The CFO of a major U.S. defense contractor has put together a playbook for his team to act on when bills are coming up that they can leverage. He says it's more function over form, but he meets monthly with the procurement lead to share interesting procurement plays she is seeing from her side. "I've been in really close contact with all of this as I've seen some of those interesting plays come around from procurement"
We're joined by Jane Graham, Vice President, Customer Success and Renewals at Kronos, to talk more deeply about the relationship between customer success and finance.
- Building the relationship early allowed for 'speed' and effectiveness when putting a plan In place during COVID
- Tracking key metrics - especially the Revenue and Cash-flow Impacts that will be realized during this situation
- This relationship (learning more about the financials) benefits you and the types of conversations you can have with your customers - understanding the situation they might be facing given that this Is a B2B environment
- Marketing, especially customer marketing, has been critical to driving value for the customer success team. Example: Learning about how to update pay-codes and packaging marketing material can be used by every CSM
- "If you're talking about your customers' problems, ultimately you should be talking about the market problems"
- Playbook design needs to be function over form - give your team flexibility to react to the situation
- Hot tip: Meet with your procurement team to share procurement plays back and forth - help understand the techniques that may be used In the Enterprise software buying space
- Give your customers access to Information that expands beyond your software and ultimately they will start to think of you as a partner
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This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/
Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/
Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach