Читать книгу Startup CXO - Matt Blumberg - Страница 35

Other than perhaps the Head of Sales and CEO, the startup CFO's most important partner on the executive team is the Head of Marketing. Why? A combination of the size of the budget and the sometimes lack of clarity of short‐term impact of the investments. There are a few areas where the CFO can be a partner to the Head of Marketing starting from the early days.

 Pricing and packaging. Pricing products and services for startups is, more often than not, a bunch of guesswork and seeing what sticks. The CFO can work with Marketing to help benchmark pricing and help model out different assumptions and implications on the business in terms of margins and growth. Pricing models for startups typically are either a value‐based approach where the product is priced at some percent of total value the product will deliver to the customer, or a cost‐plus approach, where the pricing is dependent on how much it costs the company to deliver it. With either approach, clear analysis with testing is important. The CFO can also help the business understand what sort of packaging will work and how features should be bundled. Packaging can include all‐in‐one packaging all the way to completely modular packaging where each deal is customized. Regardless of the packaging, helping the team clearly state the value proposition will help the sales and marketing teams accomplish their goals.

 Customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV). Overall, it is helpful for the CFO to help the organization with all of the key unit economics of the business. For Marketing, two of the most important are CAC and LTV. There are a number of ways to calculate both, so initially, just ensuring the calculation makes sense for the business is a great way Finance can help. Establishing targets for both of the metrics as well as the ratio and payback period is also helpful as it will likely require some benchmarking analysis.

 Marketing initiatives return on investment (ROI). Marketing teams are continually looking at the ROI on their efforts, both in aggregate across all their initiatives and on individual campaigns. In a startup, the best way Finance can partner on this topic is to help with revenue attribution, marginal cost assignment, and segmentation. There are of course many ways to do all of the above, but the key goal to keep in mind is what Finance can do to help ensure the data will drive good decisions. This means providing accurate and useful analysis and also providing timely information that can be delivered to the right people. It's also helpful to work with Marketing to make sure that the analysis you provide is using the proper data sources and is aligned with Sales and Product.