You built it in January. A spreadsheet, cells locked. Top-of-funnel goals. Lead source mix. Conversion rates by product, source, rep. All of it snapshotted into a board deck — and then frozen in time while the actual business kept moving.
By Q2 the assumptions are stale. By Q3 the model and the reality have drifted so far apart you stop referencing the plan and start running on gut. By Q4 you're presenting a board “GTM update” that has nothing to do with the plan you presented twelve months earlier.
For a $5–15M company, that gap between the plan and the reality is where quarters quietly go to die.
