Starting the Year Behind?
The beginning of 2026 is days away. As many rush to close out the year and finalize 2026 plans, while balancing personal holiday obligations, key areas and actions are often overlooked. At the top of the list are the distinct actions that, when executed, make the 2026 planning real.
The Gap Between Planning and Doing
Most companies enter January with a plan.Revenue targets are set. Quotas are assigned. The numbers look achievable on paper. What is often missing is the bridge between that plan and the daily actions that produce revenue. January arrives, and the organization turns inward. Sales kickoffs consume the first weeks. Reps prepare presentations on how they will achieve their number. Leadership reviews strategy decks.Territory assignments get debated. CRM hygiene projects finally get attention.
None of that generates revenue.
By the time the organization pivots to actual selling, February is halfway gone. The pipeline that exists is what was built last year or deals that did not close in December. New opportunities are just starting to form. And the math becomes unforgiving.
The Pattern That Repeats Every Year
This is not a one-time problem. It is a structural pattern that plays out across companies of all sizes. January and February produce weak results.Leadership attributes it to seasonality or holiday hangover. March becomes the real start of the year. Q1 closes below plan, but there is confidence that Q2 will recover. Q2 improves, but not enough to close the gap. Now the pressure shifts to the second half. Q3 carries the weight of catching up. Q4 becomes make-or-break for the entire fiscal year. By December, the organization is exhausted.And then the cycle begins again.
I have seen this pattern firsthand and what it takes to break it.
I once took over a team at the end of H1 that was significantly behind on its numbers. The first half had been unfocused. Lots of activity, but not the kind that moved the pipeline or closed deals. The hole they had dug was deep. We made changes immediately. The team responded with a strong second half and finished as the top-producing team in Q4. We still missed the annual target, but only by a small margin, a gap that would not have existed with a disciplined first half. The following year, with execution discipline in place from day one, the team overachieved on quota. Strong H1. Equally strong H2. The difference was not talent or effort. It was focus and purpose applied to every quarter, every month, every week.
That experience reinforced something I already believed: the pattern that leads to a stressful Q4 does not start in October. It starts in January.
Why Execution Plans Get Overlooked
A revenue plan answers the question: What do we need to achieve?
An execution plan answers a different question: What specific actions will we take, starting when, owned by whom, to produce those results?
Most organizations have the first. Few have the second. The assumption is that a clear target will drive the right behavior. But targets do not create action. Defined activities with accountability create action. When January arrives without an execution plan, the organization defaults to what feels productive. Meetings.Presentations. Internal alignment. These activities feel like work, but they do not move pipeline or close deals. I have inherited teams where this discipline was absent. There was plenty of activity, but little of it was relevant. People were busy without purpose. The shift that matters is simple but not easy: start with focus, then apply deliberate actions that support that focus. If an action does not align with revenue-generating outcomes, challenge why it needs to be done at all.
Building an Execution Plan That Activates Immediately
The difference between companies that start strong and those that spend H1 recovering is not effort. It is structure. But structure does not mean complexity. I design execution plans for simplicity so that everyone on the team, from early career professionals to seasoned veterans, can participate and execute.Over complicated systems look impressive on paper, but they fail in practice.They get written for the best members of the team, leaving others unable to follow. A new professional cannot draw on years of experience to navigate ambiguity. They need clarity.
An execution plan that works has four elements. Notice that none of them are complicated.
First, defined expectations tied to revenue-generating behavior. Not vague goals. Specific, measurable actions.With one team, I set a clear expectation: every AE would have two meaningful conversations with each account over the year. A meaningful conversation was not an email exchange. Priority was a face-to-face meeting, followed by a video meeting. The objective was to build the relationship and understand the business’s challenges or opportunities, and how we could be part of the solution. Two conversations per account. Simple enough for anyone to understand. Clear enough to execute against from day one.
Second, a realistic assessment of the current pipeline. Before January begins, every opportunity forecasted for Q1 should be validated. This is where honesty matters most. I ask two questions about every opportunity:Is there a clearly defined next action? When is the next engagement with the account regarding this opportunity? Two questions. That is all it takes to uncover the strength or weakness of a deal. When a rep cannot answer them, we collaborate to obtain that information. Often, during that conversation, an AE will share that they "hoped" something would happen. That word, “hope”,is a signal. It indicates the opportunity is weak or invalid. Sometimes the right action is to remove the deal from the forecast with the understanding it can be added back once it is re-qualified. That may feel harsh, but consider the alternative. When do you want to understand reality, when you can fix the situation and build more pipeline, or after you miss your quota?
Third, protected selling time. Kickoffs and planning sessions have their place, but they should not consume the first weeks of the year. If your sales team spends January in conference rooms, they are not building the pipeline that Q2 requires. Schedule internal activities around revenue-generating work, not the other way around.
Fourth, early accountability checkpoints.Waiting until the end of January to assess progress guarantees that problems surface too late to correct. Weekly reviews in the first sixty days create visibility and allow for rapid adjustments. The accountability culture I built was rooted in one question: Did we do what we said we would do? That question got woven into every conversation. And I held myself equally accountable for the expectations I set. Accountability is not something you impose on a team. It is something you model.
One question. Asked consistently. That is the system.
The First Sixty Days Determine the Year
Revenue in March, April, and May is primarily determined by what happens in January and February. If those months are consumed by internal activity, the pipeline that should support Q2 does not get built. This is the compounding effect that catches companies off guard. A slow January does not just affect Q1. It weakens Q2. A weak first half creates pressure that makes the second half feel like a constant scramble. The companies that avoid this pattern treat January 1 as an execution date, not a planning date. The plan is already set.The kickoff content is already prepared. Day one is about action, not alignment.
The Leadership Shift That Matters
This is not about working harder. It is about working with intention. Strong leaders understand that internal activities expand to fill available time. If you do not define what execution looks like in the first sixty days, the organization will fill that space with meetings, reviews, and planning refinements. The shift I made with every team I led started with one principle: understand the importance of time and how to use it efficiently to improve selling activities. Time is the one resource you cannot recover. Every day spent on unfocused activity is a day that does not build pipeline.
Complexity is the enemy of execution. When systems are too complicated, people default to what feels manageable, which is usually internal activity rather than revenue-generating work. Simple expectations, applied consistently, outperform elaborate frameworks every time.
The question to ask yourself now, before the year turns: What specific revenue-generating actions will your team take in the first two weeks of January? If that answer is unclear, your execution plan is incomplete. If that answer is complicated, your team will struggle to execute it. Because the pattern that leads to a stressful Q4 does not start in October, it starts in January, when the plan existed, but execution was delayed.
That is something you can change if you choose to act immediately as the new year begins.
