Setting Annual Plans With Humanity

I closed out the Chief Revenue Officer Summit with a story about a sales leader I once worked with whose entire growth strategy was telling reps to close one more deal a year — as if they'd been sitting on unclosed business out of laziness. It never works, for the same reason I can't shave five seconds off my marathon pace every single day just by wanting to: eventually the math catches up with you.

Most annual plans get built on neat little spreadsheets that assume every rep hits 100% of quota, every month, forever — which ignores the fact that actual humans have babies, take leave, get sick, or decide to open a yoga studio. I walked the audience through the six-step process I use instead: start from historical performance data for tenured reps and new hires separately, model ramp time honestly, plan for both voluntary and involuntary turnover before it happens to you, and treat new products or training programs as cautious bets rather than the load-bearing wall of the plan.

Then there's the calendar itself. I like to lower Q1 targets by just a couple of points below what history says the quarter will actually produce, so the team starts the year winning instead of playing catch-up. It sounds like a small trick, but a team that beats its number in Q1 carries that morale all year, and it's a big part of why the average tenure for a VP of Sales sits around eighteen months — leaders get replaced less often for missing the number than for never having a credible story about why they missed it. Past performance is generally the best predictor of future performance, and a plan built on that instead of hope is one you can actually stand behind in front of your board.