Storytelling for enterprise is an advanced form of business storytelling with three additional challenges: multiple stakeholders, complex transactions, and extended timeframes.
- Multiple stakeholders means multiple stories need integration. Like solving a net force vector problem, where each stakeholder exerts force from a certain angle on the overall deal, you have to determine the resultant force vector (a story which speaks to all stakeholders).
- Complexity means risk. The products, services, and solutions being sold are expensive (read: risky) and typically require customization, which means doing things for the first time (read: risky).
- Enterprise deals take time. If they take too much time, by the time they close, it’s possible the situation has changed enough to make certain customer initiatives irrelevant or the proposed solutions obsolete.
In a sense, we could reduce the different types of enterprise storytelling problems to the first problem: multiple stakeholders. If those two words don’t generate a tiny flutter of fear in your belly, imagine trying to get a group of ten people with different dietary restrictions to choose a restaurant.
Of course, it’s much more difficult than that. Two of the problems in “driving alignment” (read: bringing multiple stakeholders on board) are the difference between internal and external stakeholders, and the varying agendas between the executive, managerial, and technical layers of both sides.
Treat the external or customer-facing narrative differently when presenting it internally.
Internal politics has a lot of decision-making weight that can have little to do with meeting customer needs. You’ll be told, “just show me what you intend to show the customer,” and don’t do that. Internal stakeholders are not customers. They have different goal/obstacle pairings. Therefore, when you’re presenting a customer-facing story internally, nest it inside the story for the internal decision-maker.
Consider the difference in roles.
When you consider how to tell the story to executives, managers, and technical experts, whether internal or external, you may already be considering the difference in their roles, i.e., executives make higher-level strategic decisions, managers distribute resources and coordinate efforts, and technical experts actually do the work of designing and delivering products and services. This is a good place to start, and yet it doesn’t account for the ways in which these three layers exchange ideas and provide counsel to one another.
Therefore, consider these role-independent storytelling elements:
- the bottleneck,
- the first domino, and
- the ministry of truth.
The bottleneck is where you believe you will get the most resistance to your idea. Sometimes the right strategy is to confront this head-on, and sometimes you need to come at things from an oblique angle.
The first domino is the person you can convince who will help you convince someone else. This doesn’t always mean a person who is easy to convince or who is on your side. It can be the person who is respected enough in a certain area. One of the qualities that makes a person a good first domino is if they have reason to be skeptical or critical of your proposal. When you convert a skeptic, you build massive credibility.
The ministry of truth is where stakeholders go to check the facts. Often, this is the layer on the customer side with similar expertise to your own. Suppose one of your most important points is, “X will have effect Y.” Who is qualified to evaluate if that’s true? That’s the ministry of truth.
Roles can be so important, sometimes you need to consider decision-makers both as human person and corporate person – as two different heroic entities. Often, these perspectives are aligned, but not always.
For example, if you’re selling IT services to the VP of Operations of a large company, that might be two stakeholders: VP as a human person, who has certain thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and the corporate role of VP of Operations, which is more structurally defined.
In this way, one of the keys to driving alignment can be to help stakeholders connect their personal agency to success in their role.