AMA: Engine SVP of Operations, Mollie Bodensteiner on Finance / Revenue Ops Alignment

Finance isn't afraid of risk, they're afraid of risk they can't see or size. Give them a structured way to say yes without feeling like they're handing over a blank check. Don't ask for a budget line, ask for a pilot. "Give us $X for 90 days, here are 3 things we'll measure, here's how we'll decide if it worked". Write a hypothesis doc, not a business case. Being upfront about what you don't know yet actually builds more credibility than pretending you have all the answers. Connect experiments t ...Read More

A well-run deal desk doesn't slow deals down, it speeds them up by making "can we do this?" a policy question instead of a five-team fire drill. The thing that kills most deal desks is that everything becomes an exception, usually because no one defined what standard looks like in the first place. Start with clear thresholds. Below X discount, no approval needed. Above Y contract length, escalate. Non-standard IP, legal in. Write it down once and hold the line. Time-box every review. Legal gets ...Read More

This partnership doesn't happen on its own, you have to build it deliberately. The fastest path is becoming their data source of record before a crisis forces the relationship. Get into their planning cycles early, actually learn how they're building their models, and make your data feed their assumptions instead of arguing with their outputs after the fact. Embed early. Get standing time in finance QBRs and planning cycles before you're needed. Learn their model. Understand how they calculate C ...Read More

You have to do this work before the cuts are on the table. Once they're in the model, you're playing defense and you're probably going to lose. Make the downstream cost of cutting visible before the conversation gets charged. Build a model that connects cost of churn to cost of CS. Finance responds to math, not advocacy. Agree on a pre-cut checklist during planning, not during a budget crisis. Something like "before reducing investment in X, RevOps models the downstream impact first" Tie CS and ...Read More

Honestly, if your forecasting is consistently off, the problem usually isn't the forecast. You're probably measuring the wrong thing. Stop trying to nail a single number and start understanding what actually drives the number. When you make that shift, variance stops being a failure and starts telling you something useful. Call it a range, not a number. Bear/base/bull with explicit assumptions forces the conversation toward inputs, not outputs. Build consensus around leading indicators upfront: ...Read More