You will sit through hundreds of presentations throughout your career.
By a certain point, you learn what works and what doesn’t. You know what to include, how to standardize slides, and how to prepare for difficult questions ahead of time. But have you ever asked yourself if you’re genuinely capturing your audience’s attention?

Getting people to sit back and listen is a huge part of being an effective presentation-giver. And incorporating storytelling into your presentations can give you a hand in doing this.

Research from McKinsey confirms what many leaders have observed firsthand: growth outperformers are 80% more likely than their peers to communicate their growth successes more often, both internally and externally. 

If you’re looking to become a better communicator, here are seven tips on how you can use storytelling to communicate your points in your next presentation.

Know Your Audience Before You Build Your Story

The most compelling story falls flat when you don’t consider your audience. Before you build your narrative, take the time to suss out who is sitting in front of you. What are their priorities? What challenges are they facing – and how can your information connect dots for them? What do they need to walk away believing?

You should tweak your story about, for example, organizational change if you’re speaking to the board of your organization vs your internal team. Using the same facts, you can create two slightly different stories about your plan and goals. As the saying goes, preparation is 3/4ths of success – so study your audience.

Start with a Moment Your Audience Recognizes

Most leaders open a presentation with context, background, or agenda. It’s normal, although perhaps a bit staid. To capture attention, try opening with a moment instead. Start with a specific situation or a real scenario your audience will recognize. Something that puts them inside the story before you explain what the story means.

When you start with a moment, you create immediate engagement because the brain naturally follows narrative before processing analysis.

This is the foundation of communicating with presence and storytelling, leading with something human before moving into information.

Make Your Data Human

Data without context is difficult to remember. Do you remember what year Vesuvius erupted? Probably not, unless you are a Roman history fan. But, most likely you know the story of what happened that day in 79 AD. 

Most people will forget a statistic only 48 hours after a presentation. But they likely won’t forget the story (hence why we like to incorporate storytelling with data).

Before you introduce a number, introduce the person or story behind it. Show your audience what the data means in human terms. For example, a metric about customer retention becomes meaningful when it is tied to a real customer experience.

Lead With Your Own Experience

The presentations that stay with people long after the meeting ends are usually the ones where the leader shared something real. They remember what they personally observed, felt, or learned along the way.

This is not about oversharing but about building trust and relationships through authenticity.

Build Tension Before the Resolution

The most effective presentations don’t rush to the solution. They let the audience feel the weight of the challenge before they reveal how it was addressed.

This means being willing to sit in the discomfort of the problem for a moment. Describe what was at stake, acknowledge what was hard, then move toward the resolution.

Let Your Presence Carry the Story

How you deliver a story matters as much as the story itself. Your voice, your pace, your eye contact, and your physical presence all signal to the room whether you believe what you are saying.

Leaders who rush through their delivery, who speak to the screen instead of the room, or who tighten up under pressure lose the audience even when their story is strong. Slowing down, making sustained eye contact, and staying physically open are all signals that you are present and confident in what you are sharing.

This is the dimension of storytelling that most leaders never formally develop, and it is where executive presence has the greatest impact.

Close with a Clear Direction

Every presentation should close with one concrete action or decision you want the audience to take.

Avoid ending with multiple next steps or a summary slide. Focus on one clear, specific ask that follows naturally from the story you just shared.

Storytelling Is a Core Leadership Skill

These seven tips are habits that, practiced over time, can change how leaders communicate in every setting, from board rooms to team meetings to one-on-one conversations.

Ariel’s Leadership and Communication Development programs are built around this kind of “durable communication skill” development, combining experiential learning, expert facilitation, and real-world practice to help leaders communicate in a way that empowers people and drives results. If you are working with leaders who need to show up with greater clarity and connection in high-stakes presentations, let’s talk.