Stories are like mustard on a ham sandwich. A little lifts everything. An inch thick and you lose the room.

Tim Chinchen has spent 30 years in technology, half of that leading pre-sales teams. In this episode he walks through the storytelling habits that move deals and the ones that sink them. Why some cultures expect you to share your life before you share your ask. Why breaking a client's website inside a demo can work better than showing them a feature list. Why the classic hero's journey does not hold up in a 40-minute call where the exec might get pulled out after ten.

The conversation unpacks a three-act structure you can drop any story into, the three business themes every commercial story eventually serves (making money, saving money, and not getting sued), and the habit of putting the last thing first so even a distracted audience gets the point.

Tim also shares where he still gets it wrong. He recently used an AI note-taker to review his own job interviews and was told he used too many stories. The lesson is that the right number is rarely the maximum.

This is for sales engineers, pre-sales leaders, technical consultants, and anyone using narrative to get technical ideas across to people who have other things going on.

About the guest: Tim Chinchen has spent 30 years in technology, the first 15 as a developer and architect, the next 15 leading pre-sales teams. He ran Northern European sales engineering at Acme Packet before the company was acquired by Cisco for 3.7 billion dollars, and has spent the last 8 years running global pre-sales at PagerDuty. Find him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timchinchen/

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Tech World Human Skills is the podcast for technical professionals who want to communicate, influence, and lead at the highest level.