The War Room

Defend the
business case.

The champion is sold. Now the CFO wants to talk. No pitching, no features. This is a financial conversation and she does not have time for anything else. You will not have every answer. Use the brief as your starting point and fill in the gaps from your own experience.

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Pre-Call Brief

The CFO Meeting.
The deal lives or dies here.

Read this before you enter the room. This is everything you know going in.

The Company
Vantara
B2B software company, roughly 650 employees. GTM org spans Enterprise, Mid-Market, and SDR. Strong product, aggressive growth targets, and a leadership team that has been pushing cost discipline across departments. Recently completed a cost audit. Tool sprawl across the revenue org was flagged as a priority to address.
Your Contact
Sandra Kowalski, CFO
Analytical and composed. She understands GTM at a high level but is not in the day to day of the sales team. She knows what the VP of Revenue told her and nothing more when it comes to how the team operates. She is not trying to kill this deal. She is trying to remove ambiguity from the decision. Grounded financial thinking will move her. Vague upside projections will not.
Your Proposal
$125K ACV. Full new business sales team.
Your proposal covers the entire new business sales org: 10 Enterprise AEs, 15 Mid-Market AEs, 5 Enterprise SDRs, and 5 MM SDRs. 35 total seats. Marketing is not included. The platform surfaces sales-specific signals that the sales team acts on proactively. Marketing has no visibility into those signals unless sales shares them manually.
35
Total seats across new business sales
$125K
Annual contract value
$3,571
Per seat annually
What You Learned From the VP of Revenue
Three conversations. Here is what you know.
The VP of Revenue has been your champion for three months. She built the internal case and presented Sandra with a one-pager. Here is what she shared with you across your conversations:
  • Pipeline is inconsistent quarter to quarter. The team has missed pipeline targets two of the last three quarters. Leadership has flagged it. The root cause is account selection: reps are chasing opportunities that were never going to close and not enough time is going into accounts that are actually in market.
  • Research is largely manual and time consuming. Reps spend an estimated 6 to 8 hours per week on manual account research, contact mapping, and trying to identify the right decision makers and budget holders. That time comes directly out of selling time.
  • New hire ramp is slow. New Enterprise AEs carry no revenue quota for the first 90 days. They are ramped on activity KPIs: demos booked, pipeline built, opportunity progression. Two new Enterprise AEs were hired 60 days ago and are currently in ramp. The VP of Revenue believes faster account prioritization would accelerate their path to productivity significantly.
  • The current tools do not talk to each other. The team uses separate vendors for data enrichment, firmographics, and limited intent signal tracking. None of them are integrated into the CRM. Reps are manually reconciling information across multiple platforms with no unified view of which accounts to prioritize.
  • Enterprise quota is $1.5M per AE. Mid-Market is $700K per AE. Total new business quota across the team is approximately $25.5M annually. Pipeline coverage target is 3x, putting total pipeline needed at roughly $76M across Enterprise and Mid-Market combined.
Current Tool Stack (Revenue Org)
There is overlap. Sandra flagged it in the cost audit.
The player knows there are overlapping vendors. Sandra knows there are overlapping vendors. What the player does not know is the contract terms, costs, or remaining duration on any of them. That is something you will need to uncover in this conversation.
Vendor A: Data enrichment and firmographic data. Not CRM integrated. Overlap
Vendor B: Intent signal tracking, limited to one channel. Not CRM integrated. Overlap
Your product: Multi-signal intent, contact and budget holder mapping, account prioritization, full CRM integration. Your product
A Note Before You Go In
The brief gives you the account context. It will not cover everything. Sandra may go deeper than what is written here and that is by design. When she does, draw on your own experience. Reference a pilot you have run, a result you have seen, a customer story that applies. The scenario is fictional. Your instincts and experience are real. Use both. How you handle the gaps is part of the game.
What You Don't Know Yet
The contract terms, costs, and remaining duration on Vendor A and Vendor B. Whether Sandra has budget already set aside or needs to find it. Whether she sees this fiscal year as the right time or would rather push it. Whether she views the overlapping vendors as truly replaceable or still sees value in them. You will need to ask.
War Room: CFO
Sandra Kowalski CFO, Vantara
Deal
SK
Click to Speak
Listening...
or type
Paul's Read
What I was thinking in the moment
"Do not start by defending the efficiency case. Start by asking about the contracts. She has the numbers and she will share them if you ask. Once you know what Vendor A and Vendor B actually cost and what the terms look like, you can reframe the math entirely. The goal is to show her this is a reallocation of existing spend, not a new budget line."
Debrief
Deal Advanced

Two paths.
Same room.

Your Approach
Analyzing your approach...
Paul's Play
Sandra opened immediately on consolidation: why is this $125K on top of tools we already pay for? Paul did not defend the efficiency case first. He asked about the current contract situation, got the numbers, and built the math in real time.
"Before we talk about what this enables, I want to understand what it replaces. Can you walk me through what you are currently paying for Vendor A and Vendor B and what the contract situation looks like?"
Once Sandra shared the vendor details, Paul reframed the math: $78K in current overlapping spend, $45K unavoidable due to Vendor A's remaining contract, Vendor B exits cleanly in 30 days. The net new cost was not $125K. It was $47K above what they were already spending, consolidating three fragmented tools into one CRM-integrated platform.
When Sandra pushed on timing, Paul tied urgency to the two Enterprise AEs currently in ramp. Every month of delay was a month those reps built pipeline without prioritization signal. That was a cost that did not show up on a contract but showed up in quota attainment.
Sandra approved moving forward contingent on a written consolidation plan showing the phase-out timeline for both vendors. The deal closed as a reallocation of existing spend, not a new budget line.
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