Primary CFO Challenges

In honor of Steve Cakebread’s promotion to the President’s Committee at salesforce.com and their appointment of a new CFO, I thought I’d share with you the results of a recent informal CFO survey we performed. We got together with a group of CFOs of high-growth, mid-market companies to talk about their primary challenges as well as their reporting and analysis requirements. Note that none of the participating CFOs were from public companies, so we were able to avoid getting bogged down in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance-related topics.

They told us that their primary challenges are:

1. Lack of revenue predictability
2. Spending too much time consolidating, analyzing, maintaining data in spreadsheets
3. Not enough time to add more value to the business
4. Not enough trust in the information coming from sales (Note: all were salesforce.com customers)

They also told us that when it comes to analytics, they’re most likely to consider an on-demand application, but it has to be simple to set-up and use and must provide the ability to perform ad hoc queries of the data.

I know, I know, it sounds like a perfect set-up for LucidEra’s Revenue Cycle Analysis application, but that really wasn’t the intention of the survey (although it certainly was a nice validation of our solution). That said, if the above list of challenges rings true for you and your company, I encourage you or someone in your sales or finance organization to take a LucidEra test drive today.

posted by Darren Cunningham at 5:48 pm

---