Investment Professionals: Here Are 5 Ways to Make You a Freakish Success
You studied hard in undergrad. You got the requisite certifications. You have been diligent at work and even went back to business school to get your MBA. You have more than 500 contacts on LinkedIN. But you are not the freakish success that you know you could be (yet). Why?
It may be because you are focusing on data and numbers (that is your job, after all) and neglecting the power of narratives. Here are the top five reasons to use storytelling in a sector that seems to be all about numbers.
5. “Logic makes you think; emotion makes you act.”
Thus advised the wise Allan Weiss, author of Million Dollar Consulting. In investment (and most other modern professions), it is easy to get lost in mountains of data and lose track of your singular goal: to persuade others to invest with you. In order to successfully persuade, we need to touch our audience’s emotions. Telling a story that contains logic, but also has an emotional element, can do just that.
4. You’ve got ten minutes, that’s it!
Dr. John Medina gave us this concrete parameter in his book Brain Rules. At most, your audience will give you ten minutes of their attention before their minds begin to drift away. The workaround is not to talk faster or skip critical information. Instead, Media says, “…you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives.” One of my favorite presentation formats is to tell a short story that gets to the whys and whats, then to back up that story with data and information that gets to the hows. You can then stretch this ten-minute rule by quite a bit.
3. Have balanced smarts.
You’ve discovered the best investment opportunities. You know you are the best person to shepherd the process. But in order to win your client’s trust, you still need to say the right things to the right people at the right time. Dr. Roger Shank, scholar of artificial intelligence and learning theory, has this to say about balanced smarts in his book Tell Me A Story, “At least two aspects of intelligence are critical …. One is to have something to say, to know something worth telling, and the other is to be able to determine others’ needs and abilities well enough to know what is worth telling them.” Investing is about trust. Through the natural selection process in the investment industry, your clients assume you are number-smart enough to interact with them in the first place. To truly stand out from your competition, show how you are people-smart by telling stories to address your clients’ hidden needs.
2. Numbers alone can intimidate.
Even if numbers, data and facts are the basic building blocks of investing, professor Aswarth Damodaran, of the New York University Stern School of Business, advised his audience to stay away from presenting only numbers at the CFA Institute Equity Research and Valuation Conference in 2014. In his talk entitled “Numbers and Narratives: Modeling, Storytelling and Investing,” Damodaran cautioned that numbers intimidate many people without having convinced or changed their minds. Complement numbers with narratives, however, and you will win both hearts and minds.
1. Be a “freakish” success.
The success of the books Freakonomics, Super Freakonomics, Think Like A Freak—and all of the subsequent media that have derived from them—is driven by two major elements: the quantitative prowess of economist Steven Levitt and the storytelling mastery of journalist Stephen Dubnar. Together, these two things have captured millions of people’s attention. As an investment professional, you already have the quantitative side covered. Now might be a good time to pick up the skill of storytelling. Then, you’ll have the tools to become a freakish success!
I believe whole-heartedly that you don’t need to be a super hero to tell great stories. All you need is a framework, coaching and lots of practice. Be the freakish success that you know you can be. Tell stories!
(Photo credits by Chris Potter of www.stockmonkeys.com, and by umjanedoan.)
