Your team presents decks. Clients remember stories.
A 4-hour workshop that teaches your client-facing people to find the stories only they have, and tell them in conversations with clients.
Your deck has your credentials.
The room remembers the stories.
Your people have done far more than they can remember. Clients only hear what they can recall in the room.
Twenty years of engagements sit in credential slides, and clients skim them. What they remember is the one story told over coffee, the one that made the person across the table sound like someone who has seen this before.
That person picks from whatever comes to mind on the day. For most people it is the same five stories, on rotation, for years. The rest is buried under the weeds of the work.
As AI makes products and proposals look alike, the client is choosing the person across the table.
A client can't fully inspect what they're buying until after they've bought it, so they read the person. What they are reading is judgment, and judgment shows up as stories. I've seen this before. Here's what happened. Here's what we did.
A person's stories are the one thing a competitor can't copy.
Same tools. Same decks. Same pitch.
Different stories.
Your competitors have the same AI. Only you have your people's experience.
Proposals, decks and follow-ups can be drafted in minutes by anyone. As that gets cheaper, polish stops separating one company from another, and the choice moves to something else.
What's left is what your people have lived: the engagements, the calls they got right, the things they watched go wrong. Almost none of it is written down anywhere, so no model has it. Once the stories are out, AI can help shape them, and the raw material stays yours.
What happens in the workshop
Name, Place, Animal, ThingMap
Places lived and worked down the side, the names you answered to across the top: employee, manager, founder, parent. Most of the grid stays empty. What's left is your territory.
Mine
Two probes bring each era back: what you did with your body and breath, and what you made with your hands. Four lenses turn one memory into several stories.
Cut
Name the feeling, find the shape and the turn, and keep the stories worth telling.
Show
The same story runs differently in a first call, a boardroom and over dinner. What moves is where the turn sits.
Work stories and personal stories
Client conversations need bothStories that carry judgment
The engagement that went sideways, the call you got right, the client who changed your mind.
Stories that carry who you are
They let the client meet the person before they hire the firm.
The best ones are both
Think of the client call you took on the way to a family wedding. It is a work story, told by a person, and the client hears both.
Everyone chooses which personal stories to share in the room. The rest stay theirs.
My grandfather had people talking to a room. StreamAlive has a room talking to people.
That line surfaced from my own scattered stories: a grandfather who taught public speaking, improv, stand-up, reading a live chat. I hadn't connected them until I saw them side by side.
Once the stories are out, each person can see what they stand for. Across a team, those threads add up to a firm voice that competitors can't copy.
What it looks like
Small groups, so everyone gets airtimeOne half-day
4 hours with a break, in your office or offsite.
2 hours, a break, 2 hours
One sitting, so the group leaves with a body of work. It can be split across two days if your team needs that.
It works well on Zoom and Teams. I've run two of Training Magazine Network's most interactive webinars, each with hundreds of participants and the room actively participating like never before. You can catch the recordings here and here.
Three check-ins keep it alive
Short, virtual- The workshop4 hours. Everyone leaves with a library of stories.
- Week 1Tell one story to a real client. Bring back what happened.
- Month 1Review the library and mine a second era.
- QuarterPull the stories into each person's thread.
About me
Track record
I didn't arrive at this as theory.
The talk on what obituaries reveal about living well. Watched more than two million times.
Years speaking from stages, plus a handful of open mics, one of them at the Comedy Cellar. All hunting the same thing: the one detail that makes a room lean in.
Name, Place, Animal, Thing, an Amazon bestseller. This workshop is the method inside it.
I founded StreamAlive after two years of watching live audiences get ignored. Every method in this workshop, I used on myself first.
Bring this to your team
We start with a conversation about your people, the format that suits them, and what you'd like them to leave with.
Prefer to message first? Find me on LinkedIn.
← Looking to learn this for yourself? See the individuals page