Storytelling & Stakeholder Skills – Why Insights Professionals Need Meaningful Metrics

It’s fascinating to read that storytelling and being able to resonate with decision makers rank highly as skills that insights professionals desire to develop.

This is heartening to see, as these elements are vital to what I think is the most important part of the insights process – using them to take action.

However, even the greatest storyteller, using fascinating visualizations, won’t get anywhere with C-level decision makers without being able to provide cold hard metrics, and this is especially true of insights teams working with qualitative data.

In my experience I know that to truly resonate with any board, you must use quantitative rigor and create alignment around one single metric which is useable throughout the whole business.

For example, you need a number that measures the importance of an audience, customer type or employee segment discussing a topic. A number which has the rigor to withstand boardroom scrutiny and improves the chances of your research leading to change.

Consider this. Do you turn up to a board meeting and relay anecdotal evidence on consumers stating that your product has ‘quality issues’? Or, do you state that consumers were 5.7x more likely to talk about ‘quality issues’ when talking about your products versus your competitors’?

Which storytelling technique do you think will lead to greater investment in product development?

Text data storytelling has typically been limited to basic visualizations, such as word clouds. While they’re an interesting visualization, they don’t stand up to the interrogation they’ll receive at board level. They show the what, but don’t explain the why, or do so in a bulletproof way.

Nebulous narratives don’t cut it at C-level – you need to hard metrics to quantify your text data research. Just like any other audience, to resonate with the boardroom, you need to speak their language.

Text analysis software not only needs to uncover insights – it must do so in a way that you can take to the board. Finding a vendor which uses metrics that are meaningful to decision makers is a vital part of your text data storytelling strategy.

This is Relative Insight’s mission – to bring you text analytics using metrics which resonate with the board.