Who effectively controls software purchasing decisions today: departmental budget owners or finance and the CFO?

Harry Stebbings · May 24, 2023

The macro downturn has reverted purchasing power to the CFO and away from individual contributors and teams, producing sharply segmented buyer and user personas

Scope: current macro environment

25:36 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn

Julian Teixeira · Mar 7, 2025

Companies no longer buy software the way they used to — CFOs now scrutinize essentially every purchase rather than deferring to a department's envelope of spend

Boards are holding CFOs accountable for managing spend efficiently

41:51 20Sales: Everything You Know About Sales Playbooks is Wrong | How to Hire and Train Your First Sales Hires | How to Crush Pipeline and Deal Reviews as a Team | How to Structure Sales Teams and Sales Comp Plans with Julian Teixeira, CRO @ 1Password

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

In 2023, happy customers still churned because CFO-driven budget consolidation forced them to pick multi-product vendors, not because they disliked the product.

Churn calls were like breakup conversations — customers said they loved Gong but had no choice against vendors offering three products; many are now boomeranging back.

Scope: many of those customers are returning now

52:17 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong

Frank Fillmann · Mar 22, 2023

In the current environment the CFO has become a new participant in enterprise buying cycles, so proposals must contain a quantified value element a CFO who never meets you can evaluate on their own

A CFO who has never met the seller and never used the product will get personally involved in material enterprise deals, so the deal has to stand up financially without the seller in the room

30:42 Proposals must be self evidently valuable to a cfo who never meets the seller

Jesse Zhang · Sep 19, 2025

There is little CFO resistance to new AI pricing because C-suites already want to adopt AI and see customer service and coding as the two obvious places to start

Nobody needs convincing to use AI, so the vendor's job is only to demonstrate the business case with pilot results

22:32 Cfo resistance is low because c suite already wants ai