Many CEOs don’t realize that Q1 is already in motion. Deals that close in January and February are born NOW. What your team does in Q3 creates the momentum for 2026 and sets the tempo for how next year starts. If you wait until the holiday season to get serious, you’ll be walking into next year with the same forecasting fantasy, the same stalled pipeline, the same excuses and likely the same outcome as this year.
Your 2026 Budget Already Started
Q1 revenue doesn’t start in January. It starts now. Enterprise sales cycles average 170 days (Gong), and mid-market B2B cycles land between 75 and 120 days (HubSpot). That means what you close in January was likely initiated before August, so stop thinking (and allowing your sales team to believe) that the ball dropping in Times Square is a fresh start. It’s a continuation of what you’re doing, or not doing, right now.
If you’re serious about building a credible 2026 plan, start with the one place that never lies: the pipeline – both the past and future.
Here’s where to focus:
- Audit deal timing. Which opportunities realistically align with your buyers’ procurement calendars and budget approvals? Question anything that doesn’t.
- Filter for lagging deals. If it’s been in the pipeline for 90+ days with no movement, it’s not real until proven otherwise. Challenge the team to ask hard questions, to get commitments on close timing, to pull levers that will prompt action from clients or compel them to level with us about whether to kill a deal. According to InsightSquared, deals that linger in stage 3 for over 60 days are 73% less likely to close than those that move within 30. Press these deals harder with your reps and require real updates from the clients. When a salesperson tells a client that they are going into their monthly pipeline review with their deal at 80% probability to close in 30 days, then asks the client if that seems realistic, most will feel inclined to fess up with the cold, hard truth.
- Review 2025 performance. Use actuals, not budget targets, as your 2026 planning baseline. Don’t build growth on top of last year’s miss. What were your close rates by rep? Is there variance in close rates by product line, by deal size, by month, or other industry-specific factors?
- Validate sales inputs. Are your required inputs strong enough to accurately forecast? Ensure that your CRM is capturing meaningful sales activity, not just call logs and fluff notes. Data quality is everything. Are your dashboards visible enough, at the rep level, to highlight who is strong at data input and who is phoning it it? Sometimes a little peer-pressure will create healthy competition, especially if you are instituting new expectations to a legacy sales team. Consider using 90 day sprints, perhaps even compensating the leaders in embracing change, to motivate and develop new sales operations habits.
- Segment by sales velocity. Which reps consistently move deals through the funnel? Who is clogging up your forecasts with wishful thinking? Consider having “side metrics” that help weight the pipeline when certain reps skew the averages. I once had a rep that consistently had a large pipeline that was 5-10% likely to close, so we pulled their numbers out, downgraded them, and added a lower forecast to the total. Meanwhile, the head of sales was charged with improving forecasting accuracy – that was an eye-opener when the person leading sales was held accountable and incentivized to accurately forecast versus build a pretty pipeline. Challenging status quo is YOUR job.
- Interview top performers and key accounts. Get direct input on what’s actually working in the field. This is more valuable than whatever your current playbook says, but be prepared to separate the opportunities from the complaints and act on both. Check in with your top accounts at least twice annually. Ask them what you could be doing to make it easier for them to buy more from you. Listen carefully. Ask probing questions. Take this data back and after you action it, regroup with the client and tell them you heard them and what changes you’ve made. They will be more likely to buy more from you when they feel heard and appreciated.
Budget Freezes Are Coming. Yours Shouldn’t.
Yes, discretionary spending drops in Q3 and Q4. According to a CFO.com survey, 72% of companies tighten budgets in the second half of the year, with over half citing vendor spend as a primary cut. Gartner reports that nearly 60% of B2B vendor relationships are re-evaluated in Q4, not because of poor performance, but because budget owners panic and cut reactively. This doesn’t mean your team can’t sell. It means your team needs a sharper strategy. This is when sales teams either show up with solutions or get replaced by someone who does.
Here’s where to start:
Revisit ideal customer profile targeting.
Focus on industries and segments with fiscal calendars that still allow late-year purchasing.
Prioritize expansion of current customers over net new.
Your existing customers are more likely to spend in Q4 than new prospects with slower procurement hurdles.
Create urgency through problem reframing.
Many buyers act when you reframe their risk, not just when you discount the price. Equip your team to lead these conversations by creating Q4-ready bundles that ties the remaining budget to urgent business outcomes. According to the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, framing value around loss prevention rather than gain increases B2B close rates by up to 22%. Your team needs to stop pitching features and start exposing hidden risks of inaction. If you’re reading this and questioning whether your sales team is savvy enough to come up with these strategies on their own or have these types of conversations, you may have just discovered a bigger problem.
If you’re still selling the same way today you did in Q1, you’re missing the biggest opportunity of end-of-year buying decisions: being the trusted partner who helps clients cut smarter, not just cheaper.
Your Comp Plan Is Probably a Cushion
The biggest lie in most sales teams is that comp plans drive behavior. Most of them don’t. They over-index in fixed salary and create the illusion of accountability with the carrot of commission or bonuses acting as a motivator. The higher the salary, the more transparency and accountability should be expected, but sales leaders often push back on these expectations, citing “admin distractions that keep sales people off the road” when pressed to require things like accurate CRM data input, annual or quarterly status reports against KPIs and leading indicators, and proactively committing to future action versus coming to the weekly sales meetings with history reports of what they simply reacted to the previous week.
A real incentive plan does three things:
- It drives urgency. Reps should feel a constant pull toward action that matters.
- It rewards leading indicators. If the only payout is for closed revenue, you’re missing the opportunity to shape behavior earlier in the funnel.
- It separates effort from outcome. Your best reps may lose deals for valid reasons. Your worst reps may get lucky. You should be close enough to the business to know the difference, and be ready and willing to cut ties when you aren’t seeing consistent behaviors that lead to predictable long-term success.
Ask your reps this:
If you had to double your revenue goal next year, what would you do differently? What would have to be true to accomplish this? This will help separate the reps that have the skills to grow vs those that will show up with the minimum required effort to avoid termination. Listen for ownership mindset – if too many of the suggestions are about what the company isn’t or should be doing, and not enough focus is on what they could be doing, you don’t have a team with the winning mindset.
If someone can earn six figures while consistently missing goal, your incentive plan is broken. A 2025 Bridge Group study found that 38% of B2B account executives missed quota in 2024 but still earned 87% of OTE (on-target earnings). That’s not a performance plan, it’s a subsidy for mediocrity.
If you’re still paying full comp for recurring revenue but asking for new growth, you’re feeding the problem. Recurring revenue should be rewarded like a customer success role: base pay with modest growth incentives, while net new should carry true upside. Comp plans should make it uncomfortable to stagnate and exhilarating to hunt. Start asking: Are we paying for the behavior we want, or are we making it easy for underperformers to stay just close enough to remain safe? Are you turning your hunters into nurturers by allowing them to keep and be equally compensated for recurring revenue, and are you seeing the YOY growth at key accounts that you should expect by allowing the closers to continue to work the accounts?
Making changes like these is hard and comes with risk. Nobody wants to have to work harder for the same amount of money when they have been trained to coast. You might lose some talent. There are things you can do to prevent some attrition, but in the long run, if you want to build a better team, some of the current team won’t be there in the future.
CRM Accountability Is Not Optional
When you get the inevitable pushback that “you’re micromanaging”, you’re not; this IS managing. Visibility into pipeline isn’t a trust issue; it’s a business necessity. At one of my past companies, I was able to see by February whether someone was going to hit their sales goals, just by reviewing the CRM activity. Several leading indicators, like total activity (when every email, phone call and meeting is tracked), total pipeline vs weighted revenue (that was adjusted based on factors like individual historical close rate, deal size close rates, tenure of the rep), and other KPIs helped me see where help was needed at the team or individual levels and when it was a lost cause. That WAS my job as CEO, to use the data, trends, and insights from the CRM to get my team the support they needed to be successful, versus wait impatiently for the revenue to trickle in. Everyone earning a paycheck at my company was counting on that money every week, and if it wasn’t MY job to be hands-on in minimizing risks to delivering on this expectation, whose job was it? Forrester found that sales teams with real-time CRM adoption experience 27% faster sales cycle velocity. If you can’t see risk until it hits your P&L, you’re managing backwards.
Top-performing sales teams use CRM to track real deal stages, not just log notes. According to McKinsey, companies with high sales tech adoption see 5x pipeline visibility and 20-30% higher close rates. Why? Because they know what’s working, what’s broken, and they act faster.
Salesforce’s 2024 State of Sales report found that only 33% of sales reps consistently log all touchpoints. If your CRM isn’t showing you the real story, it’s not a system issue; it’s a leadership one. If your team fights weekly updates, avoids pipeline reviews, or pushes back on KPI transparency, they’re not protecting time to sell; they’re scared and hiding. If your head of sales tolerates that culture, it’s not a leadership style; it’s a liability. Put the spotlight back where it belongs: on data, discipline, and the daily activities that lead to real revenue. If your team resists that, it may be time for new talent or new expectations.
What Q3 Is Really For
This isn’t about patching a bad year. It’s about installing a better operating system before next year even begins. In my recent blog “Mid-August Math – You’re Not Gonna To Make It“, I called out the danger of pretending Q4 would save you. Now I’m giving you the blueprint for what to do instead:
- Pressure-test your pipeline now. Not in December, NOW. Ask your team: What percentage of our current Q4 pipeline is net-new vs. expansion? How many of those accounts have confirmed budgets? What stage is each deal, and what’s the last client action taken? If those questions create silence or guesses, you’ve got a visibility problem, and a closing problem.
- Scrutinize your incentive structure. Make sure it rewards what matters.
- Rebuild your CRM expectations. Visibility creates accountability.
- Refocus your team around leading indicators. Daily activity matters more than quarterly dreams.
You’ve lead with the best information you had. It’s time to rebuild with better tools, sharper visibility, and maybe a stronger partner by your side, because sometimes bringing in a consultant to see things from a different angle can save you 10X in lost sales opportunities. You shouldn’t and probably don’t need to overhaul everything overnight, you just need to stop pretending you can win with a system that has proven it doesn’t work. If you’re ready to lead with clarity and create a predictable revenue outcome, we’re here to help.