The beginning of a new year symbolizes a fresh start. Nearly everyone sets at least one resolution to be the best version of themselves. While we are setting our personal resolutions, companies are busy crafting their annual goals and quotas. A new year marks a time for businesses to refocus their vision and implement either tried and true or new strategies to hit their goals. With that said, there are four considerations that should be on every CEO’s mind during AOP (Annual Planning) in order to facilitate a year of smart, strategic growth:
- Raising Expectations and Setting Stretch Goals: Setting safe, attainable goals for the year across sales, marketing, customer operations, and R&D can leave potential revenues on the table, missing out on key growth opportunities. Ensure your teams are challenged this year to drive more leads, greater sales bookings (for both new and expansion business), higher customer retention rates, and more strategic product releases.
- Encouraging Teams to Employ Data-Driven Planning: Without proactive, data-driven planning, stretch goals could potentially set your teams up to fail. Therefore, it is critical to design an AOP that guide teams to success this year. However, not all plans are created equal. Avoid the pitfalls of hopes and guessing in hiring, pipeline, and marketing plans. Intuition can be good in certain instances but leverage the power of historical data and trends to design plans that learn from the past. Data is the key to having confidence in future planning: it can help you answer questions such as “are we investing the right number of resources in the correct areas of the business?” and “are we optimizing the return on these investments?”
- Proactively Monitoring Performance Against Goals: Tracking performance in real-time empowers teams to evaluate strategy effectiveness throughout the year and pivot as needed to hit goals before year end. Nevertheless, manual goal tracking can be a pain and often lacks transparency and timeliness. Business leaders, managers, and contributors should utilize technology to gain a clear picture into individual and aggregate performance.
- Understanding How the Performance Will Impact Your Company’s Valuation: Performance across distinct business areas such as sales, marketing, product, and customer success has a significant impact on your company’s valuation. Understanding how the unique performance in each of these business areas will impact growth and valuation projections for this year and beyond will be the ultimate driver for your company’s success.
As you start the upcoming year with a sense of excitement and optimism, consider the above during AOP to ensure both your team and business are set up for a productive year.
