Aviv Canaani, VP Marketing, Datarails, and Christian Wattig, Head of Training at Datarails and founder of FP&A Prep, join Paul Barnhurst for a conversation about marketing vs finance.
In the world of business it sometimes feels like finance and marketing are talking a different language. Christian Wattig has been the FP&A leader at some of the highest profile marketing teams on the planet at P&G and Unilever, where campaigns for brands such as Dove, Skippy and Hellman’s saw marketing spend hundreds of millions of dollars. In this episode he talks about some of the biggest challenges, misconceptions, and opportunities between FP&A and marketing and actionable insights when partnering with the creatives in a business.
Joining Paul and Christian is Aviv Canaani, VP Marketing, Datarails. Giving the marketing take on the finance-advertising relationship, Canaani has led multi-million dollar campaigns at companies including IBM. Since then he has led marketing at hyper growth startups, Workiz and Datarails. In this frank discussion Canaani talks about the conflicts with marketing: “We are not always sure that the finance people have our best interests at heart.”
Also in this episode
- How can FP&A teams work with marketing on long-term marketing investment
- How to build trust between finance and marketing
- The best way to make a finance case for marketing investment
- How to best market to an FP&A audience
- How FP&A can help measure direct response marketing
- Making yourself aware of the wildly different incentives for finance teams vs marketing teams
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Connect with Christian Wattig on LinkedIn
Connect with Aviv Canaani on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Paul Barnhurst:
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From Datarails. This is FP&A Today.
Paul Barnhurst:
Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today, I am your host, Paul Barnhurst aka the FP&A Guy, and you are listening to FP&A Today. FP&A Today is brought to you by Data Rails, the financial planning and analysis platform for Excel users. Every week we welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis and discuss some of the biggest stories and challenges in the world of FP&A. We’ll provide you with actionable advice about financial planning and analysis. This is going to be your go-to resource for everything, FP&A. I am thrilled to welcome today’s guests on the show. Today I have with me Aviv Canaani, who’s the VP of Marketing for Datarails, and Christian Wattig, who also works for Datarails. Welcome to the show,
Aviv Canaani:
Hey, great to be here, Paul.
Paul Barnhurst:
Welcome Christian. Yeah, no, thank you both for joining me. And Christian, thanks for being the first return guest that we’ve had. Thank you. So just a little bit about them and then I’ll give them an opportunity to introduce themselves with a little more detail. But Aviv is coming to us from Tel Aviv. He earned his MBA from Duke University. He teaches startup marketing at a local university, and he’s also led marketing for several startups. Christian comes to us from New York City. He runs a successful FP&A training program called the FP&A Bootcamp, and also for works for Data Rails. He’s worked with customers, does some training stuff as well. And he has over a decade of FP&A and an experience working in industries including consumer goods and subscription businesses. So, Aviv, maybe you could start by just telling us a little bit about, a little more about yourself and how you ended up where you’re at?
Aviv Canaani:
Awesome. Sounds good. So actually, not everyone knows that I’ve actually started in politics in Israel. I was an advisor to a minister in the Israeli government later was an advisor sorry, I was the director of communications to a member of Parliament. That’s where I really started in all my so-called marketing PR career. But I quickly understood that if I really want to learn the best about marketing, I need to go to the private sector. So, I moved to the States, did my MBA at Duke, which has a great marketing program. During my time there, I interned at Lenovo in IBM started working for IBM actually as a social media manager in New York there. Got the opportunity to move to Austin, Texas and lead a content marketing team. Moved up to ranks there and then my final role at IBM, I was a program director at IBM doing everything that has to do with paid media.
And eventually I decided after having two kids, actually one was born in New York, one in Texas, so maybe there’s going to be some kind of future rivalry there. I decided to move back to Israel to where all the grandparents are, but I stayed with startups that focus on the North American market. Start with the online marketing company later. I was a VP marketing at a startup called Workiz, and about a year or so ago, I joined Datarails. Actually, the founder Eyal Cohen approached me and said, let’s talk. And it’s something you know can’t ignore. You’ve already built a unicorn startup called WalkMe, already publicly traded, and this is hopefully it’s going to be his second unicorn. From the moment I started, I just saw how exactly like Eyal said there was amazing product market fit in terms of what Datarails does and the need for it among FP&A professionals. We started running some marketing campaigns with really any marketing people on the team and still it performed amazingly. So, we quickly grew the team. The company grew a lot in the past year. We’re doing a lot of fun marketing stuff, also sponsoring this podcast. And yeah, I’m really happy to be here. And as you can understand from doing an MBA, I actually have some friends in finance, like must admit. Yeah, so really excited to be here.
Paul Barnhurst:
Good. We’re glad to have you and we’re glad that you have some friends in finance that we’re not all enemies.
Aviv Canaani:
Even the way, even Sruthi, that was one of the guests recently on your podcast? Wait, which guest?
Paul Barnhurst:
Oh yeah, yeah. Got it. Short, small world. I remember saying she went to Duke. That’s definitely a small world. Exciting. All right, Christian, why don’t you go ahead and give us a little bit more about your background.
Christian Wattig:
Yeah, I’m originally from Germany. That’s where I grew up and where I have my accent from. And I started my career there at P&G. It’s a large consumer goods company, but I knew eventually I would end up in the States because my wife, my then fiancé, is from the States. And so, after four years I just said, okay, now is the time now or never. I quit my job. I came over here without anything. We drove from San Francisco all the way to New York City, to the southern states. Beautiful, if you ever get the chance to do that. And I was very fortunate that I was able to start working at Unilever in the FP&A. Unilever is a large consumer goods company, maybe brands like Magnum and Ice Cream, Ben and Jerry’s, Dove, body lotion, shower gels, etc. And I was fortunate that I had the chance to work at several, several different FP&A roles.
And then I also moved into leadership roles. And my last role there was leading the FP&A and the accounting team for the logistics finance department there. And then I also did my MBA . I did it at Stern. And when I talked to people during my MBA, they told me that if you’ve never worked at a startup before or especially in tech, you should because you’ll see that decisions are being made a lot faster. And that’s definitely something that resonated with me because of the large multinational company like Unilever, whenever you make a recommendation, you want to change a process, et cetera, the local team has to approve, the regional team has to approve and then they have to convince the global team to make the change. So, a lot of bureaucracy, long decision making cycles. And so, after my MBA, I was excited to get an offer from Squarespace.
It’s a website builder company, a late-stage startup, already 1500 people. And we actually took it live while it was there. We took it public while I was there, which was a fantastic opportunity and a fantastic place to be in the FP&A team. And we were doing all the game plan planning and prepping the CFO for speaking to analysts for the first time. I learned a lot there. And then I moved to Datarails. And Datarails fascinated me because what I enjoyed most about FP&A had always been helping my business partners make better decisions through financial analysis and also process optimization, making their life a bit easier, making sure that not everything you’re doing is manual, helping them with Excel and stuff. And when I realized that there’s a company that hires people with FP&A background, but my role at Data Rails would be helping other companies get out of their manual processes, I immediately jumped on it.
That’s what Datarails does. We work with finance teams that are drowning in spreadsheets and we help them automate the process and look through that. And around the same time, I also started my education online education business on the side, FP&A Bootcamp is the course. And I did that because when I was onboarding new direct reports on my team, I realized that learning FP&A from scratch is difficult because there’s a lot that they don’t cover at universities. And at the same time, I realized that I really enjoyed teaching. And so, it really was a no-brainer to go and try and see if I can build a course where I can teach FP&A to others through the internet. And that’s what I’ve been doing for over a year now.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for both of you sharing a little bit more about yourself, just so our audience is aware, in this episode we’re going to talk a fair about marketing. That’s why we brought in a marketing person and how finance and marketing work together. But before we jump into that part of it, I have a few more questions. So, I’m curious, how did you and Christian first connect? I mean, how did that happen that he ended up at Datarails with you?
Aviv Canaani:
So yeah, it’s a cool story, but based on what he said, the theme of this podcast, it’s marketing and finance. So actually, when I started in Datarails, I quickly decided that we don’t want to want to be yet another B2B company that’s boring to boring and do their regular boring webinars, white papers and so on. And I went to get in touch with influencers in the field of FP&A. Apparently there are influencers in FP&A who would’ve imagined that. So, I got to speak with you, Paul. I got to also speak with Christian. And actually, in one of my visits to our New York office I reached out to Christian. I said, okay, have lunch let’s talk. I noticed Christian, based on the great content that he posts regularly on LinkedIn and also with the FP&A bootcamp where we started to partner on and we met for lunch, had a great discussion, and during lunch I said, maybe you should meet the team, learn more about what we do in our startup. So, we have very spontaneously, we just went into our office, Christian met our Sloane, our director of customer success Jonathan, our director of presales they hit it off, had a great conversation from here to there. All of a sudden Christian joined the company. Yeah, well lucky. Luckily, we had that lunch.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. No, and I can see where that started with the bootcamp. Sounds like worked out really well for both of you and great situation, so I appreciate that answer. And speaking of bootcamp, when we first met, how was that going now for you Christian? How’s kind of the progress been coming on the bootcamp?
Christian Wattig:
When I launched it for the first time, a bit over a year ago, I really had no expectations. I had no idea how many people would be interested in doing that. I had no idea people would like it, but I’m really positively surprised by the response. I’ve been doing it for a bit over a year and I just had my 200th student this year. And it’s always, what I enjoy about it is it’s live over Zoom so I can see in people’s eyes when they get it, right, when the eyes light up and they’re like, okay, I get what you mean. I get how I can apply it. And that’s just super motivating,
Paul Barnhurst:
A hundred percent with you on that. I love when I’m training somebody, whether it be Excel or the FP&A courses I have, and you can see the light bulb go on and that they’ve really understood something and that it’ll make a difference. That’s always really rewarding. So that’s probably my favorite part of teaching live as well. So, thank you for sharing that. So, Aviv, this question is for you. I’m curious, what attracted you to marketing for startups? You’ve led marketing at several startups, why startups versus IBM where you started?
Aviv Canaani:
I think it’s similar to what Christian said also from the finance side that he said people were telling him try startups. So, I worked for IBM for four years and it was nice. I was doing different roles, managing teams, but at the end of the day when reading books about this marketing or following thought leaders in the space, I just felt I’m not doing the same thing. Because when you work with a big company, you’re doing something very niche, something very specific, you don’t see the full perspective. So, I decided maybe the salary isn’t going to be as good or the job protection is going to be as good, but let’s go for it. And yeah, the last couple years I’ve been, sorry, last couple of jobs, I’ve been just working in small startups. First, I was in a startup that went from round A to round B.
Now the same thing here with Datarails being on this roller rollercoaster of hyper growth startups that invest a lot of money in. And you need to quickly do everything in marketing, whether it’s building the website, starting paid media, product marketing, working with influencers, doing podcasts, building a brand, calculating the CAC to LTV, stuff like finance terms payback period. All of a sudden you feel you’re much more engaged. You feel like you’re making more of an impact as opposed to if you were at a big company that maybe you can impact on paper or let’s call on Excel. It seems like millions, tens of millions of dollars are moving around based on everything you do, but it’s still just an Excel. It’s not the same feeling as if you’re in a small startup and every sale is a celebration. Everything that you’re able to figure out and every process you’re able to do better really can make a dent. So, I’m super happy now at startups and especially here at Datarails
Paul Barnhurst
Thank you for sharing that answer. And I can see where the attraction comes to startups. There’s a lot of fun and I really like how you mentioned the reward. You can immediately see that impact. You celebrate a sell versus, oh, I saw something on an Excel file this month and it looks like we’ve done better. It’s just a different, you get a much closer to the actions, so to speak.
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, I can share that. We’re talking about sales cycles for over a year. So, we used to do huge events, Mobile World Congress and Barcelona. It was fun. But at the end of the day, you look at the numbers and you’re influencing some kind of part of the buyer decision that can take over a year and Datarails, usually the sales cycles are less than a month, sometimes even just a few weeks. So being able to see, okay, this an action now in a few weeks, they see the result. That’s awesome. That’s just fun.
Paul Barnhurst:
A agree. Having started my own business and seeing the times where you see something, you do actually have a quick result. Very, very satisfying.
[Datarails ad]
So I have a question for you. Obviously there’s been kind of I think a reputation out there between marketing and finance that there’s friction at times. It seems that a lot of business leaders in particular marketing are hesitant about working closely with finance, particularly around budget season. So I just want to give some of your thoughts. Why do you think that is? Do you think marketing and finance sometimes seem to be at odds and a little bit of friction there?
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, let’s make it interesting. This is a podcast we are listening to especially by finance people. So I’ll be happy to share the other side. First of all, we as marketers, we believe best and I’m sure finance people, I think they know best as well. So it’s very hard to just say, okay, can rely on someone else in the C-Suite to tell me how to do my job better. And there is also the challenge. I’ve been listening to a lot of episodes in the podcast and reading about that according to also a lot of research that CFOs and people in the finance department, they want to be business partners and they want to feel that they’re really supporting other decision makers in the company like the CMO in my case or any other chief product office or any other sales, any other position. The problem is, and this is I’m sharing opening my heart here, it’s the marketing side that we’re not always sure that the finance people have our best interests at heart.
Because sometimes, and this happened to me in a previous startup, the finance person or the CFO figures out something doesn’t make sense. He goes to the CFO, sorry to the C E O gets credit and showing you see the CMO is spending all this money on this thing and it doesn’t make any sense. We’re the results? And then the c o comes to me asking, okay, what are you doing here? It doesn’t make sense. And I think first of all, sometimes they make good points, but sometimes I don’t think CFOs see the full picture. And I think it’s a misalignment of interest that at the end of the day, it’s not that the finance department reports to marketing or sales or anything like that, it’s like you need to work together for the best thing to do for the business. But sometimes everyone has their own interests at heart and they know they want to show the CEO that you are smart, that you’re able to figure things out and save money, especially during times like this. So yeah, it’s a friction. So I think my recommendations for finance people listening is build that honest relationship with business partners that they can trust you and they won’t feel that the first thing you’re going to do once you figure out a problem is run to the CEO and say, look, they don’t know what they’re doing. Let’s say cut that budget.
Paul Barnhurst:
Christian, you said that honest trust relationship. I think something about that, did you give a speech about that at AFP?
Christian Wattig
Yeah, I talked about trust gave a speech there, but I want to touch on what Aviv mentioned is because I think he is absolutely right that sometimes incentives can be slightly different. Finance we are being told, okay, we have to look at the profit. No one else is looking at the profit. Marketing just wants to, so that’s what sometimes we’re being told, marketing wants to have as much money as possible so they can do as much as possible, but that that’s not necessarily true. Often the incentive actually aren’t misaligned. People just think they are based on limited information. And so based on my experience, what I learned as I partnered with marketing for very closely for a number of years is you have to earn that trust. As a finance business partner, you have to show them that you want to do more than just cutting budgets or following up about month and close topics because sometimes the image we have because that’s what we have to do, we can’t get around that.
That’s just part of any finance role you have to manage the budgets and follow up about correct accruals, etc. But we can do more. The challenges that finance can only do more when we have enough information early enough. But the challenges that marketing to share that information with finance makes them vulnerable because we could go in and say, oh, this new marketing channel there, you’re trying with TikTok, it really seems like it’s not working. The ROI doesn’t seem to be there. Let’s cut it. And that’s where we as finance people also need to be able to wear both hats and need to be able to first of all understand really what the goals are because not every marketing asset that’s getting pulled out there has the job of immediately turning a profit. A lot of what the marketing team does is more long term. It’s about understanding really what the goals are of your market business partners and specifically the question that I like to ask them specifically is, in an ideal world, what would you like to know about your business to make better decisions and when would you like to know that?
So I don’t ask about metrics right away. I just askthem, what do you want to know about the business? What do you want to know earlier so you can make better decisions? And that then usually leads to something where they talk about, oh, if I only knew if I only had this data earlier or this analysis. And then you can go in and you can put that together, you can share that with them and that’s how you can show that you actually want to help them reach their goals rather than just managing budget and cutting costs.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you. I appreciate the answer there. And two things came to mind. One, as you talked about often cutting budget is I worked for a company where they were spending so little on one of the businesses I supported for marketing that I had to go to bat to try to get them more. And I never had much success with the CFO in this company, but it was so bad that one of our salespeople came back and said, some people don’t even think we’re in the market anymore because we were spending so little on marketing, they weren’t even aware we were still a product. And so that definitely gave me an appreciation for finding that right balance of, okay, marketing really does need to spend it works. You can’t always attribute it directly. You may not be, like you said the TikTok example or different things.
You can’t always say this is what resulted in a sale, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have an impact. So talking that I really appreciate both the answers about building that trust, talking to each other about what you need to do and making sure that you have that relationship so you don’t end up in a situation where they run to the CEO and then someone comes to Aviv’s office and is like, wait, why are you doing this? Instead of you knowing upfront that they have some concerns and you’ve been able to discuss it with them first.
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, yeah. No, it’s a big challenge because I think especially for finance people, you want to be able to see everything in excel. You want to be able to measure everything and it’s not just always possible. I think marketing is still a mix of a science and an art and it’s a matter of also of trust that you like for marketers, you need to have with the CEO or CFO that maybe you need to allocate the X amount of budget to first of all reach your targets in terms of building a pipeline or revenue, but you always need to have the other things that you just believe in them, even if it’s very hard to measure.
Christian Wattig
Yeah, that’s a great point that you’re raising there Ari, because as a finance person, as an FP&A leader even you’re, you are always trying to make decisions based off of data. You’re always trying to be as data focused as possible. But it also took me a little while to realize that when it comes to return on marketing investment, that’s not always possible. It really is an art in science and that simply, I think there’s two reasons maybe that also helps understand the listeners wider as the case. The first one is allocation and understanding which part of your marketing mix of all the different activities that you’re doing at the same time is delivering which return on investment. So for example, you may be able to measure how many clicks you’re getting with your Google ads for example, but if at the same time you’re on a Facebook campaign or maybe even a TV ad, then it becomes really difficult to attribute how much each of those activities is actually contributing to your revenues. So that can be really difficult.
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, I know the point here that we’re talking in marketing circles here is we call it sometimes dark social and so on. It’s think about it, if you just look at analytics, so the best sources I can share in marketing that come to the websites are people that come from Google or organic or direct that just come to your website or search for the world. For us example, the branding Datarails come to our website and sign up. So in a way, if you would ask from a finance perspective what you should do, so what am I supposed to do? Invest more in Google organic or more in the website? No, that’s not the solution. The question is why did that person even think about searching for my brand name? And it’s not everything you can measure. How would you be able to know if, let’s say a few CFOs spoke about Datarails over dinner and decided one of them decided to check it out or maybe they were in some kind of slack community or they heard about it in a podcast or something like that. Some things are measurable, let’s say like a Facebook ad, you just click on it, but that’s like the bad thing and the incentives that sometimes it makes you just want to invest in the things that easily measurable as opposed to the things that might really make an impact. But it’s very hard to measure
Christian Wattig:
Exactly. And it becomes even a bigger issue when you’re making decisions about how much to invest into direct response marketing. So that’s marketing that where you immediately looking for a purchase and then brand investment, which is much more long term where you’re building your company’s brand and hope that then later on that leads to people responding to direct response marketing. And the challenges that brand investment is very difficult to measure from a finance point of view because there is no immediate goal of immediately making a profit from the investment. It’s more over the long term. It’s setting a seed in people’s head than when the next time they’re thinking about FP&A process automation data wells comes to mind. And what really convinced me that this is more an art than a science is when we did customer interviews and we asked them, so okay, now you can tell us which of all these ads that you’ve seen convinced you to sign up and they didn’t even know. So if they don’t even know, there’s really not much data day to work with. So that’s really where you have to find the balance when you’re working in finance.
Paul Barnhurst:
So speaking to that, you made a lot of good points. There’s obviously an art and a science. How do you recommend finance and marketing get on the same page of how to measure things, right? Because you have to measure performance regardless of whether you can attribute everything into nice clean buckets, which obviously you can’t. So how do you think about that alignment? Cause first that’s often a friction point. Marketing may be looking at things one way to say, hey, we think we’re getting at a good return, and finance may be looking at it a different way and saying, Hey, we don’t think you’re getting a good return. So how do you get on the same page and make sure you’re aligned around those metrics to determine if campaigns are working, if marketing is giving an ROI that makes sense for the company. What’s your thoughts on that, Aviv?
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, so I would say that despite everything we said, so you live in the world that you want to be able to measure. So you do want to first as a CMO, focus on things that are measurable, that in terms of the CEO, they’re asking, okay, I invested X amount of dollars here. How many SQL sales qualified leads it got? How many meetings? How many opportunities, how many sales? You want to be able to be really good at that. But I think if you’re experienced enough and if you are able to deliver the results you need to have this kind of relationship with your CEO and CFO and saying, I still need, I dunno, 10%, 20% of the budget, just let me do things I believe in. It’s harder to measure, but let’s try doing it. I’ll give you one example of how we’re trying to measure it.
Although again, it’s very difficult because like I said, the examples before, it’s like if someone talks with another CFO or let’s say they’re in a Slack community or something like that, you can’t really measure it in terms of analytics. So what we do on our website, when you sign up on a form, we ask you, how did you hear about us. At the beginning I actually had it, it’s like a dropdown menu, but we change it to free text because if someone says LinkedIn, sometimes it’s even not enough. I want to know why LinkedIn, LinkedIn ad, maybe a LinkedIn influencer, maybe an employee posted something. So it’s very hard to do big data on it, but it just adds a lot to the equation. So in addition to the form and the website, we also have our SDRs, when they call someone the sales development representatives, after they sign up for a demo, we ask them to ask again how did they hear about us? And sometimes they actually get different responses from what someone filled in a form. So we constantly try to measure it. Although we know it’s difficult because at the end of the day we want to know where to invest and sometimes we see, yeah, I was in a dinner and CFO spoke about it or a Slack channel or I listened to this podcast. And yeah, we’re constantly trying to do it, but it’s very difficult.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I would imagine it’s very difficult. Christian, any thoughts there from your perspective? From the finance end of things?
Christian Wattig:
Yeah, so attribution on a low level detail is difficult, but what you can do and what companies do is take marketing expenses at a high level customer position cost and then compare it to your lifetime value. That’s a common ratio for subscription-based businesses. Your LTV, your lifetime value should be three times as high as your customer acquisition cost if you’re an early growing company. But then you can also look at other metrics. So for example, at Unilever we are also looked at working versus non-working media. So what it means is how much of your media budget is spent actually on to Google for launching the ad or to a TV channel for launching the ad that’s working And non-working is the money that goes into creating the ad, maybe agencies that you’re working with, contractors, et cetera. And making sure that your non-working expenses aren’t over proportional compared to the expenses that actually make your money.
That’s one. Another metric or non-financial metric we look at is we looked at this on time and in full. So when you’re giving a brief that you want to have this story, you want this asset created, what’s the percentage of those assets that actually get delivered on time and full by your agency partner or by your team? Because whenever an asset is delayed, that technically hurts your bottom line. And then a really important metric also is asset wear out. So essentially when you, you’re spending a lot of time creating an ad and then when you run it, you want to run it long enough so that until it starts to wear out, until you, you’re saturating the market. And many companies make the mistake of always going after the next shiny thing and creating another campaign and another campaign without making sure that the old assets actually worn out. You know, can work with analytics companies, market research companies that tell you whether your asset is worn out or not. And then finally, asset test scores. So at Unilever we had a rule that we weren’t allowed to publish to launch any ad campaign until it got tested, until a peer group reviewed it and we got good test scores.
Paul Barnhurst
Thank you for sharing. And I managed FP&A for a marketing company. We marketed the automotive space, so really around service and sales trying to get people to bring their car back to the dealership. So there’s a lot of response rate and different metrics and we had multiple different channels and it was always a lot of things you mentioned here, attribution, different challenges, how often do you refresh things? Because we had a lot of where they could custom build them off catalogs, the different ads they wanted to do and special direct market campaigns. We called them on demand. And so I can relate to a lot of what you’re saying there Christian and it’s definitely can be a challenge at times. And Aviv, you look like you’re about to say something there a minute ago.
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, so I agree with everything to mentioned and again it comes back, we’re talking both of you about also direct response and how to measure stuff. So of course a lot of the stuff we do and we have a large user acquisition team, whether this company in previous companies I was at constantly AB test, test stuff, see what works. But it’s always a problem when you limit yourself just through things to that are going to generate results now. And in my startup marketing class, I actually talk about it that think about it like dating. Imagine you go on Tinder and all you do is send me messages to girls saying you want to get married, this is a PG version, of course. You want to get married, you want to get married. This is not going to lead you to where you want to be. You need to start gaining the interest you want to get people to follow you in the world of B2B we say that within our target audience, probably 99% of the tall addressable market are not ready to buy. Maybe 1% is we can’t only do ads for direct response for that 1% that are going to click on it, ask for a demo and become a new client. You have to play on the long term game. You have to start conversation, whether it’s engaging LinkedIn or podcasts or YouTube stuff and getting people to follow you, to start liking you, to want to follow the things that you’re doing. And maybe eventually you’re going to make the sale. It may take a six month, might take a year, but then it makes it, when we go back to finance, very hard to measure because you can’t really measure throughout a year all those little things that happen, especially if they didn’t need to actually sign up or any actual things that you can measure. But it’s just the right thing to do and it’s very hard for both marketers and finance people to graphs that you know just don’t have that full control out of it.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. So speaking to that, I saw a post from someone who was a chief marketing officer on LinkedIn in the finance space and they’re like “reminder sales cells impacts the quarter, marketing impacts the future quarters”. That idea that you can’t go to marketing a week before the quarter and hey, we need your help in getting a bunch of sales. It’s like it’s a longer play than that. And it was a really good point. I really liked the way she kind of laid it out and it speaks to what you were talking about there.
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, I think it goes back to, so what you mentioned, and we spoke about it before about the incentive system, we’re talking about finance versus marketing there’s something both for CMOs or CFOs, you are measured in the results of this quarter. So you want to do things that like the CEO or if you’re publicly traded, the stockholders are going to be happy now. So it’s very hard sometimes to say, yes, I’m willing to do something that’s going to turn in results maybe six months from now or a year because maybe we’re not going to be here if I don’t deliver the results now. But yet again, if you don’t do it, so maybe now you’ll have a job and in six month a year if you didn’t really invest in creating good content and a reason to follow you, then you’re kind of in a tough spot. If everything has to be direct response,
Paul Barnhurst:
Great point. And aligning those incentives is so important and it’s a challenge because often you’re worried about the quarter and you’re trying to figure out, okay, how do I help bring in some sales this quarter? But it’s a long-term play as well. So I think we had a good conversation there. Appreciate that. I want to shift gears just a little bit here and ask you Aviv, what’s it been marketing to the FP&A community maybe how has that community been different from other industries you’ve worked in?
Aviv Canaani:
Interesting. Yeah, so actually in my previous industry it was very different. I was working at Workeez in the field service management space, so it was like a CRM for locksmith, garage door repair technicians, plumbers as you can imagine different than FP&A professionals. I think there’s a things that are different. I think for example, previous space, we could post things online and people in different Facebook groups and we would get dozens of different answers and people would start debating and they have less of a sense of what are other people thinking about them maybe as opposed to finance professionals or professionals in general. So it was fun. Even when we sent marketing emails to people after Covid, we sent an email asking them, how are you doing? Is everything fine? We got heartwarming emails saying, yeah, it’s been a tough time. People are opening up and when finance people are a bit more conservative you can say, but they look much more, they want to see more of the facts, they want to read more, they want to look into more white papers and reviews. They really want to make sure that you’re less of BSing in a way. Straight down the facts and actually see the product as much as possible in our ads. We try to show the product as much as we can and doing really high quality conversations and really delivering, I think value. That’s the main thing we notice. I notice finance professionals they are looking for.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you, I appreciate that. I’m curious Christian, similar type question for you, but with the bootcamp, what have you found trying to market to FP&A professionals? Cause I’m sure that’s very different than supporting marketing and support and being in the FP&A role. So what have you found? Yeah, yeah, I mean going into this, I didn’t know much about marketing at all, right? Really just my background is an FP&A of course. And in the beginning it was tough because I was like, okay, I have this course here but no one knows about
It. So how can I show people what it’s all about? And then if I put out a link and say, hey, I do this free workshop to teach you something and introduce the course, why would anyone do that? Why would anyone actually take an hour out of the day and join that? That’s how I thought in the beginning. And it took me a while to understand that it’s all about building trust. It’s actually very similar to working inside of a business. When I started posting regularly on LinkedIn, I posted almost every day and I just shared what I know just for free without any ask attached to it. Then people started to see that, okay, this guy actually knows what is talking about and they got interested and they looked me up and they found my course website and that’s how it all started. And I’m really fortunate that someone gave me that advice early on that nowadays it’s not about spending a lot of money on ads, it’s about showing people, proving to people essentially that they actually know what you’re talking about. And from there I realize that I actually enjoy writing and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Great. Thank you for sharing and I totally agree with you, especially when you are the brand, a business of one, it’s so important to be able to show you’re qualified that you know what you’re talking about, to build that credibility cause they’re coming to you for training and if they don’t think you’re qualified, right, they’re not going to come to you. You’ve lost any chance of bringing in that customer. So it’s a great point there. So appreciate both of you sharing a little bit about the marketing to the FP&A community and how it’s different. So speaking of communities, I know you guys data rails recently launched an FP&A community. It’s a slack community of you. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about that? What led to launching that?
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, so again, based not what I said before, we really believe in the long run and something we notice that’s missing is in the world of FP&A, there’s not one place that I always try to figure out what I was talking with FP&A people or CFOs of where people can really share ideas about FP&A. So yeah, some people like you guys actually post a LinkedIn but it’s more like a public forum, but there’s no place where you can just share ideas, really have open conversations, really debate maybe between different vendors or between best practices and a close community where you feel safe. And I have stuff like that for marketing. So I thought it’s worthwhile to really open community just for FP&A, please google it, go to FP&A to search for FP&A community or go to the database website and you’ll be able to join it.
And again, the goal is not sales at all. We really want to have online conversations. It’s strictly forbidding to talk about any trying to sell or market any specific software. So we already have a few hundred people like that join and we’re trying to build it more and more. There’s a lot of more room to grow it or I’m seeing some interesting conversations are starting there and I think it’s just the beginning because it just feels like something that FP&A community just really wants and needs and just something that was lacking in the industry. So hopefully it’s going to be successful. So we’ll see with time.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great, I’d like to see that grow. And just in case anyone didn’t hear that, you can go to the Datarails website or just search FP&A community on Google and you’ll find it, it’s a Slack community and I know Christian’s a member of it myself and seen some great conversations on there that people have had. So thanks for sharing a little bit about that and creating that for the community. I agree with you, it’s something that was good to have because we need those opportunities to connect and discuss things. So now we’re going to move into a little bit more kind of the say the personal part of our podcast here. A couple questions we ask all our guests. And we’ll start with the first one here and we’ll give this one to you Christian. Can you maybe tell us about an accomplishment as you look back on your career, something you use in a job interview that you’re most proud of?
Christian Wattig:
So I was in charge of the team at Unilever that manages the marketing expenses centrally. So it’s like a center of excellence where we were part, instead of partnering with just one team, we were responsible for managing the forecast and the budget for all of the marketing teams. And when I started that role, I was surprised to see that everything was done in Excel. A budget, I can’t quote the exact numbers, but in the hundreds of millions that was managed in Excel was with shocking to me. And so I started a project where we wanted to get, replace that process with a proper tool, a proper FP&A tool. Datarails wasn’t around back then, it was a while ago, otherwise of course it would’ve went that way, but it was a different tool. I’m not going to name it, but it was a fantastic opportunity for me to lead a project like that because I was responsible end to end first I had to get the budget for it and the CFO originally wasn’t convinced, right?
Because it would save the finance team a lot of time. That’s how I pitched it initially. And he wasn’t really that convinced. And then I talked to other senior leaders and tried to figure out, okay, what does the CFO actually really care about? And I realized that what he cares most about is financial controls. And so I approached him that way. And it’s true that when you move out of just vanilla Excel into a proper software, your financial controls are better because you can’t accidentally upload the wrong version or lose a file or get lost in email. And that ended up convincing him and we got the budget, but then I thought basically then I thought the job was more or less done. We found a vendor, we started implementation process, but I realized that the job wasn’t even close to done because now I had to convince the marketing team and there were a few people there who actually a number of people at the beginning who were happy with the way things were managed before. They understood their Excel files, they knew what they had to do and they didn’t want to switch to a different tool.
They didn’t want to learn having to learn that they didn’t want to go through the process. And so the beginning,
Too at the beginning I was just emphasizing all the benefits so it put save time, etc. It didn’t really ring true for them. And then I had the idea, okay, maybe let’s grab two of the most marketing managers who were most against the tool who had the most criticism. And we actually brought them into the project team. So they were joining the meetings with us, they were meeting with the vendor and the vendor was very receptive to changes that we were proposing to the tool. And then once they became part of the experience, they completely changed because they realized that their voice was heard. They realized that we are actually trying to make the life easier, not just the life of finance. And then they became our best ambassadors. They talked to the rest of their team and in the end people were fully on board and it was a big success. So it was a really cool story.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing that Christian. And I think there’s a lesson in there and influencing. Bring in your detractors and make ’em part of the project and it’s amazing how quickly you can get buy-in and things go smooth because there’s usually always one or two voices that are driving a lot of decisions and if you get the right people along, it makes things become a lot easier. So thank you for sharing that. There’s a lot to learn there about partnering and influencing in that answer. So this next question is for you Aviv, and this is one we like to ask everybody. Can you describe a time you experienced a failure at work, something where it just didn’t go as planned, maybe a marketing campaign that was a disaster or project implementation, and then what did you learn from the experience? What was the takeaway of going through that experience?
Aviv Canaani:
Yes, I think my answer can be even a mix of this question and also the previous question you asked. So in my previous role when I started my success was within six months I was able to reduce the cost of acquisition to a third of what it was before. So that should have been my success story. If that was the question you asked. The problem was that we were still working with lower budgets and what happened is we start to increase the budgets more and more and more the hyper growth mentality of 2020. And I think that the thing that we failed on is that we didn’t have a strong enough product market fit and the more we increase the budget, it’s like drugs in a way. You become addicted because every time you don’t hit your target you want to put more money in and more money in.
And at some point it just didn’t make any more sense. And I think the problem was we were still trying to get into too many verticals at once with the same solution. In retrospect, I think we should have focused more on a specific vertical or waited until the product would be a better fit for this vertical or another. And we were just trying to hammer it too hard and it broke. We had to take at some point a step back and I think this mentality of spray and pray may have been maybe something that worked to some degree in 2020 or even 2021. But I think especially now when we’re know at the end of 2022 with our recession and everything, inflation and everything that’s happening, I think all companies need to be smart. And I think that’s something I learned from and something we’re doing also now in Datarails. We’re understanding that sometimes it’s the smart thing to do is reduce your focus on crazy growth in terms of growing responsibly like Christian said, like the CAC LTV and looking at the payback period, you want to do it the right way. Yeah, that’s something I learned from that failure in my previous company.
Paul Barnhurst:
It’s funny when you said the pray and spray, it reminded me, I worked at a large bank and the conversation we had one time is at the bank we would point and point and point never shoot, right? Some people just pray and spray and then we were talking about one of the main competitors, their philosophy was just point and shoot. It’s like kind of go for everything. It’s like we would never make a decision. They were always jumping from thing to thing. And the reality is the answer is somewhere in the middle there’s times small bets you want to move quickly, but there’s value like you said in discipline and not getting caught up in having it be a drug as you mentioned, just keep spending and spending and spending.
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, I think it’s the incentive system like we discussed in the past for marketing. It’s like you want to hit your revenue target, especially again 2021 and times like that, you can’t tell your CEO you know what, let’s reduce our targets. And the same thing I think for the CFO, the CEO. You can’t go to the board and say, you know what? We promised you X four growth, you let’s do it more responsibly. Let’s do an X two and take it down a notch because the product isn’t ready. And I think you always have to look at the incentives of specific individuals to understand decision making.
Paul Barnhurst:
I fully agree with you. Lot of great points there. So this next question is one we like to ask. That’s a personal question and so it’s something unique about you we wouldn’t find online that you can share with our audience. And Aviv, we’ll start with you first.
Aviv Canaani:
So I don’t think finance is boring. I know a lot of finance people might think that marketers or salespeople would think it’s boring, but I actually like that part of the job. I like creating budgets and working on forecasting and working with the CFO and planning for the next year all this kind of budget plans and doing different scenarios. I do enjoy that part. So if you use Datarails a like sync, so I actually use a tool called funnel IO that syncs to your Excel and updates automatically with everything that’s happening within HubSpot and Salesforce and all your numbers in. Yeah, like I mentioned, I also did my MBA, I have friends in finance and I must admit no one’s perfect. But yeah, I enjoy finance.
Paul Barnhurst:
So that means Christian, he actually kind of likes us people. I mean that’s a good thing. I guess we got to have a few marketing friends. So Christian, how about you? What’s something you can share with our audience?
Christian Wattig:
Yeah, so what a lot of people don’t know is that I have a background in martial arts. So when I was a teenager I did a lot of judo, I’m brown belt in judo and I also taught it to kids as a teenager, as a judo coach. And it actually ended up being a big factor in deciding to go down my path to study business and going to leadership path because we had this one kid in our class, in our judo class that was very rude. He would never do what we asked him to do. He would bother the other kids instead. And we tried everything. My partner and I, we tried to make him do pushups and let him run around so he can get a bit more rid of his energy. None of that works. We talked to him, we talked to his parents, none of that worked.
And then I thought, okay, let’s try something different. And I went to him and I said, Hey, we have a lot of kids here today. Do you maybe want to help us a bit and help us as a coach? And we told him, hey, maybe you can go over to those kids and you’ve done this for a while, how to do this technique, maybe you can explain it to them. And he lit up and he went there and he explained it to those kids and he was so excited about getting his job then seeing that we trust him do that. He had never seen something like that even ever since he changed overnight. And from then on he was one of the best behaved kids that we had because he really felt empowered and he felt that we believe in him. And it really opened my eyes to how much of an impact a good leader or a good mentor can have. And that played a role, definitely played a big role in my decision to study business and working towards a management role.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing. That sounds like a very rewarding experience and a reminder that there’s different ways you can reach people and bring them to accomplish great things when sometimes you don’t think you can went from being the problem child, so to speak, to being a great asset for you. I really appreciate that answer. So this next question is one of the favorites we have. We ask everybody this, we’ll start with Aviv because I’m pretty sure I know what Christian’s answer’s going to be. Aviv, what’s your favorite Excel function feature? What’s your favorite thing about Excel?
Aviv Canaani:
SUM, summing up numbers is amazing. No, actually everyone else. So I was doing V lookup, I’m listening to the episodes. I’m saying probably you finance people think, all I know is SUM and average, but actually also V lookup. I think it’s great actually from listening to the previous episodes. I know I think I need to ask Christian to teach me about index match but one step at a time and based on what I mentioned before, I also love the different tools that do integration , but like I mentioned before, funnel IO or other ones, everything that can really automate what happens within Excel. I think that’s really what makes Excel even better
Paul Barnhurst:
Agree. There’s a lot of great integrations out there. And Christian first, lastly, what do you think of VLookup?
Christian Wattig:
I’m not a fan of VLOOKUP. So Paul and I had a big discussion about that and on LinkedIn about X lookup and I’m Index Match through and through and I could probably talk for half an hour about how great index match is. Give you a 30 seconds.
No basically iIndex Match. It’s a dynamic cell reference. So if something changes and you source data, your Index Match won’t show your wrong number. But VLookup does and that’s not even the worst thing about we lookup. The worst thing about we lookup is it shows you a different number than what you are looking for. If your source data changes in the wrong way and it doesn’t even give you an error message, no, it just shows you a wrong number. So you may report a wrong result without even knowing it. And Index Match doesn’t have these flaws. Index Match just shows you a nice error when it can do something. And that’s why I’m a big Index Match fan
Paul Barnhurst:
This is the fun of asking this question. Everybody has a different opinion. Yeah, I like X lookup myself and Power Query, but my view is use whichever one works for you. Just understand the pros and cons. If you know what you’re doing and you’re making sure you’re checking your data and it’s working, I’m all good with it. But everybody has different views there. Well first I just want to thank both of you for being on the show today. We’ve really enjoyed the time here. I know I’ve enjoyed talking about marketing, I’ve learned some new things and I haven’t spent a ton of time supporting marketing, so I always enjoy these conversations. And just the last question I’m going to have for each of you, if someone wants to get in contact with you, maybe learn more, what’s the best way to connect? And we’ll start with you, Aviv, on this question. What would be the best way to connect with you?
Aviv Canaani:
Yeah, I guess LinkedIn, LinkedIn’s the best to connect with new people, professional networks. So yeah, reach out to me. Aviv Canaani. of course the Datarails, you’ll easily find me. I’m probably the only one with that name on LinkedIn.
Paul Barnhurst
Yeah, I wouldn’t imagine there’s a lot, especially Datarails. So thank you Aviv, Canaani and Christian, how about you? What’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you?
Christian Wattig:
Same here. I’m on LinkedIn every day so feel free to reach out there. Name is Christian Wattig. Also unique on LinkedIn, fortunately so yeah, feel free to connect and happy to chat. Thank
Paul Barnhurst:
You for that. Christian, thank you again, Aviv and Christian for being on the show and hope you guys come back again sometime. We really enjoyed the conversation, so thank you.
Aviv Canaani:
Awesome. Thank you very much.
Christian Wattig:
Paul. Thank you very much Paul. I really appreciate it.
