Storytelling Coaching & Speaking for Events

Storytelling for Corporate Events

You need to deliver, and so do your corporate events. Corporate Events are a fantastic leadership and communications tool that can deliver results fast by clearly communicating with key internal and external stakeholders and triggering actions, changing behaviour and revising perceptions. 

For years before COVID, global businesses were already live-streaming Face to Face events and recent events have just accelerated holding events virtually. The event still needs to happen (the technology requirement has obviously increased), and I believe the future will see an increased hybrid of both formats.

Whether your audience sees you on a big stage or a small screen, your corporate events have to do their job. They are expensive, and their success is your success. Nobody will become a brand warrior, promote or buy buckets of your stock or instantly become a more productive and engaged employee just because you held a dull, dreary tick-box event. Results count.  

You have to have a trusted internal events person or team who start planning months in advance and who commission and choreograph, usually with a quality external events team, all the thousands of moving parts that make a successful event.

They will organise the tech side and logistical side and make sure everything happens when it should. There are some truly amazing events companies out there, and I have seen empty hangar spaces transformed overnight (literally) into events that have made their client’s CEO’s jaw drop. Hire the best - they are always worth it. 

They set the stage. Who you put on the stage and what they say is up to you. Your messaging and content needs to do its job and so do your speakers. 

The effortless amateur personified by James Bond is fiction. TED and TEDMED talk content is usually locked down three months before an event. Work drafting the State of the Union address by the U.S. President starts 3-4 months before the event. No musician gets anywhere without practising. No athlete wins a medal by just pitching up and “having a go”.

This is all made more complicated in the corporate world because of the welcome increase in transparency that technology gives us. What you say internally will get out. What you say to analysts will be noticed internally.

This complexity happens because you have so many stakeholders all with slightly different agendas and priorities, and the CEO, CFO, Board and SLT all have to communicate in such a way that all stakeholders are happy. 

Consistent, transparent and clear communication delivered by all your people is key*. Ideally from people who visibly give a damn about what they are saying and who are not reading badly someone else’s words.

*Including you.