The CFO’s Guide to B2B Revenue Forecasting and Efficient Growth

Introduction

When the economy falters, buyer behavior changes. But the key questions CFOs always ask are: By how much? And how much will it affect the sales pipeline, the lifeblood of the business?

To maintain a healthy balance sheet, it’s critical for CFOs to get those answers right. And that’s where things get tricky. When CFOs trim budgets with a too-heavy hand, they can cripple the business’ future growth. Conversely, if they don’t trim enough, the business can bleed out.

Worse still, CFOs are often forced to make decisions based on the hunches and guesswork provided by stakeholders in other departments — namely sales and marketing.

The critical key to eliminating these disruptive guessing games is for Chief Financial Officers (and their companies’ revenue teams) to have access to unbiased, real-time data that make a big impact on pipeline, such as:

• Which prospective customers are shopping for your company’s solutions
• What they’re researching and how much research they’ve conducted
• How much they are likely to spend, and
• How close they are to making a buying decision

It doesn’t matter how much a marketing or sales team crows about other metrics such as email open rates, organic website traffic, and other golden oldies. That stuff won’t amount to much if they can’t build a reliable, high-quality pipeline.

When CFOs are armed with the right data, they can:

1. Generate faster, more accurate revenue forecasting
2. Get more ROI from the same sales and marketing spend
3. Trim budget without sacrificing growth

This ebook provides insights into how AI-driven sales and marketing technologies can greatly influence pipeline and ROI, and why CFOs should know about them. Part technology primer and part examination of “current state challenges” vs. “future state benefits,” this document lays out how AI and data-powered solutions:

• Lower costs
• Help revenue teams find buyers in any market
• Boost ROI by improving win rates and average contract value
• Boost productivity and make it easier to scale
• Accurately gauge and predict pipeline value

Let’s dive in.

Generate faster, more accurate revenue forecasting

Building a revenue forecast should be simple — but if your mileage is like most CFOs’, the task is a lot like untangling a mess of Christmas tree lights. To craft accurate revenue forecasts, CFOs need answers to questions such as:

• How many opportunities are in the pipeline?
• How many are likely to close?
• How soon?
• For how much money?

This is table-stakes stuff. But the problem that pervasively undermines a CFO’s efforts is that pipeline projections are often based on guesswork, not data. Let’s examine why.

What marketing says

Your organization’s marketing team knows how many leads roll in per month. But it cannot spot — and may not even understand — market fluctuations that can impact lead flow.

And while the team knows the percentage of leads that typically turn into opportunities, it often can’t anticipate how quickly those conversion rates can fluctuate based on ever-changing buyer behaviors.

What sales says

The sales team faces similar challenges. Its stakeholders can tell you the number of opportunities in the pipeline, but often struggle to predict which deals will close, when, and for how much.

The above-mentioned fluctuations in the market and buyer behavior are key reasons for this (as is the chronic “happy ears syndrome” that plagues many sales teams).

Where to find real answers

Bedeviled by limited information and wishful thinking, revenue forecasts are wobblier than they should be. It’s not uncommon for organizations to suffer financial losses based on this misinformation. Left untreated, this can sink a company.

But revenue teams can sidestep these dire outcomes — and provide far more useful and actionable data to their CFOs — when they use AI-driven sales and marketing technologies to measure the market and guide their efforts. This generates measurable benefits that are highly relevant for CFOs, including:

Spotting changes in buying behavior and the market

Take a peek at the bar chart above, which hails from 6sense’s own pipeline report.

At the time of this screenshot, there were 684,275 accounts that matched our ideal customer profile. But slightly less than 6% of those companies — 39,394 — were actively researching solutions.

Every business will see a similar pattern: a huge number of potential customers and a far smaller subset of companies that are actually engaged in a buying journey. This intelligence is critical for CFOs because it determines near-term revenue potential.

But how can companies and CFOs determine this kind of differentiating engagement with any level of confidence? For the longest time, they couldn’t … and most still can’t.

Today’s buyers operate in ‘stealth mode’

Accurate pipeline forecasting is challenging for many reasons, but this uncertainty is often driven by something most revenue teams —and CFOs — don’t know about.

Buyers don’t want to talk to salespeople anymore. Today’s buyers spend nearly 70% of their B2B buying journey conducting research online by themselves, not with a consultative salesperson. They spend months consuming content on third-party review sites, trade publications, social networks, and message boards.

This activity isn’t trackable by most revenue teams, which throws a wrench into pipeline predictions —and ultimately, revenue forecasts.

Who forced these buyers underground? We did.

Years of aggressive online marketing — and the inevitable deluge of unwanted spam and phone calls — trained buyers to stop providing their contact info to sales teams. Now, buying team members usually volunteer their contact details only near the end of their buying journeys. This is well after they’ve already made many key decisions about their needs, budget, implementation timelines, and more.

This puts marketers and sellers at a major disadvantage. They can’t properly educate prospects on their solution. Without the rep driving a value-centric conversation, products and solutions often become commoditized — reduced to checkboxes about capabilities and costs.

Here’s how this affects CFOs: Since revenue team members never fully controlled the narrative or understood the prospect’s needs, they’re never fully sure how many prospects and customers are seeking a solution. This means CFOs are never fully sure how many of the prospects in the pipeline represent a real revenue opportunity.

The challenges of buyers going underground

Let’s talk a bit more about buyers’ anonymous research habits. When B2B buyers conduct product research online, they leave a kind of “virtual breadcrumb trail” across the internet. These virtual breadcrumbs hint at:

• What business problems they aim to solve
• What kind of solution might meet their needs, and
• When they’re going to make a buying decision

This intent data can be revelatory to B2B revenue teams. But unless buyers explicitly identify themselves through website Contact Us forms or demo requests, these highly valuable signals are invisible and untraceable.

This keeps marketers and sellers from knowing that these actively interested prospects exist, or that they may be ready to buy. This dramatically influences a revenue team’s perception of the market … and impacts pipeline and revenue projections.

6sense calls this invisible part of the buying journey the Dark Funnel™.

How are ‘virtual breadcrumbs’ de-anonymized?

The right revenue technology platforms use privacy-compliant methods via partnerships with governmental organizations, third-party data collectors, regulatory agencies, financial reporting agencies, and more to accurately connect buying signals back to the companies conducting that research.

Modest technology investments make all the difference

However, there are technology solutions that completely circumvent this drama and bring clarity and certainty to key information and factors that are highly important to CFOs.

These purpose-built B2B sales enablement platforms integrate with your existing data sources, add their third-party insights into the behavior of B2B buyers, and then use artificial intelligence and machine learning to:

• Spot these potential buyers’ activity
• De-anonymize their research
• Understand when they’re approaching a purchase decision

This intelligence — which CFOs can access directly within these technology platforms, complete with continually updated predicted pipeline value — empowers revenue teams to expand their revenue forecast window and accurately spot demand trends long before they otherwise could.

Know when deals are likely to close

The best AI-powered revenue growth platforms are game-changers for forecasting. Here’s why:

Accurate, future-focused pipeline reports

With the best AI-powered solutions, your company’s revenue team can tell you:

• How many buyers are currently in the marketplace
• How deep they are in their buying process
• How much they are likely to spend on a solution
• And the impact of your team’s efforts to reach and influence them toward a buying decision

By understanding this data, your team can more accurately forecast months, or even full quarters, in advance.

Reliable short-term predictions

Your revenue team (or you, via dashboards or exported reports) can also see when buying groups are nearing a purchasing decision, and determine how different buying team members engage with your brand. This makes it much easier to forecast the near-term deal flow accurately months, or even full quarters, in advance.

Tweak projections (and expectations) in real-time

Armed with this clarity into all of the prospects’ buying journeys, you can spot shifts in demand much earlier — such as the number of businesses nearing a purchase decision, or increased interest in a particular product or service — and adjust revenue projections accordingly.

Accurately predict deal value

Another reason CFOs often experience forecast challenges is that sales teams struggle to accurately predict deal health. CRM giant HubSpot reports that sales representatives spend over two hours a week on forecasting, but those forecasts are often less than 75% accurate.

That’s because most forecasts are built on anecdotes, hunches, and guesswork … which injects confusion and FUD into your revenue forecasts. No bueno.

Again, integrated sales and marketing platforms can come to the rescue. They leverage AI, machine learning, and pattern recognition to accurately predict individual deal value based on factors like:

• The characteristics of the accounts in your pipeline
• Account and buying group behavior
• Content consumption and campaign engagement
• Historical deal data

And since the best platforms continuously update this information, CFOs can access this information instantly, with real-time accuracy.

With these faster, more accurate revenue forecasts, CFOs can confidently design business plans that maintain healthy profitability while maximizing growth.

Get more ROI from the same sales and marketing spend

Boston Consulting Group recently released a report that estimates B2B companies waste $2 trillion a year due to wasteful, inefficient, and outdated sales and marketing processes. Further, research from Gartner indicates that poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million every year. Over the long term, this shortcoming “increases the complexity of data ecosystems and leads to poor decision-making,” the report says.

There’s plenty for CFOs to unpack there, but for our purposes, let’s zoom in on one chronic source of waste that hails from revenue teams: generating leads.

Companies commonly spend hundreds of dollars for each Marketing Qualified Lead they acquire. (An MQL is generally defined as a buyer who completed a website form-fill, actively reached out to schedule a call, or downloaded a certain number of assets.) These costs quickly add up since revenue teams need a lot of MQLs to work. Only a sliver of those leads convert into paying customers.

So let’s do the math. Assuming your revenue team acquired 1,000 MQLs…

• 1,000 leads x .013 (lead to opportunity rate, per Salesforce): 130 opportunities
• 130 opportunities x 0.06 (opportunity win rate per Salesforce): 8 deals
• Lead-to-close rate: Less than 1%

If a revenue team invested $500 per MQL (you can find industry-specific cost-per-lead benchmarks here), it loses $8,300 for every lead it closes. That’s a critical source of waste, considering the additional costs associated with working those leads, including:

• The marketing hours invested developing and executing campaigns
• The sales hours invested in outreach toward candidates who are unlikely to buy
• Digital marketing investments trying to engage companies that lack purchase intent
• And more

But CFOs can help dramatically reduce this bleed-out by understanding and addressing the information gaps that hurt revenue team performance.

Using account-level market intelligence is the best way to eliminate these gaps, find more opportunities, and close more deals.

Here are a few questions every CFO — and revenue team — should continuously ask:

• How efficiently does our marketing team target prospects who are likely to buy?
• How well is the marketing spend attracting opportunities (not just leads)?
• How easy is it for the sales team to prioritize actions that lead to revenue?

Let’s quickly explore these questions and how better solutions translate into stronger growth planning for CFOs.

Question 1: Are we targeting the right prospects?

Sales and marketing teams spend lots of time identifying businesses that could make great customers. These accounts — and for most companies, there are often tens of thousands of them —represent your Total Addressable Market (TAM).

Here’s the rub: Most of those accounts have no interest in making a purchase right now. Only a sliver of them represents true revenue opportunities. This issue is especially concerning for CFOs because most revenue teams never know which accounts deserve attention, which means they’re investing lots of resources in irrelevant engagement.

That’s when the common guesswork and time- and money-sucking tactics begin:

• Revenue teams waste prospects’ time (and risk irritating them) by sending out mass emails to fish for interest.
• They grind through thousands of cold calls to identify buyers, but annoy far more potential customers (and waste sales rep time on a morale-killing mix of monotony and rejection).
• They take a “spray and pray” approach to digital advertising by blasting ads to a huge audience and hoping they help close enough deals for an acceptable ROI.

All of this inefficient guesswork means revenue teams have to over invest to have any hope of hitting sales goals. Working the entire Total Addressable Market requires enormous money and effort. This colossal inefficiency and waste should concern every CFO.

But what if, instead of searching for a needle in the haystack, your revenue team could generate a stack of only needles?

That’s what buyer intent data helps marketers and sellers do. Intent data is a collection of signals that indicate which companies are interested in your solution and — with the aid of artificial intelligence and analysis — how close they are to making a buying decision.

By targeting only potential buyers and prioritizing buyers who are closer to making a decision, sales reps can generate 140% more annual revenue than those who don’t, according to some reports. Armed with concrete data, revenue teams know who to target — and more importantly, who not to target.

Better targeting allows CFOs to trim budgets without sacrificing growth.

Question 2: How qualified are our leads?

So why do only 13% of leads convert into opportunities, per Salesforce’s stats? Here are two big reasons:

Reason 1: They have no intention to buy

Marketers often withhold valuable content and information behind website form-fills as a way to entice (or, if we’re being more skeptical, coerce) visitors into providing their contact info.

But many of the people who fill out forms simply want to learn. They do not want to buy.

Ninety-seven percent of website visitors do not fill out forms because they know they aren’t ready to buy (and don’t want their phones and inboxes to blow up with sales pitches). And what about the 3% who do fill out forms? Most will ghost sales reps because they’re not ready to engage in a sales conversation. They just want basic info.

These “mirage leads” waste immense amounts of sales reps’ time. Companies spend tremendous amounts of money to pay sales reps to chase bad leads … and low close rates mean fewer commissions, which inevitably leads to increased turnover on your sales team.

To avoid this problem, revenue teams can use AI-powered Buyer Stage prediction capabilities to track the overall engagement of accounts and distinguish between accounts that are early in their research phase and those that are approaching a buying decision.

• Researchers should be nurtured by your marketing department, which can provide useful resources that match the info the account has been seeking.
• Buyers can be nurtured by your marketing team and approached by your sales reps.

Website form-fills come from individuals, but individuals rarely make B2B purchase decisions on their own. These days, buying decisions are mostly made by teams. Gartner reports that in 2020, the average technology purchase decision involved 14 to 23 people. And as the size of the purchase increases, so does the size of the buying team.

Reason 2: They have no authority to buy

This can be great news for B2B sellers that use account intelligence platforms. This makes it possible to spot:

• Which accounts are engaging in anonymous research about their brand or services, and
• Which members of the buying team are engaged in research

As former Sirius Decisions and Forrester analyst Kerry Cunningham writes, “When buying groups research solutions, they leave a substantially greater trail of digital behavioral clues (e.g., website visits, keyword searches, clicks on advertising) than would an individual or couple.”

Cunningham, who now works for 6sense, continues: “With more of these behavioral clues to work with, well-equipped B2B organizations can more accurately differentiate organizations that are truly in the market to acquire solutions from those that have a more casual interest but no intention to buy. This, in turn, allows B2B organizations to focus attention and resources on higher propensity buyers.”

By focusing on buying teams rather than individuals, sales teams can make much more accurate predictions about which businesses are likely to sign deals and how quickly. This makes it much easier for CFOs to build accurate growth plans.

Question 3: How easily can your sales team prioritize their efforts?

A few pages back, we presented three questions every CFO — and revenue team — should continuously ask. Let’s now examine the third:

• How easy is it for the sales team to prioritize actions that lead to revenue?

According to a study by CSO insights, sales representatives spend only 41% of their time on revenue-generating activities.

That’s a pretty shocking stat — but it’s not often the sellers’ fault. Remember, they’re highly motivated by commissions and bonuses.

The problem is that teams don’t often have the kind of enablement tools that:

• Remove non-revenue-generating activities from their task lists, or
• Eliminate guesswork by helping them prioritize the accounts that are most likely to buy

Every moment a sales rep spends distracted from customer conversations is like a moment spent idling your car’s engine in a traffic jam. You’re burning gas (and cash), but going nowhere. You want them roaring down the highway toward Dealville. Which means…

Spend less time on administrative tasks

According to the CSO Insights study mentioned on the previous page, the list of responsibilities that frequently fall into sales representatives’ laps include:

• Researching potential prospects
• Generating and nurturing their own leads
• Admin tasks such as data entry and building sales forecast reports

This is glorified grunt work, which burns time and pulls reps away from what they do best: working and closing deals. Here’s where investments in technology can bring transformative efficiencies to revenue teams — which is of particular concern to CFOs.

Technology can reduce the time spent on all of these tasks by:

• Identifying the accounts that should be targeted
• Providing your org’s marketing team the tools it needs to remove lead-nurture responsibilities from the sales team
• Sharing data between platforms and providing dashboards and reports so reps can spend less time on data management and analysis

Follow the fastest route to revenue without dropping opportunities

Admin tasks aren’t the only challenges that sales reps must juggle. They’re also constantly forced to triage their time between working with a high volume of new prospects and providing in-depth assistance to a lower volume of extremely high-priority prospects.

To get the best results, sales reps should:

1. Treat each new lead like a potential deal — with plenty of follow-up
2. Still devote focus and attention to top prospects who are progressing toward a deal

Unfortunately, that’s virtually impossible using traditional approaches. Again, it’s not that sales reps aren’t trying. It’s simply that when leads don’t respond to initial outreach, it’s easy for them to wind up on a permanent backburner as reps field new leads and try to provide a great experience to likely buyers.

Prioritizing communication and outreach is a struggle. Technology can help fix it. Here’s how.

Treating each new lead like a potential deal

Revenue teams have long suffered from overworked Business Development Representatives and low conversion rates. However, automated technologies such as Conversational Email solutions eliminate manual (and burnout-inducing) BDR tasks and ensure each lead receives bespoke follow-up and engagement:

• Conversational Email solutions automatically qualify and categorize accounts based on contact replies, then leverage integrated workflows to connect those buyers to the right salespeople
• They engage the correct buying team members, schedule follow-up based on out-of-office replies, book meetings with the right owners, and send targeted content
• They turn simple marketing inputs into ready-to-use emails based on millions of data inputs (and the AI continuously learns to optimize messages for your business)
• They effortlessly and cost-effectively create personalized emails at a scale humans could never achieve

Conversational Email can radically enhance a BDR team’s productivity and impact on pipeline. According to McKinsey, companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue. And in our recent research evaluating the effectiveness of Conversational Email, 6sense customers reported:

CFOs should ask their companies’ sales and marketing leaders about these solutions. They provide profound ways of streamlining processes and reducing effort while increasing revenue.

Devoting focus and attention to top prospects

When 6sense surveyed business development representatives in 2021, BDRs told us that 46% of them did not know if their prospects were in-market, 57% experienced negative reactions to outreach, and 29% of prospects either had no interest in making a purchase or had already purchased a similar solution.

So, nearly a third of their outreach was a complete waste. Combine the wasted labor dollars, the missed commissions, and the reputational risk of annoying potential future customers and it’s a lose-lose scenario.

Quantifying the financial impact

Earlier, we shared the following Salesforce stats:

• Only 13% of MQLs ever convert into real sales opportunities
• And of those opportunities, only 6% convert into deals

We used those metrics to determine that a typical lead-to-close rate for 1,000 MQLs is less than 1% … which means if a revenue team invests $500 per MQL, it spends $8,300 for every lead it closes. (You’ll recall this doesn’t include additional costs such as hours invested by marketing and sales personnel to work those leads, digital ad buys, etc.)

However, when CFOs and revenue teams implement the technologies and best practices described in this section, the script gets flipped. ROI and revenue growth become immediately apparent.

Let’s use 6sense’s solution to illustrate this ROI and revenue growth.

Revisiting the math

We’ll be using findings from a 2022 Forrester Total Economic Impact Study, which examined the potential cost savings and business benefits that 6sense provides customers.

Armed with this information, we’ll revisit the sales pipeline math we encountered earlier in this chapter. We’ll use the same metrics and variables presented there, which were:

• 1,000 leads x .013 (lead to opportunity rate, per Salesforce): 130 opportunities
• 130 opportunities x 0.06 (opportunity win rate per Salesforce): 8 deals

According to Forrester’s analysis, 6sense helps customers increase:

• 75% increase in opportunity conversion rate
• 40% increase in opportunity win rate
• 2x increase in average deal value

When we combine those findings with Salesforce’s averages, we get a dramatic picture of how account-based intelligence can impact revenue growth:

This type of efficiency not only improves revenue growth. It also increases profitability and reduces risk — which translates into a higher valuation for your company and all the benefits that accrue.

And these solutions offer additional ways to eliminate time and costs. For instance, Forrester found that 6sense delivered:

Trim budgets without sacrificing growth

Finally, even after discovering ways to generate more accurate forecasting and boost ROI, CFOs may still find themselves examining quarterly their revenue forecasts and asking, “What do we need to cut?”

Here are some initiatives, and unseen nuances, to consider.

Events

Sales and marketing can — and should — keep hosting and attending events; they’re critical for building relationships with customers, potential partners, and suppliers. But events can get expensive, fast.

There are ways CFOs can encourage revenue teams to squeeze more value out of smaller budgets.

For example:

• Many companies host major events for their customers. But attendees can still have fun without pricey live bands, celebrity speakers, large prize giveaways, and swag bags.
• Consider running online or hybrid events to reduce travel costs, venue rental fees, expenses for on-site food and refreshments, swag, and giveaways, etcBy offering a virtual component, you may even see more attendance.
• For in-person events, reduce the number of sales representatives attending.
• Do you need to pay for flights and hotel rooms, and registration fees for 20 reps when 10 would suffice?
• Get assistance from an event management platform that can help you host events, optimize your event program, and measure and maximize your return on event (ROE) with rich data and insights.

Use your new tools to boost event ROI

Your team can use account-based marketing practices to generate more pipeline from events.

Before the event: Use keyword targeting and campaigns to identify attendees and book meetings ahead of time.

After the event: Send follow-up emails and campaigns to help keep your brand and message top of mind and pave the way for future outreach.

Consolidate tech tools

When it comes to martech platforms, more doesn’t always equal better. Consolidating tools can help strike a balance between efficiency and costs.

Your revenue team likely uses an amalgamation of tools to carry out tasks such as:

• Account management
• Content creation and delivery
• Social outreach
• Email campaigns
• Advertising
• Data analytics

Many tools only serve a single function, which means that for each of the tasks above, you’ll have yet another line item on the expense report.

Unify your marketing tools, and reduce costs by adopting platforms that do it all. The best solutions have comprehensive, built-in capabilities that help customers consolidate their tech stacks while making a greater impact on the bottom line.

For instance, the 6sense platform is designed to play nicely with, and enhance, other marketing tools. It also provides direct solutions for:

• Account identification
• Intent data
• Data enrichment and management
• Predictive modeling
• Orchestrations
• Audience building
• Engagement personalization
• Programmatic display advertising without markups

6sense also sends insights directly into CRM contact records, delivering instant insights to sales representatives working to close deals with high-value accounts.

Top-of-funnel ad spend

It’s natural to look for ways to trim your organization’s digital-ad spend — and ax your top-of-funnel ad spend altogether. Here are two reasons to reconsider that approach:

Today’s new customers are tomorrow’s upsells

Upselling to existing customers is the easiest, least costly way to drive revenue. During recessions, companies sometimes cut back on new customer acquisition and double down on selling to their existing customer base.

The problem lies in the future: If revenue teams don’t keep new customer acquisition strong, they lose the opportunity for future upsells, which kneecaps the company’s post-recession growth trajectory.

Acquiring new customers is challenging during a recession; the pool of potential customers understandably shrinks. That’s why it’s so critical to target only in-market accounts.

By keeping your sales — and your sales team — strong, the business is positioned for greater success once the economy rebounds.

Countercyclical advertising can yield big ROI

During a recession, an industry-wide reduced competition for ads will likely boost ROI for brands that maintain an ad presence. Your revenue team can invest in more ad impressions and stay front-and-center with the remaining pool of buyers.

Less competition also means your company has a chance to dominate mindshare and increase brand recognition among your target customers.

Hiring

Reducing headcount is perhaps the most difficult choice that CFOs and other business leaders must make when they need to cut costs. Layoffs will get costs under control in the short term, but it’s critical to think about the impact it will have on future revenue generation.

Recessions last an average of ten months. If you reduce headcount now, how will your organization be positioned a year after the economic situation improves? You may face several challenges:

• Laying off talented team members results in lost organizational knowledge and expertise. This brain drain will leave the remaining staff scrambling to fill in the gaps. Multitasking and inefficient processes ultimately lead to lost productivity and revenue.

• Remaining employees face increased pressure to perform, leading to burnout. Employees may stick around during the worst of the recession, but once the job market improves, they may be attracted to positions elsewhere, leading to even more brain drain.

• When the economy is on the upswing, a reduced workforce may not be able to keep up. Your opportunity cost may outweigh short-term savings.

If you need to implement a hiring freeze or layoffs, the right sales and marketing technologies can help your remaining employees stay focused on the most important revenue-generating activities. It also puts them in the best position to keep hitting goals despite challenges, so they can keep the company healthy and maintain their own confidence through the downturn.

And once the economy recovers, technology that helps team members stay focused and prioritize efforts can help you quickly ramp up new hires so they can seize new opportunities.

Conclusion

During recessions, the pool of potential buyers shrinks — but there are still plenty of buyers. The right technology can help your organization’s teams find them, communicate effectively with them, and turn them into paying customers.

Account-based intelligence platforms provide insights into the minds of prospects and customers, which help:

• Marketing teams know who to target
• Sales reps know who to talk to and which topics prospects care about the most
• CFOs project revenue based on AI-driven insights into which customers are likely to buy, when, and for how much

It’s critical for CFOs to know about — and embrace — these AI-driven sales and marketing technologies to identify sources of inefficiencies and waste, and help spot opportunities for sustained and predictable revenue growth.