---
title: Your 2027 Target Is Being Set This Month, by the Same Process That Missed in 2025
description: 42% of B2B firms missed their 2025 target and confidence rose anyway. How to set your 2027 revenue target from the system before the budget closes.
---

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 RevOps

# Your 2027 Target Is Being Set This Month, by the Same Process That Missed in 2025

By Lester Laine November 5, 2026

Between now and the end of December, most B2B companies close their budget and set the revenue target for 2027. The usual method is familiar: take this year's revenue, add the growth the board or the founders want, and split the result into quotas and campaign budgets.

Research published this year suggests that method doesn't learn from its own misses. More companies missed in 2025 than in 2024, confidence went up anyway, and most sales leaders say the number they are given is largely decided by things outside their control. When the target misses, the review usually ends with the sales team.

Below is what the data shows, where each source stops, and a way to set the 2027 target from the commercial system before the budget is signed.

## Confidence went up after the miss

Bain's 2026 B2B Growth Agenda surveyed 1,125 commercial leaders across 18 sectors and 40 countries in January 2026. In 2025, 86% expected to hit their growth targets and 42% fell short, up from 32% who missed in 2024. For 2026, companies expected growth rates 20% higher than the year before, and 91% said they would meet their targets (Bain, 2026).

Nobody has measured 2026 results yet. Bain's next edition will. What the data already shows is the pattern: a rising share of misses followed by rising confidence, with Bain's partners describing volatility as a permanent condition that many commercial models can't keep pace with (Bain, 2026).

My reading: when confidence rises after a miss, the process that sets the target isn't taking the miss into account. The 2027 number is being produced by that same process right now.

## Most of the number is decided before sales receives it

In a Gartner survey of 210 chief sales officers and senior sales executives, run in January and February 2026, 60% said their revenue number is largely driven by elements outside their control (Gartner, July 2026).

Bain's data shows what some of those elements are. Only 4% of executives say their company has a strong, consistently understood value proposition, and nearly half name core product or service differentiation as their biggest challenge. Companies with a clear and consistent value proposition grew revenue 19% in 2025, against 12% for those without one. Nearly 40% of revenue and margin leaders cite brand perception as a top factor in winning, keeping or expanding accounts (Bain, 2026).

My reading: a 2027 target quietly assumes a value proposition, a market and a brand. If none of those change and the target rises, the gap between them is a hope, and sales will be measured against it.

## A bigger AI budget won't close the gap on its own

90% of executives in Bain's survey are experimenting with AI, and 60% say their data foundation isn't robust enough or their technology isn't ready to scale it. The top performers redesign commercial workflows end to end and assign clear ownership, and they get twice the AI-driven revenue growth and 1.8 times the cost efficiency of their peers (Bain, 2026).

Gartner's survey of the same 210 sales leaders found that AI saves sellers nearly five hours a week, yet 72% of sales organizations report low reinvestment of that time into high-value selling activities. Organizations that do reinvest it are 2.2 times more likely to exceed their customer growth targets. Gartner's Dan Gottlieb put it in system terms: productivity stalls because the system "quietly caps" sellers (Gartner, May 2026).

My reading: many 2027 budgets will justify a higher target with new AI tools. Without changes to the data and the workflow they run on, the tools save hours that disappear into the existing process.

## If 2026 ends short, a new revenue leader rarely saves 2027

Research by SBI Growth, published in Harvard Business Review, puts the average tenure of a chief revenue officer at 25 months, among the shortest in the C-suite. In the fiscal year after a CRO change, 62% of companies saw their revenue growth decline or stay flat, with average growth falling from 15.5% the year before the change to 11.7% in the first full year after it (Toman, Kurey and Lingebach, HBR, 2024).

That study shows what follows a change, not what causes it. Companies that replace a revenue leader may already be slowing down. It still removes the assumption that a new leader in January brings a recovery by December.

My reading: a new revenue leader inherits the same value proposition, the same CRM and the same target, and spends months learning them. If the cause sits in the target-setting process, the replacement resets the clock on a year that is already committed.

## How to set the 2027 target before the budget closes

This is how I would turn the evidence into a planning process for the next six weeks. These are recommendations, not findings, and they work for a company of 15 people as well as one of 500.

1. **Review the misses before you discuss the number.**
   
   Export every deal lost or pushed in the last four quarters from HubSpot and tag each with one reason: no decision, lost to a competitor, price, timing, or disqualified late. Weight the tags by deal value. If most of the lost value sits in "no decision" or in late disqualification, the 2027 plan needs to fix the start of the funnel before it adds quota. Those lost deals are also your cheapest pipeline for next year, which I covered in [Your "Expired" Buying Signals Are the Most Underpriced Asset in Your CRM](https://elevatingbrands.net/blog/your-expired-buying-signals-are-the-most-underpriced-asset-in-your-crm?hsLang=en-us).
2. **Build the base target from the system, and put ambition on top in writing.**
   
   Calculate the base from three numbers by segment, taken from the last four quarters: pipeline coverage, win rate and sales cycle length. Any growth above that base needs a written assumption, an owner and a date to check it, ideally the end of the first quarter. "New AI tools" or "a new market" are only assumptions once someone has written how many deals they add and by when.
3. **Test the value proposition before you fund it.**
   
   The CEO, the best seller and the head of marketing each write, in one sentence and without talking to each other, why a customer chooses you. Compare the three sentences with the reasons buyers gave in your last ten won deals. Only 4% of companies in Bain's survey pass this test. If the sentences differ, fix them before the campaign budget for 2027 is approved.
4. **Budget for clean data before more AI.**
   
   Pick five fields every deal needs: lifecycle stage, original source, deal amount, next step with a date, and close reason. Measure how many deals have all five filled, make them required at the right stage in HubSpot and build one report on completeness. Any AI tool in the 2027 budget will reason from these fields, so their quality sets the ceiling on what it can deliver.
5. **Write down where the saved hours will go.**
   
   Name the two or three activities that win deals in your market, for example reaching more people in the buying group or building the business case with the buyer. Give each a weekly target per seller and track it as an activity type in the CRM. Without a written destination, time saved by automation goes back into email and internal meetings.
6. **Agree now what happens when an assumption fails.**
   
   Attach a mandate to the target: what the revenue leader owns, which system numbers they are measured on besides bookings, and what happens if a growth assumption fails by the end of the first quarter. The answer should be that the target and the spend change in April, so nobody is replaced in December for an assumption made in November.

## What goes on the scorecard

| Area | Measure | Move to the appendix |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Target | Share of the 2027 target covered by the system-based base | Growth percentage announced in January |
| Assumptions | Growth assumptions with an owner and a check date | Number of initiatives in the plan |
| Losses | Share of lost and pushed value by reason, no decision versus competitor | Number of calls and emails per rep |
| Value proposition | Share of won deals where the buyer's reason matches your one sentence | Number of messaging decks |
| Data | Share of deals with all five required fields filled | AI licenses in the budget |
| Capacity | Hours per seller per week on the named high-value activities | Changes in sales headcount |

## About the evidence

Each source measures something different, so it's worth being precise about what they show.

- Bain's figures come from its Commercial Excellence Longitudinal Survey of 1,125 commercial leaders across 18 sectors and 40 countries, run in January 2026 and published in March 2026. Whether a company hit its target is self-reported, and the survey covers mid-size and large companies more than small ones. Bain sells commercial strategy consulting.
- Gartner's figures come from a survey of 210 CSOs and senior sales executives run in January and February 2026, reported in May and July 2026. Sales leaders asked about the causes of their own results may lean toward external explanations. Gartner sells research and advisory services to the same leaders.
- The CRO tenure and growth figures come from SBI Growth research published in Harvard Business Review in October 2024, the most recent public study on this question I found. The article doesn't describe its sample or method, it shows correlation rather than cause, and SBI Growth is a revenue consultancy.
- I left out a widely shared figure that 87% of enterprises missed their 2025 revenue targets, because it comes from a vendor survey of 400 North American respondents that excluded the vendor's own customers.

None of these sources reports 2026 results yet, so whether misses rise again this year is unknown. None measures directly how companies set their targets or how often they blame sales for a miss. Those points, the planning process and the scorecard above are my interpretation, based on the data and on what I've seen in client work.

## What I've seen work

Over the last two decades I've worked on revenue programs from both sides: growing companies of 10 to 20 people where the CEO is still the main seller, and enterprise deals in UCaaS, energy and hospitality with long sales cycles and large buying groups. The years that went wrong rarely traced back to one weak seller. They traced back to a target set in a planning meeting, on top of definitions nobody had written: who the ideal customer is, what counts as qualified, what the company promises that a competitor doesn't.

That is why the SCALING™ method starts with Strategy and Audience before any campaign, tool or quota. When a CEO asks me to look at next year's plan, the first week goes to the lost-deal review and the three-sentence value proposition test. The target usually changes after those two, and so does the conversation about who is accountable for it.

### Setting your 2027 target?

The **2027 Target Check** includes a sheet that builds the base target from coverage, win rate and cycle length by segment; an assumptions log with owners and first-quarter check dates; the lost-deal template with the five close reasons and a HubSpot report weighted by deal value; the three-person value proposition worksheet; the five-field CRM data checklist; and the scorecard above, ready to copy into a dashboard.

Send me a message on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesterlaine) with the word **TARGET** and I'll send it right away.

### Sources

- [More companies missing revenue targets amid AI and geopolitical volatility, Bain & Company survey finds](https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2026/more-companies-missing-revenue-targets-amid-ai-and-geopolitical-volatility-bain--company-survey-finds/), Bain & Company, March 30, 2026
- [B2B Growth Agenda 2026](https://www.bain.com/insights/topics/b2b-growth-agenda/), Bain & Company, 2026 (survey sample and method)
- [Gartner Predicts AI Agents Will Outnumber Sellers 10 to 1 by 2028](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-07-28-gartner-predicts-ai-agents-will-outnumber-sellers-10-to-1-by-2028-yet-fewer-than-40-percent-of-sellers-will-say-agents-improved-productivity), Gartner, July 28, 2026
- [Gartner Survey Finds AI Saves Sellers Nearly 5 Hours Per Week, Yet 72% of Sales Organizations Fail to Reinvest Time in High-Value Activities](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-19-gartner-survey-finds-ai-saves-sellers-nearly-five-hours-per-week-yet-seventy-two-percent-of-sales-organizations-fail-to-reinvest-time-in-high-value-activities), Gartner, May 19, 2026
- [The High Costs of Chief Revenue Officer Turnover](https://hbr.org/2024/10/the-high-costs-of-chief-revenue-officer-turnover), Nick Toman, Bryan Kurey and Dave Lingebach, Harvard Business Review, October 10, 2024

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