Talk to BDRs
Forecast Accuracy Lives at the Edge
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The best FP&A leader I’ve worked with was a guy named Dom.
If you were ever looking for him and he wasn’t at his desk, chances are he was talking to the BDRs. For those of you who don’t work in the lush valleys of enterprise SaaS, Business Development Representatives are the proverbial “low man on the totem pole”. They’re entry-level soldiers, grinding through 80 dials a day, just trying to book a decent meeting for the more tenured account representatives.
At first, I thought he just liked telling jokes or grabbing beers with them. They were pretty hilarious and they did get drinks a lot. But one day I asked him why he spent so much time with that team.
He said something I’ll never forget:
“I feel like I have a better handle on the forecast because I’m talking to the people as close as can be to the deals.”
And he was right.
Why Finance Should Talk to BDRs
Most forecasting processes start with pipeline revisions, trendlines, and aggregated data from a CRM. But by the time data gets rolled up to leadership, it’s already been sanitized, filtered, and adjusted for optimism bias.
In other words, it’s been massaged into a narrative.
BDRs don’t have that filter. They’re the first to feel when messaging stops working. When budget freezes hit. When prospects go cold. They hear objections before they show up in churn reports or down-sell conversations.
It’s like getting information straight from the horses mouth.
Dom’s Edge
Dom didn’t have better spreadsheets than everyone else.
He had better context.
He knew when conversion rates were slipping — before Salesforce did. He’d hear which competitors were showing up more often, or which personas were ghosting. That intel didn’t come from dashboards (which the rest of the team spent their days heads down in). It came from walking the floor, grabbing a coffee, and asking a few simple questions.
While everyone else was doubling down on digital dashboards, Dom went analog. He’d wander over to the other side of the office, take a few lazy putts on the bullpen’s janky green, and casually eavesdrop as the BDRs yammered away. That’s where he picked up real signal.
The Takeaway
If you’re in Finance or Ops and you want to build better models — talk to your BDRs.
Not just once a quarter. Make it a habit. You don’t even have to join their standups. Ask them what’s working, and what’s not. Give them visibility into how their feedback actually influences planning — because it should.
Paul Graham wrote an essay a while back called “Founder Mode.” It spoke to the importance of leaders getting more involved in the guts of day to day operations. A big part of that is talking to people who don’t report to you on the org chart. It’s a reminder that you’re never too “big” or “important” to go and talk to the people on the ground floor.
You can’t control the market.
But you can listen to the people who talk to it 50 times a day.
They won’t always be right. But they’ll never be late.
(Oh, last, and maybe most important lesson from Dom:
Never follow the BDRs to the second bar)
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