CFO GUEST: Rajat Bahri of Icertis
EPISODE: 859: The Everyday, Conscious Effort to Add Value
Machine Generated Transcript
CFOTL: As you look to influence the workforce. And I’m wondering if you do it any differently than you did maybe 10 years ago. These tools are allowing you to do that, supposedly.
Rajat Bahri: Couple of things I would say to that. What I’ve seen is lot of automation and tools have come in place and data governance structures have come into place that you get information real time. I’m a strong believer in getting information real time because if you don’t know where you are, it’s impossible to course correct. And if you’re always like, no. So as a finance person, you really need to know at any particular moment where the business is. You need the pulse on the business. So then you can guide, I can see it on the corner saying, “Okay, this is the problem I’m seeing now. How do I work with this function or this place to course correct it?” So it really starts with knowing where you are very precisely. And then you can course correct things in a timely fashion. That’s one thing that I pay a lot of attention on.
Read MoreThe second is you need to make sure that you have a buy-in because you can’t do it alone. You really need a buy-in from all the function heads. And typically in a SaaS, what I have done and what started doing here is benchmarks. Benchmarks are available for best of class SaaS companies. They’re available on what was Salesforce like when they were our scale, what was Workday like when they were our scale, so we have best of class. And then you compare, “Hey, this is where we are and this is what best of class is. And obviously we want to be best of class. In some places we are there in some places we clearly are not. And then this is the data. It’s publicly available. I’m not making it up. And we want to be best of class, so let’s talk about how to do it.”
So that’s how you bring the whole team together. People will challenge data. Make sure your data is solid. And once people get comfortable with data and this is what it is, then you see strong alignment, then it comes into how you’re going to get there. So that’s kind of the things I’m doing in the company.
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