Why Go-to-Market and Finance Teams Struggle To Work Together — And How to Fix It
How great leaders create value outside of their function
Over the past month, I’ve been leading the Operator’s Guild Master Class on the CRO/CFO relationship. This post is a preview of what we covered over the course of the 3-hour and 60-slide workshop. If you’ve already attended the master class — scroll to the bottom for links to related posts that are worth exploring next.
Today’s cover image is a copy of a Banksy that I found while walking the streets of Ponta Delgada in the Azores. Will let you decide who is GTM vs. who is Finance in this photo.
Too often, the relationship between the GTM and Finance teams feels like the graffiti in today’s cover image:
Zero-sum, antagonistic, distrustful…
This serves nobody:
#1 reason CFOs get fired is for “not getting the business.” Root cause behind that: their peers do not believe the CFO is setting them up for success.
#1 reason CROs get fired is for “missing the target.” Root cause behind that: the target wasn’t achievable relative to the resources they were given.
My core belief is that this is fixable — but needs to start early and at the top. It comes down to three things:
1. Cross-team alignment up/down the org chart
The CRO/CFO relationship – and their ability to consider themselves a cross-functional leader needs to be supported by teams that integrate “across the aisle” – outside of their JDs. For example, accounting needs to ensure that GTM is not constrained by GAAP reporting quirks (e.g. GM % goals limiting CSM hiring), while sales managers need to be in a position to provide feedback to finance because they often disproportionately bear the cost of decisions made by others.
2. Shared ownership of a high-visibility output
When Finance and GTM orgs partner on the bookings forecast – the highest visibility result at a startup – everyone succeeds, learns, and grows together – faster. The focus of this partnership needs to be iterative learning. Answering questions that neither team individually is setup to answer e.g. regardless of this Q’s final result, do we believe our underlying business health is improving or deteriorating?
3. A culture of collaboration
The traditional view of “CFO sets the target, CRO hits it” is not just unhelpful – it’s value destructive. You need to challenge the biases and help teams build good habits of working together. You do that by identifying shared points of pride and working towards the mantra that “Nobody succeeds unless the company succeeds.” Ultimately your goal should be not just to help the company hit the quarter, but to setup everyone around you for sequential success.
Building this foundation, leading teams while scaling rapidly, creating trust while figuring out the right answer, sticking your neck out when you venture outside of your functional domain — is incredibly hard to do all at the same time.
But the rewards and benefits are, in my view, well worth it.
When the CRO/CFO partnership is working well it lifts the entire company up:
Financial decisions and processes are aligned to Go-to-Market execution.
Resources are allocated based on ROI and not based on an adversarial negotiation.
The company has better forward-visibility across revenue predictability, capability gaps, and execution risks...and is setup for sequential success.
Furthermore, only by working together can Go-to-Market and Finance teams answer three key questions:
Is our go-to-market investment aligned to fundamental growth drivers vs. an artefact of our org chart? Does our product investment directly support growth?
Is our pricing simply a way for us to monetize and capture value, or is is it acting as a powerful value-creation framework that aligns customer outcomes, the sales process, and product investment decisions at the individual deal level?
What are the trade-offs that are within our control as we think about growth narrative and investment? How much burn risk can we reasonably take on?
One of the biggest joys of having the opportunity to lead a master class for the Operator’s Guild community is the incredibly energizing feedback I received in the process. Next week, I will be sharing my own personal learnings from this workshop with almost fifty Finance, Sales, Product, and Operations start up leaders who attended.
In the meantime, I want to thank everyone who joined and participated.
If you’re curious about learning more or going deeper on one of the three key GTM + Finance collaboration areas — feel free to setup time to chat 1:1 about:
Aligning your Financial Planning & Go-to-market Execution
Harnessing the full power of you Pricing & Packaging
Debating and deciding on your Growth vs. Profitability trade offs
Previous posts in the cross-functional leadership series:
Be your own culture demolition expert (link)
Your CFO is failing and might not even know it (link)
Most CFOs think they own annual planning & budgets — do they, really? (link)
The top fundraising mistake Founder & CFOs consistently make together (link)
Upcoming posts:
Being a great CMO is the hardest job in the C-Suite
Why you should never goal CROs on sales efficiency
How to use pricing to align sales, marketing, product, finance, and operations!
…and more