When I do an acquisition, my head of RevOps owns the forecast for both companies. Not after close. Not once the 100-day plan kicks off. In diligence, before anyone’s signed anything.
I will take a moment to make that real. I run a Monday morning Weekly Tactical with the Exec team. In that meeting, I do a 2-minute dashboard review to get a flavor of where we are and where we’re headed, including any big deals and risk to those deals. As soon as I hit LOI on a target, my Head of RevOps reports on those same things for both companies for me. It means they’re collecting outputs from the target weekly, synthesizing, and giving me an accurate forecast for a company they don’t work for. You are allowed to think I’m exaggerating. You are also allowed to ask around.
Say that out loud to another operator and watch their face change. It sounds reckless. Handing forecast ownership for a company you don’t own yet, built on models you’re still validating, to the same person already running your existing business? Every instinct says you’re overconfident, understaffed, or setting up for a very public mistake.
It’s the easiest, healthiest way I know to run it. The reckless version is the one everyone else is running: wait until the ink dries, hand the target’s numbers to whoever has bandwidth, spend the next two quarters finding out the forecast was never real.
Every assumption behind that has to be true
Here’s the part that makes it sound impossible instead of just early. It only works if three things are already true before the deal ever shows up.
Your RevOps leader is mature enough to be in the room. Not reading a summary after the fact. Not getting a deck handed to them post-close with someone else’s fingerprints all over it. They’re in the diligence meetings, across the table from the target’s finance and revenue leadership, reading the target’s own models directly and forming their own opinion of them.
While they’re in that room, they’re forming opinions they’ll act on later: what’s wrong with the model, where the people gaps are, which piece they’d change first if the deal closes. Getting data from two places instead of one bothers them enough, right now, that it turns into a Business Systems migration request on day one instead of a complaint six months in.
If your RevOps leader has never sat across from a target’s CFO before you’ve signed anything, they’re not ready to own this. Better to know that before the deal than after.
They fully own the mechanics of your existing forecast, not helping a CRO build one. There’s a real difference between owning a number and supporting whoever owns it. A RevOps function that pulls reports on request, updates a dashboard, and waits to be asked for an opinion isn’t going to walk into a diligence room and form an independent view of a target’s business. Owning the mechanics means they built the model, they know where it’s soft and why, and they could defend every assumption in it without pulling up a slide first. That’s Lead to Cash run by one owner, not stitched together by whoever’s asked to help this week, and if that’s not already true internally, don’t expect it to cohere just because a second, harder version of the same problem shows up in diligence.
If your RevOps leader has never had to defend your own forecast under real pressure, without a CRO standing between them and the question, they’re not ready to defend a target’s either. Diligence isn’t where that gap gets discovered for the first time. It’s just where it gets expensive.
Ownership starts in diligence. Full stop. No IMO in between. No handoff. No “the deal team runs it until close, then it transfers to integration, then eventually it lands with RevOps for real.” Every handoff is a chance for the number to go soft, for nobody to actually own the assumption underneath it, for “we’ll tighten this up post-close” to become the sentence that’s still true eighteen months later. The person who owns the forecast after close is the same person who owned it before you signed. There’s no intermediate.
Run those three against your last deal. Any one of them not true, and what you ran wasn’t a lighter version of this practice, it was the default: wait, hand off, hope the model holds, and hope nobody asks too many questions about why. None of that is about anyone being bad at their job. It’s just what fills the space whenever nobody actively chooses something else: a forecast guessed at by whoever’s turn it was to hold the pen that quarter, while everyone downstream already suspects it’s soft and waits for the board meeting where someone finally says so.
The alternative feels harder. It isn’t. It’s just earlier.
The actual test
Ask yourself the question that actually matters, not the comfortable one: could your head of RevOps forecast a target’s business today, before you’ve signed anything, using the model they already run for you?
If the honest answer is no, sit with that before you file it under “just a diligence problem”. It was there before this deal ever showed up, and it’ll be there for the next one too, whether or not you do anything about it.