How a CFO drives forecast accuracy and sales alignment with Outreach

Drew Laxton, Chief Financial Officer at Outreach, shares how he uses the platform to align finance and sales teams around a single source of truth. By operating directly within Outreach, he avoids the confusion of scattered spreadsheets and reports, gaining real-time visibility into pipeline health and forecast accuracy. 

Drew relies on tools like the pipeline summary, forecast roll-up, and AI-driven scenario planner to monitor progress, assess risk, and compare sales forecasts against AI projections. He also uses Outreach to analyze deal momentum, assess rep behavior, and prepare for customer calls by reviewing recent interactions and recorded conversations—all from one centralized platform. 

Hello. I'm Drew Laxton and I'm the CFO at Outreach. I want to show you how I use the platform and it's probably not the typical use case for the average user, but I find the platform incredibly powerful. And probably the biggest upside is that it puts me and my teams operating in the same system as our sales teams. 

Eliminating Forecast Confusion with a Unified System 

Everybody has dealt with this as you tried to put together a forecast or the commit call where it's a mess of spreadsheets and reports that you're pulling down from Salesforce and either, you know, BI solution or something along those lines. Well, by having all of us in Outreach, we're all looking at the same numbers, and there's no confusion around that. So as I typically get in, and this is almost every day, I land on the pipeline summary. I think this is a really useful place for me to check how is the quarter going because nothing is more important to me than being able to manage our way through a quarter where I've committed to the board or I've committed to our investors and understanding where we are and where the risks are so I can start asking the right questions and understand how things are going. 

Using AI Insights to Compare Commit vs. Reality 

So this also gives us a projected finish that's developed by Outreach's AI, understanding how each opportunity is being used. This can contrast against the commit call that is actually being out there, and I can understand what the puts and takes are between the two pieces. 

Daily Cadence with the Forecast Roll-Up 

But I spend most of my time in the forecast roll up, and this is where our sales leaders go and do their commit. This is we have at least a weekly cadence, if not more often, and I can just land on the landing page to see what has moved since the last time I've looked at it. There's also a very easy feature where I can drill down to individuals and understand how their commit is going, live code, and understand the renewals or the new opportunities and the renewals that sit underneath. 

As I look at the underlying opportunities, I can quickly sort by what are the largest opportunities, which are the ones that I generally need to keep on my radar. Those are the ones where I feel like I may be pulled in or I may need to have an opinion for the board. 

Analyzing Deal Health and Rep Behavior 

I can drill down very quickly and understand what our most recent interactions drill down in the opportunity and understand when the last interactions have been. That way, I can better understand what the possibility of closing is. I've said a lot in my career, part of my job in finance is to analyze the sales reps and understand who the people are who are aggressive and who are the people who are conservative. Well, Outreach does that for me by scoring every opportunity, and I can drill down in the actual components of that scoring. So, if somebody is telling me that a deal is likely to close in the next month, Outreach has an opinion, and I can use that to inform my opinion. 

Planning for the Quarter and Supporting Customer Calls 

I also use the scenario planner, and this is mostly as we're forecasting an individual quarter or a month. It allows me to go and, by forecast stage and by period, look at what the scenarios are that are the most likely outcomes for that given period. I can use this again to contrast against what we're doing within the finance organization and better understand where we may be looking at something more aggressively or more conservatively than the tool and the AI that sits underneath this. 

The final piece of the tool that I use fairly often is our account stage or accounts function. 

I get pulled into a lot of customer calls, sometimes because they're vendors of ours, and we want to make sure that we're managing that relationship, and sometimes because a CFO has been pulled in on the other side. This gives me a quick place to go search for our prospects or our existing customer, look at what the most recent interactions have been, and I can even drill all the way down to the Kaia calls that were recorded. I can search for specific pitches that we may have, may have had. I generally like to know if we're pitching other products to our customers or who we're interacting with, and it's all in a single landing page for me. This is way easier than going into your CRM or other places where that might be. I hope you found this helpful. Thank you for watching.