The only financial model template you'll ever need—just plug in your actuals to see projections
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Snapshot of Mindtickle
Integrations
Key Challenges Faced
Limited visibility into revenue metrics
Static planning
processes
Need for timely and accurate forecasts
When Aman Bafna joined Mindtickle in September 2021 as part of the CEO’s office to lead their business operations, he needed visibility into business critical metrics and a way to streamline their reporting.
Data was all over the place. We had to manually consolidate headcount data from BambooHR with cost data from NetSuite and our sales, marketing & customer data from Salesforce to compute a bunch of metrics.
As a result, Aman and his team did not have real-time visibility of their key metrics that needed to be monitored both at the business level and the product and market segment level. “Each product and market segment combination had very different characteristics—different deal cycles, ACVs, win rates,” Aman explains. “Calculating all these metrics took us several weeks of effort every quarter.”
And at the end of every quarter, with the looming deadline of a board meeting, there was a mad scramble to pull in data from multiple sources and build reports in Excel. This caused a serious problem with data accuracy and resulted in discrepancies while preparing reports.
Aman needed a fast and flexible reporting and monitoring solution purpose-built to easily create reports themselves and track progress against targets without relying on IT or expensive data analysts and consultants.
Mindtickle’s extensive use of Excel spreadsheets could no longer meet their planning and budgeting needs. It was not scalable and highly cumbersome to handle their business complexity (dimensions), the volume of data and manage stakeholders. Aman’s team struggled each quarter with multiple linked sheets.
“Planning was difficult since we couldn’t compute KPIs quickly at the dimensional level to key in the baseline values for various business drivers,” Aman says.
Ground realities were changing quickly, and we couldn’t afford to wait for weeks for these metrics because any plans we made would be outdated.
Aman needed a planning tool that could integrate multiple data source systems and make it easy to collaborate with stakeholders.
With Mindtickle experiencing rapid growth, a key priority was to come up with a reliable forecast based on up-to-date actuals.
They needed to do monthly re-forecasting exercises for the current quarter, the next quarter and the rest of the current year based on various drivers influencing the business.
Creating three versions of these forecasts—best case, worst case and most likely scenarios—based on a triangulation approach was a highly detailed and complex process. The model considered the rep-level, manager-level and stage-weighted inputs across products and segments. “Implementing all this on Excel was proving impossible. It was simply not designed to be an enterprise-scale forecasting tool.”
He needed a way to quickly access and interpret the data to make adjustments to the forecast model and get the final projections.
Key Outcomes Delivered with Drivetrain
Faster streamlined reporting & analysis
Faster collaborative planning
Shift to weekly forecasting cycles
Drivetrain automated the data gathering and consolidation process for Mindtickle’s sales, marketing and revenue operations teams with a central database. It integrated with Mindtickle’s business systems, including Salesforce for pulling in the sales pipeline and customer information, NetSuite for getting up-to-date ledger entries and BambooHR for headcount details.
Instead of going over dozens of individual spreadsheets, Aman has access to accurate and reliable numbers at all times—thanks to Drivetrain’s seamless integrations with all of Mindtickle’s data sources.
With Drivetrain, we have a real-time view of what is happening in different market segments and products. We have much higher visibility into our numbers compared to what we had before.
A single source of truth means we can see the breakup of where these numbers are coming from and even access those individual records tagged to the source systems.
Furthermore, the ability to quickly create custom reports and drill down to see the data behind the numbers reduced the time to answer critical business questions.
“We have all the data we need in Drivetrain. The ability to compute new metrics and add them into existing reports helps us analyze and identify opportunities faster,” Aman adds.
Initially, there were just five users on the platform—Aman’s team and a couple of people from the leadership. Now the number has grown to over 35 users contributing to all aspects of the revenue funnel, including sales, marketing and customer success. And Drivetrain serves as the central point for key processes like lead gen planning, customer expansion modeling, deal pipeline forecasting, and more.
With Drivetrain, we are now able to seamlessly aggregate data from multiple stakeholders into one unified planning process and collaborate within the same view. We don’t deal with offline spreadsheets or experience data fidelity challenges anymore.
With faster and better access to key metrics that were previously hard to obtain, Aman used Drivetrain to come up with accurate forecasts. “The bottom-up forecasting model built using Drivetrain is giving us great results. We have a high degree of confidence in our projections on where we will land at the end of each quarter and how the overall year will pan out,” Aman says.
Before Drivetrain, our quarterly reports took up to three weeks to complete. But, now we have a monthly reporting cycle with all our metrics updated daily, which has helped us build a weekly forecast model.
“Drivetrain clearly shows us how the conditions are changing so that we can adjust our forecasts. Our model is based on trailing data that goes back up to four quarters. So, as average deal cycle times, win rates, and deal sizes change, we are able to recalibrate quickly and adjust our forecasts and guidance for the quarters ahead.”
It also helped Aman identify where the numbers are changing drastically and where they need to focus their efforts.
Drivetrain has facilitated a change in my job description where it’s now focused significantly towards strategic aspects of the business such as understanding how the business is changing and what we need to do to win in certain markets.
Manager - Office of the CEO
With faster, easier access to data, a shorter monthly reporting process and a more collaborative planning process, Drivetrain has enabled Aman’s team to realign their focus toward more strategic aspects of the business, such as improving their forecast accuracy and finding gaps and opportunities.
“Currently, the Drivetrain team is helping us build efficiency models to look at our revenues in conjunction with costs. This will help us tighten up our expenses and improve GTM efficiency, which has become crucial given the current macroeconomic situations,” Aman says. “In many ways, the Drivetrain team has been a strategic partner and an extension of our own team. Their subject matter expertise in building SaaS models and their turnaround time has been simply amazing.”
