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Ep 23: Leading Cross-Functional Teams

Ep 23: Leading Cross-Functional Teams

Are you tired of sitting through unproductive monthly meetings that turn into show-and-tell sessions? Do you want to shift your focus to key metrics that matter and move away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach?

In this episode of the Planning Aces podcast, Cohosts Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles feature the commentary and insights of three finance leaders who don’t mind displacing the status quo as they seek to optimize their business metrics and drive performance.

Episode #23 kicks off with the hosts featuring recent commentary from Dayton Kellenberger, CFO of Vendavo, who shares his experience with implementing a metrics-based approach to monthly business unit reviews. He explains that they shifted their focus to key metrics that matter and moved away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach. Dayton also discusses the importance of optimizing SAS gross margins, which is a cross-functional effort that involves finance, sales, cloud ops teams, and customer success teams.

Later in the episode, Celeste Ackert and Jason Quinn share their insights on creating cross-functional dashboards and raising the profile of metrics within an organization. Brett emphasizes the importance of using planning tools to build cross-functional dashboards, as it allows for better integration between the planning and operational cycles. He also highlights the significance of customer contribution analysis in optimizing resources and identifying areas of sub-optimization.

Jason Quinn also discusses the importance of cultural norms in achieving desired outcomes. He emphasizes the need for fairness, transparency, kindness as a service, pursuit of truth, and trust through transparency. Brett summarizes Quinn’s points into three categories of measures for FP&A professionals: the overall scoreboard, success potential (leading indicators), and experiences.

Overall, the episode aims to highlight the takeaways and provoke listeners to think about other ways of monitoring how their businesses are performing.

Related Episode Content

The Path to Unlocking Gross Margin Points | Dayton Kellenberger, CFO, Vendavo

About Brett Knowles

OUR COHOST BRETT KNOWLES | Brett Knowles is a long-time thought leader in the performance measurement space. His clients have been profiled in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Forbes. There are over 20 business school cases covering the success of his clients. Share a comment or two with our resident thought leader. Brett@pm2consulting.com

MADE POSSIBLE BY PLANFUL | Planful is the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software. The Planful platform, which helps businesses drive peak financial performance, is used around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and analytics. Planful empowers finance, accounting, and business users to plan confidently, close faster, and report accurately. https://planful.com/?utm_source=cfothoughtleader&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=2021-01-04_OA_CFOThoughtLeader_PlanfulLogo

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