GTM Planning and Forecasting, Without the Spreadsheets - Toni Hohlbein

Nov 27, 2023

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In a world where we have so much tech, it's amazing that revenue planning and forecasting remain relatively primitive in most companies.

You could have literally a million dollar tech stack and yet still be creating your business plan with a spreadsheet and forecasting results with a best guess from sales.

Today we look at how to go beyond the spreadsheet paradigm with the CEO of Growblocks, a revenue planning and analytics platform. We'll explore whether it's possible to have a truly predictable forecast and how operators can spot and fix issues before they become million dollar problems.

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About Today's Guest

Toni is the CEO of Growblocks. He spent years as a B2B SaaS CRO and revenue operator, achieving multiple exits. Through this experience, he created a revenue operating operating model that helped his company hit targets 12 quarters in a row. This model was later on used as the basis for Growblocks.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonihohlbein/

Key Topics

[00:00] - Introduction
[01:33] - Toni's background. Founding Growblocks. Sharing a focus on data-driven, system-thinking approach to revenue with his co-founders.
[04:27] - Most forecasting tools focus on only on the opportunity forecast, ignoring the rest of the funnel. Why there aren't more companies building software for full-funnel planning. Forecasts are split into silos. Once you forecast the full funnel, you can identify how a gap in one stage translates to revenue impact further down.
[07:40] - How Toni explains this vision to the market and what benefits people are connecting with. When people finally see their actual revenue engine end-to-end for the first time, it's a huge impact.
[10:09] - Flaws with the planning process today. How the planning process should take place: top-down and bottom up meeting in the middle.
[14:09] - The impact of the tech bubble on the planning process and how it has distorted expectations and behaviour. You can only be efficient once you are predictable.
[18:00] - The factors that lead to predictability. The first comes from understanding your sales engine as a whole through the entire funnel. Not relying on sales people that can pull rabbits from hats. The second factor is proactively spotting issues and jumping on them quickly.
[21:39] - Issues with marketing and sales alignment. Why marketing will hit their number but sales misses theirs. Toni doesn't have an issue with MQLs, so long as the company splits handraisers from non-handraisers. Then marketing can't just hit their number with low-intent MQLs.
[25:24] - Outbound is still alive and kicking. Think of it as the delivery mechanism for a message. Importance of choosing channels that work for your audience. Someone may not be on LinkedIn but they are listening to the radio all day.
[28:32] - Starting to dive into the Growblocks platform. Growblocks works with any kind of funnel design and is also configurable across different dimensions. Solving for garbage-in-garbage-out problems. If data points are missing, it's best to go up a level and exclude that step, then circle back to it when better data is available.
[32:58] - Identifying factors that may influence funnel performance but that are not themselves funnel stages. Toni calls them "monitoring notes" - akin to gauges on a machine that show you certain indicators about its performance.
[36:00] - Growblocks can connect to different data sources and mash them together. It applies sophisticated math and statistics to forecast results. They are incorporating machine learning, but Toni is trying to keep it as transparent as possible so customers can have trust in the results.
[39:30] - Main value props of Growblocks. The first is more predictability, less choppy results. The second is showing things that were invisible to enable to teams to make changes and improve.
[42:21] - Toni's vision for the future of the product.

GTM Planning and Forecasting, Without the Spreadsheets - Toni Hohlbein

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