The following is a guest post from Toya Del Valle, chief customer officer at Cornerstone. Opinions are the author’s own.
CFOs are no strangers to pressure. The last few years have been riddled with challenges that have tested CFOs in every aspect of their role, from wavering economic uncertainty, to rising inflation and fluctuating interest rates. Now, a second month into the new year, it’s becoming more evident that 2025 will be just as complex of a landscape for CFOs to navigate, if not more so, as several policy changes take shape.
No matter what happens on a global economic scale, the worst thing CFOs can do when facing increased pressure is to operate in siloes, especially with the chief customer officers (CCO). No matter what external factors are impacting the CFO’s everyday work, it cannot be understated how important the relationship between CCO and CFO is.
With that in mind, CFOs must ensure their 2025 playbook includes a plan to strengthen their relationship with the CCO. If not, they’re withholding themselves from the insights necessary to accurately get a picture of the business’s financial success.
The relationship between CCO and CFO is so crucial because CCOs are leading revenue generation initiatives, whether it be renewability, expansions, connecting with partners to help them sell, identifying white space in the current platform or finding solutions based on customer feedback. Even if CFOs are seeing new revenue flooding in, if they’re not working with their CCO to ensure they’re maintaining and growing existing revenues and retaining customers — two directives that CCOs oversee — an organization will be set up for failure.
By prioritizing building a stronger strategic partnership with the CCO in 2025, CFOs will not only gain more visibility into the true state of the business but will be armed with the tools and insights needed to foster an agile workforce that promises long-term success.
The historical CCO-CFO relationship
CCOs and CFOs are both laser-focused on developing the areas of business they lead to drive company growth, which can sometimes create siloes for each function. It doesn’t help that oftentimes CFOs associate revenue with sales, not customer success, which, whether intentionally or not, can isolate CCOs from critical revenue conversations that warrant their inclusion and unique insights. This outlook is wrong for many reasons, but most notably because it focuses too much on new revenue and neglects to consider the importance of existing revenue, of which CCOs lead efforts.
The synergy generated when a CCO and CFO work together not only boosts revenue for the entire business but enables long-term workplace agility — the ability of a workforce to predict, leverage and respond to changes and use them as opportunities to advance an organization’s goals, which is arguably the most important quality a company can have in today’s workforce.
That said, the historical trend of CCOs and CFOs lacking collaboration needs to change. The first step to making this happen is by CFOs understanding that it’s not as heavy of a lift as it seems to build an effective partnership with the CCO, and it will pay dividends in the future.
The long-term, sustainable growth required for companies to succeed in 2025 and beyond is infinitely more difficult to achieve when there is not clear alignment between CCOs and CFOs. That said, for CFOs who started the year neglecting to incorporate strengthening the relationship with their organization’s CCO into their 2025 plans, it’s not too late to adjust. There are three key steps to creating and maintaining strong synergy between a CCO and CFO.
1. Establish a culture of collaboration
First and foremost, to lay the groundwork for a collaborative relationship with their CCO, CFOs should ensure they’re meeting with each other on a consistent cadence. Setting aside recurring time on both leader’s calendar to collaborate, share information, and strategize keeps both the CCO and CFO accountable for maintaining the relationship.
Establishing regular meetings also works as an example for greater customer success and finance teams to follow. If the top leaders of each department are regularly collaborating, it sets a standard for the rest of their functions to follow, resulting in more comprehensive departmental alignment. The more seamless the collaboration between customer success and finance is, the better equipped an organization is to connect the dots across departments and ensure they are operating as efficiently as possible to support an organization’s broad financial strategy.
2. Consistently report customer KPIs into financial models
To foster a true ‘constant collaboration’ mindset, both leaders must connect and agree on what customer KPIs are most important to indicate the financial success or distress of their organization. Once the key KPIs are agreed upon, CFOs and CCOs must ensure they are brought up on all check-ins between the two. In terms of what KPIs to start with, the most crucial are net revenue retention (NRR), availability to renew (ATR), expansion opportunities and customer health score.
3. Ensure equality in revenue modeling
Lastly, to initiate a powerful collaboration between the CCO and CFO, CFOs need to make a point to ensure that CCOs are involved in the same discussions as sales. When CFOs have equal visibility into the strategic decisions happening to drive new (sales) and existing (customer) revenue, financial forecasting is more accurate, enabling more accurate planning and long-term growth.
One way to do this is having CFOs invite both CCOs and Sales leaders to be equally involved in revenue modeling. As it stands, there are not many revenue models that account for customer success, adoption, and utilization, all of which are crucial considerations for CFOs to get a forward look into what revenue looks like for their organization.
Looking ahead
When CFOs and CCOs are not working in lockstep, the organization suffers. Through prioritizing the relationship with their CCO and in turn, opening themselves up to a plethora of insights tied to existing revenue opportunities, CFOs are better equipped to successfully usher their organization through challenging times.
CCOs are revenue drivers at their core, constantly chasing renewals, expansion opportunities, current and future partnerships, and customer experience feedback. The insights a CCO can provide, coupled with a CFOs overarching view of a company’s financial health, enables an organization to foster long-term success and adaptability.
When there is a strong relationship between the chief customer officer and chief financial officer, a company achieves a higher level of predictability, enabling it to get ahead of future challenges, stave off a potential risk and foster an agile workforce.
