Think about the last mismanaged meeting you attended. Who was in the room? How many executives were in it? Did that meeting go long, or turn into two or three meetings? Without question, every meeting needs a clear agenda. A lack of an agenda leads to disorganization, mass confusion and meetings that are far more likely to get off track or hijacked. A mismanaged meeting leads to a black hole of inefficiencies and wasted salaries. Makes sense, right? Well, a SaaS finance meeting run using Excel as the backbone of your financial platform leads to the exact same challenges.
For example, to prepare for the monthly board meeting, Helena from Marketing forwards her budget to her leader, Ben, however it is the wrong version. The version she mistakenly sent has a bad formula. Ben doesn’t notice and sends it straight to Steve, the CFO, who realizes after a few hours that there is something wrong. Steve then sends it to Henry in accounting to play detective and he and Helena have numerous emails going back and forth looking for the right version.
If they had used one platform for their budget and financial data, it would have been easy. With this simple mistake, it occupies four people and costly salary and hours are spent. In this example, we estimate that more than $1,000* was spent on this simple error. How many times a day, month, or year is your company experiencing situations just like this?
Sadly, the example above isn’t an exaggeration of the truth. We heard it first-hand on our Virtual Launch in April when Don Erwin of SaaStr spoke to us about the $20,000 meetings that he’s sat in. I interviewed Don a couple of weeks ago to take a deeper dive into the topic.
What are some of the challenges you see in many executive and operations meetings?
Don Erwin (SaaStr): “Quite honestly, everyone is still using Excel and not making the commitment to put money into a better infrastructure. I’ve been a part of Sales Ops meetings with CEOs, COOs and leadership teams where there were 17 Excel spreadsheets being looked at for the exact same information. The problem is that there is no version control and every department has their own version of the truth. In any given meeting, you need at least nine sources of truth to trust.”
Chris Price (Baker Tilly): “That seems about right. I’ve collaborated in many meetings where version control was a serious issue. I read recently that
