It’s the same song every year. Teams spend months building an annual revenue plan, only to watch it unravel within weeks. According to new research by XFactor, a staggering 94.6% of go-to-market leaders lack confidence in the plans they build. The disconnect? Those plans are often built top-down, divorced from execution realities on the ground.
“You’re left with a plan that’s destined to fail from the start.” – Joe Sexton
Joe describes the annual planning process as a “six-month food fight” between departments with different agendas, leading to unrealistic targets and misaligned expectations. The result is a balloon-squeeze effect: sales teams are expected to deliver more with less.
Stephanie explains that teams are stuck in a “growth guess gap” - making decisions on headcount, budgets and territories based on assumptions buried in spreadsheets rather than real-time data. When plans fall apart (which they always do), it’s too late to course correct.
Instead of relying on retrospective forecasting and gut-driven decisions, XFactor advocates for a dynamic, “always-on” planning model powered by real-time data. Think of it as pipeline forecasting for your go-to-market strategy - not just your deals.
“Most revenue teams don’t see problems until it’s too late. They’re looking backwards, not forward.” – Stephanie Martin, VP of RevOps at XFactor
For a deeper dive into overcoming the "Growth Guess Gap," explore XFactor's whitepaper: Is Your Revenue Plan Built on Guesswork?
One of the hardest and most overlooked components of predictable revenue is sales capacity. Ramp time, yield, and attrition all play a role - and most companies are guessing at best. Joe breaks down the formula for true capacity planning:
Without this clarity, leaders end up building targets on faulty assumptions and setting their teams up for failure.
XFactor's Revenue Operating Center (ROC) offers AI-driven simulations to reconcile top-down and bottom-up plans, optimizing headcount and resource allocation.
According to the survey, 59% of teams fail to integrate capacity planning, territory design, and marketing efforts into their annual plan. That means inbound demand often doesn’t align with available reps or territory coverage. Joe points out that this disconnect stems not from lack of effort, but from a lack of integrated systems and shared data across departments.
“Marketing’s job is to make sales successful. But they’re often using different data and flying blind.” – Joe Sexton
To break the cycle, Stephanie and Joe suggest moving away from MQLs and vanity metrics and focusing instead on accepted opportunities and revenue-producing activities.
Explore how top companies align RevOps and marketing in Why Marketers Don’t Understand Their Salesforce Metrics.
Nearly 90% of respondents said they only trust about 25% of their pipeline. Why? Because reps aren’t being held accountable to real activity or follow-up. Deals slip through the cracks, and forecast accuracy tanks.
Joe shares some tried-and-true tactics:
“If they’re not whispering to you about a deal, you’re probably not winning it.” – Joe Sexton
For a comprehensive approach to aligning your revenue operations, consider taking XFactor's Revenue Operations Benchmark Self-Assessment to identify gaps and opportunities in your GTM strategy.
Both Joe and Stephanie agree the tools used by RevOps today haven’t kept up with the complexity of the job. The rise of AI and machine learning opens the door for proactive, predictive revenue planning - but only if the underlying data is clean and integrated.
Instead of spending 50% of their time cleaning data or managing spreadsheets, RevOps teams should be diagnosing problems, modeling scenarios and guiding strategic decisions in real time.
Start prepping your team for AI with Ready for AI? 10 Data Quality Must-Haves Pre-AI.
Looking for more great content? Check out our blog and join the community for more expert conversations.
.avif)
