Marketing vs FP&A: adventures in business partnering

Swati Bagri, head of FP&A for a major global FMCG company was told early in her career: “Either you are sales or you are helping sales”. In this second in our series of finance business partnership Swati, representing finance, is joined by Stephanie Troy, VP of Sales at Datarails, for a candid conversation with host Glenn Hopper about what sales leaders actually need from FP&A, and what great revenue-producing partnerships look like.

In this special episode: 

• The dynamics of sales vs finance needs 
• Pipeline communication challenges 
• The problems with forecasting
• Where lack of communication hurts sales and finance
• What finance needs from sales leaders in budget season
• Dealing with the Office of No 

Today on the show, we're launching a special series on finance business partnering - exploring different facets of modern finance business partnering. Today’s special guest is Tunc Tezel VP group FP&A, Ontax, bringing 30-years of lessons from Ontex, Pladis, British American Tobacco, Procter & Gamble, and Gillette - business partnering with marketing, sales, and operations to reach common goals and bringing some of the most popular CPG products to market. 

• From “spy” to “strategist” in business partnering   
• Secrets to storytelling 
• Embedded vs. centralised FP&A business partnering 
• Working capital as a partnering tool
• Breaking bad news in business partnering 
• When business partnering breaks down

Tom Hinkle, senior leader in data and analytics at TIAA, has  built his career at the intersection of finance, technology, and strategy. He also has a budding YouTube channel (Tom's Data World, which includes instructional videos on Excel, SQL, and AI). He's worked extensively with Excel (is a Microsoft MVP) and SQL, as well as Tableau and Power BI, and has worked with major financial institutions, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and TIAA. 

"Nobody really gets excited about spending money on data governance. They get excited about machine learning, about AI, about data storytelling — everybody wants seminars on that. But data governance? At the end of the day, you're coming up with something you thought was right anyway, and then you're asking someone to spend more money just to make sure it's right."

• Why data governance is the foundation of AI 
• Trust but verify challenges
• The two sides of data governance: master data management vs. data quality and controls
• How FP&A teams should think about their role as downstream consumers of data
• Why domain expertise is still non-negotiable in the age of vibe coding
• Tom's Minesweeper-in-Excel story, and what it taught him about prompting

What does it actually take to move FP&A activities into a shared service organization at Coca-Cola— and then transform how a global marketing giant manages billions in spend? Sébastien Privel, Senior Director Financial Services FP&A, has done both.

Sébastien Privel career spans pharma controllership in late-'90s Beijing to country CFO for France, being involved in the implementation Coca-Cola's global FP&A shared services from scratch, before leading a multi-year marketing finance transformation

In this episode 

Building finance infrastructure from scratch in 1990s China — from rice paper ledgers to SAP, with floppy disks in between. 

Business partnering and being the finance voice in multi functions projects (including Coca-Cola buying Tropico an iconic French brand) 

Driving transformation in the FP&A area standardizing processes and moving key activities to a shared service organisation

Experimenting with AI including baseline forecasting and the real impact