Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Landing — and What to Do About It
By Eric Janssen
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Most founders prepare obsessively for investor meetings: the financials, the market size, the team slide.
What they under-prepare is the two-sentence answer to the simplest question in the room: what do you do?
I review hundreds of pitches a year. The ones that move forward aren't always the best businesses. They're the ones where I can still explain the idea clearly the next morning.
Clarity, it turns out, is a competitive advantage. The business that makes progress is rarely objectively the best one in the room. It’s the one that is easiest to understand.
This gap between having something valuable to say and getting people to understand it is not a charisma problem. It’s a delivery problem. And the most reliable solution isn’t more data or better slides. It’s story.
But not story in the vague sense of “be more vulnerable” or “paint a picture.” Specific, structured storytelling that functions as a precision delivery mechanism for the ideas you need people to retain, repeat, and act on.
I recently sat down with Eric Silverberg and Eli Gladstone, the founders of Speaker Labs for an episode of Sales Reframed. They've spent years teaching executives and founders how to communicate under pressure. What struck me was how systematically they approach something most people treat as instinct.
Their core conviction: storytelling isn't a charisma trait. It's a craft. And like any craft, it can be taught, practiced, and refined.
The Pill and the Peanut Butter
Anyone who has tried to give a dog a pill knows the dynamic. You have two options: force it down their throat and risk a fight, or wrap it in peanut butter and watch them swallow it whole. The pill is going down either way. One method just works considerably better than the other.
The idea: the insight, the recommendation, the data-backed conclusion, is the pill.
The story is the peanut butter.
Most professionals obsess over the pill and assume that if the idea is strong enough, people will simply accept it. But the real obstacle usually isn’t the quality of the idea. It’s the resistance that forms the moment people encounter a claim.
When someone hears an assertion, their default response is skepticism: prove it. When someone hears a story, they lean in. Attention rises. Resistance softens. The audience becomes more open to the underlying message before they’ve even consciously evaluated it.
This is what good storytelling does in a professional context. It isn’t decoration or charisma. It’s packaging. It’s the delivery mechanism that increases the probability that your idea gets absorbed, retained, and repeated when you’re not in the room.
The same core idea can be expressed many different ways, just as the number 10 can be written as 5+5, 8+2, or 100−90. The underlying truth doesn’t change. Only the delivery changes. The most effective communicators aren’t necessarily those with the best ideas. They’re the ones with a wide repertoire of ways to express the same idea to make it land.
Four Steps to Structuring a Story That Sticks
The mistake most professionals make is treating storytelling as something that either happens naturally or doesn’t. In reality, effective business storytelling follows a learnable structure. Here is the one I learned from Eric and Eli:
Step 1: Start with the point, not the story.
Most people find a story first and hope it lands somewhere meaningful. That’s how you end up in the most common trap: a story that trails off and ends with a weak “…and yeah.” Before you start, ask: What is the specific point I want this audience to walk away with? Once you know the destination, you can choose the vehicle.
Step 2: Find a lived experience that illustrates it.
The experience doesn’t need to be dramatic. A moment of learning something new, making a small mistake, or realizing something unexpectedly can carry as much weight as a high-stakes crisis story — often more, because it’s easier to identify with. The key is choosing a specific moment where you arrived at the insight you want others to reach. That moment of personal realization is what makes the story authentic rather than constructed.
Recently, I was working with a group of executives whose job was to communicate complex regulatory issues to decision-makers: people with limited time and even less patience for technical detail. The point they needed to make was specific: farmers were being charged stormwater fees for a service that didn't apply to their land. Accurate. Legitimate. And almost impossible to make compelling to anyone outside the room.
So we abstracted it. Instead of leading with stormwater policy, I asked: when have you ever been handed a bill for something you didn't receive or derive value from?
Imagine you go out to dinner with a partner. The meal is great. Then the bill arrives and there's a charge for a third meal neither of you ordered. You'd flag it immediately. Of course you would. You didn't eat it. You didn't benefit from it. The restaurant would remove it without argument.
That's exactly what's happening to these farmers. They're being charged for a service that flows right past them.
The policy hadn't changed. The injustice hadn't changed. But now the room could feel it because the story gave regulators somewhere familiar to stand before asking them to follow you somewhere new. That's what abstraction does. It finds the universal inside the specific, and uses it as a bridge.
Step 3: Let the audience inside the experience.
The sequence of events is not what makes a story land. What makes it land is humanity, specifically, what you felt while it was happening. Nervousness, uncertainty, relief, embarrassment. When you share your internal experience, the story shifts from a sequence of facts to something the audience can actually feel. Emotion is the bridge that turns information into connection.
Compare these two versions of the same micro story:
"I landed a big meeting. I prepared. I walked into the room."
"I landed a big meeting, and I was genuinely excited. As I was preparing, the nerves started to creep in. But the moment I walked into that room, I felt confident."
Same timeline. Same facts. The second version lets the audience travel with you rather than observe you from a distance. That's the whole move: don't just tell people what happened. Tell them what it felt like to be inside it as it was happening.
Step 4: Land the plane explicitly.
This is the step most people skip. At the end of your story, no one should have to wonder why you told it. A strong ending doesn't hint at the lesson, it states it clearly.
Which means it's worth asking: what is the specific point I want to end on?
Not the general idea. The actual line. Because how you end is what people carry out of the room with them. A story that builds well but trails off at the finish loses most of what it earned.
That means rehearsing it. Not the full story necessarily, but the landing. Know exactly what you're going to say, and exactly when you're going to say it.
The founders and executives who communicate most effectively aren't necessarily the most naturally gifted storytellers. They're the ones who've decided in advance where the plane is going to touch down and practiced it enough that when the moment comes, it sounds completely effortless.
What This Changes for Leaders
When professionals meet resistance, whether in sales, fundraising, leadership, or hiring, the instinct is almost always to add more. More information. More slides. More proof. But additional information makes it worse.
The better response is to reduce friction.
Make the idea easier to hold. Make the takeaway easier to repeat.
The goal isn’t just to make people feel something in the moment; it’s to give your idea the structure it needs to travel without you: from a buyer to their executive team, from an investor to their partners, from a manager to their direct reports.
Story is not a soft skill or a personality trait.
It is a communication system.
And once leaders begin treating it that way, as craft rather than an innate talent, the question stops being how do I become a better speaker? And becomes: How do I effectively communicate ideas that travel?
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Eric Janssen teaches sales and entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School at Western University. He is the founder of the Founder Sales Sprint and host of the Sales Reframed podcast, where he interviews Eric Silverberg and Eli Gladstone from Speaker Labs in Episode 8.
