Is there enough pipeline? Are sellers creating enough activity? Can leaders trust the forecast? Does the team need more capacity?
New research from Varicent featuring data from more than 1,000 revenue and operations leaders suggests these are the wrong questions. What turns out to be most predictive of whether a team hits the number or not? How strong their plan is. This was true even when we control seller experience, team size, industry, and any number of other variables.
In other words, the teams that pull ahead are not always the biggest or most resourced. They just make better decisions before the year began.
Those teams are 40% more likely to exceed their target.
Join Varicent’s Head of Research & Insight, Curtis Schroeder, and industry leaders as they unpack findings from the 2026 Market Spotlight. They’ll examine where weak planning puts revenue at risk, why sellers often inherit the consequences, and how AI can help teams test assumptions, compare tradeoffs, and adjust sooner.
You'll learn:
Why last year's decisions still shapes this year's number: See how decisions about territory, quota, capacity, and comp continue to shape which accounts sellers chase and where they spend their time, long after those decisions were made.
Why the pipeline and activity metrics often hide the real problem: Learn how pipeline gaps, missed quotas, and uneven performance may point back to assumptions built into the plan.
How leaders can begin to see which planning decisions worked: Most organizations have no way to know which planning decisions actually paid off. Learn how leading revenue teams trace results back to the choices they made long before the quarter began.
Where AI is starting to help: See how some organizations are beginning to apply AI to revenue planning decisions, compare scenarios, identify risk, test tradeoffs, and adjust the plan before performance moves too far off course.
How leading teams learn and adjust faster: Discover how companies shorten the time between making a decision, seeing what it produced, and applying that evidence to what they do next.
If you lead sales planning, revenue operations, incentive compensation, or sales performance, join us to see which of last year's decisions are still shaping your number today, before you build next year's plan the same way you built this one.