How to build a revenue argument that survives Procurement

Impact Storytelling, communicating the value of what you do in terms your audience can measure and act on, takes different forms depending on who you’re talking to. When that audience is a finance function, the argument usually comes down to revenue or productivity. And sometimes often both.

Imagine you need to build an ROI case for a consultative selling skills programme at a global bank. The sales leadership love the programme. They’ve already scheduled the sessions. But Procurement has picked up the proposal on the way through the approval process, and they’re asking hard questions. Why does it cost this much? Where’s the return?

You could talk about “building capability” and “embedding a customer-first mindset”, but Procurement don’t buy words, they buy numbers.

So you need to talk in their language, and build a spreadsheet.

Start with the cost

The training costs £104,000 for 800 salespeople. That’s the number Procurement is staring at. Your job is to connect that cost to an outcome they care about.

Find the outcome your audience values

In a bank, that’s revenue or productivity. Ideally both. So you build two parallel arguments:

For revenue: if these salespeople have any influence over deals, what improvement in their effectiveness would it take to cover the cost of the programme?

For productivity: if the programme makes people even slightly more effective at their jobs, what does that translate to in pounds and days?

Express both in the same unit

Let the maths tell the story. You calculate:

Revenue: If 800 salespeople each influence £500,000 of revenue per year (a conservative estimate for a bank’s sales population), a 0.1% improvement across each of the three layers of the sales funnel - more prospects, better conversion, larger deals – compounds to over £1.2 million. The programme costs less than a tenth of that.

Productivity: Assume an average salary of £60,000 across the sales population. The bank is paying £48 million per year in compensation for these 800 people. For the training to break even, it needs to improve their collective effectiveness by just 0.2%. That’s equivalent to half a day per person per year.

Show the threshold, not the proof

A common challenge rears its ugly head here: sometimes you won’t have empirical data to show as evidence. You may have run a similar programme, but in a different organisation, in a different market, with different dynamics. You’ll get the easy objection: “aah, but you see, our business is completely different”.

So instead of claiming the training will deliver a specific result, you show what it would need to deliver for the investment to pay off. You make the bar visible rather than asserting you’ve cleared it.

It’s more honest for sceptical audiences like Procurement. The bar is visible. They can judge for themselves whether it’s plausible.

When the threshold is “half a day's work saved per person per year”, the answer is almost certainly yes.

One more thing: the soundbite

At £104,000 for 800 participants, the cost per head is £130. That’s less than a train ticket from London to Manchester.

If you can land a number like that, you show the investment’s small versus the obvious upside. That’s Impact Storytelling.

A method you can use

If you’re trying to make a financial impact case, here’s the approach:

1. Start with the cost of your intervention

2. Identify the outcome your audience cares about: revenue, productivity, time, risk

3. Find a way to express both the cost and the outcome in the same unit

4. Calculate the break-even threshold

5. Show it at both aggregate and individual level

6. Land a soundbite that makes the threshold feel trivial

This kind of storytelling requires more than narrative skill. You need to be comfortable with the maths, or work with someone who is. Wordsmiths alone will struggle here. But combine narrative instinct with numerical rigour, and you can build cases that land with even the most sceptical audiences.

Sometimes the best story really is a spreadsheet.

I spent twenty years in senior leadership roles at Sky, ITV, NBC News and Future Plc before becoming a Positive Momentum consultant, where I help organisations across financial services, sustainability and technology with strategy, storytelling and change. Impact Storytelling sits at the centre of that work.