Is having the CIO as your best friend enough? Armed with an expanding technology budget, a new breed of buyer is adding a new dimension to the sales cycle.

When sitting down at the boardroom table, this new breed of customer sits opposite. Engaging them, as you have learnt, being conversant with technology is never enough.

Chief Finance Officers (CFOs) is just one such new audience for our partners. What keeps them up at night? How do you speak their language? And how can you help them deliver business impact through technology innovations?

In the recent the Microsoft APAC Partner Boardroom Series for Partners designed to equip our partners to engage “across every room in the house” of our customers’ organizations, Fabiano Siufi, Area CFO for Microsoft APAC had this piece of advance for partners: Be curious, be prepared and build rapport.

The role of today’s CFOs

In today’s digital world, finance leaders are changemakers. With the ready availability of data and technology, CFOs can shape and optimize the future of organisations.

Modern Finance is what Siufi describes as how finance professionals leverage technology to augment their capabilities. “As finance professionals, we love data. The question is what do we do with that amount of data when you just don’t have the right systems, processes, and tools,” he shared.

With global macroeconomic conditions, finance leaders must address even more challenges. Fresh out of a pandemic, CFOs are also dealing with more regulated marketplaces and a fluid tax environment. There’re also increased cyberthreats that put business-critical data at risk, as well as diverse, distributed teams that need to work efficiently in a hybrid arrangement.

But from Siufi’s perspective, it’s important to optimize the present to be able to shape the future: “I am going to be spending a lot more time that truly adds value to the company, its shareholders, and stakeholders.”

“There is nothing really super sophisticated,” shared Siufi on the concept of Modern Finance. “It’s the way finance professionals leverage technology.”

The idea is simple – to have a single source of truth, and to reduce spending on “shadow applications” which can cost millions.

“People get quite excited about having volumes of data. However, if the data is not properly rinsed and curated, it is not relevant or meaningful, and cannot be aligned with company goals,” Siufi shared. He added that a common issue he saw in the sector is that there is always a lack of a single source of truth and that consistent data streams remain a top issue. There is a real opportunity for Microsoft partners to tackle this challenge head-on.

Winning CFOs over

From a CFO perspective, Siufi offered the following advice: “Of all the investments that we made in the last few years, are we really getting the return that we’re looking for?”

What he noted is that CFOs are not looking to stop investing, but to justify and optimize their spending. Ultimately, CFOs are looking to extract the value of every dollar and ensure that the organisation runs efficiently. The notion of doing more, with less, is now more important than ever.

The viewpoint was echoed by Florent Bellahsene, Senior Vice President of Sales & Services, Crayon APAC during the panel discussion. He cautioned peers to not anchor conversations on price. “CFOs are not just looking at price, they are interested in governance, business value, and long-term profitability for their company. If they have a solution that offers or creates value then, they will be keen to collaborate and allocate budgets.”

Bellahsene, whose team advises customers in the region, shared that it is important to listen and ask questions. Conversations on products and features are comfort areas when selling to IT but this approach will not be enough when selling to CFOs and the finance functions. As a service provider, Crayon had to understand the customer and their priorities and create business value that can be quantifiable when working with CFOs. Increasingly, sustainability – specifically how an organization manages risks and opportunities related to environmental, social and governance criteria (sometimes called ESG factors) – has become a key consideration for customers. For example, CFOs will want to understand the carbo footprints they create when consuming technology.

Amanda Del Carmen, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Business Applications for Microsoft APAC offered the following tips for engaging CFO: “When we go in (and speak to organizations), we need to really know what we are talking about. Gone are the days where our customers don’t know anything, and just wait for us to tell them.”

Del Carmen also highlighted the importance of encouraging adoption within the organization. Siufi agreed that a well-deployed solution can open more opportunities for partners to upsell or expand to other workloads: “…it just opens up so many opportunities to what’s next.”

But more importantly, it’s the importance of doing research and building rapport with CFOs which can help sellers better understand and pitch solutions. One of the best approaches to closing a deal is not necessarily having the answers but helping CFOs find the answers themselves. This requires partners to build connections and synergy during the sales process.

“I believe that if you work closely with CFO, if you collaborate with CFOs, you will see your profitability increase,” Bellahsene offered.

Top tips from panellists on engaging CFOs

1. Understand the business and do your homework.

2. Focus on adoption.

3. Build rapport with CFOs. Having leadership buy-in is also important.

4. Be ahead of trends – compliance, tax, and even ESG requirements.

5. You may have the answer, but your role is to help your customer understand the value they can unlock from their IT investments.

Learn more from the Microsoft APAC Partner Boardroom Series for Partners: CFOs here.

If you missed the Microsoft APAC Partner Boardroom Series for Partners: CFOs session you still have the opportunity to learn from it on-demand here. Also available are the CHROs and CISOs session.

Who should attend? Anyone – sales, technical and marketing – who wants to understand CHRO, CFO and CISO priorities and challenges and boardroom conversations on employee experience, modern finance and security, and learn how to engage/have connected discussions with these new breed of technology buyers/decision makers.