Your Preparation Checklist for Annual Revenue and Sales Planning

‍“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” is a fairly well-known quote from boxing champion Mike Tyson. When it comes to annual revenue planning, what’s your best defense? Everyone knows reality has a way of changing plans, but there are things you can do now to make your planning process more efficient, collaborative, and better informed to increase your chances of successful goal achievement.

Annual planning periods typically kick off in September/October and take several months of data gathering, budgeting negotiations, collaborative discussions, iterations, and finally Board approval. Planning also must anticipate strategic investments or major changes the company intends to make, both positive and negative. That can include everything from new product launches or sunsets, acquisitions, entering new markets (both geographic and ICPs), and restructuring or right-sizing.

However, before you start the actual work of laying out those MBOs, crunching data, and building your models, the right preparatory work can ready yourself and your teams for a smoother planning process. Our team at Revcast has seen hundreds of annual plans and we’ve learned there are most definitely some best practices to follow.

Below are some of our preparation recommendations, along with a number of links to short videos and blog resources explaining some of these points further.

Pre-Flight Checklist for Annual Revenue and Sales Planning:

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“What information do we need as key inputs?”

Now’s the time to think through all the factors and inputs that should be captured in order to build your plan. Think of these as the “essential ingredients” for baking an amazing bread -- you want to make sure it rises. Your plan's "recipe" ingredients are also inter-related = i.e. without salt, your baking soda won’t get activated, and without considering the right ramp times or attrition, you won't have quota on the street when you need it.

Rather than this being a “wish list,” this is when you determine where and how you will get the data on actual performance for these inputs – not just past assumptions – and what is the level of effort (LOE) to get that data once planning time comes.

A best practice baseline of comprehensive inputs for any good plan should include the following, ideally broken down by each sales segment by MONTH:

Current staffing and hiring plan
Non-quota staffing
Ramp times
Quotas of all types (i.e. sales, demos, meetings)
Attainment
Attrition assumptions
Leaves of absence
Expected org changes

There may be other inputs that make sense for your business. Revcast’s team would be happy to share with you some recommendations on how to handle these inputs and improve your assumptions for any of them.

Don’t forget pipeline generation

Now is a good time to get with marketing to determine what the conversions are actually looking like, by segment, month-by-month, and where the major gaps or achievements exist for the current fiscal year. For B2B sales, marketing has its own pre-funnel pipeline – there is lead time to plan, schedule, and launch campaigns (particularly those that are dictated by third-party calendars or seasonality outside of their control). After that, there must be time to nurture prospects or even the whole buying team if supporting an ABM strategy.

Example annual plan managed in Revcast, showing pipeline generation status against plan and revenue outcome estimates

For this reason, the sooner you can synch up with marketing to have a real conversation about actual past performance on pipeline generation and their contribution portion, the better. The goal will be to understand what you should be generating in demand across your sales org.

Are you using the best solution for your building and keeping your plan?

Obviously, your plan needs to live somewhere that has all this data so you can model and report against it. For most companies, this is the good ol’ trusty spreadsheet, but it shouldn’t be. Spreadsheets bring risk to your planning process for a number of reasons:

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Which one is the current version, the ‘source of truth’? How do you handle version control?
Who owns it and the models/formulas in it? What if the owner leaves or has a role change?
How can you be sure there are not formula errors or incorrectly designed formulas?
How can you easily add in new inputs or assumptions you want to model?
How can other stakeholders across your GTM teams – and your sales managers who must be accountable to the plan’s targets – view and understand these spreadsheets?
How do you ensure there are permission controls for the spreadsheet to prevent over-writes?

It’s always a good time to explore better solutions out there to give you the best home base for plan development and ongoing tracking and optimization. You can of course start with a Revcast demo!

‍Find Ways to Improve Collaboration and Transparency

Plans are not built in a dark corner by one person. Multiple stakeholders are involved – spanning revenue/sales leadership, RevOps/SalesOps, marketing, finance, and the CEO and board of directors. For revenue and sales leaders, they should also think about how they can get input from their sales management layer as part of the process.

Think about the timings and types of meetings/discussions you need to have to facilitate this. Get those on the schedule, provide team members and stakeholders ample notice of what’s expected from them to bring to the table to inform and improve plan development.

And finally, don’t neglect the part about how you intend to make sure the most current, approved plan is transparent (where will it live?), well communicated, and understood by those who have accountability and a key contributing part to its success.

What Scenarios Do You Want to Explore for Efficient Growth Achievement?

If you’re already using a spreadsheet as your home for your plan’s data, you’re likely also using it for scenario modeling. Some organizations might instead use a reporting tool for modeling. All of that requires team members who have the expertise to build these models and re-run them as assumptions and inputs change. It also places significant trust on internally-built models being error free… are they?

You can start to make a list now of the types of scenarios you may want to model in order to compare outcomes on revenue achievement and/or costs to achieve those targets. There may be different constraints you want to test side-by-side.

You can also now start to get a better understanding of the level of resource effort this piece of the process requires internally. Talk to those doing the modeling and quantify their cost in hours. There may be a better solution or process to simplify this and free those resources up for other higher-value work. ‍

Prevent Revenue Plan Shelfware

So after all the effort, time, and decision making is put into creating an annual revenue and sales plan for approval, let’s make sure it doesn’t become an afterthought to your stakeholders. Keeping a plan alive needs its own game-plan – how can you track at least once per month how the key elements of that plan are performing? Is your bread baking as you hoped, or did you add too little salt or your yeast wasn’t ready?

Define the type of revenue plan performance reporting you are able to build without further over-taxing your internal resources. If that’s too high of a lift, look to tools like Revcast to help. The stakes are high – quantifying the impact on revenue estimates as new risks and opportunities arise can be absolutely critical to your success.

Free Assessment from Revcast’s Experts

Revcast can accelerate this preparation phase and improve your readiness for 2025 planning. For a limited number of organizations, we offer up to 3 hours of our experts’ time to review your planning template, your inputs and data needs, advise on scenario modeling, and identify action items for you.

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