When asked whether a new sales enablement hire would be a “direct report,” Bill Koefoed, CFO of OneStream Software, replied: “Organization matters only when your processes and relationships don’t.”

It’s an observation not shared widely perhaps among newbie CFOs, who upon their arrival are known to rely more on organizational reporting lines than relationship potential to assert their influence.

Nevertheless, four months and one pandemic into his latest CFO tour of duty, Koefoed has his relationship-building skills in high gear as he works alongside OneStream’s sales leaders to better identify those factors contributing to sales productivity.

According to Koefoed, the challenge is not just about sales productivity, though, but also about how to make the team productive more quickly. Hence OneStream’s new sales enablement hire. 

Says Koefoed: “People don’t have to sit in finance to be effective, and having great partners and relationships in other areas of the business is just a great way to run the business.”

In addition to sales, Koefoed’s relationship-building skills also appear to be focused on OneStream’s customers. How long a customer has been in the pipeline frequently correlates to deal size, says Koefoed, who concedes, “Obviously, big deals take longer.”

Still, Koefoed says that his focus these days is more on something that he refers to as “customer familiarity”—and here, too, he’s looking for ways to accelerate OneStream’s upward climb on his customer awareness meter.

“The more familiar somebody is with your company, the better able they are to make key decisions,” adds Koefoed, who note that in the case of OneStream, “key decisions” are what trigger the movement of customers to OneStream’s software offerings and away from software provided by larger, more established rivals. –Jack Sweeney