The CFO Presentation

So in my last post I talked about the theme of the keynote presentations at the CFO conference--and how mine was different and why I thought it was important that it was.

And it's not a huge long ego trip for me to say that it was great "because" it was different, or great just for the sake of being different. Or that it was even great. Which it was, but that's beside the point.

The point was that CFO's are inundated today with the same information when they're at work--they hear the vendor pitches, the inventive direct marketing campaigns designed to somehow skirt the executive assistant and magically make it onto their desk--they've seen it all.

And if they're going to pay money to leave work for two days and spend time in a darkened conference room, then they're not looking for 2 year old market stats. They're looking to be inspired. They're looking for that spark that starts a process, an idea, heck, that something keeps them awake.

And so talking about the importance of strategy and strategic planning was an interesting approach for me, as we obviously could have trotted out the same old slides about process and closed loop solutions. But when we saw that no one was talking about strategy, a topic that's in the forefront of a CFO's mind, but which they don't get to spend as much time as they'd like, we knew we had a winner. And grabbing almost 40% of the conference into our presentation up against 4 other vendors was great validation.