Hey, it's Jose.

Back in The Quarter That Looked Fine Until It Wasn't, I mentioned the readiness review I ran before every quarter. I never told you what it found the first time it failed.

The rule was simple: before Day 1, every account team confirmed it had enough real, qualified pipeline to hit its number. We didn't wait for the official quota. We worked against an estimate.

The first time we ran it with one sales team, the pipeline looked healthy. Then we read it line by line.

Most of it was business as usual: spend the client was going to place anyway. Very few net-new ideas had been confirmed with the client. The ones that existed weren't built on what the client was trying to achieve. They were product math, what the account would be worth if we sold them this product or that one. That isn't interest. The client didn't know why the idea made sense for them, because nobody had asked.

So the review told us something no dashboard would have: if the quota came in higher, we had no solid path to it. A number is not a path.

Because we were working against an estimate, we found that gap while the quarter was still ahead of us. We tied each idea to a real client objective and got it confirmed. When Day 1 arrived, the team was already moving.

Right now, a lot of you are about to sign off on a 2027 plan. Very few teams run a readiness review on the year.

This year's mandate has a familiar shape: do more with less. The target stays, one cell gets cut (usually headcount), and the gap gets closed by quietly inflating another. More dials per rep. A bigger addressable market. More pipeline from every account.

The plan balances. But on what?

Remember the story of the quarter where the $4M forecast closed at $1.8M? The quarter didn't go wrong in week 6. It went wrong in a plan that assumed the pipeline would be there.

Joey Gilkey, the CEO of a sales-tech company, said at a recent GTM conference: "cheap activity can be extraordinarily expensive production." The inflated input looks free in the spreadsheet. Its cost shows up a quarter later as conversion decay, blamed on the reps or the market. Pour more volume into a leaking channel and you just lose more of it, faster. That was the point of Rain Doesn't Fix a Leaky Bucket. Then next year's plan inflates the same cell again.

The obvious objection: finance already reviewed it. Fair. But finance checks that the plan adds up, not that it's true. That sales team's pipeline added up too.

So, check one: which input grew while headcount didn't, and has anyone tested that it can?

The readiness review asked one question of a quarter: can this team, with these accounts, hit this number? Ask it of the year.

Put bottom-up next to top-down. Did you start Annual Planning already? argued that your baseline isn't your capacity; now build the capacity model and lay it beside the target. Use the close rates from The Quarter That Looked Fine Until It Wasn't, by seller, segment and product, not one average. The gap between the two is the point.

I recently heard Stephanie Martin, head of RevOps, make a great distinction worth borrowing: raise that gap now and it's a problem-solving conversation. Raise it mid-year and it's a replan. And remember the product math from the opening: a bottom-up built from it is just a top-down number in disguise.

Quota has the same problem once you account for ramp and attrition. Martin's example: "every new AE that comes on board gets a $1.2 million quota." What that ignores, she pointed out, is how long a new hire takes to ramp, and how much of the plan year they're actually there for. Add up the quota you'll actually deploy after ramp, start dates and the reps you'll lose. Does it still cover the target?

The accounts are where product math does the most damage. One test I heard at that conference: before you accept the number, check whether your current team can activate the accounts it needs. I'd add one condition. An account counts as workable when the client has said yes to an idea, not when you've calculated what it could be worth.

The fifth check is the one I'd fight hardest to keep.

When I built annual planning for three multi-billion-dollar verticals, every plan included shortfall scenarios: if key accounts underperform, here is the recovery. Written before the shortfall, not during it. It feels like planning to fail. It's the opposite. It's the only part of the plan that's ready for March.

The sixth is choosing one constraint. Try to move every metric and nothing moves. KD Dorsey provided an example at the GTM conference: a team pushing close rate from 27% to 35% while its show rate sat at 48%. Wrong number. Pick the one metric that would close most of the gap, and point next year's enablement, comp and tooling at it. That's where RevOps stops supplying the plan's inputs and starts testing them, the GTM Architect role this newsletter started with.

Any question you can't answer yes to is where your remaining time should go.

That readiness review never existed to approve the quarter. It existed to find the hole while there was still time to fill it. Your 2027 plan deserves the same read, line by line, before anyone signs it.

Which of the six would your plan fail today? Hit reply. I'd like to know which one shows up most.

Jose Celorio Founder, GTM Reloaded
Former Strategist at Google, Mastercard & Deloitte Consulting

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Views are my own and don’t represent any current or former employer.

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