Storytelling With Data: What Is It? Why Is It Important? And How to Do It?

Stories. We all love them. In fact, that’s what makes us human, our sense of imagination and creativity. Ever since childhood, we have been hearing different sorts of stories. When we grow up, we watch movies or series to satisfy our urge to consume stories, let it be crime, fiction, romance, thriller, horror, drama, or action. And those who are not into watching turn to reading. But the bottom line is that we are all fond of stories. Now you may be wondering: Is it unprofessional to bring stories into business? It’s not. Businesses are run by humans for humans. And, as mentioned before, you can barely go wrong with storytelling in business.However, the thing is, storytelling with data is different from telling stories to kids.

Basically, storytelling in business is the process of presenting facts in the form of a story rather than just listing them on a slide. Let’s consider an example to understand this better. Today, we’ll discuss the before-after-bridge method of storytelling, which follows the customer's journey from being in a problem to moving towards a solution using a company’s product or service.

”Jane is a freelance consultant with 10 years of experience in McKinsey & Company. When she moved to Berlin, she had a tough time finding freelance consulting work. Then she discovered Consultport, an online platform that connects freelance consultants and businesses. Today, she is working on two different high-paying projects, both with Fortune 500 companies.”

Now that's storytelling, and it is much easier to follow and remember as compared to bland and generic communication, for instance: ”Consultport is a freelance consulting platform. We help consultants find freelance projects.”

Storytelling with data may sound like an unusual idea to someone who is not used to it. But storytelling in business is very similar to telling stories to children. Let’s understand why you should also use it with business executives .

Reason #1: It makes the stats less painful to follow

”I love memorizing a lot of stats in every meeting.” This is a sentence no CEO has probably ever said. Let’s face it, numbers can stress people out. But if you leverage storytelling with data in your consulting slide deck, your presentation will become more interesting and easier to digest.

Reason #2: It helps you communicate with people who are not used to data

As a consultant, it is likely that you have a very high IQ and you can interpret complex data with ease. However, not everyone is like that. For example, if you say “78% of your web pages have a load time higher than 5 seconds and 89% of these pages have a very low session duration”, a layperson would never understand what you truly mean. Instead, you could say, “If your web pages don’t completely load by the time a user has taken one full breath, they’ll probably click on another site that is faster.”

Reason #3: Storytelling with data turns numbers into actionable insights

Let’s continue with the example that we discussed in the previous point. So, if a web page is taking more than 5 seconds to load, what can be done to fix it? In this case, an actionable insight could be to cache the web pages or minimize the number of HTTP requests, or employ any other method that a qualified web expert suggests increasing the loading speed.

Reason #4: Stories in your consulting slide deck make it easy to remember the key takeaways

Do you know how tall the Titanic was? Can you tell how many lifeboats were present onboard? Probably not. But you surely remember that Jack and Rose shared that broken door to stay afloat in the movie Titanic, and then Rose blew the whistle really hard at the end. That’s the power of stories, they are easy to remember. Similarly, in the loading speed example that we discussed previously, if you only tell your client that 78% of web pages…5 seconds…89%....bla bla bla,” they’ll probably forget it. But they’ll likely remember that their web pages need to be completely open within one breath.