Startups are nimble—they get products to market quickly. As a result, revenue generation often happens before quote-to-cash solutions are fully thought out. Christina Liu, former VP of Zendesk, joins us to assert that startups should focus on getting their sales and billing tools right from the start. She warns about the dangers of piecemeal quote-to-cash tools and keeping sales and finance away from one another:

“All of that resulted in dirty data coming to the revenue tool…my team spent a lot of time undoing some of these things to get a quote right,” she remembers. “And so it was like a double-edged sword—we were wasting a lot of internal calories on things that really didn't need to be so hard.”

As Zendesk scaled, it added new products, introduced new pricing and packaging structures and moved upmarket to focus on enterprise customers with a direct sales motion—all of which had profound effects on the way Christina views RevOps and its impact on RevRec. So, her key takeaway became: why can’t we (and by we, we mean sales and finance) be friends?