“If you’re not thinking about annual planning in July, you’re falling behind.” - Werner Schmidt
Planning ensures that companies make informed decisions and are prepared for challenges. The most successful companies excel at planning. Understanding the anatomy of a good planning process can help you align and your unify your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to achieve efficient, scalable growth.
“It’s not enough to say you want to grow, you have to be specific and prescriptive.” - Jeff Ignacio
What’s the best tool for creating a solid foundation during sales and revenue planning? Use a RACI (responsibility assignment) matrix to ensure that all roles and responsibilities in the planning process are covered. This avoids gaps and overlap, which can lead to inefficiency and finger pointing.
As part of your responsibility assignment, make it clear who’s actually empowered to make decisions on your planning team. If your CFO or CEO can’t attend, their proxy should make decisions for them or come back quickly with an answer. This streamlines the planning process and can stop the cycle of second-guessing.
Finally, set clear deadlines. The impact on your company, especially the sales organization, can not be overstated. Compensation plans rely on all previous dependencies like marketing plans, segmentation, and your strategic focus. Plan to have these precursors in place by November.
Smaller companies can suffer from siloed communication and activities. The CFO and CEO will talk about what they want to see from sales next year, but don’t always include the RevOps team in their decisions.
You must break down these silos of communication, especially with RevOps. They operate as the mechanics and plumbers of the GTM org and are equipped to recommend better tactics to accomplish your revenue goals.
Communication is nothing without a change management plan. It doesn’t have to be complicated; an annual revenue planning calendar and a timeline is easy for everyone to follow. Aim for biweekly communication, even if it’s just a quick check-in with a few bullet points. This will keep everyone aligned.
Best practices for formal checkpoints:
“Don’t fall into a false sense of security that, if you’re the one who set the deadlines, it's okay if you miss them.” - George Erskine
At the end of your sales planning process, your team should be able to deliver these key deliverables for the new fiscal year:
Struggling to set deadlines for key deliverables? Don’t worry, our panel has done the hard work for you. In early August, schedule your revenue planning kickoff meeting. By the end of October, be ready to review your initial revenue plan with your CEO and CFO. Watch the full webinar for a comprehensive calendar.
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