• Option 1: Shirk planning, suffer all year
• Option 2: Suffer this workbook, succeed all year

As I’ve written before, not producing an annual pan is very, very expensive. You waste 26% of your marketing budget in the best case scenario and are fired in the worst, because when the CFO asked what happened to all that money they gave your department, you replied, “We frittered it away through random acts,” which was a bit too candid. You must have a plan on a page, as shown in the workbook below.

But where does all the information come from? How should you organize it? Who should help? In this article, we explain. Download the workbook and template for the full explanation and to follow along.

Who’s in the room?

You, the CMO, and the leaders of each team Ultimately you, the CMO, are responsible for producing the plan, even if your chief of staff does lots of the organization. Because the truth is, this “plan on a page” matters, but it also sort of doesn’t matter. It’s the planning that’s important, and what’s behind the planning is agreements you make at the highest levels with leaders of other departments like sales and finance. Or, as Eisenhower put it, “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” If your planning doesn’t start at the top, it won’t work.This begins with you ensuring the entire revenue shares one language of work: 

• Shared dashboards
• Shared metrics
• Shared terminology

A manager on the sales or customer success team should be able to look at your plan on a page and know what they owe you, what you owe them, and in broad strokes, how it’s all going to go down next year. And you’ll only know those details if you ask.

You’ll need the business to have a plan, too

Annual planning is actually just a snapshot from the ongoing movie of marketing—a photo you take about a quarter of the way into the film. (See that process below.)

Before you can capture your annual marketing plan on a page, you must know: 

• The business’ 3-5 year plan
• Your go-to-market plan
• What competitors are doing
• How your audience is changing
• How the market is evolving
• Your past performance
• The sales team’s plans

What’s difficult about this is the executive team may not have agreed on those goals. But your annual plan is a description of how you’re going to contribute to those goals. So what do you do? Use your judgment. If you can’t guide the rest of leadership through a conversation about narrowing down to 3-5 business goals, choose them and ask if those are the right ones to prioritize. (Usually, at least one about revenue and one about brand.) 

It is essential you choose no more than 3-5. I promise you, we’ve worked with businesses with 80,000 employees that were able to do it. Any more, and you diffuse everyone’s limited attention. Yes, you can create sub-goals for specific teams, but 3-5 is the productive number that all brains across the business can recall and handle. 

Prepare first, then fill it all in with your leaders

There’s a certain perspective only you will have. That’s why you’re leading this process, and why you should prepare rough answers to everything, and fill in the first column of “business goals.” Then, gather the leaders of your various teams (especially marketing operations; do not neglect to include them—you need that technological perspective) and fill it all in.

There’s no exact science to this—just brainpower and caffeine and possibly baked goods. Set the expectation that this should be fun, people should collaborate, trade, and disagree, and that it is not final. Give everyone freedom to weigh in and call on those who’ve been silent. 

An easy place to begin that conversation is filling in the easy spots. If you have any ongoing campaigns that’ll continue into next year, begin with those. And fill in any events or programs you’ve already committed dollars to. 

Aim to get a quick and dirty plan draft where everything is filled in, with guesswork as needed. Return to it several times over the next few weeks to pressure-test it, find truer data (e.g. on what things actually cost) and get to a finalized version.

Once approved, share it seven times in seven ways

Make copies, both physical and digital, and send them to every employee to keep by their computer. All review meetings should center around, “How did your activities contribute to one of these objectives?” Hold people to those agreements and bring the plan to life by acting upon it and referencing it frequently. When things change substantially, revise and recirculate it.

Do all of that, and you’ll have an epic agreement tool for everyone on your team, as well as everyone on the revenue team. And because it’s just one page, it’s short enough that nobody forgets—nor forgets what they owe you. 

Get started right now with our free workbook.