Stop Treating Revenue Planning Like a Side Hustle
In this issue:
Stop treating revenue planning like something you squeeze into spare time
All accounts are NOT the same: how RevOps should think about account selection differently
How RevOps teams can vibe-code custom tools in hours instead of waiting months for engineering
1. Stop treating revenue planning like something you squeeze into spare time
New Breed, Bootcamp for CROs and GTM Leaders: How to Build a Winning 2026 Revenue Plan (Oct. 15, 2025)
TLDR
Strategic revenue planning requires a cross-functional team including CFO partnership, not just the CRO working in isolation
Start with clear guiding principles and model assumptions before building detailed plans
Success comes from measuring progress against your model's key metrics weekly, not shelving the plan after creation
Revenue planning season often feels like purgatory. You're juggling your regular responsibilities while trying to build a comprehensive plan for next year. Jonathan Burg, SVP of Revenue at New Breed and a veteran of multiple planning cycles through acquisitions and growth phases, has a better approach.
Stop treating planning like a side hustle
The biggest mistake revenue leaders make is treating strategic planning as an add-on project. Burg emphasizes creating a dedicated planning team with clear focus time, just like any other critical initiative. This team should be truly cross-functional: RevOps, sales leadership, marketing, customer success, and critically your CFO.
"The CFO is likely running their own planning process at the same time," Burg explains. "This is an amazing opportunity to align and be a true partner, not just a recipient of a number that comes out at the end of a different planning process."
Establish your planning principles first
Before diving into spreadsheets and quotas, define your guiding principles. Burg uses the DARCI model (Driver, Approver, Recommender, Contributor, Informed) to clarify decision-making roles. For example, who's the driver of your planning process? Is it the CRO, VP of RevOps, or someone else? Who has veto power?
Beyond roles, establish philosophical principles. These might include: data-driven decision making, transparency across the organization, or focus on customer retention. These principles become your anchor when debates arise about resource allocation or strategy changes.
Build your model bottoms-up from assumptions
Rather than starting with "We need to hit $X in revenue," Burg recommends building from the ground up with clear assumptions. What's your expected win rate by segment? How many opportunities do you need in pipeline? What's your average deal size?
Document every assumption and the methodology behind it. Board members will ask detailed questions about your calculations, and if they don't sense you understand your own model, they lose confidence.
Communicate relentlessly
Only 40% of employees feel completely informed about their employer's mission and how they'll accomplish it. Burg recommends deciding on key milestones for communication updates before you even start planning. Weekly business reviews become crucial for rallying around gaps and holding teams accountable week-over-week.
The payoff comes at your company kickoff. Instead of calling it a "sales kickoff," Burg suggests making it a company-wide event where every department understands the revenue targets and their role in achieving them.
When finance, product, and operations all understand how they contribute to revenue goals, you create true organizational alignment.
2. All accounts are NOT the same: how RevOps should think about account selection differently
FullFunnel.io, Episode: Sales in ABM: The good, the bad and the ugly with Elric Legloire (Oct. 22, 2025)
TLDR
The traditional automated outbound playbook is broken, with only 8.5% of cold emails getting any response, and 36% of SDRs were laid off in 2025 because of it.
Account selection requires scoring on three dimensions: propensity to buy (team maturity, ICP fit), value of the account (deal size, growth rate), and buying mode (strategic initiatives, hiring signals).
Prioritize accounts into three buckets: Cluster ICP (create awareness), Engaged Accounts (validate needs), and Active Focus List (80% of sales time) based on relationship level and buying signals.
If you're running account-based marketing, here's a sobering stat: most companies just exported a list from their CRM, ran automated sequences, and hoped for pipeline. The result? A 2025 report found that 36% of laid-off employees were SDRs – because the playbook they were running simply doesn’t work anymore.
Elric Legloire, who led ABM campaigns at Chili Piper, joined Full-Funnel Live to share exactly how sales and RevOps teams should think about account selection differently.
Stop exporting CRM lists and start with three scoring dimensions
Most companies pick target accounts by asking "Who has enough employees to qualify as enterprise?" That's not enough. Elric recommends scoring every account on three separate dimensions, each rated 1-5:
First, propensity to buy: Is this account actually mature enough to buy your solution? Look at signals like whether they have the right titles on the team (if you sell to sales teams, do they have at least 300 sales reps?), whether they're already using adjacent tools, and if the team structure suggests they'd actually adopt your product.
Second, value of the account: Don't just look at company size. Look at the size of your end user team. For example, Chili Piper shifted from targeting "any enterprise with 1,000+ employees" to specifically tracking companies with 300+ sales reps, which dramatically increased deal sizes.
Third, buying mode: Are they actually shopping right now? Track strategic initiatives from earnings calls, new executive hires (a new CRO typically means changes are coming), funding rounds, M&A activity, and intent signals like competitor research on G2.
The three-bucket prioritization system that tells you where to spend time
Here's where most ABM programs fail: they treat all target accounts the same. Elric recommends splitting your account list into three distinct buckets, each with different goals and metrics.
Cluster ICP accounts are companies that fit your ideal customer profile but don't know you exist. You don't have relationships there, and you don't know if they're in-market. Your goal isn't to close deals; it's to create awareness. Success metrics: number of accounts that hit your engagement threshold.
Engaged accounts know about you (maybe they attended a webinar, visited high-intent pages, or someone from the company signed up for your newsletter), but you still don't know their specific needs or whether they're actively buying. Your goal: validate their needs and understand their use case. These accounts need different nurturing than cluster accounts.
Active Focus List is where sales reps should spend 80% of their time. These are accounts where you know them, they know you, and you understand their buying initiatives and needs. This is where true one-to-one ABM happens—personalized account plans, custom solutions, discovery calls.
Sales can't just wait for marketing to create awareness
One of the biggest misconceptions is that awareness is 100% marketing's job. In reality, sales plays a critical role in making accounts aware of your solution. But not through cold outreach.
Elric shared tactics for sales to build awareness:
meaningful engagement (commenting on their posts, answering questions in communities),
one-on-one content distribution (marketing creates it, sales shares it with specific buyers),
personalized account “love letters”,
progressive profiling through conversations with end users, and
content co-creation with technical buyers.
The bottom-up approach works especially well for technical products. Instead of going straight to the VP, start with end users and managers who will actually use your product. They'll recommend tools to leadership, and executives trust internal recommendations far more than vendor pitches.
3. How RevOps teams can vibe-code custom tools in hours instead of waiting months for engineering
RevGenius, Webinar: Vibe Coding: How the Build vs. Buy Equation Changed Overnight for RevOps (Oct. 22, 2025)
TLDR
"Vibe coding" lets non-technical RevOps pros build custom applications using AI tools like Replit; no coding required
Brandon Smith from QuotaPath built a Slack activity tracker and 2026 budgeting tool in about an hour each, solving problems that had no good market solutions
The new “build vs buy” equation: if it's not mission-critical and downtime won't break revenue, consider building it yourself
RevOps teams waste an average of 11+ hours per week on manual work while engineering resources stay backlogged for months. But something fundamental has shifted. For the first time, the people closest to the problems – RevOps professionals who understand the full GTM motion – can build their own software solutions without writing a single line of code.
What "vibe coding" actually means for RevOps
The term comes from Andrej Karpathy at OpenAI, who described a new way of building software: "You fully give into the vibes... I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, copy paste stuff, and it mostly works." While that sounds chaotic, for RevOps it means something powerful: You can describe what you need in plain English, and AI coding tools like Replit turn those descriptions into working applications.
Brandon Smith, Director of Revenue Operations at QuotaPath, put this into practice. His team was losing visibility into customer conversations happening in Slack, a black hole where activity couldn't be tracked in Salesforce.
Traditional options? Wait months for engineering to build something, pay for a SaaS tool that only gets you 80% there, or continue losing data. Instead, Brandon spent an hour with a vibe coding tool and built a custom Slack bot that automatically logs customer interactions to Salesforce.
The secret sauce: domain expertise beats coding skills
Here's why RevOps professionals have an edge. When Brandon built a budgeting tool for cross-departmental planning, he embedded the system prompt with QuotaPath-specific context: their commission structure, team roles, sales stages, and business model. The AI suggestions came back tailored to their exact situation; something no off-the-shelf tool could match.
Engineers are better at building, yes. But they need someone to translate requirements. Every translation loses fidelity. With vibe coding, the translator becomes the builder. You know your pipeline stages intimately. You understand how comp plans actually work. You see the gaps between systems every day. That knowledge becomes your superpower.
Drawing the line: what to build vs what to buy
Not everything should be vibe coded. Brandon's framework is simple: Is it mission-critical? If your custom tool goes down for a day, does revenue stop? Then buy a proven solution. The Slack activity tracker going offline for a few hours? Annoying, but not catastrophic. You can backfill that data.
The maturity curve matters too. A year ago, vibe coding was only good for prototyping front-end interfaces. Six months ago, you could build medium-sophistication apps. Today, Brandon is building tools his team uses daily. In 6-12 months? We might see vibe-coded tools replacing more core systems.
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