The Sales Transformation Podcast

#184 – Sales Frequency: Winning Over the CFO with Data-Backed Selling w/ Maxim Tarasevich
===

George: Hi everyone. George here, the editor of the Sales Transformation Podcast. This week we've got a recording of an episode of our LinkedIn live show, sales Frequency from a few weeks ago.

Regular hosts Jesus and Will were joined by Maxim Tarasevich, EVP of Sales at Aviso. If you'd like to find out more about Consalia's partnership with Aviso, there's a link in the show notes to get in touch.

With that said, please enjoy the episode.

​

​

George: Good afternoon, London. Here we are in another sales frequency, live, uh, in a cloudy day, 15 Celsius in London. Hopefully you're preparing for a great Halloween day. Uh, so we have, uh, of course Will is with me today as always. Hi Will. How are you doing?

Will: Hey, Heus. I'm very well thanks.

Jesus: Preparing for Halloween.

Will: Very excited about Halloween and, uh, almost over the weekend. Has. So, yeah.

Jesus: Almost all good. Yeah. Yeah. For, for those in the audience, we are doing this in this time because we have the privilege of, uh, a great guest today. We have Max with us. He's in the West Coast in the US and he's working for Abso, which is an, an ai, uh, revenue platform in, in, in, in the US with a big success.

We've recently partnered with him. And with the company and, uh, welcome Max and thank you very much for joining us from the West Coast. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for having me. Are you ready in the Halloween as well, or not on the Halloween? Absolutely, yes, very much so. I have small kids, so I have to be ready.

I must say I love the, the, the, um, advertisement that you had on Halo, your new pro on Halo win. Right. It's, it's been fantastic to see that through linker, so thank you very much for that. So yeah, thank you very much for joining us. So today we are gonna be talking about. Well, the title is like, show me the numbers.

We over the chief financial officer with data-backed selling as you know, um, many of the deals, we start to talk with the, with the buyers. We start to talk with several kind of departments. The business owner of the solution we are selling to, but many times we don't start, we engage with the finance teams maybe later in the process, right?

So how we translate the the USP into a commercial value. Using financial language that we can engage this chief financial officers earlier and, and maybe all the financial stakeholders right in, in B2B sales. That's, that's the reason why we thought when we are selling approach or a service, one of the most difficult things today is when you're selling something related to.

Right. So everyone is talking about AI is fantastic, but what is the return on investment? My finance officer is not gonna be approving this, blah, blah, blah. We don't believe that's the reason. We thought, well, you know, we've recently partnered with Aviso, uh, why not to hear from Max, which is, uh, leading the sales team within Aviso.

And you are living with many multiple kind of, uh, uh, customers in different situations, right? But what, max, why, why don't you maybe introduce yourself? Maybe you take 15 or 20 seconds and introduce yourself before you, we, we start.

Max: Absolutely. So like you said, so I run sales for Aviso. Avis is an end-to-end revenue platform.

What we do is we, uh, con connect your systems software accurate, and then we generate insights into your pipeline, into your deals by looking at the objective data. Uh, we help you with decision execution and we help you consolidate your tech stack. So as part of this exercise, we do see how our clients interact with finance teams for sure.

Jesus: Very good. Very good. So I think I, we have a couple a, a, a statistic here, like according to G two in 2024, by behavior report, the C FFO holds finalization making power in 79% of silver selection processes. Is this something you'll be aligned to Max, or do you think it's more or less it's a hundred percent.

Yeah, we see

Max: something similar in our data. One thing I would like to, um, uh, I would like to emphasize is it's not necessarily the CFO him or herself. Uh, we see companies that, uh, sell to, let's say, finance teams as part of their sales cycle. So it could be a VP Finance or somebody else on the finance team.

And then oftentimes what they would do, they would have an internal conversation with the CFO if needed. But it's not necessarily that The expectation is that you as a salesperson have direct contact with the CFO. It's not always necessary. We do see that, um, more and more of course, but when we talk about CFOs, I think the assumption here is we're also talking about finance teams in general.

Jesus: Yeah. Well, I'm pretty sure you'll help the business unit team to prepare whatever is required to make the request to the CFO and win the, and win the budget they, they need for Right.

Max: Absolutely. And this is, uh, a very important thing to clarify at the beginning of this process. 'cause every company is different, like every CFO or every finance team, uh, even though they care about capital deployment, generally speaking, and they wanna the best program, the best product for their company, they may have different metrics, different priorities, the way they look at their business.

So when you. And by the way, this conversation starts not only with the finance team. Yeah, it might be a little too late when you get in front of the finance team to initiate this conversation. This conversation starts with your other stakeholders. That you're normally sell to? Like what's important for your company?

Is it unity economics or is it the TCO or is it something else? So how should we as a vendor be thinking about it? And we see that companies and sellers that are better at discovering those kind of insights and capturing them, they're more successful later on with their deals. 'cause they are prepared, they understand what the finance team that they're talking to cares about.

'cause again, there is no one size fits all. It's like, okay, here's my TCO model. It's, it's supposed to work because it for you, because it worked for somebody else. We see less and less of that.

Jesus: I think

Will: even from, from our side as well, max. We see, um, a lot of sales teams wanting to address how they can, um, how they can present a proposal or a proposition.

To A CFO and a big part of that is just developing a, their kind of commercial acumen. And, um, understands, you know, what are the different levers that a, um, uh, CFO or Chief Revenue Officer, um, really cares about when, um, deciding on making a a decision. Um, so I think, I think it is very, yeah, it very much is something that, um, I think a lot of sales teams are really.

Striving to improve. It's not just in the tech sector is kind of, you know, depending what, what any company is selling, they need to, they need to have a, a good insight as to, you know, how businesses operate, what the Chief revenue officer cares about, what's gonna impact their decision making ability

Max: as well.

Great. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what we see as well. Will you do want to be fluent in finance metrics? Mm-hmm. And again, it's tied to a particular company because they might care about metrics that, um, are not standard for your typical business case. So you need to understand that. But if you also take a step back, what you will want, um, to ask yourself is like, do I understand?

Who am I'm dealing with, and also at the personality level because, um, we always encourage our customers to deaggregate the profiles of, of the personas that they, that they work with. It applies to CFOs and finance folks too. It's like, for example, CFO is a complex job.

Will: Hmm.

Max: So. What does this person in particular care about more from the personality perspective?

Are they more like efficiency focused, just like, you know, I wanna deliver on what matters? Or are they also, um, interested in latest and greatest innovation? Would they be like. Speaking of ai, for example, that's what we do. It's like, would this CFO be excited about the potential of ai or should we strictly focus on just the numbers?

Meaning like, this is the results, this is the prediction, this is the ROI, you can expect, et cetera. And surprisingly, when we run personality profiles on CFOs, in this case, not every CFO is just interested in numbers. Oftentimes, they're like, yeah, I want to understand how you're gonna get me to those numbers.

I want to understand how your technology is different. I know my team kind of selected you, but still I want to understand it for myself. Mm-hmm. And sometimes 80% of the conversation is actually with those profiles, is on this ai. Part, which has nothing to do with the business case per se, and then 20% is like, okay, confirming take everything we just talked about and we,

Jesus: sorry, we had some noise there.

Will: Yeah. So yes, there's, uh, it's, it is getting dark over here because we, we have, um, a garden just out front of us and the gardeners, um, currently. Streaming hedges. So I'm gonna mute myself 'cause I don't wanna No

Jesus: worries. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. In the UK we have this, you know, so anyway, um, I think it's very interesting what you mentioned, right, max?

So, uh, um, so of course the, the, the, the finance team is always interested on the numbers and the business case and to believe on the hypotheses and all the scenarios that you can present. But I understand that as AI is such a big new topic. Potentially they need to understand the business behind that, the business model to really understand if the fears and the business case may work, right?

But, uh, we see that sometimes the deals fail at the finances stage. Sometimes we think it's because of, you know, maybe. The, the, the return on investment has not been clearly presented or cons or built. Maybe there is, uh, some misalignment between the budget cycle and, and or some cashflow issues. Could be that the conversation with the finance team may enter late because there is also some budgeting conversations is like, you are doing the budget for 2026.

Now if you start to talk about. That in January, February potentially is gonna be late for including that in 2026. Right. If it's a, such a big expenditure, or, or sometimes it's like a, you know, a conflict and, and within, within the different, um, business owners, business units in the company. Maybe you are, uh, the head of sales and you're asking for this improvement, um, Avis or whatever is the problem, right?

But, but then maybe another unit is asking for. Budget as well. And there is no budget for everyone, so you have to prioritize. So well in, in your view, in your, in your, in your experience, what are the, uh, the most, um, the most tricky ones that we should be taking care of in order to try to avoid and, and be successful, uh, through the finance, um, process?

Max: So what we see with our clients. Uh, one of, one of the most popular reasons for, um, deals falling through at the last minute with the finance team is when the sales team is not working on the right set of metrics or the way they're thinking about presenting their business case is not aligned with how the finance team is thinking about it.

It could be as simple as like, your metric that you are prioritizing is wrong. You might be leading with cost savings. Okay? Everybody expects finance team to care about cost savings, for example. Or you might be leading with the TCO. Like, look, it's gonna be this much. That's what you ask me for. Or, I thought you would be interested in this three year TCO.

Here's my number. Okay? But sometimes what happens, the finance team. Would prioritize other metrics. Like we had a situation recently with one of our clients where we looked at, um, why one of the deals, uh, fell through and the client prioritized unity economics versus the the TCO. The numbers make sense. I was like, yeah, but that's unfortunately not how they think about it.

The finance team. And sometimes you get this window of opportunity when it's like, okay, like either I give you a green light or it's gonna be another month before we talk about this business case again. So if that's, if that's the case, then you might lose this window. Of opportunity to get the finance team on board.

So this is not to say you lost the deal completely, but you might have delayed it. So that's popular as a reason. Like you are, the way you are thinking about your business case, the way you're packaging, the way you're framing it, is simply not aligned, number one. Number two, sometimes we see that, um, what sales teams forget in the process is that the business case for finance, whatever the metrics are, it does not exist in isolation.

Because the finance team will go to their business team and say, okay, do you have a supporting set of metrics that on your end will ensure that the business case numbers make sense? In other words, make me comfortable as the finance person that the numbers in the business case makes sense. And if you did not, ha, if you haven't done this prep work with your business team, where maybe you talked about productivity about their employees, or maybe you talked about velocity of their deals that you will be impacting and how you'll be impacting this, then this link between the finance and the business team might be broken.

And it's not like the business team does not want to help you. They will probably want to help you, but if the finance team does not get the reassurance that the. The work, the analysis has been done and therefore the business team is actually in a position to say, we want this, and we believe in the business case, and the finance team may ask for additional information.

Again, it'll delay, delay everything. So that's the second popular, popular reason. Um, we also do see that simple things like finance team is not involved at all. Meaning like everybody knows you should be involving them at some point, but sometimes they get involved when it's a little too late, or the way they're engaged is not the right way.

So that happens too. Um, I think this would be the most popular ones. And, and then of course, whenever you present a business case is how do you convince the finance team that the numbers are real? Because they get a lot of business cases where there's a hockey stick baked into it somewhere is like, you know, nothing.

Nothing. And then magic. Boom, things happen. So they need to be convinced, and therefore you need to find out the right way to bring your best case studies and all of that. So again, every company is different, and sometimes the companies would ask you, okay, you present your business case and then work with my team to convert your business case into our format of the business case.

And this conversion can be extremely important as well. Because they will be doing it the way they understood your business case and, but also the way it works internally. So you wanna make sure this final business case is as strong as possible.

Jesus: I think I, I'll do a small Thank you very much ma I'll do a, a small pause, uh, for the audience.

If you want to do any question, please. We have our, uh, production team, uh, taking all your questions. They will pass into Will and myself and we will. Of course, uh, as max in, in realtime. So, uh, um, thank you very much, max. I mean, I think on the topics you've mentioned, I think there is one about the finance team not being involved at the right time or late in the process, which is, of course, it's, if it's not involved, then there is nothing to speak about, right?

So we need to involve them. So that's maybe the, the first topic. But then after that is to really understand. What are the metrics that move the nivo and the interest in the finance team? Right? So how, how do you think, what, what's your. In your view, what is the best practice in order to get these conversations at the right moment with the right people in finance and how to discover the the right ratios that they will understand?

Because I understand that most of the times, depending how you present the ratios and the business case, if this is aligned with their ratios and what they're following. What they're trying to get, then the conversation is a fluid conversation. So you, you speak the same language. Right? Right. So I think important to first establish the, the, the conversation.

So at the right time. So how, how do you do that? And then how do you, the discovery process of, of there?

Max: So I think this is a very nuanced question. Jesus. So what we see is it's not necessarily that salespeople are oblivious to the fact that they should be talking to finance. It's more like they tend to over rely.

On their champion to do it for them.

Jesus: Yeah.

Max: I was like, okay, here's my standard business case. Here's my standard set of case studies. Here's a bunch of metrics that we helped other companies with.

Jesus: Yeah.

Max: So does this sound good? The champion tells you? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So that's exactly what our finance team will be looking for because that will, I will use it to build my business case and present it on your behalf, and oftentimes we see.

And when we look at, um, insights from conversation intelligence, from relationship intelligence, or their emails, et cetera, we see that a lot of sales teams stop at that. It's like, okay, fine. It's a feel good moment. My champion just told me they will help me. They will go and have this conversation with finance on my behalf.

Why don't we talk about something else? Check the box. All the companies have this part of their sales processes, like you know, is finance, or do you, have you presented the metrics? Have you quantified the impact or the value, et cetera. So the answer is like, yeah, done. So it's not like people don't do it at all.

What I meant was people do it, but it's not enough. So people don't push the champion in this. Examples, like, okay, exactly. What would the finance team care about? Because you have multiple options. You can lead with the cost side of the things, you can lead with the top line growth. You can lead with just productivity metrics, or there could be some other metrics like unit economics or round rates that, that the finance team will care about.

If you don't understand this, and of course, timeline is important, right? So of course the budget windows and impact in the next 12 months versus next five years and all that. All this is important, but that's what you want to understand with your champion in this example. And then if you do get in front of the finance team, then hopefully you'll be speaking their language and it's.

Hopefully we'll be focused on the metrics, on the, the approach that resonates with them. But for this, you need to get coaching from all the people in the organization that you talk to, and we see the best teams. What they do is like, there is, it's not like there is one meeting necessarily, I mean that will be ideal, but um, does not happen all the time.

It's like, okay, let's have the meeting to talk about finance and metrics, because not everybody will be in the position, first of all to have this meeting on the. Yeah, on this buyer side, because they simply don't know. I was like, oh yeah, last time I built a business case like this was three years ago.

Okay, so when you talk to multiple stakeholders, they will be mentioning things. So based on that, you can stitch together an understanding of how this company thinks about, uh, business cases, about financial results that they expect from a vendor like you. So that's why. Pulling this insights from multiple interactions with customers is extremely important, and then you have an educated perspective as to what might work, and this is what you want to start socializing with customers.

When salespeople, when sales teams operate like that, when we see that engagement pattern, typically it correlates with higher wind rates.

Will: Um, max, just bringing this back to your experience at Aviso, because I know, you know, in a, I know massively oversimplifying, but ASO's platform really helps salespeople improve their effectiveness and efficiency. Um, by drawing upon data insights, leveraging AI to make sure you are, you're behaving in the right way and you've got, you know, it does, it does a huge amount.

And I won't, I won't paraphrase this. Mm-hmm. Um, uh, myself, I would like you to do that, to be honest. To be honest, max. Um, but so when you are, when you are selling kind of visa technology, um, are you selling directly to. The Chief revenue Officer. Is that your, that's your I ideal kind of customer profile.

But when you position a visa and say, look, this is going to improve, um, the effect effectiveness, the efficiency of your sales team, um, which should draw a certain, you know, increase in sales, um, when you, when you start getting the sort of data input from that chief revenue officer that you are. That you are selling to, that, that naturally should evolve into a conversation.

I would've thought, but correct me if I'm wrong, where, where your champion, the CRO in this case would start positioning. In terms of what do finance teams care about? Absolutely. Because you are, you are, you are building this business case together, um, to, to kind of present an ROI in terms of what's a visa can deliver.

Um, is

Jesus: that, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So

Max: the way it usually starts is when we work with CROs, we will talk about their priorities. So like, what do you care about most? Um, is it overall accuracy? Is it knowing which deals will close or not close? Is it being able to help, uh, your teams, uh, improve their win rates by giving them nice best actions and insights?

Is it just transparency to your pipeline? Is it being able to measure objectively your pipelines? Or is it being able to understand the true yield that you, you can expect from your pipeline for the next quarter? Or is this a productivity metric at the rep level, for example? Or is this something else? So usually CROs have a very good understanding as to what their priorities are.

And then the next natural question would be, okay, so for us to get the green light from the CFO so that they unlock the budget for this. How do we convert this metrics that the CRO cares about into the metrics that explain the financial impact of our program? Like in other words, we are asking ourselves together with the CRO, can we put the price tag, the value tag?

On, let's say accuracy or an improved win rate or, um, an improved productivity metric. And usually the answer is yes. So that's what we then discuss with the finance team. Yeah.

Jesus: We have a question in the chat, max, uh, from, from Garrett Williams talking about, uh, CapEx and opex. So he's asking more or less how, how do you.

How do you approach this with decision maker? So I understand that sometimes the business case is, I mean, it also, the, the answer probably is also, uh, depend on the, on the company, right? But some companies, um, um, classify certain costs like Cap, certain costs like Operat, and maybe it is the same cost, right?

So I know you have a, an approach. Yeah. So first of all,

Max: this goes back to what we discussed a few minutes ago. You want to understand the priorities that. This particular finance team has, this could be a certain metric or what, whether they care about CapEx or OPEX more because you might be building your business case, optimizing for an OPEX metric, and it'll look fantastic.

Unfortunately, the answer is what they care about is CapEx or the other way around. Okay? So then your business case is great. Nobody can disagree with it, but it's not gonna be effective. That's typically, um, a very good way to start this conversation with a decision maker when you are at the point where, okay, it looks like some companies call it a technical win, but to me it's actually a technical and organizational win where you say, okay, it seems like we are aligned, that we as a vendor, as a solution might be the right solution.

It seems like we have the support from the. Or business, let's say. So how do we pat, how do we make sure we put the best food forward in front of finance? 'cause it's, at some point it becomes in the business's interest to help you. It's not like you are the, the lonely warrior who is trying to convince finance and, uh, your business stakeholders are just on the sideline.

No, they will be with you. And that's how I, I see, um, great sales teams do that. They say, okay, sir. What's the best way for me to frame this so that this program gets the go ahead, that you as a decision maker also need? Because we just talked about the value, the positive impact that this program is going to deliver for you.

When we, when, when we look at calls and that have positive sentiment for this kind of conversation, usually that's how this conversation. Um, unfold. That's how they start. You start with like, we, we want to help you. We, we jointly agree that we are the right solution to help you. So now how do we explain that to, to your finance?

Like what matters? Timeline, CapEx ops, certain metric.

Jesus: How are we, how can we do that together? I think we've seen in Consalia no will that many times. It's like, uh, you know, your, your champion maybe is the, I don't know, the head of sales or the business, sorry, the, the somebody that is buying your probe, but, but maybe it's not so connected or so prepared to talk to finance or to talk to other departments.

Right. So we've seen this in many companies where. We are, we are trying to help sales teams to navigate through different stakeholders because every stakeholder has different language. Mm-hmm. And sometimes they're not ready to speak the language. Right. So, uh, your champion is a champion, but, uh, this maybe, maybe we think the champion about is like a superman that can do everything and

Max: it's not, well, this is

Jesus: where a little objectivity

Max: helps as well.

So when you look at an engagement pattern for a certain deal, it's like. Again, it could be a feel good, uh, deal. It's like, yeah, I have, um, max who will take a call always. Max is willing to chat, but Max is not necessarily like objectively if you look at the engagement pattern, like people whom you are talking to or people whom you should, versus people whom you normally should be talking to for a similar deal.

And you see a lot of gaps. Like yeah, if it feels good that Max is open to giving you his time, but it's not very effective

Will: and,

Max: and when we see this kind of disconnect, unfortunately win rates tend to suffer.

Jesus: Yeah.

Max: Even though the sales person feels good and the sentiment of this calls with Max can be fantastic, but your sentiment for the calls.

With other stakeholders is either negative or non-existent because there was no call. And of course it's not ideal.

Will: Yeah. And I think, I mean, just trying to relate it, but uh, to what we do as a, we quite often yeah, sell to sales directors or sales leaders, um, hr, l and d. Kind of positions. Um, quite often we spend a huge amount of time, you know, crafting the, uh, proposal or responding to an RFP that is going to land.

And then, and then procurement comes in right at the end. And it's always, I think it's a challenge that a lot of salespeople face. Is how do you have access to the finance teams? Mm-hmm. Um, quite often they, they, yeah, they come in right at the end of the sales cycle. Mm-hmm. Um, and it's a challenge because, you know, we haven't, um, spent enough time.

Trying to understand what are those levers that the financial procurement people, um, really care about to craft a proposal in language that is gonna resonate with them. And I, and I'm not, I'm not just saying this is a challenge for Consalia. I think, you know, we, we see that as well in terms of the people that, um, are on our programs, you know, a lot of, a lot of times, um.

The students, we have sort of lack that commercial awareness that I mentioned at the start, and they're, they're looking to develop commercial lackman because they, they know it's a challenge that salespeople face.

Max: Typically what we see is, um, if you are trying, um, if, if we look, if we look at the engagement pattern, um.

It's not like on day one, suddenly you wake up and you have connections to all the senior stakeholders in the company. Of course, just like, like that. Now what we see is it's an evol, it's a process, and the way it evolves is you touch upon different topics with different stakeholders that you're currently talking to, and then gradually over time it opens doors to others.

The very basic stuff. The trick is, mm-hmm. Are you good at managing this process? Are you managing the process or is your buyer. Managing this process for you, and then you are in his or her hands. It's like if they're good, if they know what they're doing, if they like you and your solution, then you're making progress.

Otherwise you are just, you know, you're there probably. So that there is a column on their slide. We have, we evaluated this solution, uh, we passed because to the key question in, in the response to your question, will, is what is it in in it for me as a finance person? Like why would I talk to Max? I know Max wants to talk to me because again, it's part of this pro his process.

Somewhere it's written like, okay, go talk to the finance person. But if I, as a salesperson cannot explain to my decision maker, to my buyer, like, Hey, here's why we want to talk to finance. We want to discuss CapEx versus opex, or, I have two options. I can give you lower price, more savings, um, but longer term or something else.

How should we be thinking about it? If your buyer has a, an answer, good, you got the answer. So there is no reason for you to talk to finance, but if you are at the point where the buyer says, look, it's a legit question. I, it sounds like it's an important question and it will have impact on whether the business case is successful or not.

So let me help you get in front of the finance or let me talk to finance team and get back to you or let me arrange a meeting. With finance team. That's, and, and this is how you get also coaching for the meeting. One of the best meetings I had was with the CFO of a Fortune 100 company. We got specific coaching as to what this person was looking for.

Guess what? It had nothing to do with the financial metrics because the assumption is like, yeah, okay fine. I have my team. They're working with you. The metrics will be fine. He was testing for something else. And this something else was not in a spreadsheet. Yeah. It was like, okay, how can you do what you are claiming you can't do?

Explain to me what your solution does. Explain to me how it's different from what we already have today. And then let me pressure test this logic. Let me ask questions. So that's what this finance person was focused for, focused on. It had nothing to do with what you would normally expect. Well, I can save you this much money, or I can add this much gross, nothing.

The assumption was this is stable stakes. It has been covered. That's why you are here in the room with me. So if you show up for a meeting like this and you're like, okay, let's, let me take you through the, you know, NPV numbers, and then they're like, yeah, that's not exactly what we want. Okay. And I'm simplifying, of course, but yeah, it's not like you just show up and say, okay, what do you wanna talk about?

Like, you get coaching from your champion, from your decision maker before that so that you're well prepared for this meeting. Not every CFO is gonna think the same way. I had recently A CFO who spent 45 minutes out of a 60 minute meeting, um, demoing testing, trying the product. It is like, again, the logic is like, guys, the numbers.

Yeah. I can read the spreadsheet and my team says the numbers make sense. Okay, got it. Like I can validate and all of that. I don't need 60 minutes for that, but I want to understand the product. I want to understand why your AI solution is different. Like show it to me. A lot of them surprisingly have this appetite and when you run, if you run a, let's say, personality analysis of this person before the meeting.

Hopefully, even if you got no input from the decision maker, from the, from your champion, hopefully you will be prepared for this kind of conversation with them. So it's just does not have to be limited to numbers only.

Jesus: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very true. Um, I mean, something you mentioned before as well is at the end.

Um, and I think it's connected to what we, how we start the conversations with the customer, right? Because sometimes it's like you have a pro that covers end-to-end things or A to C, but maybe, maybe it's about to land the use case to land. What is this specific benefit? Right? And, and then is when potentially we see that the conversation is more valuable for both parties.

Right. Um, I understand that also, when, when, when. This is co-created and this is what we normally work in, in some of our programs and consulting intervention. So when, when you co-create with a customer, when you use this tactical audacity mindset, right, to and, and proactively activity mindset to create, um, and co-create a solution, which is very.

When you land the use case, essentially the, everything makes more sense. So for finance it will make more sense. All the ratios that come along, this kind of a, uh, use case that is landed, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know if you feel that, because ASU is like a strong, I mean, it's end to end platform. You have like a, you have the capacity to, um.

You have the capacity to, you know, cover a lot of use cases. So I am not sure if, uh, this is something that resonates with you guys as well to narrow to the, uh, to the use case. And then by doing that, the conversation, not just with the champion, but with the finance, procurement, hr, whoever is involved makes more sense.

Max: Uh, ultimately any program boils down to a specific set of use cases. You're not just saying, Hey, you're buying this end-to-end platform. You can do everything and anything with it. Uh, let's just assume we go ahead with this. Here's your numbers. Every company is different. They have different priorities, they have different level of maturity with their processes, data, et cetera.

So their journey. On the platform looks different and that's what you are quantifying this journey, it'll be different. Therefore the numbers will be different or the logic behind the numbers will be different. And that's what the finance team wants to understand. They don't want just, okay, if it worked for company A, you're telling me this exact same thing is gonna apply to me?

No, no, no. My business is unique. My business is different. And if you don't understand it, then we have a problem here. You cannot just, that's, that's the difficulty, right? You cannot just say, okay, I mean, I have five use case, five case studies of this same use case. So here's, here's your numbers. Please trust me.

I don't even need your business. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't work. So you wanna be very focused.

Will: I think, pat, I mean, correct. Correct me if I'm wrong. If you've seen, seen it from another. From the other side, but you just, you'd lose credibility straight away if you're not, if you don't have a deep level of insights, and by, by the way, you lose

Max: credibility even before you talk to finance usually.

But the moment you say, look, X percent for this, Y percent for that Z percent here, like, I don't even know your company. But look, this is what I can throw on the table right now. Mm. This is, this is what I can promise. The chances of the sentiment to go down at this moment is very, very high.

Jesus: So

Will: how, how much time then, max, do you, would you spend, um, developing these sorts of use cases within, you know, when you are in this sales process and typically, typically what

Jesus: we see well is.

It's not like

Max: as clear cut as we would prefer it to be. Like, okay, you have a little slide that this explains your sales process. And step seven in this,

it's like we get together and we build a business case. Patients we reach seven, uh, step number seven, now sharpen your pencils. Let's, let's work on a business case. Your buyers are fragmented. They have. No time and they assume you have been paying attention. So what you wanna do is like when you feel you're ready and, and it's an intuitive process, so I would not wait until step number seven.

It's, it's good that you have it as part of your sales process like this, but you hopefully are talking to multiple people on the buyer side and they are giving you bits and pieces of information that you can use. To start building this use case. Then you could go in inside a platform like a Visa and you say, okay, summarize everything that we learned so far.

That helps me create a business case. And this is when you start validating this business case, almost like this talk track with your buyers by bringing up and saying, Hey, will talked about. Productivity being important. And it sounds like you guys have this 10% target for next year. So here's how we can help.

And Jesus actually told us that we need to deliver, um, at least 12% savings for your tax stack. 'cause otherwise you will not be able to move forward. So then you start weaving those. Insights those metrics into your conversation. You start getting feedback. It's like, okay, you're going in the right direction, or, no, no, no.

What what Will talked about is actually not that important. I mean, it's important for his part of the organization, but not for the entire organization. That's how you can start constructing the business case. And then when you get to your step seven, you already have 80% validated business case. This is where you show up to your point, well, not like, oh, like you have no idea what you, what we actually do.

No, you show up, prepare it, and say, look. I have some facts, I have some hypotheses, so I'm ready to present both.

Will: Mm-hmm.

Max: And you start, and then your buyer suddenly feels like, yeah, we've been in it for a long time. I feel like you have been following along, so this is great. And now let's start fine tuning it.

And this is where it conversation becomes less about, okay, so how do we do it? Like, um, what does your typical business case look like? Uh, that sounds like a lot of work for me. As a buyer, you show up and say, okay, so I heard this. Seven things are important for you, so this is how I put them together. Does this make sense?

What do you have a better way of structuring it? That's something that the buyer can react to. And then this is naturally, you'll bring up this point. Okay. Do we, you and I have enough here so that the finance team will be happy, or do you think it makes sense to have a conversation with the finance team?

Yeah, and this is where the buyer will start guiding you, but you're giving him or her enough to build this trust that this meeting is not gonna be a waste of their time, and you will be a valuable partner because again, you have been paying attention and it, it's fairly easy these days with technology to collect all this information automatically.

So it's not like you should be doing it manually. Yeah. Should be doable. In other words,

Jesus: I think you mentioned trust and I think it's, I mean our, while you were talking about Max, uh, I was thinking on this model that sometimes telco have, right, so the telco have like the presales team, because sometimes the technology solution is so complicated, so you have the.

Sales professional, which is leading the sales and engagement with the customer. But when the conversation done too much technical, then the pre-sales engineering team comes into the conversation. Do you think that for the finance should be something similar or, I mean, I understand that the sales professional should have a list.

Some fine as literacy, but if this comes too much. Into the finance, uh, conversation. Do you think that is like a, a specialist in, in in finance conversations comes along the sales professional or, or do you think the sales professional himself should, should have this conversation end to end?

Max: If you have somebody on your team, like a value engineering team or somebody else who can handle those conversations, this definitely can help, but the best salespeople.

Um, they are fluent enough in those metrics, meaning somebody else can help you build the business case, but then you need to understand the results of this business case. It's like, okay, what is the main metric? What, what are the main metrics? If it's multiple metrics, it's like, what is, what's important for the client and how are we going to impact that?

'cause again, it's not about one. Conversation that will be a silver bullet where you talk to the CFO and finally the CFO says yay or nay. No, it's not like that. It's oftentimes you, once you have this business case, you will be bringing it up with multiple stakeholders in different conversations. And they're not necessarily finance people, they're not necessarily experts in those mentors themselves, but you want to be able to paint the picture for them and say, okay, the business case suggested that.

It can be all CapEx or opex or whatever the split is, and it can improve your productivity and improve you the accuracy of the deal level of your predictions by X. And we quantify this and it'll be, uh, 20% improvement over what you guys expected or whatever. Okay. So once you have this story, once you understood this story, you can.

Bring it up. You socialize it with multiple stakeholders, not just the finance team. But to get to that point, of course, you, you may need help. And also remember, yes, your solution is probably complex. Um, everyone's solution based on what I'm hearing, tends to be complex, right? So, um, you, again, you are not alone.

Uh, meaning you can use AI to help you. And say, okay, here's my situation. Here's what I'm trying to do. You know what I'm selling because you are my AI agent, so help me craft the right way. Help me craft the right message here. Help me prepare for this conversation. You can actually role play this conversation with, with ai, you can ask, okay, let's role play a conversation with Afin, with A CFO, or with a VP of finance, and let's role play it in such a way that they're skeptical, for example.

So you give instructions like this. And then the system role plays it with you so that you get this coaching life and it's in a safe environment so you can get better and you can improve your product knowledge by asking the system to help you, uh, with an answer in particular scenario. So you can do all of that by yourself.

Before you actually go and talk to the CFO.

Jesus: And that's, that's the use case, right? Because if you have, sorry. If you have like a, you know, Avis platform with all the technology connected to everything, you know where the deal is, what the conversations you've had, so what, what is the current status so you can do rule, role, place to prepare yourself for the next meeting.

Right? So that's fantastic. Sorry, will. Yeah,

Will: I was gonna say, so we spent quite a lot of time talking about the importance of building up the use case and, um, presenting a Yeah. A business case. Um, how do you in, you know, say you get is bought, you know, customers, um, bought your, your solution and your technology, and you've, how, how do you ensure that the ROI is met?

How do you ensure that the kind of the numbers that you've presented are going to be achieved by, um, by your client?

Max: Well, for us, it starts even before, uh, you have the business case. So we would oftentimes have our customer success team on our calls with prospects so that they can start learning and they can start providing guidance too.

The potential customer as to how to structure this program best. So this is when we start thinking about how will we realize the ROI. Then of course, the nature of the ROI is extremely important. It's like when you build this business case. So when you put this number on the table, the ROI number, how. Was this number calculated?

What's the logic? I was like, okay, I'll double your profit. I'll double your revenue. Okay, great. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. How are you gonna do that? And then this how will help you understand how you'll be tracking this. So some, some things will be easy to track. It's like, for example, accuracy. Like I expect you to be as a system to be not.

Less accurate than, let's say 98% plus, or I expect you to be able to tell me which deals will close or not close, and you have to be three times more accurate than human judgements. That's easy to measure. Some things would be trickier to measure because of attribution is like, okay, your sellers became more efficient.

Is it because they spend time with Lia or is this because they're using aviso as a platform? So we don't know, right? For sure. But you can do some attribution to the extent possible and you can say, look, this is what we think we contributed to this, um, to this improvement. So you can track all of that and.

We do that on a regular basis. We do continuously, and we discuss it with the customer on a regular basis. So we're not waiting until, okay, 12 months in, let's look at the numbers now. We have these conversations, um, on a regular basis, um, early, early in the process when we start. And it's also important to make sure that the finance team that approved the business case is kept in the loop.

Because otherwise it's like they signed, you are doing QBR and whatnot, but the finance team is, has no idea. Especially if you did have this meeting with the CFO where they're like, yeah, I'm interested in this program. I expect a lot from this program. So you wanna be closing the loop well with them as well.

Yeah. So it's end to end. It's like you start early and you know what to measure and you do measure. Then you discuss the results with the buyer, but you also close the loop with the finance team.

Jesus: Yeah. Again, it's a business case, very customized for the, for the u, for the user, for the customer, right. And uh, and also if the success team is early in the prospects conversation, it's quite interesting, right?

Because somehow they are gonna be the ones responsible to make it happen after the contract is signed, right? And the solution is implemented. So at the end, they, they have to agree to something that is doable. Right. So that's, that's the kind of a, you have the right balance between this, the seller that promised the moon and the, the guys that have to deliver that comes later.

Right? Right. Well,

Max: yeah. So that's a constructive tension that you can have when the salesperson. Wants to present the best possible outcome, hypothetical potential outcome, but the company knows that they will have to deliver. But on the other hand, as a salesperson, you also wanna make sure that your numbers are backed by, uh, a very solid, um.

Logic, the assumptions and the level of understanding of the business that people will say, yep, we believe this number, because the finance team will pressure test the numbers. Remember, they will go also through the business and say, wow, okay, so you are expecting this much. Are you sure you understand how this solution is going to deliver that?

And if what they hear is like, yeah, we don't really know. It's not gonna be very

Will: promising. Have you ever, um, been in a situation max where a customer has, I guess, forecasted more optimistically than what the subsequent kind of aviso technology then suggests? Um, yes. Based on all of the, all of the data that it's collected.

Max: Yeah, it happens because, um, we are typically top down 98% plus accurate, which means we can be, um, higher or lower than human judgment.

Will: Mm-hmm.

Max: Because we are decoupled from human judgment. So you as a user, you can have your own forecast. That's okay. So we want this, the company that you work for wants this.

Our AI prediction exists independently, if you wish. It's an, it's another number that you can use to triangulate your forecast. Okay. So, and there will, will be situations where, um, what you forecasted is actually higher than what we forecast, and the end result will be closer aligned to what we forecasted.

Yeah.

Will: Yeah, it is the future. No more, you know, sound bagging opportunities and things like that, max.

Max: But, but that's how the conversation shifts, right? So instead of like, okay, um, it's like what you, you have to, you have two options, right? You can say, okay, I know I visa is fairly accurate, so I, I'll try to, uh, just ignore it.

Uh, I'll ignore it and I'll just try to, you know, follow my forecast and I will not change my behavior. That's possible. But option two, you can actually ask Aviso, okay, why are you forecasting this number? Why is your number different than my number? What can I do to course correct? What can I do to mitigate the risks that you're talking about?

So you can use the system to your advantage. It does not have to be the competition, a, a competition. It, it, it, we are talking about this augmentation that you hear about, uh, from a lot of companies. We want to augment your judgment. We allow you to act on those insights. Hopefully you are interested in those insights, and then you can take action and we help you with next best actions and nudges and things like that.

We can actually do certain things on your behalf, so we can automate things using our agents workflows, and we can create a single pane of glass for you so that you just interact with the system without knowing how the sausage is made. You don't, we don't expect you to. You. So a lot of, most of our users, they do not ignore what, what the system tells them.

They just react to it.

Jesus: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, we have just a few minutes left, so maybe my, my last question, uh, uh, max is, I mean, if I put myself in the shoes of the chief financial officers, right. Um. So when you come with a business case, and this business case is quite landed and customized to their needs, and most probably part of the hypothesis will take into account your previous experiences, right?

Either in the same industry or same kind of, uh, use case, et cetera. What, what is the kind of, uh, proof points that, uh, the finance team or the chief financial officers are asking for? Because. To believe the, the, the hypothesis, right? Because then it's a kind of a negotiation. We don't believe that. Let's take 70% of whatever you're saying or, but what are the kind of proof points that they're normally asking for?

Max: So the standard stuff would be, have you done it for other companies similar to ours and what the results were. Um, have we done the reference tracks? Um, have we understood? Exactly how this company is going to work in our environment, like with our data, with our systems of record. And especially if you have, um, some level of um, um, complexity that is not typical.

For example, you have multiple com multiple systems of record. Like will we be able to actually connect to those? It's like there are some differences in how we run our company, so are we sure your solution will be able to handle those? It's like all those questions will, will, will be taken into account and then um.

Maybe have we demonstrated that the solution actually is going to work in our environment by doing like some kind of a technical POC or something like that. So all these questions will be on the table depending on how big the deal is and how important this decision is for the company, I guess. Okay.

Jesus: Will any, any more questions from your side?

Will: I don't think so. Um, I think it. I mean, it's really fascinating. You know, what's a, what's a visa can do? The power of a visa, um, how it, I mean, what we haven't done is obviously demonstrate, but how it can impact everyone from a chief revenue officer all the way to the activity of say, like a frontline sales person, uh, to improve.

You know, the accuracy of the business of selling, which I think is going to appeal to everyone in, uh, in the organization. Um, yeah, so it's, uh, it, it really is a glimpse into the future it feels like

Jesus: well into, into the future, which is today, right? Because Aviso is really making this happening. So, uh, I mean, we are, we are welcoming, uh, part of the Aviso leadership team in the global sales transformation, uh, event we have at the end of November.

Uh, we will, I mean, which the theme is about the connection between the AI and the human right. So I think, uh. Uh, I think humans can no long live without the ai, and the AI cannot long, uh, live without the the humans, right? So it's the, we have to see how this hybrid. Mode has to work and, uh, uh, who better to, to speak with rather than Max and and Aviso team?

So I think today we talk about, you know, uh, we, the, the sales team need to speak the same language of the GS stakeholders. So we are talking about the finance language, even high level or at least this kind of understanding. You don't need to wait until the objection is raised to start looking for return on investment on the right.

Uh, laser focus landed kind of a use case. Uh, you have to leverage on internal data cases, studies as, uh, proof points, uh, in your vertical, et cetera. And. And of course, um, yeah, try to see how you can navigate that with, uh, with the current existing, uh, sales tech you have. Or if you don't have Avis, maybe just, uh, um, scanning the QR code.

Uh, get a, get a meeting with us. We will be very happy with, uh, max and the team to present, uh, to present what Aviso is doing already with, uh, large customers. As, as you know. Uh, so Max, thank you very much. I think that was a fantastic, I mean, it's not that we want to stop, we have, uh, we have more questions, but you know, I think Yeah, we, we don't want to take more time from you.

I know that, uh. Uh, it's, it's getting dark here, Halloween time and hopefully in a few hours Halloween for you as well. So thank you so much. Has been lovely. It was a pleasure.

Will: Yeah. Thank you very much for your time. And for the

Jesus: audience, just, uh, you have the QR meeting, the QR code, if you want to request a meeting with us, uh, with Max and the team or just connect us on link.

Kevin, thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. Bye bye.

​