Get Funding For Your AI Projects With Storytelling (Guest: Scott Taylor)

Andreas Welsch: 0:21

Today we'll talk about getting funding for your AI project. And who better to talk to about it than someone who's a master at doing just that. Scott Taylor. Hey Scott. Thanks for joining.

Scott Taylor: 0:32

Andreas, it's good to see you. I'm here to help you turn your outcomes back into hype.

Andreas Welsch: 0:37

Oh, I like that. That's awesome. Great spin on my tagline. So hey. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do? Maybe there are still folks in the audience that have not met you.

Scott Taylor: 0:49

I hope so. I hope I'm meeting some new folks out there. Hello, data gals data kids, data guys. data queens, data kings. They're the Jacks of data. Ten of clubs maybe, if that works. Data jokers, data aces. I'm Scott Taylor, Data Whisperer here to be your data friend on the screen. I help people calm data down. That's what data whispering does. We all try and calm data down. We need good, solid, calm data to drive the kind of analytics work and AI work that we all want to do. I just produce content in a variety of different ways focused on the strategic importance of proper data management, which is a rather boring sounding topic. So I try to do this in the most entertaining way I can get away with. I used to write white papers, but now I do puppet shows. Continue to do these kinda live broadcasts, videos, events, any way we can get people paying attention to the importance of the value of data management, data governance, data stewardship, and more importantly, around how to tell that story to the business side, to those executive leadership stakeholders on the business side who really don't care about how you get the work done. They wanna know why it's important. And so I focus on helping businesses, both enterprises and tech brands put that data story together in an engaging, business friendly manner.

Andreas Welsch: 2:18

Awesome. And I think that's such an important part, right? Even though you say, hey it's, data management and data governance. And if we look at AI or generative AI, it still comes back down to data and do we have data? Do we have good data? Do we have clean data? So it's really fundamental and I'm really excited to have you on the show today. Because I know you've been active in that data and AI space for quite some time. So thank you for, joining.

Scott Taylor: 2:45

You bet. Thrilled to be here.

Andreas Welsch: 2:47

Hey folks in the audience. If you're just joining the stream, drop a comment in the chat where you're joining us from today. I'm curious how global our audience is again. Scott, what do you say? Should we play a little game to kick things off?

Scott Taylor: 3:00

Sure. I'm ready. This is the Jimmy Fallon part of the program. Yeah. Is there singing involved?

Andreas Welsch: 3:05

There's no singing in involved for the benefit of the audience.

Scott Taylor: 3:09

That's the good news and the bad news, but mostly,

Andreas Welsch: 3:12

I'm not a good singer. So I, take that on me for the benefit of the audience. But hey I don't have my usual set up today. But the game I wanna play with you is called In Your Own Words, and if you've followed the show for a while, you know what's coming next. But I'll read a sentence to you and I would love for you to answer it with the first thing that comes to mind and why. In your own words. And for those of you watching this live, also drop your answer in the chat. What do you think it is? Scott, are you ready for What's the BUZZ?

Scott Taylor: 3:45

I guess I'm ready here.

Andreas Welsch: 3:47

Awesome. Hey, if AI were a restaurant, what would it be? 60 seconds to make a little more interesting. Go!

Scott Taylor: 3:57

A sushi restaurant. It would be a sushi restaurant. Because you get these little tasty little nuggets and you have a wide variety of things that you can get rolls inside out, outside in cones, sashimi. But the most important aspect is it's fresh. The fish is fresh. If your data's not of good quality, if your data isn't fresh, if it isn't dependable, it doesn't matter what it looks like on the plate. It's gonna make people ill. So you can write in line with my basic data philosophy, which can boil down to three words, truth before meaning. You want to determine the truth in your data before you spend time deriving meaning out of it. You wanna make sure that sushi fish, even though it's raw, is super fresh before you start to lay it out there and all those wonderful, miraculous, exciting configurations. If I were a restaurant, it would be a sushi restaurant.

Andreas Welsch: 4:57

Way to think on the spot. I'm feeling you've done this before. I'm taking a look at the chat. All the way from Kenya, Islamabad, Pakistan. Thank you for joining us. But Scott, why don't we jump into the meat of the session and our questions.

Scott Taylor: 5:10

The fish of the session. Yes.

Andreas Welsch: 5:12

Yes, exactly. So look I've been in, in technical roles for most of my career. And early on in my career journey, I remember thinking to myself: why do you need to tell a story? Like when you hear people say, oh, you need to tell a good story for people to understand what you want to do and to follow you. And I thought isn't it obvious what we're doing and why we're doing it? So storytelling, to me, always seemed so fake at that time. But I also see a lot of people in technical roles asking similar questions. And I think that's now especially important as companies are chasing AI, generative AI, and so on. So my question to you would be: Why do you need a story to begin with?

Scott Taylor: 5:53

If you don't put things together in a story, then the people who you need support from are not going to understand you, are not gonna realize why it's important. And you're not gonna work always with the kind of technical practitioners that you might be out there, and Andreas, where you came from, right? Being very technical, highly specific, highly skilled in those really hard skills. Storytelling by its nature is one of those soft skills, and I think the soft skill category is probably ironically named, because those aren't easy. Soft doesn't mean it's easy either, so they're pretty hard to figure out. But if you don't capture that narrative in a way that people can understand it, you're not gonna move forward. And if you think about the power of storytelling, and I've been doing storytelling my entire career, probably my whole life, I think I've been doing storytelling since it was two words. It's a way to change people's minds. It's a way to have them imagine what the value you could bring could be. It's a way to grab them emotionally, logically, capture all their senses to have them see what and if you focus just on how you do it, which is the technical side. And you don't explain why it's important, then you're gonna fail in a business setting. And I would suggest that most people we're talking to are in some form of business enterprise setting, where they need to show value. The company's gotta make a profit, it needs to have a strategy, it needs to move forward. There's all kinds of issues in the company about what that brand is trying to accomplish and storytelling. Actually is a shortcut. It's the easiest way to get into the minds of the leaders of your business.

Andreas Welsch: 7:52

That's I think especially important because at the end of the day, your projects depend on budget and getting that budget to do what you actually want to do and what you're passionate about. But at the same time, like you said, showing what is the value. Now let me ask you this: if we talk about storytelling and that it's so very important and so critical to unlock that funding so you can do what you wanna do and move the business forward, obviously not everybody is at the level that you are at, the master level, right? So what are some of the common issues that you see people make when they do tell a story? What's missing? Where do they start off wrong and how can you do it better?

Scott Taylor: 8:34

A lot of times they start with how they're gonna do it. People don't care about how, until they understand the why. Don't start with your data model. Lot of times, especially from the practitioner technician perspective, they tell how they got to where they are. So we tried this, then we tried that, then we did it this way, then we figured it out that, and that's your wonderful process journey. But most people don't care about that. Not when you start. They might ask you later. You start with the headlines, what's the most important message that these folks want to hear. The type of story and they also don't structure it in a way that will drive action. So when you think about storytelling, business storytelling, the purpose of it is to drive an action, not just explain some kind of parable or leave people with a nice thought provoking idea or elaborate on an experience. Those things are nice, but the kind of when you're trying to get the money, whether it's for your AI project, your data management project, or anything. When you're trying to secure funding, you need to keep in mind why whatever you're doing is going to enable the strategic intentions of your enterprise. So think about that end in mind. Don't start with how it's gonna get done. Don't start with how you got to today. In a lot of cases, you wanna start with the end. It's not a suspense novel, the story you're telling. It's journalistic. It's sales oriented. And when I say journalistic who, what, why, where, how think about that in the beginning of those kind of lead sentence. A typical news article starts with some sort of headline. So the least important things are at the end. So you can shape that article in a way that you get the most important stuff at the top. If we get back to the essence of it, start with why. That's not my phrase. We all know that from Simon Sinek, but know that those folks there are gonna wanna know why this is important to the business.

Andreas Welsch: 10:47

That brings back memories. I remember a couple years ago, we had a meeting with some of our senior technical executives and leaders, and I brought some of our more junior data scientists and senior data scientists along. And we prepared this presentation and we were doing exactly what you said. Here's the data, here's the process, here's how we did it. We never got to what the benefit is because we ran out of time and a little bit out of patience as well.

Scott Taylor: 11:14

I'll bet your audience. The only why question they were asking is why am I in this meeting?

Andreas Welsch: 11:18

Yes, exactly. Tell me, get to the point. Tell me what you actually want to tell me, what I want to hear, what I need to hear. Sounds very familiar, but maybe I should have had that conversation with you years ago.

Scott Taylor: 11:32

There's exposition if you think about the classic storytelling techniques. Yeah. Studied Shakespeare at all, which I did as well. Every play has the same kind of format. You start with this exposition. Who are the characters? What's the context? What's happening? Drive to this climax. But you want to end with some form of call to action, a pitch, a sales pitch, which is what I would call this with all of the respect and positive nature of what sales can do. It focuses on benefits. It focuses on identifying the problem that exists and why what you are presenting or talking about will help solve that problem, which is different than, here's a lot of things we have, right? It's the difference. If you wanna study anything real quickly, take a look at the difference between a feature and a benefit. A feature is what it is. A benefit is why it's important and what you get out of it. And people wanna understand benefits first.

Andreas Welsch: 12:41

I think that's another important point that you're making. If we look at the chat I see two questions there. Maybe we can take them and combine them.

Scott Taylor: 12:52

Does the storytelling need to be different? You remember when you had to work multiple iterations or rather more challenging one? What structure do you usually follow? Those are great. When I was doing pitches formally, we'd always start with the situation overview, what's happening now? What are the issues that are happening where? What is it your company's facing? What's the current stated strategy or vision? And then from that comes the needs and opportunities. We wanna expand our distribution into multiple markets. We want to reduce customer churn. We want to automate our quote to cash process. Name a business problem challenge. Whatever, but identify that first. Is this what you want? Isn't this where you want to go? Yes. Let me show you what comes outta that in terms of the needs you have. If you wanna do this, then you probably need this A, B, C, what we're working on. We'll provide this A, B, C in a way that will help you meet those particular challenges or answer that opportunity or benefit from these types of capabilities. Obviously, I'm free associating here in a rather generic fashion, and then you end with closing it, right? This is it. This is what we want to do. This is how we wanna move forward. The basic marketing structures goes way back. It has these notions of attention, interest, desire, and action or close. You wanna grab somebody's attention. You want to make sure you develop their interest. You want to nurture the desire they have in whatever you're talking about. And then you want to drive that towards some formal closure call to action. It goes in that order. It always goes in that order. Nobody says yes to something that they're not even paying attention to. Nobody wants something that they're not interested in. Attention, interest, desire, close. Attention, interest, desire, action. That is the process you want to take and you wanna make sure you have all of them. It just is like a physical reality. It will not happen unless you go through all four of those different steps.

Andreas Welsch: 15:22

Thank you for sharing. Building on that, what are some tips and tricks, maybe some words of wisdom, for our audience? How they can tell an even better story? And what Joanna had asked you in the chat is: does the storytelling need to be different for AI than for any other business initiatives? I think that's a great one to ask. Because I also see that there are different aspects in in the technology itself, in what it is able to do, but I'm curious what your perspective is or not?

Scott Taylor: 15:58

One thing you can do is practice. Learn some techniques. Learn how to speak in front of people. Me? I over rotate obviously. I'm very focused and have a lot of experience, talent, energy, ideas around the presentational aspect of it. That's just my very nature. I tell people I have a fear of not public speaking. There's not a lot of folks who brag like that. But learn some techniques. That's one thing. Ways to tell a story. Stand up in front of people you don't know. Talk to your dog. Explain it to your partner. Join a Toastmasters group or something that just gets you on your feet and comfortable in front of folks that in some cases have no idea what you're talking about, have never met you, don't know who you are, and are wondering why they're even in the room. Think about that as a audience. Get good at that. You cannot get enough practice in no matter what. Is there any athlete out there who doesn't always hit the ball around, throw the ball around, warm up, all those kinds of things. For some reason, we think in business we can just turn a switch and just walk in the room and say, okay, I'm gonna do that. I practice all the time. I rehearse all the time. I'm working on my craft constantly because as a professional communicator, you want to be able to nail it. I don't have a choice. When somebody pays me to do a speaking gig, I don't get to use that as practice. I've gotta deliver. I've gotta change the energy in the room. I gotta be inspirational. I gotta bring the in the passion, the humor, the drama, whatever it is I'm trying to nail. I've gotta make sure that works like a musician, somebody in sports, like anybody who's got those kind of talents. So practice. The other thing I would say is understand the nature of a story because just, because the techniques doesn't automatically make the story any good. I was at the CDOIQ conference last week. A graduate student came up to me. It was a lovely moment. He said that he followed me, asked me what's the one tip? And I'd say, learn how to tell a story. And he said, so I should do presentation skills. I said, that's all good. Yes, important, but also get a sense of a difference between a good story and a bad story. Can't explain all that right now, but there is a difference. The example I actually used with him and I've used with others is you can go to a movie. It can have tremendous special effects. It can have this top-notch director. It can have all these wonderful stars. The movie can still suck. And the reason it'll suck is because the story sucks. So it's age old. It's the way humans communicate and it's such a powerful capability that even a small amount of it that you work on is gonna go a long way. And especially in our space, which is why I love being in the data space, being a non practitioner. I'm not a data scientist. It's not a very kept secret,'cause I shout about it all the time. Besides being a data whisperer, I don't really work with data. I've always been on the supplier side. I've never worked at an enterprise, but I get the pain. I understand what people are going through. I can connect with them emotionally, and I can translate those needs and opportunities into something that feels like you should take action upon it in a business sense. But I learned early on that a disproportionate amount of these techniques about understanding whether there's a story there about driving towards action can give you a disproportionate amount of effectiveness in this business setting.

Andreas Welsch: 19:49

Now, we've heard quite a bit about how and when to apply storytelling, but I'm wondering if you also have some examples when not to do it. When should you not apply storytelling?

Scott Taylor: 20:00

When it's time to shift from the why to the how. When you really gotta get it done. That's when the practitioners take over and speak to their peers. And I have huge respect for people who actually do the work that I love to talk about. It's sold, it's done. You wanna move on finishing it. getting it off the ground, whatever that aspect is. When you get the yes, shut up. Don't keep talking. Let's say you're in this board meeting and you have this wonderful story and you've gotten halfway through it and people are energized and realize this is something you they definitely wanna do. And they go, okay, what do we do next? The next thing you do isn't, Oh, I had another half of the story. I had 12 more slides I wanted to go through and just take you through this. No, shift to execution, shift to the plan. There may be a story and a narrative in that, but that's not the time to start to paint this wonderful image. It's time to shift to the practical reality of feet on the ground. There's kind of head in the clouds and there's feet on the ground. There's a balance there and everything. It's time to get into we need to execute on these features.

Andreas Welsch: 21:16

So, also being nimble and being able to pivot quickly or move on to the next phase is, what I'm hearing is key.

Scott Taylor: 21:23

I had an experience where I was brought in. I've worked at Dun and Bradstreet, worked at Nielsen. They used to love to bring me in. Sales folks used to love to bring me in for that kind of big account, command performance session because I could really whip people up and get'em inspired. I did it with a session for a client. Our clients saw me at an event. But then they said, okay, why don't we bring you in and we want you to talk to the technical folks. And I was paired with a solution architect. For me, it's always important to be anchored by the technical reality. And I was a little hesitant. I was like, you really want me to go through all this? And they said, oh yeah, the client loved it. And, please take'em through your show. And I started talking. It was on a webinar. I really wasn't getting a whole lot of engagement. And then I saw a couple notes like, when are we getting to the data model? And people were pinging and then suddenly I got this side note that said, okay, we're gonna shift over. And I had this kind of instinct, but I wasn't really fully formed in my gut, but I knew something was awry. And they apologetically said, this is all nice, but we gotta get to the execution. So I learned the hard lesson, even though I had a sense that I might be taught it that day that the stuff I do, for example, as good and as effective it can be has a place. And knowing that place sometimes is as important as being able to deliver that message.

Andreas Welsch: 22:47

Yeah. Hey, we're getting close to the end of the show and I was wondering if you can summarize the three key takeaways for our audience today before we wrap it up.

Scott Taylor: 22:56

Learn how to tell a story. Focus on the why. And if you ping me on LinkedIn, follow me, take a look at my stuff. I'm all over LinkedIn and YouTube with a lot of these kinds of different ways to tell these data stories and I love doing this. So hopefully that was helpful. Thank you for having me today.

Andreas Welsch: 23:17

Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your expertise with us. And for those of you in the audience, for learning with us. So Scott, thank you.