Growth plans often begin the year with confidence. The targets have been agreed. The pipeline has been reviewed. The roadmap has been presented. The board pack looks credible. Everyone understands the direction of travel.
However, confidence is not the same as evidence.
Bain’s 2026 B2B Growth Agenda highlights the problem clearly. Whilst 91% of B2B leaders expect to hit their 2026 growth targets, the previous year tells a more cautious story: 86% expected to hit target in 2025, yet 42% fell short. That gap matters because it is not usually caused by a lack of ambition. Most leadership teams are ambitious and are working hard and have sensible plans on paper.
The issue is often different. Growth confidence can run ahead of commercial reality.
Growth confidence is not the same as evidence
Every business needs growth confidence. Without it, decision-making becomes cautious, defensive and slow. But confidence becomes dangerous when it is treated as proof.
A leadership team may feel confident because the forecast looks healthy, the pipeline appears active, customer relationships seem stable, sales activity is high, and new products are coming through the roadmap. None of those signals should be ignored. But none of them automatically proves that the business is commercially ready to deliver the number.
Forecasts can be optimistic. Roadmaps can move. Customers can delay. Sales cycles can lengthen. Competitors can sharpen their offer. Existing relationships can become less influential as buying groups change. This is why commercial confidence needs to be tested against reality, not just reinforced internally.
Gartner has reported that only 7% of sales teams achieve forecast accuracy of 90% or more, with median accuracy sitting around 70–79%. That does not mean forecasts are useless. It means they need judgement, challenge and regular testing. A forecast is not a guarantee. It is a view of what might happen if the assumptions behind it hold.
The problem is that those assumptions are often weaker than the plan suggests.
The forecast often believes the product before the customer has seen it
One of the most common places this happens is new product revenue.
During budget planning, a new product can move very quickly from business case to forecast. A proposition is being developed. A roadmap date is presented. The business case includes a revenue model. Finance takes the numbers. Before long, the plan assumes revenue from launch day.
In reality, that almost never happens cleanly.
Technology and SaaS products often launch later than expected. Even when they launch broadly on time, early versions can carry teething issues. Implementation may take longer than planned. Sales teams may need time to understand the proposition properly. Customers may need time to trust the offer, compare alternatives, build a business case and secure internal approval.
A roadmap date is not a revenue date. That distinction matters.
A 2019 Gartner survey found that 45% of product launches are delayed by at least one month. The exact figure varies by sector and organisation, but the pattern is familiar to anyone who has worked around technology, product development or B2B sales. Products slip. Adoption takes time. Early customers ask harder questions than internal teams expected.
The risk is not simply that the product launches late. The bigger risk is that the business has already built the year’s growth plan around revenue that was never mature enough to forecast with confidence.
There is an important difference between business case potential and forecastable commercial reality. A product may have a strong long-term opportunity. It may solve a real customer problem. It may deserve investment. But that does not mean the organisation should assume full revenue contribution from the first date on the roadmap.
The rule of 78 makes slippage more expensive than it looks
This is especially important in recurring revenue models.
The rule of 78 is a simple way of showing how monthly recurring revenue builds across a year. Revenue won in month one contributes twelve months of billed revenue, whilst revenue won in month two contributes eleven months, month three contributes ten months, and so on.
That means early sales carry far more in-year revenue weight than later sales.
For example, imagine a plan assumes five new customers a month at £1,000 monthly recurring revenue. The January cohort contributes £60,000 in-year. The February cohort contributes £55,000. The March cohort contributes £50,000.
In that simple example, losing the first three months removes £165,000 of planned in-year revenue before the business has even considered onboarding delays, teething issues or slower-than-expected conversion.
If the product launch slips by three months, the business does not simply lose “three months of sales activity”. It loses the highest-value revenue months in the year.
The same issue appears when pipeline creation starts later than the plan assumes. Even if sales performance improves later, the lost compounding effect is hard to recover inside the same financial year.
This is where confidence can become misleading. A team may still believe the annual number is achievable because the opportunity still exists. But the timing has changed, and in recurring revenue models timing is not a detail. It is the economics.
Targets need to shape behaviour before the year starts
Sales targets also play a major role in whether growth confidence becomes reality.
Targets need to be agreed before the financial year starts. Incentives need to match the strategic intent of the organisation. When they are late, unclear or misaligned, the business loses time and sends mixed signals to the sales team.
A strategy focused on new product revenue needs a target and incentive model that supports the shift without pretending launch-day revenue is guaranteed. A priority around margin improvement cannot rely on incentives that only reward headline revenue. Strategic account growth needs to be recognised differently from short-term transactional wins. Retention, cross-sell and customer quality also need to be visible in the way performance is measured and rewarded.
A strategy that is not reflected in targets and incentives is often just a preference.
This matters because sales teams respond to the system around them. Incentives that reward volume will naturally pull behaviour towards volume. Targets that ignore margin will make margin harder to protect. New propositions that are strategically important but commercially harder to sell need time, enablement and a clear reason for sales teams to prioritise them.
The growth plan has to connect ambition, behaviour and reward.
The growth confidence gap builds quietly
The danger is rarely one dramatic moment. More often, the gap builds quietly.
Launch dates move, but the forecast does not. Deals slip, but remain in the committed number. Pipeline creation starts late, but the annual target remains unchanged. Customer hesitation is explained away as timing. Implementation delays are treated as operational noise rather than commercial risk.
The business is still busy. Meetings are happening. Activity is visible. Progress is being reported. But underneath that activity, the commercial assumptions are weakening.
The growth confidence gap is the space between what the business believes should happen and what customer, market and execution signals are already saying.
It shows up in small ways before it shows up in the numbers:
- Proposals taking longer to convert
- Customers asking sharper questions than before
- Familiar contacts becoming less influential in buying groups
- More discounting needed to create movement
- Sales teams interpreting the proposition differently from each other
- Roadmap slippage being absorbed without commercial reforecasting
- Implementation capacity becoming a brake on revenue recognition
- Marketing activity increasing without stronger traction
None of these signals automatically means the plan has failed. But they do mean the plan needs attention.
Spotting issues early at the right level
The answer is not more reporting for the sake of it. Most organisations already have enough reports. What they often lack is a clear rhythm for spotting the right issues early enough and escalating them to the right level.
Some problems belong in a team meeting. Others need senior attention because they affect strategy, forecast, customer confidence or delivery capacity.
A delayed feature may be a product issue. A delayed product with revenue attached may be a board-level commercial issue. A slipping deal may be a sales issue. A pattern of slipping deals may be a proposition, pricing or market-fit issue. An implementation delay may be an operational issue. Repeated implementation delays may be a growth constraint.
Leaders need to ask practical questions before the numbers make the problem obvious:
- Which revenue assumptions depend on something not yet launched?
- Which roadmap dates have become financial commitments?
- Where are we relying on pipeline that has not yet been created?
- Which deals are slipping in ways that affect the full year, not just this month?
- Where are incentives pulling behaviour in a different direction from the stated strategy?
- What are customers saying that does not match our internal story?
- What needs a quick operational fix, and what needs a leadership decision?
These questions are not designed to reduce ambition. They are designed to protect it.
Growth confidence has to be re-earned
Growth confidence is useful when it is earned repeatedly.
The best leadership teams do not abandon confidence when conditions change. They refresh it by testing the assumptions behind the plan, separating potential from forecast, aligning targets before the year starts and making sure incentives support strategic intent. Most importantly, they spot drift early enough to respond before the gap becomes too expensive to close.
In a more volatile B2B market, that discipline matters.
Growth plans do not fail only because markets change. They fail because organisations keep believing the internal version of reality for too long.
The best growth plans do not remove uncertainty. They make it visible early enough for leaders to respond.
Sources:
Gartner sales AI/forecasting page