One of the most challenging aspects of storytelling with data is ensuring your message not only reaches your audience but also leaves a lasting impression, one that inspires action. As a founder, this becomes key when presenting to investors or closing your next big deal with a potential customer. It's not just about presenting numbers, or telling a story; it's about weaving those numbers into a compelling narrative that resonates with your audience.
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As a founder, you’ve likely read a lot about how storytelling is the key to everything from wooing initial customers to attracting and retaining top talent. And while storytelling is critical, storytelling with data is widely acknowledged to be even more powerful, especially when it comes to a more sophisticated audience such as your investors.
Founders have to captivate their audience from their first moment of interaction – think Shark Tank – but even more importantly, they have to inspire action. This could be to invest, to purchase, or to sign an employment contract.
This means that landing your message is the crucial element of storytelling with data. We’ll give you the playbook to land your message perfectly, along with the must-have tools that ensure you get this right every time.
How to land your message
Harvard professor Frances X. Frei and leadership coach Anne Morriss have created a robust framework to effectively land your message and inspire action.
With decades of experience, they’ve broken down this critical skill into 4 steps:
Understand your story so well that you can describe it in simple terms
Honor the past
Articulate a persuasive mandate for change
Lay out a rigorous and optimistic path forward
Understand your story so well that you can describe it in simple terms
The first step to effectively landing your message is to have a deep understanding of your story.
As a founder, you’re immersed in every detail of your business, but the key to compelling storytelling is distilling this complexity into simple, clear terms.
Understand that investors and other stakeholders don’t have the same level of knowledge or emotional connection to your company as you do, so it’s crucial to strip away the jargon and focus on the core narrative. Whether you’re pitching to potential investors or explaining your vision to a new hire, being able to articulate your story in a way that anyone can understand is the foundation of persuasive communication.
Honor the past
Acknowledging the past is an essential aspect of building trust and credibility in your storytelling.
Whether you’re addressing your company’s history, the industry landscape, or your own entrepreneurial journey, showing respect for what has come before creates a sense of continuity and stability.
Investors and other stakeholders need to know that you’re not ignoring the lessons of the past but are instead learning from them. By honoring the past, you demonstrate that your vision for the future is grounded in reality, making it easier for your audience to buy into your message.
Articulate a persuasive mandate for change
To inspire action, you must clearly articulate why change is necessary and why it must happen now.
This involves presenting a compelling reason for why the status quo is no longer sufficient, how your company is uniquely positioned to address this gap – and backing this up with high-quality data.
As a founder, your ability to convey urgency and necessity is crucial in motivating others to join you on your journey. Investors, customers, team members and other stakeholders are looking for opportunities that solve real problems in innovative ways, so your mandate for change needs to be both persuasive and actionable. This is where you can turn your vision into a call to action that resonates with your audience.
Lay out a rigorous and optimistic path forward
Finally, it’s essential to provide a clear and optimistic roadmap for the future.
Stakeholders want to see that you have a well-thought-out plan that addresses potential challenges while also capitalizing on opportunities.
This step is about balancing realism with optimism – showing that you’ve done your homework and are prepared for the journey ahead, while maintaining a positive outlook on the outcome. Your path forward should be detailed enough to inspire confidence, yet flexible enough to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. In laying out a rigorous and optimistic plan, you give your audience the assurance they need to invest in your vision and take the next steps with you.
Decipad as the ultimate data storytelling visualization tool
Imagine telling your story, with key data points along the way. Persuasive, right?
Now, imagine providing visual data points that work together with your narrative. This is more than just persuasive – it’s powerful. And this is the power of a data storytelling visualization solution like Decipad.
Let’s look at a brief example, using a pre-built Decipad template. In this case, we’ll use the B2B ROI Savings Calculator template and simulate how effective data storytelling can help you prove the value of your product during the sales process.
For this template, let's imagine you’re a B2B-focused HR platform. You’re presenting to a 250-person company, a pretty big potential client. Your story talks about the value of people, and the impact that people can make – for good and for bad.
The narrative and data points include the hidden costs of a bad hire, and how small optimizations in their hiring process could provide savings of over $150k per year, or an ROI of 853%!
With Decipad, you can share this template and ask them to fill in whichever inputs you've defined. Let’s take a look.
In this case, we're starting by getting them to provide some company data - things like number of employees, average employee salary, annual revenue, etc.
This sets up your punchline on potentially yet-to-be-uncovered benefits, drawing in the audience:
Then, you dial it up a notch. What about all the tools they're using? Surely there’s room for optimization here?
But you’re not done. With some other basic metrics, that can be updated live with the prospect collaboratively, you fill out the missing pieces of the puzzle:
Decipad not only helps you land your message by combining numbers and narrative in one same notebook. It also gives your readers (your clients/prospects/investors, etc) the power to play around with the inputs you've defined and see how changing this affects the notebook results, in real-time. Way more visual than a spreadsheet calculator.
Remember, all of this is dynamic, and changes in real-time. You’ve also incorporated the key elements of great action-oriented storytelling:
You’ve broken down your story into simple, easy to digest building blocks
You’ve referenced the past and the golden future that awaits if they take on your product
You’ve been persuasive in terms of providing a motivation for change
You’ve laid out a “rigorous and optimistic path forward”
(note: you can also embed calculators like this in your website!)
Conclusion: land your message every time
We cannot emphasize the importance of storytelling, and particularly storytelling with data, enough. In a fascinating interview, McKinsey partner Julia McClatchy advocates for CEOs and company leaders to “be their companies’ chief storytellers.”
To be a really great data-driven storyteller, to land your message and to inspire action, you need Decipad in your corner.
