Why the CFO Thinks Your Business Case is Bullsh**

I’m not a CFO. I went to business school, but Accounting was a slog and Corporate Finance was a struggle. 

I do, however, know a lot of CFOs. When you lead a Value Advisory practice and become “the ROI lady,” it comes with the territory. 

And it’s true: I have spent the better part of the last decade developing financial justifications for major technology investments and digital transformation initiatives. I have stood (or sat, on Zoom) in front of dozens of senior-level financial leaders at the world’s biggest consumer brands and multinational corporations, stared into their cold steely quantitative eyes, and steadied my voice as I methodically explained ROI and TCO calculations, payback period projections, and NPV estimates. 

If there is one metric in which I have a high degree of confidence it is this: ~100% of the time, the CFO thinks your business case is bullshit. 

It’s not that you got the math wrong. Or that your framework is flawed. It’s not even that your solution isn’t valuable. 

The CFO thinks your business case is bullshit because they’ve been to this rodeo enough times to know that your pretty waterfall charts and well-meaning FTE assumptions are divorced from reality. 

Admit it: your ROI exists in a utopian parallel universe without any of the day-to-day challenges that every corporation faces: resource constraints, resistance to change, fluid operating models, lack of cross-functional alignment… the list goes on. 

This happy-go-lucky cartoon version of ROI has given the business case a bad reputation. I’ll often shy away from the term altogether if I want the CFO to join a meeting (euphemistic stand-ins include “value roadmap”, “investment justification”, or Forrester’s preferred “Total Economic Impact”). 

And it’s a shame, really. Let’s have some empathy for the CFOs in our lives for just a moment. Allow yourself to see beyond those cold steely quantitative eyes. Because deep, deep, deeeeep inside lies a human being who is just trying to operate a financially solvent business and make shareholders happy while being constantly dogged by their CMOs and CIOs to sign multi-million dollar recurring annual contracts or usage-based commits with fledgling venture-backed tech start-ups sporting computer-generated names like “Syncwattix” and “Datamoney.ai” who all claim to be the ONLY GenAI-powered enterprise solution for maximizing revenue and minimize cost. Oh, and the business case is bullshit. 

So while I am not myself a CFO, this is the empathy I conjured every time a CFO openly laughed at the financial model I had spent weeks fine-tuning. It’s the compassion for which I dug deep after having my 30-slide ROI deck verbally ripped to shreds. 

And it’s the motivation that drove me to develop a credible, bottoms-up business case approach. One that lessened my chances of public shame and humiliation. Because self-preservation is a powerful thing. 

I plan to go into detail on each of these in future posts, but here’s my TL:DR recipe for a BS-free SaaS business case:

1. Say the quiet part out loud. ROI has a bad name. Get out in front of it early on. Acknowledge that the CFO might have “business case baggage” and explain how your approach is designed to allay their skepticism. Invite their questions and pushback and be open to their feedback. 

2. Co-create, co-own, and co-present. If you don’t have a partner on the prospect side who is willing to take accountability for the business case alongside you, stop right where you are. Pencils down. This is not a “deliverable” that you go off and run through your magical ROI calculator and then — Ta Da! — present in a grand reveal. It is a golden opportunity to work hand-in-hand with your prospects, dig into the unique aspects of their business, and establish comfort in any underlying assumptions and benchmarks. The most successful ROI presentations I’ve seen were not presented by me - they were presented by the prospect to their own boss. Note: this usually means that you won’t be doing a business case until at least Stage 3 in an enterprise sales cycle. Good. 

3. Draft, iterate and refine. If you’ve checked the box on #2 above, you’re in luck: you now have a partner to cosplay as the CFO and show you exactly where their financial leaders are going to poke holes in your ROI. The process should look something like this: Initial workshop to align on approach and gather inputs, generate an initial draft, reconvene for feedback, iterate on the draft, reconvene for more feedback, iterate on the draft again, get somebody else’s feedback, keep iterating….. you get the point.

4. Bottoms-up, not tops-down. The business case should be built around granular, tactical “jobs to be done” — the kind of buzzword-free use cases that require no further explanation or clarification. Things that can be tangibly assigned and accomplished. Even better if they are specific activities that are currently underway and already have an owner, but they’re not being done to their maximum revenue-driving or cost-saving potential. At Amperity, I developed a framework of 30 specific CDP use cases that went many levels deeper than wishy washy ideas like “1:1 personalization” and “omnichannel orchestration.” This served as the menu of ROI drivers that we would dig into during discovery, and would later become the scaffolding of the business case.

5. Prioritize ROI drivers based on impact and level of effort. That age-old 2x2 impact/effort matrix is not just another snazzy MBA consulting tool. Your platform can probably achieve dozens if not hundreds of benefits. That doesn’t mean you have to pack them all into your ROI. And it certainly doesn’t mean that your prospect has any shot in hell of actually achieving every single one on your list. Keep your business case from floating off into the ROI dreamscape by focusing on 3–6 high impact/ low effort no-brainers and leaving out the rest. 

6. Provide receipts. Every use case underpinning the ROI should come with corresponding evidence. That evidence should manifest in two areas of your business case: in the lift assumptions and benchmarks within your financial model, and in the final exec-facing deck. Each of the 30 use cases in the Amperity ROI framework had a sister case study that included the specific quantified impact, and importantly provided details on exactly how the brand achieved success in the face of common constraints. Lead with these, don’t just relegate them to the appendix. 

7. Develop a crawl, walk, run roadmap. Map your value milestones to the implementation plan, and discount the annualized value of each use case based on when it can be implemented (i.e. if the use case won’t be live until 6 months into the first year, account for that in your ROI). Remember: you should be in at least Stage 3 of the deal cycle by now. Which means that the Pre-Sales team has at least a vague sense of what the implementation scope and timeline are going to look like. CFOs want to know that the business case is achievable. They want assurance that you’ve thought through the worst case scenario of operational pitfalls. Don’t wait for them to bring this up. Make it part of the business case. 

8. Take accountability for the ROI post-sale. If the last time the CFO ever sees the business case is during the sales process, prepare for churn. Have a sales → post-sales handoff plan for the business case, make sure the CFO knows what it is, and then follow through. This means that your post-sales team should be enabled to take the business case (the very same one that the client co-created with you) and run with it. Implementation managers should make the business case part of their regular cadences to resolve any blockers standing in the way of your ROI drivers. And Account Managers should include it in senior-level QBRs to continually remind the client why they bought and where they are on their journey to value realization.

More to come on each of these in the future. Until then, sending thoughts and prayers to my friends in the value engineering / value consulting / value advisory world, and all the poor unfortunate souls out there justifying ROIs to the skeptical masses. May your payback periods be short and the winds of NPV always at your back :)