A Simple Framework for Telling Business Stories

Summary

• Stories are powerful tools for business communication. They have the ability to illustrate problem-solving capabilities, unique business features, or the journey of starting your business from scratch. The best part? These narratives can be drawn from customer experiences, business history, or personal backgrounds, making the story relatable and impactful.
• Story creation starts with a 'story sketch,' which is basically an organized brainstorm of main ideas rather than a rigid outline. It covers a simple and versatile story framework: the introduction, background, insights, and conclusion, all tied back to the business and topic at hand.
• The real magic of business storytelling is that it sets you apart by championing your customer, celebrating your employees, and acknowledging personal lessons infused into your work. By consistently sharing these stories, whether through blogs or emails, you can increase your impact and reach even more people, including those who discover you because someone retells one of your stories.

Beginning, middle, end.

It may seem elementary to remind you that most stories follow a simple structure, but you’d be surprised how quickly we can be off to the storytelling races and forget we have a job to do.

This article is Part III of a series on business storytelling. If you haven’t read these articles, read part I here and part II here then circle back. You’ll want a list of topics as you read through so you know how to apply these storytelling insights to your business.

Already done your Part II homework? You get an A+! Now let’s up your story IQ by applying what I call your ‘story compass.’

Story Compass

In part II, you created a list of topics to help you tell stories about your business. But where do you go from here?

The first step is to match your topic idea up with an element of your business narrative (the story of how your business solves problems for your customers). Here’s what I mean.

Although the language in the Story Finder exercise was about yourself, remember your job is to create content that speaks to your customer. So, as you scroll through your list, think about stories from your customer experience or business history that symbolize these phrases.

Here are some examples. If your statement is “We are problem-solvers,” consider when a customer has asked you to do something that was new or when a customer has come to you for a difficult solution. Tell that story.

If your statement sounds like “We provide content creation,” you might tell the story of a customer who called after discovering they were losing search rankings in google to a local competitor. In your story, you can help your audience by walking them through the content strategy you applied to increase SEO.

And if your statement is “We were the underdogs,” you could tell the story of starting your business on a dollar and a dream, or you could tell us a story from childhood when your baseball team was the underdogs, what you learned, and how it applies to your business [and therefore your customers] today. The combination of your topic, background, and lessons/insights is what actually makes the story. Below is a story framework to help you take the next step in writing your story.

Make a Story Sketch

Remember the pesky outlines you had to write in school? Or at least the ones you were assigned? I know from coaching writers that not everyone acquiesced to this rigid writing requirement.

Good news! I don’t believe in rigid outlines. Most of us aren’t equipped to really know what we’re going to write about before we get started, much less pen perfect topic sentences.

Instead, I recommend creating what I call a story sketch. This form is much more of an organized brainstorm, where you simply list out your main ideas before you start pounding the keys. Here’s an example.

Business: Coaching Thought Leaders on Emotional Intelligence

Topic: I was a teenage ice cream scooper

Introduction: Description of the ice cream hut where I worked at 16

Background: How I needed the job to earn enough money to buy a car, so I could drive myself to school when my mom moved out of the school district and why this was so important to me.

Insight 1: The unconscious emotions that were driving me (fear, excitement, self-belief)

Insight 2: What I learned from eating ice cream everyday after school: amazing but probably not a way of life.

Insight 3: The way my first job fused together ambition, money, and a willingness to ‘do whatever it takes’ and the reframe I would need later in life.

Conclusion: It’s normal to feel a mix of emotions. What’s hard is naming them. (Shout out to Brené Brown.) By identifying our emotions, we can learn to integrate them. And we can determine what we really want and how it fits into our values. It’s about consciously choosing ice cream rather than robotically eating a double scoop of mint chocolate chip.

Note: I really was a teenage ice cream scooper. But I don’t coach thought leaders on emotional intelligence. At least, not yet. 🙂I blended my original topic with an imagined industry because I wanted to show you how the magic of the story compass works. It’s not just the story of my first job – it’s the story of how my first job connects to my (fictional) industry.

When you create your story sketch, I encourage you to fill-in-the-blank for your business and topic. Even though you understand these things intuitively, it’s helpful to create a checks and balances system for yourself as you move from analytical thinking into creation.

If you want to learn more about how to move from list-making to regular writing, check out my article on building a writing habit.

A Story Reminder: Why Story Works

As we wrap up this series on business storytelling, here are a few helpful reminders.

When you tell stories about your business, you differentiate because you’re able to champion your customer.

When you tell stories about your employees, you get to celebrate the awesome people that make things happen at work.

When you tell stories about yourself, you get to humbly acknowledge that the lessons you’ve learned have been infused into the work you do and have better equipped you to create products or services for your customers.

If your business needs content, the blank page can be intimidating. But just committing to publishing one blog or sending one story through email weekly can help you stay in touch with your audience and continue to add value to your customer’s lives.

And guess what? When you do that, your expertise and helpful content will become the subject of their stories. That means you’ll be creating impact among people who may never encounter the actual story you’ve written. Instead, they find you after hearing a story about you, your products or services because someone they trust is talking about you.