Revenue Ops / FP&A
Practical, actionable blueprints for growth.
Break down silos to achieve accurate financial planning, strategic resource allocation, and ultimately, sustainable business success.
Common Challenges in Financial Planning
Without robust collaboration with sales, FP&A teams encounter significant challenges in accurately planning revenue and budgets. This disconnect leads to a cascade of problems that undermine financial integrity and strategic decision-making.
Without direct input from the sales team on current opportunities, deal stages, close probabilities, and historical win rates, finance teams are forced to rely on outdated data or broad assumptions. This leads to inaccurate revenue forecasts that don't reflect the true sales landscape. Sales teams are on the front lines, sensing shifts in customer demand, competitive pressures, and market trends. Without this invaluable insight, finance might build revenue models based on stale assumptions, leading to overly optimistic or pessimistic projections.
Finance might set revenue targets that are unachievable given the sales team's capacity, market conditions, or product offerings. Conversely, sales might set targets that don't align with the company's overall financial goals or profitability objectives. Without sales input on headcount needs, commission structures, or desired training/tools, finance may allocate insufficient or excessive budget to the sales department, impacting performance and cost-efficiency.
When sales and finance don't collaborate, it's hard to pinpoint why revenue targets are missed. Is it a sales execution problem, an unrealistic target, a market shift, or a product issue? Without shared data, it's a blame game. When actuals deviate from budget, finance struggles to understand the root causes without sales context, making corrective actions less effective. Finance loses the opportunity to be a true strategic partner. Instead of providing forward-looking insights based on a deep understanding of the business, they are relegated to historical reporting and reactive adjustments.
