Paul Barnhurst and the speaker discuss how technology aligns teams across functions. Sales and finance clash over forecasts because they lack a shared definition of a booking. An FP&A professional must convene both sides to establish that common truth, then make forecasts transparent and tied to actual decisions.
Something you've often said that I agree with is the real purpose of technology is around aligning people. So how does that shape kind of Qflow and how you do things on a day-to-day basis, especially as we all know, sales and finance, there's often a lot of friction, disagreement about forecasts that kind of come at the data from different perspectives. So talk a little bit about that.
You were talking earlier about getting everyone into a room and getting everyone aligned on from the CRO to the CFO on what a booking was. And I think a great FP&A professional is the one orchestrating meetings like that. And pulling people into the room. Probably there's a class of FPA professionals who would just say, nope, this is the definition of bookings and I'm going to filter the dataset down this way and I'm going to continue with my predictions and off the side of my desk or in the closet. Predictions in the closet are worthless, really. And forecasts matter when they justify operational change or future operational changes. And operational change requires having a team that agrees on what is true.
Trust and Leadership Lessons for FP&A From 100+ Top Leaders with CFO Jon Laudie
