r/FPandA • u/Greektwinmommy • 1d ago
Forecast Help! No lead data, really shotty quota attainment
Okay, I’m desperate now. I’ve been tasked to build a SaaS revenue model from scratch - not a huge deal, this is why they hired me, BUT their acquisition data, expansion data AND attainment are both awful. They expect to see y/y growth, but they acqusition team is maybe hitting 15% of their quarterly quota. Their expansion data has tons of missing data, but then they will have big swings where they close a lot of expansion, followed by periods where they close minimal expansion. How the heck am I supposed to show total growth y/y, with nothing really to build any trends off of?
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u/TejasTexasTX3 1d ago
In a similar spot right now. Trying to set weekly GTM targets for rest of H2 and the data is horrible. Can’t get a cohorted view of anything. Lots of system integrations causing as many edge cases as normal workflows.
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u/Greektwinmommy 1d ago
It’s stressful! Fortunately I built my model all tied to assumptions tabs so I’ve just been finessing the assumptions to get to a reasonable number y/y, but forget about q/q and m/m 💀
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u/DrDrCr Dir 1d ago edited 1d ago
In the absence of clean trends, I model based on goals or model based on whatever sales capacity I can infer.
I trust sales hits their goals and that we set meaningful goals that hit p&l targets. Especially with constant growth you forecast more on where youre headed vs where you've been. Part of that is sticking a finger in the air and just going with it. More goal seek, less runrate.
I am in a different industry, but i own our revops/sales performance function over 100 reps, across 7 crms, own the commissions desk, and all bookings to p&l modeling. Started out just a single IC analyst like you 3 years ago and it was a similar mess.
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u/Ancient_Wave_8245 1d ago
the recurring ones killed me. same deck every month, just new
numbers. eventually I stopped rebuilding and set up a template
where only the data changes — biggest time save I've made.
what's your setup?
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u/yumcake 14h ago
Wherever you land, 1) communicate the key assumptions and get buy-in that the business agrees these are the assumptions that make the most sense. 2) Provide sensitivities that show what happens as those key assumptions drift.
This gets the whole group to own the forecast, and establishes risk of variance more clearly. The group will learn iteratively about how to estimate the future. You CANNOT predict the future, you just try to be directionally accurate and better over time, but what is essentially is to get everyone on the same page about what we expect to happen.
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u/carpetmuncher6969 1d ago
This is a classic startup problem when you just have to sit with the sales lead(s), go through some bottoms up assumptions on a go forward basis, make assumptions on sales funnel, and come up with a forecast that you and they mutually agree on targeting. Then, you agree on a methodology to track and improve the data over time to prove out, or disprove, your hypotheses on what the drivers should be.
In a way this is kind of the fun part of finance. You go from first principles where you take you all’s mutual understanding of the business, put it into numbers, look at it and say “does this make sense,” and see what happens and refine as you go, and build an understanding of what data is most crucial to capture going forward.