t do anything, and I can help you and here’s why and so on and so forth.”
But one thing that struck me when I left corporate America is the elevator pitch in the small business world, because the elevator pitch before was my name and my title. That said it all, right? But that’s not the thing for an elevator pitch. So let’s talk about how the structure of an elevator pitch plays off of the four acts that you’ve just described, because you don’t have a slide deck. It really could be just a ride in an elevator up two floors.
Absolutely. So what’s funny is intuitively people think, “Oh, I only have a minute for this. Whatever. What should I talk about? Me, my product, my solution, try to squeeze as much of it in as possible.” And once again, that is completely the wrong answer.
So what you want to talk about, you don’t want to sacrifice that moment of the feeling, of the connection to the heart and gut, which the problem statement or the villain can do. So when you have that first act of the problem that you’re tackling and the pain in the world, the best way to highlight that in your pitch is turning it into a story.
It could be a story about how you came up with this idea and what you experienced in life. It can be a story about a place you worked or a client that you had or have. It could be something from the news just to show that you truly have an understanding. And then we hear that story.
So what we’re doing is we’re doing a story within a story. We have the whole structure of a story, and then we’re weaving in stories and metaphors to illustrate what we’re talking about. Again, upping the stickiness level. So then, when you go for like an elevator pitch or a quick pitch, if you have just a two-minute or a five-minute opportunity, you want to start with that story, just an abridged version of it. And then very briefly talk about what your solution is.
And in the solution section, which is act two, I talk about a simple solution statement, one or two sentences that say, “We do X for Y by Z.” This is our solution X for Y, our audience, Z is our secret sauce or how we get it done. And if you can nail those two things and then throw in something interesting about the market or a fabulous achievement like signing a contract or getting funding that you could throw in, that’s a fantastic elevator pitch that will get them wanting more.
Very good. Well, I see the structure, I see the different applications and the elements here, but what separates a great pitch from a eh, so-so pitch?
I highlight in the book a few great founder stories of clients that I’ve worked with over the years, and I have so many of these. And it’s funny because one of them that I talk about, I just found out they exited in March. They were sold, and it’s one of the ones that I can’t say who it was. So maybe now you can figure it out.
But I remember these stories that I’ve worked on years ago because they stick in my mind. And I may have changed over the years some of the details, but the core story of it sticks. That’s what makes a great story, something that’s relatable, something that’s sticky and something that as humans, we can go, “Oh my gosh, I so feel that. That reminds me of the time that I did blah, blah, blah.”
Okay. Stickiness, that relatability factor. Awesome. How many pitches do you think an entrepreneur needs to have?
So there’s a few that they should have in their pocket. So we need to have an investor deck and we need to have like a teaser deck abbreviated version to do. And then you need to have a sales deck and probably a send-out version of that as well. And a sales deck is very different than an investor deck because we’re talking to different people with different needs and different goals.
So they’re kind of like – I think of it like a Siamese cat with the same body and two different heads. You need to be able to communicate with different personas according to their needs. Also, you want to have the elevator pitch and you want to have, again, an elevator pitch for a potential investor, an elevator pitch for a potential client, an elevator pitch for a potential partner, and just for random people that are interested in what you do.
So have fun with this. Play with it. Have different versions. Include your team. Try what works and always be evolving and trying new things with your pitch until you know you’ve hit on the golden messages.
Well, how do you recommend somebody practice these pitches, especially since some of this is hit or miss? And as you said, “Keep at it until you find the golden message.” The golden message that your team says, “Oh, yeah. That is great, Donna. You nailed it.” But they know what you’ve been talking about. They know what you’re working on. So, yeah, they can cut through a lot of the baloney.
It’s not the golden message that your team thinks is great. It’s that your team has tried on other people and they thought it was great.
All right.
You don’t care what the team thinks, but what we want to do is turn it into a game. So the CEO, the CTO, the CMO, everyone should be able to pitch because you never know when you’re going to meet the next person that could potentially change your company’s life.
And okay, so let’s say I was at an airport and I found myself in conversation with somebody sitting next to me and I pitched them and I’m like, “Oh, that was a new way. I never thought of that before. I should use that again.” And I add it to my list of potential pitches for my team. And then Sarah, my CTO, was pitching someone and she came up with a new way of explaining the technology. She jots it down. So we’re constantly seeing what flipped the light bulb in people’s eyes.
I like that phrase. What flipped the light bulb in people’s eyes, because you can really tell whether they got it, whether it resonated. There’s just that spark of recognition which is really tremendous.
Yeah. “Ah!”
Yeah.
Yeah. It’s just like yeah. It’s like that “aha” moment. And you see when they have it and it’s a delightful moment.
It is delightful. It’s very, because suddenly you’re on the same wavelength and you can get it, and you can take the conversation further. You can advance it, which is really what you want to do is get your foot in the door with that “aha” recognition, and then you can see what questions they have and take it from there. Your book, Sticking to My Story, great, great title.
Thank you.
What is the most important thing you’d like the readers to take away from that as far as storytelling tips for entrepreneurs?
Well, the title is really what it’s all about because we want to tell stories that stick and that resonate and that stay with us. So I want people to really get the structure of a story, but also that we all are storytellers. We tell stories all the time when we’re in conversation with our partners or our kids or our friends. We’re telling stories.
You are a storyteller. I’m a storyteller. Everyone is. And we have the power to change the narrative of how we tell our stories. Like even a question like, “So tell me about yourself,” and how often do we get that question? Whether in an interview or a podcast, you can choose where to start. There’s no one right question.
You can master that ability to take people on a journey and show them whatever side you want. Storytelling is such a beautiful power that you have. And you just said a moment ago “on the same wavelength”, there is actually evidence that shows when someone’s telling a story and someone’s listening, our brains get on the same wavelength, and that’s a true opportunity to forge a connection and to forge trust. And it’s incredible.
It is incredible. Which is why storytelling tips for entrepreneurs is important. I appreciate that. It may sound like one more thing, but it is really the key to the kingdom in many ways. And I really appreciate you explaining it, providing some tips and some guidance for how to be better at it, because it sounds like it is just an ongoing and continuous process.
So thanks, Donna. I appreciate your time and these storytelling tips for entrepreneurs that you shared with us today. And if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Donna Griffit, her work, her book, Sticking to My Story: The Alchemy of Storytelling for Startups, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.
So I thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back in two weeks with another episode of Business Confidential Now. So until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow filled with great storytelling about your business. Thank you.
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