Where You Should Tell a Story in your Presentation

Andy is a consultant that works with clients to help them implement and manage major change initiatives. He recently came to Stephanie for some presentation coaching. He had received the feedback that his presentations lacked refinement. He was clearly knowledgeable about his topic, and had lots to say, but his messages weren’t coming across, and his audiences were glazing over. Stephanie and Andy spent the first session discussing the opportunities Andy had, and he left with the homework of inserting a few stories into the presentation at key moments. The next session, Andy came back with bupkis… instead he said, “I don’t know what stories to tell, let alone where to put them!”

Yup. This is the key challenge of presenters everywhere. They want to include stories in their presentation, but have no idea where they should go or what they should be about. Here are a few moments in your presentation where leveraging a story is  particularly effective.

Opening

Think about how you can start your presentation before you jump into your slide deck. Once you start talking about your agenda, your audience gets ready to sit back with expectations of a “same as usual” presentation. Part of what can make you a compelling presenter is to figure out how to disarm your audience right from the jump; and show them that this presentation will be more engaging than they expected. You can do this through story because stories help you connect with your audience and introduce them to who you are as a person, especially if you’re the vulnerable main character of your story.  A good story will encourage your audience to lean forward instead of back, watching and waiting to discover where the story will go.

Interestingly, opening stories don’t even have to have anything to do with your presentation (though they certainly can). It can be a story as to why you now have a mustard stain on your shirt, or how this past weekend you tore your ACL water skiing, or even how on the way up to the meeting just now you had a moment where you thought the elevator was going to get stuck. The purpose of an opening story is to introduce yourself, build rapport, and disarm your audience. If you do this effectively, they’ll already be more open to your message, and you haven’t even officially “begun.”

Establishing the WHY

Often presentations are designed in response to some kind of problem statement. Maybe the presentation is intended to offer up recommended solutions to the problem, possible root causes of the problem, or simply lay out a case for why a problem needs addressing. When this is the case, bringing the problem to life through a story can go a long way to establishing the burning platform and encouraging your audience to pay attention to what you have to say. 

Problems often become problems after a certain amount of data analysis and number crunching; the data surfaces the issue. But if you want to get people to buy into the issue and care about finding a solution, taking that problem back to a specific, individual experience is what will make the difference. Instead of saying “On average, nurses spend over 1.5 hours of their 8-hour shift logging into their computer system,” tell a story about a nurse, Sarah, who’s frustrated with the number of times she has to log in and how this login time is affecting her ability to care for her patients. Instead of saying, “67% of managers feel ill-equipped to manage their team remotely,” tell a story about Jeff, a seasoned manager with a new team who has never met anyone on his team in person and how he’s having managerial crises for the first time in his long and successful career. Stories that bring to life the real-life challenges that Sarah or Jeff are navigating make the problem easier for your audience to understand, and give them people to visualize and care about.

Key Messages

A common presentation structure is to have a main idea followed by 3-5 key points. Presentation titles that follow this structure might be something like, “The Keys to Success,” or “Our Values,” or (for those of you thinking about Sales Kickoff Events for 2025) “Key Sales Priorities of 2025.” One can imagine how each of these presentations will have a few upfront context-setting slides, followed by a few “sections” of the presentation that dive into each one of what is essentially a list of ideas. When a presentation follows a structure like this, give each section its own story.

Stories make concepts memorable. As presentations like this are often information downloads, retention is one of the most important things to consider. Each takeaway that you want the audience to remember deserves a story to reinforce it.  The Keys to Success, for example, would have several stories where each showcases how ONE of the keys made a difference. Our Values might have a story for each value, illustrating how that value comes to life in the workplace. Key Sales Priorities of 2025 could potentially have a story that establishes the WHY behind each of the priorities.

Narrative Through-line

Sometimes your presentation IS the story. This is an extremely effective presentation style. Many of the most popular TED and TEDx talks have a story as the main narrative through-line of a presentation. In particular, this works well for a researcher (or any problem solver, for that matter) presenting their own research (or journey to the problem’s  solution); rather than simply presenting the findings, the researcher can share the story of how these findings were uncovered, the trials and tribulations that accompanied the research, and the emotional experience the researcher had along the way. This is a story! And it will absolutely be more interesting and compelling than simply sharing the findings.

These are all great moments for stories to be embedded into a presentation. Where else have you found storytelling to be particularly effective inside the context of a presentation?

PS: if you’re looking for a tool to help you craft stories to insert into your presentations, look no further than here!