Planning for Revenue Success

It isn’t until you understand who your audience is can you begin to make a plan for how to reach them. (If you’re not sure if you truly understand your audience, go back to Chapter 1.) This chapter is all about creating that plan, from how to approach the planning exercise itself to the different factors and signals you need to incorporate to be able to reach your buyers effectively. 

In other words, this is the thinking part—the “look before you leap”—before you can start to enact your new, black squirrel strategy. 

And that means annual planning. Well, sort of. The old way of doing annual planning meant trying to project the whole year in advance, without consideration for the kinds of curveballs that might arise. And if, say, executives were pressuring marketers to meet some unrealistic targets (not that it would ever happen, right?), the plan could get off the rails even quicker. 

In this chapter, we’ll focus on a new, more flexible way of planning that will allow you to look ahead while responding to events as they are happening. We’ll also cover the other components of thinking through your marketing—from how to figure out what kinds of campaigns you need to identifying the kinds of content you need to produce to determining what kind of data you need to be collecting. In the chapter after this one, we’ll focus on the “doing.” 

Grab your whiteboard markers and let’s get into it. 

Take your planning from static to dynamic 

In the past, traditional annual planning made more sense—at least in theory. It was more feasible to plan a year in advance because product offerings and markets stayed more consistent over time. Of course, even the best-laid plans faced unexpected roadblocks and needed tweaking. In practice, the annual plan was always more of an ideal than a reality.  

If we were already seeing the cracks back then, today, we’re witnessing a full-scale disintegration. Product cycles may now last mere months—rather than the years that companies could previously anticipate. Markets are changing all the time and so too are your competitors. The assumptions we’d built the annual planning process on no longer hold true. To be able to keep up in today’s fast-moving environment, you need to be more nimble. 

Enter, dynamic planning. Unlike traditional planning, which is based on fixed goals and programs, dynamic planning leads with the assumption that the plan is going to change. It has to because the market is going to change in ways you can’t yet anticipate. 

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t create an annual plan. Quite the opposite. As Eisenhower once said, "Plans are worthless but planning is essential." You should create an annual plan—but one that treats change as a constant. Instead of thinking of your annual plan as a list of must-do’s, treat it more like a flexible framework—a useful set of guidelines for your marketing that’s open to reinterpretation as necessary. 

To pull back in our squirrel metaphor, it’s not about changing your fur black because Forrester told you to. It’s more about planning to change your coat—and knowing you’ll try on a few colors in the process. 

A dynamic annual plan anticipates what is most likely to happen while also leaving space for the unknown. A great plan is your best guess of how you're going to achieve your key business objectives, based on rigorous planning and assessment from both the top-down (your big ideas) and bottom-up (do your ideas create the numbers you need to achieve your goals?).

Then, quarter by quarter, you assess how well it’s working and adjust as needed. We recommend revisiting your plan on a quarterly basis at a minimum, or more frequently if things are moving fast in your industry. 

But dynamic planning doesn’t just mean adjusting the plan as you go, it also means deliberately scheduling time and resources for experimentation. You might not always know what programs will work best, so it can be useful to try several approaches and reserve budget (for ad spend, freelancers, or content) to feed the experiments that are performing best after they demonstrate success. We’re big fans of the annual plan-on-a-page process for this reason—it’s a big agreement tool that gets all the relevant teams on the same page so you’re equipped to successfully experiment. 

And you are free to experiment precisely because you created a plan about how you expect marketing to hit different business objectives. The experiments are about trying and adjusting things to find the most efficient path to hitting your goals. Having a plan is what gives you the groundwork to play around with your options. 

So you know that you need a plan—and that plan needs to be flexible. But how do you determine the kinds of campaigns and programs you should run? We’ll cover that in the next section. 

Build your plan around revenue goals—not campaigns

The biggest bad habit most marketers need to break is using the campaign as your base unit of planning. A series of campaigns is not a marketing plan. How you’re going to use various marketing strategies (including campaigns) to meet your revenue goals, is. It’s a subtle, but important difference. 

A series of campaigns is not a marketing plan

This brings us to the Demand Continuum. The Demand Continuum is a framework for visualizing where your company’s revenue comes from and designing marketing strategies to achieve those revenue goals. The question it answers is: Where do we expect to get our revenue? 

We’ve written fairly extensively on the Demand Continuum and how to use it if you want to go in-depth (we even have a nifty free template). As a starting point, however, the important thing to note is that the framework helps you plan your marketing by starting with the revenue you need to generate, then working backwards to figure out the best way of getting there. It looks like this: 

Along the top of the continuum template, you have the type of campaign, which is dictated by your audience (top row). Once you know which audiences you’re targeting, you can plan your messaging, content, orchestration, sales outreach, and tracking metrics. 

For instance, say you need to generate $10 million this quarter. Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is large enterprise companies buying custom solutions (of course, we’ve simplified this for the purpose of this example—if you remember from Chapter 1, a lot goes into zeroing in on that ICP). 

Looking at your revenue goals and audience you might conclude that a 1:1 account-based marketing (ABM) campaign targeted to a select number of these high-value customers is the best and most efficient way of getting you those deals. Of course, this isn’t the only “right” answer to hit this revenue goal—marketing is both an art and a science. But by starting with your revenue goals and audience profile, you can make more informed decisions as to how you spend your marketing resources. 

This is in direct opposition to the “old marketing” way of doing things, where you would first decide to run a 1:1 ABM campaign, then figure out who the most suitable customers for it were. In this new way, you look at the revenue you need to generate and your audience, then craft a marketing plan around them. It’s not a choice between whether you’re doing ABM or the demand gen waterfall, but when and how you employ those different approaches to meet your revenue goals. 

And of course, this doesn’t just apply to new logos, but also to existing customers that you want to retain and expand. The Demand Continuum can help you look at your revenue picture as a whole and figure out the best marketing approach to take to achieve your goals. 

We covered ICP in the previous chapter, but identifying your ideal customer is just the starting point for figuring out how to engage your audience. In the section below, we’ll cover how you can think about engaging the buying committee—not just the kinds of companies you’re targeting (your ICP), but the people who are making decisions. 

Meet your buyers on their level

The reason we advocate so hard for dynamic annual planning is there are just so many unknowns—including how your buyers are researching and choosing your solution. As we’ve tried to drive home in this series, buyers today are buying differently than they have in the past. 

It no longer makes sense to map a traditional buyer’s journey with a “top, middle, and bottom” of the funnel, because buying committees are so much larger and chaotic than they ever have been. For example, in a company that’s planning on migrating to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, you might have one person Googling “what is ERP,” another one reaching out to agencies that help with large-scale ERP migrations, and another downloading every whitepaper and PDF guide on the topic they can find. 

When you have an average of almost eleven people on a buying committee, consuming content from all around the web, it’s hard to create a consistent story or drip-feed them the right content in the right order because they’re all at different stages. You have a mini-universe of potential audiences that you might not even know exists, depending on the sophistication of your data tools (which is a challenge we’ll get into in the next section). So how do you address them all? 

What you can do is try to answer their questions. 

Our recommendation is to conduct audience research so that you can identify the key questions that buyers across the spectrum are asking. Talk to your pre-sales engineers, solution consultants, and customer success teams about the most frequently asked questions they encounter—plus, supplement their lists with keyword research and third-party intent data. This will give you a broad outline of what knowledge gaps customers have and how you can fill them.

Then, you can produce content that answers the questions they have—and create self-service resource centers that cater to a variety of knowledge levels and format preferences (kind of like we’re doing here, in this playbook). 

Remember, your buying committees are made up of a diverse group of people, not just the one or two “buying personas” you might have created in a deck. Some of them know a lot about your solution, others little. Some prefer articles, others podcasts or videos. By making your content available in a range of different formats, you increase the chances of them finding and engaging with it. AI and software are already making this much easier. Good search engine optimization (SEO) practices are a consideration too, but once your onsite SEO is in order, one of the best things you can do to improve your content’s discoverability is to write clear, high-quality answers to the questions that people want to know. 

Strategize and optimize your plan through data

The success of your marketing programs depends on good data. Data and content work together in a cycle—data informs the kind of content you should produce, and the content, in turn, gives you more data on what customers want to know. 

Some marketers take “good data” to mean that you should only rely on the high-quality data that your company produces (your first-party data), but we actually don’t think this is the best strategy. By the time you’re able to collect first-party data from your website, your buyer is likely already so far along their journey that you may have missed some important signals. 

That’s why we think it’s important to harness a variety of data sources in order to get a complete picture of how your buyers are engaging. Third-party data sources provide leading indicators of prospects who may be searching for a solution like yours, while first-party data sources give mid- and bottom-of-funnel insights as a customer more seriously considers a purchase. Relying on only one or the other can lead you in the wrong direction or cause you to move too late in a sales cycle. That’s why you need both. 

How exactly you should ingest, weigh, score, and ultimately turn your data into actionable insights is something that we’ve covered in-depth in another article—but it’s critical to note how important it is that your go-to-market teams are operating from a single source of truth. If your sales team has one system for interpreting your buyers’ signals and your marketing team another, that’s a recipe for miscommunication and, if you’ll pardon the pun, mixed signals. To be able to engage effectively with your buyers, you need to have a consistent view of the relationship. 

This all means that the role of marketing operations (MOps) is critical—and needs to become more strategic than it has been before. In order to get high-quality data you can rely on, your MOps function needs to evolve from basic execution to strategic implementation. 

It’s only with this data infrastructure in place that you can understand how best to engage your audience and come up with the strategy to do so. 

Expect the unexpected 

Phew, we’ve covered a lot in this chapter. If you’re still with us, thanks for sticking it out to the end. 

To recap: The most successful marketing teams are the ones that both make a plan and plan to adjust. Like the black squirrel, you have to evolve as your environment does. That means taking into consideration your revenue goals, audiences, buyers’ frequently asked questions, and key data sources. With these elements in place, you have the thought infrastructure that will allow you to create a flexible plan you can adapt to rapid changes, without losing your strategic focus.

If there’s one thing we hope you take away from this, it’s to expect the unexpected and be prepared to constantly adjust your strategy. Nothing is staying still in today’s market, from your buyers to your competitors—so you can’t afford to either. 

In the next chapter, we’ll cover how to take all of the great strategizing you just did and start to put it into action.