I am reading Peter Guber's "Telling to Win" again for his thoughts on storytelling as a way to sell ideas, and I am struck this time by an observation that Guber quotes to the effect that the verbal telling of the story is very important to the effectiveness of the message. The suggestion is that the verbal face-to-face presentation might have more to do with whether you're going to convince someone of your point than the story itself.
This is a little bit of a comedown for a writer who makes a living in print. But then it occurred to me that print, and in particular a good show daily, is how you get people to your booth so they can hear you tell them the verbal message. After all, it's not enough to have a good story -- you have to put yourself in a position to have people to hear it.
Over and over again, as I visit our clients during shows, I see that the show daily makes a difference to that. It'll be the last day of the show, the "dead day," and all over the floor, there'll be exhibitors who are staring into space or playing with their phones, and yet I can't find one of my clients who isn't too busy to talk to me. And I'm the press, for cryin' out loud, trying to give them some free publicity in our monthly magazines, so if they're too busy to talk to me, it's because they're still writing business.
There's much more to say about Guber's book, of course, and you can expect me to be writing more about it, especially since everyone else is also talking about it. It's a solid read, full of fun stories about how Guber has used stories to sell his ideas and even more fun stories about the times he failed to sell his ideas because he forgot to tell a story (Shadenfreude, anyone?), and there's some solid advice about how you put together a story and find the openings to tell it.