7 Comments
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Brian Weisberg's avatar

Solid post. Your atomic unit mirrors my approach to forecasting where we agree on a revenue target and then I use some similar heuristics to determine how many people (and how much money) we need to achieve that goal. Only I go one step further and use that same goal to determine how much we need to invest in R&D as well (not just GTM).

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OnlyCFO's avatar

Yep - It’s easy to get lost looking just at the high-level. If you go deeper than you really understand efficiency

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Brian Weisberg's avatar

This is also why it is important to take a conversational approach to budgeting and not just send Excel templates. Finance teams need to take the time to understand how *their* teams operate and then go from there.

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Agnes Og's avatar

Great post!

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JD's avatar

Hi! The back of the envelope calculator is a great sanity check tool. Quick questions :

1. what is the role of an account manager? (I thought this was rolled into CSM).

2. How do you track marketing spend per pod? (various tools should allow to track marketing spend per product pretty accurately I believe but does allocating the spend to a sales pod require some guesswork?)

Thanks!

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OnlyCFO's avatar

1. Yeah, they can/do often overlap. In my example I included both to show how inefficient it can get if you don’t consider everyone (and you may have too many roles)

2. This part is tricky. It almost always requires some guesswork

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JD's avatar

Thanks for the reply, much appreciated!

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