How to develop killer report stories that support client goals.
In any kind of consultative work, the most difficult task is typically taking everything you know about a project you’ve worked on for months and distilling it into the most important information your client needs.
Everything rides on the initial insights, because that’s when you grab your client’s attention, state the case, and inspire them to trust your judgement and take the action you recommend. If you do this well, the client will achieve their goals and continue the relationship. Do it well consistently, and you’ll have a valued brand.
Insights and reports are only as good as how effectively they get our clients to take action.
—Jamie Myers, Insights Industry Executive
Budget the time for research, and then more for thinking.
As Jamie Myers mentions in the video above, “If we don’t do a good job at making things interesting and meaningful, the research sits on a shelf.” As a marketing research executive, Jamie understands the value of building room into the research timeline to think through the insights as a team and develop the narrative that will land with their client and guide their future actions.
They’re paying for the research, of course, but what’s really valuable to your client is your ability to think through their problem, help them understand the implications for their business, and guide them toward decision-making based on what the research results say.
It’s tempting to crunch the numbers, build the charts, title each slide with the chart question, and let the numbers speak for themselves, but your clients haven’t been in the data trenches with you for the last three months. They’ve been working on other things “until the research comes back,” so it’s your job to reconnect the pathways between the questions they wanted you to answer and the data that’s arrived.
This is the hard part, because it requires a pivot from core skills (doing the research) to interpreting the findings and divining a way to present them in a short, neat narrative.
As we walk teams through specific interactive examples, we provide guidelines and formulas people can use to write shorter headlines, crisper copy, and design slides to support their ideas visually. Our goal is to deliver information that helps them build a strong data story, one that makes the case for clear decisions based on the data.
—Miriam Carey, co-founder of Insight Story Studio
Are your clients getting their money’s worth?
Take a good look at your brand’s public-facing material. You probably invested a lot of resources into your logo, design, and voice, and these elements shine in the marketing materials you use to attract clients: beautifully designed collateral, a clear brand throughline on your social channels, thought leadership to back it all up. Now go into your shared drive and look at the PowerPoints your top clients have received in the last twelve months. You may need to take a few minutes to calm down if you’re seeing materials so far off-brand, they need a visitor’s pass.
How does this happen?
Your teams carefully conduct the research and leave a small window for producing key elements, like Executive Summaries and stakeholder-focused reports. Because they live outside of the marketing department, they may not know how to use your brand guidelines correctly. Your PowerPoint templates may have been designed without their input, so they often have to build their own presentations or hand over their reports last minute with scant directions to your already-overburdened design team.
Worse yet, they may turn to AI to “design” their reports, flowing all of your client’s proprietary information through a system that may or may not have good controls on data sharing. And now you have a report that looks AI-generated to clients rather than curated by your in-house team.
For many researchers, particularly junior staff, writing, and all the thinking, rewrites, and feedback that go into distilling a large amount of data into short-form key insights, is a difficult skill to cultivate. It takes mentorship, team interaction, and skill to create the kind of reports senior-level executives will read and react to.
You probably invested a lot of resources into your logo, design, and voice, and these elements shine in the marketing materials you use to attract clients: beautifully designed collateral, a clear brand throughline on your social channels, thought leadership to back it all up. Now go into your shared drive and look at the PowerPoints your top clients have received in the last twelve months. You may need to take a few minutes to calm down if you’re seeing materials so far off-brand, they need a visitor’s pass.
—Joy Panos Stauber, co-founder of Insight Story Studio
Build an internal approach that opens a pathway for insights work.
In our client work, we almost always see room for system improvement that can save time and go far in supporting a client’s overall brand presence.
Problem 1: Most people outside of the market department don’t even know there’s a brand book.
Make sure you’re upholding your end of the bargain when it comes to brand consistency, so that your teams understand expectations and have practical guidelines to follow.
- Get input from your teams on how to build easy-to-use, on-brand templates, and train them to use your brand book and templates to ensure consistent branding.
- Invest in high-quality photography and illustrations that support your brand as well as the industries your clients work in.
- Get feedback from your top clients about your report delivery and how you can improve it, along with their expectations for data privacy and guidelines on using co-branded or white-labeled templates.
Problem 2: Project management discipline is way off-kilter.
Agencies we’ve worked for have project managers get things done on time. You need someone who can take the long view and see how all of the teams involved in the report development process can work together. If you don’t have project managers on staff, here are some key strategies to assess your process.
- Bring teams together and brainstorm process improvements that will ensure realistic timelines for all aspects of the research and report development and delivery. The end result here might be adding more room to project timelines, but you may identify key efficiencies that can keep projects streamlined and manageable.
- Solve end-of-process issues, like a report that’s completely off-base or poorly designed, by introducing project check-ins. For example:
- A start-of-project review of expectations, assets to use, and a preliminary outline for the end report and other deliverables such as Executive Summaries or stakeholder-specific reports.Mid-point check-ins to identify elements of the report that can begin early production, such as sections that can be written and design elements your design team can begin working on.
- As the research wraps up, bring everyone together to identify any surprises that might impact the timeline, and expand into a detailed report outline, identifying which aspects of the report can be “universal,” which need multiple versions, and which need to be tailored to specific teams.
Problem 3: Everyone assumes it’s all going well. Until it’s not.
If you’re not being hired year-over-year by the same client, or if clients you’re established a relationship with are suddenly leaving, you’re in trouble. Never let it get that bad. Consider developing a survey or client interview post-report to gauge their satisfaction with it, and ask for specific feedback on how you can deliver excellence every time.
When you give your staff the best tools and help them work out stronger approaches to timelines and deadlines, you’re clearing a path for them to focus less on logistics and emergencies and more on their core mission: developing killer client reports. Now, help your teams cultivate the skills they need to create on-brand, client-centric, actionable reports.
New skills and a repeatable framework leaves room for your teams to write killer reports.
Now your teams have the access to the right branded materials, and they have expanded their project management approach to ensure they have a solid timeline. It’s time for each team to optimize their report development and data story skills.
We developed Insight Story Studio™ training in tandem with your key stakeholders in your organization to meet your teams’ specific needs. We first gain a clear understanding of your brand and how to implement it, and then get a clear picture of the challenges and successes each team experiences with client reports. From there, we identify a recent project, or sometimes even a project in progress, on which we base our training approach.
Working in small groups of eight to twelve team members, we develop interactive sessions that help us quickly get to know your team members and identify their strengths and weaknesses in core skills like writing, editing, proofreading, visual design, presentation, and delivery. As we work with your teams, we help them:
- Identify the critical points essential to a successful client outcome, and apply that mindset to every point they make in the report.
- Think about the findings and how to distill them into the insights clients need to make key decisions.
- Develop a report flow that helps clients digest material at a glance and inspires them to dig into the data specific to their work.
- Identify a visual communication strategy that supports the content and aids understanding.
As we walk teams through specific interactive examples, we provide guidelines and formulas they can use to write shorter headlines, crisper copy, and design slides to support their ideas visually. Our goal is to deliver information that helps them build a strong data story, one that makes the case for clear decisions based on the data.
We help teams turn a data dump into a clear story; one that shows what the numbers mean and what to decide next.
In the examples above, content has been blinded to protect proprietary information.
Your clients depend on you for insights that will grow their brand. Deliver excellence every time.
It’s easy these days to get lost down the AI rabbit hole. Teams stressed for time lean on these tools, especially when they’re on deadline. As more and more work is done remotely in isolation and augmented by AI tools, critical thinking skills suffer, and newer consultants miss some of the best opportunities in their careers to learn and develop the problem-solving skills that will mold them into excellent client advisors.
Building a system that supports group interaction, a framework for developing and delivering reports that make a difference, and feedback loops that ensure ongoing excellence will ultimately set your firm apart from your competitors. Your consultants will know and understand the material, and provide the guidance needed to drive real growth for the clients they serve.
Want to learn about our Insight Story Studio™ training?