RevOps Live! | 2025 revenue planning: forecasting, pipeline management, and automation with Janis Zech

With annual revenue planning cycles in full swing, now is the perfect time for a deep dive into RevOps forecasting.

In this episode of RevOps Live, I sat down with Janis Zech, CEO of Weflow, to talk about all things forecasting, pipeline management, and data hygiene.

Here’s what we covered:

• Alignment between RevOps and finance: The primary challenge for revenue forecasting is aligning top-down financial expectations with bottom-up sales data.
• Salesforce data hygiene: Data quality is fundamental to RevOps success, yet poor Salesforce data hygiene is common.
• Establishing a common data language: Creating a shared data language across teams is critical for alignment.
• Elevating the role of RevOps: RevOps professionals can elevate their impact by running their roadmap like product managers.

Click here to watch the full episode

Alignment is the #1 challenge for revenue forecasting

Aligning top-down financial forecasts with bottom-up sales execution is the number-one challenge for organizations when it comes to accurate revenue forecasting.

Janis emphasized that bridging this gap is key to RevOps success, noting that revenue operations, finance, and executive teams must agree on a common set of metrics to guide growth. He pointed out that while finance teams often have specific targets set by the board, sales teams are dealing with market realities that are more volatile than ever.

GTM leaders must effectively balance what the board envisions to secure the next round of funding with on-the-ground sales data. The challenge comes from trying to align these interests, especially in an unpredictable market.

RevOps plays a crucial role in aligning these objectives, ensuring that both sales and finance are on the same page when it comes to revenue targets and forecasts.

“It’s not just the company planning, but there’s essentially a board of directors that has a plan for the company. And especially if you look at high-growth SaaS companies. They have ideas about what they need to achieve to be fundable or achieve the next milestone of funding versus the reality of the business. And that is often a really challenging balancing act.”

– Janis Zech

Why Salesforce data hygiene is crucial for revenue operations

Data quality is the bedrock of any successful RevOps strategy. Janis highlighted the importance of maintaining clean data in Salesforce to lay the groundwork for meaningful reporting, insights, and accurate revenue forecasting.

He broke down the four layers of data hierarchy:

1. Data
2. Reporting
3. Insights
4. Predictions

“The reality is that most Salesforce instances have pretty poor data hygiene,” Janis said. “The fundamental job for RevOps is to become really good at automating, simplifying, and streamlining the data collection side as the ground layer for everything.”

Without clean data, organizations risk compromising every layer of their revenue operations, from reporting to predictive insights.

How to establish a common data language in your organization

Building a common data language is vital for aligning teams across the organization. This shared understanding ensures everyone — from sales to finance — is working with the same definitions and metrics.

Janis discussed how the process starts with defining key metrics and documenting workflows, but he stressed that operationalizing these processes is where the real challenge lies. Automation can minimize manual touchpoints, making it easier to maintain consistency and accuracy across teams.

Janis emphasized the importance of ensuring key data points have consistent definitions and are clearly understood by everyone involved.

“When do you open an opportunity? This is a simple example, but if different teams have different answers, it affects everything from win rates to sales cycle length.”

A common data language reduces the chaos caused by too many standalone reports. Janis encouraged organizations to focus on fewer, more insightful reports, and to ensure the team fully understands and aligns with the insights these reports provide. Too often, data interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. RevOps should take an active role in defining what the data in these reports means, and how it’s used.

“Work with teams to enable them to understand the reports and the insights, and to derive action from them,” he said. “It’s not about the data, it’s about the action that helps you have more revenue impact, but the data is the foundation.”

Automating data capture

It’s no secret that relying on sales, SDRs, and BDRs for manual data entry can be a recipe for data quality disaster down the road. The solution? Automate as much data capture in your CRM as possible.

Automating data capture not only improves productivity (nobody likes doing manual data entry) but it also creates healthier pipelines.

Types of CRM data to automate

• Emails
• Meetings
• Contacts
• Conversation and transcript data

He also stressed the importance of standardizing metrics and KPIs. Establishing a repeatable process for tracking key metrics allows for consistent benchmarking over time.

“If you constantly change your sales process or definitions,” Janis explained, “your historical data becomes worthless because you can’t compare.”

How can RevOps professionals elevate?

Janis offered a framework for RevOps professionals looking to elevate their role within the organization. He encouraged them to prioritize their work using a KPI tree, focusing on key signals that impact pipeline health and revenue performance.

“What we dream of is creating a system that has the data quality so that you can surface insights at the right time. This allows account executives, managers, or customer success managers to know exactly what they should do to close more deals.”

He also advised RevOps leaders to run their roadmaps like product managers, establishing a clear prioritization framework and communicating trade-offs with executive stakeholders.

Challenges that RevOps teams are facing

According to Janis, the biggest challenge RevOps teams are grappling with today is balancing executive expectations with operational and economic realities. RevOps leaders must go beyond having the technical chops needed to work with big data and manage GTM tech stacks. Now, they must also become strategic partners to the executive team by providing insights into revenue that help guide decision-making.

“Do you have executive stakeholders that understand the need for trade-offs? It’s tough right now. The average tenure of a CRO is about 18 months. It’s a frightening environment. So I think there’s a question around prioritization, but I think there’s another question: How do you become a strategic partner to the executive layer?”

Janis wrapped up the conversation by emphasizing the need for GTM teams to ask the right questions to drive continuous improvement. He urged RevOps leaders to empower their teams with the tools and insights they need to eliminate bottlenecks and improve data-driven decision-making.

Watch the full episode with Janis

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