The Power of Unifying Storytelling and Analytics
Imagine you’re an analytics manager at a large organization who has been asked to present industry and marketing insights at the C-suite’s annual strategy meeting. You’re thrilled to have the opportunity to become a trusted adviser, but you’re unclear how to design the presentation given such limited direction. Your first instinct might be to do the following:
- Pull data
- Look for insights
- Open PowerPoint
- Insert insights
- Present
If your insights are sound and reliable, what’s wrong with this approach? Very likely you’ll produce a “data dump” — information overload with no cohesive or coherent message — which diminishes your ability to persuade your audience¹. Research shows that people make decisions, like whether or not to trust you, based on emotion first and logic second². Which means if you want to become a trusted adviser, you need to make an emotional connection as much as a rational one. That’s where it helps to be both a shrewd analyst and compelling storyteller. As a hybrid of the two, your job is to effectively 1.) translate data into insights, 2.) connect insights to recommendations, and 3.) tell the story.
1.) Translate data into insights
Every business presentation should begin with an understanding of your audience’s assumptions³. Before you pour through data looking for every insight under the sun, think about what matters to them — what do they want? How would they define their problem? In our example, perhaps you know the C-suite is concerned with heightened competition and how to differentiate the brand. You also know they want to build a sustainable company for the long term, so you pull data around customer growth, acquisition costs, and lifetime value.
As you crunch data in various ways, you’ll encounter many insights. Which ones should be included in the presentation? Sociologist Murray Davis, in his essay “That’s Interesting!”, argues that boring insights reaffirm your audience’s assumptions, whereas interesting insights challenge your audience’s assumptions. In other words, insights are interesting when they are counter-intuitive. Perhaps you notice that customer growth has slowed despite increased marketing spend. The fact that customer growth has slowed is not interesting in and of itself. What makes this interesting is that one would expect customer growth to accelerate based on the increased marketing spend. Challenging some (not all) of your audience’s assumptions works in a business context because it provokes the question “Why?”, jump starting meaningful conversation.
2.) Connect insights into actionable recommendations
You may be tempted to open PowerPoint once you have uncovered a few insights. Resist! Remember, as a trusted adviser, your goal is to help the C-suite take action. Storytelling with data, unlike a collection of insights, involves cause and effect: “Because of what I’m seeing in this data, you might consider doing X next year.” Crucially, your recommendations should tie directly to the insights you shared. All insights extraneous to a recommendation can be included in the appendix or sent via email.
A good way to know if your presentation flows with cause and effect is to examine the transitions between ideas. As South Park creators Trey Stone and Matt Parker point out, if the transition between each idea is “And Then” — i.e. this exists and then this exists and then this exists and then… — you have not translated insights to action clearly. What you want is to transition using the words “But” or “Therefore.” So for example, “It appears new customer growth is slowing despite increased marketing spend. A hypothesis is that the competition is driving up acquisition costs THEREFORE our acquisition costs may soon exceed the lifetime value of customers THEREFORE increasing our marketing budget at the current rate may be unsustainable THEREFORE we might look into cheaper ways to acquire new customers.” Each of those points could be one slide in a five slide deck. Unlike data dumps, cause and effect architecture distills the essential message and connects the dots for your audience.
3.) Tell the story
At this point, you may have a decent story with interesting insights and actionable recommendations. But you can go a step further. To maximize emotional impact, recognize a distinction between the story content and the telling of the story. The latter delivers a “wow” factor that makes people remember who you are and what you said.
A story, at its core, is a chronological series of events with cause and effect. How you choose to represent those events is another matter. In his short story “Knock,” Fredric Brown chooses to begin a story about a post-apocalyptic world at the end⁴. He writes: “The last man on Earth stood alone in a room. There was a knock on the door….”
In two chilling sentences, Brown captures the reader’s attention and motivates them to seek understanding. His suspenseful telling of the story is separate from the story itself. Consider how your favorite movie draws on storytelling techniques (i.e. pacing, cinematography, soundtrack, etc.) to evoke an emotional response from you, all while your attention follows a sequence of events. The same is true in our business presentations. How we communicate information — how we visualize data and organize our thoughts — is as important as what we say.
Now suppose you apply storytelling techniques from “Knock” to your presentation, You start with a hook:
“The Internet Trends 2019 report observes customer acquisition costs rising faster than their lifetime values. I wanted to investigate that trend for our business, and propose what could be a $50 million opportunity.”
That should get the leadership to lean in. Then you proceed with your insights and recommendations, and finally, end where you began:
“…If we look into cheaper ways to acquire customers, we might learn from Spotify. 60% of Spotify’s premium subscriptions come from people who sign up for free. If we offered free accounts, and 60% turned into paying customers, I estimate we could lower acquisition costs by 15% and save $50 million.”
This ‘bookend’ technique — returning to the hook at the end of the story, as “Knock” does — has the effect of delivering a payoff for your audience, rewarding them for their time. In this case, the cost savings analysis, assuming its thoughtfully done, is the payoff. There are countless other lessons available from masterful stories — that is, if you’re willing to develop a curiosity about how they’re constructed.
The vast volume of data available to analysts gives them more options for insights than ever before. But having endless options for insights doesn’t make it easier to communicate — it makes it harder. As companies hire armies of data scientists, they’ll need translators who can present information to executives succinctly and clearly. If in your presentations you can defy your audience’s assumptions, connect insights to recommendations, and sharpen the telling of your story, you’ll be well-equipped to differentiate yourself as a trusted adviser and business leader.
This post was co-written with Aaron Smith . Aaron Smith is a Principal Industry Analyst at Google covering Financial Services and Insurance verticals. He holds a B.A. in Film & Media Studies from Middlebury College and an M.S. in Business Analytics from NYU Stern.
¹ B. Fryer, “Storytelling That Moves People,” Harvard Business Review, June 2003.
² D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
³ M. Davis, “That’s interesting! Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology,” Philosophy of The Social Sciences 1, no. 2 (1971): 309–344.
⁴ F. Brown, “Knock,” Thrilling Wonder Stories 33, no. 2 (December 1948).
