"We're going to double down. We're going to find another gear. We're going to dig deep."
I've heard CEOs and CROs say those exact words in board meetings after a missed quarter. Every time, the board leaves convinced the leader has no idea what's happening in the business.
At SBI Growth Advisory's 2025 Spring Regional Summit in Atlanta, I asked a room of CROs, commercial leaders and RevOps leaders how they were tracking against plan halfway through the year. Then I made the case that CRO turnover isn't really about missing the number. QuotaPath found that 91% of the companies it studied missed quota in 2024. Map out how long it takes to recruit a new CRO, ramp them and course-correct, and most are replaced on less than a year of real performance. The CROs who last are the ones who can tell the board it's raining, and roughly when it will stop.
The session walked through the tools I use to reset for the second half:
The one-page annual plan: every revenue source down the side, every month across the top, colored red, yellow or green as the year unfolds.
Sales velocity, broken into its parts: in one interim CRO role, the board was sure it had a sales-skills problem. The win rate was 34% and the team was creating twice as many opportunities as ever. Deal size had slipped 5% at a time until the pipeline was worth roughly 20% less than plan.
An honest commit: what I'm committing, what's possible, and what has to go right, instead of looking calm on the surface while paddling hard underneath.
A second-half theme sellers can rally around, like "On Target" or "Plus One."
The weekly flash report: quota, forecast and bookings plotted week by week, so the board never hears bad news for the first time at a board meeting.
Watch and Go Deeper
Full session: Resetting Your Go-to-Market (and Yourself) for a Strong H2
Video: The Weekly Flash Report
Book: The CRO's Guide to Winning in Private Equity (includes the flash report Excel template)
Free toolkit: The Day Nobody Puts on the Calendar