Revenue Predictability | SBI GTM Corner

On SBI's GTM Corner, Tony Erickson ribbed me about a headshot photo shoot I missed by three weeks years earlier — a fair callback, since half our conversation was about why missing a date matters less than telling people you're going to miss it. The average CRO lasts about 18 months in the seat, and I told Tony I don't think that's really about missing the number. It's about the CROs who keep promising $100 million and then quietly come in at $96 million with no warning, versus the ones who flag it early enough that the board can still do something about it.

I walk sellers through the same weekly cadence at every company I've run: a commit number, a best-case number, and a forecast, reviewed with their manager, then rolled up into a flash report that shows not just this week's figure but how it's moved over the last several weeks. Layer an AI forecasting tool on top of that — the one I use gets to 98-99% accuracy by the second week of the quarter — and you get what I call the Goldilocks of forecasting: not too hot, not too cold, just close enough that nobody gets surprised. Bad news doesn't get better with age, and in a private equity window where you've usually got three to five years to create value, an unpredictable CRO is a fired CRO regardless of whether they hit the number.

The conversation doubled as an early look at The CRO's Guide to Winning in Private Equity, which had just launched — Tony was kind enough to remind me he had a signed copy before I was, in his words, a "bestselling author."