Fireside Chat With Glenn Hopper: Closing the GTM–Finance Gap
I’ve done plenty of product demos and pitches; this conversation with Glenn was something else entirely.
No slides, no roadmap—just two ex-operators comparing scar tissue. Glenn’s career moved from marketing to CFO; I took the reverse path and ended up building QFlow.ai. That overlap made the discussion hit closer to home than I expected.
Some of what we discussed includes…
Why the Alignment Problem Still Hurts
Whether we talked about my first Chicago startup (where unit economics were religion) or Bay-Area blitz-scale, the pattern never changed: CRM data lives one life, ERP data lives another, and the forecast becomes an exercise in creative writing. The bigger the company, the more systems and opinions get in the way.
Forecasting Isn’t Broken—The Plumbing Is
We chewed on the usual suspects—long sales cycles, lumpy deal sizes—but the real culprit is data integrity. If a deal marked “closing next week” hasn’t seen activity in two months, the fanciest statistical model won’t save you. Clean hand-offs and digging into operational CRM, billing, and ERP data matter more than another tab in Excel.
The 90-Day Cliff
Glenn called out something in the back mind of every B2B CFO: beyond the current quarter, pipeline visibility falls apart. My simpler-to-say-than-implement take is in the video:
- Use pipeline details and behavioral clues for what’s in front of you.
- Switch progressively to driver-based trends when you zoom out.
- Reconcile the two every single week.
No silver bullet—just discipline and shared definitions.
RevOps, Marketing, and the CFO
Bring RevOps and Marketing in early and the forecast becomes a living document instead of a quarterly autopsy. Ignore them and the model drifts from reality. Bringing teams together was the subtext of half our chat.
Spreadsheets: Friend and Foe
Glenn and I both love Excel. We also know its dark side: one hidden formula wrecks trust faster than a missed quarter. I’m not anti-spreadsheet; I’m anti-“only spreadsheet.” The future is controlled workspaces where assumptions are transparent and versioned, with Excel reserved for the one-off rabbit holes it does best.
Closed-Loop Planning
Plan → Execute → Measure → Adjust—weekly, not yearly. When the loop tightens, surprises shrink and Finance stops playing whack-a-mole. That’s the north star for QFlow, but it’s also the mindset shift every modern CFO needs, whether or not you use our software.
A Word on AI
We touched on “AI washing” and why most finance teams haven’t felt real impact yet. My view: AI adds value the moment it surfaces data integrity issues automatically or flags a stalled deal before humans notice. It’s less about robots replacing analysts and more about freeing analysts to challenge the business instead of cleaning data.
Thanks, Glenn
Conversations like this remind me why we started QFlow in the first place. If you’re a CFO, CRO, or CMO wrestling with messy systems and wondering where AI actually fits, I think you’ll find the full recording worth your 37 minutes.
—Alex