While stats can shift beliefs or attitudes, stories have a stronger impact on behavioral intentions. If your goal is to get people to do something rather than simply mere agreement, storytelling is more effective.

 

When we’re immersed in a narrative, we drop our defenses. It’s called narrative transportation. We stop arguing and start feeling. And that opens the door for change.

Emotionally engaging stories trigger dopamine (attention), cortisol (focus), and oxytocin (empathy). Translation: people remember stories better than stats.

A recent study in Frontiers in Communication confirms that narrative messages persuade more effectively because they're processed effortlessly. Simply put, stories are easier to understand and clearer, which makes your message more compelling.

A meta-analysis by Allen and Preiss showed that the strongest messages combine both data and stories. The takeaway? We don’t need to abandon data. We just need to wrap it in story.

This one’s obvious to all marketers working on brand communication, yet we rarely do this in any other business presentations. Start by clearly defining your audience.

💡 Ask yourself: Who’s in the room? What do they care about (emotionally, practically, politically)? What’s at stake for them?

Do you want them to approve funding? Say yes to a proposal? Shift a behavior? The outcome you want impacts the story you tell.

3. Have one Big Idea.

4. Design an emotional journey, not just an agenda.

Tactics

I hope these Structure and Strategy tips feel practical and doable for most business presentations. But let’s be honest: You won’t always have full control over content or structure. Some decks are pre-written, others cover several unrelated topics, and not every meeting calls for big emotional shifts. Even in those cases, you can still use storytelling tools to make what you present more engaging and persuasive.

As I was navigating this myself, I put my strategic brain to work. I combed through the frameworks, templates, and storytelling advice, and reverse-engineered what actually works in practice. What came out is the list I wish I had when I first tried to bring story into a slide deck. It’s clear, practical, and designed for real-world business settings — especially when data, strategy, and research are your starting point.

You don’t need to use them all. Start small. Try one. Build from there.

10 Practical Storytelling Tactics That Will Make Your Business And Data Presentations Land

1. Start with the end in mind.

Before opening PowerPoint, identify your one Big Idea — the single message you want remembered. Filter every slide and stat through that lens. If it doesn’t support your main point, cut it. They won’t remember it next week anyway.

 

2. Open with a person, not a pie chart.

Open your presentation with a human moment: a specific challenge, a quote, or a question from the field. Even a single line —“Let me tell you what happened last Tuesday…” — can draw your audience in.

Stories stick when they’re vivid and sensory, grounded in real scenes your audience can easily imagine. For example: “Imagine you’re a new manager walking into your first budget meeting…”  The more clearly people picture your story, the more deeply they’ll feel and remember your message.

3. A story doesn’t have to be about a person.

One of the biggest roadblocks I personally face and hear from others: “But I don’t have a real person story to talk about.”

Good news: stories don’t need a hero in a cape. They just need change. That could be a broken process, a shift in data, or a flawed assumption. If something moved, failed, improved, or flipped — that’s a story.

Here are three ways to tell a story without a human protagonist:

• A broken process inside the company: tell a story about a clear moment of breakdown, and how you fixed it.

• A product’s journey: tell a story of how something evolved — a campaign, a product, a feature.

• A surprising data shift, where the numbers themselves are the main character.

If there’s change, you have a story. So don’t just look for people, look for change. That’s where your story lives.

4. Use micro-stories.

I used to think a good business presentation needed one perfectly crafted story — like in storytelling courses, with a main character, dramatic arc, and emotional climax. But most business presentations don’t work that way. We’re dealing with data, research, and strategy. Slides are pre-set. Topics shift. Time is tight.

The solution? Think smaller. A micro-story is a short, specific moment of change — a surprising data point, a flawed assumption, a decision that paid off. One situation. One quote. One challenge overcome. You don’t always need a big story. You need one moment that brings the key insight to life, and supports your Big Idea.

 

5. Build a bigger narrative from your micro-stories.

Here’s the next move. If you’ve got a few strong micro-stories, step back and ask: Do they connect?  If each story supports the same Big Idea, you already have the building blocks of a bigger narrative.

Let me give you an example.

Last month, I was prepping for a workshop with a pharma client — five behavioral barriers to diagnosis and treatment. Important stuff, but I knew the risk: data overload. Five sections. Dozens of insights. No clear throughline. It felt like death by detail.

I kept circling the content, trying to find something to pull it together. At first, nothing clicked. They were just five separate barriers. Until I saw it: one of the five wasn’t just another barrier — it was the root cause. That changed everything.

I added a single slide upfront with the core insight in one sentence. Then, as I walked through the data, I kept looping back to it — anchoring each point in that bigger idea. I knew that even if I lost someone along the way, they’d remember that sentence. It gave the whole presentation a backbone. A story to hold onto.

How to find the thread?

💡 Ask yourself…

• Is there a cause-and-effect relationship between mini-stories?
• Do they follow a natural sequence (e.g. steps, journey, timeline)?
• Do they stem from the same root issue or point to one key insight?
• Can one metaphor capture the pattern?
  
  

6. Use language that sparks emotion and improves clarity.

Sometimes storytelling is nothing but a few small shifts in how we talk about the data, without even needing to change what we say.

• Add contrast and tension. Use words like “but,” “until,” “even though” to signal change. Without tension, your story has no pulse. For example,“We expected a 12% lift… but the results were flat. Until we looked closer.”
  
  
• Talk in present tense. It makes your story feel immediate and alive. “She walks into the meeting and realizes the report is wrong.” hits harder than “She walked…”
  
  
• Invite curiosity. Open with: “Here’s what surprised us…” or “Let me show you what happened.” It pulls people in.
  
  
• Explain a shift, don’t just talk numbers. Most presentations dump numbers, while stories explain a change. Don’t just show numbers. Tell your audience what changed.  For example,“Revenue jumped by $700K — and here’s what drove it.”
  
  
• Turn metrics into consequences. Make abstract numbers real. Tie them to what they mean for people, resources, or decisions.“That 8% lift in retention? It means 11 more people stayed — including two key managers.”
  
  
• Cut the jargon. Say: “They felt overwhelmed and didn’t know who to ask,” not “users experienced decision-making friction.”

7. Pause.

Don’t just talk at your audience. Let them think with you. A well-placed pause can turn a data dump into a shared moment of insight. Ask open questions like:

• “What would you do next?”
• “Have you seen this happen before?”

This invites reflection and creates ownership, not just understanding.

8. End with meaning, not just metrics.

End with a takeaway that ties it all together. Use lines like:

• “Here’s what this means for next quarter…”
• “The bigger story these numbers tell is…”
• “Why this matters beyond the spreadsheet…”
  

Don’t wrap with “That’s the data.” Always tie your final point back to your Big Idea. For example: “All of this points to one thing: if we want to retain talent, we need to fix week-two onboarding. That’s where the drop-off starts.”

9. Cut in half (then cut again).

When you’re close to the work, every detail feels important. But to your audience, too much data is just noise. Here’s the rule: If it doesn’t support your Big Idea or move your audience emotionally, it doesn’t belong.

💡 Always ask: Will this help them understand, feel, or remember the point I’m trying to make? 

If not, cut it. Less content = more clarity.
 

10. Use AI to shape your story.

Feeling stuck, still confused or overwhelmed by all the tips? First of all, please remember you don’t have to use them all. Just pick one or two that fit your context and build from there.

And remember: you don’t have to do this alone. Use tools like ChatGPT to help turn dry content into something more compelling. 

Here’s a prompt to get you started. Copy, paste, and customize:

You’re not replacing facts. You’re making them land. Storytelling helps you use data strategically, not randomly. It allows us to use the right facts and insights to drive the outcome we care about — whether that’s buy-in, a budget, or behavior change.

Do you want to present all data… or drive a decision? Data should only be there to support your main objective (what you want your audience to do). It's not the hero of the story.

 

You’ll hear many storytelling gurus say that we’re all natural-born storytellers. That’s it’s in the human nature. While there is a lot of truth to it, I personally find such narrative unhelpful. It puts a lot of pressure to be an “expert storyteller”, while practically I have no clue where to start and how to bridge the gap between Dataland and Storyland.