The Marketing Attribution Strategy for FP&A Teams to Take Control of Marketing ROI with Jeff Greenfield
In this episode of FP&A Unlocked, host Paul Barnhurst is joined by Jeff Greenfield, an entrepreneur, advisor, and founder of Provalytics, a leading attribution and measurement solution. Jeff discusses marketing attribution, the challenges marketers face in proving the impact of their campaigns, and the evolving role of FP&A in understanding marketing spend. He shares his entrepreneurial journey, from building an SEO platform to leading Provalytics in providing marketers with a single source of truth for their efforts.
Jeff Greenfield is the co-founder and CEO of Provalytics, a "cookie-less" attribution solution that helps marketers demonstrate the value of upper-funnel channels like CTV, podcasting, and more. Before founding Provalytics, Jeff built and led multiple digital marketing companies, pioneering the use of data-driven approaches to improve marketing performance.
Expect to Learn:
The challenges marketers face in proving campaign ROI and how to overcome them
Why FP&A professionals should understand marketing’s data models
How marketers and finance teams can align on data-driven goals
How to ensure marketing budgets are being spent effectively
Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode:
“A great FP&A relationship is when marketing can demonstrate that their efforts are working and walk away with the budget they need.” – Jeff Greenfield
“It’s important to understand that marketing is not just about clicks, it’s about capturing attention.” – Jeff Greenfield
Jeff Greenfield shared valuable insights on the challenges of marketing attribution and how finance teams can collaborate with marketing to ensure efficient budget allocation. He emphasized the importance of understanding marketing data and aligning on a common measurement framework for better decision-making.
Campfire: AI-First ERP:
Campfire is the AI-first ERP that powers next-gen finance and accounting teams. With integrated solutions for the general ledger, revenue automation, close management, and more, all in one unified platform.
Explore Campfire today:https://campfire.ai/?utm_source=fpaguy_podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=100225_fpaguy
Follow Jeff:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgreenfield/
Company: https://provalytics.com/
Earn Your CPE Credit
For CPE credit please go to earmarkcpe.com, listen to the episode, download the app, and answer a few questions and earn your CPE certification. To earn education credits for FPAC Certificate, take the quiz on earmark and contact Paul Barnhurst for further details.
In Today’s Episode
[02:40] – Jeff’s Background
[03:33] – What Does Great FP&A Look Like?
[08:21] – Measuring Revenue from Podcasts
[11:25] – From Chiropractic to Marketing
[15:10] – Founding Provalytics: Marketing Attribution
[18:48] – The Google Tax in Attribution
[29:46] – Why Google Isn't Enough Anymore
[37:49] – AI and Podcast ROI
[41:07] – Top Technical Skill for FP&A
[48:00] – Last Questions & Final thought
Full Show Transcript
Host: Paul Barnhurst (00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of FP&A Unlocked. Are you tired of being seen as just a spreadsheet person while others are getting that seat at the table? Well, then FP&A Unlocked is for you, FP&A Unlocked is where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst. Many of you know me as the FP&A guy, and each week I bring you conversations and practical advice from thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who are reshaping the role of FP&A in today's business world. Together we'll uncover the strategies and experiences that separate good FP&A professionals from great ones helping you elevate your career and drive strategic impact. Speaking of strategic impact, our title sponsor for FP&A Unlock is campfire. Campfire is the ERP. That's helping modern finance teams close, fast and scale faster. Thrilled to have this week's guest on. We have a real marketing expert to talk about marketing attribution and all those things that we in finance often seem to struggle to try to figure out. So I'm excited to welcome Jeff Greenfield. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (01:18):
Paul. Thanks so much for having me. And I got to say, likewise us marketers, we struggle with the finance side of things, so we're like a match made in heaven, if you will.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (01:30):
Yeah, no, I definitely, we've had those conversations over the years with both trying to understand marketing and them trying to understand where our numbers are coming from and how we can help and learn together and improve the business. So glad we're on the same page there. So a little bit about Jeff's background before we jump into questions. Jeff Greenfield is an entrepreneur, advisor, and disrupter with three decades of strategy, growth and marketing leadership. Jeff is currently building the next generation of AI-Driven Attribution as the co-founder and CEO of Provalytics which is a 'cookie-less' attribution & measurement solution which enables marketers to prove the impact from upper funnel channels like CTV and grow their budgets.Love the background. Excited to have you. We're going to jump into an FP&A question right away before we get to all that marketing stuff or is I like to say when I was in grad school, the marketing fluff for the people who didn't want to do finance. I've since changed my view just so you know, but what does great FP&A look like to you? If I asked you what great FP&A is, you've been a CEO, you've obviously had to work with FP&A, what does it look like from you, from your perspective?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (02:50):
Well, from my perspective, and I'm going to put on the perspective of a marketer, that's kind of my worldview more so than anything else. It means that we're able to go in and discuss what the budget looks like and also what we should get out of it as a result. And I'm able as a marketer to be able to demonstrate with proof essentially, Hey, if I do this, we're actually going to get here and be able to show you the numbers and explain things that we're using. A similar modelling approach that finance is using, and this is the other thing that a lot of marketers don't understand is that you guys in finance use models. It's not necessarily deterministic. It's a modelling approach. So to me, great FP&A looks like that. I can go in as a marketer, show you what I'm doing, prove to you that it's working and walk out of there. Like I always say with the big check in my hand that I'm on a game show and say I got the budget that I wanted and be able to set realistic expectations with that. That's really the key is to be able to have a conversation where, not that the math is wrong, but that everything adds up and that when I walk out, finance feels good about it and I feel good about it as well too. That happens now, I'm kidding.
(04:12):
It can when everyone is talking the same language, but what ends up happening in the real world is that marketers walk in with really fuzzy math. It's a lot of guessing. Now, what marketers don't understand is that models are guessing to a certain extent. There's that concept that all models are wrong, some are useful, but the way that the attitude that finance has towards marketing, it makes marketing feel as though that their numbers are always right. Finance numbers are always right and marketers numbers are always wrong. But being able to have parody on those two where they're both using regression based models where there's an R square, you can look at a map and that you can update these models on a monthly basis and you can check in with finance to show, Hey, this is how we're progressing. This is the same model that we use when we set the budget for the year. Now everybody's talking the same language because we're updating our models just like you guys are and we're all aligned. So that's the whole idea behind having some sort of single source of truth, if you will, for marketing, which doesn't exist in most marketing organisations today.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (05:24):
Single source of truth on a lot of data, not just marketing is a struggle. But something I really liked that you said there that aligns with me is right, being able to be on that same page, I heard someone say it's really important for the CFO and the CMO to agree on how they're going to measure things and make sure they're looking at it the same way. Because so often marketing comes with this model. There may be some fuzzy math finance challenges. You end up leaving the meeting with belief, you have two totally different assumptions, and if you're coming from two different points and you can't align, it makes it really hard to get beyond that
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (05:57):
A thousand percent. I mean, that's really the key, but you said it single source for just about everything, and that's one of the biggest issues that marketers have is that we have all of these different sources, and it's even more complicated now because used to be that you just go back a couple of years ago, if all I was doing was digital advertising, I could say that Google Analytics incorporated all of that, and there's a good chance that most organisations are using that and finance is looking at it and everything kind of ports into there. But the problem now is that a lot of digital ads, they're not click-based. Things like connected television, digital out of home, we're on a podcast, podcast advertising, and those things don't show up in Google Analytics. So now I got to go elsewhere and put it all together, and then on top of it, I've got agencies that have a different perspective on it and it just becomes this mess that in order for me to just keep track of how much money I'm spending week over week, that's like several hours a week right there just to know because God forbid I'm riding up in an elevator and somebody asks how things are trending this week and where are we at in terms of pacing?
(07:19):
I don't know. I need to spend a couple hours to figure that out. So having it all together in one place just makes everyone's life so much easier.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (07:27):
Now, as a business owner now who has a content creation business can totally relate someone who does a bunch of podcasts, it's like, okay, how much revenue do I really generate from these podcasts? Yes, I have some advertising. Those are easy to measure, but selling courses and benefit of, alright, people meet me here and they go to another platform. There's just a lot of challenges because there's so many different ways to market as we've gone into a lot of influence marketing podcasts and different sources beyond what we had 5, 10, 15 years ago.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (07:59):
And I'll give you a great example that really illustrates this both from the marketer and from the business owner's perspective. Let's say you create a great tax planning course, Paul, it's just amazing. And you do on one of these AI tools and you create this cool 15 minute video that talks about all the advantages of it and you decide you're going to start running ads on Facebook for business owners. And so you start running these ads and so someone's scrolling along and they see it, it captures your attention, but they don't click on it, they don't do anything. They just notice it. And that's the most important thing is the first job of advertising is get someone's attention. So you got this person's attention a week or so later they're scrolling through Instagram, they see the same ad, but now they watch it and they say, man, this is great when it comes to tax time, and let's say tax time is like, let's say three months away, I'm going to get this.
(09:01):
So a couple months goes by, they're sitting down, they're doing their taxes, and they're like, what was that tax planning course called? And they go and they Google and they Google a couple of things and then they find it because you're also running ads on Google under the name of the course. They click on it and they buy the course. You're going to see that in your CRM that you got an order and it came from Google. That's what you're going to see. Multiply that by a thousand times because it's tax season now and you get all these orders in and you're going to look at the money you spent on Facebook and Instagram and the money you spent in Google. And as a business owner, you're going to say, my god, Facebook sucks. This was a waste of money. I'm going to take all that money and I'm going to move it over to Google next year for tax time.
(09:45):
And you do it next year and your sales plummet. You can't figure out what's going on. And it's because Facebook and Instagram built that awareness and grew that desire. Google was just the navigation to get there. That's all it was. Google was just, we call it the Google tax. So that's a very simplistic example with just one item that you're selling. Now imagine you're a very large corporation that's selling a multitude of skews across your website, walmart.com, amazon.com. This gets to be very, very confusing and you're advertising across all of the different avenues, it becomes a very impossible math problem to solve.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (10:30):
Yeah, no, and so we'll jump into that. I want to go into that in a little more detail, but I want to step back for a minute and I have to ask, as I was preparing for this episode and learning a little bit about you, you got a doctorate in chiropractic
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (10:44):
That
Host: Paul Barnhurst (10:45):
You're a marketing person today and you CO of a marketing company, those are kind of far apart. How did that come about? I'm sure there has to be an interesting backstory here.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (10:55):
There is an interesting backstory. So I did my undergraduate in biochemistry at the University of Maryland and I wanted to go into healthcare, I wanted to help people, and I was also a professional magician at the time as well too. I worked at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and I specialised in card magic, so I used my hands, and so I thought I didn't want to go and become a surgeon, and I was seeing a chiropractor and I got amazing health benefits from it, so I decided to go to chiropractic. And so that's what I did. So I was a small business owner, just like a lot of people out there, and I thought that was it. That's all I was going to do. And then once I opened my practise and built it, I unfortunately was involved in a car accident and I damaged a nerve in my dominant hand that made it impossible to take care of patients anymore.
(11:51):
I had to have surgery on it to decompress the nerve. And so I got into where I hired people to work for me and it wasn't fun anymore. I enjoyed taking care of people, I liked helping people. I didn't enjoy managing and doing that kind of stuff at like 29 or 30, so I really didn't know what I wanted to do. So I sold my practise and I went back to do magic and ended up travelling to many of the colleges in the US for about two years. This is around the mid nineties, right around the time that the internet was starting. I hired a company to make my website that we were not able to complete it, so I had to finish it. And that enabled me in 95 to have a website that I was able to update on a regular basis. And then I ended up working with a bunch of other entertainers and consulting with them as people were kind of moving to the web. And so I was able to kind of go off the road from travelling and start being a consultant and get into this new emerging digital world. I started from consulting building websites. I started one of the first SEO optimization SaaS platforms, built one of the first SEO firms that's still out there today. And that evolved into a whole series of steps that landed me into this crazy space of measurement in the mid to late two thousands, and I've been here ever since. Thank
Host: Paul Barnhurst (13:23):
You for sharing your journey. Sorry you ended up having the accident, but glad you found something you love doing now. And so magic, you used to do a lot of card tricks. Do you have a favourite magic trick you like to do?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (13:38):
Yeah, my best trick is the one where I met my wife. So that's my best card trick is I did a trick where the card would constantly travel to the top of the deck, but it's my best trick because when I did it, I had her writer name and phone number on it, and then I called her that night and asked her out. The rest is history.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (13:56):
That definitely has to go to the top of the list. Smart, smart man. I like it. Alright, so let's get back to a little bit of marketing, but that's a great story and appreciate you sharing the magic and how it all happened in the nineties, building a website in 95, obviously extremely early for the internet. So you've been there from the beginning, and so now you founded your company, protic. Talk a little bit about what they do and then we're going to spend most of the rest time diving deep into marketing attribution and all the fun things that we struggle with.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (14:31):
So protic is actually an Italian word that means proof. So we provide marketers the proof that they need to demonstrate that the channels that they want to spend in are actually having the impact that they are. And when we talk about that, walking in and setting budgets and sitting down with FP&A, one of the biggest struggles that marketers have is being able to demonstrate that channels such as TV and radio or CTV and podcasting, these what we call awareness driving channels, are actually leading to revenue because with the tool sets they currently have, they cannot prove it. So PROTIC enables them to do that, and it does that by creating a single source of marketing truth. And so we're not just talking within the organisation, but we're also talking that all of the different agencies and all the different partners will use this single source of books, if you will, to use for optimization and recommendations. Because currently they may say, Hey, the Facebook agency gets 5% more money, but then they use Facebook's recommendations on how to optimise, but Facebook doesn't know about the direct mail, they don't know about the billboards, they don't know about the connected television. Protic knows everything that's going on. So it's a holistic way of managing your marketing budget, which as you know is one of the most expensive capital expenses within an organisation, or at least it's below headcount and it's below cloud, but it's up there for most organisations.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (16:12):
Sure, yeah. There are many organisations that obviously marketing, sometimes SaaS, world customer acquisition costs, which a big part of that is marketing, right? Yeah. You hear those terms, it can be a substantial piece of the business. Totally agree. So let's step back so you help people have a source of truth. So when you say source of truth, are you basically being a database, you're bringing in all the different tools or how should people think about a source of truth when it comes to marketing? We have spend all over the world. So maybe start a little bit of what does a source of truth look like when it comes to marketing?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (16:50):
So the source of truth, what it looks like is it aggregates all of the spend. So you've got kind of the, if you will, the stimulus in the response. So you've got what am I spending and where am I spending at? What am I getting for it in terms of how many ads each day, how many clicks and all of that stuff. Then you've got the response, which is what are our dollars in terms of sales? What are the number of orders that we had or whatever it is that we're doing, and in the source of truth it lives in between them, which says, what is each one of these things on each day that we're spending dollars on? How much is it resulting in sales or orders, and what is the return that we're getting on every single one of the line items? And it does that through a proprietary process that we develop that actually uses several old school econometric and machine learning techniques.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (17:51):
That's helpful. So it leads me kind of a question, what about how do you think about attribution, right? You gave the example at the beginning, I run a bunch of Facebook ads, but yet they found me through Google, the Google tax, and so the sale's going to show Google, but the reality is we know they're shifting between all that. We know you have to often touch a customer seven times before they buy something or whatever the numbers are, depending on industry, we hear different numbers out there. How do you think about that? Because the data can say one thing, but as we learned with your example, reality can be something quite different. And now, a brief message from our sponsor, Campfire. Build a best-in-class AI-native ERP designed for modern finance and accounting teams. With Campfire, you can automate revenue, streamline your close, and centralize accounting, all in one unified platform. And now they've hosted Finance Forward, a first-of-its-kind AI summit in San Francisco. They brought together the sharpest minds in finance and operations, all focused on how to actually use AI to move the needle. You don't even have to travel to learn the tactical skills to put your team ahead. You can stream the whole thing on demand, totally free, anytime after the event. So if you're ready to get tactical about AI and finance, head to campfire.ai and register for the on-demand content for free. That's Campfire, where finance teams go to think forward.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (19:28):
Right. Well, and that source of truth that we talk about when you talk about attribution, there's kind of two ways to look at it. Attribution is about splitting up the credit and the example that we gave for your course, it would be dividing the credit between Facebook, Google, and Instagram. But the type of source of truth that we provide, it's not just attribution, it's also incremental. And that's really important because what our platform looks at is it looks at what sales would you not have had if it wasn't for this one particular line item on this one particular day. Really what you want to know is you want to know what is the incremental impact that every line item has, and that's kind of another level of attribution. The other piece as well is there's sales. Like for example, in that example, you told a bunch of friends about your course, and let's say one day you had 10 sales and half of them were from friends.
(20:31):
Well, in the example we gave, Google would probably still take credit for it because they would click through from Google. And typically people that use Google Analytics, they see that Google ends up taking credit for just about everything, but every business knows that there's what we call a base. Meaning if I were to turn off all advertising, what would I actually have in terms of sales? Our platform is able to mathematically determine what that number is. We're able to see what is the real true impact that the ads are actually having on your business versus just taking credit for everything. So not only does our platform look at splitting and dividing that credit up, but it's divided up based upon its incremental impact.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (21:17):
Okay. So kind of stepping back, I get the platform, different people will use different tools, different things. How should they be thinking just in general? What advice would you add to people to be thinking about attribution and ROI? Maybe they don't have the single source of truth, but they're trying to do it. Any advice of how they should be thinking about that? Just kind of starting, so ignoring technology in general or certain platform, which is kind of high level, how should IN FP&A be thinking about it when marketing comes to me and gives me some numbers to try to understand this?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (21:52):
We have to learn that marketing, and you said this just a couple of minutes ago that it takes seven or eight touches, marketing takes time. So we need to kind of step away from the metrics that we look at and change our perspective on it. So let me give you an example. Most people, the way they evaluate marketing is they start with their KPI or their conversion event, let's say sales. And they go backwards from there and they say, well, I can't get a sale unless someone comes to my website and in order for someone to come to my website, they have to click through something. So that's what I want. I spend money and I get clicks. And so in their view, what ends up happening is you invest dollars to get clicks and clicks lead to sales, but that is a very constricted view.
(22:43):
The actual view of how marketing works is you invest dollars to get attention. Attention over time leads to awareness. When awareness is built up high enough, people will walk into your store. If your store happens to be online, that's clicks and then you get sales. So there's a multitude of steps before the clicks. And so what happens is that since everyone has this click centric view, most FP&A folks, most marketers, most business owners, they have a Google sheet that has a list of every dollar that they spent in marketing expense each day it has a list of how many clicks they got each day, and then they calculate the cost per click and the cost per sale. And so they feel like, eh, I'm a data-driven smart marketer, I'm just going to follow the clicks. And so they spend more money where the clicks are and they spend less money on the things that aren't clicking as much.
(23:47):
That example that we talked about your course, that would mean spend more money on Google, spend less in Instagram and Facebook, which is completely the wrong move to make. How do we change our perspective as someone that needs to look at things through a different lens? And the answer is we need to focus on that attention metric, that first kind of touch, if you will. And the crazy thing is, is that when people download these reports that attention metric is in the report they download, but we don't know what to do with it. So we ignore it. And that attention metric is what's called impressions and impressions is how many ads were shown for every day. Real simple. So essentially the way to look at it is if you, you had 10,000 ads in a day, maybe you had a thousand clicks and you had so many sales.
(24:44):
So now we want to expand this kind of Google sheet, if you will, to have date, impressions, clicks and sales. And then what we want to do is we want to graph them all and then we want to push our chair back and lean back and look at the big picture. Because what we want to do now is we want to look at those days where we had a lot of clicks and we'll look at that same day in impressions. And what we're going to see is we didn't necessarily have a lot of impressions that day. We have to go backwards maybe a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks before to try to find what was it that drove those clicks. Because clicks that come today are the result of ads today, but also ads that happened yesterday, two weeks ago, even two months ago.
(25:35):
And so the key is just trying to visualise as a small business owner to pan back the camera and look at it and then drill into that day that you feel like correlates with those clicks in the future and see what you did because something happened, something magical and you want to do more of that. I mean, that's really what it comes down to. So instead of optimising based on what's driving clicks, you want to optimise on days where impressions actually drove more clicks in the future. And you can do that with a Google sheet. It's pretty straightforward. Or you can put that together in a spreadsheet and upload it to chat GPT and take the transcript from this podcast and feed it in and say, Hey, can you do a correlation analysis between the impressions, the clicks and the sales, and point me towards days where there's impressions that are highly correlated with the clicks and later on in the future.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (26:35):
Got it. So really you're arguing and makes sense to me. We spend too much time on where the cell came from and not enough time focusing on the impressions that ultimately drove the click. Even though the click may have came through a completely different channel than the impression,
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (26:53):
And it's not because marketers and business owners aren't smart. We have been following the data. The data tells us it's in Google Analytics, when you follow it, it tells you in that example I gave you to reinvest more dollars in Google, I mean who would go against that? It's Google. But people forget that we now call it GA four, but it is Google's analytics. That's what it is. It's Google's analytics. It does a great job of measuring Google, but it short changes every other channel. That's the issue.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (27:30):
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Guest: Jeff Greenfield (28:55):
They are. If all you're going to do is spend your money there, and back in the day, that's all we did because Google was 80, 90% of the way that people started their journey into the web. But now most people live in the app universes. That's where they spend most of their time, which is outside of Google's reach. So you need to go where people are, and Google's not part of that universe, so how can they measure it?
Host: Paul Barnhurst (29:22):
So let's step back, kind of bring this back to FP&A and finance. I'm an FP&A professional. I look at the data. Everything my marketing team's giving me is all about where the sell came from and focusing on doing more of that. How do I have those conversations or how do I say, look, do we know where the impressions are coming from and how that's feeding? So what advice would you offer to get on that same page? Or maybe the finance person saying, all I care about is the end where the sale came from and the market's like, no, you need to understand the impressions. So any advice there to get on the same page between marketing and finance in this case?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (30:01):
Yeah, it's interesting because the question always is is that where does analytics and where does measurement live inside of an organisation for larger organisations as a whole separate analytics team? And marketing has sometimes their own measurement versus the analytics, but I really feel as though as a FP&A professional, you're the ones that have the fiduciary duty in terms of how the money is being spent. So really it's kind of on you guys and your team to make sure that it's being spent in the most efficient manner at least to where you're satisfied and happy with it. And this is one of the problems where budgeting starts to break down with marketers is when they come in and there's no math that's involved, marketing's numbers are wrong. Where I've seen it work best is where finance is looking at that data and running their own regression type models to ensure that things are actually working the way that marketing says they're working.
(31:09):
Sometimes I've seen it where we've been brought in by finance and we're running the model just for finance. Other times I'm brought in and we're running it for finance and it's shared with marketing and one organisation years ago, analytics fell under the CFO how important it was. That's how much of a large percentage of the budget was the marketing spend. So it's eventually all going to roll up to the C ffo. So when you start to think about this type of analytics, it really does belong under finance when you start to think about it. So that's what I would say is that ultimately it's finance's responsibility in terms of making certain that the dollars are being spent in the best manner. So it's the responsibility not to try to extract the crazy math that marketing comes in, but to say, Hey, if you aren't doing the types of models that are sophisticated enough for you to be able to look at all of this, then our team will do it. That's kind of my perspective on it.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (32:12):
Yeah, I get it. You're like, look, FP&A finance really should be, analytics often lives there. The ones that are doing analysis, they have the fiduciary responsibility to make sure marketing's creating an adequate return for the business, whatever that means for your industry, your company, et cetera. And so if they're not comfortable with the numbers, the math, whatever, they should be running their own. Is that kind of what I'm hearing here?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (32:39):
That's exactly what you're hearing.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (32:40):
So any advice on running that? I got this FP&A person, he's hearing this and he's thinking, I don't trust my marketing stuff, but I don't even know how to run this data. Where do they start?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (32:49):
That's the issue because it's not like running a standard financial model. Yeah,
Host: Paul Barnhurst (32:53):
It's not a typical p and l. There's some regression and statistics and other stuff involved in
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (32:58):
This. Yeah, there's seasonality. There's all of these crazy corners that kind of get you on this. The nice thing is is that there are some open source models that are out there that are available. Facebook has one called Robin where you can run similar Bayesian regression type modelling that'll kind of give you a larger global picture. The problem you run into is that, and you know this just as well as anyone else, is that if you have a model that tells you one thing, but your marketers are acting in a different route and a different direction, in order for this to actually work, everyone has to be rowing in the same direction. Otherwise it doesn't work. You set a forecast, everyone has their marching orders, and if the person with 25% of the budget is not marching in the same direction, we're not going to hit the forecast.
(33:47):
It's just the way it is. And so that's really the key is that, so you need to have something that works across that you can essentially as a shove down to marketing say, this is how the money needs to be allocated, this is how it needs to be spent. We're going to be checking in on this every month. And that's where tools like ours comes in. That's really the best because this becomes a specialty item. The reality is marketers themselves don't know how to do it. Typical analytics, company analytics. This is a highly specialised area that needs experts and expertise involved with it.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (34:23):
I mean, I can't just use AI to be an expert.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (34:26):
You could and it will spit out something. I mean, that's the greatest thing about ai. It'll give you an answer that may look right, but when you go and send in the same data for the exact same timeframe a month from now, it's going to spit out a completely different answer. And that's the other thing that's important is you want to make sure you have consistency with the numbers. That's the other piece to this as well too.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (34:51):
Yeah, I know a hundred percent agree, and I kind of say that tongue in cheek because it feels like everything nowadays is just go ask ai, right? We all see it.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (34:59):
It's very tempting because it does do an amazing job in terms of generating numbers and reports and answers. When you go in and start to validate some of the data, that's where you start to run into issues. Now it's getting better without a doubt, but there is no magic bullet. Let's just be honest. You got to do the work. That's really, and the problem is, is that if you don't do the work yourself, you're never going to be able to tell if what you're turning in is actually correct or not. That's the other problem.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (35:29):
Well, the prime example, I've been doing a lot of work with these Excel agents. If it built the model for me, if I don't know the ins and outs and all the assumptions, how do I defend it?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (35:38):
That's exactly right.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (35:40):
Just because AI can do it for you doesn't mean you don't have to know what you're doing really well.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (35:46):
That's right.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (35:47):
I had this conversation just yesterday with somebody. AI is a magnifier for so many industries. If you know the industry really well, it will magnify the work you're able to accomplish. If you don't, eventually it'll magnify that as well.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (36:00):
That's great, Paul, actually, that's exactly what it is because it gives people a false sense of security. It's like, what is that TV commercial where it's like, I'm not a doctor, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night,
Host: Paul Barnhurst (36:15):
That
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (36:15):
Type of thing. So it does make you feel like, Hey, I'm an expert in this. This is just amazing. I can ace this test type of thing. You nailed that one. That's exactly right.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (36:26):
Well, I've had some time to think about that one and done a lot of testing, so that's kind of the way I think about it. Alright, so now before we move into the FP&A section and the get to know you a little better, I have my selfish question. Obviously I do a lot of podcasting. I actually have three podcasts all in the finance space, one on AI and technology, one on modelling, one on fp a lock. You mentioned the channels like CTV podcasts. They're all really hard to measure. I find it hard to measure any advice you're going to offer me is around trying to figure out what the return is I'm getting from my podcasts beyond advertising revenue for a sponsor. Obviously I can measure those type of things relatively easy.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (37:08):
Yeah. The way to do that is you need to go back to that Google sheet and you need to add a line item every day for your podcasts. And then what you need to do is you need to go to every one of the podcasts platforms where it's out there, YouTube, your website, wherever, and keep track of how many views there are each day and add that under the impressions column. You do that over time. You're now going to have a whole look back in terms of how impactful over time your podcasts are. That's the best way to do that. That's how our clients do it as well too.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (37:48):
So go ahead and do that. Let say I've tracked it for six months. If I'm selling different products, multiple channels, it gets really tough to know, okay, did they come so I just look at impressions and see where sales went up? Is that kind what you're saying here? Just love to dig a little deeper to make sure I'm grasping it. I'm a little slow sometimes.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (38:07):
Yeah, yeah. No, no, you're not slow at all. This is complicated stuff here, Paul. Definitely. So first off, if you're selling multiple products, we always say to ourselves, I want to know what they came in for originally. And the truth is, you're not doing enough volume to kind of figure that out. The key is to just, you want to look at the big picture. Also, no one's going to be able to know what they first became aware of. This is the other thing is that we used to live 10 years ago in a deterministic world where we could actually figure out what was the first thing they saw that got their interest. But now because of privacy, everything is probabilistic, but that's where these models can come in. So the key is to just keep track of all of those impressions every day of each, the different things you could put in.
(38:55):
You had 10 views today for one video, and this video was on this topic and this video was on this topic. You can go granular if you want and then fold it into a larger spreadsheet because that way once you find the days that clicked, you can then dig in and see specifically what ads or what content was really driving things those days. But the key is to step back and then look and see how things are impacting the visits to your website. Because the way to look at it is you can't have a sale until somebody visits your website. So every day, every time you have a sale, there's a conversion rate on your website. So that becomes part of the equation as well too, if you will. And then for you, you could probably run some regression analysis to look at the connections between those. That's what I would do from a small business perspective.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (39:49):
Thank you. That makes sense. And I won't go any further on that. I'll bore my audience. We don't care about how you measure your podcast. We're here to talk FP&A and marketing. So we're going to move into our FP&A section, how this works. I have a couple of questions to ask and I'm really curious to hear what your answers are. Being someone who's a C marketer doesn't have that typical finance background. First one is, what is the number one technical skill that you think FP a professionals need to master?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (40:18):
I'd say just because from my perspective, I'd say I actually, I have a couple of things in this. One is modelling without a doubt, but I'd also say Excel modelling. Some of the most impressive FP&A folks that I've worked with, we've talked when we were building out these financial models for some of the other companies I was at, and they would come back in a couple of days with these things and I was just blown away. But not only building out the model but making it so that someone who's a non-finance person that I can actually read it, I can find the assumptions in it, I can find the levers so that it looks simple so that if you give it to an executive, they don't need a 10 minute overview on it, they can just figure it out. So I think that's kind of an art and a science if you will. Hey, I can build out a great model, but it looks like hell and nobody can figure it out except for me, that doesn't do any good. I sometimes get stuff from folks and it's like the font size is like a six. That's the other thing is understanding your audience as well. So I would say, and I would put that all under technical skills modelling, building out Excel that makes sense for people that are non-finance people.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (41:39):
Great advice there. Appreciate that. Obviously simplifying the model so everybody can understand it, being able to build it makes a huge difference. We've all had those models where you're like, I'm never going to understand this because they made it too complex. So what about that softer human skill? What's that most important soft skill? We need
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (42:00):
Listening. I don't think enough finance, in my experience, a lot of finance folks are a lot of analytics people, super smart, very talented, and they know what they know. And the perspective of the executive or the marketer that they're dealing with is that they just don't understand and they never will. And so there's a tendency to speak more versus listen. And I think by listening more, you learn that yes, you may have the best model, you've built it out, it covers everything, but it doesn't matter. It's so complicated. Nobody's going to use it. It's great, but I'm not going to use it. So what good is it? That's the key is that if you learn to listen more than to speak, then what you're building and your contributions will actually be used more and then you will be seen as an asset. I've sat in meetings before, not on the finance side, but on the analytics side with the CEO of a large company.
(43:09):
And the analytics person came in and gave this amazing presentation. I was blown away. I was like, this is incredible. And he laughed and I turned to the CEO and I said, what do you think? He is? Like, I didn't understand a single word. The guy said, we're not doing a single thing. He said, I was like, oh wow. So this is the key is that you got to know your audience, you got to listen and you have to know how to speak that executive speak. You have to understand that your massive model is going to get distilled down to a single bullet point on a slide. And if you can't distil it down yourself to explain it, don't expect anyone else to do it.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (43:48):
I really like that being an active listener and knowing your audience. Great advice there. Alright, so this is a fun question. Obviously you've done budgeting, you've done forecasting running your own business. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the budgeting process,
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (44:06):
What
Host: Paul Barnhurst (44:06):
Would you change?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (44:07):
That I could just submit it and people would believe me and there'd be no questions asked. That would be awesome. That would be awesome. Yeah, and my first submission would always be accepted. That would be great. That would
Host: Paul Barnhurst (44:19):
Be interesting. My guess is if we did that, we would always end up with less revenue than the board wants and more expense.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (44:28):
Yes. Yes, of course.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (44:31):
So we'll have to try that one. Let me know how it works in your company.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (44:35):
Well I'm not doing it,
Host: Paul Barnhurst (44:36):
But that was my wick. That's the dream. I get it. It'd be awesome if that's where we at. Alright, so I have a couple get to know you questions as we wrap up here. First
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (44:48):
One, what do you like to do in your spare time? My wife and I love to go see shows theatre and music. In fact, we're going Saturday. Billy Gibbons, the lead guitarist for ZZ Top is one of the best blues artists, blues guitarist in the world. So we're going to go see him perform live. So yeah, we love live music.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (45:11):
Awesome. Enjoy that. I've been trying to get my ZZ top beard. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting close.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (45:17):
You're getting very close, Paul. Definitely.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (45:20):
I noticed on your website you have a website for your name, so not business website, you had a section dedicated to art. So obviously you mentioned you like theatre, like shows like music. Do you have a favourite artist?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (45:32):
Gosh, I kind of go in and out with that. You fall in love with a piece of art. I have a lot of pieces in here from an artist who just passed recently. His name is John Sarkin and I love any type of everything from abstract to, I also love all of the old 16, 1700 religious paintings that you find if you're in Italy and you just walk into church. Just so, so powerful. I just think art is, it's beautiful. It's one of the most interesting parts about being alive is we get to enjoy art.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (46:08):
Got it. Love it. Thank you for that. Alright, if you could have any job in the world for one week, what you picking
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (46:17):
For one week? Wow.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (46:20):
It could be a person's job, a certain type of role, but what would you pick and why?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (46:24):
Wow. One job for a week. That's an interesting one, Paul. I haven't really thought of that. You know what, I think I'm going to pull something out of the air. I'd love to be the Walmart greeter for a week. I think that's a pretty interesting job. Your job is to say hello to people and get a smile on their face and stuff. And whenever I go to Walmart at least once a week, I love seeing the greeter there. She's always smiling and stuff like that. I think that would be an awesome job as long as I don't have to do anything else. I think that's a killer job right there.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (47:01):
I like it. So greet people and smile, the Walmart reader. Last question here. If people want to learn more about you, your company, get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that?
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (47:13):
You can go to pro lytics.com as our company. Best way to get there is go to get Prova. That's G-E-T-P-R-O-V a.com. Or you can also find me on LinkedIn. Those are the best places to get us. Perfect.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (47:26):
Well thank you Jeff for joining, sharing a little bit about marketing. I think there's some great advice in there for us finance professionals of how to think about things and take a bigger ownership role in the models and how we figure out what's driving ourselves. So I appreciate you spending an hour with me.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (47:45):
Oh, it's been my pleasure, Paul. Thanks for having me.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (47:47):
Thanks and enjoy your show this weekend, listening to some blues and keep the magic tricks up. Obviously they've helped you in your life.
Guest: Jeff Greenfield (47:58):
Absolutely. Magic is very important.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (48:00):
That's it for today's episode of FP&A Unlocked. If you enjoy FP&A unlocked, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. It's the best way to support the FP&A guy and help more FP&A professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpe.com. Downloading the app and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the FPAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the FP&A guy, and I'll see you next time.