What matters most in financial decision making - numbers or words?
The truth is they are both of equal importance. To make a compelling budget, numbers should be presented as part of a story. This is because a powerful narrative about a company will secure buy-in for critical financial and budgetary decisions. In turn, corporate objectives become much easier to understand and therefore achieve.
We like to cite renowned screenwriter Robert McKee, who told Harvard Business Review (“HBR”) that a “way to persuade people is by uniting an idea with an emotion”.
“The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story. In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener’s emotions and energy,” McKee argues.

This is far more effective than a data-heavy PowerPoint presentation detailing a company’s biggest challenges and possible routes to success. The full interview between HBR and McKee can be read here. We highly recommend taking a look.
With this in mind, here is why TriFidus prioritises corporate storytelling
Corporate storytelling is a core area of work for TriFidus because it can be genuinely transformative in a number of ways.
The first is that it offers a refreshing departure from a traditional approach to communicating budgets and business plans. It involves incorporating unstructured insights about the business and making assumptions explicit within the plan. This puts greater emphasis on budget drivers, rather than simply focusing on financial outputs. This is fundamentally important for planning in an uncertain and radically changing world.
Applying storytelling can also be transformative through directly addressing the emotional and rational needs of key stakeholder groups. They need to understand the business in terms of its purpose, its history, its outlook, and the challenges and opportunities it faces. A compelling story, supported by robust numbers, delivers astonishing results in terms of investment, sales growth and employee morale.
Two heads are better than one: corporate stories are written by multiple authors.
While financial storytelling has some novel-writing traits such as a plot, climax and resolution, there’s one key difference: there absolutely has to be more than one author.
Sure, the outline of the story is written by management. But this skeleton narrative needs to be developed in collaboration with employees, who will provide vital inputs and think about angles that might not have occurred to the leadership team.
The result will be a story that accurately captures the character of the business and its aims - a character whom people want to help achieve positive outcomes and avoid negative scenarios.
Crowd pleasers: who are the audiences and what do they want to achieve?
All good stories need an audience and in business there are several to consider: employees, investors and shareholders, and customers and suppliers. Let’s take a look at each group in turn.
Employees are arguably the most important stakeholder group of any business. Convince staff to feel part of something larger than themselves and motivation will increase. They’ll develop a greater awareness of how their contribution fits into the bigger picture.
Tapping into your employees’ ideas, hopes, concerns and knowledge in relation to the business will provide a wealth of information that will help to improve your overall budgetary plan.
The next group is investors and shareholders. Financial backers need to experience a logical narrative to reach rational decisions about funding. More often than not, these decisions are emotionally driven.
The business needs to make sense to Investors. Once they ‘get it’, they’ll then look at the numbers to reinforce the messaging. Providing the numbers support the story, investors will begin to see the world from the management team’s perspective. This is a powerful framework for decision making as it reinforces trust and credibility in management.
Finally, we turn to customers and suppliers. They, for the most part, engage with your story via employees and marketing platforms. Get the story right with your employees, and your colleagues will be empowered to move customer and supplier relationships from transactional in nature to mutually rewarding, long-term partnerships.
The aim with good storytelling is to create an emotional connection with customers and suppliers, prompting them to ‘buy-in’ and feel invested in your organisation.
What’s your story: how TriFidus can help
Good storytelling is more than just words on a page. It’s a paradigm shift that requires robust tools and organisational wide integrated planning, to effectively support its implementation. The challenge is incorporating rich, but largely unstructured, data and creating a clear link to tangible financial outcomes.
At TriFidus, we work to a tried and tested formula honed over many years. It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in. It’s about a set of principles that can be applied to any organisation with a budget to communicate to a range of stakeholders.
In our experience, when a budget or financial plan is enriched with an overarching narrative, leaders tend to witness transformational change that directly benefits the organisation in numerous, self-reinforcing ways.
To learn how TriFidus uses storytelling to help companies of all sizes achieve corporate objectives, email us here.
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