The Ultimate Annual Planning Playbook: Your Guide to Strategic Business Planning and Growth
8 Steps to Create Your Best Strategic Business Growth Strategy and Annual Sales/Marketing Plan.
Inside, you’ll find business planning steps, annual business goal setting techniques, and strategic planning guides to help you create a robust growth plan.
Tired of stressful annual planning that’s ineffective in the long run? Transform your strategic planning process using the proven 8-step method outlined in our comprehensive ebook – plus, an actionable annual planning checklist.
8 Steps for Your Best Annual Plan
The Ultimate Annual Planning Playbook
Discover A Better Way to Plan
Unlock the power of data-driven decision making and market trend analysis to stay ahead of the competition and exceed your growth targets.
This playbook isn't just a guide: It's your strategic planning framework for Sales, Marketing and Rev Ops. Imagine a year of fewer surprises, accurate projections, and better performance.
The Ultimate Annual Planning Strategic Playbook has the power to transform your organization's annual planning, growth strategy, revenue forecasts, strategic & sales growth plans.
Why You Need This Playbook
Ready to unlock your path to strategic excellence? Download “The Ultimate Annual Planning Playbook” now and lead your organization to a year of record-setting achievements.
Bridge the gap between executive vision and operational reality with our strategic business planning guide, ensuring company-wide alignment and accountability.
A Peek Inside
Get Planning Right From the Outset
Planning isn’t something to be afraid of. While we might never be able to create the “ideal” method for planning, there’s an easy to follow eight-step process to ensure your annual planning is aligned across departments and throughout the various levels of your organization.
Some other outliers to consider when choosing a baseline:
- • Deals that are larger than your average deal size and any shift up-market
- • Impact of product launches on your entire sales funnel
- • Effects of government regulation, e.g. ELD in Supply Chain
- • Outsized revenue lifts from outsized renewals or price increases
- • Changes in the overall market growth rat
Remember, your business must grow faster than the market for long term success. In fact, a SaaS Capital survey of 1,200+ B2B SaaS software companies indicated a median growth rate of 35% in 2022. If you don’t understand the overall market growth, planning for faster organization growth becomes difficult, if not impossible.
- Decide on the baseline you’ll use to model projections for the next year.
- Normalize data from the baseline period you’ll use for your forward projections, correcting for anomalies.
- Discuss any outliers that can affect next year’s growth, including any pending legislation, product launches, etc.
- Create models for natural growth rate for your business as well as market growth for the industry as a whole to ensure your organization plans to outstrip both.
Step 3
Model Forward
With a baseline established, logic should be applied in order to model what the future will hold. A standard mathematical method for such evaluation would be linear interpolation, a method for using your known data points to project future data points. This is one-way you can understand where trendlines are taking the company.
The analysis should include seen and unseen pipeline. Seen pipeline refers to the deals currently forecasted in your CRM software. Unseen pipeline, on the other hand, includes deals not yet in your CRM system. Those engaged in planning may not know unseen pipeline yet but they can use baseline data to predict what should happen–aka what deals should appear in the funnel—in future months and quarters. You’ll want to ensure that you are modeling from the earliest TOFU entry point because only then will you have the most accurate information for your projections.
As you model forward and plan for the year, be wary of attribution wars. Too often, Partner, Sales, Marketing, etc. can get over-occupied with attribution, sometimes fighting amongst themselves to get credit for bringing in a TOFU lead. While attribution may be a concern, save it for other meetings. While planning, stay on task: The plan is not about who gets credit. The plan is about driving revenue.
As you model forward and plan for the year, be wary of attribution wars.
- Model forward using the starting point, “In the absence of intervening variables, where do we predict we will land – by channel – in 12 to 24 months.”
- Ensure you’ve included the earliest TOFU entry point during your projections.
- Create multiple projections based on different scenarios in order to give yourself as much data as possible for the possible outcomes of the next year, including current projections and market growth projections.
- Discover a better method: Learn why the old ways of annual planning fall short and how you can address these problems at their root.
- Follow step-by-step guidance: Annual revenue planning is broken down into manageable steps, making it easy for you to follow and implement.
- Simplify your planning: Streamline your planning process with our proven 8-step method, saving you time and resources.
- Develop a comprehensive company growth plan and revenue forecasting template
- Transform your annual planning process with our data-driven, cross-functional approach that aligns top-down goals with bottom-up insights.
- Learn to balance ambitious top-down goals with realistic bottom-up projections to create a robust, achievable annual plan.
Learn how you can strategic plan with confidence from the outset.