Here’s how Korbel Champagne Cellars topped a PRSA Silver Anvil Award-winning pitch:

Have you heard about the guy who mowed “Will You Marry Me?” into his lawn? How about the practical joker who “accidentally” dropped a fake diamond ring overboard, only to watch his girlfriend jump off their sailboat to retrieve it?

Storytelling is the most powerful form of human communication, according to Peg C. Neuhauser, author of Corporate Legends and Lore. No wonder anecdotal leads are so effective. If you need to win the hearts and minds of your audience members, tell them a story.

Here are four ways to find stories for your leads:

1. Look for moments of truth.

Find the Aha! moment — aka the moment of truth or desk-pounding moment. Here’s how Eastman Chemical Company launched an annual report feature:

Let’s pause and ponder that for a minute too.

Alone in his laboratory on a snowy evening the week before Christmas, Dr. John Monnier observed unexpected peaks on the readout of his gas chromatograph.

“I thought the equipment was broken,” he recalls.

Instead, the Illinois farm boy was seeing evidence of the discovery of a lifetime. He had found a low-cost route to epoxybutene, a building block for scores of industrial, specialty, and fine chemicals.

2. Grab a story from the headlines …

Or the comic pages. Here’s the lead, nut graph and background section for a Sprint feature article about an overworked facilities management team:

When Karen Hand saw the “Dilbert” cartoon that pictured employees hanging from the walls by Velcro, she laughed. Then she thought: “Hmmm … wonder if that would work?”

Hand and the rest of the Facilities team have tried just about everything else to find space for the growing number of associates at Sprint Spectrum. We’ve soared from 50 to 1,500 associates in a year, and we’re likely to exceed 4,000 by year-end.

“Head count is a moving target,” says Hand, manager of Facilities and Administration. “We want everyone in the company to have a comfortable, efficient place to work. But some days it feels like we’re just packing and stacking.”

3. … Or from the history books.

One place to find existing stories is in the history of your topic. Specifically, look for the moment of discovery, or the “aha!” moment.

Richard Preston told this historical anecdote for Demon in the Freezer, his exhaustive book on the topic:

In the late seventeen-hundreds, the English country doctor Edward Jenner noticed that dairymaids who had contracted cowpox from cows seemed to be protected from catching smallpox, and he thought he would do an experiment.

Cowpox (it probably lives in rodents, and only occasionally infects cows) produced a mild disease.

On May 14, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into the boy’s arm a droplet of cowpox pus that he’d taken from a blister on the hand of a dairy worker named Sarah Nelmes.

A few months later, he scratched the boy’s arm with deadly pus he had taken from a smallpox patient, and the boy didn’t come down with smallpox. The boy had become immune.

Jenner had discovered what he called vaccination, after the Latin word for cow.

4. Try a scenario.

Fred Shlapak needed to explain Motorola’s plans for embedded electronic systems to an audience of non-techies. So the senior vice president of Motorola SPS created a scenario to show his products in action:

You might start your day by waking to a digital clock that is powered by a Motorola microcontroller.

From there, you would grab your electric shaver — another device driven by DigitalDNA.

Next, you make your way to the kitchen, where Motorola embedded systems control your microwave, coffee maker, refrigerator and dishwasher.

On your way out the door, you grab your cell phone and check your email on a DigitalDNA-powered network.

Embedded systems surround you, and you haven’t even made it to your car.

Win hearts and minds through storytelling.

Want to grab attention and move people to act? Steal a tip from Pulitzer Prize-winning feature articles and tell readers a story.

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First things first.

Start your story with the inciting incident — the conflict that begins the action of the story and causes the hero to act.

Think of the inciting incident as the discovery of the corpse that begins every episode of “Law & Order.” Elizabeth George’s For the Sake of Elena, for instance, starts like this:

“Mercifully, the arm was attached to a body.”

Without this event, there would be no story.

Three tricks for starting with the inciting incident:

1. Find the ‘desk-pounding moment.’

When you’re interviewing for a narrative, look for the “desk-pounding moment.”

That, according to Ragan Communications editor David Murray, “is the moment when somebody pounded on his or her desk and said, ‘Damn it, we’ve got to do something about this.’

“That moment is the origin of every corporate program. … The closer you as a reporter get to the very moment the idea was hatched by a human being, the better your story is going to be.”

2. Begin as close to the action as possible.

“Come in late and get out early.”

— David Mamet, Tony-nominated playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross

A participant in one of my storytelling workshops once shared this advice:

“If you’re writing about seeing a snake at a picnic, for gosh sake, start with the snake. Don’t start with fixing the sandwiches.”

The conflict — the snake — is the inciting moment.

So start in the middle of things, at the most dramatic moment of the conflict:

• The day the tax bill came
• The day the bank called your loan
• The day the company shipped its $60,000 circuit board with a fatal flaw

3. Skip the background information.

And of course, don’t include 40 paragraphs of background information before something actually happens. Do that, and readers won’t stick around long enough to get to the inciting incident.

___

Sources: Ann Wylie, The Art of the Storyteller, Wylie Communications Inc., 2003

David Murray, “Writing Between the Lines: How to tell good news well: Separate the meat from the fluff,” Corporate Writer & Editor, July 1, 2003

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