Add Predictability, Manage Risks

Here’s a snippet of wonderful insight I gleaned from someone working in Finance about selling to CFOs.  He was talking specifically about hedging.

“Hedging doesn’t add value, but it does manage risk and adds predictability to your business planning”

He went on to describe how major shareholders (that in his opinion had no experience of running a business for themselves) liked to be told of how companies that they invest in are doing everything they can to manage all the risk.

It’s been quite a while since I was last in the arena of selling to a CFO, but I can indeed imagine how well a pitch along the lines of the aforementioned predictability would go down.  My most frequent prospect role is the person at the sales helm, and I wonder how important to them ‘predictability in forecasting’ or ‘managing the risk of competitive threats’ would for instance be.  Quite appealling, I’d suggest.