Navigating risk in turbulent times

Market volatility and rapid technological change are putting pressure on CFOs’ planning efforts as they navigate fresh uncertainties — from tariffs affecting supply chains to AI rollouts and growing competition for talent. 

At an American City Business Journals virtual roundtable last week, the CFO of workforce technology provider Magnit and the vice president of finance and strategy at kitchen products company Made in Cookware suggested ongoing scenario planning is essential.

“As I think about challenges today —  beyond AI and technology — we've got this uncertainty in the markets with tariffs and seeing customer pullbacks,” said Rudy Gonzalez, CFO of Folsom, California-based Magnit. “As a CFO, you have to be a utility player.”

CFOs should plan for optimization and recovery, including how to manage debt if interest rates rise. They should also anticipate customer churn, he added.

Jimmy Du, vice president of finance and strategy at Austin-based Made in Cookware, said the company has been running scenario plans for some time. Systemic events in recent years — including the COVID-19 pandemic and bank failures — can affect cash and revenue projections, and companies need to pivot, he argued. Now, the company is assessing the fallout from trade tariffs.

“Tariffs, to some degree, are outside of our control, but we're asking our manufacturers to share the cost,” he said. The company is scrutinizing expenses, including headcount, processes and warehouse operations — while working to retain inventory and meet growth targets. It’s also looking for ways to offset tariffs while keeping operational expenditures tight.

Amid lingering inflation and high financing costs, return on investment “has to be held to a higher standard” than just a few years ago, Gonzalez said.

Holding on to cash to invest in growth

Magnit, after paying down debt, built a cash “war chest” that allowed it to invest in automation and agentic tools to offset wage inflation, Gonzalez said. 

Made in Cookware said it hasn’t made major changes to its allocation strategy in response to economic pressures, but as an inventory-heavy business, maintaining the flow of payments to suppliers is a priority, Du said. The company has frozen hiring and accelerated cost–cutting measures. 

Cost savings, including from the back office, will be redeployed to marketing, which the company sees as a critical growth driver. 

“Marketing spend is probably the last thing I would touch, as long as it's spent efficiently and at the right metrics — all of the savings that we make are then redeployed to drive growth,” said Du. 

Managing AI adoption

Both companies are cautiously optimistic about the role of artificial intelligence in streamlining tasks across finance and the broader workforce. Made in Cookware is testing the use of AI to automate tasks, including invoice tagging. 

While using AI to drive efficiency is appealing, companies should weigh the benefits of an enterprise platform against a patchwork of point solutions, which can be less attractive “because it's hard to get the ROI when you're duplicating costs and have to build integrations,” Gonzalez said.

Companies also need to consider how much human oversight AI-generated output requires, particularly around data privacy, he added.

Panelists also discussed how CFOs can attract top talent to their firms, with remote work and quicker career development paths acting as possible inducements for up-and-coming professionals.

Remote work “opens the door to talent that's not right by a physical office, and that used to be a limiting factor for companies,” Gonzalez said. Remote work also opens up opportunities to bring in talented candidates who are based outside the U.S., he added.

Five years after the pandemic normalized remote work, companies are still wrestling with the pros and cons of requiring employees to return to offices. For CFOs, a strategic approach to office space and RTO goes hand in hand with prudent budgeting. 

That’s because, for many companies, office real estate remains the second-largest expense, following payroll, whether “it’s being used or it’s not,” Andrew Farah, CEO of workplace analytics company Density said. It’s up to a company’s leaders to make the tough decision to either use it or lose it — in order to avoid shelling out for empty space.

“The main question is, should you try to get your employees back into an office, or should you let your physical space go?” Farah said in an interview. For CFOs, who tend to consider real estate in terms of numbers, answering the RTO question can come down to the simple question of utilization: “if you have a real estate portfolio that's not being used, get rid of the buildings or require people to come back,” Farah said.

Utilization refers to how often and effectively employees are making use of a space: a good meeting room utilization rate, for example, is between 40% to 60%, according to a 2024 post by workplace software firm Envoy.

The San Francisco, California-based company provides workplace analytics software and sensors aimed at enabling companies to gain insight into how their real estate is being utilized, according to its website. Farah has served as Density’s CEO since May 2014, and previously served as a managing partner for software development agency Rounded, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The ‘de facto’ remote pitfall

The office space question has continued to loom large in the minds of CFOs and other C-suite leaders, as many high-profile companies — as well as the federal government under President Donald Trump — have begun to issue return to office mandates.

Many of the RTO policies that have been enacted this year have triggered pushback from both company employees and even executives, some of whom themselves prefer hybrid or remote work, CFO Dive previously reported.

That could be partially due to wishy-washy guidance from top-line leadership: many C-suite leaders are unwilling to be strict about RTO policies “for fear of attrition or the inability to recruit, Farah said, “so what they do is they just choose not to have a policy,” he said. “Or they say we're hybrid, which actually means many things. Hybrid is a terrible term. It's imprecise, it's vague,” and Farah said it’s often left to managers to execute.

In such cases, “hybrid” companies often turn into “de facto” remote companies, he said — with the business still footing the cost of real estate.

Fixing the ‘movie theater’ problem

As well as unclear guidance, many executives can often have a murky idea regarding exactly how the office spaces they do have are really being used by their employees — a question distinct from occupancy. For CFOs as the stewards of finance, figuring out if the space is being put to effective use is a critical factor in determining an RTO policy, especially in the midst of rising cost pressures.

Businesses that are implementing RTO policies have also found themselves facing both logistical and financial challenges, such as pricey office refurbishments to entice employees that can strain an already tight budget or a shortage of necessary supplies such as desks and WiFi access, March reports by Raconteur and NPR found.

Underutilized buildings tend to have what Farah calls the “movie theater problem,” where, entering into an empty theater, patrons “naturally spread out,” he said. “They don’t sit next to each other.” A similar pattern emerges in underutilized offices, where, lacking critical mass, employees will fill the space they’re in, but “for a CFO, it's just dollars being spent on space that's not being used,” Farah said.

As such, many “CFOs are turning to their heads of real estate and expecting hard data on utilization,” Farah said. Finding out key numbers — such as exactly how much the business is spending per head — can help finance chiefs make targeted decisions regarding if “you're going to grow some places [or] you're going to consolidate [in] others,” he said.

Historically, chief revenue officers mainly focused on driving sales and revenue growth. Today, CROs are front and center when it comes to such areas as financial planning, investor relations, pricing strategies and forecasting, according to Irina Wolpert, a leader with the executive search firm Egon Zehnder. 

As businesses have become more complex and market dynamics have shifted over the last three to five years, the responsibilities of the CRO have expanded to “just encompass a much broader set of strategic and operational functions,” Wolpert said. 

That leaves CROs nudging up against CFOs’ typical remits, an evolution that comes both with potential points of tension as well as greater opportunities to create success for their businesses.

“Both roles are incredibly critical and in fact have to coexist and partner in order for the company to have a long-term, sustainable growth agenda,” Wolpert, who serves as leader, financial services, tech & fintech practice groups at Egon Zehnder, told CFO Dive in an interview.

Weighing risk versus growth  

One of the newer entrants to the C-suite, the CRO position began to gain ground as companies — especially startups in the technology and software spaces — increasingly focused on high growth, according to a 2015 article by VentureBeat.

The position, which could also be occupied by a “chief experience officer,” or “chief growth officer,” is “tasked with creating a single revenue engine — from lead generation in digital marketing to closing the sale,” a 2023 write-up by McKinsey said. “The CRO’s role goes beyond sales and marketing to the entire market landscape, customer journey, and strategic expansion plans.”

As such, one of the main areas of tension between a CRO and CFO tends to be that “balance of risk versus growth,” Wolpert said. CFOs tend to have a more conservative approach, focused on risk management and financial stability, while CROs “are typically incentivized to take much more calculated risks to achieve more aggressive revenue targets,” she said. 

“Typically, where we see the tension is, number one in the area of resource allocation,” Wolpert said. “If you think about the traditional role of the CRO, typically they tend to push for more resources to drive sales and revenue growth. The CFOs, rightfully so, are typically much more focused on budget constraints.”

Prior to joining the Zürich, Switzerland-based leadership advisory firm, Wolpert served as global head of sales enablement and go-to-market strategy for e-commerce company Amazon, according to her LinkedIn profile.

A former professional ballet dancer turned business executive, Wolpert also served a 15-year span at American Express in various roles including as head of sales enablement and marketing and VP, global sales enablement.

While the two positions can tussle over growth versus stability, both the CRO and the CFO are morphing into more strategic leaders within the C-suite.

“Given how both roles have evolved, these two critical roles can actually build a much stronger partnership than they ever could in the past,” Wolpert said. In order for businesses to achieve their goals, that collaboration is critical, she said.

“When I think about strategic planning at the end of the day, you need both functions to focus on revenue growth and they have to be completely in alignment on their financial goals,” Wolpert said. “And I think you need a very strong CFO and a very strong CRO to really come together and think about a business strategy that ultimately drives growth and profitability.”

Broadening the path to the CEO seat  

A strong relationship between CFOs and CROs — both of which typically report to the CEO — can also help top executives to more smoothly execute on their business strategies, balancing “financial frugality” with a customer-centric approach to growth and revenue, Wolpert said. As such, both CFOs and CROs are becoming more “viable contenders” for the role of the CEO, she said.

In her view, the CRO is in a slightly better position to assume the top executive seat, as those executives have a “comprehensive” view of the businesses’ entire revenue ecosystem and so, they naturally develop “a very deep understanding of how various parts of the organization ultimately work together to achieve [a] common objective,” she said.

Finance chiefs are also emerging as more popular candidates for the CEO chair, however — and for those companies which are examining their CFOs for such a role, it’s important to invest in honing the operational leadership and other key skills of their finance chiefs outside of finance, Wolpert said.

Some companies approach this by crafting “an intentional path for the CFO to step into a chief operating officer role or a divisional CEO role” within the same company, she said, enabling them to develop their operational skills.

“I also think… the most successful CFOs who ultimately become CEOs, not only do they bring the kind of operating chops and experience running other parts of the organization, but they have really cultivated tremendous relationships with the board, with their peer set,” Wolpert said.

Today’s CFOs are facing a growing crop of challenges, from persistent inflation to questions over how to best utilize emerging technologies such as AI.  

While there’s always been pressure associated with the top financial seat, the expanding scope of the role’s responsibilities, plus increased volatility in the business environment, is only compounding those pressures — leading to increased risk of burnout, as well as rising CFO turnover, said Jay Peir, head of strategy and interim CFO for Pigment, a business planning software provider.   

“I think the expanded importance and role of the CFO [to] a strategic partnership coupled with increasing pressure and change driven by volatility are both factors,” Peir said in an interview regarding CFO turnover.

Rising pace of change  

CFO turnover reached a six-year high this year, a trend occurring as the supply of finance talent continues to shrink as more and more experienced financial professionals retire, a recent survey by Russell Reynolds found.

While some of the turnover within the role is due to finance chiefs departing for board positions or to the CEO seat, CFOs are also faced with an expanded to-do list that could contribute to burnout. Today’s finance chiefs play an integral role in developing their companies’ strategies — including responding to shifting market developments, the top external risk on finance chiefs’ minds, according to Pigment’s 2025 Office of the CFO survey.

The evolution of the CFO role has also dovetailed with the accelerating pace of change in the global business environment, Peir said.

Companies had to pivot quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and since that point, “we've seen high inflation, supply chain disruption and geopolitical events…and then even this year, it seems as though every week or every day there's news where companies need to make decisions and need to pivot quicker than ever before,” he said. 

Peir has served in his current role at the Paris, France-based company since December 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to Pigment, Peir served as EVP, corporate development and strategy for Tableau Software, and logged an eight-year tenure at SunPower Corporation in roles including VP of corporate development and CFO.

Another factor increasing the pressure on finance chiefs is the dual mandate of both improving efficiency and lowering costs. While finance is often asked to identify efficiencies, available technologies have not “evolved at quite the same pace to support the extended scope and needs” of the finance team, Peir said.

Trust, but verify

Bringing in new technology could help CFOs to better tackle their growing list of responsibilities, both enabling more efficiency as well as helping to attract and retain top talent. In the face of an ongoing accountant shortage, employee recruitment and retention within the finance function remains top of mind for finance chiefs. 

According to Pigment’s survey, managers identified “inadequate technologies and tools” as one of the main reasons for attrition inside of their finance teams, with “work-life balance” and compensation emerging as other key factors. Those at the director level or above, meanwhile, pointed to compensation, business performance, and a lack of training or professional development as reasons behind departing finance employees.

One way CFOs could approach the issue of inadequate technology is by paring down the number of tools they use.The finance function, like other areas of businesses, typically taps multiple platforms for their daily operations — one such platform for budgeting or forecasting, another for financial planning and analytics and so on. However, that means “decision making is spread between those [platforms] where there's, many times, a lack of a single source of truth,” Peir said.  

As well as removing redundant or outdated technologies, CFOs could also utilize emerging tools like AI. Though finance chiefs are still interested in AI’s potential applications — with its potential usages for generating insights and automating manual tasks top of mind — the technology still remains on the list of top risks for CFOs, according to Pigment’s survey.

There’s an element of “trust, but verify” when looking at the technology for finance chiefs, Peir said, especially when it comes to ensuring good data governance and security.

“I think it's hard for finance to just receive an answer versus…having the underlying dynamics of the [forecasting] models or the rationale for the answer,” he said.

The impact of new tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump this week will be “widespread,” affecting many products and industries, according to KPMG’s Andrew Siciliano.

Following Trump’s announcement Wednesday of his sweeping new levies on imported goods, on top of his previous tariff actions, Siciliano offered CFO Dive his view on the best ways to minimize the harm. Options include the “first-sale-for-export” tool, he said.

First sale is an approach that allows importers to declare, for U.S. customs purposes, the transaction value of imported goods based on the initial sale from the manufacturer to an intermediary, rather than the final sale price to the importer. The tool has been a duty-savings mainstay for years, but its popularity “has exploded given the dynamic trade landscape,” according to a KPMG report.

Siciliano, U.S. national practice leader in KPMG’s trade and customs practice, shared his views on the newly reshaped tariff outlook in written responses to emailed questions from CFO Dive’s Maura Webber Sadovi. The exchange has been edited for clarity and brevity.

CFO Dive: What are the major changes today from any tariffs/expectations already set?

Andrew Siciliano: On April 2, President Trump announced a wide-ranging list of “reciprocal tariffs” aimed at addressing trade imbalances and promoting U.S. manufacturing. These measures included a baseline 10% tariff on imports from all countries effective April 5. In addition, for certain nations maintaining significant trade surpluses with the U.S., the rates will be higher such as China (34%), the European Union (20%), and Japan (24%) and will be effective April 9. In addition, once the Secretary of Commerce’s notification that adequate systems are in place to collect tariff revenue, President Trump announced he would end duty-free de minimis treatment for China goods on May 2. Lastly, on April 3, a 25% tariff on imported automobiles will be imposed.

CFO Dive: Which industries/products are most affected?  

Andrew Siciliano: Since the tariffs are widespread across many countries, they will impact many products and industries. However, one industry that will be impacted significantly is the textile and apparel industry. Many retailers moved out of China in 2018 once the China 301 tariffs were implemented and moved to counties such as Vietnam (46%), Thailand (36%), India (26%) and Malaysia (24%), which now have high reciprocal tariffs.

CFO Dive: What is the compound/cumulative tariff rate some companies need to calculate and how? 

Andrew Siciliano: To first determine the applicable tariff you need to determine the U.S. Harmonized Tariff Code for the product, the Country of Origin and the Value. Once you have those items you can determine the standard duty rate and then assess whether any additional punitive tariffs apply. The additional punitive tariffs can be country based (such as the reciprocal tariffs), or industry product based (automobiles, steel and aluminum). Each tariff rate will be applied individually against the imported goods’ value. This is known as tariff stacking, which is the cumulative application of multiple tariffs on a single product.

CFO Dive: What mitigation steps have worked to date in the Trump administration era, what hasn't?

Andrew Siciliano: Several duty minimization programs such as valuation unbundling, first sale for export and the use of foreign trade zones, can be used to minimize or defer tariffs. Duty Drawback is another popular tariff recovery program but is not permissible for some of the IEPPA tariffs. (It is unknown whether it is allowed for the reciprocal tariffs). What doesn’t work is bifurcating the price and making two separate payments to a seller — one for the goods and one for intellectual property. That will almost always be dutiable, especially if paid to the seller of the goods.

CFO Dive: Is lobbying/negotiating through trade groups something CFOs need to ask their boards to get involved with?

Andrew Siciliano: Yes, CFOs responsible for the financial health and strategic financial planning on behalf of a company should consult with the board when considering actions that could have a significant impact to the company’s operations, costs and competitive position. It’s important to remember that while we don’t know how short or long-term the tariffs will be, speaking up may be beneficial to certain industries.

CFO Dive: How can CFOs keep a lid on costs companies may be facing from legal and consultant fees as they wade through all the changes? 

Andrew Siciliano: Not taking the ‘wait and see’ approach but starting early. This may mean engaging a third-party provider to help you integrate tariff mitigation planning and technology — that helps with modeling and scenario planning — into your trade strategy early on. This will help position companies in the long run, to not be unprepared or caught off guard for different outcomes, and/or in a position where they’re scrambling to catch up at the last minute.

Editor’s note: CFO Dive’s Alexei Alexis contributed to this report. 

President Donald Trump has quickly moved on several fronts to make good on his promise to be a pro-cryptocurrency president: he’s ordered the creation of working groups focused on crypto and the issuance and operation of assets such as stablecoins and is exploring the potential creation of a national stockpile of digital assets. At the same time, he’s also sparked concerns about potential conflict of interest stemming from his family’s own financial interests in the sector. 

Taken together, Trump’s actions have helped bring crypto further into the mainstream financial fold in recent months, at the same time that buzz is rising around stablecoins — digital assets which have their value pegged to another asset such as a currency. The shift is pushing many businesses and their finance chiefs to take a second look at the pros and cons of bringing digital assets onto their balance sheets.

However, CFOs eying digital assets also need to keep pace with shifting regulations and accounting requirements surrounding crypto, at the same time as they seek out potential use cases for crypto assets. As the Trump administration is moving to cultivate friendlier relationships with crypto-focused firms and platforms, it’s the “right time to get educated” about the potential capabilities of crypto — and especially, stablecoins for CFOs, treasury officials, and other financial leaders, said Paul Bances, VP of market development for PayPal.

Stablecoins 101

Along with appointing pro-crypto leaders to agencies such as the SEC — the new administration is also walking back aggressive enforcement against cryptocurrency assets and platforms, and creating a large opportunity for the industry to woo new customers.

Ever since the election of President Trump to his second term, “I would say there has been a lot more demand from the corporate segment,” Steven Capozza, director, Americas institutional sales for Coinbase told CFO Dive. For one thing, there’s “a lot of public companies starting to add crypto, not just stablecoins, but Bitcoin, Ethereum, to their balance sheet as part of their treasury,” he said.

This is not the first time cryptocurrency has captivated the attention of business leaders, however — and its past time in the spotlight shone a harsh light on its potential drawbacks, such as the volatility of certain digital assets. As such, many vendors are honing in on stablecoins as a potential asset to draw in often risk-adverse finance chiefs.  

PayPal sees stablecoins as “the first killer use case for crypto,” Bances told CFO Dive in an interview, “because you're basically taking this concept of [a dollar] and tokenizing it and then adding to it and unleashing the power that a blockchain can provide.”

Unlike many other digital assets like bitcoin, stablecoins owe their name to their structure and are viewed as being more stable due to being pegged to another asset — often a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar — making them more viable as a method of payment for finance leaders.

In October, PayPal completed a proof of concept with Coinbase and Big Four firm Ernst & Young, where it used stablecoins to pay EY invoices, according to a press release at the time. The following month, it conducted a similar pilot with Google Cloud, both aimed at demonstrating to CFOs and finance leaders the efficiency and speed of such transactions, Bances said.

Using stablecoins for cross-border transactions can offer an alternative way of moving money than traditional methods such as wire transfers, which can take between two and five days. But “if you're able to do that instantly, and you deliver it on the other end, there's so many more efficiencies in terms of repatriating money,” Capozza said.

However, many finance chiefs are starting from the ground level when it comes to identifying the potential benefits of stablecoins. Getting finance and treasury teams comfortable with stablecoins and educating them about the asset’s uses and benefits can often be a multi-month process, Capozza said.

“These large corporate treasury teams are conservative by nature, and so probably haven't done super deep dives on any of this stuff,” Capozza said. “And so when they come in, it's really a process on our part to help educate them.”

Stablecoins have swiftly seen their transaction volume rise in recent years, a trend that is likely to accelerate with the continued adoption of the asset by large companies, vendors, and payment providers, as well as with a friendlier relationship with federal agencies such as the SEC. In addition to PayPal, Mastercard and Payoneer are among the payment entities which have moved to expand and experiment with stablecoins for transactions, CFO Dive sister publication Payments Dive reported.

It’s important for finance chiefs to take a look at stablecoins currently, because over the next few years, “I would say we're probably not even talking about stablecoins. It is just a net operating part of moving money,” Michelle O’Connor, Vice President of Global Brand and Market Expansion at digital asset tax firm TaxBit told CFO Dive.

The other side of the (stable)coin  

While crypto enthusiasts have praised the Trump administration’s actions to create regulatory clarity and align crypto more closely with traditional finance, others remain wary of the potential risks stablecoins and other digital assets might pose.

“To me, stablecoins remain all risk with little reward,” Jack Castonguay, an associate professor of accounting at Hofstra University in New York, told CFO Dive in an email.

“For most US-based companies, stablecoins are a solution looking for a problem to solve. Most of our companies and CFOs have access to the actual assets the stablecoins are pegged to in value. In my opinion, stablecoins create an unnecessary risk for companies who hold them,” Castonguay said. “They would be better off just buying the asset: dollars, foreign currencies, etc., outright and placing it on their balance sheet instead of investing through a stablecoin.”

Another potential hiccup is the fact that stablecoins — which currently lack an accepted legal definition — could swing in value even though they are pegged to a fiat asset due to a number of different factors. If the stablecoin fails to maintain proper reserves, or the entity issuing it has a risky balance sheet, “then it will decline in value even if the pegged asset is increasing in value,” Castonguay said. From an accounting standpoint, those changes in valuation could potentially increase the P&L exposure of the asset, he said.

Regulators themselves have also expressed concern over potential risks associated with such digital assets. The STABLE Act which recently passed the House Financial Services Committee received pushback from lawmakers largely along partisan lines, with many Democrats arguing the bill could open the gate to conflicts of interest and to consolidating private forms of currency into the hands of corporate firms such as Facebook parent Meta, Time Magazine recently reported.

The act sketches out a framework for stablecoin regulation, requiring privately-issued stablecoins to be backed one-to-one with the U.S. dollar or assets controlled by federal or state regulators, Bloomberg reported. However, it does not bar politicians — including President Trump — from issuing their own stablecoins.  

There will also be those in the crypto space which are looking to make a “quick buck,” O’Connor said.

“I think there are those projects that unfortunately will continue to cast a shadow over us, but also with traditional finance, my hope, and where I see this going is, there's a lot of good coming that hopefully overshadows some of the nonsense and the meme coins and all of that,” O’Connor said. “With where the market has gone recently, I was worried that we could go into another cycle of that. I haven't seen it as much.”

The past few years haven’t been easy on finance leaders charged with setting pricing strategies for their firms’ products, according to Adam Echter, a partner with the global consultancy firm Simon-Kucher & Partners and the co-author of “Beating Inflation,” a book which examines pricing and other strategies companies can use to cope with inflation. 

From 2021 to 2023 companies scrambling to keep up with the rapid onset of inflation instituted fast-paced price increases; executives called emergency meetings on the subject and ditched historical once-a-year price increases to make as many as nine in an 18-month span, Echter told CFO Dive in a recent interview.

Sentiment shifted last year, as consumers and B2B industrial customers, experiencing what Echter called “price fatigue,” pushed back against hikes after indices that had justified hikes began to decline. Then, too, the Federal Reserve’s multi-year campaign to slow the pace of price pressures brought the consumer price index rise to a 2.7% annual rate in November from 9.1% in July 2022. In 2024, as companies sought to hold prices flat, corporations’ strategy swung away from price increases and instead focused on cost cutting, Echter said.  

Now Echter is predicting that 2025 will be a year in which companies will once again go back on offense on pricing, as lower interest rates, proposed tariffs and other policies of the incoming Trump administration risk pushing up inflation.

“When you look at 2025, you get into a world that’s a little bit pro inflation, and that also means pro price increases,” Echter said. “CFOs have a little more air cover to start asking again for upward price movement.” 

Exactly how CFOs go about establishing their pricing strategy this year — whether it be by raising prices or by doing a better job explaining why a product is worth its price tag — requires a well-thought out approach. Echter offers four pricing tips for 2025, including: 

1. Make your higher price case — inside and outside your company. The smart CFO works with the sales organization to push the message about products’ higher value without adding cost, he said. “You can get further than you think by just explaining why the value has changed,” Echter said. This can be easier for industrial companies as they often have multiple opportunities to have conversations with clients. Consumer-facing companies such as grocers or other retailers face a tougher challenge this year, he said. 
2. Consider options before reducing prices. Companies largely did a good job raising prices to keep up with inflation in recent years but were less effective in explaining the price hikes, Echter said. Now they can either lean into value messaging or add some perceived new value to their product. “If you don’t or can’t do those two, then your alternative is to bring your price back down,” he said. 
3. Don’t give away the store. When developing discount strategies and promotions, it’s important to do an analysis of the market. Echter said many companies “over-rotate” and throw in extras to a product package that can be costly without realizing a customer might not even attach value to the added bonus item. “We’re going to see a lot of companies make that mistake and that’s where a CFO can step in and say, ‘Before we start adding to our costs, we want to go out into the market [and find out is] this valuable to you or not?’” 
4. Find the smart add-ons. When looking to convince customers about the value of a product, think about inexpensive upgrades you can make in your product offering, he said. For example, if your product has a one-year warranty, consider making it a two-year warranty, or if you offer 9-to-5 phone coverage try offering 24-7 phone coverage, two options that can be highly scalable at a relatively low cost, he said. “If I can find items that are valuable to my customers but they’re relatively low cost, a good CFO will start adding those in,” he said, thereby defending margin.