Graham Ballbach's guest appearances

Graham Ballbach

CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Marc Elliot

Sachin Patel

Lawrence Levy

Rajesh Gupta

Dave Jones

Jeff Epstein

John Collins

Eric Johnson

Michael Tannenbaum

Kraft Heinz

Chris Baker

Bob Feller

Dave Kellogg

Jeff Nichols

Jim Stewart

OwlTail

Ballbach:  We found something really interesting on the go-to-market side that I believe will have a major impact on our top-line growth, and it came through the analysis that the finance team conducted. We looked at our sales model and at the number of customers that we have around the country. We looked at the run rate and the renewals and the retention of these customers. In partnership with our new head of sales, we then did a deeper dive into what kind of time was spent by our sales force—that is, primarily our outside salesforce. We noticed that the sales enablement infrastructure was not set up so that our sales folks could go out and win big deals—win big deals that could make a step change difference in our business.  Instead, they were spending a lot of their time on working with the existing customer base. So we are actively now reinventing our go-to-market by investing in tech enablement for our sales folks so that they are freed up to truly do what they do best, which is to sell and to go obtain new logos with more strategic and kind of longer-term sales cycles. The second thing that came out of this was a desire to invest in digital marketing. There's never been any testing of what kind of ROI we can get from investing marketing dollars in these new areas. Given the long list of customers that we have and the disparate array of long-sale customers that do relatively small deals, we suspect that we can invest in digital marketing that will that will return a very high ROI on the investment as opposed to what we get with the kind of legacy sales model.

<p>Ballbach:  We found something really interesting on the go-to-market side that I believe will have a major impact on our top-line growth, and it came through the analysis that the finance team conducted. We looked at our sales model and at the number of customers that we have around the country. We looked at the run rate and the renewals and the retention of these customers. In partnership with our new head of sales, we then did a deeper dive into what kind of time was spent by our sales force—that is, primarily our outside salesforce. We noticed that the sales enablement infrastructure was not set up so that our sales folks could go out and win big deals—win big deals that could make a step change difference in our business.  Instead, they were spending a lot of their time on working with the existing customer base. So we are actively now reinventing our go-to-market by investing in tech enablement for our sales folks so that they are freed up to truly do what they do best, which is to sell and to go obtain new logos with more strategic and kind of longer-term sales cycles. The second thing that came out of this was a desire to invest in digital marketing. There's never been any testing of what kind of ROI we can get from investing marketing dollars in these new areas. Given the long list of customers that we have and the disparate array of long-sale customers that do relatively small deals, we suspect that we can invest in digital marketing that will that will return a very high ROI on the investment as opposed to what we get with the kind of legacy sales model.</p>

526: The Inside Out World of a Carve-Out CFO | Graham Ballbach, CFO, Riverside Insights