Revenue Excellence: Extend the Power of OneStream to Sales Operations & Compensation

Introduction

According to OneStream’s Finance 2035 initiative, 67% of chief executive officers (CEOs) say their company’s success depends on the chief financial officer (CFO). CFOs, in turn, rely on OneStream for financial planning, forecasting, and performance management.

But when sales operates in isolation from finance, those critical insights vanish. A revenue black box emerges, obscuring pipeline movement and sales execution. As a result, CFOs are left blind and profitability becomes vulnerable to unpredictability, misaligned incentives, and inefficient sales execution.

By extending OneStream to sales, CFOs gain a data-driven, finance-aligned approach to sales planning, operations and incentives. We call this Revenue Excellence.

This guide outlines how CFOs can bring sales operations into OneStream to ensure revenue growth is predictable, profitable, and aligned with corporate strategy.

Why CFOs Need Revenue Excellence

CFOs own revenue predictability, cost control, and financial strategy. On one hand, strong revenue signals the need for capacity expansion, inventory adjustments, and resource allocation. Weak performance, on the other hand, forces cost controls and strategic shifts.

But Revenue Excellence suffers when sales and finance operate on separate systems. Without revenue-driven insights, supply and demand planning remains reactive and slow. Tying sales execution to operational planning ensures finance isn’t just tracking performance but also driving it. Here are just some of the issues that arise when separate systems are used:

• Inconsistent Revenue Projections: Finance and sales projections don’t match.
• Unstructured Territory & Quota Setting: Sales goals aren’t aligned with demand or financial objectives.
• Incentives That Drive Bookings, Not Profitability: Compensation plans reward top-line growth but neglect margin control.
• Manual, Error-Prone Processes: Inefficient workflows slow down decision-making and increase risk.

According to a Gartner survey, 84% of sales leaders agree that sales analytics has fallen short of expectations for transforming the business. “Limited cross-functional collaboration” was in the top three reasons.

Revenue Excellence solves this issue.

Revenue Excellence is achieved when an organization's sales operations, planning, and incentives are fully integrated with the financial strategy and planning on one platform. In other words, the platform brings together sales, finance, and operational data and processes.

This integration impacts every revenue decision, from territory/quota setting to incentive management and sales execution. Specifically, the integration directly supports and drives profitable growth, predictable revenue streams, and alignment with organizational objectives.

The integration ultimately eliminates silos between finance and sales, providing real-time visibility and data-driven decision-making to optimize revenue generation.

By extending OneStream to sales, CFOs connect sales planning, territory and quota management, and incentives to financial strategy. Such alignment ensures every revenue dollar contributes to profitable growth. That’s Revenue Excellent in action.

The Barriers to Revenue Excellence

Many enterprises still rely on customer relationship management (CRM)-based planning, legacy incentive compensation management (ICM) software, or spreadsheets. Notably, though, these tools don’t integrate well with the tools used for corporate planning. These disconnected systems are the enemy of revenue optimization and create a host of issues:

• Fragmented Data: Sales planning and ICM platforms operate independently from finance.
• Inaccurate Tracking: CFOs can’t track sales pipeline changes in real time.
• Misaligned Quotas & Territories: Sales plans don’t reflect market conditions.
• Inefficient Incentives: Compensation plans drive revenue volume, not profitability.

When sales planning and ICM platforms run in silos, it forces up to 90% of data to be duplicated across systems. Or worse, it leaves key stakeholders having to navigate conflicting versions of the truth. Using two siloed solutions can sometimes seem like forwarding an email to someone by printing it out on the office copier and then couriering the email.

With one shared system and real-time data, finance can predict demand accurately and make decisions that truly align with the organization’s financial goals. If sales and finance operate off different systems, the result is conflicting strategies and mixed signals.

Without an integrated system, CFOs can’t ensure revenue plans align with financial targets, control incentive costs, or hold sales accountable for profitable growth. Additionally, out-of-sync systems can be devastating if they lead to CFOs announcing incorrect financial numbers to internal and external stakeholders or the investment community.

Revenue Excellence with OneStream SPM

OneStream’s sales performance management (SPM) solution delivers Revenue Excellence by unifying sales, finance, and operational data, ensuring that every revenue decision supports profitability.

These capabilities are enabled in part through unified sales planning. Throughout such planning the platform identifies market opportunities, aligns them with the best sales resources, and embeds that into the overarching plan. The functionalities create visibility for both sales and finance.

Unified Sales Planning

1. Align financial goals with real-time sales execution.
2. Link territory and quota management directly to revenue plans.
3. Use Sensible AI to improve plan accuracy and quota setting with AI-generated forecasts that drive more accurate quotas and sales plans.

Revenue Excellence is also enabled by the capabilities we call Optimized Incentives. These incentives drive behavior and motivation to meaningfully impact the achievement of organizational goals.

Optimized Incentives

1. Automate commission calculations to reduce errors and compliance risks.
2. Design flexible, date-effective compensation plans that adapt to changing business conditions.
3. Provide real-time earnings insights to sales teams, ensuring transparency and motivation.

With OneStream, CFOs achieve Revenue Excellence by integrating sales and finance into a single, data-driven system. That system eliminates guesswork and ensures every revenue dollar contributes to financial success.

Next Steps to Achieving Revenue Excellence

CFOs looking to improve revenue predictability, quota setting, and incentive management should take the following steps:

Assess Your Revenue Planning Process

1. Where can data be leveraged across the organization, based on an audit of existing data?
2. Do sales projections align with financial projections?
3. Are projections leveraged daily, weekly, and monthly to drive top and bottom line results?
4. Are quotas optimized for both growth and profitability?
5. Do incentives drive sustainable revenue, not just short-term bookings?
6. Are there any gaps where sales and finance operate in silos>
7. Is your system configured to pre-process and validate incentive payments prior to processing payments?
8. Are your tools and processes designed to support agile adaptation to changing scenarios?

Gather Stakeholders

1. Engage different points of view around revenue and profitability from different sources and methods to create a shared vision for how key stakeholders can collaborate.
2. Start a conversation about revenue unification with your sales and sales operations colleagues. Ensure all stakeholders think about solving the problem using a truly unified planning approach, avoiding a silo where three or more systems must work together.
3. Help the organization understand the mutual benefits of running sales and corporate planning on one trusted platform.
   1. Benefits to the sales team:
      1. Optimize Go-to-Market (GTM) resources to unlock market potential.
      2. Align motivation and rep retention to market opportunity.
      3. Stay agile and focused.

1. Benefits to the finance team:
   1. Confident annual operational planning aligned with GTM resources.
   2. Accurate and transparent financials with aligned GTM plan.
   3. Streamlined planning without the procedural chaos of Excel.

Set Up Timelines

1. Develop a clear roadmap that fits within the fiscal calendar.
2. Outline milestones for integrating finance and sales systems.
3. Schedule periodic reviews to track progress and adjust plans if needed.

Schedule a demo to see how OneStream SPM can impact your organization

See how OneStream SPM streamlines territory and quota management, automates commission calculations, and delivers a single platform for Revenue Excellence across finance and sales.

By extending OneStream SPM to sales operations, CFOs gain control over revenue predictability. The Office of Finance can use the same OneStream platform they use every day to create a unified planning environment. In such an environment, finance can drive sustainable growth and ensure incentives align with long-term financial success.