CFO-CCO Partnership’s Link to Business Success 🤝

In today's customer-centric business landscape, a leadership team that truly understands its customers is crucial. Everyone on the C-Suite should be learning from one another and challenging one another to be more customer-focused.

All leaders should have a common understanding of the business, its customers and its financials and come together to share ideas and observations to drive business forward. 

One unexpected yet necessary business partnership is the one between customer success and finance — 

Your CCO and CFO should be working together in a relationship built on mutual respect. 

Having a strong partnership between CFOs and CCOs makes it easier when challenges arise with customers. If the CFO understands enough about what will enable customers to be successful, the CCO and customer success team will have a strong advocate on their side from pre-sales all the way through board presentations.

Building a Strong CFO-CCO Relationship

Doing right by your customers is the key to success. All leaders should have a firm understanding of what it takes to drive customer success, including finance.  

Remember, it’s less expensive to keep a customer than it is to find a new one. Your leadership team needs a customer-centric culture and a strong relationship between finance and customer success to help drive retention and expand the customer base. 

When starting your journey toward building a successful and collaborative CFO-CCO partnership, follow these steps:

Step 1: Take a data-driven approach. Seek clarity on how previous targets were set, what data points were used, etc. and do a bottom-up forecast on where things are with respect to risk, renewals and predicted trends.

Step 2: Be transparent. Share honest data points. Discuss wins and dig into why certain customers churned as well as why new customers contracted. Then, develop a reasonable target together based on data.  

Step 3: Collaborate and move forward. Consider why the data is the way it is and why the business is or is not achieving the results you desire. Come up with a collaborative plan for how to pivot to what is a reasonable target for the metrics that really matter in driving business.

3 Traits CCOs Look For in a Winning CFO

Strong CFOs make developing and maintaining the CFO-CCO relationship quicker and easier. There are three traits that set the best CFOs apart. 

Trait #1: Customer Empathy. Care about and understand your customers. Take time to occasionally join customer calls or attend events and user groups. The more you understand customers, the better you can help build your team to be customer-centric.

Trait #2: Partnership. Be a good partner. Invest in finding a balance between support and challenge. The best CFOs get on board with customer-centric initiatives and challenge the CCO to consider new perspectives and opportunities. This level of collaboration ensures a stronger, more effective partnership.

Trait #3: Post-sale understanding. Know what really matters for customer success. Customer success requires striking a balance between what the customer defines as value, your ability to deliver against the expectations and the customer experience. Remember — the goal isn’t just to make the customer happy, but to make them successful, solve their business problems and deliver authentic value.

Looking for more insight and advice on building a strong, collaborative relationship between finance and customer success on your leadership team? April shares her guidance on the journey toward developing a successful CFO-CCO partnership on week’s episode of The CFO Show, available wherever you enjoy podcasts.

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What’s next…

A CFO’s job is to protect the financial health of their organization, not only through financial planning and analysis but also through telling the right stories to various stakeholders. CFOs need to be able to interpret the data, and then relay what it means to C-suites, board of directors, employees, and investors to make informed decisions. Akash Kapoor, CFO at ColdBlock Technologies, joins The CFO Show to talk about how to create compelling, data-driven narratives.