We can’t help but cringe when a finance leader tells us that they don’t want to be known as “the CFO of ‘No’”—that shopworn characterization of CFOs who seem to enjoy giving thumbs down verdicts.
So, we were pleased when CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail steered clear of the trite trope when he recently joined us as a return guest.
Nonetheless, we were still curious as to what has replaced the iconic “thumbs down” when it comes to finance leaders projecting their diligence onto the monitoring of risk and governance practices.
Read More“I probably have it a little bit easier than most CFOs because one of our five culture statements is Mind the business—which is music to a CFO’s ears,” comments Morgan, who adds that the simple phrase is best voiced in a question.
“’Are we minding the business?’ is what I ask our team every day,” reports Morgan, as if prescribing for the CallRail corporate culture a regimen of essential vitamins and minerals.
Notes Morgan: “It’s naturally easy for me to be the culture carrier of this because I am able to leverage that business mentality as we focus on being a business partner to all of our different departments.”
Also, the question’s emphasis on the “we” helps to amplify a business’s shared mission and achieve “buy in” when it comes to some prickly decisions.
“It’s a nice sort of framework where you can step back with folks and say, ‘Are we minding the business?’—as opposed to, say, just stating ‘I don’t think that’s a wise spend of dollars’ or ‘That doesn’t really follow our mandate,’” remarks Morgan, who again emphasizes that within CallRail, Mind the business is not just a popular phrase but also one that the company has codified.
Says Morgan: “Mind the business is how we ultimately achieve trade-offs and prioritizations across the business—it’s what we call a culture statement.” –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about CallRail … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Morgan: We were founded by a small business owner who set out to solve the problem of how to make the nature of calls more accessible to these small businesses who need to know what’s driving their phone to ring—with what sorts of leads—and how these leads and customers end up finding them. We started off about 10 years ago with a call-tracking product—which is the industry that we’re in—and we have really turned this into a lead intelligence platform for small businesses. Now we also have a forums tracking product. We have the ability for our customers to have insights into their calls in terms of what items are being discussed. We are all about anything and everything having to do with marketing smarter.
Read MoreA lot of these marketing attribution problems have been solved in the digital world if you are communicating with and finding customers online, but there still remains the fact that even if you pick up the phones a lot of times, you usually really have no idea where these customer leads are coming from. Our software and our platform help business owners to answer this question.
We’re a little bit over 300 employees, so we’ve made great progress. We surpassed $75 million in annual recurring revenue last year and are seeing great results this year. The priorities for our company, and certainly for me, are to understand the needs of our customers in terms of these digital interactions that drive phone calls and are continuing to increase at a rapid pace. Everyone knows about the classic digital interactions and whether you’re buying things online, but there are still a lot of companies and verticals that really rely on phone calls. Think about home services, legal, automotive, businesses whose information you may gather through a digital interaction or digital search engine but that ultimately you’re going to call on the phone. All of the information that can come out of this phone call is really, really important to our small businesses. We’re bringing forth more information around that lead, like how they found the customer, how the customer found the business, the types of customers, the types of interactions, whether they’re a first-time caller, how many times they’ve called, how long their calls have been, and so on. All of this is really important.
Bringing more of this information to the forefront for our customers is on our road map for the next 12 months—enhancing the range of this information and improving our ability to refine it.
jb
CallRail | www.callrail.com | Atlanta, GA