Recently I had the opportunity to attend a conference where my team had coached a majority of the speakers. The conference was about a specific software solution for a particular industry, one that I don’t know anything about.
As I arrived, someone we hadn’t coached was onstage, walking the audience of 300 people through his very detailed slides. Each slide showed lines and lines of data, and his talk was full of acronyms and lingo. I couldn’t discern what he wanted us to do differently as a result of his talk. It was too short to be a training, but the level of detail was comparable.
The next speaker, one of our clients, took the stage next. Her job was to make the folks at the conference feel welcome and and reassured that she is on their team. They have to hit levels of compliance to meet government standards and avoid fines, and the software is supposed to help them do this.
The speaker’s expertise is data—just like the first guy. But she started by telling us the story of a client who was so frustrated with the bureaucracy of compliance that he was going to leave the field rather than figure out how to meet the standards. She shared what happened when she had a short call with him, to show him exactly how the software could help. Then, she showed a picture of his software dashboard, with 100% compliance. Then, the speaker shared relevant facts and figures—on spare, uncluttered slides that were designed to guide the eyes to the relevant information.
She showed up as compassionate, knowledgable, and patient—exactly the person you want beside you as you figure out how to integrate this software into your daily work routines. The story did the work of putting each listener in the frustrated client’s shoes, and getting them to experience the transformation vicariously. The facts bolstered the emotional experience of the story.
Give us both—a story to understand the “why” of the facts, and the proof that the story matters.
