Tyler Fahrion on “The biggest mistake companies make in revenue planning.”
The biggest mistake companies make in revenue planning?
Letting Sales, Marketing, and Finance operate like distant relatives who only talk at Thanksgiving. We sat down with Tyler Fahrion, Director of Professional Services at KeenVision, to dig into why GTM alignment is so hard—and how to fix it.
Meet Tyler & KeenVision
Tyler Fahrion is a finance technology expert with nearly a decade of experience helping companies improve their financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes. At KeenVision, he works with mid-market and enterprise finance teams to implement Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) tools like Planful and Pigment, helping them modernize their budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation.
Through his work, Tyler has seen firsthand the disconnect between Finance, Sales, and Marketing—and why so many revenue plans fail to deliver predictable growth.
The Problem: Finance, sales, and marketing speak different languages
You’d think a company’s leadership team would work from the same numbers. But reality check: they aren’t.
Sales says “revenue” when they mean bookings.
Marketing says “ROI” when they really mean lead volume.
Finance gets the numbers, changes them, and never shares why.
It’s like a bad game of telephone where, instead of a silly phrase, the outcome is a completely disconnected revenue plan.
“We see finance doing bookings and revenue one way, maybe using high-level drivers or just setting a top-line target,” Tyler told us. “Meanwhile, Sales and Marketing are thinking about campaigns, sales capacity, and lead flow. And they’re rarely on the same page.”
The result?
👉 Finance is flying blind
👉 Sales is confused about quotas
👉 Marketing is spending money with no idea what impact it actually has
Key Takeaway #1: Finance shouldn’t work in a vacuum
A common complaint from marketing leaders:
“Finance presents numbers I’ve never seen before. That’s not the plan I gave them!”
Tyler confirmed that this isn’t just paranoia—it happens all the time.
“Finance will receive a baseline plan from Sales or Marketing—often in a spreadsheet—and then adjust it, sometimes completely scrapping it and rebuilding from scratch,” he explained. “And then the new plan becomes the financial forecast, but Sales and Marketing never see it again.”
So, what happens?
👉 Sales leaders wonder why their pipeline numbers don’t match the company forecast.
👉 Marketing wonders why their budget just got cut.
👉 Finance wonders why no one understands the numbers they spent three weeks fine-tuning.
The fix? Ongoing collaboration. Finance needs to bring Sales and Marketing into the forecasting process—not just collect data and disappear into a spreadsheet vortex.
Key Takeaway #2: Revenue forecasts age like milk
“We see finance teams putting a plan together for the next fiscal year in September or October. By the time that plan is done, the data is already three or four months old,” Tyler pointed out.
Let’s put that into perspective. Imagine building a financial model in October based on pipeline data from July—then expecting that plan to still hold in February. Spoiler: it won’t.
The problem? Most companies build their annual plans on outdated, static data.
👉 Deals slip, priorities shift, and new go-to-market strategies emerge.
👉 Sales doesn’t always log things properly in the CRM (shocking, we know).
👉 Marketing campaigns take unexpected turns.
The fix? Live, real-time forecasting. If Finance, Sales, and Marketing don’t have access to the same, up-to-date numbers, they’re setting themselves up for frustration (and missed targets).
Key Takeaway #3: Sales leaders, your revenue forecast is not the gospel
Look, we get it—CROs are optimistic. But finance teams don’t take sales forecasts at face value.
“I’d say finance trusts a CRO’s forecast for maybe three months,” Tyler said. “After that, they start layering in adjustments, driver-based modeling, and cohort analysis.”
Translation:
Sales says they’ll close $5M this quarter. Finance looks at past trends and says, ‘Try $3.5M.’
The fix? Sales needs to give Finance better data—not just gut-feel projections. And Finance needs to loop Sales in on how they adjust forecasts, instead of just changing the numbers and moving on.
Key Takeaway #4: GTM teams need to stop thinking of finance as the ‘No’ department
Sales and Marketing often see Finance as the team that cuts budgets and says no to everything. But that’s not how Finance sees itself.
“Nobody grows a business by saving as much money as possible,” said Outset CEO Daren Lauda. “Finance wants to invest in growth. But they need a quality bookings forecast to do it.”
If Sales and Marketing came to Finance with a data-backed plan—instead of just a wish list—they’d probably get more of what they want.
Imagine this conversation:
📊 Sales & Marketing: “We’ve analyzed our pipeline, cohort data, and regression models. We need $X investment in these specific campaigns, and here’s how we expect bookings to flow by month.”
📈 Finance: “Sounds solid. Let’s talk about how to fund it.”
Sounds better than “No, you can’t have that money,” right?
Final Takeaway: If finance, sales, and marketing aligned, ELT meetings would actually be productive
We asked Tyler: What’s the #1 thing companies should do to fix this?
His answer:
“Communicate. Align on forecasting methodology. Use real-time data. And for the love of all things, don’t let Finance and Sales operate in silos.”
Because if they did this, executive leadership meetings wouldn’t be about explaining why the numbers don’t match—they’d be about making strategic, actionable decisions.
And isn’t that the whole point?
TL;DR – How to fix revenue planning and GTM-finance alignment:
✅ Make forecasting a shared process, not a Finance black hole.
✅ Use live data—your September plan is useless by February.
✅ Sales should give Finance better data, not just “trust us” numbers.
✅ Finance isn’t the “No” team—they just need a data-backed case to invest.
✅ ELT meetings should be for strategy, not explaining mismatched forecasts.
If this sounds familiar, we should talk. Outset helps Finance, Sales, and Marketing stay aligned on a single, real-time plan.
Watch the full Interview with Tyler Fahrion
Want to hear more insights from Tyler on how finance teams can take the lead in aligning revenue planning with GTM execution? Watch it below.
Final Thought: Finance, Sales & Marketing Need to Be One Team.
The reality is, no one wins when Finance, Sales, and Marketing operate in silos.
So the question is: how can your team start making decisions from the same playbook?