The Revenue Optimists

Pitching to your CFO?

Hot take: Your CFO wants more than just ROI.

Beyond ROI: How to sell to your CFO


Video Transcript

Anne: We all build some sort of like ROI business case that I’ll use for my internal executives to convince them this is something that we need to fund. These are kind of the three core problems we’re going to solve. These are the capabilities, these are who we looked at, this is how they scored.

In addition to what the use cases, this is something that I did when I purchased Gong for one of the first times. It wasn’t just about what is the ROI because what does that mean? For forever? For end of time? If you’re talking to a CFO, they don’t care. They want to know what it means now. And so in addition, I said here are the core problems, here’s the ROI that we expect. Good news is I  have the access to that data because I’m the head of RevOps.

And then in addition, here’s the payback period. And this is what we’re going to be instrumenting to ensure that we realize that payback. So it really talked a lot less about the project and more operational what I was going to be doing an embedding in terms of process, or altering process and reintegrating that technology into that.

That gave I think in that company, my CFO and my Chief Commercial Officer, a real level of confidence that this has a plan for scale, this has a plan for high adoption and utilization, and it’s about something that I care about as an executive.

Dave: That is super smart. I like that a lot because then you can not just showcase that we’re buying it it’s gonna help us with this but how are we actually gonna roll it out. Because so much in any project like that is about the change management and the adoption versus the tool itself.

Want to learn more?

Ready to hear more from Anne Pao, including how to build tech to scale.

You can listen to her in-depth interview in Episode 14 of the Revenue Optimists series. We’ll see you there.