Show Notes
Stories are like mustard on a ham sandwich. A little lifts everything. An inch thick and you lose the room.
Tim Chinchen has spent 30 years in technology, half of that leading pre-sales teams. In this episode he walks through the storytelling habits that move deals and the ones that sink them. Why some cultures expect you to share your life before you share your ask. Why breaking a client's website inside a demo can work better than showing them a feature list. Why the classic hero's journey does not hold up in a 40-minute call where the exec might get pulled out after ten.
The conversation unpacks a three-act structure you can drop any story into, the three business themes every commercial story eventually serves (making money, saving money, and not getting sued), and the habit of putting the last thing first so even a distracted audience gets the point.
Tim also shares where he still gets it wrong. He recently used an AI note-taker to review his own job interviews and was told he used too many stories. The lesson is that the right number is rarely the maximum.
This is for sales engineers, pre-sales leaders, technical consultants, and anyone using narrative to get technical ideas across to people who have other things going on.
About the guest: Tim Chinchen has spent 30 years in technology, the first 15 as a developer and architect, the next 15 leading pre-sales teams. He ran Northern European sales engineering at Acme Packet before the company was acquired by Cisco for 3.7 billion dollars, and has spent the last 8 years running global pre-sales at PagerDuty. Find him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timchinchen/
Show notes footer:
Enjoyed this episode? Here's what to do next:
Get Ben's weekly newsletter, practical ideas for technical professionals, straight to your inbox: https://www.techworldhumanskills.com
Follow Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpthoughts
Explore the Technical Storytelling Professional Program: https://www.elevatedyou.live
Follow Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timchinchen/
Tech World Human Skills is the podcast for technical professionals who want to communicate, influence, and lead at the highest level.
More from Tech World Human Skills
This episode looks at how to get hired as a sales engineer while the hiring process itself is changing. David Ledger has run more than fifty interviews in his first three months at HiBob. He walks through the three questions that haven't changed in decades and still trip people up: why do you want to work here, why do you like being a sales engineer, and tell me about a deal you are proud of. The conversation gets specific about what a weak answer sounds like (a twenty-year life story, a complaint about a former manager, a timeline of events with no ownership) and what a strong one sounds like. That includes the test David applies to every deal story: if another SE had been there instead of you, would it still have closed?
Stoicism is not about feeling nothing. It is about deciding what deserves your energy and what does not.
The skills that make someone a strong technical expert are rarely the skills that make them a strong leader of the business around that expertise.
Fixing weaknesses feels productive, but doubling down on what you are already good at is usually what actually moves the needle.
Change management often fails for one simple reason: nobody diagnosed why people are actually resisting before throwing more training and communication at the problem.