Welcome to the What's Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova.

This week on the podcast, I'm interviewing Nancy Duarte. Nancy is a communications expert who's been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and on CNN. Her firm, Duarte Inc., is the largest design firm in Silicon Valley as well as one of the top women-owned businesses in the area. It's the global leader behind some of the most influential visual messages in business and culture creating more than a quarter of a million presentations.

As a persuasion expert, she cracked the code for effectively incorporating story patterns into business communications. She's written five best-selling books and is ranked #1 on the list of the World's Top 30 Communication Professionals. Her TED Talk, The Secret Structure of Great Talks, has over 1 million views.

Nancy's expertise in the world of communication and presentations reveal how people can use stories to make real connections. In a B2B situation, real connections go beyond PowerPoint or pitching off of a slide deck. It's about doing your research, asking the right questions, and not wasting anyone's time.

In this episode:

3:24 – How to NOT drink your own Kool-Aid

4:06 – How your words can change the world with an idea

4:24 – Are sales people selling a product or change?

5:02 – What is a story?

5:50 – How stories are empathy-builders

7:06 – How companies are challenged with trust

7:23 – The lack of storytelling is hurting executives

8:35 – How executives can create an emotional connection

8:59 – How to create emotional connection in our social world

10:08 – Finding the moment of inspiration

12:00 – Should you be transparent in front of customers to inspire them to buy?

13:06 – The impassioned plea, how all sales calls start

13:33 – How slide docs are beautiful, modular, collaterals

13:53 – A bad example of pitching to get $100,000,000 and what to do instead

15:37 – Machine learning + AI + pitching

16:44 – Can AI learn the secrets to the human heart?

17:46 – Human + Machine + AI

18:10 – Will AI replace sales people?

18:43 – AI + Machine learning predicting outcomes

19:46 – What is a data story?

20:15 – Bias in the data

20:35 – What happens when you make 25,000 sales calls?

22:14 – How to create a hook on a sales call

24:50 – Why the customer knows so much more than they used to

25:05 – Are people emotionally invested in brands?

25:59 – How to be prepared for the face-to-face

27:20 – Why you need 4-5 different stories

28:03 – What's next for storytelling?

31:32 – How to be better at storytelling

Running Time: 32:54

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