Every quarter tells you something. Q4 tells you how good your team is at sprinting. Q2 and Q3 tell you how well you manage the long game. But Q1? Q1 tells you the truth.
No excuses have been built yet. No "we lost a key rep in April" or "the product gap cost us Q3." It's just you, your plan, and the market. And what you see in Q1 reflects something deeper than performance. It reflects the quality of your assumptions going into the year.
That's what makes it uncomfortable for a lot of leaders.
Your planning assumptions are on trial
When you built your 2026 plan, you made bets. You bet on territory design, on headcount, on where your best opportunities sit. You bet on which segments would convert, which accounts were worth chasing, and how your team was set up to win.
Q1 is when those bets get graded.
If pipeline is thin by week six, that is not a motivation problem. That is a planning problem. If reps are burning cycles on accounts that have no realistic shot at closing, that is not a time management problem. That is a targeting problem. If your market map was built on last year's assumptions about who buys and why, you are already running behind.
The dangerous middle
Here is where most teams get it wrong. They see the early warning signs and they react tactically. They push harder on the same accounts. They add meetings. They ask reps to do more with a system that was never going to produce what they needed.
That is the dangerous middle: when you mistake activity for progress and miss the window to actually fix the underlying structure.
The teams that come out of Q1 stronger are the ones who treat it like a diagnostic, not a punishment. They ask what the data tells them about their scoring, their carve, their coverage model. Are the right accounts in the right books? Is the market segmented in a way that reflects how buying actually happens today?
What to actually look at
If you want Q1 to work for you instead of against you, focus on these questions:
- Are your reps spending time in accounts that fit your ICP, or did territory design scatter them across too much noise?
- Does your account scoring reflect current buying signals, or is it running on assumptions from two years ago?
- Is your book of accounts surfacing accounts that are actively moving, or are reps working static lists with no prioritization signal?
- What does your market map tell you about whitespace versus accounts already in motion?
Q1 is a gift
The leaders who treat Q1 as a mirror instead of a scoreboard are the ones who have the best second half. They use the early data to pressure-test their assumptions, tighten their coverage model, and make structural corrections before the year gets away from them.
There are still three quarters left. But the window to fix the system without losing the year is shorter than it feels right now. In the posts ahead, we will get into exactly what to look at and how to move fast.
