Sales and Finance: From Friction to Fusion with Everest

The relationship between sales and finance has often been a balancing act, with both sides navigating different priorities to achieve shared goals. 

Sales teams drive to close deals quickly, introducing complex terms that require manual processes, while accountants work to ensure compliance, profitability, and accurate forecasts. 

This tension often leads to friction. But what if sales and finance could transform from frenemies into power partners?

The Historical Struggle 

Historically, the partnership between sales and finance has struggled due to fragmented systems that don’t communicate well. This disconnect becomes most evident in complex deals, often stalling growth as companies scale. For example, in a seven-figure deal with a Fortune 500 company, custom bundles and precise usage limits were needed to meet customer demands while protecting margins.

As the deal progressed, discounts spiraled out of control, leading to revenue recognition issues. Multiple finance stakeholders had to model and rework the deal in spreadsheets, resulting in weeks of back-and-forth between teams to maintain margins. This process consumed significant time and pulled key resources from other projects.

Despite a sophisticated tech stack, fragmented systems couldn’t handle deal complexity or margin assessments, forcing manual processes that delayed approvals and deal closures. These challenges were not unique to one deal—they often stalled momentum, delayed signatures, and impacted revenue growth. The reality is, it’s not deal complexity that slows business; it’s disconnected systems and processes.

The Power of One System: Everest

Designed specifically for SaaS businesses, Everest unifies Order to Cash to GL into a seamless, real-time system. It fully integrates order management, billing, revenue recognition, spend management, and cloud and people costs into one platform. 

No more bifurcated systems. No more disconnected processes. No more costly integrations.

Flexibility That Works for Both Teams

The rigidity of traditional billing solutions and legacy ERPs inability to handle non-standard deals is the most significant barrier to a winning relationship between sales and finance. Finance teams should be empowered to "say yes" when the company is trying new pricing and selling models to drive growth or test new revenue streams. Bundled pricing? High discounts? Ramp deals? Custom invoice schedule? Pro-rated Amendments? Those types of deals would send traditional systems into a tailspin, forcing finance to take extra time to manually adjust everything on the back end.

Everest changes that. Whether it’s a straightforward SaaS contract or a complicated multi-element arrangement, Everest accounts for it all. Our system is built to flex around complex deal structures without forcing finance to jump through hoops. By tightly integrating with Salesforce and mirroring its product catalog, we ensure that what’s happening on the sales side is instantly reflected in finance, eliminating delays and miscommunications.

Empowering Sales, Streamlining Finance

With Everest, finance moves beyond the role of gatekeeper and becomes a key partner, helping sales close deals more efficiently while ensuring compliance and reducing end-of-month pressures. The productized integration between Salesforce and Everest means that finance gets accurate, real-time data to recognize revenue appropriately, forecast accurately, and maintain financial integrity.

Meanwhile, sales get the flexibility and strategic guidance they need to close more deals, confident that finance is right there with them, with all the operational metrics that leadership needs to run the business. The ongoing ‘source of truth’ debate around metrics like ARR, MRR, churn, cash flow, and forecasting is resolved when sales and finance are unified within a single, trusted system that gives a 360* customer view. This alignment ultimately gives all stakeholders rich insights into how to book profitable deals that drive the business forward. Win-Win.

The Future of Sales-Finance Collaboration

As companies grow and deal structures become more complex, the need for a unified system that bridges sales and finance will only become more critical. Everest offers the all-in-one solution that SaaS companies need, enabling harmonious collaboration between two departments that have historically struggled to accelerate operations side by side.

The frenemy days of sales and finance are over. With Everest, they’re on the same team, working together to drive business growth, close deals faster, and manage finances with precision. It’s time to make sales and finance power partners, and we’re here to help you do just that.