How to Kick off Your Planning for Next Year: Build a Better Strategy

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What’s your plan for next year? If you’re hoping for a strong Q1, keep reading.

We all know that a strong Q1 doesn’t begin on Day 1 of a new fiscal year. Instead, it needs to start a few months ahead of time. The best strategic plans start with the executive management team getting together to develop a shared vision and group-wide goals for the new year. That strategic plan is the basis from which the organization’s strategies will flow. In other words, the vision, goals, and strategies will flow down to the next level of management. And the next level… and the next… until the entire organization has a clear plan.

We’ve worked with many leaders who “get this”, and who are able to “walk and chew gum” as they simultaneously finish Q4 while building the next year’s strategic plan. Salesforce stands out as a company that embraces planning. They don’t look at planning as an annual exercise to produce a document that sits in a drawer until the next year. Rather, they follow a company-wide approach called V2MOM to build what Marc Benioff describes as a “detailed map of where we are going and an understanding of how to get there.” 

Why Start Your Strategic Plan Months Before Your Fiscal Year Begins? 

Companies who start their strategic planning after the new year put themselves at a huge disadvantage. Late planning means that teams and individuals react to the fire drill of the day as opposed to proactively tackling the right set of priorities. We’ve seen team members wait months into a new year for their assignments, compensation plans, and general direction. When you don’t plan ahead, you lose  valuable selling time and put Q1 at risk. 

Additionally, there are a lot of dependent groups who need to be on the same page so the entire organization is pointed in the same direction. If you work in a multi-tiered or complex organization, it takes time for the details to cascade to each level so each team can create their relevant strategies in support of the overall vision and goals.

Plus, think about all of the people outside your company who need to know your plan. Your partners most likely initiate their strategy and planning sessions a few months ahead of their fiscal year start, so if you want your strategy to be reflected in their plans, you need to let them know your intentions, investments, commitments, and expectations now.

Finally, a benefit of early planning is leaving room for contingencies. If something goes wrong or needs to be changed, you’ll have time to adjust before the new year actually begins. If you don’t allow for this buffer time, your Q1 could suffer and  set a bad precedent for the year.

Besides, if your Q1 planning is finished early, you can get right back to focusing on the all-important Q4. 

How to Make an Iron-Clad Business Plan

1. Agree on an Executive Strategy

We advise the executive team to come together to build a shared vision (the “why”), company-wide objectives (the “what”), and key strategies (the “how”). Doing this exercise as a team ensures that you hear multiple viewpoints and get buy-in and accountability.List all of the potential priorities on the board, and whittle that list down to a critical few. These top priorities will serve  as the foundation for all other objectives and strategies.

Your priority list will give you a head start on aligning resources and making investments. After all, there is never an unlimited budget or unlimited people, so agreeing on where you’ll place your biggest share of resources and investments is essential.

Ask these questions as part of your executive planning session:

  • What are our target geographies?

  • What are our target customer segments (Enterprise, Large, Mid-Market , Small, or Consumer)?

  • Which products will we focus on?

  • Which industries will we focus on? 

2. Share Your Key Priorities

Once this high-level set of objectives and strategies is complete, the next step is to roll it out to the next level of your business leaders. Using these pre-defined priorities, they’ll build their own strategic plan.  

Now that each “level” of manager in each department will start with the same priorities, you know that each team and individual will contribute to the overarching strategy. 

By following this process, you’ll communicate a consistent strategy to every employee and ensure the entire company is pointed in the same direction. 

Without this cascading alignment (when every group is left to create their own objectives and strategies in a vacuum), you may see a lot of action, but your employees will be working in multiple — and possibly competing — directions. For example, your sales team might be focused on revenue while product management is focused on profit. Or, marketing may be focused on the very solutions that the product management team is planning to phase out.  

The bottom line: Multiple strategies = no strategy. 

3. Get Specific

Now that each team has developed their strategy, and you’re confident it all cascades down from the overarching one, they need to complete the rest of the strategic plan: 

  • What are the critical dependencies? 

    • People: Who else needs to know this and how will we gain agreement?

    • Resources:investments, tools

    • Enablement: playbooks, training 

  • What potential inhibitors or obstacles might pop up?

    • How could we plan ahead to mitigate each of those obstacles?

  • What metrics will we use to track progress?

    • Leading indicators

    • Lagging indicators

    • Milestones

OK, I've Completed My Strategic Plan. Am I Done?

Not quite! Now it’s time to communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more.

Your goal is to reiterate and reinforce your objectives and strategies. Your communication plan should ensure consistency (“on message”), frequency (x times per month), timeliness (relevant information), and transparency (say what you know and say when you don’t know or can’t say something). 

Include wins and proof points to demonstrate that the strategy is relevant and on track. Consider the stories you can use to point out successes from different teams, positive customer experiences, or competitors you’ve displaced.

Communicate in this way with both your internal audience as well as for your partners. Create opportunities for questions and conversation. 

When your team members can finish your sentence, you know the message has made it through! We’ve even used “secret shopper” calls to test if the team has internalized the strategy. We would let them know we’d be making calls to ask them to reiterate the strategy and give them time to practice putting the key messages into their own words.

The most successful companies make iron-clad plans, based on a common set of objectives and strategies, that they communicate over and over again throughout the entire organization. When an entire company is pulling in the same direction, amazing results happen.

What are you waiting for?