The Glean Blog

You’re committed to Sales enablement. What about Finance enablement?

Written by Zach Negrin | December 23, 2021

Finance enablement is providing finance professionals with the tools and processes that allow them to do their jobs better, saving time, working smarter, and becoming experts of your company's spend.


Sales enablement is defined as the process of providing your business's Sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. As a leader within your organization, this makes perfect sense to you: give your people the tools they need to do their job effectively.

Building on this principle, how committed are you to your Finance team? Are they enabled too? 

Finance enablement is providing finance professionals with the tools and processes that allow them to do their jobs better, saving time, working smarter and becoming experts of your company’s spend. 

Among today’s business leaders, Finance enablement has evolved from being a luxury ‘one day’ investment to an operational necessity. 

Enlightened CEOs, CFOs and team leaders got the wake-up call: every dollar wasted on spend inefficiency, invoice errors or lack of expense visibility is one dollar taken away from marketing, engineering or revenue generation efforts. 


Tools facilitate knowledge

Imagine your Head of Sales saying, “Our revenue grew 25% last quarter, but we’re not sure why.”

It would be so absurd that it’d probably raise concerns, right? 

Sales enablement tools use easy to navigate dashboards with double-click capability so business leaders can better understand revenue drivers. These tools enable replies like “Our revenue grew 25% primarily because new user acquisition increased 20%, driven by 13% top-of funnel growth and 6% improvement in conversion rates. Pricing also increased 5% in the quarter.”

But if this is the fine-grained level of understanding that is expected of your Sales team, why not your Finance team too? 

 

Finance Enabled

“Our marketing expense increased by 10% last quarter but we’re not sure why.”

 

Is this concerning too? 

 

Proactively managed businesses do not — and cannot — fly blind when it comes to spend management. Glean’s Intelligent Accounts Payable solution was created to give Finance professionals access to the same dashboards, historical data, and in-depth analytics that their Sales colleagues have utilized for years. 

 

Glean’s Finance enablement solution surfaces insights proactively and allows Finance professionals to double-click to a deeper understanding of their business’s spend drivers. For instance, drivers of spend variance, upcoming relationship renewals, duplicate bill alerts, and savings recommendations are readily flagged in Glean.  Research has shown that $130 billion a year is being lost by US companies because of a lack of spend visibility; it is time to stop this bleed. 

 

What Finance Enablement Sounds Like

“Our marketing expense grew 10% in the quarter, as we invested more in top-performing channels of LinkedIn and Google. Despite the increase, our CAC declined 8% driven by the higher ROI channels and improved conversion rate."

 

Does this sound like what you’d like to hear from the members of your Finance team? If yes, email us at info@gleancompany.com to learn more about Glean’s powerful Finance enablement solution.