Revenue execution blindspot: How Finance and sales teams work in harmony to perform

All right. We're going to wait for a couple of people to join. We've got some people entering the room.

And we're going to go ahead and get started. So welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Revenue Execution Blind Spots. My name is Mark Nichols. I'm a frontline manager with OneStream. I cover California and various parts of the Western half of the United States.

What we're going to dive into today is near and dear to my heart as part of the revenue execution cycle. My job is to help bring all of this together with the help of two individuals that I'm going to have with me as part of the presentation, bringing planning incentives and performance blind spots to the organization. Part of my job is to deliver revenue to OneStream. So you may be interested in it to understand how we do that and how operations come in and how we use our platform to execute on this vision. Let me introduce the panelists. I'll start with Lindsay.

Hi, guys. I'm Lindsay Miller. I feed our global revenue operations team here at OneStream. I've been here just under six years based in Phoenix, Arizona. I've been in kind of a revenue operations leadership role for well over a decade at this point.

Thanks, Lindsay. Yeah. And I'm Phil Kazuba. I'm one of the co-founders at one of OneStream's partners in an organization called Infinity SPM.

We've actually been working with OneStream for just about three and a half, actually almost four years now, where we've been jointly building out a sales performance management solution specifically built right on top of OneStream. And when I say that, that means there's no integration. There's nothing that's happening in the background that you have to worry about how to move data. And we see that as a huge advantage. So really looking forward to today's session, Mark.

Awesome, guys. Let's go ahead and get started. So today's discussion, setting the stage, is how OneStream's growth shaped the need for RPM. As you know, we've grown tremendously over the last eight years that I've been in with the organization from 300 to 1,800 customers. So how do we manage that growth within the revenue performance management cycle?

We're going to then define what that is so you have an understanding of where you fit in that cycle. We're going to give you opportunity to understand some of the signals, some of the things that may be aligned or the gaps that you may have in your own organization and how to spot those.

What OneStream does in it to enable those gaps and make a complete revenue cycle within the organization.

We'll talk about how AI is empowering our unified platform in this particular area. I'll follow up with Q&A. And as always, ask questions along the way. The chat is open.

Next slide. All right. So I'm going to give you guys a little bit of that setting the stage, help explain kind of the growth and evolution and change that OneStream has gone through over the last few years to really give you a picture as to why we do this. We've changed a lot about how we were managing some of our performance management processes and work streams.

So as Mark said, we had some pretty big growth. If we just think specifically about the last two years, so 2023 to 2025, we experienced 52% growth in our ARR and a 30% growth in our customer base, just the sheer number of customers that we're now supporting.

If you think about the people. So a lot of this program that we have is about managing a lot of different people, right, with incentive and comp and commissions and all of that.

We have currently 300 over 300 sellers and some specialized roles that support our global market. Right. So that includes a lot of various segments, verticals, lots of countries across the globe.

But if you take it back a little bit. So I like to think about it from 2020 because that is actually when I started at OneStream.

And if I go and think about that time frame and what it looked like then, we've actually seen a 285% increase in that number of sellers since that time. Right. And that is about the time when I came here that we were in Excel. Everything was in Excel. And we were thinking about those decisions that says, hey, how are we really going to help scale and keep up with the change and the growth that's happening?

And then alongside that, there were a lot of changes happening with the structure of the organization. So we also had a 2.8 times change or growth in just the roles that we're managing. Right. So think about just having one standard account executive moving to various segments, moving to roles like hunter farmer, moving to hybrid roles. So a lot of different roles that we now have to manage that have a lot of implications across different work streams and processes.

So really gave us a reason to take a step back and think about the long term scalability of all of those changes because it's not stopping anytime soon.

For sure. And I know that one of the things that you mentioned to me a few times is around the complexity of all of those changes, but also just managing the business on a regular basis.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. So we have the things that our team as a revenue operations functions just do day to day, right? Business as usual, the things that just happen as we're trying to hit the bookings targets, as we're trying to manage everything that's happening.

But then we have these changes that sometimes are annual planning. Sometimes they're in the middle of the year because we need to pivot and make decisions about how best to support the needs to hit our annual operating plan for the year. Right. So there's kind of that two sides of it. We're thinking about annual stuff, but also thinking about the stuff that happens real time as you're making decisions about business.

And for me, like when I think about revenue performance management and kind of your experience, Lindsay, at OneStream, but also working with other clients, like that complexity just doesn't show up as a single problem. Right. It's there's a mix of problems that always happen.

That's right. Yeah. So this is a great representation to help talk through that. Right. A lot of people think about performance management and all you think is incentive comp. Right. How are we managing commissions? How are we managing performance, percentage of quota, that kind of stuff? But there is a lot more to it. There are a lot of impacted work streams and processes and things that impact how we make decisions about the business.

Right. So think about planning. Right. And the annual operating plan. Things that I actually just mentioned when you think about segments, verticals, some of those strategies, markets that we're going to do.

Those are very dependent on our operating plan and vice versa. Those decisions are made in support of the annual operating plan that we know we need to execute.

And so it has a pretty clear dependency on that. Right. It can create some issues there. When you think about territory and quota. Right. If I'm splitting roles, if I'm creating new segments between, you know, a commercial and an enterprise group. Now I have to think about the coverage, the capacity model. How do the quotas change? Because I've introduced all these different types of roles into the organization.

That obviously feeds into the inside of side. It's just the inside we kind of all expect. Right. How do we actually manage that? How do we look at performance?

But the last one's actually really important because the one thing that you actually want to know when you make all the changes like this, you have expected outcomes. Like we have an expectation of what all those changes are going to do for our business and the ability to be able to assess that, to see it, to see if it's working, if it's not working and pivot and make decisions really quickly. See if we miss something. Is there any risk? Right. Associated with the changes that we've made.

That's just as important as the rest of it. Right. Yeah. And for me, like when I think about it, it's also like the annual planning process. Like for most companies, it's a couple of quarters in length. It starts with some very high level expectations and then drives into very granular detail, whether it's people or territories or quotas.

But of course, while you're doing the planning, the business is still moving forward. Right. Maybe your top performer just got promoted into a new leadership role and you're backfilling in a previous role and you have a different level of performance. Or, you know, maybe there's a change in the customer base or something like all those things to me are this continuous flow that you have to have inside of the way a RevOps team thinks about these planning exercises, reporting and that.

That's absolutely right. But yeah, I mean, what you set up at the start of the year isn't how you end the year. Right. You don't set up with the same number of people, the people in the same roles. Like it is constantly changing every day, every week, every month.

Right. Yeah, for sure. And that's like in this kind of conversation, we kind of refer to that as being the blind spots that kind of enter the way that you think about the business. Right. Is you go into the planning exercise. There's a series of blind spots there.

You go through your incentive design and think about how you want to motivate people and drive the performance. But there's blind spots there as well. And I think a lot of the conversation we talk about is like, how do you find those blind spots? How do you address them? But also, how do you take a platform like OneStream and tools like SPM and even some of the Revenue Insight tools and really try and bring that together so that you have better visibility overall? Absolutely.

So that blind spot is not just something I know the OneStream team has faced and you keep working on. We see it very consistently with a lot of clients. And it kind of stems from a fundamental challenge that I think most companies have where finance lives in one world, one series of systems, one back office kind of environment. And sales lives in a different one. And so it starts to create challenges in the way that they look at the data, they look at the insights that you can get from the organization, from the data that you're collecting.

And those blind spots really show up where, you know, things like assumptions don't match the expectations or, you know, the forecast risk shows up way too late because we didn't have those systems connected properly. So, you know, sales is projecting maybe more sales on a particular product line, but operations isn't ready to fulfill that demand from a supply and demand perspective.

And so a big theme that we've seen that we're really focused on addressing with OneStream is how do we get a more unified view from planning to ongoing performance to the measurement and tracking of how the teams are doing against the goals and objectives they have.

And so we're going to talk a lot about blind spots in this conversation today, but it's going to be based on this foundation of how do you address them from a system platform perspective as well.

And that's what we've been focused on with OneStream over the last three and a half years. How do you help take the planning, the selling, the delivery, and the optimization and create a single view of that so that the entire business can manage the business more effectively?

What we've done at Infinity SPM has been very focused on the sales performance management quadrant. You know, having an automated incentive compensation strategy in place so that your reps have visibility, that the team that's responsible for management has the controls, has the ability to look at the impact of those compensation dollars on the overall business.

Together with how you think about assigning resources to the marketplace, whether it's in a geographical model, a segmentation model, Lindsay, like you were just talking about a few moments ago, or a combination of both or others that might be required.

In parallel to that, the OneStream AI team has also been working on a series of tools that they call the revenue insight platform that lets you get better visibility to your forecasting, to having better analytics, better predictive models available through AI on how your teams are performing, whether that's from sales data, or more importantly, the combination of sales and financing data in a meaningful way.

And this is all being done on the platform that you already have, that you already trust from a finance perspective. And that's OneStream. So we're using the same platform, the same data structure to deliver both sales performance management, but also the AI insights that you can take advantage of because you have the data in a unified platform in a meaningful way.

So as you think about revenue performance management, it's really designed to remove and give you better visibility on those blind spots so that you can be not only doing it at the planning stage, but also as Lindsay was talking about, as you go through the year and you see different signals and you better understand the business, you can make the right adjustments. You can make the changes and then go back to the original plan and continue to work through that.

So that's what we've been focused on. That is revenue performance management at the highest level. We're not going to spend a bunch of time diving into product features and capabilities. What we're going to talk about is some of the challenges that organizations face and how revenue performance management is specifically designed to address that from a capability and a platform perspective.

All right. So revenue alignment. So we're going to play a little game. Do you have a blind spot? So the first one I think about is, you know, you have a blind spot when every forecast call ends with, let's take that offline. Certainly that's an issue. You're taking things offline. The confidence in the forecast is not there. Your CRO then has a very pointed light on what you're doing in your business.

Yeah. I think the next one that we've probably all seen is sales says we feel good and finance immediately hears start building the downside case of what they just said to us. Is that what they're thinking in their heads when I give a forecast?

The board deck and CRM tells different stories. And I think Lindsay probably has seen this not too often in the latest rounds as we went public. But in years past, this may have been offset with one another. And that's certainly an issue because you put your CRO in a position to not be able to defend from numbers that are not real.

Yeah, for sure. Hey, I think we've all seen this. Eventually, we all get aligned, usually after the quarter's completed because the numbers are locked in and reported. But it's not in time for leadership or the team to be able to react or do something different to change the outcome from a revenue perspective. Right. The meeting ends with follow ups, not decisions. And if I'm asked to do a follow up with my VP of sales or CRO, that's a blind spot. And I'm certainly going to have to have some explanation. So filling in those gaps, very important. Awesome. Perfect.

All right. So taking all of those blind spots, which I could talk for hours about because they have all absolutely happened at one stream.

They all feed pretty heavily into a lot of the reasons if you think about where one stream has come from and where we're at now. So I'm thinking about kind of the revenue side and going to a bit of the before picture. Right. A lot of those blind spots are a result of things like having different set different sources of truth. Right. You can ask the same question and get 12 different answers from 12 different people. Right. Without having the same connected piece of information. Right. If we're all running different data sets and that inherently would happen.

Finance has their sales or CRO. Has his. My team has ours. We're running data in different ways. And so we're spending all of our time trying to reconcile that information and make sure that we trust the information. Are we making decisions off of data that we believe to be correct? Right. And accurate. And so you end up with a lot of bridging of data, a lot of reconciling of data, figuring out what's right, what's wrong.

It creates issues where we're very disconnected in the way that we plan. So we're doing a kind of bottoms up build on a sales side, finances doing a tops down build on their side and they come together and suddenly don't match up at all. Right. And that's just the nature of doing things in a way that's not connected in the same place.

The visibility becomes poor because we're talking spreadsheets on spreadsheets on spreadsheets. Right. Which become outdated. It's hard to manage that way. And unfortunately, all of that means it's taking us a really long time to make decisions. Right. Because we're spending so much time on all of these other things. We're not coming to the last point. We're not coming to a meeting with the data prepared to make answers and decisions off of. We're coming to a meeting and spending the whole time talking about the data and whether it's right or wrong. Right.

So fast forward and where we're at now. Right. As we've got my team, we've got our CFO and our finance organization. We've got our CRO and sales team all talking the same language, all reading off the same piece of paper. Right. And so we're making decisions off of the same data. It means our priorities are aligned. It means we're planning together. We're connecting that tops down and the bottoms up approaches. Right.

Plans, quotas, incentives, everything is connected from end to end. We're sharing that data. So we kind of all know exactly what everybody's looking at at any given point in time. And it means we're making decisions faster. We're moving faster. We're acting faster. We're making decisions much faster.

Yeah. When you think about that, Lindsay, what did you think had the biggest impact on your team and how you help service and bring value to the organization, but maybe more broadly, the entire company?

Yeah. So honestly, I mean, the disconnect that happens with data falls so much on my team. Right. My team is largely responsible, especially because most of that data is coming from our CRM.

Right. That's really kind of a source of data for a lot of that information. And that's owned by my team. And so when you get into any of these situations and people are questioning the data, that reconciliation falls back on my team. And so instead of being able to go into a meeting and have really valid strategic conversations, we're spending all of our time trying to answer questions about why something maybe doesn't match somebody else's number. Right.

And the way that you want to look at it, whether it's the planning process or your in -quarter reporting or any of those types of things. Right.

And it feels like you now have a really strong foundation for doing that across finance and sales together. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so having us all working in the same system, off the same set of data and also doing it systemically, which means it's so spreadsheets are outdated the minute you pull them. Right. Everybody knows that. Right. It is instantly outdated because you're working off of data that's changing every day inside of a CRM. Right. When that's your source of data.

So knowing that we have real time updates, we have real time integrations and data pulls, which means we have real time refreshes.

So we're able to look at data in a way that's not spending all of these time refreshing. And we're able to look at and make real time insights right off of information that's happening every day, every week, every month. So as those changes are happening with the company, with, you know, our whether how we're tracking towards our forecast, towards performance, towards plan, all the changes that happen with planning right throughout the year, we're able to make decisions in a more real time fashion than we were before.

Yeah. That's so powerful. Such a great place to be, especially for a robots team. Right. Like, sure.

I want to be doing strategy. I don't want to be doing reconciliation. Right. For sure. Yeah. Awesome. Cool.

Should we move on to the next section? Yep. Okay. Territory and quota blind spots. I love creating territories as a sales director. It's the best thing that's ever happened to me. I sense a little bit of sarcasm there, Mark. I don't know why. It's the worst thing for me to be doing is putting me into an Excel document, trying to create level set territories. It was so, I was so thankful when I actually used OneStream to do this.

And I know that. Multiply you by 27 others, Mark. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's exponential. And the amount of time I wasted putting together these multiple Excel spreadsheets, sending them back to you. So, this is near and dear to my heart. One of the reasons I wanted to put this seminar together. So, you know you have a territory blind spot when

the annual operating plan assumes coverage that does not exist or does not happen. So, maybe you have firsthand knowledge of this, Lindsay, or Phil.

But coverage is everything. Yes, it is. It is. And Lindsay said it before. It changes all the time, right? Like, people move. Maybe someone's along with the organization. Maybe there's a bunch of new people that just come on board and they're ramped up. Now, like, there's so many factors there. I think another one is where the quotas are fair and excel, but when they get to the field, like, everyone's protesting. They don't understand how I got to that number. Why are you giving me that quota? Like, the debate continues versus having some unified view of that.

Absolutely. So, hiring slips, but the target doesn't move. One of the things about having a quota and being a salesperson and a director is, I get an annual quota. It doesn't change on the circumstances, the people that are in the seats, or most importantly, the people that are not in the seats yet. So, if you're hearing that from your revenue producers, there's a blind spot. Yeah,

and I think directly connected to that is territories change faster than a plan can react, right? Where, you know, whether it's someone coming into the organization and you're creating a new territory for them for the first time ever, or maybe you're taking two or three territories and trying to think about how you want to cover them differently.

I know, Lindsay, there was a great example on the East Coast with OneStream where one of the senior leaders had to manage four or five major changes all at the same time. And I can't imagine trying to do that in a spreadsheet. Like, I couldn't imagine that type of chaos. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and on that point, I would take that home at night. If I couldn't create that masterful territory, it would sit on me at night. So, just like finance people, they take their work home. Yeah. Salespeople as well. So, super important. Last one, sales leaders debate fairness instead of execution. There's a lot of whining in sales. So, this goes without saying.

But having one system to operate off of, much better than having a multitude of Excel spreadsheets. So, yeah, for sure. Great. I appreciate the accountability with the whining, Mark. Thank you. Yes. I can't answer the whining. I can't answer the whining.

No, all of those blind spots. Again, like, we've experienced every single one of those. Territories has actually been one of, for me, one of the bigger pain points that we've had in the past with trying to really manage that. And I will say a lot of it comes back to actually that last point that Mark was talking about, which is really trying to create equal territories. The debates about what a fair territory looks like. What does a good account look like? Going through all of that.

And, like I said, do that across not just Mark, but all of the sales directors we have. And then you go a level up. And our, you know, regional VPs have opinions, too. It's a lot of things to try to manage to help everybody get comfortable with something.

So, old state for OneStream, right, it was a very kind of fragmented process. So, spreadsheets on spreadsheets on spreadsheets, right? That is the OneStream story from the past, right? We would do quotas in a spreadsheet. We would plan for capacity in a different spreadsheet. We would have targets top down from finance, different spreadsheet, right?

Targets at kind of sales director, RBP levels, different spreadsheet, right? So, we're just talking lots of spreadsheets. And none of them really come together in a way that makes sure that we have visibility into where the disconnects or the coverage issues or whatever might be, which, again, makes it really hard for us to see when gaps occur as we move through the year, right? So, now everything, again, is just wildly disconnected from what finance is doing, from what we're doing.

Our territory models were really manual. They were all in spreadsheets. Every single one of our sales directors was using a spreadsheet to analyze territories. And we were really making decisions off of either tribal knowledge or just one single analytical point, which was the company size. So, annual revenue, size of company. That was the only thing we were really using to decide how to create territories.

And that just doesn't create a lot of trust in it, especially for our sales reps, because they'll look at it and say, well, this, you know, billion-dollar company is not the same as that one or whatever those answers might be, right? So, just not a very mature or data-driven model, truly, at the end of the day.

And then you have all the sales leadership feedback that we've been talking about. It is really difficult to take all of that and create something that generates trust that everybody feels confident in when you're talking, you know, 40 different people who all have a different view and perspective of the market in their area.

And so, all of that together, it took us months, months to get any of this done. And that's a wild distraction for our sales leaders when they're supposed to be out selling, right, and helping us at our bookings targets. I don't need them spending months and months and months trying to figure out territories, right?

Yeah. So, fast forward, and where are we now? So, using the solution we have in OneStream, we're bringing together all of those planning targets. We're bringing together all of this capacity planning. We're bringing together all of our data for our territories out of Salesforce. So, what does that account-level data look like? And we're pulling it together in a way that allows us to do these really data-driven models to analyze territories, to score accounts, to say, what does a good territory look like?

And then, are they equal across all of the people, all of their sales reps across the org, right? Are we really creating fairness to make sure that the quotas that we're attaching to those are also fair? And it gives everybody a lot more trust. It gives everybody a lot more confidence in not only that they have the ability to hit the quota we're giving them, because we've gone through that work to make sure the territories are fair, but understanding that it's not subjective anymore, right? It's more objective in terms of the data that we're using to make those decisions.

And it's great, because all of this scenario planning that we do, it's directly connected to the quota management process, right? So, when we go through all of these quota planning, we go through territories, we define all of the targets. It immediately, with the click of a button, pushes into quota management. I don't have to go copy it from spreadsheet to spreadsheet or system to system. It's all integrated in the same tool. And that means no more months and months and months of Mark and all of his peers doing territories and spreadsheets. We're able to do it much more agilely.

Nice. Now, Lindsay, one of the things I love about how you've set this up is you have this truly collaborative model set up where the first level managers get to contribute, the next level, the next level. And it's all tracked and managed and automated, right, where the feedback's there. And I think that's really unique. I'm wondering if you can maybe take a minute just kind of talking about that and maybe what the impact of that has been.

It is. Yeah. So, it is unique. A lot of companies, a revenue operations team just makes those decisions in a silo. Like, they own it. They execute it. They do all that. They do. Like, the sales directors don't even have a say in it. They're not involved in it.

Frankly, I am not the one, my team is not the one that's going to the sales reps to deliver their quotas, to talk to them about their territories, to look at their accounts with them. That is what our frontline leaders are doing, right?

And so, I think it is really important that they feel as confident in the models that we're putting out as we do, right? I want them to feel confident and have the tools to be able to do it in a way that gives them that confidence. But they have to be able to deliver the message. So, having them involved in it, I think, makes that messaging very different. And I think that's what gives our reps a lot of trust in it is they trust their leaders have been involved and have made all the right decisions.

Yeah. It's such a powerful place to start with that kind of perspective that my manager, my direct manager knows it, understands it. They're there to help you be successful, right?

Yeah. Especially as an evolution, right? Because we obviously came from a path of it. It was all in spreadsheets and everybody was doing their own thing anyway. And so, it was almost as important to me that our sales leaders felt comfortable with what we were doing, not just the sales reps.

Over time, there's probably a place where we will mostly just do it all, deliver it, give them a chance to look at it, and then we're done, right? Like, it'll continue to evolve as everyone gains more trust in it. But coming from where we were, right, which was everybody doing it in their own spreadsheet in a very disconnected fashion, it's gone a long way to create trust in what we're doing.

Nice. That's awesome. That's great. Yeah, for me, like, that opportunity to kind of bring the planning together in a seamless way with finance is a big win, because I think we've all lived it where the annual plan probably changes 20 times before it ever gets distributed to the individual departments and teams. But even after you start making decisions, it changes again, right? Like, whether the company did better than expected in the previous quarter or something like that. So, I don't know, to me, that's a huge advantage and opportunity. Absolutely. Yeah.

All right. Commission is near and dear to my heart. So, you know, you have a commission blind spot. When?

Everyone audits commissions, but nobody is an accountant. I can tell you firsthand that this is the most important thing that hits a sales reps bank account and what they care about most. And auditing on our side becomes first and foremost. I have it on my own spreadsheet that would take place every time I got a commission. And what happens is it's like a black box. You've probably experienced this. If you have a black box out there, we no longer do. Thank goodness. But this becomes a challenge for organizations. For sure.

The next one is, like, for a lot of organizations, commissions is probably one of the largest sales expense items. And typically, you know, a lot of time is spent up front thinking about how do we want to structure our compensation plans? How do we want to motivate the team to drive specific results?

But it's rarely reviewed. And typically, in most companies, it's owned by one person on some spreadsheet somewhere. And so connecting the reality of what happened in the business to your compensation and that really big expense doesn't happen as often or at all for some organizations until after you finish the year. So it's way, way too late. It just doesn't give you the opportunity to see it. And that's definitely a blind spot in my mind.

So sellers chase the goal, then wait a quarter to know if they won. So that's absolutely something that happens within our organization. We're always chasing a revenue target, quarterly, annual goals. Oftentimes, the commission doesn't catch up with that.

That's what was before. Now, with OneStream's unified platform, we're allowed to be able to see revenue as it comes in and be able to visually audit that. So super important as it comes to systematizing commissions. Yeah, for sure.

And that's the challenge, right? And it's like when the sellers trust their own spreadsheets more than the official statements they're getting from the company, right? Like the wasted time that they're spending trying to track and all that stuff. Hey, every once in a while, someone's going to make a mistake and ask a bunch of questions that was off that single error that they might have made. Like, it's just not a good productive use of time.

Well, and then for Lindsay, I can't imagine pre and post implementation of OneStream. How many questions did you get when commissions came out pre and then post? Those questions are probably not as many. Yeah, for sure.

And then the last one is that, you know, you don't have visibility on the commission cost, not the performance, right? Like really understanding how did our compensation strategy drive the business the way we want to.

I think every senior leader starts the year thinking about the strategic goals and objectives they have. They work on how to get that alignment in their comp structure. But, you know, you need that ongoing visibility to really understand the impact it's having. Is it driving the motivation you want? Is it driving the results that you're looking for? And if you can't do that, that's absolutely a blind spot.

Yep. All right. So once again, like I said, I could talk about all of those blind spots because we have a lot of those. Not anymore, but we did.

So if we talk a little bit again from a commission's perspective, the before and after evolution at OneStream. So before we were on spreadsheets, like I said, when I started here in 2020, almost six years ago, everything was in spreadsheets. Sales was managed in spreadsheets. This development was in spreadsheets.

To some of those blind spots that Phil and Mark were talking about, there is zero visibility when it's a spreadsheet that's managed on somebody else's desktop, right? There is no way for you to know what that looks like to get any of those details. All you're seeing is a commission check at the end of the period, right?

So that's one. And we did move to Captivate IQ, but it only supported sales. So that was with a really heavy services dependency. We had a lot of services engagement services money spent just to roll over plans, to add new plans, whatever it looked like. We actually never got business development stood up inside of Captivate IQ. So it stayed offline in spreadsheets for quite a while.

Our plan documents were actually issued by HR through our HR system. So completely disconnected from anything happening inside of Captivate IQ or anywhere else. So there wasn't anything happening where you could even see those in the same place.

The reporting was manual. So the reporting we were getting out of Captivate IQ just was not great. It was kind of hard to read, hard to use, was not really in the right formatting. So we'd end up exporting it all, reformatting it, manipulating it however we needed to, to make it usable for how we wanted to measure and manage performance.

And all of that together was just not a lot of audit trails. And for a company that was going public right at the time, that's really important, right? To be able to have audit trails, to be able to have approval workflows built into everything that we're doing. And really none of that existed.

So fast forward and where we're at now is all of that is done inside of OneStream. So sales is in there, migrated that from Captivate. We built the business development plans, which we never stood up inside of Captivate before, inside of OneStream. We added in our kind of specialist roles for our AI sales team. And we added our pre-sales organization into it, which wasn't even on our radar previously, right? So now we've got a lot more roles and a lot more people that we're able to manage inside of a systemic automated process.

Our reps and sellers all get incentive statements every single month, right? And that data is refreshed regularly so they can see how they're tracking at any point in time.

Not waiting until the end of the month, not waiting until the end of the quarter, not waiting until the end of the year, right? They're able to see how things are tracking inside of there.

Additionally, when we talk about transparency, right, and building trust and trusting the incentive statements, those statements are built in a way to give them full transparency into what's being paid and what's not being paid, right? We do have rules here, like most companies do, that create reasons for deferring commission or holding it for any reason.

And they can very clearly see which deals are being held and why. So it is very clear to anybody if there's something that hasn't been paid why that's happening, which creates a lot of trust in the data and the processes that we're following.

Plan documents are done directly inside of OneStream, no longer isolated and handled by HR. It is integrated with our HR system, which is UKG, which makes sure that those plan documents do land in like employee files and things like that that are important to our HR team, but directly available to all of our individual sellers inside of OneStream alongside their incentive statements.

And then we even automated a lot of reporting. So the attainment reporting that we were doing manually before, you can get live inside of the system with the click of a button, can export it and use it for other things if we need to. We also automated all of our payroll reporting. So if you think about accruals and amortization and things like that, those are all built out into automated reporting files that are generated and actually integrated into some of our payroll systems like CloudPay.

And then lastly, again, approvals, audit trails. The audit trails are everywhere inside of OneStream, right? By being a finance-led system, it is inherent that there is audit trails on quite literally everything, right? Every change that happens in that system. And then we're able to use kind of the native workflows within OneStream to do controller reviews of the commission. So to the point, huge expense, our controller needs to be looking at it. We've got an approval workflow for that.

Our sellers are doing statement approvals. We've got plan approvals. Everything is built right in the system.

That's cool. One of the things that you guys have all been a little bit uniquely is every month when you go to pay commissions, you give the reps an opportunity to review their performance from a commission's perspective, ask any questions, get clarification, approve it. So going back to your workflow and approval stuff, and then it gets submitted. I mean, that's pretty unique, but that transparency trust must just go to the next level when you're doing those things.

Yeah. And I mean, so yes, transparency, trust, all of that. And because we're putting it all there, it makes it pretty easy to know if you think something's missing or not. And if it's missing, you can usually see why because it'll tell you, oh, you have a missing PO or a delayed effective date or something like that. It's really easy to know why it's not included.

But for my perspective, right, from a revenue operations side, it actually puts some accountability on the team to be looking at it and reviewing it proactively and making sure that they're also owning and raising their hand if they see something that doesn't look right. And sometimes that actually is because it's wrong in Salesforce, which turns it back into a accountability of did you put it in correctly in the system, right, when you entered it. So it creates a really great kind of accountability with everybody who's involved on that data.

Yeah. That's very powerful for sure. Awesome. Okay. Okay. So revenue performance enabled AI insights.

So we're all using AI in one form or another. We're all learning as we go as the evolution of AI is starting to impact organizations.

And then excited. And certainly that applies to the revenue story, as we talked about all the capabilities that OneStream brings to the table.

You know, teaching AI the full revenue story. Everyone is using AI revenue data. Most are only feeding small portions of that data.

Yeah, for sure. And I know, Mark, like, I'm sure you've done some of this too. Like, I'll take some data from CRM or something I'm working on. I'll ask AI a bunch of questions and then realize after the fact that maybe I didn't give it enough to give me a meaningful answer or something like that. So definitely that's one of the patterns I think we're all starting to see in the marketplace.

Another one is like, hey, it's one thing to look at it from a CRM only perspective. But if it's not connected to the way that finance is thinking about the broader business or reporting on how the business is doing, again, you're kind of having this disconnect, right? Where suddenly you've got a couple of pieces trying to come together and it never really does. And AI would never know the difference, right? It would have no understanding of what the reality is.

So AI finds the revenue risk, but without the plan and incentives, it can't explain what to do next. Yeah, for sure. You know, CRM is telling AI what sellers are doing, but revenue performance management is really designed to tell what matters and how it can have an impact on the business. And that to me is, again, trying to find a way to bring the two pieces together in a very unified view for the organization to look at.

So the blind spot is an AI capability. It's the incomplete revenue data behind it. And certainly I would say me fishing out data from CRM is just part of the story. Certainly the entire revenue insight is needed to be brought to the table. And we're learning the best ways to handle that at OneStream by enabling our platform to do that.

So what are we learning from how AI is being leveraged from a revenue perspective? The first thing is that concept and idea that you really do need to feed it all of the indicators to the business. So I know a lot of sales organizations are playing with different AI tools that are more closely aligned to CRM.

But the challenge with that is, you know, you're going to get part of the signal, not the whole signal, right? It might tell you where there's pipeline activity or where there's sales actions, but it's not going to align it directly to how the organization reports as a business, how the other parts of the organization support sales and supports the organization in general.

AI can flag risks. I mean, that's one of the very powerful things that I've seen in my experience using it is they can start to identify where maybe there's a risk in a deal or a series of deals or a marketplace or maybe a team that I should be spending more time on.

But it's really going to struggle with that risk and then directly connecting it to the impact that it can have on the business, right? So, yes, we might be a little slower in a particular region and we've been able to identify that using some AI tools, but how do I adjust for that from a demand and supply perspective? Or how do I adjust for that in how we want we dissipate the quarter being completed from a finance perspective?

I think the real connection here is around you just you don't want to find yourself in a place where you have sales only insights that are trying to drive decisions that impact the entire organization. overall.

The lens and view that we have in working with clients on our AI initiatives is you need to have that unified platform and it needs to be from trusted data sets that you're confident you can move forward with quickly and very decisively from a decisions perspective. So it needs to have feeds from sales, from finance, from operations.

It needs to be connected to the annual plan that you started with the year, how the teams are performing day in and day out, month in and month out, but also connected to the way that you're motivating and driving the behavior and performance of your entire organization.

That is really critical because without that you're going to have a lot of signals that look clear and decisive, but aren't delivering the value or the impact that you want to have on the business.

I think as you think about using AI to determine risk and action, again, that unified view is very important, but you also need to be able to do that for all of the different stakeholders that are responsible for your revenue strategy. When I think about it at the simplest level, I want to be able to create a chat experience where the seller can ask a question about their comp statement and get a quick answer and not bother a Lindsay, not have to go to their mark as their manager and ask a question. I want them to be able to ask it and do it on their own.

At the same time, I want someone in finance to ask the deeper questions around how effective is my comp?

Like tell me who the top 10 reps were and how much business did they drive and maybe take it to the next level and tell me about how much gross margin they contributed to the business or how much market share were they able to contribute? All of the things that come along with having this on top of a unified data strategy.

We're spending a lot of time on this as joint organizations, OneStream and Infinity together. There's a whole host of applications that are going to be coming out later this year that are really identified on helping organizations forecast better, how to predict what's going to happen from a revenue perspective better, and create better experiences for people that are managing commissions, paying commissions, receiving commissions, thinking about territories.

There's a lot coming at us from this perspective, but it's really fun and interesting to say the least. I don't know, Lindsay, as you think about this and your experiences or anything that gets you excited about how AI can impact?

Yeah, I mean, so we're starting to kind of test the waters with some of this stuff, obviously, internally.

We're starting to try to use AI for forecast projections, kind of as that way to really level set. Like everyone else is forecasting. We have forecasts at every level. What does that really look like if we start using AI to help us assess if there's any risk in those forecasts? The agentic stuff is really powerful. Like the examples you just gave about a rep being able to go on and just ask questions, about a finance person to be able to ask questions.

That's the kind of stuff that makes all of us get to decisions much faster because we're not the ones spending the time trying to do the analysis and read the output and figure out what the insights are.

AI can do that so much faster than we can, right? And that is really exciting to my whole team, actually, as they think about all the different ways that we can apply that, not even just in this context, but in a lot of different places.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So as we think about the four different areas that we were covering, you know, I just wanted to take a moment and kind of bring this back to, you know, revenue performance management, how that potentially helps you address the blind spots.

What I love about what we're doing together with OneStream is we really are trying to address and build a place where you have trusted signals on how your revenue team is performing, how the organization is delivering the top line. It's AI enabled with real insights, not just for finance,

sales as well, in a very trusted and easy to use kind of environment. And what that all allows you to do is focus on execution, focus on delivering the revenue strategy, the revenue plan, the overall top line number that you and the organization are focused on. And that's what ourselves, the team at OneStream are focused on is continuing to build out new functionality, new capabilities that continue to deliver on that vision.

Opening up to Q&A, we already have some questions in the chat. I'm going to have, we'll read some of those out. So this is for Lindsay and Phil. So how does OneStream connect our annual operative plan to real world sales execution when headcount coverage territories quoted changes mid-year?

Sure. So from a OneStream perspective, right? So we do our planning at the beginning of every year, right? And part of that exercise is analyzing kind of the capacity, the overassignment.

Like, are we accounting for attrition? Are we accounting for changes? Have we embedded enough kind of wiggle room inside of that plan for those things to happen, right? And then as we go through the year, we're able to see and assess those. As those changes happen, we come through and we're in. It helps us just see, do we have any risk against our plan? Do we have any coverage issues? Do we have capacity issues?

Because it'll help us actually decide maybe we need to consider bringing in and hiring some more people to fill the gap, right? If that was the answer. Like, there's some different ways that we can pivot to be able to answer if we do see some sort of risk. But it's actually inherent that we're looking at that information at the start and then measuring it as we go through the year.

Great. So another question, I think this is for you, Lindsay. When we talk about one governed revenue model, how does that encompass and who is responsible for that on a day-to-day basis?

Yeah. So it's interesting because I think inherently you want to have one person, right, who owns something. But in this situation, it actually becomes a bit of a joint ownership, right? So because there's that collaboration and there's the necessity for primarily finance and my team, right, to be talking the same, looking at the same numbers, answering the same questions all the same way.

That governed model is this whole data and the way that it feeds through all the reporting, all the dashboards, all the analytics that we have inside of OneStream. And the fact that we're both using the exact same set of information in the way that we make decisions off of. Yeah.

And maybe, like, I know for OneStream as a software company, there's a certain model that you have. But if I'm a manufacturing organization, like, that single model becomes critical for supply, for demand, for the ability to take the bookings that the sales team works so hard to get and convert it into revenue that the company gets to recognize. And having that model is almost demanded upon as opposed to it's nice to have kind of thing. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

I'll take one more question. So maybe this is for Phil. Phil, what differentiates OneStream's revenue insights from others in the market?

Yeah, I think there's two things. One is, as we all think about AI and how to apply it, you know, there's the sense of urgency to this, right? Like, how fast can I get there?

The great news as a OneStream customer, you've already got an amazing base of data that you've already brought into OneStream for all of the other finance functions. And that's the same base of data we get to reuse again from an AI perspective. So there's a huge win in that unified data story and an even faster win for OneStream customers, you know, as far as getting access to it. And there's this element of AI that we're all figuring out, which is how much of it can we trust when it comes to making decisions and driving that.

And what I love about how we're doing this with OneStream and that unified platform is we're truly creating a collaborative environment where you're not debating the data or the numbers. You're taking the insight and actually actioning it because you have that level of trust, that transparency, the ability to take a high level concept that might be uncovered through an AI agent and then double click into it and find the actual answers and data. Like, to me, that's a huge advantage doing this on top of OneStream.

And when most companies think about it, I mean, revenue drives almost everything, right? It drives the investments. It drives the people, all that wonderful stuff. So as you get this really tight and unify that platform, it's going to really help accelerate other parts of the business as well.

Great. So with that, you can continue to drop your questions in the chat. We'll be happy to take those offline and send them back to you. I want to thank our panelists today, both Lindsay and Phil for your insights. And we appreciate you having us virtually today. Thank you.