Validating Value Models with Finance Champions

  • 29/10/2026
  • Posted by: A Gable
  • Category: Metrics & Economic Levers
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Two colleagues reviewing a spreadsheet of highlighted formula cells with a checkmark on the screen

You present a polished ROI model to the executive team. Two minutes in, the CFO asks where the labour-rate assumption came from. Nobody on the buyer side can answer, because nobody on the buyer side has seen the spreadsheet before. The model collapses, and with it the business case.

The problem this solves

A value model built only by the vendor is a vendor claim. A model that someone inside the buyer’s finance team has reviewed is the buyer’s own analysis. The person who makes that difference is a finance champion: an analyst, controller or business partner who understands how their company measures savings and what the CFO will accept. Your job is to bring them in before the readout, not during it.

Run the review in four moves

  1. Ask your sponsor to introduce you to the person in finance who would normally check a business case like this.
  2. Walk through the formulas line by line. Show where each input comes from and who supplied it.
  3. Ask which assumptions they would challenge and what evidence would change their mind. Write the answers down.
  4. Change the model with them, then send back the revised version so they can see their edits in it.

A finance champion who has edited the model will defend it in rooms you are not invited to. That is the real return on the review.

Treat the pushback as the product

Expect them to cut the soft savings, shorten the payback window or rename a category. Accept the cuts that are fair. A smaller number that finance believes beats a larger one it rejects. Keep a record of what changed and why, because it becomes the audit trail for the executive readout.

Where it goes wrong

  • Sending the spreadsheet by email with no walkthrough, so it is never really read.
  • Defending an assumption instead of asking what evidence would replace it.
  • Going around the sponsor, which can cost you the relationship that opened the door.

Decision and check

Before any executive readout that includes a value model, book a thirty-minute review with a finance champion. The check: the revised model carries at least one change made by them, and the champion has confirmed in writing, even in one line, that the method is how the company would calculate it.

The free SE Ignite curriculum frames this through the 80% mindset: the few reviews that happen early prevent most of the failures that happen late.