Throughout my career, I've found that data requires a compelling story and compelling stories use data. Without a story, you risk losing, or worse confusing, your audience. Without data, you lack the evidence to build confidence and land the intended impact of your presentation.

Being a strong storyteller requires the resources to collect information, craft a narrative, and visualize data. This process is often time intensive, requiring coordination across your organization; a challenging task these days as we try to do our jobs faster, smarter, and cheaper.

The cost of data storytelling is time.

A Hubspot blog post captured this time investment in the below three requirements for sellers: "Success in selling belongs to those who can balance the roles of analyst and storyteller. Doing so requires the ability to source, organize, and communicate data in a way that connects the salesperson’s solution to the buyer’s challenge."

Finding your way to become a data storyteller means overcoming these challenges:

• Sourcing - if you don't have the right resources at the right time, sourcing data will be a significant issue. This leads to compromises or extrapolating conclusions with a few data points putting you at risk with your customer. To mitigate this challenge, invest in strategies and people to collect and categorize data in your organization.
• Organizing - finding data is one thing, but ensuring it's well-organized, labeled, and mapped is entirely different. Poorly organized data will be a headache for your team and lead to wasted time and lower productivity across an organization. Having up-to-date data dictionaries and strong governance (usability and integrity) improves efficiency.
• Communicating - with a persuasive narrative and captivating visuals, everyone enhances their ability to communicate with data. Without these elements, it will be an uphill battle and lead to confusion for your audience or disrupt key points in a presentation. The best way to combat these challenges is with consistent building blocks of a narrative in place and then tailoring these blocks for each customer. This allows you to prepare for objections ahead of time and have a seamless talk track to accompany your insights.

When done well, data storytelling can land evidence of your organization's value with emotional impact. I joined Matik because our solution simplifies storytelling making it accessible to everyone while empowering users to tailor stories to any customer. Based on my experience, this solution has transformative potential and means not only saving time but improving the scale of data storytelling across your company.

Request a demo with us today to see how Matik can scale your data-storytelling in your data analytics presentations!!