The Quest

As many of you know, I am on a quest to quantify the value of storytelling. I want to put a number to it. I want a calculation I can put into a spreadsheet.

It is not enough to say, “Storytelling is good, we should do more of it.”

It is not enough to say, “Storytelling drives sales, we need to train our salespeople how to tell stories.”

It is not enough to say, “Storytelling is an important leadership skill, leaders need to know how to tell stories.”

Don’t get me wrong, these are excellent places to start, but we need more.

We need a calculation that enables us to say “Storytelling is worth $X to my organization.”

Then, and only then, will my quest stop.

When we saw that oil was an important component of plastic, we didn’t say, “Oil is important, let’s put some in there.” No, we measure how much oil is needed, and we track how much that oil costs, and we hedge against future price fluctuations.

If we all agree that storytelling is an important part of sales and leadership, we need to treat it with the same respect we give to oil. We need to put a number to it. We need to measure it. We need to put it under the pressure of performance.

If you have some info you can share (like how your organization calculates the value of storytelling), please reach out and let me know.

Your calculation is vital to the cause, because I’m not finding too much so far.

Related Posts

On AI and consulting

I have a number of clients in the consulting business, and many members of this email list are consultants. This one goes out to them… Some outside the industry say consulting is all about the collection and presentation of data. However, the real business of...

There is no spoon

This subject line is, of course, a reference to the scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo visits the Oracle's house and the weird bald kid tells him how to bend the spoon. (As you can tell, I am a huge fan of The Matrix, and in fact have, for over three years, been...

More on AI and writing

ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) will get you 90% of the way there. Which means if you are using ChatGPT to write your sales materials, you will convert about 10% of the time, which in B2B leads to bankruptcy. If you are a going concern, you will usually convert 20% to 25%...