Predictive Revenue in a new market appears, on the surface, to be an oxymoron but it’s the fastest path to clarity.
If you’ve ever launched into a brand-new market, you’ll know the feeling: you’re operating in the dark.
No historical data. No proven benchmarks. No clear sense of whether your deal assumptions are even realistic.
And yet, someone will still ask you for a revenue forecast. They’ll want to know what you expect to land in year one, quarter by quarter.
That’s where most people falter. They treat Predictive Revenue as something you can only do when you’ve got years of market data. I think that’s nonsense. In fact, I’d argue Predictive Revenue is even more valuable in a new market than it is in a mature one.
The argument against Predictive Revenue in a new market goes like this:
It’s true. You don’t know those things yet. But that’s not a reason to delay Predictive Revenue. That’s a reason to start it now. Because the only way to get those answers is to put opportunities through a structured process and see what comes out the other side.
Predictive Revenue is an approach developed to make revenue forecasting more accurate and actionable. It works by creating a single source of truth across marketing, sales, and leadership — aligning every function around revenue generation. In a new market, it’s less about perfection and more about building usable data quickly, so you can turn uncertainty into clarity.
Not having a precedent doesn’t mean you don’t start. You start, then iterate and learn as you go.
This is what I call intelligent naivety. You understand the macro opportunity: the size of the market, the shape of the demand, the potential channels. But you don’t pretend you’ve mastered the micro-operational reality.
The danger is in waiting for certainty. In a new market, certainty doesn’t arrive on day one, and if it does, it’s probably a guess dressed up as fact.
Intelligent naivety says:
Here’s the truth: the fundamentals of Predictive Revenue are the same whether you’re in Aberdeen, Abu Dhabi or Austin. The same gated process. The same conversion milestones. The same discipline in data capture and review.
What changes are the nuances: average deal value, time in pipeline, and diversity and cadence of deals.
You can only discover those nuances if you’re tracking your activity from day one. Which means you need the Predictive Revenue model in place from day one.
In every international expansion, someone will say it: “It’s different here.” And maybe it is. But “different” isn’t a strategy; it’s an observation. Until you’ve got enough trend data to prove it, your process stands. That process is your control in the experiment. If you change it based on gut feel or hearsay, you’ve destroyed your ability to compare markets objectively.
“Trend will emerge much more quickly than you imagine.”
In most new markets, you’ll start to see the shape of your trend within a quarter to a year. It won’t be perfect — early data never is — but it will be directional.
You might discover deals are larger but slower than you expected. Or perhaps conversion rates are lower in the first stage but higher once a proposal is in play. Certain channels might outperform your initial assumptions. Without the Predictive Revenue model, you’d miss those patterns entirely. With it, you can adjust strategy in-market while there’s still time to make the year.
People assume it’s harder. I say it’s easier.
Why? Because you’re starting with a clean slate. There are no bad habits to unpick, no legacy data cluttering the CRM, no false assumptions baked into the process.
If you’ve got the discipline to apply the model from day one, your new market will generate its own dataset quickly, and that’s when the fog starts to lift.
On day one, Predictive Revenue in a new market might feel like an oxymoron. But by the end of the first year, it becomes your single most important source of truth.
You’ll know:
That’s the difference between wandering in the dark and walking with a map.
If you’re waiting for perfect conditions before applying Predictive Revenue in a new market, you’ll be waiting forever. Start now. Track everything. Iterate only when the numbers tell you to. Because “oxymoron” or not, it’s the fastest way to turn market noise into market knowledge, and market knowledge into revenue.