Dispatch #005
The plan looked great in the deck. Here is what survives first contact.
The revenue plan looked great in the deck. It had a waterfall chart, a hiring timeline, and a pipeline model that added up. Then January happened. The new hires did not ramp on schedule. The pipeline from Q4 did not convert. The territory redesign created three months of account confusion. By February, the plan that took six weeks to build was already fiction.
Revenue plans fail for the same structural reasons every year, and those reasons are not market conditions or execution failures. They are untested assumptions baked into the model: ramp times that have never been achieved, pipeline projections that assume last year's conversion rates in a different market, and headcount plans that assume recruits who have not been sourced. The plan is not wrong because the team failed. The team failed because the plan was never stress-tested.
The answers below expose the assumptions that kill revenue plans and explain what a plan built on evidence — not aspiration — actually requires.
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38 questions that expose what survives first contact with reality.
Revenue Plan Reality Check →