This will not be news to some of you, but taking a route through Finance business partnering is now the best way to achieve your ambition of getting into a CFO role.

It used to be the case that financial control and reporting was the established path to the Chief Financial Officer’s chair. A solid Financial Controller was seen as not only the CFO’s right hand person, but the CFO’s natural successor.

This, I believe, is not the case any more.

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There are three areas you need to develop in if you want to be a good Chief Financial Officer or Finance business partner – business acumen, tools/techniques and behavioural skills.

And my intention is to unpack these three areas a little bit, so that you can get to grips with planning your development journey more effectively.

In another article I shared my belief that Finance business partner is the new best route to a CFO role. That is to say, core CFO skills are Finance business partnering skills. And well-developed Finance business partnering skills are what you need to be a CFO.

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An Introduction to Personal Effectiveness for CFOs and Finance Professionals is a book that I wrote to give an outline of some core behavioural skills that are essential to business-focused Finance but don’t receive enough attention.

The book arose out of a reading project I undertook in order to get a well-rounded view of CFO and Finance business partnering roles, and the skills and behaviours involved. And I think it’s only fair to acknowledge the influence of at least some of the books I read. In fact, I’ll mention just two, because these are the most relevant to the subject matter of this book.

Firstly, a kindle-only book by Alan Warner, Finance Business Partnering - The search for value, was useful in suggesting a skills framework for Finance business partnering. Warner’s analysis is where I got the three categories that I now talk about - Business acumen, Behavioural, and Technical.

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Last week I summarized a presentation PitchBook analysts made at a Portland business event, Breakfast with PitchBook – Recap of 2019 and Predictions for 2020.

Since then a number of members from our community have asked me how they should use this information as finance leaders at their company. Here is a condensed version of my responses to them.

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Depending upon what study you look at, most of the time in sales is spent on administrative tasks instead of being in front of customers. Given that the lifeblood of a company is the revenue that our customers so generously give to us, it is amazing that so little time is spent on helping sales teams be more efficient at generating revenue. CRMs are fantastic tools for gathering data on customer and sales rep activities, but organizations spend very little time in providing meaningful information to help sales teams be more effective.

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