After a year of caution and retrenchment, CFOs are as hungry for growth as their sales leaders - our studies show that, across the middle market, CFOs pick top-line growth over profitability by a nearly four-to-one margin. If ever there was a perfect time to reduce the friction between the CFO and sales leader, it’s now. For example, the CEO of a heavy equipment company in the Southwest that grew sales from $325 million to over $600 million in two years told me that the relationship and shared goals between the CFO and sales leader was the number-one reason for that extraordinary growth. I’ve also seen how dramatic the benefits of collaboration can be.
Having started my career as a CPA, moving on to various sales leader roles, and now having helped hundreds of CFOs and sales leaders work better together, I’m convinced that both parties have nothing but the best intentions toward each other.
Intramural friction is especially damaging for middle-market companies, whose processes are informal and rely on personal interaction. The consequence: Internal friction that wastes energy that could produce the profitable growth both parties (and the CEO) want. Unfortunately, our years of experience and research support the above, the result being that the relationship between finance and sales is often more confrontational than collaborative. CFOs are trained skeptics, whereas sales leaders have to believe the next call will produce a deal. The CFO is focused on cost and efficiency, the sales leader on revenue and growth. The pandemic has changed customer buying patterns, calling all forecasts into question.Our CRM system gives incomplete data or doesn’t connect with our other data, so we can’t really see what’s going on.
Our sales leader’s forecasting track record is inaccurate.After many sets of eyes stopped rolling and comments faded, my next question was, “Why?” Here’s what I heard: During two recent business relationship seminars, I asked groups of assembled CFOs, “How many of you reduce your sales leader’s forecast 25% or more each month?” Without exception, every hand went up, with many pointing to the sky, indicating that they need to discount the forecasts even more.
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