Is your annual planning checklist up to date?
Ganesh Tayi
Advantary Partner
B2B Revenue Operations & Sales Processes
As the new year approaches, having a plan is essential to meet goals, engage team members, and grow successfully.
Below are the seven key aspects of a solid Annual Business Plan that need to be congruent like a jigsaw puzzle.
#1 An Annual Theme is the rallying cry for your entire organization and crisply communicates what you want to accomplish this year. The theme should capture the imagination of the whole organization and drive them toward a common goal. Some examples are Cash is King, Embrace the Process, Go Digital, dominating a specific market, or launching a new product category.
#2 Sales & Marketing Plan optimizes the GTM model, prioritizes the routes-to-market, finalizes resourcing decisions, and focuses on high levels of execution across different channels. A solid plan has a calendar and budget and breaks down revenue by quarter at a granular level down to the sales rep and product mix. Next, it identifies the lead generation tactics used to generate the desired leads to achieve financial goals. Finally, the plan should identify initiatives to increase the effectiveness of your sales process to achieve the desired conversion rate.
#3 Organizational Plan captures the changes you intend to make in the organization throughout the year. This includes hiring plans, training and coaching programs to improve the skills and capabilities of your employees, and a well-defined Performance Incentive Plan that motivates them to accomplish your goals.
#4 New Product Introduction(NPI) Plan ensures that you have executable project plans for every NPI along with the launch activity and desired financial outcome for each of these NPIs. The Sales, Marketing, and Organizational Plan should be aligned to ensure a timely and successful launch of the NPIs. Identifying dependencies between NPI launches and legacy products ensures no excess and obsolescence.
#5 Financial Plan & Budget establishes your business's revenue, gross margin, and net profit goals and is broken down by month so that you can track your progress regularly. It has a detailed mix of products or services by geographic region, industry verticals, and critical accounts that contributes to the revenue and gross margin goals. The financial plan and budget align with the sales & marketing, NPI, and organizational plan.
#6 KPI Targets measure the progress of your business toward your goals. It would be best if you had assigned appropriate KPIs to everyone in your organization and tied the performance incentive plan to achieving these KPI targets.
#7 Communication engaging key team members in developing the Annual Business Plan is essential; sharing and communicating with all your employees is critical. Team leaders should inform each employee about what they need to contribute and the monetary benefits and career growth they can achieve by implementing the plan.
Ganesh is an author, speaker, and CEO of Never Lose The Deal. Ganesh has 25+ years in the technology industry and helped close deals worth over $12 billion.
As an author of the book, Never Lose the Deal and a trusted advisor for CEOs of some of the fastest-growing tech companies (on the Inc. 500 list), he has helped plug the holes in their sales pipeline to win more sales. Before starting Never Lose The Deal, Ganesh was VP & GM at Motorola for their global push to talk business with P&L responsibility for a $500 Million business.
