Quick Summary: Customer success-finance partnership struggles stem from poor communication and misaligned language. CS leaders must translate adoption wins into financial impact, involve finance early, and align on shared metrics like NRR and profitability to secure true partnership.
This is a guest post by Jonathan Marciano, VP, Brand and Communications, Datarails.
Customer success teams have the worst relationship with their finance department of any department.
Datarails, the FP&A solution for Excel users, carried out a survey of 240 US department heads, spanning sales to R&D. To pull out a few pain-inducing stats, 64% of CS leaders say they suffer from poor communication with their CFO. Overall, 100% of CS leaders see the CFOs most important goal as “limiting spending”, affirming the CFO’s office as the “Department of No”. Not the greatest start for a CFO-CS relationship.
“It is concerning but not surprising” says Jeff Heckler, Director of Customer Success at Jurny. “In my experience, this isn’t due to a lack of intent but a mismatch in language. Semantics and fluency matter. CS speaks in retention drivers and adoption curves, while finance speaks in cost control and margin contribution. Unless CS translates its impact into the CFO’s language—quantified revenue influence—this gap will persist.”
This is a finding only reinforced by the numbers. Only 64% of the CS executives surveyed say their comprehension of the P&L (summarizing a company’s revenues, expenses, and resulting profit or loss over a specific period) is “good”, while 36% admit it is merely “okay”. No CS executives claim their understanding of the P&L is “excellent”.
The dream of customer success-finance partnership
However, if you pick up any consultancy report, from McKinsey to PwC, they suggest a different reality in companies, where “finance business partnership” appears engrained in cross-department relations.
CFOs-as-business-partners are variously described as “co-pilots of the business, pointing out the dangers or possible shortcuts, resulting in valuable information at the right time” (PwC) or providing “actionable insights working with business leaders strategically focused and decision-making supporting activities (Deloitte), or finance business partners ensuring that finance colleagues “contribute to the conversation and reframe new business conversations and decisions” (KPMG).
Heckler points out a couple of examples from his career where this dream actually happened. At Pipedrive, he partnered with a customer success executive on a forecast model showing a 5-point improvement in net revenue retention (NRR). At MarketSource, he partnered with the CFO’s financial planning and analysis team to build a model that showed how improving onboarding efficiency by 15% accelerated ARR recognition, turning a CS efficiency play into a revenue story.
David Karp, Chief Customer Officer at DISQO writes: “At a previous company, our CFO and I realized we were unintentionally working from different definitions of “at-risk” revenue. What I called “red” accounts, they assumed were unrecoverable. That gap led to some overly conservative forecasting and some challenging board conversations.
“Once we realized the gap, we built a shared risk-scoring framework, aligned renewal tiers to forecast categories, and ensured Finance was in the room early during QBR and planning cycles. Our forecasts improved dramatically, and the partnership solidified from then on.”
Related: How to work more effectively with your CFO as a customer leader.
The big consequences of a failed relationship
For some, a failure to explain CS value to finance bosses saw customer success professionals suffer the biggest brunt when layoffs hit, per the latest data. Jan Young, founder and CEO of StepUpXchange, provides a course which has seen 30 CS managers and leaders getting a leg up in better explaining the financial imperative to those in CS.
Young explains: “For CS leaders, even if they’re focused on generating revenue, they still do not understand what the P&L is and what their impact is. Back in 2022, 2023, when there were layoffs, CS leaders were taken by surprise. They were like: ‘why would we be cut just because there’s no new logos?’ The CFO is trying to show profitability to their investors. You are COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) by definition, unless you worked out with your CFO to have the revenue generating part of your team under OPEX. There’s a fair amount that you can’t get away from being under COGS. This is news to them.”
Sumi Jaiswal, founder of Only CS Jobs, ramped up the message in a viral LinkedIn post.
“Happiness doesn’t pay bills. CFOs aren’t impressed by how well your team nurtured a great relationship if the customer didn’t renew. They’re not interested in your Slack channels overflowing with customer praise if your expansion targets are falling short. If you can’t show the direct correlation between these metrics and cash in the bank, you’re wasting time. They care about one thing: Profitability per customer. Yet most CS leaders can’t prove profitability. Instead, they bury CFOs in vanity KPIs and feel-good anecdotes while demanding bigger budgets. For years, CS teams has been the department that cries for more: more CSMs, more tools, more budget. Where’s the ROI on those investments? When was the last time you increased renewals or expansions by 2x your team’s cost?”
How to make friends (and influence the finance team)
The reality: CS leaders are pretty stressed about approaching finance colleagues. As Young points out, CS teams are often very far from the CFO’s office and have a minimal to zero relationship with finance chiefs. At best, the Datarails survey shows, 48% of CS executives feel “somewhat comfortable” approaching the CFO or finance department. More extreme: 31% of CS executives are outright uncomfortable knocking on their CFO’s door.
Heckler outlines a playbook he follows and recommends to other CS leaders that involves knowing the common ground in the relationship and accurate language of finance to break this pattern.
1: Translate outcomes into financial language. Don’t just say “We improved adoption” — say “We accelerated time-to-value by 22%, contributing to $X in retained ARR.
2: Involve finance early in the CS lifecycle. Bring them into retention forecasting, onboarding optimization, and tech stack evaluations. Make them co-owners of expansion modeling, not post-mortem reviewers.
3: Align on a shared metric stack. Use metrics like NRR, CAC payback, and customer lifetime margin to bridge CS-finance thinking. These translate customer impact into CFO priorities.
4: Use forecasts, not just retrospective data. Finance wants predictive insight. Use churn risk models and expansion probability scoring to contribute to revenue planning, not just QBR storytelling.
5: Respect their agenda. CFOs are focused on cost, and rightly so. Show how CS reduces avoidable churn, drives expansion with no new CAC, and prevents support burden. It’s not defensive—it’s disciplined.
Related: how to reposition your CSP as a revenue management platform.
From fear to fast finance friends
Young adds: “What I’ve found is for every leader, once they go through this and they start to build out this data and they start to share it with their CFO or VP of finance, is that all of a sudden they’re tuned in and they’re best buds and it changes. Because when they shift they can do things more profitably, and be on the same page with what the CFO is trying to show the board and do on behalf of the company.”
Heckler adds: “The CFO is not the Department of No. They’re the Department of Know. Know your impact. Know your inefficiencies. Know your growth levers. When CS gives them that clarity, the relationship flips from friction to partnership.”
Jonathan Marciano is VP, Brand and Communications, Datarails, which is transforming the CFO’s office to make it the home of business insights. Datarails allows companies to keep their Excel financial models and spreadsheets and benefit from AI for data consolidation, reporting and planning.
Want to work more effectively with your CFO?
In this ChurnZero webinar, You Mon Tsang and Maxio CEO Randy Wootton tackle the CCO-CFO disconnect head-on, digging into the shared and unshared metrics of each team to identify the common ground where CS leaders can bridge the gap.
