It might seem like an organization like yours just can’t afford to make an annual plan. Who has the time? But I’m here to tell you quite literally, you cannot afford not to.

Marketers waste an estimated 26% of their budget when they don’t have a strategy. Mismanaging that budget and missing revenue targets is the number one reason they’re fired, says Carilu Dietrich, former CMO of Atlassian. And in my own experience, not having a plan is the primary source of random acts of marketing, whereas once you implement a plan, those acts trail off.

And, I would go even further: You must produce an annual plan that fits on one single page. Yes, one. Download our latest free marketing plan workbook for a one-page template and practical examples to help you build a simple, revenue-focused plan that your entire team can rally behind.

At the heart of marketing planning are hard conversations 

Five years ago, marketing software budgets surpassed those of IT. Now, marketers spend 20% of marketing dollars on technology, and researchers at the Duke Fuqua School of Business project it’ll climb to 30% over the next decade, largely because of AI. 

I have a theory on why this spend keeps increasing.

All that software is convenient cover for avoiding the difficult but necessary conversations to align the revenue team. I think we’ve all been at that company, where the tension was so high that purchasing sales automation software was easier than truly training the SDRs. Where web personalization software offered a convenient workaround for talking to the web team, and where launching marketing automation and attribution software were easier than talking to sales leaders.

I believe it’s a very similar story with making an annual marketing plan. Senior marketers see it as a minefield, and in the short-term, feel it’s easier to just not rock the boat. But without those conversations, you get mis-set agreements and misalignment. You get sales and marketing undoing each other’s work. You arrive at a place where the marketing and sales teams have totally different definitions of the word “campaign,” and pipeline numbers that do not at all match.

Annual planning is the fix to this. If you need structure and inspiration to get started, check out our detailed annual planning for marketers guide — it walks you through each step of aligning your goals, team, and tactics for measurable growth.

Annual marketing plans show everyone how to contribute

The GIF below sums up pretty well wh at happens when you don’t do rigorous planning, or bother to document it in a single page. You get a sort of message drift—everyone hears the version they want to hear, and retreats to their laptop to work on a bunch of stuff that doesn’t quite level up to pipeline. 

In this environment, without any sort of cheat sheet, your team doesn’t actually know what’s expected of them. Or whether the ways they’re spending their time level up to a coherent motion. Just 45% of people know what’s expected  fear of hard conversations, probably won’t tell you. That’s a lot of disappointment baked into the game plan before the new year even starts.

Then there are other executives. Probably, they’ll expect what we marketers have trained them to expect—hard numbers and MQLs. In fact, they’ll probably entirely focus on MQLs, like they’re some form of hard currency, and trap you in a box. If you only present MQLs and easy-to-gather media and digital signals, you get caught in the hamster wheel of 'doing more for less’ and are never seen as strategic again.

And worst of all, without an annual plan on one page, those other teams and executives are not going to know what you expect from them. Few sales leaders will wander into your office saying, “You hadn’t asked for it, but I was thinking on how we can make the most of your campaigns and here’s a plan for what my salespeople will commit to doing upon every handoff.” And if you produce a big deck with all the information, others are very unlikely to read it.

It really must be one single page. If you’re working through your own process, explore our B2B growth planning insights to uncover five hidden roadblocks that derail annual planning—and how to overcome them with clarity and alignment.

If it’s not, it puts you in a very hard place—accountable to things you haven’t agreed to, measured by metrics you don’t consent to, and having difficult conversations about where all that budget went. Which is to say, it puts you in a much harder place than having those difficult conversations upfront, and producing a plan.

It isn’t easy. We won’t lie to you. But you really can’t afford not to. Our workbook can help.