Annual Planning Part 1

Building the Annual Operating Plan (AOP) has traditionally been seen as a finance activity. But in my experience it is most effective as a partnership between Go To Market, Product, HR, and Finance. It is truly an opportunity for the company to come together. Annual planning is the process of developing a plan — complete with goals, objectives, and milestones — for the year ahead. Some companies will put together a long range plan (LRP) or a 3 year strategic vision. Think of the annual plan as the first domino of that rolling strategic plan.

You tell ‘em Cap!

Today I’m going to break out one way of putting an annual planning process together. Below are the phases and suggested timelines.

Phases

1. Product Roadmap alignment

   1. T-shirt sizing product bets

2. TAM/SAM/SOM (Total Addressable Market / Share of Addressable Market / Share of Obtainable Market)

3. Segmentation

4. Marketing planning

   1. Historical analysis

   2. Define target audiences

   3. Programmatic marketing forecast

   4. Event planning and budgeting

   5. Headcount planning

5. Sales planning

   1. Account ownership rules

   2. Headcount allocation

   3. Territory Formation and Sales Team Assignment

   4. Initial Revenue Target Cascade

   5. Target Setting

   6. Sales Rep Readiness

   7. CRM Segmentation Cutover

6. CS planning

   1. Customer ownership rules

   2. Touch segmentation

   3. Headcount allocation

In today’s article we’ll focus on sales planning and next week I have a guest writer focusing on territory design and management. I prefer to think of annual planning as a heavily important cross-functional project. Below is a sequential view of an annual planning process which you may follow.

Planning can start as early as May but I’ve often come across an August start. The earliest I have ever seen was April. In that organization we had a Launch Readiness phase. The Launch Readiness phase prepared the organization for the Annual Planning cycle. Revenue Operations may develop the following to ensure a smooth planning cycle:

• Announcement of core planning tools

• Development and publication of important resources such as the Annual Planing calendar

• The Annual Planning data flow and architecture

• The Dispute Resolution Process

• And training content resources (i.e, office hours, Wikis)

Key strategic decisions happen during this phase, such as segmentation policy and discussion of changes to existing accounts

Account ownership rules

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