Episode 101: A Leaders' Guide To Business Storytelling With Alison Esse

In the latest episode of Climb in Consulting, Nick talks to Alison Esse, the Co-founder and Director of business transformation specialists The Storytellers. Having begun her career in communications, and later in big show production, Alison has been no stranger to captivating people through the power of storytelling. But when the events industry went into freefall in the early 2000s, she decided to switch focus from telling stories on stages, and into helping businesses create emotionally-compelling narratives that allow leaders to navigate their people through periods of change. 19 years later, and The Storytellers have worked with over 200 of the world’s biggest brands, including HSBC, Coca-Cola, Deloitte and BP. In this conversation Alison and Nick discuss a range of fascinating topics around storytelling, including: • Why stories cut through the noise to help make dense and complex information much more digestible. • How to use the traditional Hero’s Journey framework to tell an engaging story for your own firm that your team will buy into. • And the origins of The Storytellers, the challenges they’ve faced on their own Hero’s journey, and how Alison and her fellow co-founders turned something often considered fluffy and intangible into a toolkit to inspire people, shift mindsets, and build trust that even the most sceptical CEOs buy in to. Wherever you are in your career, Alison shares some brilliant advice on how to be a good listener, how to take knocks and learn from them, the importance of always staying in tune with what your customers actually want, and why it’s crucial for entrepreneurs to take the back seat from time to time. You’ll get so much from this conversation, and we hope you enjoy the show! Get in touch with Alison at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alison-esse-ab2bb91 Find out more about The Storytellers at: https://thestorytellers.com/ Specific things discussed in the show: Dan and Chip Heath – Switch https://www.waterstones.com/book/switch/dan-heath/chip-heath/9781847940322 Will Storr – The Science of Storytelling https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-science-of-storytelling/will-storr/9780008276973

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As a management consultant myself I’ve always been lucky to have mentors who have guided me through my career. When I was in house I regularly had quality time with Senior Partners that helped me rapidly accelerate my career and has continued to help since I’ve gone out on my own. While I had this great resource and knowledge bank to draw on I know many friends in Consulting aren’t as lucky with some only speaking with senior partners on a monthly or quarterly basis. That’s why I created this podcast. I wanted to help people like you who want to accelerate their careers in consulting by interviewing leaders in the field to share the advice, tips and strategies that they used to get to the top so that you can to so that you can too. In each Episode I’ll be interviewing a senior figure in the industry so that you can learn from them. We’ll be going deep in to their background, how they succeeded and what their advice would be for you. This podcast is brought to you by Create Engage the Digital Marketing agency for the disruptive Management Consultancy. Digital Marketing has moved forward, but most consulting firms haven’t. Many Consulting firms still see their corporate blog as their sole Digital Marketing channel and find themselves frustrated when these blogs yield little if any results. To help those of you who want to harness the power of Digital Marketing to grow your Consulting Business but don’t have the knowledge, capacity or in-house capability to do so I launched Create Engage, the first Digital Marketing agency for the Management Consulting Industry. If you’d like to find out more about how Create Engage can help you use Digital Marketing to take your business to the next level then drop me an email at [email protected] or go to our website www.createengage.co.uk where you can download our free case study that breaks down down the Digital Marketing strategies used by one successful Consulting firm to help them grow over 400% in just 3 years and gives you the secrets they used, so that you can apply them in your own firm.