TL;DR | The Highlights
- Set revenue goals strategically: Combine historical performance (bottoms-up) with growth aspirations (top-down) to create achievable targets.
- Factor in ramp time: New hires take time to contribute, so plan accordingly to avoid unrealistic expectations.
- Use data to drive decisions: Track key capacity metrics like conversion rates, sales cycles, and rep productivity to optimize scaling.
- Invest in the right tech: Prioritize tools that solve actual business problems instead of creating unnecessary complexity.
- Break down silos: Revenue Operations (RevOps) ensures alignment across sales, marketing, CX, and finance to drive sustainable growth.
Growing revenue isn’t just about selling more—it’s about setting the right goals, building the right capacity, and equipping teams with the right tools to execute effectively. Yet, many businesses fall into the trap of setting arbitrary revenue targets, scaling too aggressively, or investing in tech without a clear purpose. So, how do you fire up a revenue engine that runs efficiently and sustainably?
We interviewed Michael Strong, VP of Revenue Operations Consulting at Lane Four, who says it all comes down to data, realistic planning, and cross-functional alignment. In this article, we break down the essential strategies.
Setting Realistic Revenue Goals
Setting revenue targets can feel like throwing darts at a moving target. Aim too high, and you risk overextending your team. Aim too low, and you leave money on the table. So, how do you set goals that are both ambitious and achievable? It starts with understanding the numbers—what’s realistic based on past performance, and what’s possible with the right strategy.
It All Starts with Data (But Only If It’s Clean Data)
“You have to pay attention to the available data. To me, this is the obvious place where you start,” says Michael Strong.
He’s right—revenue planning without solid data is like trying to navigate with a broken compass. You need accurate, meaningful data points to guide your decisions. But here’s the catch: not all data is useful.
The first step is ensuring that the data fields you’re creating (especially custom ones) and collecting actually matter to your business. If the numbers don’t align with real revenue drivers, they won’t help you make smart decisions.
The Balancing Act: Bottoms-Up vs. Top-Down Planning
Strong outlines two key approaches to revenue planning and emphasizes why leaders must leverage both to make more informed, future-proofed decisions:
Bottoms-Up: This method looks at last year’s performance to set a realistic baseline. How many deals did each rep close? What was the average deal size? What were the conversion rates at each stage? Understanding these granular details helps set targets that reflect actual performance. There’s no point setting new goals for the new time period if you haven’t understood last period’s performance.
Top-Down: This approach involves looking at the company’s big-picture growth goals—where you want to go. From there, you reverse-engineer what needs to happen to bridge the gap(s) between current performance and future aspirations.
The magic happens when these two approaches meet. “That gap is where you apply a strategy,” Strong explains. In other words, if your top-down growth goals don’t align with your bottom-up reality, it’s time to refine your approach. Are your reps clear on what they’re selling? Do you need more reps? Better marketing? Higher conversion rates? Understanding where the gap lies is what makes revenue planning actionable.
The Role of Capacity Planning: Scaling Smart
Without Breaking the Machine
Planning for Growth? Don’t Ignore Ramp Time
Growth is exciting—who doesn’t want to see their revenue charts moving up and to the right? But here’s the thing: scaling isn’t just about setting aggressive targets. It’s about ensuring your team can actually meet those targets. And that’s where effective capacity planning comes in.
One of the biggest mistakes fast-growing companies make, according to Mike, is underestimating ramp time—the time it takes for new hires to become productive.
“If one of the fundamental movers of your revenue is bringing on new people, you have to be realistic about their ramp-up period,” Strong explains. “Not everyone you hire is going to succeed, and not everyone will ramp at the speed you want.”
And yet, businesses often assume that a new sales rep will be hitting full productivity from day one. That’s simply not how it works. Aligning with a market standard, if you’re hiring someone today, you should typically expect them to start generating revenue in a minimum of three—more realistically, three to six months. Of course, go back to what the business goals are and decide if these expectations need to be adjusted.
Failing to factor this into your revenue model creates an illusion of rapid growth that won’t materialize. Worse, it can lead to over-hiring, unrealistic sales quotas, and a never-ending cycle of turnover when employees fall short of impossible expectations.
Using Data to Build Smarter Capacity Plans
So how do you make sure you’re scaling intelligently? By letting data do the heavy lifting. You bet we’re going back to the data.
Technology allows businesses to quantify the contributions of both individual reps and entire teams. You can break sales teams into performance quartiles, track conversion rates at different funnel stages, and model realistic productivity expectations based on historical data.
Your systems should be generating the data that feeds into your capacity planning model. If you know your leads convert at 10%, and you know each rep can close X number of deals per month, you can actually build a model that makes sense instead of just guessing.
At a minimum, here are some of the key capacity planning metrics revenue leaders should be tracking:
- Productivity per rep: How much revenue does each salesperson generate?
- Lead conversion rates: What percentage of leads actually turn into closed deals?
- Sales cycle length: How long does it take to move a deal from lead to close?
- Ramp time: How quickly do new hires reach full productivity?
By tracking these metrics, businesses can make informed hiring and resource allocation decisions—rather than just crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.
The Dangers of Unrealistic Planning
Strong warns against one of the most common pitfalls in capacity planning: over-reliance on top-down targets without considering the operational realities on the ground.
Too often, leadership starts with a big revenue number, works backward, and assumes they can just divide it among their team. But if that number isn’t based on historical trends or actual capacity, it’s completely unrealistic—and can be corrosive to the business.
Why? Because unrealistic quotas lead to:
- Burnout and attrition: Sales teams working toward impossible targets quickly lose morale, and billing consultants or service providers stretched beyond their capacity risk exhaustion, leading to decreased quality of service.
- High turnover: When reps don’t hit their numbers, they leave—or get pushed out—resulting in constant rehiring.
- Revenue instability: A team in perpetual flux struggles to deliver consistent results, whether it’s a sales team missing targets or a consulting group unable to maintain steady client delivery due to overworked or underutilized staff.
You can set stretch goals, but they need to be achievable stretch goals. If everyone has historically brought in $100,000 a year, you can’t suddenly make the quota $200,000 and expect to hit your targets. You just have a model that looks nice.
Scaling the Right Way: Strategy Over Wishful Thinking
Stretch Goals? Sure. Fantasy Goals? No. Effective capacity planning isn’t just about setting targets. Your team needs to understand the actual levers that move the business, like we mentioned earlier. If you do have very big (but realistic) goals, then that probably means you need to be hiring more. But remember, it’s not just about expecting more from your team—it’s about introducing different processes, optimizing operations, and making smart investments when needed.
Leaders who fail to recognize this end up in what we call a “failing exercise”—setting arbitrary growth targets without a clear strategy to achieve them.
“Being in these meetings, I’ve done these things. This is hard and can leave real scars,” claims Strong.
So, what’s the takeaway? Scale responsibly. Use data. Plan for ramp time. And most importantly—don’t just increase your revenue target and expect magic to happen.
Tech Investments: Solve Problems, Don’t Create Them
Helpful Tip...Don’t Buy Tech for the Sake of It
With the explosion of RevOps tools on the market, it’s easy to fall into the trap of “buy first, figure out the problem later.” We caution against this approach. You need to think about the problem first and then find a tool that solves it—not just go out shopping and get excited about what you find.
Too often, businesses invest in technology because it seems like it will improve efficiency, only to find that it doesn’t integrate well or isn’t actually solving a core business challenge. Worse, unnecessary tools create tech debt—a tangled mess of underutilized software, inefficient processes, and disconnected data.
One of the most dangerous pitfalls in automation is an unsupervised process running unchecked. It quietly operates in the background—until one day, you discover it has generated millions of unnecessary records. The real problem? Those bad records feed into your analytics, distorting key insights and leading to flawed strategic decisions. Before you know it, you’re setting future goals based on inaccurate data, steering the business in the wrong direction.
So how do you invest wisely? Ask these questions before committing to a new tool:
- What specific challenge are we solving?
- Does this tool integrate seamlessly with our existing tech stack?
- Who will be responsible for managing and maintaining it?
- Will this tool make our teams more effective—or just add complexity?
If a tool doesn’t have clear, measurable value, it’s probably not worth the investment.
Breaking Down Silos: The Role of Cross-Functional Teams like RevOps
One of the biggest challenges in revenue planning is that sales, marketing, and customer experience (CX) often operate in silos. Each function has its own priorities, goals, and tools—but without alignment, those efforts don’t always add up to actual growth.
That’s where Revenue Operations (RevOps) comes in. RevOps has a unique view of the entire revenue funnel and it’s architecture. They understand the technology needs of each function and how they intersect. Sales, Marketing, CX, and Finance don’t always think about how their work affects the teams before or after them, but having someone or a team dedicated to overseeing the revenue strategy does.
RevOps ensures that decisions made in one department don’t unintentionally create bottlenecks elsewhere. For example, a sales team might push for aggressive lead generation, but without RevOps in the room, they might not realize that the customer success team doesn’t have the resources to support a massive influx of new clients.
What Happens Without a Revenue Leader?
In companies without a dedicated revenue leader—which is actually not uncommon in smaller companies—siloed decision-making is more likely. If there isn’t a revenue leader, responsibility usually falls on whoever’s in the C-suite or the SalesOps point person. But since marketing, sales, CX, and finance often report to different leaders, there’s no single person ensuring alignment. That may lead to disconnected results.
The takeaway here? Whether it’s a dedicated RevOps leader or another executive taking ownership, someone needs to be responsible for keeping revenue functions aligned and communicating the needs to the right people. Otherwise, businesses risk disjointed efforts that don’t translate into sustainable growth.
The Revenue Engine: People, Process, and Tech Working Together
Sustainable growth requires alignment across three key areas:
- People – Hiring and ramping new employees realistically, based on past performance and industry benchmarks
- Process – Defining clear workflows so that sales, marketing, and CX function as a cohesive unit
- Technology – Investing in the right tools to enhance productivity, not complicate it
When these three components are in sync across the revenue functions, companies can scale without burning out their teams or constantly recalibrating unrealistic targets.
Revenue Growth Isn’t Magic—It’s Strategy
Scaling a business isn’t about setting lofty goals and hoping for the best. It’s about aligning data, people, processes, and technology to create a revenue engine that runs smoothly.
The key actionable takeaways:
- Set revenue goals based on both historical performance and growth aspirations
- Plan for ramp time: New hires won’t contribute immediately, so factor that into your models
- Use data to optimize capacity planning: Track productivity per team members, lead conversion rates, and sales cycle length
- Invest in tech that solves real problems: Don’t buy software just because it looks cool
- Ensure sales, marketing, and CX are aligned: RevOps plays a crucial role in breaking down silos and driving efficiency
Ultimately, companies that treat revenue growth as a strategic, data-driven process—rather than a numbers game—are the ones that scale successfully. So, is your revenue engine built to last? If not, then our Foursight services can help fine-tune the gears. Let’s chat!
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