#113 How to Earn Your CFO’s Trust - with Stephen Diorio, Author of "Revenue Operations"

Episode notes

Stephen Diorio, author of "Revenue Operations" and a go-to-market strategy veteran with decades of experience - from co-founding one of the first GTM strategy firms in 1993 to serving as a Gartner analyst - joins Janis and Philipp to unpack the math of growth. Stephen explains why the financial systems behind most B2B organizations fundamentally fail to measure what actually drives revenue, and how RevOps can close the gap between what the business spends on growth and what it actually gets back. We cover: Why traditional accounting treats all go-to-market spend as expense - and why that's fundamentally wrong Growth assets: databases, brands, digital channels, content - and why no one measures their value The bow tie model: what it captures, what it misses, and why the back end is where CFOs get scared Why a third of closed deals originate from actions taken 12 - 18 months earlier The 25 post-booking variables that can double or halve lifetime customer value Why "cost to sell" has 100 definitions across 100 companies - and none are right The dark funnel and LLM search: why 90% of the buying process is invisible Forward-looking vs.

• #118 Inside RevOps at a $100M+ ARR Consumption-Based Business - with Markus Jaensch, Head of RevOps at Aiven80 / 100
• #117 Why Your Forecast Is Inaccurate (+ How to Fix It) - with Andy Smidmore, RevOps Leader (ex-Confluent, Cloudera, Docker, Ditto)
• #116 Sales Forecasting in the Age of AI - with Janis Zech & Philipp Stelzer (WeFlow)
• #115 Building a Customer-Centric Revenue Org - with Robert Kaiser & Christoph Dünhuber, Revenue & RevOps Leaders at Tacto
• #114 Running RevOps on AI Workflows & Agents - with Eric Portugal Welsh, Head of RevOps at PlanetScale