Miscalculating Revenue

Miscalculating Revenue

Ever seen 20% of your ARR just... disappear? 💸

Was a hard lesson learned by a client of mine recently.

Turned out it was due to a manual miscalculation at the opportunity entry point.

Ouch. 😰

And these weren’t small potato amounts - we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars being over-reported due to confusion around calculating multi-year deals.

In a former post, I mentioned the importance of the close-won process to ensure a smooth customer journey, clean handovers, and accurate historical reporting.

But to start looking forward using pipeline reports and forecasting tools, the accuracy needs to come much earlier - at the data entry point itself.

That’s why I always stress that revenue metrics are more than just numbers on a report to share. Inaccurate forecasting has a significant impact on strategy, growth plans, and investor relations.

What this exposed was not that there was a product mis-fit or pricing issue, but a training issue with the revenue team. But leadership was then able to focus on creating appropriate resources and formalizing training to tackle the problem head on.

Any tech you have is only as good as the people and processes that are intertwined with it which is why all three are RevOps pillars.

Use all three wisely! 🦝