Effective communication skills are necessary to become a trusted business partner in finance. The business trusts FP&A because of its understanding of the numbers and listens to FP&A because of its ability to tell the story of what those numbers mean. When you can clearly convey financial information to non-finance colleagues, you build credibility across the organization and position yourself to influence decision-making at all levels.

Being an effective communicator enhances collaboration, improves financial literacy across the business and facilitates change management. Plus, the higher you ascend in your career trajectory, the more important these skills become as your role will increasingly involve conducting presentations to senior leadership and driving organizational strategy.

PART 1

How to improve your verbal communication skills

Employing confidence, clarity and conviction can significantly increase the impact of your verbal communication.

  • Confidence: The assurance that your message is trustworthy and should be acted upon. To convey confidence, make direct eye contact, maintain a grounded stance with a relaxed posture, use intentional hand gestures and practice open body language, e.g., no folded arms or hands in pockets.
  • Clarity: Your ability to convey complex information in a simplified manner. Clarity can be enhanced by using language familiar to your audience, practicing concise sentence structure, employing a deliberate cadence and pace, and maintaining an audible volume that is comfortable for your audience.
  • Conviction: Your conviction will be communicated when you feel confident in the data, information and insights you’re presenting. Make sure to do your homework so you are prepared.

Another way to improve the clarity and engagement of your conversations and presentations is to consciously take more pauses. This small change helps ensure you’re giving your audience time to process the information and invites questions and interaction.

For more information on how to boost your communication skills, check out the following articles: “5 Ways to Improve Your Verbal Communication Skills in Finance” and “4 Steps to Influence Your Organization.”

Hybrid Meeting

PART 2

How to improve your presentation skills

Any presentation you give should meet three key objectives:

  1. Your audience understands the information.
  2. They’re able to draw meaningful conclusions from it.
  3. They’re able to take action on the information.

Achieving these objectives requires more than just numerical accuracy. If you lose your audience’s attention, they will never get to the numbers. To ensure your communication resonates with your audience, tailor your presentation to their needs.

Start by asking yourself what the audience needs to hear. What challenges are they facing? What actions do I want them to take after this presentation? By framing the message with their perspective in mind, you can adjust your presentation style and content to better align with their expectations and concerns.

Make sure your presentation materials are clear, concise and easy to read and understand, with an appropriate level of detail for the intended audience. Strive for the presentation to not only be accurate but also impactful and actionable.

To help keep the audience invested in your presentation, follow these five steps:

  1. Capture their attention. The first words you speak need to earn their interest, set the tone and make a human connection. Consider going beyond typical phrases like “good morning” and instead sharing a story, a thought-provoking question or statement, a relevant compliment, a thoughtful quote, an analogy or a focused fact.
  2. Connect with the big why. Answer the question, “Why should I care?” Show your audience that you understand their world. For example, if your goal is to explain why your marketing business partner should collaborate with FP&A, you could say, “Our partnership ensures you hear what our customers care about. Our data captures their voice, allowing you to create a targeted message that converts customer interest to revenue.”
  3. Summarize the current state. Clearly identify the problem to be solved or the opportunity to be achieved. Think of this step as akin to a lawyer building their case. They do this by presenting evidence, which is exactly what you’ll want to do using tools such as statistics, facts, exhibits and testimonials.
  4. Explore potential solutions. The goal here is to generate dialogue and ensure your audience is vested in the outcome. Good questions are helpful, such as how do we get back to where we need to be? What would success look like and how do we get there?
  5. Gain commitment. You have an agreed-upon action, but who is going to do what and by when? While your audience is captive, have them pull up their calendars to set meeting dates and deadlines.

For more information on improving your presentation skills, check out the article “5 Tips for Creating an Effective Financial Presentation.”

PART 3

How to write an effective email

Well-crafted emails can convey complex information clearly, prompt others to take action, reduce misunderstandings and help maintain professional relationships. They serve as a record of communication and are often used as an aid in decision-making, project management and accountability.

To help ensure your emails aren’t overlooked, misunderstood or deleted, keep the following best practices in mind:

  1. The subject line should speak the recipient’s language. What does the recipient care about? If they’re in sales, their interest will be piqued by a different language than if they’re in HR. What is it about the information you need to convey that is most interesting or important to them?
  2. Keep it brief. Emails are a tool for conveying short pieces of information. If the content requires multiple paragraphs, consider whether the email should be a conversation instead.
  3. Highlight the big idea. Tell the recipient from the start why the message is relevant to them. Keep the main point front and center.
  4. Keep it simple. Use fewer words and short sentences. Include bullet points to guide the recipient’s focus. If there is an action they need to take, make that clear in the email — define who needs to do what and by when.
  5. Edit. Circling back to the second point, once your email is written, review it. Delete anything that is not absolutely necessary (which may be most of it), then send.
Data Visualization

PART 4

Why data visualization is important in finance

Data visualization helps people better understand the data, regardless of their level of expertise or familiarity with the numbers. Finance often involves data-heavy reports, but numbers alone don’t tell the full story of the data. Distilling the data into an easy-to-understand narrative helps bring the insights to life. Data visualization is effective at simplifying complex information and making the message of the data more accessible to non-finance audiences.

The sections that follow include tips to make your data visualizations more effective.

PART 5

Effective spreadsheets and tables

Creating effective spreadsheets and tables is about making your data easy to understand and visually impactful. When done well, spreadsheets and tables communicate information that helps your audience make effective decisions.

Excel offers a variety of tools, including number formatting, text and cell effects, and conditional formatting, to improve the clarity and effectiveness of your spreadsheets. Using these techniques can transform raw data into compelling visual presentations, helping your audience quickly grasp key insights.

Number formatting

Number formatting refers to how numbers are presented. In terms of ordering the information, you’ll want to present it the way your audience reads — for English speakers, this would be left to right and top to bottom.

The ordering of elements in a row or column should be intuitive and serve the intended purpose of the report. Examples of orderings include:

  • Time: If each column represents a time period, typically, oldest-to-newest would be shown left-to-right.
  • Numerical order: Rows (or columns) are ordered based on the ranking of the values.
  • Alphabetical order: Typically, the element being ordered would be the leftmost column or topmost row.

Justification should be uniform, whether left-, center- or right-justified. Try all three, and you’ll likely find that right-justifying the numbers allows the audience to get a better sense of their magnitude. This is because the largest numbers become the leftmost digits and stand away from the other numbers.

Text and cell effects

Text and cell effects are the visual effects in a spreadsheet unrelated to the numbers. Some examples include boldface text, white space between rows, different colors of text, cell borders, font choice and size, and fill.

Use these effects to emphasize your message and avoid design choices that do not further the audience’s understanding of the information. Be sure to check your organization’s style sheet to ensure consistency across the company, making it easier for your audience to understand the presentation quickly.

Conditional formatting

Conditional formatting refers to a capability within Excel that allows you to define changes in how selected cells are formatted if certain conditions are met. You might use this feature to highlight numbers specifically important to your audience. It could also be used to give your audience a sense of magnitude or enable them to find items of interest in a database.

PART 6

Effective dashboards

The intention of a dashboard is to create a virtually complete visual impression of the performance of a department or an entire organization on one page — as the name implies, much like the dashboard of a car. Metrics are displayed in the format most appropriate to each metric — e.g., line graph, table — and the entire piece is displayed in a way that is easy to read and visually appealing.

It is important to choose which information to present to tell the story and to back it up with relevant data. Key attributes of an effective dashboard are that it is concise, visually impactful, consistent, error-free, easily read and understood by non-finance stakeholders, and delivered on time.

PART 7

Effective graphs

Graphs are most effective when the presenter is either demonstrating a trend, pattern or relationship between two variables, or making one or two key points they want the audience to grasp instantly.

When creating a graph, ask yourself these four questions:

  1. Which will be more effective: a graph or a table? As presentation tools, both graphs and tables have their strengths and weaknesses, so first consider whether your information should be presented as a graph or whether a table would be more informative.
  2. Which graph type will best tell your story? Six of the most common types of graphs you could use include column, line, pie, bar, area and XY scatter graphs. Audiences typically expect to spend very little time studying a single graph, especially if that graph is one slide in a PowerPoint presentation, so choosing the graph that most clearly makes your point is important.
  3. What have you done to make your graph quickly and easily understandable? Options to consider within this question include maximizing the “data-ink ratio,” which is the proportion of all ink visible to the audience; colors and shading, gridlines, axes and legends; data labels and supporting information; and the avoidance of certain effects or features, such as the use of two vertical axes and 3D.
  4. Could your graphing choices cause your audience to question your agenda or your character? Graphs are often used to make a point you feel strongly about or to persuade the audience. Your audience is aware of this and will be on the lookout for any efforts to confuse or mislead them. Ways in which this is done include manipulation of the vertical axis, using area rather than length, cherry-picking data, and using new, changed or omitted metrics.

For more information on creating effective graphs and charts, check out these articles: “5 Common Types of Financial Charts for Data Storytelling,” and “5 Tips to Improve Your Financial Charts and Graphs.”