如何协调财务和销售以获得成功
Sara Baxter-Orr is the global head of CFO practice at Anaplan. A veteran CFO executive, Sara has deep experience in finance operations, risk governance, information security, and high-stakes business transactions.
\nJason Loh is the Global Head of Sales and Marketing Solutions at Anaplan, where he leads the go-to-market strategy for Anaplan’s solutions designed to drive performance and revenue.
\nThis discussion has been edited and abridged from a webinar entitled Finding Common Ground in Uncertain Times: How Sales and Finance Can Stay on Target. View the full webinar here.
\nOver the last several months, sales and finance leaders around the world have witnessed buying patterns shift in ways that they have never seen before. Some are calling this the Great Lockdown. And it’s causing business leaders to reconsider the sales and revenue plans that they may have just put in place only a few short months ago.
\nSales and finance leaders are often turning to one another for answers to difficult questions about revenue and liquidity. The results of these discussions can help put organizations back on a path toward stable and reliable revenue, or they can mean poor revenue forecasting and delays in recovery once the economy rebounds.
\nWhat are some of a CFO’s biggest challenges in navigating through this crisis?
\nSara Baxter-Orr: Finance leaders are working in a state of uncertainty and a fractured work environment with so many people working from home. They’re working on several time horizons, with some now solely focused on stabilizing in the short term and others looking at what comes next. They need to understand their sources of cash, and they’ve probably drawn down on their credit lines and activated any available government assistance. They are now looking for rapid cost reductions.
\nThey are spending more time with their boards, investors, employees, creditors, suppliers, and customers, and they’re evaluating their products and revenue trajectories as they consider making a pivot or change. With this, they’re probably running a lot of scenarios. Never before has it been so important for them to radically collaborate with their team members. They are working especially tightly with sales and marketing to evaluate revenue trajectories, with HR to plan the gradual return of the workforce to the office and ensure workforce safety, with supply chain to make any necessary adjustments or form new alliances, and with IT, a partner who has been by their side through all of this.
\nHow can the Chief Sales Officer (CSO) or Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) be a better partner with their finance counterpart?
\nJason Loh: As we think about all the questions that finance leaders are struggling with, they are predicated on one thing: revenue. And it’s the sales organization that is actually bringing the revenue in. So one major role for the CRO, the CSO, and all sales leaders right now is to partner with their CFO and finance counterparts to secure the revenue line. They need to understand what business is vulnerable, what’s not vulnerable, and, given this new state of the world, what business they can count on.
\nThe impact of today’s situation is certainly uneven. Organizations in travel and transportation, or hotels and hospitality, or certain kinds of retail, for example—those organizations are highly impacted. On the opposite side of that spectrum are industries like consumer essentials, telecommunications, and waste management. Some of the delivery services are ramping up their hiring to support this new demand. The CRO can help their heads of finance navigate through all this.
\nDana Therrien: I’ve spent most of my career in sales, and I think what’s changed during all this is that you suddenly have to care more about things like liquidity and cash flow. You have to work more closely with the CFO and care about factors beyond just the booking, also looking carefully at the quality of that booking, and the timeline for when it could potentially come in.
\nAs businesses look to build an accurate sales forecast, how do you think CFOs and sales leaders are working differently now than they did in the past?
\nSara Baxter-Orr: Well, for one, there’s a lot more communication going on. Accurate and reliable forecasting is a cornerstone, and to get there, everyone needs to collaborate, cooperate, and innovate in ways that they perhaps never have. The viability and the success of the corporation means making the most precise move you possibly can. And the impact of the forecast on financial decision-making overall is mission-critical.
\nThere’s a supply chain impact: Do we have the products that we ask the salespeople to forecast? Do we need to make substitution? Are our vendors healthy?
\nThere’s a workforce impact: How are we ensuring worker safety? What investments might we need in this new environment? Do we need to reconfigure workspaces?
\nFor me, it’s paramount to be running multiple scenarios as you build your forecasts, and then you’ve got to be able to evaluate things swiftly, accurately, and collaboratively, with the most critical and relevant data. That’s a cornerstone for setting a business up for success.
\nHow are sales leaders and finance leaders working together to secure the revenue line and get a better understanding of the ability to deliver product during this crisis?
\nJason Loh: In order to understand what potential revenue is going to come in, the first thing we need to do is to stabilize the foundation.
\nSo often when we do this, we look at our past, document these revenue baselines or foundations, and then build the forecast on top of that. How do we know that the foundation we’re standing on is firm? One of the best ways is to meticulously inspect the pipeline in partnership with finance. And I mean “meticulously inspect” in the sense that we need to remove bias. We typically start by breaking the pipeline down across three dimensions: shape, size, and content.
\nWhen you think of a traditional pipeline shape, it’s often like a funnel, where it’s very wide on one end and then it gradually tapers until it becomes narrow on the other. The feature to notice here is that you can’t have more coming out of the pipeline than goes into the pipeline. From a ranking and scoring perspective, it’s all about understanding how to jettison the bad deals as quickly as possible.
\nThere is also the size of the pipeline. I can’t say how many times I’ve sat in meetings and people say, “How big of a pipeline do we need?” It all depends, and not on the industry you’re in or the segments that you serve, but really on the selling styles of your sales team. For example, if you have cautious reps who forecast conservatively, you don’t need as big a pipeline as you would if you had a team that was overly optimistic.
\nFinally, consider the contents of the pipeline. Analyzing this involves questions like Are we focusing on the right customers? Are we focusing on the right products? Are the deals desirable and are they winnable?
\nAsking ourselves these questions and doing this assessment, I think, is paramount in order to inspect the foundation to understand what we’re building on.
\n| For more insights on creating alignment between your finance and sales organizations, view our full webinar Finding Common Ground in Uncertain Times: How Sales and Finance Can Stay on Target.\n
| \nView now | \n
Dana Therrien是anplan加速团队的负责人，在商业规划、销售运营、上市战略设计和执行方面拥有专业知识。
Sara Baxter-Orr是anplan首席财务官实践的全球主管。Sara是一位资深的首席财务官，在财务运营、风险治理、信息安全和高风险业务交易方面拥有丰富的经验。
Jason Loh是anplan的全球销售和营销解决方案主管，领导anplan的解决方案进入市场战略，旨在提高业绩和收入。
这一讨论已被编辑和节录自一个题为在不确定时期寻找共同点:销售和财务如何保持目标。查看完整的网络研讨会在这里．
在过去的几个月里，世界各地的销售和财务负责人目睹了购买模式的转变，这是他们从未见过的。有人称之为“大封锁”。这导致企业领导人重新考虑他们可能在短短几个月前刚刚实施的销售和收入计划。
销售部门和财务部门的领导经常会相互寻求有关收入和流动性等棘手问题的答案。这些讨论的结果可以帮助组织重新回到稳定可靠的收入道路上，或者它们可能意味着糟糕的收入预测和经济反弹后的复苏延迟。
首席财务官在应对这场危机时面临的最大挑战是什么?
莎拉Baxter-Orr:由于很多人在家办公，财务主管们的工作处于不确定状态，工作环境支离破碎。他们在几个时间范围内工作，一些人现在只专注于短期稳定，另一些人则在关注接下来会发生什么。他们需要了解他们的资金来源，他们可能已经透支了他们的信贷额度，并启动了任何可用的政府援助。他们现在正在寻求快速降低成本。
他们花更多的时间与董事会、投资者、员工、债权人、供应商和客户在一起，在考虑转向或改变时，他们会评估自己的产品和收入轨迹。有了这个，他们可能会运行很多场景。对他们来说，与团队成员进行彻底的合作从未如此重要。他们与销售和营销部门密切合作，评估收入轨迹;与人力资源部门密切合作，计划员工逐步回归办公室并确保员工安全;与供应链部门密切合作，做出必要的调整或形成新的联盟;与IT部门密切合作，IT部门是一个一直陪伴他们度过这一切的合作伙伴。
首席销售官(CSO)或首席收入官(CRO)如何与财务部门更好地合作?
杰森·Loh:当我们思考财务主管们正在努力解决的所有问题时，它们都基于一件事:收入。而真正带来收入的是销售部门。因此，CRO、CSO和所有销售主管现在的一个主要角色是与CFO和财务同行合作，以确保收入线。他们需要了解哪些业务是脆弱的，哪些是不脆弱的，并且，在这种新的世界状态下，他们可以依靠哪些业务。
今天局势的影响当然是不平衡的。例如，旅游和运输、酒店和接待或某些零售行业的组织——这些组织受到的影响很大。与之相对的是必需品、电信和废物管理等行业。一些快递公司正在加大招聘力度，以满足这一新的需求。CRO可以帮助他们的财务主管应对这一切。
Dana Therrien:我职业生涯的大部分时间都花在销售上，我认为在这一切中发生的变化是，你突然不得不更多地关注流动性和现金流之类的事情。你必须与首席财务官更密切地合作，关心订单以外的因素，还要仔细观察订单的质量，以及订单可能到来的时间。
随着企业希望建立一个准确的销售预测，你认为cfo和销售主管现在的工作方式与过去有什么不同?
莎拉Baxter-Orr:首先，有更多的交流在进行。准确可靠的预测是一个基石，为了实现这一目标，每个人都需要以他们可能从未有过的方式进行协作、合作和创新。公司的生存和成功意味着你要尽可能做出最精确的行动。总体而言，预测对财务决策的影响是至关重要的。
这是对供应链的影响:我们是否有我们要求销售人员预测的产品?我们需要做替换吗?我们的供应商健康吗?
这对劳动力产生了影响:我们如何确保工人的安全?在这种新环境下，我们可能需要哪些投资?我们需要重新配置工作空间吗?
对我来说，在构建预测时，最重要的是运行多个场景，然后你必须能够快速、准确、协作地评估事物，使用最关键和最相关的数据。这是企业走向成功的基石。
销售领导和财务领导如何共同努力，确保收入线，并更好地了解在这场危机中交付产品的能力?
杰森·Loh:为了了解潜在的收入将会有多少，我们需要做的第一件事是稳定基础。
通常，当我们这样做的时候，我们会回顾过去，记录这些收入基线或基础，然后在此基础上建立预测。我们怎么知道我们所站的根基是稳固的呢?最好的方法之一是与财务部门合作，仔细检查未来的项目。我说的“一丝不苟地检查”是指我们需要消除偏见。我们通常首先将管道分解为三个维度:形状、大小和内容。
当你想到传统的管道形状时，它通常就像一个漏斗，一端很宽，然后逐渐变细，直到另一端变窄。这里需要注意的特性是，从管道输出的量不能超过进入管道的量。从排名和评分的角度来看，这一切都是关于了解如何尽快放弃糟糕的交易。
管道的规模也是一个问题。我不知道有多少次我坐在会议上，人们说:“我们需要多大的管道?”这完全取决于，而不是取决于你所处的行业或你所服务的细分市场，而是取决于你的销售团队的销售风格。例如，如果你有一个谨慎的代表，他们的预测保守，你就不需要像你有一个过于乐观的团队那样大的管道。
最后，考虑管道的内容。分析这个问题包括以下问题我们是否专注于正确的客户?我们是否专注于正确的产品?这些交易是令人满意的吗?它们能赢吗?
问我们自己这些问题，做这个评估，我认为，是至关重要的，以便检查基础，了解我们正在建立的基础。
| 要了解更多关于在财务和销售组织之间建立一致性的见解，请查看我们的完整网络研讨会在不确定时期寻找共同点:销售和财务如何保持目标。 | 现在的观点 |