Into group finance at multinational scale

The challenge

Financial planning software competes with two things at once. The first is the status quo: Excel, the planning tool that came with the ERP, and a finance team that has learned to live with both. The second is the field: Anaplan, OneStream, Power BI and the rest, every one of them calling the same people. The person who owns the decision is the Group FP&A Director or the Finance Director, who reports to the CFO, already has a system, and has a reason to ignore every vendor who rings.

And the organisations Metapraxis is built for are large. Multiple entities, multiple locations, hundreds of reports a month, a close that takes weeks. Those are the finance teams with little time for a cold call, and a great deal to gain from taking one.

The approach

1. Open on the month-end, not the platform

   Outreach asked about how planning actually happens. How many reports does the team produce by hand? How many locations feed the consolidation? How long from period end to a number the board will trust? A finance leader will answer that in a sentence, and the sentence tells you whether there is a conversation. One prospect’s team was consolidating Excel reporting across multiple locations by hand. That is the opening, and the product arrives as the answer to it.

2. Compare them to their own industry

   The pitch was rebuilt around industry comparison: how a business of their size in their sector runs planning, and where they sit on an FP&A maturity curve. Finance leaders are competitive about this in a way they are not about software features. It turned a vendor call into a benchmarking conversation.

3. Go to the top of finance and stay there

   The target was the person who owns FP&A for the group, not an analyst who would pass it up. Group FP&A Directors, Finance Directors and Finance Systems leads, multi-threaded inside each account so one person going quiet did not close it.

4. Work both sides of the Atlantic

   The UK list was built at group level across law, banking, healthcare, infrastructure and professional services. The US list opened more than eight hundred new accounts in life sciences and multi-site food and hospitality, where multi-location reporting hurts.

5. Hand over a prepared meeting

   Every meeting came with a handover pack: company profile, the prospect’s role and tenure, the prospecting journey from first email to booked meeting, and the discovery notes - what they run today, what they said hurt, what they want to see. Metapraxis walked into every meeting already knowing the conversation.

What the campaign returned

The organisations below are described by sector and size rather than named. They are Metapraxis’s prospects, not Caption’s clients, and we have not asked them.

• A meeting with the global head of FP&A at a multinational quick-service restaurant group - the parent company of four household-name brands with tens of thousands of restaurants in over a hundred countries. Already running a tier-one ERP with a planning tool on top, and still wanted to see how Metapraxis compared and where it could add value.
• A meeting with the FP&A lead at a US multi-site brewery and restaurant group, thirty years established, who had built an in-house fix and knew it had room to improve.
• A meeting with the finance systems lead at a UK infrastructure management group with twenty years in PFI and PPP projects, whose team was losing days to manual Excel reporting across locations. First email to booked meeting in just over two weeks.
• Every meeting was with finance leadership: Group FP&A, Finance Systems, Finance Director level. Nothing that had to be taken upstairs.
• An active pipeline across an international law firm, a multilateral development bank, a UK specialist bank, a US academic medical centre, a global marketing group, the national new-home warranty body, a listed transport group, an energy company, food manufacturers, pub and hotel groups and two life-sciences companies.
• A pitch proven on two markets, and a clear read on which industries answer.

Where it goes next

• Deepen the US. Life sciences and multi-site hospitality answered first. The next move is width inside those two: more accounts, more contacts per account, and the industry comparison built out for each.
• Multithread every open account. FP&A, finance systems and the finance director each feel the problem differently. Three routes into one group is three chances at the trigger.
• Follow the ERP. Organisations mid-way through an Oracle or SAP programme are the ones asking what planning will look like afterwards. That is a timing signal worth building a list around.

Why it worked

The list was never the point. The argument was. Finance leaders at large organisations will take a call about their month-end from someone who can describe it back to them, and will not take one about a platform. Get the sector, the size and the person right, and the top of group finance is available.