Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Financial Storytelling

If you're a finance professional and you spend weeks on a brilliant analysis, presented to leadership, and then people just nod politely and move on to the next topic, that's a failure. Your job isn't just to present numbers. It's to get leaders to discuss your insights, agree on actions, and actually implement your recommendations. This means you must master financial storytelling. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact framework I use to turn financial presentations into compelling stories that drive actual business decisions. It's the same framework I used when I was leading finance teams and presenting data to leadership at companies like Brooklyn Gamble, Unilever, and Squarespace. So let's get into it. Firstly, it's important to understand that most financial presentations fall flat for a few key reasons. They focus way too much on the data itself. They don't have a clear narrative. They fail to connect the numbers to actual business impact. And honestly, they just don't grab and keep people's attention. Now, I discovered a framework that completely changed how I approached this. It's from the New York Times bestseller, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. The book looks at how advertisers make the messages memorable and impactful. And when I read it, I thought, wait a second, we can totally adapt this to financial presentations. And it works. It's transformed how I teach FP&A professionals to communicate. The framework is called success. And here's what that stands for. S is for simple, U is for unexpected, C is for concrete, the second C is for credible, E is for emotional, and S is for stories. Let me break down each element and show you exactly how to apply it to your financial presentations. S, keep it simple. So first up, you keep it simple. Your slides should be to the point. Before you even start building your deck, ask yourself, what's the one thing I want people to take away from this? Each slide should have just one main message. Sometimes with financials, that's not possible, but try to keep it to no more than three insights per slide. Remember that your headline is some of the most valuable real estate you have. Don't waste it by just saying something like May sales actuals. Use it to tell a story. Say something like May sales exceed a target by 12% due to product launch success. Now, before you finalize your slides, do two quick checks. First, skim through the deck quickly and see if the key message of each slide is immediately clear. Or even better, ask someone who hasn't seen it to skim through and tell you what they got from it. If they can't catch the key message right away, his slides aren't simple enough. Second check, look at the visuals specifically. Make sure they support your message instead of distracting from it. If you've got too many data labels, too many lines, or you're just trying to show too much in one chart, there's a good chance it's hurting more than helping. Before I continue, if you want more practical FP&A frameworks like this, I've put together my 10 most popular one-pagers that you can download for free using the first link in the description and start using them immediately in your work. Back to the video. Next, be unexpected. You want to grab attention by surprising your audience. Lead with your most impactful insight. Put it right there in the headline so people see it immediately. This creates curiosity and makes them actually want to hear more. One of the biggest mistakes I see is people reading what's on the slide. The thing is, people can skim your slide faster than you can read it to them. By the time you're halfway through reading it, they've already seen everything. So the second half just becomes repetition. And nothing bores people faster than repetition. So how do you avoid this? You need what I call a voiceover. That means having talking points that go beyond what's on the slide. Let me give you some strategies to have an effective voiceover. First one is context-action-result. You show the result in your slide, but when you're speaking, you also mention the context and what actions you tried. This gives depth without cluttering your visual. Then there's drill-down and drill-up. Let's say you're reporting results by country. Drill-down would sound like this. In the US, we missed our sales forecast by three percentage points. But if we look at the state level, all states are actually meeting expectations except California. And because California has such a big weight, it's dragging down our overall performance. You're not showing state-level data on the slide. You're just speaking to it. Drill-up would be the opposite. We missed the sales forecast in the US by three percentage points. But as I mentioned in the executive summary, on a global level, we're still well on track to meet our targets. Another great voiceover technique is comparison to previous periods. You probably already have prior year comparison on your slide, but when you're talking, you can mention how the figures compare to two or three years ago or how they compare to before a major event like the pandemic. Now, this next one surprises people, but I also recommend to talk about your reservations and what you're still working on. Some people worry that mentioning reservations will undermine their recommendations. But actually, it does the opposite. By showing data that doesn't perfectly align with your story, you demonstrate that you looked at the business from all angles. You're not cherry-picking results and leaders really respect that. It's also valuable to mention what you're still working on and planning to do. It's way better to address these things up front than have them come up as questions later. The last voiceover technique is giving a preview of the next slide. I witnessed this at Unilever during a really high-stakes presentation. A senior director of marketing was presenting to our SVP, who had flown in all the way from London. Before moving to each new slide, she'd give a short preview of the key message, then she'd advance the slide. This was brilliant for two reasons. First, it showed she was super prepared and didn't need the slide as a crutch. But second, and more importantly, even with clear slides, flipping between them creates distraction. When you move to a new slide, people start skimming and you lose them for a few seconds. By making your main point before you transition, you make sure they don't miss it. C. Make it concrete. People only remember what they actually understand. Abstract concepts don't stick, but concrete examples and specific details do. So whenever you share something abstract, add a concrete example. Even better if you can include analogies or metaphors when you're explaining complex financial processes. This makes the content more accessible to everyone in the room, not just the finance people. And when you're dealing with complex calculations or financial models, break them into smaller, understandable parts. Walk your audience through each part, pause for questions before moving to the next section. Don't rush it. Clarity is way more important than speed. Keep in mind, though, that the more senior someone is, the less likely they are usually to admit when they don't understand something. They're not going to raise their hand and say, I don't know what that acronym means. So always try to share more examples and explanations. You're not going to lose credibility by being too clear. You'll lose it by being confusing. C. Establish credibility. Credibility is huge when you're presenting financials. Rule number one is never guess. If you get an unexpected question, it's totally fine to say, I'll get back to you later. For high stakes meetings like board presentations, you can even say, I'll get back to you later today. That's way better than saying something you'll regret because it wasn't accurate. Next, be ready to share your data sources, but only when you're asked. Have your sources documented and ready to go, but don't proactively share too much detail about your methodology. Because sometimes oversharing actually raises questions that people wouldn't have even thought about otherwise. Make sure your assumptions are quantified and documented. And here's an important one. They should be falsifiable. This means people can actually hold you accountable to them later. Let me give you an example of what not to do. Don't say something along the lines of, we expect a new TV commercial will result in incremental revenues of $500,000. If you have no way to actually measure that impact later, if you make unfalsifiable claims like this repeatedly, you'll damage your credibility over time. So this might seem superficial, but use high quality professional visuals. You might think, isn't it all about the data and finance? And it should be, but our brains don't work that way. If your slides look messy, if points aren't aligned, if you're using random fonts and sizes all over the place, people will consciously or subconsciously assume you were sloppy with your analysis too. Fair or not, that's how it works. Do explain your methodologies, but keep it brief. A quick explanation of how you arrived at your conclusions will increase people's confidence. But don't over-explain because again, you might raise questions that wouldn't have come up otherwise. One thing that makes you look really prepared is proactively addressing potential counter-arguments. For example, let's say you're launching a new laundry detergent with a unique ingredient that makes it the most effective in the market. A potential skepticism someone might raise is, well, couldn't our main competitor easily add that ingredient too? Address it up front. Say something like, our analysis shows adding the superior ingredient would take our competitor at least six months to execute. During those six months, we can establish our product as superior in consumers' minds and that awareness will sustain us even if competitors eventually copy us. See how that works? You've preempted the concern before it even comes up. Another small thing is to quote your numbers precisely. Don't say, revenues grew by just over 8%. Say, revenues grew by 8.3%. Their precision signals that you were rigorous in your analysis, whether that's real or just perceived. But this is crucial. Make sure you brainstorm possible questions ahead of time. And I mean, actually sit down with a piece of paper or word document and write down every question you think the audience might ask. Think back to previous meetings. What questions did they ask then? Because people usually ask similar questions to what they've asked in the past. Then prepare answers for each question ahead of time. You don't need to create appendix slides for everything, but at least have bullet points for each one. When I was at Squarespace, we were preparing our CFO to take the company public and speak with Wall Street analysts for the first time. We spent weeks just brainstorming questions that analysts might ask. We created financial models and analyses to answer each one. We had this huge spreadsheet with hundreds of questions and we studied all of them. And when the first analyst call happened, the CFO looked totally effortless. But it was only because of all that preparation behind the scenes. Last thing on credibility is make sure to triple check your data accuracy. Nothing is worse than having to correct yourself because you presented inaccurate data. Your data should come from reliable sources. Double check everything. Better yet, reserve some time to step away, do something different and come back and review it with fresh eyes. Or even better than that, ask a colleague for a quick review. Ask them if anything looks odd or stands out. Even if they are not as familiar with the topic as you are, a different perspective really helps. Create emotional connection. I know this surprises people because finance is supposed to be all about the numbers, right? But here's the reality. Making an emotional connection makes your message way more compelling and memorable. Doing this is simple. Every metric needs a comparator. Your metrics have to be compared to prior year, forecast or budget. Without that context, you literally can't say whether a number is good or bad. I actually tell my team, if there's a metric on a slide without a comparator, take it off. It's not useful for decision-making. But there's more you can do. Highlight the human impact. Include the voice of the customer in your presentations. You can get audio from the consumer hotline. You can interview customers directly. For major investments like new product launches, you might even hire a market research firm. Now, you might think, why would I do that? The hard data is what matters, right? Well, newspapers figured this out a long time ago. When they're reporting on big events, natural disasters, elections, whatever, they always highlight individual stories. They interview random people who were affected by the event. And technically, it doesn't add any quality data. The highest quality data is the aggregated hard facts they have collected. But those hard facts alone aren't enough to convey emotion. Personal stories make the message stick. The same thing works in corporate presentations. The voice of the customer can have a huge emotional impact. You can also share the journey. Highlight challenges and triumphs that the team went through on the project. This creates connections and shows the real work behind the numbers. Another thing that works well is tying your story to the company vision and values. Connect what you're presenting to your company's vision statement, mission, or core values. Now, this works best if your company actually has a clear vision that people know. And ideally, it's granular enough that you can connect it to your specific project. But be careful with emotions. If you're presenting bad results like a big miss versus target, make sure the people who are responsible are informed beforehand. Never surprise someone with bad news about the area in a group setting. This prevents unnecessary embarrassment and maintains trust. Tell stories. This is really where everything comes together. Financial presentations should tell the story behind the numbers. The so what, what they mean for the company today. Most importantly, what action should be taken. It's all about interpretation and implications. Now, most stories share some common elements. There's context that sets the scene, an obstacle that needs to be overcome, a hero who takes bold action, or at least there's a recommendation for bold action. And then there's a resolution that shows the outcome. But here's the most important part. Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. These three components make it complete and memorable. Let me give you a finance example of what this looks like in practice. The beginning might be, last month's orders were 30% lower than prior year. Unfortunately, our production plan was based on prior year levels. The middle, as a result, we missed our inventory forecast by 40% and working capital increased by $10 million. In the end, we identified the root cause, three specific customers changed their order timing, we contacted them, and they confirmed the gaps will be closed this month. Based on this, we recommend no change to our overall forecast. See how that structure gives leaders everything they need? They understand what happened, they see the business impact, know the root cause, and they have a clear recommendation. That's how you turn numbers into a story that actually drives decisions. Now, if you want to dive deeper into finance best practices, I've created a free resource with my 10 most popular FP&A infographics. These one-pagers cover everything from forecasting to business partnering, and they're designed to be practical references you can use immediately in your work. Just click the first link in the description to get instant access to them. If you want to learn how to build perfect financial models in Excel using AI, then watch this video next.