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Several years ago, when CFO Anna King first began to champion the benefits of real-time data, she recalls a sudden clamor around new customer activity afforded her the consensus-building moment for which she\u2019d been waiting.

At the time, King worked for Transactis, a payment processing company that she had first joined in 2011 as a controller. A year later, after having helped to raise the company\u2019s Series C financing, she found herself being appointed CFO.

\u201cI was completely shocked\u2014but I was grateful for the board\u2019s confidence in me,\u201d recollects King, who would occupy the CFO office until 2019, when Transactis was acquired by Mastercard.

Along the way, King got to work alongside seasoned entrepreneurial CEO Joe Proto, who counted Transactis as his third start-up and had a \u201cplaybook\u201d when it came to scaling a business. While King\u2019s C-level appointment gave her new stature within the company, the move to leverage real-time data cross-functionally within the firm demanded something more.

\u201cChange management is typically very difficult,\u201d comments King, who observes that frequently during her tenure she came to rely on the power of consensus-building.

\u201cI had to get the CTO on board because we needed some \u2018dev\u2019 resources\u2014which are always hard to obtain\u2014and I needed to convince our CRO that he would be better able to communicate his needs to management,\u201d remarks King, who notes that the initial stages of the effort involved integrating data from the company\u2019s operations, accounting systems, and sales pipeline.

Says King: \u201cWe were able to see in real time how much revenue we had made on a given day or month-to- date, and by seeing the pipeline data, we were able to forecast what the rest of the month would look like.\u201d  

Still, the value of the data was not immediately apparent to each of the functional groups, and King would sometimes have to demonstrate how to put the data to work.

Such was the case with the Transactis sales team, which had been amplifying a request for additional resources in response to reports of new customer activity. However, management had been somewhat reluctant to give approval, given that the reports remained more or less only anecdotal. 

\u201cWe were able to show via new dashboards that there was new customer activity, which allowed them to get them the resources that they needed,\u201d points out King, who adds that one functional area\u2019s experience with real-time data soon led to its spread to other areas.

Concludes King\u201d \u201cChange management is really about how you communicate and tell the story and build the consensus.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney