Few would argue that in order to have a successful and sustainable revenue organization, it requires looking beyond just weekly pipeline and deal reviews and quarterly targets. But in reality, revenue team leaders are hardwired to primarily focus on weekly forecasting reviews, which gives only a narrow picture of what’s likely to result in the short term.
What’s missing from this weekly cadence is the ‘zoom out’ to look beyond just the deals currently in play – and to understand how well the key ingredients and inputs underlying your revenue org are performing:
- hiring and headcount allocation
- ramp timing
- pipeline generation and coverage
- quota attainment
- closing effectiveness
- costs
Those elements ultimately produce the outputs you desire: pipeline, revenue, and growth.
Those foundational ingredients are certainly reviewed when building your annual revenue plan – and that plan should be treated as the critical roadmap for the year. But the unfortunate truth is that even after the significant amount of time, effort, and thought spent building and approving the plan, there’s not a habitual practice to measure your ongoing performance against that plan (other than the top-line number). Instead, it may get revisited in QBRs, but let’s face it: a three-month gap to react to any deviations from the plan and to understand the root causes of those deviations is a stunningly negligent amount of lag time.
With CROs having an average tenure of just 25 months and only 41% of CEOs having confidence in their revenue leaders (source: Harvard Business Review), a new leadership strategy is needed to survive, much less thrive. The new mandate is that your revenue plan must be seen as actively living and breathing – not just a spreadsheet in a shared folder – and therefore you must quickly and smartly adapt it to the obstacles and opportunities that arise along the way.
Our team at Revcast sees hundreds of revenue plans annually in our work with CROs, heads of RevOps, and Finance analysts. Supported by our AI-powered revenue plan operating system, revenue team leaders and their GTM stakeholders are always in the know about what’s happening right now that will impact their revenue outcomes and what their optimal, most efficient path is to reach their revenue goals.
From that experience, we help CROs modernize and operationalize revenue plan management into an active, agile practice. We help you ask and answer 7 questions each week that focus on strategic, proactive management:
- How are we doing on hiring and attrition against our plan?
- Does our current headcount allocation make sense, given performance so far?
- Are our actual ramp times falling behind or on track?
- Is enough pipeline being generated to cover our reps?
- Where are certain segments performing differently than plan, and what can we learn from that?
- How is quota-on-the-street attainment looking?
- How is our closing performance tracking, in terms of: velocity, ASP, and win rates?
Regardless of the approach and solution taken, what’s needed is a regular cadence of reviewing and then smartly adjusting the foundational contributors to your GTM and revenue “supply chain.”
