Storytelling Course Lesson 8: The Underlying Structure Of Successful Business Stories

All this talk about persuasive stories in presentations… You’d think that there must be a boilerplate/template of sorts. Re-visiting Lesson 4, you’ll realise that most stories have a ‘hero’. At the same time, there are plenty of other similar traits that persuasive stories share.

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I’m a big fan of Marvel movies and Hollywood productions in general. I’m sure many of us are as well.

What is it about these stories that keep us engaged, intrigued and how can we apply this to our presentations?

Let’s use Star Wars as an example. In it, we can see many classic elements present in different types of stories across mediums.

We could quote the hero’s journey formula by Joseph Campbell where a hero will go through trials and tribulations to achieve a certain goal. On a macro level, most stories and even presentations follow a certain sequence of thought:

Current State – Conflict – Resolution – Evidence (more in presentations) – Desired State
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Each segment of your presentation can follow this underlying structure, I’ll give you an example:

Current State – Your company currently is not making any digital marketing efforts to drive leads for your business.
Conflict – Your company’s marketing funnel is leaky & you’re losing $XYZ worth of opportunity from your traffic.
Solution – We can help you generate and capture leads on auto-pilot with minimum ad spend and landing pages that we’ll build once and use for the long-term
Evidence – We’ve helped Company XYZ attain 300% ROI over 2 months using out proven methods.

This can of course also be applied to Keynote speeches, boardroom presentations and the like. We’ll always need to identify a problem follow by an evidence-backed solution to the gaps highlighted.

How will you apply this in your next presentation?