Episode #9: GTM Planning and Forecasting, Without the Spreadsheets - Toni Hohlbein
Escaping the Multiverse of Madness and making revenue predictable.
In a world where we have so much tech, revenue planning and forecasting remain incredibly primitive in most companies.
You might have a million dollar tech stack but still keep your most important business information in spreadsheets.
Now, I love them as much as the next person, but the thought of multiple disconnected-but-cascading spreadsheets makes my skin crawl.
Your business plan is a spreadsheet. Your sales plan and marketing plan are two more. Changes in one place inevitably get missed in another.
Then your forecast is another spreadsheet. And your actual results are somewhere else.
If you need to troubleshoot something, it often takes ages to pull the data, split it by channel / geo / product / etc., calculate whether you’re on pace or not, and identify the source of the problem.
By the time this is done, you may have missed the opportunity to correct it.
I set out one day to see if there were tools to fill this need and came across Growblocks. It seemed like exactly what I wanted: a single source of truth for planning, forecasting, analyzing, and troubleshooting the commercial side of the business.
So I got connected with Toni, their CEO, who came to chat with me about getting out of spreadsheet hell and how to make revenue predictable.
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My Take-Aways
Sales forecasting isn’t enough:
Most companies fail to achieve forecast predictability because they’re primarily focused on opportunities.
However, the true cause of a revenue shortfall might be way further up the funnel. By the time it translates to a revenue gap, it’s too late to fix it.
Only an end-to-end funnel forecast helps you see the 10% MQL problem today that translates into a million dollar revenue problem two quarters from now.
Blended numbers lie:
It’s easy to miss gaps when you’re looking at numbers in aggregate.
Your forecast might be on target as a whole, but over-performance in one area could mask weakness in another. Over time that weakness compounds and becomes a real problem, but again is diagnosed far too late.
The key is to be splitting the funnel by many dimensions (channel, geography, inbound vs. outbound, product, segment, etc.) and proactively surfacing when any area begins to fall off track.
This is very difficult to do with a spreadsheet.
Monitor variables that influence your forecast:
There may be many variables that influence your results that aren’t themselves KPIs.
For example, at a previous company, we saw a huge drop in conversion when a technical issue stopped the “Welcome” email from our product being sent.
Like gauges on a piece of machinery, you need to monitor these factors that could influence the health of your funnel proactively.
About Today's Guest
Toni is the CEO of Growblocks. He spent years as a B2B SaaS CRO and revenue operator, achieving multiple exits. Through this experience, he created a revenue operating operating model that helped his company hit targets 12 quarters in a row. This model was later on used as the basis for Growblocks.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:33] - Toni's background. Founding Growblocks. Sharing a focus on data-driven, system-thinking approach to revenue with his co-founders.
[04:27] - Most forecasting tools focus on only on the opportunity forecast, ignoring the rest of the funnel. Why there aren't more companies building software for full-funnel planning. Forecasts are split into silos. Once you forecast the full funnel, you can identify how a gap in one stage translates to revenue impact further down.
[07:40] - How Toni explains this vision to the market and what benefits people are connecting with. When people finally see their actual revenue engine end-to-end for the first time, it's a huge impact.
[10:09] - Flaws with the planning process today. How the planning process should take place: top-down and bottom up meeting in the middle.
[14:09] - The impact of the tech bubble on the planning process and how it has distorted expectations and behaviour. You can only be efficient once you are predictable.
[18:00] - The factors that lead to predictability. The first comes from understanding your sales engine as a whole through the entire funnel. Not relying on sales people that can pull rabbits from hats. The second factor is proactively spotting issues and jumping on them quickly.
[21:39] - Issues with marketing and sales alignment. Why marketing will hit their number but sales misses theirs. Toni doesn't have an issue with MQLs, so long as the company splits handraisers from non-handraisers. Then marketing can't just hit their number with low-intent MQLs.
[25:24] - Outbound is still alive and kicking. Think of it as the delivery mechanism for a message. Importance of choosing channels that work for your audience. Someone may not be on LinkedIn but they are listening to the radio all day.
[28:32] - Starting to dive into the Growblocks platform. Growblocks works with any kind of funnel design and is also configurable across different dimensions. Solving for garbage-in-garbage-out problems. If data points are missing, it's best to go up a level and exclude that step, then circle back to it when better data is available.
[32:58] - Identifying factors that may influence funnel performance but that are not themselves funnel stages. Toni calls them "monitoring notes" - akin to gauges on a machine that show you certain indicators about its performance.
[36:00] - Growblocks can connect to different data sources and mash them together. It applies sophisticated math and statistics to forecast results. They are incorporating machine learning, but Toni is trying to keep it as transparent as possible so customers can have trust in the results.
[39:30] - Main value props of Growblocks. The first is more predictability, less choppy results. The second is showing things that were invisible to enable to teams to make changes and improve.
[42:21] - Toni's vision for the future of the product.
Resource Links
The Revenue Formula - Toni’s podcast.
The Revenue Letter - Toni’s Substack.