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Communication in FP&A: The Importance of Storytelling

insightsoftware -
December 26, 2020

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions, empowering organizations to unlock business data and transform the way finance and data teams operate.

10 2021 Calumo Blog Communicationinfp&a Inline

Marketing and accounting teams have traditionally set up on figuratively and literally opposing corners of the office, but that’s starting to change. The evolution of finance, the changing role of CFOs, and the increasing importance of company-wide data literacy are bringing these two distinct business functions closer together.

Modern financial planning and analysis (FP&A) tools are equipping accountants with powerful imagery, analysis, and information, which they need to be able to effectively communicate to drive businesses forward. That’s where us marketers come in. We can’t help you with your balance sheets or horizontal analysis, but we can help you share your message through storytelling.

Beethoven was a storyteller. He was also, in a way, an accountant. Bear with us.

To orchestrate a beautiful symphony, Beethoven had to aggregate reams of instrument-specific notation, integrate complex auditory datasets, and convert winning harmonic formulae into a compelling story line—less analytical minds might call this a melody.

Like Beethoven, you too can see truth and beauty in the science of a spreadsheet. Where you and Beethoven currently differ is in critical storytelling skills and overall panache.

This article is made for any accountant, from grads to CFOs, who need to communicate their data to other arms of the business. It will highlight the rising importance of telling engaging stories in modern FP&A, and also offer some easy tips and tricks to help you effectively deliver your key analytical messages.

Why FP&A Needs to Tell Stories

The ultimate purpose of FP&A is decision support. With the evolution of FP&A technology, leveraging your data into meaningful insights for your business means striking the proper balance between analytical depth and high-level storytelling.

As a modern FP&A professional, you must make your findings comprehensible for the movers and shakers (the Excel-averse non-accountants) within your business.

Do not fear or loathe a term like “storytelling.” It’s not pretentious, nor is it exclusively the domain of holier-than-thou “creative spirits”. Storytelling is a business tool. An essential skill. It should be a lever, employed to get the most out of your data insights.

Get the Recognition Your Finance Team Deserves

Good storytelling will not only illustrate the depth of your insight and analysis, it will also help you demonstrate your Finance team’s brilliance and hard work. Tell the story of your data and the story of its analysis. This will help you convince business leaders of Finance’s value in driving higher-level decision making.

Budgeting and planning solutions like Calumo are eliminating tedious, onerous busywork from the accounting profession. Our customers leverage the full suite of insightsoftware’s products to do better accounting. Finance teams need to be able to communicate their increased analytical capacity to management, to demonstrate their value-add and ensure they’re focusing their resources on the proper channels.

Through two cyber-attacks and the pandemic, property valuation company Acumentis leveraged Calumo’s easy and impressive reporting capabilities to keep its board and business partners updated and confident in results. Its CFO oversaw 54 board meetings in one year, and the capacity to publish a wide range of dynamic reports and re-forecasts was critical in directing strategic decision making. Telling the story of your data will drive your business forward.

Storytelling is Good for Business!

Your Finance team is central to all other business functions. Accumulating, analysing, and importantly, explaining diverse and disparate data sets is crucial for wholistic corporate performance. The more compelling and effective you can make the story of your data, the easier it will be for decision-makers to do their job.

Finance is unique in its ability to see and work across all functions of the business. Good communication skills and strategies will ensure your team makes the most of that privilege. An FP&A solution like Calumo has a low barrier to entry for all staff, and its powerful reporting and dashboarding functionality that will help you:

  • Empower other departments with critical business information
  • Create a data-driven culture of decision making
  • Show finance’s value
  • Boost the overall data literacy of your organization

Technological advances and an evolving business landscape are increasing the critical importance of FP&A for corporate performance, and you need your analysis to be understood.

Storytelling Skills and Strategies

Human beings have been telling stories for millennia. It is one of the most important things that we do. And though your subject matter may be altogether more analytical and “financey” than a timeless fable or the Harry Potter series, there are universal skills and strategies that we can all leverage to make our stories more compelling and informative. Some are no-brainers that are easy to forget, others are more nuanced.

With the evolving functionality of financial intelligence solutions, a lot of traditional storytelling skills have been digitalized for your convenience. For example, insightsoftware’s Calumo product has a number of reporting tools that will make the story of your data more impactful:

  • Skylights embeds live, interconnected datasets into your PowerPoint or Word document so all you need to do is refresh.
  • Publications delivers specific reports directly to a team member’s inbox, so they have all the data they need regularly delivered to them.
  • Start Pages allows admins to choose the entry point for users, and ensure specific users only see relevant reports, views, apps, and URLs.
  • Meta allows you to label all your Calumo assets, providing crucial contextual information to all users which improves data literacy across the organisation.

The following practical tips will help you communicate your FP&A findings to managers, business leaders, and otherwise Excel-agnostic staff.

How to Tell Better FP&A Stories

Back Them Up With Data

A prerequisite for compelling and meaningful storytelling is strong analysis. Be willing to do the work, and to really drill down into the science before we get to the art. Foster intellectual curiosity about what your data set is communicating and rid your analysis of data-biases and pre-conceived assumptions. This is the part of the storytelling process you’re great at. It’s pure, unabashed numbers.

Strong data gives your narrative the best possible start.

Develop Key Messaging

Don’t muddle your strong analysis by launching into a tangential, information-dense PowerPoint. If you overwhelm your Board or CFO with graphs and data, you’ll dilute your key message.

Pick the three most important findings from your analysis–to do this, consider urgency, audience, and potential value-add to the business. Don’t stray from these points as you craft your narrative. Keep your messaging impactful and direct.

A useful strategy to achieve this is to condense each of your points into a single sentence. It’s hard to do, but it will help you articulate the essence of your message from which to flesh out your more comprehensive case.

Address Your Target Audience

Are you delivering FP&A insights to the Board or to the Sales team? Are you shooting the long-term forecasting breeze around the water cooler or are you giving specific insight to an underperforming department of the business?

Your “who” affects your “how” and “what”. Tailoring not only the content but the medium through which it is delivered is critical to meaningful storytelling. Develop messages that are relevant to your audience and convey them in a way that is engaging, appropriate, and encourages action.

Identify Key Metrics

Once you’re clear on who you are talking to and what you want to say, it’s time to be selective about what metrics you present. The human mind can only comprehend so many numbers per meeting, and you don’t want to bombard board members with every bit of interesting data that has come out of your analysis. All data is interesting to accountants!

Cherry pick metrics that are informative, and reflective of your wider narrative. Again, you should consider what data has the most urgency, relevance to your audience’s function, and potential value-add to the business.

Have a Strong Call to Action

A weak or absent call to action is like ending a novel with, “It was all a dream”–which we consider to be a “Big No No” in the storytelling business.

You can deliver the most compelling, insightful, and visually scintillating presentation of all time–you could even win an award from the good people at Microsoft for “Most Outrageously Good PowerPoint FY22”–but if your audience doesn’t leave knowing exactly what they should do next, then you’ve wasted everyone’s time. Clearly articulate how you want your story to inspire change, and make it as simple and motivating as possible for your colleagues to follow this plan.

Complement your storytelling with regular returns to your call to action.

Data Visualization

Once you’re clear on what metrics will be most impactful and how you want your audience to act, you should consider how you’ll visualize your findings. Choose the dataset that is most relevant, insightful and important to your report’s narrative, and present your findings in a way that is compelling to managers. When visualizing your data:

  • Reduce noise and the number of colours.

Remember to empathize with your audience, and to have visuals that specifically cater to them. A CEO may want to see charts that demonstrate how different departments intersect. Finance-savvy executives would appreciate a deeper dive into the data. The sales team might need a different approach entirely, one that drills down to an individual transaction level and uses lots of bright colours – don’t be afraid to experiment!

Calumo is designed to provide consistency across a range of mediums. Create visuals that deliver a quick understanding, and visuals that help initiate action.

Final Tips and Tricks

Some quick, universal storytelling tenets to keep in mind as you go forth:

  • Less is more. Capture the essence of your report and articulate it quickly.
  • Have a clear structure to best serve your narrative.
  • Tell a story that helps your audience.

Go Forth, Intrepid Storytellers

Don’t be afraid of storytelling–it’s a business tool, and a vital life skill, that will help you extract the most value from your FP&A reporting. Your analysis is central to effective decision support, and you need to articulate it clearly and compellingly to members of your organization.

So: have good data, clarify your key messaging, and present it in an engaging way. Strong storytelling will transform the value of your financial planning and analysis.

Want to learn more? Download our 5-Step Guide to Effective Financial Storytelling.