The Social CFO: Collaborating with Sales – Part 3

By Ernie Humphrey, CTP

In Part II of The Social CFO: Collaborating with Marketing, Sales & HR blog series, I explore how CFOs can collaborate effectively with marketing to drive growth and deliver a competitive advantage.

In this post, we are going to explore how CFOs can collaborate effectively with sales leaders to drive new customer growth, customer engagement, and optimize the customer experience.

At first blush, customer engagement can seem like a stretch for CFOs. Until recently, customer interaction by CFOs was usually limited to resolving customer issues related to accounts receivable. But, the Social CFO understands the impact a strong customer relationship and experience can have on improving customer retention (reducing customer churn), customer satisfaction, and the lifetime value of customers — resulting in increased profitability.  

Here are five key avenues in which Finance can pursue to impact the overall customer experience and increase profitability with sales:

1. Invest in building and strengthening CFO to CFO relationships with your customers. 

• • Interact regularly with customer CFOs. At a minimum yearly, if not quarterly.
  • Reach out and be accessible during times of crisis impacting your customers, like now with COVID-19.
  • Phone calls with key customers. Email communication with all customers.

2.  Understand how Finance impacts the customer experience.

• • Customer Onboarding
  • Customer Success Monitoring
  • The Accounts Receivable Experience for the Customer
  • Ease & Types of Payment Options
  • Accounts Receivable Related Communications

3. Collaborate to define metrics and a dashboard to access and manage the health of the sales pipeline.

• • Track velocity, loss by stage, and loss reason types
  • Understand why prospects fall out of the pipeline and what sales needs to avoid revenue leakage throughout the sales lifecycle
  • A healthy pipeline will vastly improve the sales forecast

4. Define and prioritize closing and retaining customers that deliver high margin business.

• • Create sales incentives based on margins
  • Create customer lifecycle value metrics
  • Assign weights to customer success metrics that give more weight to high-value customers and those that are responsive to more communication

5. Collaborate to deliver a 360-degree view of customer engagement. 

• • Create a framework to measure customer engagement as illustrated in Figure 1. Define, measure and evaluate the success of each engagement. Intention (CTA) of each interaction.
  • Identify all employees who engage with a customer in any manner.
  • Understand each engagement with a customer and “the why” of each interaction
  • Invest in the technology to deliver 360-degree visibility into all aspects of the customer relationship.

Next up, I will offer specific advice for CFOs to leverage in collaborating with HR leaders.