RevOps can significantly enhance its value to the organization by centralizing projections and dashboards, ensuring that all teams—across management, finance, and partner departments—speak the same language. This clarity through alignment is the key to making better decisions to propel the business forward. This article will provide pragmatic examples to fix this and turn RevOps into a strategic powerhouse.
Introduction
As anyone in RevOps can attest, the real nightmare is reconciling data across countless tools or juggling seven different sets of projections. 73% of C-suite leaders admit they don’t fully understand how their employees are using data, and it’s estimated that knowledge workers spend 12 hours a week just trying to find and interpret data. Why?
Siloed data. Dozens of disconnected spreadsheets and dozens (if not hundreds) of tools, each with its own dashboard, make it difficult to get actionable overviews across the full customer journey. This fragmentation creates massive confusion, pulling teams away from focusing on business-critical activity. It makes answering fundamental questions like, “Where will we end up this quarter, and how will it impact cash flow and CAC?” nearly impossible.
RevOps is on the front line of this challenge. The most significant impact RevOps can provide is by giving clear, actionable insights from projections and actuals. Yet, many teams spend the majority of their day producing daily reports, creating CRM reporting workarounds, or processing endless “cuts” of the data. When asked to deliver insights, they often resort to exporting into Excel, pivoting data, writing commentary, and potentially uploading the results into another system. If any of this information is wrong, trust erodes quickly, making the role even more difficult.
RevOps can solve this by standardizing dashboards and forecasts (including capacity models, commission, plans, sales forecasting, cohort analysis, etc) into a unified, automated system. By doing so, all teams—RevOps, Finance, Management, and others—can access a single, consistent picture of the business and speak the same language. This resulting alignment enables the company to focus on driving real results rather than managing around inconsistencies.
Setting the Scene
As organizations grow, they tend to accumulate more tools to manage operational demands, while new hires often bring their own preferences for different tech stacks and spreadsheet styles. Far too often, this leads to the following reality:
Sales leaders make back-of-the-envelope numbers using Quota/AE to hit the top-line sales target, but often miss the mark when the outbound/inbound pipeline isn’t balanced.
RevOps gets so deep into per-system reporting and customization (Salesforce, Hubspot, Churnzero, Gong, etc) that it is often hard for other teams to understand their projections, which is the ‘right’ number, or how strategic changes will impact results.
Customer success has a difficult time projecting churn, especially across segments, cohorts, ACV size, which may end up deprioritizing work from strategic clients.
Marketing deals with incomplete data and a several-month time lag that makes things difficult to project leading to costly inconsistencies.
FP&A/CFOs spend too much time reconciling conflicting data and mediating disputes across the management team.
The result is a modern-day babel. Each team defaults to speaking their own versions of the truth – reinforced by their siloed team dashboards.
The RevOps Solution
RevOps has the tools and technical expertise to centralize dashboards and projections into one place, so that people can easily understand reports across *all teams* without needing to understand the vagaries of each system. The key to this is to provide:
One source of truth that everyone uses to explain team-wide performance.
Team-wide reports that are all in the same format and easily readable by other teams
Standardized projections next to actuals that everyone understands and are based on the numbers they know
An easy-to-use tool that allows team leads to easily update sales, marketing, and customer success drivers to create scenarios that project ARR, CAC, and LTV across all dimensions.
Putting this all into place takes work (and we built Abacum to simplify this), but once you do, you will empower each team in the company to understand each other’s results, stop the arguments over numbers, and get actionable projections.
Steps To Unify Data and Lead By Example:
1. Agree and publish key dimensions and metric definitions
It’s crucial that all teams align their actuals and projections using the same dimensions – whether by geography, channel, or pod – to ensure everyone operates under a unified strategy. To do this:
Agree on geography and channels: Set clear distinctions for geography and channels across all teams, and update them quickly when there is restructuring.
Ensure consistency across systems: Make sure your ERP, CRM, and CS tools track these same dimensions. If they don’t, create a mapping system to maintain consistency.
Define the calculations for your key metrics: Create a central repository (in your reporting tool) where all teams can view and understand the exact underlying calculations.
Enforce rigor: Require that all dashboards and projections are broken down by these dimensions to ensure the math adds up. For example, if you’re 10% over target, identify which geography or channel is responsible.
Startups change quickly, and so do dimensions (hopefully less so for key metrics). Make sure you use a flexible system that adapts to changes and links actuals back to your original forecasts.
2. Map out what data should be used in each system by whom
Weekly team reviews and cross-team discussion should all revolve around a company standardized reporting format. Of course, teams should still use operational reports from the systems they use daily. But, by standardizing the reporting format, RevOps can vastly increase the speed of understanding data across the business. To do this:
Identify key operational data: Determine what live data points each team needs to perform their tasks effectively and what historical data is needed to provide insights and context.
Map out data visibility: Make it clear to each team where to see each piece of data they need. You should try not to replicate too much of the same data across systems. Provide a clear explanation why operational and team-wide data should be viewed differently.
Create team-specific dashboards: Build team-wide dashboards for each team using the same tool
Create a data accuracy dashboard: When your data is in one place, create a data accuracy dashboard that compares the source system data to the reporting system (yes, we know that the integrations should *theoretically* always match).
Update tools for consistency: Modify or remove any tools that present data in a different format, ensuring uniformity across all forecasts.
This alignment guarantees that everyone is speaking the same language across the organization, encouraging cohesive decision-making.
3. Tie dashboards and forecasts together
No forecast exists in isolation. Every new piece of data and updated projection impacts other parts of the funnel, so an accurate forecast should encompass any changes. To do this:
Put projections next to actuals: Give people the confidence to forecast by putting actuals right next to their projections
Project in the same format as you report: If people are used to reviewing the same format for actuals on a frequent basis, make it easy for them to project out the numbers in the same format
Link key variables: Ensure that a change in the forecast (number of logos) rolls across every part of other teams’ forecast
Roll up team data to company level: Consolidate elements from each teams’ dashboard into a company-wide view that shows projections and actuals. Allow drill-downs from the company dashboard to more detailed reports for deeper insights and context.
Use a dedicated system: Ideally, implement a forecasting system like Abacum that is specifically designed for linking actuals and integrating projections seamlessly.
Connected forecasts provide a holistic view, ensuring that teams understand how each projection ripples through the business.
4. Lead by example: standardize your sales forecast
A strong sales forecast incorporates key elements such as open pipeline, actual pipeline, deal velocity, close rates, full-year projections, ACV rates, and more. These factors are not only complex to explain to non-RevOps users, but they can also be difficult to model accurately in most CRMs. Instead of producing slightly different analyses each month with varied metrics, you should automate a reusable report that enhances others’ understanding of your model. To do this:
Build your models once: Since the same metrics are used each month, focus on building a robust, easy-to-understand model that the entire team can rely on.
Automate data collection: Ensure your data is automatically pulled from relevant systems, minimizing manual updates and reducing the chance of errors.
Make it engaging: Not everyone is comfortable with raw numbers. By designing a visually compelling dashboard, you’ll increase engagement and comprehension across your team.
Be a reviewer, not a creator: Shift your focus from building reports to reviewing them. This will allow you to more easily spot trends and provide deeper business insights.
By standardizing and automating your forecast, you will increase the understanding of everyone in the team and be able to spend more time providing strategic insights.
5. Link your sales, sales velocity, capacity, and commission planning models
Now that you’ve created a unified sales forecast, you can integrate it with other key models used by your team – such as Commission Models, Sales Capacity, and Sales Velocity. By linking these models together, you’ll enhance their accuracy, reduce your workload, and provide users with more actionable data. To do this:
Build and automate the models: Just like the sales forecast, build each model once and automate the data flows to minimize manual updates.
Set up access controls: Provide appropriate access based on roles. For example, a commission calculator should only be accessible to management, sales leads, and the relevant employees.
Provide clear explanations: Include detailed descriptions next to every key figure, explaining its source and how it’s being used, to enhance transparency.
Link to cash flow: Once all models are centralized, tie them directly into your financial models to show the true impact of your projections on cash flow.
By connecting all models and ensuring transparency, you’ll significantly reduce the team’s monthly workload and provide stability through consistency.
6. Integrate cohort understanding throughout your business
Every person often has a different perspective on cohorts, and various tools segment customers in different ways. This makes it challenging to gain a complete view of the customer journey–something that is critical for the business. For example, understanding cohorts like customers from the last 90 days, high ACV clients, companies from specific marketing campaigns, or users upsold in the last 12 months, is essential. To do this:
Establish Cohort Definitions: Identify the 2-3 most important cohort definitions you want to track, and remain consistent with them to observe meaningful historical trends.
Set Up Cohorts Across Systems: Cohorts are critical for customer success and are incredibly valuable for both sales and marketing. By integrating cohort data across systems, teams can better understand how these clients are performing and how to target them more effectively.
Add Cohorted Data to Company Dashboards: Include cohort-specific metrics such as churn, retention, and ACV on your organization-wide dashboards for a more accurate view of business performance.
Enable Drill-Downs into Individual Data: Ensure your teams can drill into cohort data to examine individual customer behaviors, allowing them to derive actionable insights.
By establishing clear cohort definitions and applying them consistently across the organization, you not only strengthen customer success insights but also the rest of the company.
7. Assign Ownership and Accountability
In every management meeting and weekly call, make sure the standardized dashboards are the main source of reference. You can achieve this by either assigning someone from your team to be part of these conversations or by making it a point to ask for dashboard updates at each management session. Culture change is challenging. However, once people see the value, they will embrace it. To do this:
Display the org-wide dashboard prominently: Consider putting it up on the wall or sharing it on screens during all team meetings.
Start every management meeting with the dashboard: Begin each session by reviewing the organization-wide metrics to set the tone.
Disallow any projections outside of the system: This prevents teams from relying on incomplete or inaccurate data – especially since 88% of spreadsheets contain errors, according to various studies.
You’ve provided your organization with a powerful tool. Some may take longer to get on board, but once they do, your contribution will have a measurable impact on the bottom line.
8. Tie everything together to create a true operational model
Once all your key models, team dashboards, and projections are in place – link them together! This is the true power of a unified reporting and forecasting platform. Not only does it ensure everyone is viewing the same data, but it also allows seamless drill-downs into team dashboards or even specific customer data – all within the same tool and format.
The possibilities are endless, and beautiful. Having everything integrated creates a true operational model that makes it significantly easier to diagnose issues and respond to market changes swiftly.
In Conclusion
By delivering a unified reporting and forecasting experience, you not only enhance the team’s understanding but also drastically reduce the time spent on fragmented analysis. This enables the team to focus more on generating actionable, strategic insights rather than wrestling with data inconsistencies.
Abacum’s centralized platform provides instant access to up-to-date financial data, projections, and automated scenarios. With all teams working from a single source of truth, your organization can eliminate the confusion of multiple reports, ensuring alignment on key metrics, projections, and strategic objectives.
