The Social CFO: Collaborating with Marketing, Sales & HR – Part 1

By Ernie Humphrey, CTP

In a previous blog, The Rise of the Social CFO, I focused on five soft skills CFOs need to master to be successful in our new remote reality (#remotereality). As the CFO role continues to evolve in many areas the focus on accounting and reporting is still important, but there are additional expectations for today’s CFOs, including the ability to communicate with impact to drive the story behind the numbers and build better relationships with their fellow leaders across the enterprise.

In this post, we are going to explore the foundation pillars of how the Social CFO (#socialcfo) needs to leverage soft skills to build relationships with marketing, sales, and HR leaders to help drive performance across the enterprise.

1. Change the inherent bias of looking at marketing and sales as overhead and instead as means to drive the bottom line.
The Office of the CFO should measure itself relative to its internal customers and define internal metrics comparable to our success in supporting HR, Sales, and Marketing.

2. Establish clear lines of communication.
Create an open-door policy. Let Marketing, Sales, and HR leaders know that you are available and welcome conversations with them.

3. Invest in knowing Marketing, Sales, and HR leaders on a personal level.
Take each leader out to lunch. Learn about them and let them get to know you. Building a relationship on the personal level will facilitate in creating more collaboration between your departments. Also, learn what makes your colleagues tick by communicating with those who know them.

4. Ask HR, Sales & Marketing leaders what Finance can do to make them more successful.
Seek to understand. What are the biggest challenges they face? If they had three wishes in terms of people, process, or technology to help them deliver more value, what would they be?

5. Help HR, Sales & Marketing leaders define success in each area.
Different functions have different perspectives but all need to be aligned with the overall strategic objectives of the company. Work with each function to make sure they understand their relationship to each other and to finance to define success metrics that will produce business results.

6. Define how Finance can impact sales, marketing, and human capital management success with the “Finance” skill set.
Create a culture of data-driven decision making to mitigate decision bias from sales, marketing and HR. Together you will need to define and communicate the common language needed to measure and monitor success in a financial and non-financial context (employee engagement, customer satisfaction).

These are the underlying building blocks for establishing and building relationships with your fellow leaders. Each function has different challenges that the Social CFO needs to better understand to build those relationships. Next up in Part 2, I will offer specific advice for CFOs to leverage in collaborating with Marketing leaders.