This article is based on the Q1 2026 Market Research Report by Prevu.ai and buildGTM, drawn from in-depth interviews with more than 20 revenue leaders across the US, UK, Europe, Australia, and APAC. Participants included CROs, VPs of Sales, Heads of Sales, and Regional Directors from companies ranging from $10M to more than $1B in revenue, with the majority at $20M-$200M in ARR.
The findings revealed a major disconnect inside modern revenue organizations. While go-to-market motions are rapidly evolving due to AI, changing buyer behavior, and increasing market pressure, most companies still rely on forecasting systems and management rhythms built for a completely different era.
The result is a growing operational drag across sales organizations. Revenue leaders are spending a large portion of their week reconstructing pipeline reality rather than shaping future outcomes.
Forecast meetings have become forensic exercises. CRM systems are overloaded but undertrusted. Managers are buried in updates rather than coaching, and executive teams are often reacting to changes long after they have already impacted the business.
According to the research, nearly 80% of organizations had either recently changed or were actively changing their GTM motion, while almost 90% described themselves as undergoing significant transformation. Yet despite this urgency to evolve, the vast majority of companies still operate with fundamentally reactive forecasting processes.
What emerged from the conversations with John and Meri was a clear divide between the organizations still trapped looking backward and the small group of companies that have learned how to operate proactively, using AI and modern revenue intelligence to create clarity, speed, and strategic focus.
1. The Market Changed Faster Than Most Revenue Organizations Did
One of the strongest themes from the research was that the disruption happening across go-to-market teams is not incremental — it is structural.
Companies are not simply tweaking messaging or refining territory plans. They are rebuilding entire operating models. New ICPs, new buying journeys, new sales motions, and new customer expectations are forcing revenue leaders to rethink how growth actually happens.
Meri explained that many of the leaders interviewed were operating under intense pressure from investors and boards while simultaneously trying to adapt to rapidly changing customer behavior.
The report found that:
- 75% of leaders said customer buying behavior had meaningfully changed
- 80% had recently changed or were changing their GTM motion
- 90% described their organization as being in active transformation
That level of organizational change would be difficult enough on its own. The problem is that most businesses are trying to navigate this transition with forecasting and management systems designed for a slower, more predictable era.
Many organizations still rely heavily on:
- Static CRM fields
- Spreadsheet forecasting
- Manual pipeline reviews
- Rep-driven updates
- Weekly status meetings
- Executive intuition
Those methods were already under strain before AI accelerated the pace of market change. Today, they are becoming increasingly inadequate.
John described the issue perfectly when he said that many sales leaders are still expected to carry a huge amount of pipeline intelligence “trapped inside their heads.” In practice, this means organizations are depending on human memory and manual interpretation to manage increasingly complex revenue environments.
That approach simply does not scale anymore.
2. CRM Has Become a Database — Not a Source of Truth
One of the most surprising findings from the research was that not a single participant relied on CRM alone to manage forecasting or pipeline visibility.
Every organization has built additional layers around it:
- Spreadsheets
- BI dashboards
- Slack updates
- AI forecasting overlays
- Internal trackers
- Manual review processes
Why? Because most leaders no longer trust CRM data to reflect the true state of the business.
As one sales leader in the report explained:
“The CRM captures status. It misses what changed, what the rep knows, what happened last Tuesday.”
That insight gets to the heart of the forecasting problem.
Modern sales environments are dynamic. Deals evolve constantly. Political support changes. Urgency disappears. Procurement introduces delays. Champions lose influence. Competitors reshape conversations.
Most of those critical signals never appear properly inside a CRM.
Instead, they live in:
- conversations
- call notes
- emails
- Slack threads
- manager intuition
- rep judgment
This creates an enormous gap between what the system says and what leaders actually believe.
As a result, forecasting becomes less about analyzing reality and more about reconstructing it manually through meetings, updates, and interpretation.
Meri noted that many CRM systems have become overloaded with fields and reporting requirements, yet deliver very little actionable insight. One leader described having 57 mandatory fields, while the actual “cheat sheet” used by leadership relied on only a handful.
The irony is that organizations now have more data than ever before, yet confidence in forecasting has continued to decline.
3. Revenue Leaders Are Spending Their Weeks Looking Backward
Perhaps the most alarming insight from the report was the extent to which leadership time was consumed by operational reconstruction.
According to the research, 65% of leaders spend more than eight hours per week simply trying to understand what is happening in their pipeline. Some spend as much as 15–20 hours.
That means a significant percentage of the organization’s revenue is being spent on retrospection rather than execution.
John explained that many leaders have accepted this as normal. Forecast meetings, pipeline reviews, and one-on-ones have become recurring exercises in piecing together fragmented information from multiple systems and stakeholders.
The cost of this is far higher than most companies realize.
When leaders spend their time reconstructing pipeline reality:
- coaching quality suffers
- Strategic thinking declines
- customer engagement reduces
- decision-making slows
- innovation stalls
- execution becomes reactive
Meri recalled a particularly emotional conversation with one VP Sales leader who admitted they spent their week gathering updates, translating them into Slack messages, and feeding them up through management layers.
The leader’s conclusion was blunt:
“If this is the best we’ve got, we’ve got a long way to go.”
That statement resonated because it reflects the frustration many modern revenue leaders quietly feel.
They were hired to lead growth, shape markets, and develop teams. Instead, many feel trapped inside administrative forecasting cycles that consume enormous energy without creating proportional value.
Meanwhile, the market continues moving faster around them.
4. AI Is Creating a Completely New GTM Operating Model
One of the most important themes in the discussion was that AI is not simply another productivity tool. The companies moving ahead are using AI to redesign how their revenue organizations actually operate.
Meri explained that many businesses start with simple use cases:
- AI copilots
- prompt engineering
- content generation
- chatbot functionality
But the more advanced organizations have moved far beyond that.
The leading companies are now building:
- Agentic workflows
- AI-assisted handovers
- Automated onboarding processes
- Real-time pipeline intelligence
- Predictive risk analysis
- Cross-functional coordination systems
In these environments, AI is no longer just helping individuals work faster. It is actively improving organizational alignment and decision-making.
The real opportunity is not simply automation — it is operational clarity.
The best organizations are creating systems where:
- Everyone works from the same reality
- Information flows automatically
- Risks surface earlier
- Coaching becomes proactive
- Leaders can focus on future outcomes
Importantly, both John and Meri stressed that AI must remain tied to customer value creation.
Many companies are currently busy implementing AI initiatives without clearly linking them to:
- revenue outcomes
- customer experience
- operational efficiency
- strategic advantage
The winners over the next decade will not necessarily be the organizations with the most AI tools. They will be the organizations that use AI to reduce friction, improve visibility, and accelerate high-quality decision-making.
5. The Best Revenue Organizations Have Shifted From Status Reviews to Strategic Leadership
One of the clearest differences between high-performing organizations and everyone else is how leadership conversations operate.
In reactive organizations, meetings focus on:
- updates
- explanations
- historical movement
- missing information
- deal interrogation
In proactive organizations, meetings focus on:
- strategy
- execution
- coaching
- resource allocation
- market opportunities
John described the transformation that occurs when leaders gain immediate visibility into pipeline movement and deal health.
Instead of spending the first hour of every meeting trying to establish “what happened”, leaders can immediately move into discussions about:
- What risks exist
- Where support is needed
- Which deals deserve investment
- How to improve conversion
- What actions move deals forward
That shift fundamentally changes the quality of leadership inside the business.
One sales leader quoted in the report said:
“I spend more time with my team actually talking about deals rather than trying to find out information.”
Another described finally having the mental capacity to think beyond the current quarter and to focus on the organization’s future shape.
Meri shared a particularly striking example from a senior leader at one of the world’s top SaaS companies who said they had not attended a traditional forecast meeting in two years.
That statement highlights where elite organizations are heading.
Forecasting itself does not disappear. Instead, visibility becomes embedded in the business’s operating system, allowing leaders to focus on strategic outcomes rather than manual reconstruction.
6. The Cost of Staying Reactive Is About to Become Much Higher
One of the strongest warnings from the conversation was that many companies still underestimate the speed of change happening around them.
John used the analogy of the “boiling frog”. The danger is not always immediately visible because decline often happens gradually.
At first:
- Revenue still looks acceptable
- Forecasts appear manageable
- Pipeline reviews still function
- Teams remain productive
But underneath the surface, problems begin compounding:
- Decision-making slows
- Execution fragments
- Coaching weakens
- Customer understanding deteriorates
- Competitive positioning erodes
Eventually, faster-moving competitors pull ahead.
Not because they worked harder, but because they built systems capable of adapting faster.
That is the real divide emerging in modern GTM organizations.
The companies winning market share are increasingly those that:
- Surface insights earlier
- Align teams faster
- Reduce operational drag
- Enable strategic leadership
- Use AI to improve decision-making
Meanwhile, companies still relying on spreadsheet-heavy forecasting processes risk becoming trapped in a perpetual cycle of reaction.
As AI continues accelerating the pace of customer change, that gap will only widen.
What Good Looks Like
Throughout the discussion, John and Meri consistently returned to one central idea: the future belongs to organizations that operate from a shared reality.
In practical terms, that means:
- Leaders no longer chase information
- Managers spend more time coaching
- Forecasting becomes dynamic and continuous,
- Risk signals surface automatically
- Customer context becomes visible organization-wide
- Strategy replaces administrative reporting
Most importantly, leadership attention shifts from explaining the past to shaping the future.
That is the real transformation.
Not another dashboard.
Not another CRM field.
Not another spreadsheet layer.
A fundamentally different way of operating.
Final Thoughts
Pree Sarkar closed the conversation by referencing Andy Grove’s famous book, Only the Paranoid Survive, particularly the idea that leadership’s role is to see change before everyone else does.
That observation feels especially relevant today.
Revenue leaders are operating through one of the biggest shifts the GTM landscape has experienced in decades. AI is changing customer expectations, buying behavior, and operational possibilities faster than most organizations are prepared for.
The companies that thrive will not necessarily be the ones with the most data. They will be the ones with the most clarity.
Right now, most revenue organizations are still spending enormous energy looking backward. But a smaller group of companies has already broken through, using AI and modern revenue intelligence to build proactive, aligned, and strategically focused GTM operations.
The gap between those two groups is growing quickly.
If your leadership team is still spending hours every week reconstructing pipeline reality, buried in forecasting meetings and disconnected systems, now is the time to rethink how your revenue organization operates.
Because the future belongs to leaders who can see clearly, move quickly, and focus their energy on what comes next — not what already happened.
To learn more about the research or explore how modern AI-enabled revenue operations are evolving, connect with:
Research source: Prevu.ai + buildGTM Market Research Report, Q1 2026
