How Do You Know If a Sales Plan Is Realistic?

Most teams build a revenue plan and then ask whether it's achievable. The better question is whether it's achievable before you build it. That requires running the model in reverse.

Start with the target. Then work backwards through every layer of the system until you either find support for the number or find where it breaks.

The first place I go is time, value, and conversion: the conversion percentage from stage to stage, how long a deal spends in each stage, and how many net opportunities exist right now.

From there: pipeline coverage, overall win rate, average sales cycle length, and ASP. These are the dials. If any one is off from historical norms, the plan is already under pressure.

Then I look at sales capacity. Who is on a ramp? A rep in month two of a six-month ramp isn't a full unit of capacity. If the plan assumed six fully productive reps and two are still ramping, the math is already wrong before the quarter starts.

Running in reverse doesn't make the plan more conservative. It makes it honest.