Funding Is All About Storytelling: Stories can trigger passion, inspiration, and loyalty-and compelling ones inspire emotional investment.

• Author: Oureshi, Danish

One of our favorite clients, Gary, once told us a story as we began talking about a possible tax transformation project for the public company he had recently joined as its new vice president of tax.

Earlier in Gary's career, he was the compliance tax manager for a large privately held corporation that sought to implement a new financial consolidation and budgeting system. As one of many inducements, the implementation partner offered to include a tax data warehouse for a fraction of the true cost. Corporate leadership was told that the warehouse equated to a giveaway worth more than $1 million. Leadership was swayed.

Gary's tax group eagerly engaged and started brainstorming about how a tax data warehouse could improve their processes and change the company. As the project got underway, the tax group participated in discussions about requirements. Optimism quickly spread.

Then came the big presentation in which the design of the tax data warehouse was revealed to the tax group and other stakeholders. Their enthusiasm turned out to be painfully short-lived.

The implementation partner had designed a warehouse that contained the summary-level general ledger account balances, consistent with summary-level detail in the financial consolidation and budgeting system. But it lacked any transaction-level detail, not to mention any drill-down capability for eighty-three different source ledgers at Gary's company.

The company had grown from a significant number of acquisitions over the years, and its owner was committed to fostering an entrepreneurial spirit. One way he did this was to allow each acquired business to keep as many of its internal processes and systems intact after the acquisition as possible. In other words, the owner did not advocate system integration or standardization.

As a result, at the time of this project, there were eighty-three separate accounting systems in production, and the tax group relied on all eighty-three to capture the detailed information they needed for compliance, provision, and planning.

So, for the tax group, the tax data warehouse as designed was useless.

Sure enough, this did not end well for the tax group. Leadership was unwilling to make funds available to change the tax data warehouse design. They didn't understand why something that worked for financial consolidation and budgeting would not work for tax.

Gary told us this story because he wanted to emphasize two ground rules in his new role as VP of tax. One, he intended to be personally involved in voicing the department's challenges and articulating its business needs. Two, he was putting us on notice that he would explain to leadership the business value of projects and technology tools. He would tell the story.

THE POWER OF STORYTELLING

Stories can trigger passion, inspiration, and loyalty. Compelling ones inspire emotional investment. And this doesn't apply only to bedtime, campfires, and dinner tables. Fortunately for tax professionals, stories can fire up the boardroom, too.

Storytelling is one of the most persuasive forms of communication because of the emotions stories touch. Good stories forge a strong connection with the audience and paint a clear picture of what could be. In a corporate context, storytelling and funding have a very strong correlation. The better the story you tell when requesting funding for a project or technology tool, the better the chances of approval.

Tax professionals work hard, and they deserve the best technology tools. However, in many cases, their storytelling abilities to request funding for projects or technology tools do not match their tax expertise--a major reason that the projects or tools they propose very frequently are not approved.

By improving your storytelling, you can improve your business. Doing so requires thought, organization, and a proven process. Putting everything together can unlock your persuasive powers and clear your path to the project or technology tool you covet.

THE SOLUTION FLOWCHART

As shown in Figure 1 below, telling a compelling story works like a flowchart. It's a multifaceted process that begins with identifying and clarifying challenges and potential solutions. That, in turn, creates a framework for building and presenting a business case. Encasing a value proposition in a storytelling wrapper can provide logistical and emotional clarity to everyone involved. The following sections spell out the seven steps to developing a compelling story, as shown in the flowchart.

UNDERSTAND YOUR CHALLENGES

Start by recognizing the daily challenges you face in your job. For a tax professional, it could be any of the following:

* wrestling with data management;

* doing mundane and...