Selling to the CFO - with Tim Riitters, CFO at Gong

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed and benchmark-validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up Podcast. Today, I am joined by Tim Riitters, the Chief Financial Officer at Gong. We'll be covering three main topic areas with Tim today. First, how Tim uses metrics to inform decision making at Gong, and how that has evolved over time.
How Gong uses metrics in board reporting and quarterly business reviews internally. And third, the key considerations to understand when selling technology to a CFO. Tim, would you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to the seminal moment I know in your career of becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Tim Riitters** (1:16)
Absolutely, Ray. Well, thank you for having me. Delighted to be here. As you said, I'm the CFO at Gong. I've been there for about four years now.
I've been a financial professional for nearly two decades, or actually over two decades now. And the best part of my job is helping companies grow. And in order to do that, you have to have great instrumentation, great measurement.
And so I got introduced to what you're doing at Benchmark. It's been a great resource for us here at Gong. And then, you know, most recently, we both produced content, as you know, about selling to CFOs. We said, hey, we got to get together and have one of these conversations. So again, looking forward to it, excited to be here.

**Ray Rike** (1:52)
Well, I'm excited to have you here. And it really was when I saw your webinar on selling to a CFO, and I had been talking about it kind of simultaneously, I'm like, we got to have you on. We're going to tease that. We're going to cover that at the end of this episode.

**Tim Riitters** (2:06)
Excellent.

**Ray Rike** (2:06)
But it says we're on the Metrics Major podcast. Let's start right there.
Now, this is a pretty open-ended and broad question, and we'll get narrowed down over time. But how do you personally leverage company level performance metrics to help you inform the decision-making process at Gong?

**Tim Riitters** (2:24)
Yeah, I mean, again, great companies are data-driven, Ray, and Gong is one of those companies. We use metrics all the time in the company, and it's a collection of those metrics that ask us questions about, hey, is it time to step on the gas?
Or is it time to think a little bit more about what we're doing, whether it's in go-to-market, whether it's in R&D, to drive the result we want before we put more fuel into the engine, if you will. So it's this sort of traffic lighting that we do, and metrics are the foundation of that to begin with.

**Ray Rike** (2:54)
One of the requests I get all the time is when I speak to CFOs, drill down into specifics.
So you talked about when do we add fuel to certain things? Let's talk about go to market.
Are there a couple ways that you use performance metrics to help drive those decisions? Is it you always do it by market, by segment? There was one or two metrics. You know, like, these are my go-to. I always have to look at these to help inform my decisions.

**Tim Riitters** (3:21)
Yeah, three, three metrics, Ray, in no particular order.
What we call rep attainment, rep participation, and they are two different numbers, right? It's really important to talk about both of them. And then we look a lot at payback periods, CAC payback periods. So again, if those are pointing in the right direction, you know, you can absolutely scale up that revenue organization to go faster and faster and faster. So we look at those as it relates to our Salesforce all the time, all the time in the business.

**Ray Rike** (3:50)
Let's talk about CAC payback period first, because we do a lot of benchmarking and let's just say that CAC payback period isn't trending in the right direction. We've seen it go from, you know, it used to be people would say 12 months regardless of ACV. And we said, okay, let's start segmenting by ACV, company size, go-to-market motion, et cetera. But in the latest public company benchmarks ripped like 25 months for CAC payback period.
Are you seeing the same trends in private?