Business innovation typically follows consumer expectations, and products are nothing without a consumer-market fit.
A perfect solution, service or product should be able to be scaled up and commercialized via successful customer engagements, Connatix Chief Financial Officer Joseph Pergola told PYMNTS.
“The one thing I’m asked by clients is all about helping them engage more with their consumers,” he said as part of the new “One Thing” executive series. “And those questions are about establishing a partnership. What are the things that would make the relationship better from a business and operational standpoint, and how can we drive more traffic? How do we create a more robust consumer experience and make the internet a better place?”
When it comes to today’s digital solutions, buyers are faced with more options than ever before. And in the overcrowded contemporary landscape, the role and relevance of technology in positively impacting business goals and growth has never been more critical, he said.
Outside of role and relevance, experiential benefits like ease of integration and the automation of previously laborious tasks remain critical for scalable adoption.
“What [clients] want is to remove friction points and unnecessary steps from the end-to-end process,” Pergola said. “And they want transparency too, so they can measure their [return on investment (ROI)].”
As technical capabilities evolve and platforms adapt to reach modern consumers, the weight clients give to their “One Thing” questions may change over time.
Pergola explained that a knock-on effect of establishing long-term partnerships is that clients want to know “where the technology is going.”
“How do we make this for the long term?” he said. “How do we get stickier together? And then beyond that, what I love is when they are peeling back the onion and wanting to know how the partnership will evolve, almost a peek into the product tech roadmap.”
Digital is no longer just a strategy; it represents an entirely new way of doing business, making it critical for commercial partners to align on not just goals but also the technical capabilities and compatibilities of the platforms they are leveraging.
Having the right innovations in place can help firms future-proof against competitive challenges and foster a greater sense of loyalty among core customer audiences whose behavioral expectations are increasingly centered around convenience and personalization.
“I’m very customer-focused from a CFO perspective,” Pergola said. “So, when I’m working with the teams to prioritize investment in our R&D, it is what is the ROI for the customer? How are we delivering customer-focused things, and how quickly can we deliver them?”
While new processes take a while to develop and gain internal traction, identifying and integrating the right-choice innovations can open new growth avenues.
The approach the finance team takes to overcome inertia is just as important as recognizing the existence of that inertia in the first place. PYMNTS has been tracking how today’s CFOs find themselves increasingly in the driver’s seat when it comes to determining a go-forward strategy for digitizing outdated workflows.
And within that context, innovative new payment vehicles and technologies have moved to the foreground as a CFOs best friend.
“As the payments technology gets faster and things are more accurate, the question becomes how can we have better financial relationships that are fair for both parties?” Pergola said. “I do see down the road a convergence on accelerated payment terms, the ability for both parties to settle in real time.”
“Taking a step back, it is just about being flexible [around payment terms and types] for the organizations you work with and making sure that you can align with what they are comfortable with so that the partnership moves forward and their problems get solved,” he added.
That’s why, in order to most effectively help their customers engage with their own core audiences, organizations themselves must first engage with their own commercial partners at a high level.
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