Ep 20: Planning’s New Math: PLG + Product Usage

Jack (3m 4s):
And I should also mention that you climbed really the fp and a ladder, and I should mention you served in multiple fp and a leadership roles prior to entering the C F O office, you know, well, clearly the long hours, so many fp and a rolls demand. So as is our approach, I went ahead and shared with you some of the comments of the three planning ACEs we selected for this episode. And we always look for a, a common thread that we can sort of pull out as a unifying theme.

Jack (3m 43s):
I’m wondering if anything came to mind for you as you reviewed the clips or one thing that these planning ACEs and finance leaders might have in common.

Ben (3m 55s):
Yeah, definitely. I think one thing looking at the semetrics, looking at unit economics and looking at metrics in aggregate and then segmenting based on how you manage your business. So I saw a couple common themes within those discussions.

Jack (4m 13s):
Well, it perhaps says a lot that I think our first planning ace actually touches on everything you just highlighted. Our first planning ace will be Jonathan Carr, CFO F of cybersecurity firm Armes. Jonathan is the former head of fp and a for Survey Monkey. Back on episode 8 5 2 of CFO thought leader. Jonathan shared a story with us how back in 2008, he was only 18 months out of college when he became assigned the accounting and finance lead for a major software implementation for Stryker down in Puerto Rico.

Jack (4m 54s):
So he relocated down there for a number of years. Great kickoff story for us for that episode. And what you’re about to hear is Jonathan providing us with sort of a download of his thinking on fp and a and metrics. Here’s Jonathan Carr.

3 (5m 16s):
Yeah, I think that the numbers and the metrics that I primarily focus on are first and foremost gonna be related to growth. And that was true the day that I came in. I think throughout all of my years, one of the things that has been clear to me, growth, certainly at this stage and in particular for us in cyber, when the market is evolving so rapidly, that is the number one thing. And so, so how do I, how do I get a pulse on that? Obviously from a lagging indicator, looking at the business we close in any given period is great, but what I look to indicate, you know, should I be adding more fuel to the investment fire or not? I spent a lot of time really looking at among our tenured sales reps, what does their productivity look like?

3 (5m 56s):
Does it look like I’m getting the right return for the investment that we’re making? And in a high growth environment that’s often muddied when you look at things in, in the aggregate picture, right? When you layer in all these new regions or all these new folks that you’re adding in it, it’s really hard to see the productivity. And so you really gotta double down into the things that are gonna prove out the unit economic model for my reps gonna be productive enough. Am I getting the gross margins on the deals that are gonna suggest that I’m gonna have that path to profitability down the road? And in the beginning, those were the, the, the two main things that I looked at was how do we ensure we’re on the right growth path, and how do I ensure that we’re getting the transactions that are coming in at that, the right gross margin? You have those two things, you know that over time you can get to your, your path to profitability that you need to.

3 (6m 41s):
And certainly in the environment we’re in today, there’s a lot more focus on path to profitability. And I think as I’ve spent time with investors and as I think about how our team is really thinking about operating this business, it’s, it’s not so much, how do I get to a point where I’m cash break given tomorrow? That’s wonderful. That’s great. I think that’s coming. But what’s more important is how do I make sure that I’m growing at unit economics that suggest if I’m putting a dollar in, I’m getting four back. And in a market that’s evolving and growing rapidly, I see no reason to shy away from our ability to do that and get that kind of return. And I think that’s, that’s consistent with what investors are telling us.

Jack (7m 21s):
Is there some number related to that, to the unit economics that you realized you need to expose earlier in the process so people can correct the ship or,

3 (7m 31s):
Yeah, I think early on, especially, you know, you joined small organizations that the data with which you have to kind of make a lot of these decisions can be muddy. So you start with some of the aggregated things in the belief system. And, and I’m a big believer you don’t wait for perfection to drive decision making. You, you come up with the things that you know, you want to ultimately measure and you start working towards that and you make decisions and you learn along the way. I think one of my early mentors used to say, I reserve the right to get smarter. I’m a huge believer in that I make a decision today, next week if I learn something new, fine, I’ll make a new decision that that’s okay by me. And so I, I think really just, we onboarded reps, for example. We looked at a handful of things. What are the, the regions for the business that are, are seeing success where there’s a customer need and a willingness to buy?

3 (8m 17s):
And in the first six to nine months, am I seeing the activities that suggest this person might be successful? Obviously an enterprise sales, regardless of the industry you’re in those, those sales cycles and time rises, they, they take time. So early on you’re going in with an investment thesis and then you’re looking for the things they’re gonna prove that out that you can.

Ben (8m 47s):
Jonathan covered a lot of ground and it was great ground. I mean, he talked about growth me metrics. He talked about sales rep productivity and those success factors to know that your sales rep team is, is ramping successfully. Of course in 2023 you talked about the path to profitability and how important that is a c v size on new customers coming in. So there was a lot of great information in in that clip.

Jack (9m 10s):
I found it interesting that he really didn’t waste any time before going right there, right there in terms of sales productivity are my reps, he asks, being productive enough, am I getting the gross margin on the deals that keep us on the path to profitability? I jotted down just now listening, what about that? What about sales rep productivity w being measured today? What are, how are organizations taking this on? And are they, are they getting to the nitty gritty? Are they really getting the visibility they need?

Ben (9m 45s):
Of course, CFOs and sas, we like to look at our SaaS metrics, our unit economics and you know, we work CFOs work so closely, closely with the sales and marketing team and you know, we like to push on them, fair or not, but really maybe they don’t know. We do look at sales rep productivity in aggregate and also at the rep level, just like John Jonathan mentioned, I had a slide on sales rep pro productivity, where they are, where’s their pipeline? Is it increasing since the last time we reported? So knowing the nuances at the individual level, if, if doable, depending on the or size of your organization. We’re also looking at the details, the mechanics of our go-to-market engine as a C F O to make sure we understand the health of that.

Jack (10m 28s):
And that slide that you have has been around five years. Do you think most SaaS organizations have that kind of visibility? Where are they? Are they, are they there? Have they

Ben (10m 39s):
Been there? I think if you’re above 10 million arr, most likely you have that visibility or maybe 20 million and above. You probably should have that visibility at the sales rep level, less than 10 million early stage. Still you’re seeing founders, right? They’re doing the sales and then they’re transitioning to their first go to market team. So they’re just learning that repeatable process as far as far as their GT motion. So maybe not there yet that we just want sales and somewhat effective sales, but above 10, 20 million. I think that’s a pretty standard slide.

Jack (11m 12s):
I enjoyed his comments towards the end there. That data can be muddy in the early days, but don’t wait for perfection. You gotta learn along the way.

Ben (11m 23s):
Yeah. Oh, oh, love it. You know, so yeah, I’m looking at my notes here and I wrote that down, like small organs, the data is muddy early on and really with, we have to have the right metrics at the right stage of our business. And first it’s always the accounting foundation, right? We need the proper chart of accounts, we need the right p and l structure for our industry. And so it starts with that foundation and then we build upon that, you know, if we’re early stage LTV to C for example, for sas, not gonna mean too much. It’s gonna be just, just too volatile of a number. We need enough volume of data moving through our business to make it meaningful. But yes, I, I work with a lot of early stage test companies and the data is always a bit volatile, a bit muddy, and we work with what we can and make meaning out of the numbers that again, are the right, the right numbers, metrics for our stage of the business.

Jack (12m 13s):
Let’s stay on sales finance collaboration for the moment, but step beyond SaaS and SaaS companies to other industries where this go-to-market conference table just is not yet engineered the same way as and, and or enjoy all the visibility that SaaS companies today enjoy. I’m sure there’s many CFOs who would tell us, I wish I had that slide in my deck. It’s just not there quite yet.

Ben (12m 49s):
Yeah, definitely. I was in the airline industry and then got on the software and it depends on the industry, right? In the airline industry, you’re not calling up customers to say, Hey, book a ticket today. You know, maybe those corporate clients, you know, so the go to market motion SAS can be so foreign, I think to other industries and yeah, go to the go to market motion working with those sales and marketing teams. There’s so much data trapped in SaaS companies that we have to leverage, especially in sales and marketing, all this lead data. Everyone who’s hitting our site, downloading white papers, submitting their email for the newsletter, and all this data starts growing and it’s, it’s hard. It’s really hard. And it, it does take a framework and experience to manipulate and use that data, you know, and, and so I think a lot of departments face this, just a lot of data and we don’t know what to do it.

Ben (13m 37s):
So it, it definitely takes time to perfect the data and how we use it within the go-to-market motion.

Jack (13m 45s):
I just keep having this image of a, a newly hired C F O coming into focus that has joined a mid-size company that was perhaps privately held for since it was founded so many decades ago. And the CEO is thinking to themselves, I finally have my strategic C F O little does that CEO know, or that C F O perhaps has an inkling if he’s going to become more operations minded, if he’s going to play this role that he’s gonna have to really assert himself with the department heads and get them cooperating.

Jack (14m 27s):
I mean, I think that’s a scenario that’s still playing out in real time today for that C F O. It’s all about trying to establish the visibility, creating that type of visibility by having other senior executives understand that it’s a data driven world today. And while I’ve never had my C F O step into my office and ask for those numbers before, it’s time to hand them over.

Ben (14m 55s):
Yeah, I mean that CFO sales and marketing relationship is so important and CFOs are so operational today, really, I can’t do my job effectively if I don’t understand the operations of the business and the operations of the departments within my business. And out of all the departments within, say, a SaaS company, the folks I talked to the most were sales and marketing because we’re investing so much in the go-to-market engine there. So we have to understand, we unfortunately have to be a bit nosy, and that relationship has to exist between the CFO and the cro or the VP of sales or the chief marketing officer that we have to understand what’s happening in their business so we can be effective and provide some guidance because CFOs are here to enable and facilitate and also push back when necessary.

Ben (15m 36s):
So it’s an important relationship. And if you think yes, SASS really wasn’t sass even maybe 20 years ago, maybe it was the as p days that now maybe that relationship wasn’t there, but now we have so much data, you know, that we have to get involved, we have to help them with all the data that’s running through their organization. So really, you know, that relationship has to be open that I need to explain to my marketing sales leader why ICAC is important, why payback is important, and also why I need to understand their lead flow and how that flows into their pipeline and opportunities. And close one

Jack (16m 13s):
Well said, and thank you, Ben, for taking a deeper dive on that with us. We are gonna tee up our next planning ace, who is Kevin Rubin, CFO of Al Alter X. And just in short, short intro for him, the implosion of the.com bubble, the collapse of Arthur Anderson in the September 11th terror tax each in their own way contributed to the future trajectory of Kevin Rubin’s finance career. It was a convergence of events and circumstances that even today Kevin Rubin finds difficult to untangle. You won’t want to miss episode eight 60 of C F O thought leader and allow Kevin to share his story with you right now.

Jack (16m 58s):
We just wanna have him share some of his thinking around the metrics right now. We’re going to share some of his thinking regarding the metrics and planning approaches we feature on this podcast each month. This is Kevin Rubin, c f o of Al Alteryx.

CFO Rubin (17m 18s):
The number, the number in depth. I, I guess the, the sheer number of metrics and the depth of those metrics have extended pretty significantly over the seven years. You know, when I joined we were barely measuring, you know, basic semetrics, but the ones that we did measure, as I mentioned, were were pretty incredible. You know, we were looking at, at, at things like net expansion and we, we didn’t focus as much on a R at the time, although, you know, you know, we were a subscription business and always have been. So, you know, billings is, is a reasonable proxy, but all of our metrics that we focused on early on were either customer dynamic metrics, as I mentioned.

4 (18m 5s):
You know, things like net expansion. You know, we did look at ltv TOC internally, you know, we looked at a lot of productivity metrics. We didn’t have as much telemetry insight as we do today. So how are customers using the product? Where are they deploying? What type of use cases? So we’ve really increased the sophistication over the years on really that intelligence around how customers are using us, where they’re using us. We don’t get to see any of the, the data or, or, or aspects of, of what they’re doing in that sense, but we really do get to understand how they’re using the product, which capabilities the product are most interesting.

4 (18m 46s):
And then we, we’ve stood up in recent years, a specific organization whose entire mandate is working with customers and prospects and defining the ROI they’re getting from using Alteryx. And so we get a lot of insight from that. That’s our value engineering group, and we get a lot of insight there. So I would say the depth and maturity of the analysis that we’re able to do today is significantly greater. The segmentation, the way that we can truly drill into a specific cohort of customers and understand behaviors, whether that’s, you know, regionally or you know, vertically, however you want to kind of slice it.

4 (19m 25s):
We have a, we have an amazing ability to go in and we also have the good fortune of being able to use altrix to do, to do a lot of this work. You know,

Jack (19m 36s):
You mentioned the value engineering group. Are these data science? Who are these people? Who,

4 (19m 41s):
Who is? No, this is a, this is a customer facing organization. It sits within our go-to-market group. And it’s, again, as I said, it’s so mandated, is really to work with organizations that our current customers are looking to be customers and help them define for a given anticipated use, what do we think the, the return on, on the investment would be from Alteryx. So there’s certainly analytic minded, but it, it’s not necessarily a data science team. We do have data, quite a bit of data scientists in the organization that help out in a variety of ways. But the value engineering group is really tasked with, you know, pulling together in a, in a very understandable way, this is your investment, Alteryx, these are the sets of use cases and ways in which you’re using Alteryx and this is the benefit in the ROI that you’re receiving from them.

Jack (20m 39s):
Okay, well done. Kevin Rubin, c f o of Alx touched on a good deal once, once more. Ben, I have a few items I’m hoping to talk to you about that Kevin touched on, but I don’t want to influence your, your opening thoughts or what you, what your takeaways were.

Ben (20m 58s):
Yeah, it was great. He talked about some course SAS metrics. He talked about net revenue retention, L T V to C, just those core metrics that really every SAS company at scale should be measuring. And then I thought was really interesting talking about sophistication around customer product usage, you know, and that’s so important. We have to also understand what makes our customers successful as they progress in the, through our product. You know, what actions are they taking, what triggers, you know, what influences do we have on that from tech support, from customer success. So not just talking those core financial metrics, but also the usage of the product and that sophistication. And then he talked about segmentation and cohort analysis, so of course talking core metrics, but I thought the product usage was really interesting.

Jack (21m 42s):
It’s about, he of course, used this phrase, which I do ask him about the value engineering group. It’s a customer facing group that sits and go to market, but I, I did ask him when it began, and apparently it’s not, it’s only a few years old. Something that got put in place and it doesn’t report to him, but it’s a sort of an organization, a similar group would we find in most SaaS organizations today. And again, I guess it’s part of the go to market, but a little more sophisticated,

Ben (22m 13s):
Definitely if he has a department or team dedicated to customer and prospect roi, how are they gonna use that product, that use case, and what ROI they’ll get out of it. I think definitely more of a larger org function, you know, earlier SaaS companies maybe don’t have the luxury of the budget for a team like that. And that could be for earlier SaaS, like a product marketer, you know, that we’re looking for so they can understand what we’re doing in engineering, how that translates to the customer and translating all that technical stuff into a value proposition for our customers, you know, so I think the, that’s probably the luxury of, of later stage sales

Jack (22m 50s):
Sis. Okay. I just wanna increase our intelligence around how customers are using us. And again, okay, you, you’ve been mentioning customer usage, customer usage, is this like the frontier where, where finance leaders are seeking to extend their lines of sight as quickly as possible? There’s like a land rush. What, what would you tell us?

Ben (23m 10s):
I think, you know, we could talk about an hour just about this. I think product usage and embedding those, the analytics in our product, the frontier was probably five years ago when that really became popular. Now of course, we know plg product led growth motion. We have to understand product usage. How are customer progressing through our product and where are those gates, where, what can we unlock? What are those expansion opportunities as the customer progresses in our product? So now you could say the frontier with PLG and product usage and understanding customer’s actions and intent to push that expansion revenue into net dollar, net revenue retention revenue that everybody’s talking about with the PLG motion. So I’d say, yeah, the frontier right now, PLG plus product usage and how we can really leverage that customer data.

Jack (23m 56s):
Okay, I’m gonna repeat that as my takeaway. PLG plus product usage. Thank you Kevin Rubin for highlighting that for us, Ben, we’re gonna move to our next planning ace. It was only last September that Patrick McClean having served earlier c f o tours of duty at Sotheby’s and IMAX stepped into the C F O office at Haggerty, an automotive enthusiast brand that first took route as an insurance agency for collector automobiles, but today serves the auto enthusiast realm using a, a menu of membership programs and experiences.

Jack (24m 40s):
Now, when it comes to entering the C F O office, Patrick Mcle tells us he likes to arrive in August or September, but no later we’ll have him explain, here’s his clip,

5 (25m 5s):
The, this role I started in September, which is right around the kickoff of the planning season, right, for the next year, which is great. You, you certainly don’t wanna show up after that, you know, maybe you wanna show up a little bit before that to get your feet wet. But what I focused on, part of it’s just understanding the team, the, the finance organization and you know, trying to meet with people, understand the scope, understand the role of what works, what doesn’t work. So there’s sort of that, you know, diagnostic around the core finance function. And then I try to invest heavily in building those relationships with my peers on the leadership team. You at Haggard, the way that works is we have presidents who run our insurance business, our marketplace business and our membership media and entertainment business, and they’re driving the outcomes, right?

5 (25m 57s):
And my job is to make sure they’ve got the right resources. And I can’t do that until I understand their business and their challenges, their opportunities. So try to aggressively invest in building those relationships so I can kind of get up the learning curve. And then for me, it was using the planning process as a learning process for me, which was great for me, and maybe it’s more challenging for other folks, but when you’re going through the planning, you, you get to be in that room with everybody and go through in detail and ask all those questions. And so I really just try to invest heavily in, all right, how do I learn? But at the same time, what are my quick intuitions and my, my quick reactions, what do we need to change, right?

5 (26m 39s):
This is the opportunity. If, if we don’t agree what we’re doing next year now it’ll be be much harder. You have to change on the fly. And so that was sort of the balance. I tried to strike learn, but also influence quickly. I, I go back to my time at imax, and so when I was hired at imax, the company was coming off of two very strong years. In the midst of a third, they had just taken their Chinese business public in Hong Kong. And that had produced a bunch of capital and the mandate for the new CFO and why they found me attractive, it was going to be external. It was, you look at ways to drive growth ad legs to the stool, acquisitions, partnerships, those kind of things.

5 (27m 19s):
In my first handful of months I did the, you know, sort of normal onboarding and diagnostic. I also joined that in August. And so went through a planning process, which was helpful. And then early in my second year, so I was sort of, you know, five months in or something myself, along with the c e o Rich Gal fund. We kind of were looking at the numbers and, you know, noticed that, you know, some of the trends were moving against us. And I went back, did a bunch of work on it, and came back and sat down with him and, and said, look, I know the mandate was X, but I’m concerned, how do we think about, you know, sort of an early warning system?

5 (27m 59s):
Like what do we use to make a decision? Are we still headed in the direction we we wanted to be? Or are we pivoting here? And you know, rich had been there forever and tremendous intuition on the business. And so he kind of agreed where I was coming from and said, okay, look, let’s look at the next three titles that are coming out and we’ll monitor our performance on those. And if, if we find that we’re in a position where, you know, we’re not on track, then let’s have a real conversation. And he said, but go get ready for that real conversation now. Like, if we end up in a spot where we need to pivot, let’s start working on it. And for me, it was sort of the moment was, okay, I was hired to do one thing feels different, and always remember the numbers don’t lie, right?

5 (28m 50s):
Like, and that was the framework that I, that rich and I came up with is, okay, look, let’s just create a little scorecard, a short term scorecard, and we’ll hold ourselves accountable to it. And if the numbers tell us to do something, we’re gonna do it. And I, the moment was sort of, especially coming from banking, right? If banking all numbers go up into the right, right? And look, we all have sort of these strategies and narratives and we’re all biased to believe that, you know, wonderful things will happen. And you know, in the finance situation, like always remember the numbers don’t lie. And ask your peers on a leadership team, like, okay, if that’s true, whatever it is, if it’s true, is it in our numbers now, when will it be in our numbers?

5 (29m 32s):
And look, it’s not about, look, there’s a very constructive way to have those conversations, right? It’s just about the, the initiative and, and sort of remembering that, ask those challenging questions. You help people recognize that Sands can shift underneath us pretty quickly. And then from the CFO slot, like you can’t just ask the question, you’ve gotta be willing to roll up your sleeves, dive in with your business partners and help them figure it out. Like, what is the pivot we need to make and how do we get at it? So that was the one for me, like that, that recognition that, huh, this is a, this can move pretty quickly. And you’ve gotta make sure that you’ve got the, the resolve to ask the tough question and then the follow through to build sort of buy-in to what the solution is.

Jack (30m 29s):
Okay. Patrick Mcle, C f O of Haggerty from episode 8 62, c f o fault leader, anytime we have a finance leader, shed a little light on the ceo, CFO, F O relationship. I always think it’s always worthy to highlight somehow. It’s pretty rare, to be honest. This notion of a early warning system, sort of a, an agreement with the ceo, I was compelled to make it part of an episode. That’s good planning right there. What did you make of what Patrick shared?

Ben (31m 4s):
Yeah, the, the early wording system, right? And I wrote down in my notes, he said, numbers don’t lie. You know, he had intuition with the numbers that they were moving a certain way and just saw some red flags coming up that he shared with his CS C ceo and they went back to his team to do some homework. So once you’re in the seat long enough, you just have that intuition, you see cycles, you see seasonality, that just helps you interpret those numbers even better. And that’s what he was explaining. Like he, he was looking at the numbers, numbers don’t lie and they’re not saying the right thing. We’ve gotta go back and do a little bit more homework.

Jack (31m 36s):
You know, I, I thought it was interesting, like the planning season is the learning season for him. And I’m wondering if you think organizations could use planning more effectively to train not just their C F O, but others, and maybe it’s done all the time, but in your experience, looking back, you know, planning’s planning, but at the same time it does offer you an opportunity each year to really look under the hood. Do companies use planning? You know, are there different ways they could be using it to benefit the organization?

Ben (32m 13s):
Yeah. And, and his comments about planning season really resonated because I felt the same way where he had liked to start, right? He, he doesn’t wanna miss planning season and start as a C F O or as an fp and a professional right after they bake the budget because there’s so much learning. You learn all the nuts and bolts, all the, everything that’s under the hood as far as what’s going on in the organization. And of course they’re lovers and haters of the budget, but planning and budgeting done right, I think is really effective. And I always felt budgeting really tests the operational knowledge of your leaders. Do they really understand their business, their departments? Where are the businesses going? What resources do they need to support those corporate objectives, those business unit objectives.

Ben (32m 53s):
So in, in his clip, right, just talking like core C f o FP and a technique and experience.

Jack (33m 2s):
So when I hear the expression planning season, I just think of this, this one conference room that is just a succession of meetings after meetings, after meetings, after different functional heads and different parts of the organization come in to discuss their budgets. And the finance people are sort of staring across the table waiting for the next one to enter. I’m sure it’s done electronically. I’m sure there’s better ways of doing it though. It seems like we all know meetings aren’t always the best, most efficient way of educating each other.

Ben (33m 37s):
Yeah. Early stage, it could be more of a, I’m dictating what the budget is as the founder ceo, but later stage I’ve done planning and budgeting at large public companies and it is, it’s gotta be a collaborative process. Now it does start with high level guidance. You know, here are the high level targets that we’re, we wanna hit and we, we disseminate that out to our department leaders so they can understand where we’re trying to go as an organization. And then, right, we, you pass the templates out or maybe our fp and a system together all their input that comes back to the fp and a team. We create the first draft of the budget. And then I always like to meet with those department leaders. Why do you have this in here? Let me make sure I understand the resources that you need.

Ben (34m 19s):
What works, what doesn’t work that I can see from your inputs? So it does have to be a collabo collaborative process it or a process with those department leaders.

Jack (34m 28s):
Department leaders who you used to meet with. And no, I’m just imagining there were, there was a conference room during a certain time of year that you’d occupy frequently and try to have book the department heads to come in and sit down and talk.

Ben (34m 42s):
I think for some people, yeah, it is like going to the dentist. I think, you know, in SAS sometimes they under, they do understand the process of what we’re trying to achieve when I was in the airline industry. It’s also an education process. Yeah. They didn’t wanna sit down with me and, and, and look at their p and l and look at their budget because they may be operational rock stars, but it did make them nervous. They just didn’t have that fundamental financial education to feel comfortable around talking about the numbers and what numbers do they need to put in the budget. So part of that fp and a process, there’s a lot of education of those department leaders really helping them through the finance and budgeting process, which

Jack (35m 18s):
Brings us back in my mind anyway, to finance, sales, collaboration. And before we go, I was hoping, Ben, we might just pick your, your brain a little more on that, the significance of that collaboration today between sales and finance. When does it work? What are the challenges? Any, anything, any closing words. I’ll put you on the spot as we end here.

Ben (35m 50s):
Yeah. I think CFOs, they have to understand the sales process, the, you know, the, the stages that the sales leader wants to take the process through or the prospect through. Now, you know, if they have a certain sales technique, am I going to really dive into that? Maybe not, but I wanna understand how they’re going to take a sales qualified lead and move it through their pipeline and the pipeline hygiene. So we have to, I think as CFOs understand that process and sales and marketing leaders have learned from different orgs and different experiences on how they want to do that. So I think CFOs have to understand our go-to-market motion, right? Is that, is it the traditional outbound motion? Do we have an inbound motion? Do we have a PLG motion?

Ben (36m 30s):
So, so again, CFOs I think really have to understand the process. Are we telling them what to do? Absolutely not. But we have to understand how their sales engine is working.

Jack (36m 41s):
Okay. Ben Murray, the SAS CFO is the name of the podcast. Ben, thank you for being our guest host this episode. Very much appreciate it.

Ben (36m 52s):
Great to be here. Have a good weekend.