How to use storytelling in presentations (without sounding like you went to a storytelling workshop)

Here’s something I’ve noticed about presentation storytelling advice. Most of it is correct in theory and awkward in practice.

Start with a story.

What kind? About whom? How long? When do I get to the point?

Make the audience the hero.

How does that work when I’m presenting a quarterly business review?

Use the hero’s journey structure.

I’ve read the book. I don’t know how to apply it to a vendor pitch.

The advice is well-intentioned. But it often produces presentations that are consciously story-shaped in a way that’s somehow more uncomfortable than the slide-heavy presentations they replaced. You can feel the structure. You can feel the moment the storyteller decides to be vulnerable now. It doesn’t work.

What I want to give you is something more practical. What storytelling in presentations actually looks like when it’s working, and how to develop the skills without developing a personality transplant.

Why most presentations don’t land

Before we talk about the story, let’s talk about what a presentation is actually trying to do. A presentation is trying to move someone from where they are to where you want them to be. A different understanding. A decision. A feeling of confidence about something they were uncertain about. A commitment to act.

That movement doesn’t happen because you presented information. It happens because the person in front of you felt something shift, such as a new way of seeing their situation, a connection between something they already knew and something they didn’t, or a moment of recognition that made the abstract concrete.

Story is the fastest way to create that shift. Not because the story is emotional, and presentations should be emotional. But because the story is about how the human brain processes and retains information. We’re pattern-matching machines wired to track narratives such as cause and effect, character and consequence, and situation and outcome. When information is presented in that shape, it sticks.

When it’s presented as a series of assertions on slides, it doesn’t.

The practical storytelling workshop question: Where does the story go?

One of the first exercises I do in a presentation storytelling workshop is to ask participants to look at their standard presentation, whatever they typically show in a client meeting or an internal review, and identify where a human being appears.

In most presentations, the answer is almost nowhere to be found.

Data. Analysis. Process diagrams. Arrows between boxes. More data. Recommendations. Call to action. Nowhere in this sequence is there a person who wanted something, faced a difficult situation, and came through it differently.

And yet, there are usually people in the story somewhere. The client who had the problem you solved. The team member who made the discovery that changed the analysis. The customer whose complaint three years ago is the reason the product works the way it does now.

Those people, and the specific moments in which they existed, are the story. They don’t need to take up the whole presentation. They need to appear at the right moment, in enough specific detail to be real, and they need to be clearly connected to the point you’re making.

Where the story actually goes in a presentation

A story has three primary jobs in a presentation, and where it goes depends on which job it’s doing.

The first is the opening.

A well-chosen story at the start of a presentation does something a statistic or an agenda slide can’t: it captures genuine attention. Not polite attention. The kind of attention that comes from suddenly being in someone else’s specific reality.

A good opening story is short, under ninety seconds, and places the audience in a world they recognize. It ends just before the resolution, which creates a question in their minds. The rest of the presentation is the answer.

The second is the proof point.

This is the most commonly used and most commonly wasted story slot in business presentations. The case study. The client example. The testimonial.

These are almost always too generic. The client is described vaguely, the situation broadly, and the result statistically. None of it stays in the room after you’ve left.

A proof-point story that works has a specific person or company, a specific situation with specific stakes, a specific moment when something changed, and a specific outcome that’s concrete enough to be real. The specificity is not a detail; it’s the whole mechanism. Specificity is what creates recognition, and recognition is what creates trust.

The third is the close.

Most presentations close with a summary and a call to action. The narrative close does something more interesting: it reconnects the audience to why this matters through story. A brief image of the world in which the decision you’re asking about has been made. What becomes possible. What changes. Concrete enough to be imagined.

The workshop moment that changes how people present

In every presentation storytelling workshop I run, there’s a moment, usually around the third session, where something clicks for someone.

They’ve been trying to add a story to their slides. They’ve been looking for places to insert narrative into a structure that was built on logic and data. And then they realize: the problem is that they’ve been building the slides first.

When you build slides first, you build a logical structure and then look for illustrations. When you build the story first, you start with the person, the problem, and what changed, and then the slides become the visual support for that story. The whole presentation becomes easier to construct and easier to follow.

The insight is simple. The habit is hard to change. Most professionals have built slides first for their entire careers.

The one rule that matters most

I’ll give you the principle that underpins everything I teach about presentation storytelling: never tell someone what to feel. Show them the situation that would produce that feeling in anyone.

Don’t say “this is incredibly inspiring.” Show me the thing that inspired you, in enough specific detail that I’m inspired too.

Don’t say “the results were remarkable.” Show me the specific result, like the number, the face, the moment, and let me find it remarkable on my own.

Don’t say “our client was transforming their business.” Show me the exact meeting where the VP of Sales looked at the new dashboard for the first time and said nothing for thirty seconds.

The thirty seconds of silence is the story. Everything else is commentary.

A final thought on getting better at this

Presentation storytelling is a skill. Like all skills, it’s developed through practice, feedback, and observation of people who are good at it.

The fastest path I know is this: after every presentation you give, identify the one moment where the room was most engaged. What were you doing in that moment? Telling a story, almost certainly. Now ask: what was specific about it? What made it land?

Do more of that. Less of everything else.

Story It runs presentation storytelling workshops for individuals and teams, helping people move from information delivery to genuine communication that moves rooms. If your presentations aren’t landing the way they should, that’s a solvable problem.