CFOs demand sign-off on everything today. It’s a combination of macro, tech consolidation efforts, and just a hangover from 5+ years of tech bloat. They’re the adult in the room, asking the questions your champion didn’t think to ask.
But they listen if you’ve identified a real problem in their business. The question is what to say to get their attention (and their buy-in).
Listen as Thomas Tuchscherer, CFO of TripActions, and Scott Layton, Asia Pacific Leader, Business Transformation Services at IBM Consulting, share their insights in their 30-minute CFO Fireside chat. Or, you can watch the 5-min highlight video below and check out this summary.
Here are the four things you need to consider when selling to today’s CFO:
- Keep it simple
- Prove ROI
- Collaborate with the entire buying committee
- What’s different when times are tough?
Keep it simple!
Both Thomas and Scott kept returning to an overarching theme: Keep it simple!
They applied this maxim when talking about a business case, how to make the math work for ROI calculation, and even the merits of consolidation.
- Keep a business case to no more than one or two pages.
- The vendor should encourage the champion to own the business case, using their own words.
- The rep can help here by giving some easy-to-remember slogans and presenting your assets in a way that’s simple for your champion to copy and paste.
Prove ROI
Exactly how your solution solves the problem should have already been dealt with earlier in the sales cycle. By the time the CFO is engaged, it’s just about the numbers.
- Make sure you’ve collaborated across the buying org to understand where the solution will have a positive impact and what change management will cost
- Use hard numbers that can be measured and avoid intangibles like indirect value from saved time.
- Faster time to value is better: A medium size return in 3 months is worth 10x more than a large (potential) return in three years.
Collaborate with everyone on the buying committee
CFOs want to know that everyone on their team is on board with the recommendation to buy.
That means the vendor must collaborate with the wider buyer committee and answer all their questions. Show how different teams can benefit and how any change management is a “known known” with no capacity for surprises.
Thomas and Scott repeatedly reinforced that the people they rely on most are their peers. This can be fellow CFOs at other companies who’ve used the solution or their c-suite peers who can produce a dispassionate analysis of the return and investment required.
While a CFO will rarely take a call from a rep, if it’s a big enough investment, CFOs will talk to a senior sales leader. Keep the conversation high-level and focus on the ROI, not the how.
What’s different when times are tough?
CFOs don’t change their priorities in tough macroeconomic environments. In good times and bad, they care about ROI and being good stewards of their companies’ finances.
But there are a couple of differences when times are more challenging.
- Risk tolerance is lower, so be more conservative and show that you still achieve positive ROI even if starting assumptions worsen.
- Timing is more important: CFOs will ask if this can wait two quarters. Guard against this by highlighting fast time to value and showing the cost of delay.
- CFOs will push for “self-funding” projects, where you start small and use the savings or new revenue promised by the vendor to fund a broader implementation. If you do this, make sure you bake in measurable success milestones that will trigger the second phase.
Help your sellers navigate CFO expectations with Align
Sales leaders can help their sellers manage all of the above with Clari Align. Align makes it easy to collaborate with multiple stakeholders on proof of value, change management, and stakeholder management—all driven by your org’s sales process.
With all that buyer signal pushed back to Clari, it’s easy for frontline managers to spot risk early and ensure that sellers are indeed giving CFOs everything they need to make a fast decision. Setting up Align is fast. In less than two weeks, your sellers could be giving CFOs everything they need in one place.