You Probably Know Only 10% of Business Storytelling
The understanding of “Storytelling in Business is often confined to the way a company presents itself in marketing materials, advertisements, or the "About Us" page on a website. Most professionals assume that storytelling is primarily about crafting compelling content to engage customers. However, this narrow perspective overlooks a critical truth: storytelling is not just a content strategy—it’s a mindset. A company that fully leverages storytelling embeds it into every aspect of its operations, from finance to sales to customer service.
If your company treats storytelling as nothing more than a marketing tool, you are using only 10% of its potential. A business that integrates storytelling into its DNA will unlock insights, enhance decision-making, and strengthen relationships at every level. Let’s explore three crucial areas where storytelling is most commonly underutilized and how shifting your organization’s perspective can transform your business and your business outcomes.
1. Finance Teams: Seeing Stories Beyond the Numbers
Finance teams often see their role as one of crunching numbers, analyzing spreadsheets, and ensuring profitability. While these are essential functions, many finance professionals spend too much time looking at numbers as static data points rather than recognizing the evolving narratives that data represents. Every financial statement tells a story—not just at a single moment in time, but also across time, trends and the patterns that unfold over months and years.
For instance, revenue fluctuations don’t just happen; they tell a story about market demand, customer loyalty, and competitive positioning. A sudden increase in costs isn’t just an expense; it reveals an underlying issue in your organization, a potential supply chain disruption, workflow inefficiency, or investment in future growth. When finance professionals begin to see their spreadsheets as narratives of their organization’s business journey, they can provide far more strategic guidance to leadership.
By embracing storytelling, finance teams can:
Communicate financial insights in a way that non-financial stakeholders can understand and act upon.
Identify and forecast business challenges through trend analysis, treating historical data as chapters in an unfolding book rather than isolated figures.
Shape investment and budget decisions by connecting financial projections to the broader business strategy and customer behaviors.
2. Sales Teams: Using Storytelling to Decode the Ideal Customer
Sales teams that focus solely on the products and services they represent and getting to close, mostly miss the bigger picture: the customer’s journey. Too often, sales professionals treat leads as generic prospects and try to match them with the products and services the salesperson wants to sell. They are tone deaf to just how unique each individual prospect is, with their own distinct stories that reveal their motivations, pain points, and the ideal solutions that will trigger them to take action.
Understanding the deeper narrative behind a buyer’s journey is essential to identifying high-potential clients and effectively guiding them through the sales funnel.
The Challenger Sales Model is so successful because it underscores the importance of getting to know your prospect’s narrative, and where they are at when a salesperson encounters them. Salespeople who understand a prospect’s story—including where they are in their decision-making process, what challenges they’ve faced in the past, and where they are in the evolution of their organization—can control the conversation with authority. This approach enables a salesperson to tailor their pitch, articulate benefits in terms that resonate deeply, and help the prospect arrive at a confident decision.
Storytelling in sales isn’t just about telling a compelling pitch—it’s about listening, decoding, and responding to the customer’s narrative. When a salesperson can say, "Based on the challenges I see in your industry and the struggles I know companies like yours face, here’s how we can help," they are leveraging storytelling to drive action. Companies that embed storytelling into their sales training can expect:
More effective prospect qualification by understanding the stories hidden within marketing-qualified leads.
Higher engagement rates as sales professionals use customer stories to frame solutions that feel personally relevant.
Improved negotiation and closing strategies by helping prospects visualize the successful outcomes of their decision.
3. Customer Service: Creating Moments of Truth Through Storytelling
Customer service is one of the most emotionally charged areas of any business, where frontline employees have the power to either strengthen or damage customer relationships in a matter of seconds. The best customer service representatives don’t just resolve issues; they understand and empathize with the customer’s story in a way that transforms transactions into trust-building moments.
Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines, coined the phrase of "Moments of Truth," emphasizing that every interaction—no matter how brief—is an opportunity to define a customer’s perception of the brand. When I met Carlzon and interviewed him in 1988, he told me stories about revelations he and his management team uncovered from employees telling them about interactions that lasted no more than 15 seconds. He transformed an entire airline, including policies and culture, based on understanding these narratives and parroting them back to the airline’s staff so they could activate more of what they already in many senses knew.
Teaching customer service teams the principles of storytelling helps them approach each interaction with a better understanding of what it means to deliver great customer service, and encourages more empathy, active listening, and an awareness of the customer’s broader journey.
When customer service reps are trained to think in terms of storytelling, they:
Listen more actively, seeking not just the surface-level issue but the underlying narrative behind a customer’s frustration or need.
Respond with personalized solutions that acknowledge the customer’s past experiences and future expectations.
Create positive emotional connections, increasing brand loyalty and reducing churn.
The 90% You’re Missing
If your company sees storytelling only as the way you narrate your company’s history on a website or as short-form customer testimonials on social media, you are overlooking 90% of its power. Storytelling isn’t just about what you say—it’s about how you think, analyze, and engage in every facet of your business.
Companies that embrace storytelling as a fundamental business culture create more informed, more effective and more empathetic teams who drive stronger business metrics because your staff see numbers not just as data but as evolving narratives, they view sales as a process of discovering and guiding a customer’s story, and they transform customer service into a relationship-building experience.
If your business wants to thrive, don’t confine storytelling to the marketing department. Embed it into the core of how your company operates, and you’ll unlock a level of insight, connection, and strategic advantage that most businesses never realize.
It’s time to unlock storytelling’s full potential.