Almost every piece of storytelling advice you have ever been given is about words. Say it this way. Open with that. Tighten the middle.

So we get better at words, and the story still lands flat. People nod. They tell you it sounds great. Then they walk out and cannot describe what you actually do.

The fix has nothing to do with writing. It has to do with what you bring.

In this issue I'll share:

Enjoy putting people in the room with you...LG

Every physical experience you have ever had came through the same five doors. Sight. Sound. Touch. Smell. Taste.

Your audience has the same sensory receptors you do.

Founders forget to tap into them. We talk. We describe. We explain. We add another slide. And the whole time there is a better and faster way in, right in front of you.

STOP DESCRIBING IT. HAND IT TO THEM.

Five senses. Five things you can physically do.

Put the photo in the deck. Capture a sound they will not forget. Carry a prop they can hold. Bring a scent they can breathe. Keep samples you can hand out.

You don't have to be good with words. Bring something to compliment the words.

There is science under this. Joann Peck and Suzanne Shu, writing in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that merely touching an object increases how much somebody feels they own it. Not after they buy it. From holding it.

Daniel Lubetzky, founder of KIND bars, learned to fully embrace this concept while building a $5B brand. When he launched the first bar, he gave it a clear wrapper, so people could see the ingredients. Then he spent time with retailers, walking them through why visible whole nuts and fruit made the bar different from the pasty looking mush bars they were used to stocking. He wanted them to hear it, hold onto it, and repeat it to customers.

Leaning into taste took him longer. Initially he wrote sampling off as an expense his first few years. But when he upped the budget from $800 to $800,000 in a single year, the sales (and KIND brand) took off.

It was never about better words for the bar. It was about letting people see it and taste it, and handing retailers a prop they could use.

ONE THING DOES MORE THAN YOU THINK

We learn the senses as five separate things. Your brain does not keep them separate. It blends them into one read of what is happening, which means a single object usually arrives as more than one sense.

Sound builds a picture. Emma Rodero, publishing in Communication Research, played people versions of the same audio story. Some had dialogue only. Others added real sound and cues that placed those sounds in the room.

The versions with sound produced more mental imagery and more attention. Footsteps. A screen door. A cash register. People start building the room without ever seeing it.

Most of taste is actually smell. Charles Spence, reviewing the research in Cell, describes flavor as taste, smell, texture and temperature all arriving together. Which is why a food story can start in the air, before anybody takes a bite.

Hand somebody your first prototype and you have not given them one sense. You have given them weight, texture, temperature, the sound it makes when they set it down, and whatever it smells like after eight years in a box.

One object. Four or five doors.

Which is the good news. You do not need all five. Start with one that hits hard. If it sets off two or three at once, better. If you can stack more together, better still.

PICK THE ONE THEY'D NEVER EXPECT

Left alone, everybody reaches for the same sense. Researchers rated almost 40,000 English words for sensory content and found 74% came out mostly visual, with under 1% having anything to do with smell. In nearly 8 million words of people describing England's Lake District, there were 28,445 mentions of what they saw, 1,480 of what they heard, and 78 of what they smelled.

Sight is covered. You will get there on your own, and so will everybody you are competing against.

The opening is in the other four. What could they hear that nobody in your category ever plays for them. What could they hold. What could they smell. What could they taste.

Pick whichever one you can actually put in front of somebody.

Seth Goldman carved out a niche in a crowded space this way. He and Barry Nalebuff, his professor at the Yale School of Management, were tired of how sweet every bottled tea on the shelf was. Not tired of the market. Tired of the taste.

So they did not pitch it. In March 1998 they carried five thermoses of their own brewed tea into a regional Whole Foods office and let the buyers drink it. The buyers ordered 15,000 bottles on the spot.

They started Honest Tea with $500,000 from friends and family, and 8 years later was doing $13.5 million on about 1.5 million cases a year. Coca-Cola bought 40% for $43 million just two years later.

An entire business came out of the one sense nobody else in that aisle was thinking about.

WHEN YOU CAN'T BE IN THE ROOM

Most of the time you are not standing in front of anybody. You are on a call, in an email, in a deck, on a website. You can still get most of the way there.

Sight travels the easiest. A photo of the real place, the real prototype, the real whiteboard covered in the wrong idea. Not a stock image of a team high-fiving.

Sound travels too. Your actual voice on a call instead of another paragraph. A voice memo. Thirty seconds of the recording.

Touch travels if you are willing to spend the postage. Mail the sample. Mail the swatch. Mail the thing.

The harder problem is not any one sense. It is the whole experience.

Some things you live through do not survive being turned into a sentence. You come back and you hear yourself saying it was incredible, and you know while you are saying it that you missed. You wanted them to feel what you felt. Maybe you wanted to brag a little too. Words were never going to get there.

That gap is a business.

Nick Woodman wanted to photograph himself surfing from inside the wave. No camera on earth did that, so he strapped a single-use film camera to his wrist with a rubber band. More than 50 million cameras later, GoPro still only does one thing. It moves an experience to people who were not there.

When none of that is possible, you use words. That is the backup, not the goal. When you cannot hand somebody the thing, you name what was actually there. The sawdust. The burnt coffee. The cold pizza at 2 in the morning.

THE BOTTOM LINE

They were not in the garage. They were not at the kitchen table, or in the hospital room, or holding the first version when it finally worked.

You were.

You are the only one who can get any of it through their five doors.

Don't describe it. Bring it to them.

This is a gathering problem before it is a telling problem. Most founders already own everything they need and have never once thought of it as part of the story.

#1. Build Your Sense Kit

You have more than you think. The first prototype. The part that kept breaking. The original packaging you were embarrassed by. The photo buried on your phone. The voicemail you never deleted.

ACTION: Go find five physical things from your company's history (or today) and put them somewhere you can grab one on your way out the door. A shelf, a drawer, a box by the desk. A story asset you cannot reach is not an asset.

#2. Pick The Sense They Won't Expect

Everybody in your industry is showing the same kind of slide. Whatever you were about to put on the screen, somebody in that room has already seen a version of it this month.

ACTION: Before your next meeting, look at what you were planning to bring. If it is a photo or a slide, swap it for something they can hear, hold, smell or taste. If the room has never experienced it from a company like yours, that is the one.

#3. Put It In Their Hands

Nothing you say about an object beats somebody holding it. Pick one object from your story. A prototype, a part, a package, a tool. Now you have a prop.

ACTION: Hand it over and tell them what to notice. The weight. The rough seam. The tape still holding it together. Give them time to do it. In a bigger room, pass it and let it travel. Keep whatever you say next about the thing they are holding.

In 2006, researchers at UC Berkeley soaked a 33-foot string in chocolate essence and laid it in the grass outside Barker Hall.

Then they sent 32 people out to follow it. Blindfolded. Ear muffs on. Thick gloves and kneepads so they could not feel anything either. Nose only, on hands and knees, across a lawn.

Two thirds made it to the end within three attempts. Four who kept practicing doubled their speed in a few days.

The study ran in Nature Neuroscience, and the researchers' own conclusion is the good part. The poor reputation of human smell may say more about how little we use it than about what it can do.

Meaning = your audience's sensors work fine. Nobody is using them.

Jinsop Lee's "Design for All 5 Senses" TED Talk brings the five senses to life through a simple five-senses graph that scores everyday experiences by sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. Lee uses motorcycles, products and even a clock that tells time through scent to show how much richer an experience can become when more senses are involved. Then try his exercise yourself: grade the last pitch or story you gave. Watch here:

Design for All 5 Senses | Jinsop Lee | TED Talks
https://youtu.be/N6wjC0sxD2o?si=INuC7_jc2bGVP-hG

Need help with your story? I got you.

Send an email to [email protected] and someone from my team will circle back with you.