FinancialForce has appointed Tony Kender as Chief Revenue Officer. He takes the position vacated by Mike Jerich who joined the company in March 2019 and left six months later. Jerich is now CRO at ServiceMax. This time Tod Nielsen, President and CEO of FinancialForce has looked for an individual with deep experience with working at the both the leaders in the ERP industry, SAP and Oracle.
Kender brings a depth of experience at a time when FinancialForce is targeting larger enterprise customers for its PSA and Financial Management solution. Though the latter is already winning business in the mid-market.
Kender has spent most of his career in the HCM space. The majority of that has been at major market leaders such as SAP, ADP and Oracle. He was at Oracle for 16 years in two stints. Most recently, he was Senior Vice President for HCM Global Strategic Customers. Most of his career has been North America centric, though he had global sales roles at Oracle, CorpU and Intralinks.
SaaS solution sales experience will be important
Kender has a deep experience of selling SaaS solutions and of building sales teams in the organisations he has worked at. Nielsen commented: “Tony brings an amazing combination of skills and experiences to FinancialForce and we are pleased to welcome him to our executive team. Tony’s expertise in building world-class teams, leading organizations through business transformation and creating customer success will be invaluable in meeting the growing demand from finance and services teams who want to drive productivity and make smart decisions.”
For Kender this is his first CRO role and one that he seems to relish. He commented: “I am thrilled to join FinancialForce at this exciting time in its history. As the market leader, FinancialForce has a proven track record of accelerating business value with the industry-leading PSA and ERP solutions on the Salesforce platform. I’ve seen firsthand the enormous opportunity of cloud-based software solutions for companies across all industries and believe FinancialForce is well positioned globally to help customers automate their operations and grow more rapidly.”
Enterprise Times: What does the mean
There are some questions this appointment raises. Does the appointment infer that FinancialForce are looking to acquire another business in the HCM space to complement its PSA and Finance solution? It sold its previous HCM business to ADP. While at the time the decision seemed right, markets change. More vendors are looking to integrated HCM into both Finance and PSA solutions. Workday and NetSuite do all three and Kimble has a close relationship with Sage People and Sage Intacct.
In the last year the changes made by Dan Brown, CTO, in the development function are bearing fruit. Every release has delivered more features than the last. The latest, Winter 20 included revenue trend predictions, industry-specific analytics, and UX innovations. There is also more internationalization on the roadmap and more languages promised. These improvements have helped FinancialForce increased subscription revenue by over fifty percent.
User experience is key to success, Kender believes. In a recent blog on the mid-market he noted: “You have to keep them excited, comfortable, and engaged by providing a fantastic user experience. That’s what today’s worker expects and demands.”
FinancialForce is holding its annual sales kick off this week. It is probably too early for Kender to have a significant impact. By FinancialForceX however, he should be embedded in the strong leadership team that Nielsen has built. By then, he will need to find a new General Counsel. John Moss left the company in January and has taken up the same position at OwnBackup.
