Before You Approve the 2027 Revenue Plan, Look at the Team You’re Putting on the Field
by Brian Shea | Lucrum Partners
We are entering the part of the year when CEOs and their leadership teams begin putting real numbers behind 2027.
Growth expectations are being debated. Budgets are taking shape. Marketing is making its case for investment. Sales leaders are looking at coverage, headcount and territories. Finance is pressure-testing assumptions. Somewhere in that process, the conversation will eventually turn to whether the organization has enough pipeline to support the number.
Before getting there, I think there is a more fundamental question worth asking.
What is your commercial team going to do differently in the market next year?
I don't mean what number they will carry or how much more activity you expect. I mean what will actually be different about the way your people engage the market and the conversations they have with buyers.
If you are planning for higher growth in 2027, but your sellers will enter January with essentially the same playbooks, coaching, assets and customer conversations they used this year, I would want to understand why we believe the outcome is going to change.
And you don't have to wait until next year to find out.
Ask your CRO to bring the current sales playbook to your next leadership meeting. Ask your CMO to bring the assets sellers are using in the market. Ask your CHRO to bring the profile the company uses to hire, assess and develop sales talent. Then spend an hour looking at all three together. I suspect that exercise would be revealing for a lot of CEOs.
Start with the people you already have
One of the questions we hear when discussing Signal-Led GTM™ is some version of, “I'm not sure I have the kind of sellers who can talk to executives this way.”
That's a fair concern.
For years, companies have hired and developed sellers to be good at explaining products, running discovery, following a methodology, managing an opportunity and moving a buyer through a defined sales process. Then we tell those same people that we want them to become more strategic, call higher and have better conversations with executives.
We shouldn't assume that simply happens. But I also wouldn't assume you need to replace the team. I would start by understanding who you already have.
Which sellers are naturally curious about the customer's business? Who understands how the customer makes money? Who follows the industry without being told to? Who can read an earnings release, leadership announcement or competitive move and develop a thoughtful point of view about what it might mean? Who is comfortable sitting across from an executive without immediately retreating to the safety of the product?
Those are different capabilities than knowing how to run a demo.
This is where the CRO and CHRO should be having a much deeper conversation going into 2027. If executive engagement is important to the growth strategy, then business acumen, curiosity, judgment, financial fluency and the ability to connect signals should show up somewhere in how you assess talent.
The question isn't whether every seller can become a C-suite strategist. They don't need to.
The question is whether you know which people should be having those conversations.
Read the playbook yourself
This is where I would spend some time if I were the CEO. Actually read what your sellers are being told to do. Most sales playbooks are very good at helping a seller operate once there is something recognizable to pursue. Identify the account. Find the persona. Run the outreach sequence. Discover the pain. Qualify the opportunity. Position the solution. Differentiate. Handle objections. Advance the deal.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that.
My concern is where the process starts. In most cases, the seller is looking for a person or company that may need what the company already sells. The product may not appear in the first sentence, but it is sitting behind the conversation.
That becomes particularly obvious when you look at the questions sellers have been trained to ask.
“What are your priorities?”
“What keeps you up at night?”
“What challenges are you experiencing?”
Those questions have been part of sales training for decades. The problem is that they put the burden on the executive to educate the seller.
Now compare that with a seller who walks into the conversation having noticed several changes in the buyer's market, connected those changes to a potential business consequence and developed a hypothesis worth discussing. “We're seeing three things changing in your market that could put pressure on the revenue plan. We have a point of view on what that could mean. How are you thinking about it?”
That conversation starts in a very different place. The seller isn't pretending to know the answer. The seller is demonstrating that they have done enough work to have earned the question. That is an important distinction.
Look at what managers are actually coaching
You can learn a lot about a commercial organization by sitting through a pipeline review.
A company may say that it wants sellers to become more strategic, engage executives earlier and bring insight into the market. Then the manager spends the entire meeting asking about close dates, next steps, opportunity stages and activity.
Those things need to be managed. I'm not suggesting otherwise.
But people respond to what leaders inspect.
If you want sellers to see opportunities earlier, managers have to become capable of coaching what happens earlier. I would ask the CRO how often managers are sitting with sellers and talking about what is changing inside an account before an opportunity exists. Are they looking at market signals together? Are they challenging the seller's interpretation? Are they asking why a particular executive should care? Are they helping the seller develop a hypothesis about the business impact?
Or does coaching begin once something enters the CRM?
That distinction matters.
You can build a new playbook, roll out new training and announce a strategic selling initiative at SKO. If the frontline manager goes back to coaching exactly what they coached last year, the organization will eventually go back to selling exactly the way it sold last year.
Then look at what marketing is putting in the seller's hands
This is where I would bring the CMO into the conversation.
Most sales content libraries tell you a great deal about the orientation of the commercial organization. Open yours and see what's there. You will probably find product sheets, solution briefs, case studies, battlecards, competitive comparisons, demo decks, customer stories and objection-handling material.
All useful.
But almost all of it helps the seller explain your company. How much helps the seller understand the buyer's company?
That is a very different question.
Where is the industry intelligence? What competitive movements are being tracked? What changes are occurring across the customer's market? What are executives saying publicly? Where is investment moving? What regulatory or technology shifts could affect the business? What are peer companies doing? What relationships inside the buying organization matter?
And what is the seller supposed to do with that information once they have it?
This is where I think marketing's role in a signal-led commercial system becomes much more interesting. The goal isn't simply to produce more content for sellers to distribute. It is to make the commercial organization smarter about the markets it serves.
If most of the material we give sellers is about us, we shouldn't be surprised when most of their conversations eventually become about us.
The question I would put on the table
After reviewing the talent, the playbook, the coaching and the assets, I would ask the CRO, CMO and CHRO one question: If we took our products out of the conversation, what would our sellers know that would make an executive want to spend 30 minutes with them?
I wouldn't rush the answer.
Because if the answer is primarily our methodology, our technology, our customer stories or our value proposition, I think you have learned something important about the commercial system.
Your sellers may be well trained to explain why someone should buy from you.
That doesn't necessarily mean they are equipped to understand why someone should be thinking about change in the first place.
That is the gap Signal-Led GTM is designed to address.
The commercial organization gets better at detecting meaningful changes around a buying organization, interpreting why those changes may matter, determining where there is enough relevance to engage and helping the right people turn that intelligence into a credible business conversation.
Detect → Interpret → Prioritize → Activate → Learn.
The starting point isn't the product. It is what is changing in the buyer's world.
That sounds like a subtle difference until you listen to the conversations.
Then it becomes very obvious.
Q4 is the time to find out
I wouldn't wait for SKO to discover whether the team is capable of making this shift.
By January, the number has been approved. Budgets have been allocated. Quotas are coming out. Territories are being assigned. Everyone is ready to go.
Q4 gives the leadership team a chance to look at this before the machinery starts moving again.
Look at the people. Determine who can make the shift and where the gaps are.
Look at the playbook. Determine whether it begins with a buyer's changing environment or eventually works backward from what you sell.
Look at the coaching. Determine whether managers can develop the behavior you are asking sellers to demonstrate.
Look at the assets. Determine whether they make sellers smarter about the customer or simply better informed about your products.
And listen to what sellers are actually being taught to say.
That last one may tell you more than any dashboard.
Because the 2027 revenue plan assumes thousands of conversations that haven't happened yet. Some of those conversations will happen with your company in the room. Some will happen with a competitor in the room. And many will begin long before an opportunity ever shows up in your CRM.
If your team is waiting for the opportunity before it knows what to say, you may already be late. Before approving the 2027 number, I would want to know which kind of team we're putting on the field.
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