Today’s complex business landscape is chock full of challenges – like digital transformation, economic uncertainty, customer satisfaction, and increased market competition (just to name a few!). Knowing which lever to pull is key—but that’s only half the battle.
The other half is making sure your initiatives map back to business goals and produce positive results. And let’s be honest, these are business challenges in and of themselves. Hybrid work teams, talent shortages, and information overload are just a few of the hurdles today’s managers have to jump over as they attempt to get everyone swimming in the same direction.
Of course, these challenges don’t even account for everyday business interactions. Think about all the ineffective meetings that take up everyone’s time. Consider all the poorly communicated change programs that hinder employee engagement, the lack of collaboration that stifles innovation, the snooze-worthy decks that miss the mark and need to be constantly reworked, and the exhaustive data reports that lack context and leave decision-makers confused.
These interactions contribute to productivity issues among teams that are already stretched thin, inefficient use of time and resources, and worse yet – stalled decisions due to unclear recommendations or calls to action on mission-critical business initiatives.
What if we told you there was one critical skill that could help you solve these business challenges more quickly and efficiently? Better yet, this skill can be learned and leveraged across your entire organization and give cross-functional teams the ability to influence decisions, communicate value, and drive business forward.
And don’t worry, we’re not talking about some tech gimmick or overused buzzword. We’re talking about a fundamental business skill that’s often overlooked and highly underrated.
It’s storytelling.
Storytelling is how we move business forward
We believe that business storytelling can become your organization’s superpower. Not only does neuroscience prove that story is the most impactful form of communication, but it can be adapted to any audience and used in just about every business interaction, from concise presentations updating the C-suite to persuasive sales emails engaging prospective clients. Its scalability allows it to be used by everyone in the company, creating synergy among teams and better engagement with your customers.
Teams need a common language and framework
While we all enjoy a good story, the reality is that most people struggle to apply storytelling to their everyday business communications. Without the right skills and confidence, we resort to cobbling together ideas and data dumping, leaving our audience confused or worse, totally tuned out.
Here’s what we’ve learned: To effectively address today’s business challenges, teams need a common language and framework that’s grounded in a new mindset: Story First, Visuals Second
Introducing our storytelling learning journey
At The Presentation Company (TPC), our learning journey brings business storytelling to life through the lens of story strategy, visual strategy, and data strategy. The journey comes together with three highly experiential workshops that unpack each strategic principle and how they can be applied, giving teams the collaborative tools and common language they need to create impactful visual stories.
Story strategy
This serves as the bread and butter of your business communication strategy. Through our Crafting Strategic Visual Stories workshop, learn how to leverage the power of narrative and integrate it into anything you say, send, deliver, or present (hint: think emails, presentations, or meetings). Our storytelling framework will teach you how to turn your ideas and data into meaningful business stories that are clear, actionable, and memorable. You’ll discover how to get to the essence of the conversation and succinctly share your critical insight – the one thing you want your audience to remember. The framework is a proven method of organizing your ideas and data into a meaningful and influential narrative.
Get the skills and confidence to flex your story
Imagine you’ve spent countless hours preparing to present to a room full of executives, and at the last minute you find out your 30 minutes have been cut down to five, or maybe as you’re gearing up for a team presentation, your boss tells you “no more than 3 to 5 slides.” And what if you’re trying to secure a deal with a decision-maker but need to influence and sell your ideas over email?
In Crafting Strategic Visual Stories, you’ll learn how to flex your story to adapt to these scenarios and also understand how to share your story with diverse audiences with varying needs. The ability to pivot in the moment will boost your confidence and executive presence, while allowing you to display complete mastery of your material.
Visual strategy
As any great communicator knows, good visuals are absolutely critical to effective messaging. However, mindless images that crowd the page are usually more distracting than helpful. Our Influencing with Visuals workshop is geared toward those who know how to craft a business story and are ready to bring it to life with clear, impactful visuals. Learn how to create a tailored visual story strategy, use interactive story building and coaching tools to pressure test your story, and get inspired with real-world examples of clear visuals that inspire action.
Jumpstart design thinking with a Visual Story Library
Influencing with Visuals participants receive a Visual Story Library, a suite of 100+ beautifully designed slides that guide you through the storytelling signposts and provide pro-tips and coaching examples to help inspire creativity. This is an indispensable tool that ensures a powerful connection between your story and visuals, every time.
Data strategy
Every company relies on data to make decisions, but presenting too many numbers and graphs will overwhelm and disengage audiences. Wrapping data in story and visuals, however, will give decision-makers the context they need to understand what the numbers are actually communicating. Presenting Data Visually rounds out our other two workshops and gives teams practical skills and tools for today’s data-driven landscape. Using key principles of data visualization, learn best practices for creating easy-to-scan charts, tables, and graphs that cut through the noise, are easily digestible, and lead to actionable data insights and recommendations.
Elevate your data stories at the slide level
In Presenting Data Visually, you’ll receive a Data Visualization Library to guide you through the five ways to display data. This collection of professionally designed data visualization slides provides inspiration, pro-tips, and coaching examples to help you create simple but impactful data visualizations.
Grounded in theory and smothered in practicality
There’s a reason we refer to our program as a journey. Our curriculum is designed to flow from one workshop to the next with skills, tools, and coaching that build upon each other and travel with you on – and beyond – the journey. Our goal is to provide useful skills you can apply immediately, build on as you move through the program, and fine-tune long after training ends.
We believe down to our core that true transformation begins on the day of training but is fully accomplished over time. That’s why we developed a unique learning model for meaningful, long-lasting behavior change. Who doesn’t want learning that’s repeatable, scalable, and immediately applicable on the job?
Learn concepts: Get access to our simple and easy-to-use storytelling framework, a proven way to craft business stories quickly and efficiently. See firsthand how visuals and data bolster your ideas and can bring complex ideas to life from a whole new perspective.
Get hands-on with tools: Practice makes perfect! Our robust suite of interactive and collaborative tools, each embedded with coaching and pro-tips, are introduced throughout the journey to jumpstart development and reinforce learnings beyond the day of training.
Apply concepts to real work: We get it. Time away from the office is hard. That’s why we go beyond just theory and ask participants to bring any real work—presentations, emails, one-pagers (seriously, anything)—to transform during our workshops.
Give and get coaching: We all need a gut check sometimes. Our journey is filled with opportunities to collaborate, mentor, and build confidence through expert and peer-to-peer coaching. Plus, our tools are designed to encourage coaching in the workplace, with the ultimate goal of building a culture of coaching internally.
Coaching helps build a culture of storytelling
So how can you go from “Hey, storytelling sounds like something we should do” to actually making it an everyday team practice that creates long-lasting change? It starts with building and maintaining a culture of storytelling that will permeate your team, department, and eventually your entire organization. The first step is getting everyone to speak “story” in your organization – through the common framework and collaborative tools that our journey provides. Another key piece to scaling storytelling across your organization requires the buy-in and support of leaders, and that’s coaching.
Throughout TPC’s program, teams are introduced to collaborative coaching techniques and resources that layer upon each other and are intended to be used outside the workshop setting. Our suite of tools is embedded with coaching prompts and reinforcement of key storytelling concepts, allowing participants to confidently coach each other with essential resources at their fingertips. Teams will feel like TPC’s experts are with them as they continue to build and improve their business stories well after the training wraps up.
Experience has shown us that reinforcement is a critical aspect of upskilling. That’s why coaching is so important. When managers and peers join together to take learning beyond the classroom—or computer screen—the degree of long-term behavior change and real transformation goes up exponentially. It’s the difference between acquiring “soft skills” that make everyone feel good and empowering your team with useful tools that impact the bottom line. And don’t sweat it—we’ve incorporated practical coaching tools and resources into every step of our learning journey as well.
Don’t just take our word for it
Communicating a more successful future
Every company is looking for a way to elevate their business right now. Some will grasp at trends and risky initiatives, but true organizational change starts from the inside out. It requires strategic thinking, collaborative action, and most importantly, good communication.
Storytelling is an innovative way to get your teams speaking the same language while also strengthening their most critical business skills. Using our three-part learning journey, you can upskill your people in real-time, move your business forward as they progress in their abilities and support each other, and create organizational and cultural change that will benefit your business now—and well into the future.
