Joined by Ben Cunningham (Marketing) and Jose Romero (VP of Product) from Xfactor.io, and moderated by RevOps Co-op CEO Matt Volm, this session revealed how top-performing organizations are moving from "top rep magic" to repeatable systems for value creation.
Carpenter, drawing from his experience as former President of Global Sales & Field Operations at CrowdStrike and Tanium, painted a familiar picture for revenue leaders: "You're expected to do more every year just like a sales rep with the same territory, but yet that problem gets bigger when you're expected to do it every year with the same amount of people and the same cost."
This challenge mirrors what many RevOps professionals are experiencing as they're tasked with growing revenue 25% or more with 0% headcount increases. The solution isn't working harder—it's finding what Carpenter calls the "cheat codes" in business operations.
"What we're looking for are those three-degree dial turns where we can make the entire battleship take a 360-degree turn. Those are the cheat codes we're looking for in business." - Mike Carpenter
When headcount is flat, marketing must fundamentally shift its approach. Cunningham emphasized that marketers can no longer rely on volume to drive results.
"I can't send ghosts to sales teams. Each qualified lead has to become X percent more effective because I can't rely on volume." - Ben Cunningham
This shift requires sophisticated analytics and process management to ensure every lead passed to sales is thoroughly vetted and high-intent.
"MQL is a vanity metric. Tell me about the conversion rate. How many of those converted? That's what truly matters." - Ben Cunningham
The implications extend beyond marketing. When marketing tightens qualification criteria, it creates ripple effects throughout the revenue organization that must be carefully managed to avoid breaking the customer journey.
One of the most overlooked areas for revenue optimization is territory design.
"Many companies don't even consider their ICP comprehensively. They don't understand what are all the companies that they can target. If they don't know how big of a market their sales reps can pursue, how are they going to be able to quantify a good quota?" - Jose Romero
The session revealed that proper territory planning requires understanding:
Carpenter shared a powerful example of how poor territory design can quietly trap revenue. Top-performing reps are often assigned territories with the highest lead volume. That raises an uncomfortable question: are they truly the best salesperson in your organization—or would someone with similar talent achieve the same (or better) results if given the same territory?
This "Feed the Eagle" mentality, while seemingly logical, often prevents organizations from scaling effectively. Building systematic approaches to territory management ensures growth isn't dependent on individual performance.
The pressure to hit aggressive targets with limited resources creates dangerous ripple effects that extend to customer success. Cunningham warned about the "churn bomb" that results from pushing unqualified prospects through the sales process.
"If these people aren't the exact right fit and they're having adoption problems, you're going to see people start to churn." - Ben Cunningham
This creates a vicious cycle where teams must not only hit current quarter numbers but also backfill revenue lost to churn from previous quarters. The solution lies in maintaining alignment across the entire revenue cycle, ensuring that the pressure to close deals doesn't compromise long-term customer success.
A recurring theme throughout the session was the inadequacy of traditional planning tools. Romero identified Excel as "our biggest competitor—a 43-year-old technology" that's holding back modern revenue operations.
The limitations of spreadsheet-based planning become critical when organizations need to:
As modern RevOps teams embrace AI and automation, the gap between spreadsheet-based planning and AI-driven insights becomes a competitive disadvantage.
The session introduced the concept of causal AI as a game-changer for revenue operations. Unlike predictive analytics that identify correlations, causal AI understands cause-and-effect relationships.
"Predictive AI is like saying there's firemen when there's fires. Therefore, the firemen must cause the fires. The fact that the data is there doesn't mean that one thing causes the other." - Jose Romero
Causal AI enables organizations to:
This technology represents a fundamental shift from reactive reporting to proactive revenue engineering, allowing RevOps teams to influence outcomes rather than just measure them.
With hiring freezes in place, capacity planning becomes critical. The session demonstrated how organizations can model different scenarios to understand their options:
Romero showed how reducing attrition from 76% to 50% in the Americas could significantly impact overall capacity, providing a clear path to growth without new hires.
Carpenter emphasized the need to move beyond feature-based selling to value-based approaches.
"You need to separate your solution with value, and you need to find a platform to be able to distill what that value is and deliver it to your clients with a closed-loop cycle." - Mike Carpenter
This approach requires sophisticated enablement strategies that help sales teams:
The panel concluded with three key recommendations for revenue leaders:
Carpenter stressed the importance of value differentiation
"Everybody right now is saying the same exact things because of the way communication and social media has evolved. You need to separate your solution with value." - Mike Carpenter
Romero highlighted territory optimization as a critical lever:
"Getting territory design right, being able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each rep, and making sure that you have a patch that is the right size for that rep for their quota is critical." - Jose Romero
Cunningham encouraged leaders to challenge long-held beliefs.
"Question some assumptions that you typically don't. We found $5 million trapped behind someone's top sales guy because no one thought to question whether he should have all those leads." - Ben Cunningham
The 2026 reality of aggressive targets with flat headcount isn't going away. But as this session demonstrated, organizations that embrace systematic approaches to revenue operations—leveraging AI, optimizing territories, and focusing on value creation—can turn constraints into competitive advantages.
The key is moving from art to engineering, from gut feel to data-driven decisions, and from individual heroics to systematic excellence. As RevOps continues to evolve, those who master these principles will not only survive the 2026 reality but thrive in it.
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