Podcast
June 6, 2025
Episode 44: Bridging the Gap Between RevOps and Finance
Unlock scalable growth by bridging the gap between RevOps and Finance with modern CPQ, billing automation, and AI-ready pricing strategies.
In this episode of the RevOpsAF podcast, co-host and RevOps Co-op CEO Matthew Volm sits down with Riya Grover, CEO and Co-Founder of Sequence, a next-generation billing and CPQ platform designed for modern SaaS companies. Together, they unpack the breakdown between go-to-market and finance teams, the rise of complex AI-driven pricing models, and why traditional quote-to-cash infrastructure is collapsing under today’s sales motions.
If you've ever been burned by a manual billing process or a CPQ tool that feels like it was built for 2012 - this one's for you.
Riya’s lightbulb moment came from deep personal experience. At her previous company, every enterprise deal had its own bespoke pricing, contract terms, and billing logic - none of which standard tools like Stripe or QuickBooks could handle. She was forced to manage it all manually, exporting billing data to spreadsheets, writing custom code, and struggling to reconcile ARR for board reporting.
That experience drove her to build Sequence: a platform that turns any sales contract into a structured, finance-ready source of truth—streamlining billing, invoicing, revenue tracking, and more.
“There wasn’t a billing solution that could handle sales-led, custom-priced deals in a scalable way. So we built one.” – Riya Grover
For insights on building a scalable RevOps tech stack, check out Your 2025 RevOps Tech Stack, Simplified.
Forget annual subscriptions. As AI eats more of the software stack, companies are rethinking how they charge for value. Compute-intensive models like GPT-4 introduce real cost per use - forcing companies to adopt usage, outcome, and output-based pricing models that align with actual value delivered (and cost incurred).
Riya outlines the emerging landscape:
“AI tools are priced like labor now. If you're replacing human work with an AI agent, your pricing has to reflect that.” – Riya Grover
Explore how GenAI impacts marketing analytics in GenAI + Marketing Analytics: What RevOps Needs to Know.
Historically, RevOps lives in the CRM while Finance lives in the ERP - and billing exists in the void between them. The result? A disjointed, manual mess. Sales closes the deal, but the contract lives in a PDF. Finance is expected to parse that file, create the invoice, calculate proration, and track revenue - all without clean handoffs.
This silo creates revenue leakage, billing delays, and missed upsell opportunities. Even small mid-cycle changes like seat increases are often lost, resulting in significant lost revenue.
One customer Riya worked with recovered over $1M in ARR simply by automating seat-based proration mid-contract.
“The existence of custom deal terms means you need structured data flowing from quote to billing - or you're guaranteed to miss something.” – Riya Grover
For strategies on aligning product and sales teams, read How to Align Product and Sales Without Killing Productivity.
Legacy CPQ systems like Salesforce CPQ are known for being complex, clunky, and rarely loved by the reps using them. The original value prop - speed up quoting and reduce errors - has been eroded by bloated configurations and slow implementations.
Sequence offers a modern alternative: fast, flexible quoting, clean proposal templates, and native billing and revenue logic baked in. The goal isn’t just faster sales cycles - it’s tighter financial operations and real-time insight into what's been sold, what’s been invoiced, and what’s left to collect.
“Most CPQs were built for a world of static pricing and simple products. That’s not SaaS in 2025.” – Riya Grover
Sequence doesn’t just streamline invoicing - it unlocks granular ARR visibility in real time. That’s a game-changer for both RevOps and Finance. Most teams today still pull revenue insights from spreadsheets or outdated BI dashboards.
By integrating billing and quoting from the start, Sequence helps companies:
Sequence’s recent partnership with Equals takes this even further - giving teams a modern spreadsheet layer on top of live billing and ARR data.
“If you can’t explain where your revenue came from and how it’s growing, you’re not ready for the boardroom.” – Riya Grover
Learn how to connect your work to business impact in Be More Strategic: The Key to Growth in RevOps.
Matt and Riya close the conversation with a bold claim: if you’re in RevOps and you can’t explain how your company recognizes revenue, you’re not yet a strategic partner. Finance doesn’t care what Salesforce says your ARR is - they care what the general ledger says. And that comes down to how deals are structured, invoiced, and accounted for.
Understanding billing cadence, timing of signatures, and how variable usage charges hit the income statement isn’t just helpful - it’s critical to being seen as a leader, not just a fixer.
“The contracts your sales team closes are what actually hit the P&L. RevOps needs to be fluent in that language.” – Matt Volm
For guidance on managing cancellations and downgrades, see How to Manage Cancellations and Downgrades in Your CRM.
If you’ve been thinking of CPQ as just a sales enablement tool or billing as finance’s problem, it’s time to rethink your architecture. In 2025 and beyond, the highest-performing revenue teams will be the ones that deeply integrate pricing, quoting, billing, and finance into a single motion.
And if you’re still manually updating billing in NetSuite from a Google Doc quote, it might be time to make the switch.
“Here Comes the Sun” may be Riya’s keynote walk-up song - but in this episode, she makes the case that automation, integration, and finance-fluency are what will truly shine light on the RevOps function in the next generation of SaaS.
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